Susan Stone is the creator and presenter of It’s a Jungle, exploring the people, science, and ideas shaping our health and wellbeing. Part one of two.
At the Longevity Summit in Dublin, I asked the researchers who study ageing a simple question: does any of this work – and would you do it yourself? Their answers were more boring – and more useful – than the internet would have you believe.
Longevity has a salesman problem.
Open any feed, and someone is hooked up to an IV drip, swearing by peptides, or logging the hundred-plus pills they claim are winding their biological age backwards. It’s a booming industry built on a very human wish: that somewhere out there is the pill, the injection, the hack that stops the clock.
So I went to find the people who would actually know. For three days in Dublin, some of the world’s leading ageing scientists gathered at the Longevity Summit – the ones who run the labs, the clinical trials, the decades of work behind the headlines. The agenda read less like a wellness expo than a graduate seminar.
My question, the one I’d put to camera on the way in, was simple: does any of this work, and would you take it yourself? No powder salesmen.
That suspicion wasn’t cynicism; the scientists share it. From the stage, Dr. Matt Kaeberlein warned that the field “has a serious signal-to-noise problem” – and that “the people controlling the narrative right now… are not the people we want getting the message out there.” His worry isn’t that there’s money in longevity; there has to be, or none of this research reaches us. It’s that so much gets sold long before the evidence exists to back it up.
Ask these scientists for the miracle, and they’ll tell you, plainly, that it doesn’t exist yet.
“None of them have been proven to slow ageing in people,” said Kaeberlein, who has spent nearly 30 years studying ageing and now runs the Dog Aging Institute. That’s kind of where we’re at.”
Eric Verdin, who runs the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, gave the same verdict: “Today we have no drugs and no supplement that we know to increase healthspan or lifespan. That’s the harsh truth.”
The only things that have earned the evidence are the ones nobody’s trying to sell you – and the good news hides in that sentence. The biggest myth, Kaeberlein says, is believing you can’t do anything about how you age: “There’s lots you can do… and, as far as we can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a point of no return. It’s not too late to start.”
The boring consensus
Ask a longevity scientist what actually moves the needle, and you get the least sellable advice imaginable.
“It starts with lifestyle,” Kaeberlein said. “Eat a high-quality diet, exercise regularly, get good sleep, have some friends, go out and have fun sometimes, manage your stress well.”
He’s evangelical about one thing people underrate: muscle. “Muscle mass is under-appreciated… you want to make sure you maintain your muscle as you get older.”
Verdin is just as blunt about how all this compares with anything in a bottle: “Walking 15 minutes every morning and every night. Who cannot do this? That will have a massive impact on your health, way more than any supplement.”
Kennedy Schaal, the founder of Rejuve Biotech, put it more bluntly still: “Sleep is the hack.” Dr. Rozalyn Anderson, an Irish professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offered the least clinical advice I’ve ever had from a scientist.
She doesn’t weigh herself or do special diets: “The key indicator is if the jeans start getting tight – you know something’s going on, and it’s time to take action.” She’s no ascetic, either: “have the cocktail, but don’t have twenty of them, and stop at one slice.”
And no perfectionism is required – as Kaeberlein put it, “you just want to move towards optimal. You don’t have to be perfect.”
One thing keeps getting left off the wellness plans, and it came up again and again: other people. Schaal’s advice was to “check on your people.” Martin O’Dea, the summit’s founder, pointed to a talk he’d heard there on how isolation harms older people – one reason he built a “longevity pub” into a scientific conference.
“You’ve got to be happy,” he said. And the social stuff rests on one of the sturdiest evidence bases in the field: a meta-analysis pooling 148 studies and more than 300,000 people found that those with stronger social ties were about 50% more likely to be alive at follow-up – an effect its authors compared to giving up smoking.
The one rule that separates science from sales
Everyone wants to know what to take. The researchers kept answering a different question: what to measure.
“If you can measure it in your blood… and you’re not in the optimal range, it probably makes sense to supplement to get into the optimal range,” Kaeberlein said. The order matters. It’s his own practice rather than settled screening advice – and, in the US at least, he notes, standard blood work skips the markers he watches, like fasting insulin and a protein called ApoB that counts the particles which clog arteries.
