6 things longevity experts wish people would stop saying

Longevity has moved from the lab to the social media feed. A 2026 report from XRC Brand Capital Fund found that web searches tied to living longer were four times higher in late 2025 than a year earlier. YouTube and TikTok now carry a steady stream of anti-aging advice, from supplement stacks to peptide injections. Much of it sounds scientific. A good deal of it isn’t.

That gap between marketing and evidence is the subject of a New York Times report by health journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer, which asked scientists who study aging which ideas they most want the public to drop. The answers came from researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of California, San Diego, the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and the National Institute on Aging. Some of the claims they flagged are merely misleading. Others are potentially harmful. Einstein’s Dr. Sofiya Milman told the Times that much of what circulates in the longevity space lacks a scientific basis and needs to be corrected.

The six longevity myths below range from the philosophical to the practical. One concerns what aging research is trying to accomplish in the first place. Another concerns whether Americans are getting healthier as they age, and the national data point the other way. Others involve the supplements sold as life extenders, the gap between how long women live and how well, the assumption that shedding pounds always helps, and the belief that disciplined habits guarantee a 100th birthday.

A thread runs through all of them. The scientists interviewed care less about adding years to the calendar than about how many of those years people spend in good health — a measure researchers call health span. They also stress that results in worms and mice rarely translate neatly to humans, and that what helps a 40-year-old does not always help a 75-year-old.

None of this means healthy habits are pointless. It means the science of aging is more complicated than a supplement label or a 60-second video suggests. Here is what the researchers want people to stop repeating, and what the studies they cite show.

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Most scientists who study aging are not trying to stretch the maximum human life span. Their main target is health span — the number of years a person lives free of serious disease and disability — according to University of Alabama at Birmingham biologist Steven Austad, who spoke to The New York Times.

The distinction matters because the two measures can move in different directions. Life span counts every year from birth to death, regardless of what those years look like. Health span counts only the years a person spends functioning well: able to move, think clearly and live independently without a heavy burden of chronic illness. A society can add years to the first number while the second stays flat or shrinks. When that happens, more people spend more time sick.

Austad told the Times that extra years would be a welcome byproduct of keeping people healthy longer, but that adding them is not the point of the work. That framing reflects a broader shift in the field over the past two decades. Rather than treating cancer, heart disease and dementia as separate problems to be solved one by one, many aging biologists study the underlying processes of aging itself. Those processes raise the risk of nearly all of those conditions at once. The approach, often called geroscience, rests on the idea that slowing them could delay the onset of several diseases together.

Public health agencies use similar thinking. The World Health Organization tracks a measure called healthy life expectancy, which estimates how many years a person can expect to live in good health, alongside standard life expectancy. Comparing the two shows how much of a population’s later life is spent managing illness.

The health span focus also changes how a person might judge a longevity product or routine. A promise that something will help someone live to 110 is a bold claim that no study can easily test. A claim that something keeps people mobile, mentally sharp and out of the hospital longer is more modest and more measurable. It is also closer to what the researchers themselves are pursuing.

For anyone weighing advice about aging, the useful question is not only how many years a habit might add. It is whether the added years are healthy ones.

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The idea that Americans are steadily growing healthier as they live longer is wrong, according to the researchers interviewed by The New York Times. A 2025 study found U.S. life expectancy rose only about six months between 2009 and 2019, while healthy life expectancy — years lived in good health — went down.

That study also found that the U.S. was the only high-income country where healthy life expectancy fell between 2010 and 2019. In practical terms, American medicine got somewhat better at keeping people alive, but the extra time increasingly came with illness attached. Steven Austad, the University of Alabama at Birmingham biologist, described the result as a lengthening stretch of poor health at the end of life.

Austad likened the pattern to Whac-a-Mole, the arcade game in which knocking down one target makes another pop up. Better treatments for cancer and heart disease, the two leading causes of death in the U.S., mean more people survive into their 80s and 90s. Those added years bring more exposure to conditions that grow more common with age, dementia above all. The risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias climbs sharply with each decade after 65. Lowering deaths from one disease can therefore raise the number of people who live long enough to develop another.

The problem is not limited to older adults. Research cited by the Times suggests today’s young adults are more likely to have chronic conditions than young adults were a decade earlier. That trend raises the possibility that the gap between life span and health span could widen as those generations age.

Some critics place part of the blame on how American medicine is organized. The Times noted arguments that the system emphasizes treating disease once it appears over preventing it in the first place. Under the fee-for-service model common in the U.S., doctors and hospitals are paid for each visit, test or procedure. Critics say that structure tilts care toward treatment rather than prevention.

For individuals, the national numbers are a reminder that living longer and living better are separate goals. Gains in survival from hospital treatment do not automatically turn into more good years. That is why aging researchers increasingly measure success by health span rather than by life expectancy alone.

