- Supplements marketed to improve longevity are booming.
- But longevity doctors say, in fact, less is more when it comes to glowing supplements.
- Expert advice on choosing the best supplements for you includes blood testing and self-monitoring.
Renew your mitochondria. Renew your cells. Get back that youthful muscle strength. Improve your fertility.
Over the past few years, a host of new supplements have appeared on the scene, promising to increase human lifespan and preserve youth. Now, longevity doctors are trying to get people to slow down.
“In our clinic, we’re removing the prescription,” Dr. Andrea Maier, a leading longevity physician who runs a private and public longevity clinic in Singapore. “First we need to diagnose what’s wrong, what someone needs and that can change.”
Maier, also a professor of functional medicine and aging at the National University of Singapore, is one of several longevity medicine doctors who told BI they are recommending patients stop taking many of the supplements they learned about online.
“People think more helps more, and it doesn’t,” Dr. Evelyne Bischof, who practices longevity medicine in China, Switzerland and Israel. “There are interactions, there are side effects.”
Bischof and other practitioners of longevity medicine say the trend toward overdoing it has been fueled in recent years by more aggressive and flashy online marketing of longevity supplements. Facebook ads, books by longevity influencers, along with gyms and resorts are promoting anti-aging fixes.
According to a recent McKinsey survey, demand for healthy aging products is on the rise; 70% of US consumers across all age groups are spending more in this category than ever after the pandemic.
Doctors like Maier and Bischof say supplements can slowly build up into dangerous health issues, affecting vital organs like the kidneys and liver or interacting with other drugs and supplements in toxic combinations.
Increasingly, they are seeing troubling results from blood, urine and other tests in patients taking many different products.
Over-supplementation can harm your health
More is not always more when it comes to taking supplements Strauss/Curtis/Getty Images
In the past, patients typically did not invest in healthy aging supplements on their own. They would first learn about them from their longevity medicine doctor, said Bischof, who serves patients at hospitals in Shanghai and Tel Aviv, as well as at her VIP longevity medicine business.
Things have changed since the pandemic. At the public clinic where she works in Israel, she estimates that 20% of patients come with a laundry list of longevity supplements in their regimen, most of them very high-dose.
“Five years ago, it was really the opposite,” Bischof said. “He was trying to convince a patient to take a supplement – besides vitamins.”
In her practice, she has seen through clinical testing how supplements can build up in vital organs. A 40-year-old patient who “overdosed” on the longevity supplement had a biological age four years older than his actual age, as measured by his blood. He also had suboptimal kidney function.
He didn’t want to go off the pill (Bischof didn’t mention the products), but his subsequent blood tests were looking worse and worse, and his biological age kept creeping up.
Eventually, Bischof was able to convince the patient to stop taking his longevity supplements. “And, of course, the biological age was reversed,” she said.
Others have noticed the same trend.
Pharmacology Myriam Merarchi, founder and CEO of Swiss fertility and biological age testing company Beyond Genomix, sees many “biohackers” wanting to test their telomeres, as telomere health is closely related to aging.. Those with a “suitcase” full of supplements tend to have terrible results.
“You take 50 pills a day that interfere with every metabolic pathway in your cells,” Merarchi said. “Of course!”
Interactions that doctors worry about
Dr. Andrea Maier often recommends that patients reduce their supplement regimens. Courtesy of Andrea Maier
Longevity supplements are a booming market. Popular new products advertised on TikTok and Instagram include NAD boosters (a popular anti-aging supplement among the Hollywood elite), urolithin A (supposedly boosts cellular health, improves muscle strength and slows aging) and coenzyme Q10 ( a popular antioxidant for fertility and aging.
Doctors are also seeing a lot of alpha-ketoglutarate (AKG). The compound, clinically studied as a potential antiaging supplement, is one of the main ingredients in a $49 “Longevity Blend” sold by tech biohacker Bryan Johnson.
Dietitian Naras Lapsys, chief clinical officer at Chi Longevity, a private clinic in Singapore, says many people are stacking these newer pills over older, well-known longevity supplements. This could be resveratrol (used for heart health) or spermidine (touted to be good for cell renewal).
“If you’re taking a longevity supplement, there’s no evidence to suggest that taking one is good and therefore two is even better and three is even better again,” Lapsys said. “A good starting point is to strip down to a smaller number and start measuring.”
Someone who is regularly dehydrated may want to think twice before taking a supplement like NMN, which can build up in the kidneys and cause inflammation. CoQ10 can make blood thinners less effective, and resveratrol can help hormonal cancers like breast cancer thrive and multiply.
“If you’re just taking supplements because a book told you to or an influencer told you to, if we think about the levels of evidence, that’s very low,” Lapsys said. “Test, don’t guess.”
Experts recommend a personalized, data-driven approach
All of this is deeply personal. One patient may benefit from taking more calcium, while another may benefit from eliminating B vitamins.
“I understand that not everyone can get a doctor,” Bischof said. “We’re trying to say, just educate yourself about what the side effect might be and how to — kind of — track it.”
For patients who are excited about longevity supplements, Bischof recommends cycling them, taking one for a few months and then stopping rather than taking them continuously throughout the year.
When you’re taking a new type of longevity supplement, you should keep track of how it’s affecting your health in specific ways. Is your VO2 max improving? Are you getting fewer colds during flu season than you used to? These are the types of simple checks that can help determine if an add-on is doing something for you.
“You have at least one marker that you can follow, an objective marker, to make sure it’s really helping you,” Bischof said. “Don’t take something where you think it might help. You have to have an objective measure that will confirm that it works for you at this dose, at this frequency, at this age, in your current situation.”