O’Dea put it plainly: “There isn’t an average person. If you read something in the newspaper and say, ‘I’ll try that’, but you may already have too much of that. You have to be tested.”
Anderson gave me the line I keep returning to: in her lab, they weigh each animal – mice and monkeys – “down to 0.1 of a gram to decide how much drug to give them. And yet for people, take two, two in the morning, two in the afternoon. It’s so unsophisticated.”
Verdin is careful about Bryan Johnson, the internet’s most famous self-experimenter, and unyielding about the lesson. “I’m not opposed to what Bryan Johnson is doing – he’s created a lot of visibility for our field. But to take what he’s doing… and apply it to the whole universe, this is just not how science works. We are all extremely different. What works for him might not work for me. It might actually hurt me.”
Test first. Supplement second.
The scams to walk past
Because the researchers were so measured about what works, they were all the more striking about what doesn’t. Take the IV drips now appearing in clinics and at parties. Kaeberlein doesn’t mince it: “There’s no compelling reason to believe that any of these peptides or NAD drips or hyperbaric oxygen are going to have significant benefits for you as an individual.”
Verdin is blunter still – and he is talking about a molecule his own institute studies. Infusing NAD “doesn’t make any sense in any regards,” he told me; he has written that IV infusions are “medical scams in a white coat.” The delivery runs through a plastic bag and tubing: “the worst thing you get is actually an injection of microplastic. These IV infusion clinics should not exist, period.”
Peptides are the biohacking world’s current darling – some are approved drugs, many are not. Kaeberlein described a black market – in the United States, he’s careful to specify, importing unregulated peptides “from China and Russia.”
He was quick to add: “I’m not trying to blast China or Russia.” His point is that they don’t go through the same purification and regulation as a US lab, and are “often contaminated with enterotoxins or other drugs.”
The supplement aisle isn’t much safer: “The incentives in the supplement world are designed for companies to lie to you, to get you to buy their product,” Kaeberlein said. As for the influencers selling all of it, he’s “blown away that there are these influencers who are serial liars and people still believe what they say.”
Before you let anyone influence what you put in your body, he says, ask the obvious questions: what’s their credibility, their expertise, and have they lied to you before?
What’s genuinely coming
If that sounds deflating, it shouldn’t – the reason these scientists won’t oversell is the reason to trust them. Kaeberlein’s own work centres on rapamycin, which he calls the most robust and reproducible ageing-slowing drug ever found in the lab, while being the first to add that none of it is proven in people yet.
There’s a homegrown chapter, too: he points to TriviumVet, the Waterford company founded by two friends of his, Louise Grubb and Tom Brennan, which won FDA conditional approval for a rapamycin drug – for the most common heart condition in cats. “They took the lessons from longevity science and brought it to FDA approval.”
What’s changing fastest is our ability to see ageing happen. Steve Horvath, who built the first multi-tissue “epigenetic clock” that estimates biological age from a blood sample, told me what excites him most isn’t a molecule: “The exciting part is actual human clinical trials” – for the first time, measuring whether something works, in people, while they’re alive to benefit.
The unglamorous truth
Near the end, Dr. Anderson, gave me the summary the whole trip had been building to -starting, as she cheerfully admitted, with her favourite headline from comedic publishers at The Onion: “Mortality is still at 100%.”
“But how we age is not inevitables” she adds. “That trajectory of ageing can be changed… anyone with an inclination to change what they’re doing, go for it. There’s a pretty good chance it’s going to work.”
That’s the secret, and the secret is that it’s cheap. Sleep. Move. Lift something. Eat well most of the time. See your friends. Get tested before you buy anything, and walk past most of what you’re being sold. Nobody can put a discount code on any of it, which is precisely why nobody is selling it to you.
The powder salesmen will tell you it’s more complicated than that. The people who study ageing for a living told me it’s simpler – and mostly free.
Next week, we’ll check back in with Susan at a London show floor to find out what the longevity marketplace is actually selling, and how it holds up.
This article is for information only and is not a substitute for medical advice. Always discuss any health decisions with your own doctor.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ.”
