Longevity researchers share 9 of the best anti-aging hacks and a few that are total scams

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There's no denying that your genetics are a huge factor in healthy aging.

Much of what determines who lives past 100 has to do with the genes we are born with, how they interact with our environment over time, and how well they protect us from developing diseases as we age.

Dr. Thomas Perls, founder of the New England Centenarian Study, recently told Insider that it's all about "getting the right combination," of hundreds and hundreds of different genes, "which is a little bit like winning the lottery." Much like the lottery, the winning genetic numbers can be different for each person.

But, the good news is Perls says that regardless of genetics, most of us are likely capable of making it into our 90s by adopting some key behaviors that promote healthy aging. Not smoking and keeping stress levels down are both great places to start.

Ask any aging expert doing serious work in the field and they'll tell you — the best anti-aging tool that we have doesn't come in any pill or elixir — it's exercise.

Exercise helps improve bone density and balance, making deadly falls less likely. It also improves blood pressure and heart health, resulting in fewer age-related diseases like heart disease, cancers, and type 2 diabetes.

A good mix of heart-pumping cardio, strength training, and some stretching is what's generally recommended. Experts say it's good to develop a routine that keeps you physically active on most days of the week.

In addition to boosting strength and fitness, working out is also good for your mind. Exercise can immediately improve a person's mood, and it has demonstrated benefits for brain health and memory, reducing the risk of developing cognition issues like Alzheimer's as we age.

"The data are pretty unambiguous," longevity expert Dr. Peter Attia wrote in his new book, "Outlive: The science and art of longevity." He calls exercise "our most valuable tool for preventing cognitive decline."

There's no single winning strategy for healthy eating, but experts agree that what we fuel ourselves with undeniably impacts how well we age.

Loading up on fresh vegetables, whole grains, and healthy fats is generally associated with some of the best health outcomes.

The reverse is true too. According to multiple studies, poor diet and exercise patterns are major contributors to the leading cause of death in the US: Heart disease.

As nutrition expert Dr. David Katz said in his 2018 book, "The Truth About Food," all the diets that have the best track records for longevity and vitality, whether they're low fat, high fat, low carb, high carb, vegetarian or meat-eating include some common traits.

They are "always sharing an emphasis on whole, wholesome, minimally processed vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, nuts, and seeds with plain water the preferential answer to thirst," he wrote.

Skimping on sleep is connected to all kinds of poor health outcomes that can shorten your lifespan, including obesity and high blood pressure, decreased immune function, and heart disease.

Not getting enough sleep can also change the way your metabolism works, impacting key hunger hormones in the brain. This results in a desire to eat more, and specifically, more junk foods.

That's why longevity experts stress the importance of getting a good night's rest as often as possible.

Dr. Robert Waldinger, who directs what many people call the longest-running human happiness study in the world, says there's one big thing that we often forget plays an important role in human longevity: Human connection.

His Harvard Study of Adult Development suggests that having strong social ties to other people, including some intimate relationships, casual conversations, and interactions that fall somewhere in between the two, all matter to our long-term health.

"Initially, we didn't believe our own data," he recently told Insider, "And then other studies began to find the same thing."

In general, the more connected we are to other people, the lower our risk of dying is, at any age, whether you're a "Black woman in rural Georgia, or a White man in Finland," Waldinger says in his new book, "The Good Life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness."

Both the frequency and the quality of our contact with other people matter to our happiness, as does having a sense of purpose in the world, and being of service to the people around us.

It may seem trivial, but good oral health, including regular flossing, is likely a great way to prevent disease and decline as you age.

"The mouth reflects general health and well-being," US Surgeon General David Satcher wrote in a first-ever report on Oral Health in America in 2000.

It isn't just about your teeth reflecting how well you care for yourself, or how much money you have for preventative dental care, either. Dentists have known for a long time that the mouth can also serve as a unique window into your overall health status in many different ways, both physical and mental.

Some research has shown how issues like inflammation or the presence of certain bacteria in the mouth can lead to more disease in general, possibly impacting your risk of heart issues — though this idea is still somewhat controversial, because it's also possible the link could be due to other tooth-decaying and heart-hurting issues, like smoking.

While starving yourself is definitely not a wining longevity strategy, there is a growing body of scientific evidence showing that a small amount of calorie restriction can be good for the aging human body.

Part of the reason has to do with key processes inside the body that are stimulated when we are not being fed, like the cancer-fighting cellular cleanup process called autophagy.

In one 2019 study, scientists found that aging people who paired up with nutritionists to consume just slightly fewer calories at every meal for two years improved both their heart health and their metabolism, and appeared to foster a younger-looking immune system too, possibly slowing down their biological pace of aging.

But there's no reason to take this advice to extremes. While some people claim intermittent fasting as a holy grail for aging bodies, there's no clear evidence yet that it is good for human longevity — except possibly in an indirect way, if it's helping people achieve healthy weight loss.