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Despite influencer claims about peptides, resveratrol, NAD+ boosters and growth hormone, no drug or supplement has been proven to lengthen human life, Aladdin Shadyab of the University of California, San Diego told The New York Times. Some of these products may carry real risks.

Many of these compounds earned their reputations in animal research. Certain substances have extended life in laboratory worms and mice, and those results travel quickly online. But Shadyab stressed that human bodies differ substantially from these animals. The roundworm C. elegans, a workhorse of aging research, lives only a few weeks, and lab mice typically live two to three years. Effects in those species can be measured quickly. Proving the same in humans would take decades of follow-up, and it has not been done.

NAD+ is a useful case study. Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide is a molecule cells use in energy metabolism. Supplement makers sell precursors such as nicotinamide riboside and nicotinamide mononucleotide on the premise that NAD+ levels fall with age and need topping up. A 2026 study described by the Times undercuts that pitch. It found that NAD+ levels in the blood hold steady in older people, which suggests replenishing them is unnecessary and unlikely to help.

Human growth hormone, or HGH, raises a different concern: possible harm. A review of clinical trials cited by the Times found that healthy older adults taking it faced higher risks of joint pain, swelling and carpal tunnel syndrome. That condition occurs when a compressed nerve in the wrist causes numbness and tingling in the hand. Synthetic growth hormone is approved in the U.S. to treat specific medical conditions such as growth hormone deficiency, not to slow aging.

Resveratrol, a compound found in grape skins and red wine, became a longevity favorite after laboratory studies in the 2000s. Peptides, often sold as injections, have also drawn a following. Neither has been shown to extend human life.

Shoppers should also understand how supplements are regulated. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration does not approve dietary supplements for safety or effectiveness before they go on sale. A label’s promises are marketing, not evidence that a product works.

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Women live roughly five years longer than men on average, but they do not stay healthier longer. Pankaj Kapahi of the Buck Institute told The New York Times that women tend to spend a larger share of their later years dealing with illness and disability.

Researchers sometimes call this the male-female health-survival paradox: women survive longer, yet experience more illness and functional limits in old age. Kapahi pointed to menopause as a turning point, after which several aspects of women’s health decline markedly. The drop in estrogen that accompanies menopause, which in the U.S. typically arrives around age 51, is linked to faster bone loss and a higher risk of osteoporosis.

The disease burden differs too. Older women face higher risks of autoimmune conditions, arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease. Women make up the majority of Americans living with Alzheimer’s, and autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis are far more common in women than in men.

Part of the explanation may lie in the research itself. The Times reported that aging studies have historically centered on men, and recent work suggests that imbalance persists. Conditions that mostly affect women have also, on average, drawn less study than those that mostly affect men. Since 2016, the National Institutes of Health has required researchers it funds to account for sex as a biological variable. Decades of male-focused work still left large gaps.

Animal research adds a related puzzle. Viviana Perez Montes, who directs the aging biology division at the National Institute on Aging, told the Times that most compounds found to lengthen life in animal studies appear to work better in males than in females. Researchers have not yet pinned down why. That pattern matters because promising compounds from animal studies are often the ones that later move toward human testing.

The practical upshot is that a longer average life expectancy does not mean women can count on more healthy years. The life span gap and the health span gap are separate questions, and the second has received far less scientific attention.

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Losing weight is not automatically beneficial for older adults, even those who are overweight. Studies linking weight loss to longer life are inconsistent, and several focused on people over 65 tie shedding pounds to a higher risk of death, The New York Times reported.

In a 2023 study, Aladdin Shadyab of the University of California, San Diego and colleagues followed women aged 61 to 81. Both intentional and unintentional weight loss were associated with lower odds of reaching 90. The pattern held regardless of the women’s starting weight or body mass index. A 2021 meta-analysis pooling 30 studies reached a similar conclusion for adults 65 and older, linking weight loss in that age group to a 59% higher risk of death. Shadyab described the overall body of evidence as mixed.

These studies show associations, not cause and effect. Unintentional weight loss in older adults can be an early sign of illness, which is one reason doctors pay attention to it. But Shadyab’s study found the link even when the weight loss was deliberate.

One leading explanation involves body composition. Some research suggests that when older people lose weight, a disproportionate share comes from muscle and bone rather than fat. Muscle mass already declines with age, a process called sarcopenia, and losing more of it can weaken strength, balance and mobility. Lower bone density raises the risk of fractures, and a hip fracture can mark a serious turning point in an older adult’s independence.

The question has fresh relevance as GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide and tirzepatide, sold for weight loss as Wegovy and Zepbound, become widely used. Some of the weight lost on these medications is lean mass, and preserving muscle is a recognized concern when they are prescribed to older patients.

The broader lesson, as the Times framed it, is that findings from younger adults do not always apply later in life. A weight-loss recommendation that suits a 45-year-old may not suit an 80-year-old in the same way. Older adults considering weight loss have reason to ask a doctor how to protect muscle and bone along the way.