#474 Longevity Supplements Ranked From Best to Worst

Siim Land (0:00)

Recently, I ranked 100 of the most popular supplements from worst to best. In this video, I'm going to focus only on the longevity supplements that have either been seen to extend lifespan in animals, or they might have some potential longevity effects in humans. Timestamps for everything are down below. All right, let's begin. First one, taurine. So taurine is quite interesting. There is animal research that has been seen to extend lifespan in mice. From two years ago, there was the study. And in humans, we have quite a lot of clinical trials showing that it improves aspects of metabolic health. So it's relatively safe, little to no side effects. It improves exercise performance, improves blood markers. And in animals, it has been seen to extend lifespan. So based on this criteria, I would put it into the god tier. Because obviously, we can't say or know if taurine is going to extend lifespan in humans, but the human studies indicated it does help with many aspects of overall health. And human longevity, the best way to track it is just make sure you have a lower risk of these chronic diseases, like lower risk of heart disease, Alzheimer's and metabolic syndrome and diabetes, et cetera, that would shorten your lifespan. So something that would reduce that risk would be quite useful.

Apigenin mostly helps with, again, the NAD metabolism. It inhibits CD38, which is a glycoprotein that lowers your NAD levels. Now, there isn't any strong evidence that apigenin would extend animal lifespan. And obviously, human research is much more limited. So I would put it in the okay tier. I do think that inhibiting CD38 with something like apigenin would be a part of a longevity stack, and would be part of a longevity strategy, when we're talking about long-term longevity. Reservatrol. Now, many people think that reservatrol is one of the best longevity supplements out there, but the actual high-quality animal studies even don't suggest that it is a life-extension molecule. Now, it was seen to extend lifespan only under one condition, which is essentially metabolic syndrome and obesity. So, mice who are fed an obesity-inducing diet, they have pretty much like obesity and diabetes, then reservatrol does extend their lifespan. But it doesn't really do that under other conditions, and human research also suggests that reservatrol improves lipids and blood sugar and inflammation markers only if you have diabetes or metabolic syndrome. And it might have some negative effects as well on things like reducing the benefits you get from exercise and reducing your VA2 max adaptation. So it's definitely not a useful supplement for an otherwise healthy individual, in my opinion. And the animal data also suggests that it's not particularly effective. So I would put it in the junk tier based on all of that. But in the previous video, the 100 supplement ranking, I did put it in the junk tier. But here, when we're talking about just longevity, I'll just put it in the bad tier. Because yes, under certain conditions, under certain criteria, it might have some effects, but it's not really that effective. Now, rapamycin, obviously, is not a supplement. I'm just going to put it into this video again, because people just ask about it. What do you think about rapamycin? And it's one of the more, you know, biggest candidate for extending human lifespan as well. There's no evidence that it would do so currently. But rapamycin is the most consistently shown, it's a molecule that's been seen to extend animal lifespan most consistently in different organisms. And most potently as well. So obviously, based on that, it would be just got here from a perspective of life extension. If we were to look at it from the animal data, from human data, it's very early to say. But I've been actually positively surprised by rapamycin over the last few years. In the past, I might have been skeptical about it, that, you know, okay, it inhibits mTOR, it might be bad for muscle maintenance, it might be bad for preserving brain cells, because you need mTOR as well for growing brain cells and neurogenesis. But there have been a few studies on humans over the last few years that show that rapamycin not only didn't result in muscle loss, but actually helped to preserve muscle in older people. So that's quite interesting, I would say, that this would really increase potential for rapamycin, for being an otherwise healthy, like a longevity pharmaceutical, especially for elderly people. So yeah, with limited evidence, I'm going to put it in the God tier, but based on the animal data, it definitely belongs in the God tier, from a life extension perspective solely. Metformin, so this is pretty much paired with rapamycin always, and similar reason, it's a very popular anti-aging drug, or people take it for anti-aging purposes. But, you know, there's much better alternatives to metformin, such as SGLT-1 inhibitors that have been seen to extend lifespan in animals and appear to have much fewer side effects than metformin. So metformin obviously is very cheap, it's easy to find, so it has obviously some potential, and it definitely is beneficial for diabetics, or people with insulin resistance. But it also has a few more side effects compared to, like, some of these other SGLT-1 inhibitors. And metformin use, in some studies, is seen to be associated with longevity, but those studies tend to be a bit poorly done. And if you just look at, yeah, what happens to people who don't have diabetes, what if they take metformin, then it doesn't extend their lifespan, or it's not associated with increased longevity in those individuals either. So I'm going to put it in the OK tier from the perspective of longevity and lifespan, because the animal data also isn't that consistent with metformin. Calcium alpha-ketoglutarate.