Will My Efforts to Extend My Longevity Work?

There’s a new wave of longevity and anti-aging treatments in high demand—brain-age tracking tools, intravenous NAD+ infusions, peptide stacks, anti-inflammatory diets, and red-light therapy are among them. Some only have early or inconclusive evidence that they work, and many come with high price tags.

How do you know whether the effort—and investment—will add quality years to your life? And do you have to spend a lot of money to have good longevity?

What is longevity—and how do we track it?

To address whether longevity strategies work, it’s important first to understand what longevity is. We’re all going to age: There is no fountain of youth. Our lifespans are, in part, determined by genetics. Everyone has an inherent time clock.

True longevity isn’t about adding years to your life—it’s about healthspan, or having a good quality of life until the end. If you can’t reach your expiration date in good health, the date itself becomes less meaningful.

Longevity isn’t a magic pill or injection. Lifestyle gives our time clocks the best chance.

I have three centenarians in my practice. One patient just turned 101. This patient still works out three or four days a week, using a treadmill and weights. They’ve been able to manage coronary disease without having a cardiac event. Another of my patients is 102 years old and drove herself until age 101. She doesn’t drink or smoke, and she’s been able to manage high blood pressure and cholesterol without statins. Both patients enjoy reading and social interaction. Neither of them is on GLP-1s or other peptides.

What’s common among all three centenarians: None of them have missed a wellness exam in 15 years.

Medicine in the United States has historically been reactive. We’re good at managing acute events like heart attacks and strokes. But we’re slow to embrace prevention. While we can’t change our age (or the fact that we all age), our gender, or genetics, we can manage weight and habits like smoking or drinking alcohol. You can also manage blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar with your physician’s help. It’s important to know your family medical history if you can, to understand your genetic patterns, and mitigate the risks you can change.  

We can choose to be proactive. Treatments like peptide stacks and NAD+ IV infusions are currently limited by economics. But we aren’t without ways to improve our healthspan.

That said: There isn’t a precise test to track biological age—or to give you an accurate, big-picture view of whether your longevity efforts are paying off. But we can track biomarkers of aging through multiple tests. The MDVIP Annual Wellness Program tracks many of these biomarkers, and wearables can also help you track your data.

We can take more inspiration from my centenarian patients and practice good habits, such as healthy eating, knowing your numbers, and regular preventive screenings. Longevity science continues to show these are the tools for a long, healthy life that are accessible and often taken for granted.

What really matters when it comes to longevity?  

This advice—what you have probably heard about good health since you were young—seems unexciting.

Consider this: European scientists recently introduced a Longevity Pyramid—a diagram that includes lifestyle, supplements, and pharmacological strategies. Cutting-edge experimental strategies are at the top.

The two foundations of the pyramid—and of longevity—are diagnostics that help patients and their care providers work on disease prevention and lifestyle choices.

Recent large studies show lifestyle makes a major difference.

A healthy diet is crucial—and you can take your pick. The famous Nurses’ Health Study, which followed over 280,000 nurses across 30 years, and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study of 51,000 men across the same time period, both found that reducing mortality and healthy aging are strongly associated with maintaining a healthy weight, consistently choosing good quality food, and using healthy diet patterns such as the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, the Nordic Diet, the Okinawa Diet, and plant-based diets.

Exercise, often called the “longevity drug,” helps prevent and manage chronic conditions that can shorten your healthspan and lifespan. Exercise reduces age-related inflammation, and you don’t have to be a warrior to benefit. Consistency over time is what’s key. Even 150 minutes a week can improve heart and cardiovascular health, the respiratory system, muscle strength, flexibility, and balance. Adding strength training can prevent sarcopenia (muscle loss) and protect bone density. Resistance can also boost brain health: Results from a study of 900 older adults correlated increased muscle strength with a 43% reduction in the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, and a 33% drop in the risk of age-related memory and thinking problems (mild cognitive impairment).

Stacking lifestyle habits together, over time, may increase life expectancy by a decade or more. The Nurses’ Health Study tracked how people approached five habits: maintaining a healthy weight, exercising for at least 30 minutes each day, avoiding tobacco, eating a healthy diet, and limiting alcohol to a glass of wine a day for women and two for men. Researchers estimated life expectancy for all participants at age 50. For people who didn’t practice any of these habits, researchers estimated an average lifespan of 29 years for women and 25.5 years for men. On the other hand, scientists predicted a longer lifespan for people who practiced all five habits regularly: for women, the average life expectancy was 43.1 years, and for men, it was 37.6 years. Lifestyle helps women add, on average, 14 years to their lives—and 12 years for men.

Do peptides work?

There is a place for new approaches in longevity medicine, which is getting another wind. The industry is expected to grow from $5.3 trillion in 2023 to $8 trillion by 2030, according to UBS Global Wealth Management.

One of the growth drivers is the class of drugs and supplements known as peptides.

Synthetic peptides—short chains of amino acids that make up proteins—have been around for over 100 years. (Insulin is a peptide.) GLP-1s like semaglutide, the main ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, are currently the most popular peptides. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved GLP-1s to treat various conditions, and we know they also have measurable metabolic benefits that can support longevity. We know patients who take these medications will live longer.

But other peptides are being developed to help treat or prevent other conditions. In fact, researchers are currently testing different peptides to validate their use in healthy aging.

While the FDA hasn’t approved these peptides yet, they show clinical promise for healthy aging. Some of the treatments in the works for longevity still need more data—as much as 15 to 30 years of research—before the FDA will formally approve them. (Perhaps less; AI in health care is being used to accelerate the time it takes for drugs to be approved for the market.)

That said, the U.S. government in 2026 has been taking steps to make some of these peptides more accessible to the public by clearing the way for state-regulated compounding pharmacies to produce them.  

Tracking your biomarkers

Four types of disease can undermine our ability to live long, healthy lives:

• Cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks and strokes
• Type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome
  • Metabolic syndrome is a group of conditions that, together, raise the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and stroke. The conditions include a large waistline, high blood pressure, high blood sugar levels, high triglyceride levels, and low HDL cholesterol (HDL is beneficial cholesterol).
• Cancer 
• Neurodegenerative disorders, such as dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease).

We know lifestyle can help prevent some of these conditions. In terms of tracking the big picture of where you are, the MDVIP Annual Wellness Exam includes testing so you and your physician can track key biomarkers and discuss lifestyle and medication decisions to improve your healthspan.

MDVIP’s wellness lab panel includes:

• Hemoglobin A1c, an indicator of insulin resistance and glucose tolerance. 
• Inflammation markers, including myeloperoxidase. High levels may suggest arterial damage in the heart.
• C-reactive protein, which the liver makes in response to inflammation.
• Advanced lipid (fat) profiles that measure the size, density, and number of particles like LDL, HDL, and VLDL—these tests go beyond the standard cholesterol panel to give your care provider better insight into your risk for cardiovascular disease  

You can review these numbers together with your MDVIP physician, understand what they mean, and know which markers you can change and how. In my experience, patients make more lifestyle changes with the MDVIP approach to health care and patient-provider relationships.

The best time to start? Now.

Having routine checkups and working with your care provider to manage your health is the most important advice I can give. We take our cars in for maintenance every 5,000 miles, but many people skip giving their bodies the same care.

Younger patients tend to fall into two groups. The first are those who actively seek longevity and a good healthspan. They practice good habits, taking care of their physical and mental health. The second group includes patients who believe they’re young enough not to need to worry about their longevity. They usually wait until a problem appears before they start working to protect their healthspan.

Also: Human bodies respond to diet and lifestyle changes at any age, even beyond age 65. It’s never too late to start.