Dr. Attia recently admitted he'd been guilty of overdoing it on entrepreneur Tim Ferriss's podcast, saying he used to fast for about three days a month "without hesitation," but when he did a recent body scan and realized how much muscle he'd lost over the past decade, it "shocked" him out of the practice.

"At the end of the day, if you're not providing any nutrients, including amino acids, you're basically just tearing down muscle," Attia said.

There are some existing drugs that are being studied as anti-aging treatments, though evidence is still being gathered. One is a cheap diabetes drug called metformin.

For decades, metformin has been used to treat type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, and a female hormonal disorder called Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

But more recently, researchers have been wondering if the same drug could be used to prevent age-related diseases in older people, including not only diabetes, but dementia, cancers, vision loss, viral diseases, and general cellular health.

"We're looking at one disease at a time, not understanding that the biology of aging drives the diseases," leading metformin researcher Nir Barzilai recently told Insider. "If we can stop the biology of aging, we have less diseases."

Rapamycin is another cheap, old drug that's already being trialed as an anti-aging treatment for dogs.

Rapamycin is an unusual anti-fungal that helps suppress the immune system, making some organ transplants and cancer treatments possible.

Decades of lab research also suggests it could be an impressive life extender. In the lab, it routinely extends the lifespan of flies, worms, and mice. Scientists aren't sure yet that it can do the same for humans, but because of the way that the drug influences a key protein in our bodies that regulates metabolism and cellular growth, researchers are hopeful that it could.

In addition to the study of rapamycin for aging dogs that is being done across the US now, there is also another study for women with aging ovaries starting at Columbia University this spring. Both trials hope to provide more evidence of the benefits of rapamycin for anti-aging.

Pills that promise to boost the metabolism-regulating enzyme NAD+ are increasingly popular, and show some potential promise in a few very small studies of people that have been done over the past few years.

NAD+ is an important enzyme in our bodies that helps us create energy. NAD+ levels decline as we age, so there's some suspicion that boosting them might help preserve a more youthful state of being, and protect aging DNA.

Two supplements, nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) and nicotinamide riboside (NR), supposedly help us produce more NAD+ — and they have a lot of hype around them. Celebrity Kourtney Kardashian called NAD+ "our genetic key to longevity" in a recent Instagram post touting some of her favorite supplements.

But the science hasn't really borne out yet whether artificially boosting NAD+ precursors like NMN and NR has real benefits for people.

The bulk of the research so far on NAD+ has been done in mice and petri dishes in the lab, and it's still unclear what taking supplements like NMN and NR can really do for people in the long run. Almost all of the human studies so far have been funded by companies that are either already selling NMN and NR supplements, or have a vested interest in profiting from anti-aging, so more independent research is needed.

In October of 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration said that because NMN is being investigated as a drug, it "may not be marketed as or in a dietary supplement." Because of this, some NMN sellers have subsequently been kicked off Amazon.

In 2019, the US Food and Drug Administration shut down Ambrosia Medical, a startup that was charging $8,000 to fill people's veins with "young blood," typically taken from people in their teens and early 20s, then injected into aging bodies over 35.

"There is no proven clinical benefit of infusion of plasma from young donors to cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent" aging, then-FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a joint statement with Peter Marks, who directs the FDA arm that regulates biological products (like blood) for human use.

But more recent research suggests that it could actually be possible to rejuvenate old blood in a less macabre and medically dangerous way, by giving people specific kinds of anti-inflammatory drugs that return their own blood stem cells back to a younger state. Research at Columbia University recently tested out the tactic in mice, and found it may work.

Taking growth hormones and testosterone supplements may seem like a good idea for people who are getting older, and naturally losing some of the higher levels of these compounds they were endowed with when they were younger.

But aging experts say taking these kinds of supplements isn't going to help you age better; in fact, it can increase your risk of developing serious diseases, like diabetes and cancer.

"These anti-aging nuts, they love the word 'hormones' because people equate it with youth," Dr. Perls recently told Insider. "It's all marketing. They try and come up with names that make people make think that the substance is safe and that it's good for them."

Red wine — and a compound derived from it called resveratrol — made waves in the pharmaceutical world back in the 2000s, when there was speculation that the compound might lengthen people's lifespans.

But that hypothesis was based on studies in yeast and mice, and it was never proven to work in humans.

Since the idea turned out to be a dud, pharma giant GSK stopped researching it in 2011.

A cold shock of water can be great for mood, inflammation, and stress levels on a day to day basis — no small feat for our health.

But there isn't any good evidence that in the long run, cold water plunges improve human longevity. One of the big reasons some people have speculated that cold exposure therapy might be good for aging bodies is because of its potential to increase our beneficial brown fat stores, which burn energy to heat us up when we're cold, improve heart health, and help regulate our metabolism.

Unfortunately, there just isn't any good evidence that a quick dip into the cold is really changing our overall metabolism or genetically-predetermined stores of brown fat enough to make a real difference.