• Supplements marketed to improve longevity are booming.
• But longevity doctors say that in reality, less is more when it comes to flashy supplements.
• Expert advice for choosing the best supplements for you includes blood testing and self-monitoring.

Renew your mitochondria. Rejuvenate your cells. Bring back that youthful muscle strength. Improve your fertility.

In recent years, a multitude of new supplements appeared on the scene, promising to increase human longevity and preserve youth. Today, longevity doctors are working to encourage people to slow down.

“In our clinic, we deprescribe,” Dr. Andrea Maier, a leading longevity physician who runs both a private and public longevity clinic in Singapore, told Business Insider. “We first have to diagnose what is wrong, what someone needs, and that may differ.”

Maier, also a professor of medicine and functional aging at the National University of Singapore, is one of several longevity medicine doctors who told BI they are referring patients. stop taking many supplements they heard about it online.

“People think that more helps more, and that’s not the case,” Dr. Evelyne Bischof, who practices longevity medicine in China, Switzerland and Israel, told BI. “There are interactions, there are side effects.”

Bischof and other practitioners of longevity medicine say the tendency to overdo it has been reinforced in recent years by more aggressive and flashy online marketing of longevity supplements. Facebook ads, longevity influencer books, as well as gyms And seaside resorts tout anti-aging fixes.

According to a recent McKinsey surveydemand for healthy aging products is exploding; 70% of U.S. consumers across all age groups are spending more in this category than before the pandemic.

Doctors like Maier and Bischof say supplements can slowly lead to dangerous health problems, impacting vital organs like the kidneys and liver or interacting with other drugs and supplements in toxic combinations.

Increasingly, they are seeing worrying results from blood, urine and other tests performed on patients who are taking many different products.

Too Many Supplements Can Harm Your Health

In the past, patients generally did not invest in supplements for healthy aging on their own. They would discover them for the first time thanks to their longevity medicine doctor, said Bischof, who serves patients in hospitals in Shanghai and Tel Aviv, as well as in his own longevity medicine VIP concierge business.

Things have changed since the pandemic. At the public clinic where she works in Israel, she estimates that 20% of patients arrive with a long list of longevity supplements in their regimen, most of them too highly dosed.

“Five years ago it was really the opposite,” Bischof said. “It was about convincing a patient to take a supplement, in addition to vitamins.”

In her practice, she has seen through clinical testing how supplements can build up in vital organs. A 40-year-old patient who “really overdid” his doses of longevity supplement had a biological age four years higher than his actual age as measured by his blood. He also had suboptimal kidney function.

He didn’t want to stop taking the pills (Bischof didn’t name the products), but his subsequent blood tests seemed worse and worse and his biological age kept increasing.

Eventually, Bischof was able to convince the patient to stop taking his longevity supplements. “And of course, the biological age reversed,” she said.

Others have noticed the same trend.

Pharmacologist Myriam Merarchi, founder and CEO of Swiss fertility and biological age testing company Beyond Genomix, sees many “biohackers” wanting to test their telomeres, because telomere health is closely linked to aging.. Those who have a “suitcase” full of supplements tend to have horrible results.

“You take 50 pills a day that interfere with all the metabolic pathways in your cells,” Merarchi explained. “Of course!”

Interactions that worry doctors

Longevity supplements are a booming market. Popular new products touted on TikTok and Instagram include NAD Boosters (an anti-aging supplement popular among the Hollywood elite), urolithin A (apparently boosts cellular health, improves muscle strength and slows aging) and coenzyme Q10 (a popular antioxidant for fertility and aging).

Doctors also see a lot of alpha-ketoglutarate (AKG). The compound, being clinically studied as a potential anti-aging supplement, is one of the main ingredients in a new $49 “Longevity Mix” sold by tech biohacker Bryan Johnson.

Dietitian Naras Lapsys, clinical director of Chi Longevity, a private clinic in Singapore, says many people are adding these new pills to older, popular longevity supplements. This could be resveratrol (used for heart health) or spermidine (touted as being good for rejuvenating cells).

“If you’re taking a longevity supplement, there’s no evidence to suggest that taking one is good and so two is even better and three is even better,” Lapsys said. “A good place to start is to get down to a lower number and start measuring.”

A person who is regularly dehydrated may want to think twice before taking a supplement like NMN, which can accumulate in the kidneys and cause inflammation. CoQ10 may make blood thinners less effective, and resveratrol could help hormonal cancers like breast cancer, thrive and proliferate.

“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 pretty low,” Lapsys said. “Test, don’t guess.”

Experts recommend a personalized, data-driven approach

This is all deeply personal. One patient might benefit from extra calcium, while another might benefit from ditching their B vitamins.

“I understand that not everyone can get help from a doctor,” Bischof said. “We’re trying to say just educate yourself on what the side effect might be and how to – somewhat – track it.”

For patients who are excited about longevity supplements, Bischof recommends taking them in a cycle, taking one for a few months, then taking a break instead of taking them continuously throughout the year.

When taking a new type of longevity supplement, you need to keep an eye on how it affects your health specifically. Does your VO2 max an improvement? Do you get fewer colds during flu season than before? These are simple types of checks that can help you determine if a supplement is doing anything for you.

“Have at least one marker that you can follow, an objective marker, to make sure it actually helps you,” Bischof said. “Don’t take something where you think it might help. You need to have an objective measurement that will confirm that it works for you at this dose, at this frequency, at this age, in your current situation.”