Understanding longevity: life expectancy and healthy life years

10. März 2025 ca. 19 Minuten

What to expect in this article

1. What longevity means and what institutions say
2. The definition that actually exists
3. Life expectancy and healthy years in figures
4. What the 26-year gap means
5. What people actually die from
6. Four factors compared
7. What diet can do
8. Anti-aging products fact-checked
9. Biological age and its limitations
10. What can be measured in your own body
11. Limitations: what this article does not answer
12. What remains of longevity
Frequently asked questions
Sources

What longevity means and what institutions say

Longevity means a long life. As a buzzword, it refers to the idea that you can influence your own aging, and to a market for tests, supplements, and programs.

For this article, we specifically looked into whether any of the relevant institutions use the term itself. Neither the WHO nor the Federal Statistical Office, the Robert Koch Institute, IQWiG, or the DGE list longevity as its own category. What they do track are three other measures: life expectancy, healthy life years, and healthy ageing.

Why this is more than a question of words

A term without an institutional definition can be filled with any meaning. That is exactly what is happening in the longevity market: under the same word, you’ll find exercise recommendations backed by clear evidence and supplements with no proof of effectiveness whatsoever.

This article organizes the topic around which institution cites which figure. Where a figure is missing, that is stated just as clearly as where one exists.

The definition that actually exists

In its Federal Health Reporting, the Robert Koch Institute explains what healthy life years refer to.

The crucial phrase is “without health-related limitations in everyday activities.” This measures not the absence of diagnoses, but the ability to manage everyday life without limitations.

The WHO approaches the issue from the same perspective. It defines healthy ageing as the development and maintenance of functional ability that enables well-being in older age. Here, too, function is the focus, not the number of years.

Life expectancy and healthy years in figures

Four figures from two official sources set out the framework.

Germany, in years

Source: Federal Statistical Office, press release on life expectancy (data year 2024); Robert Koch Institute, Federal Health Reporting, Healthy Life Years (data year 2023)

The figures from age 65

For retirement age, the same sources give two other pairs of figures. The Federal Statistical Office gives 65-year-olds a further 21.2 years for women and 18.0 years for men. The RKI reports healthy life years from age 65 of 10.2 for women and 9.0 for men.

Of the remaining twenty-plus years, about ten can therefore be expected to be free of health-related limitations, based on the calculation. This comparison is our own calculation based on two sources and does not appear in either one.

What the 26-year gap means

Subtracting healthy life years from life expectancy gives around 26 years for women and around 22 years for men. This, too, is our own calculation based on two official figures, not a figure reported by any institution.

The scale is still significant because it shows what this issue is about. Anyone who talks about longevity and only talks about lifespan is discussing the smaller half of the problem.

The gap is widening

The RKI documents a trend that is often overlooked. Between 2019 and 2023, healthy life years at birth fell from 59.2 to 57.1 years for women and from 60.0 to 56.7 years for men.

For men, that is 3.3 years over four years. Life expectancy did not fall by a comparable amount over the same period, meaning the gap widened.

There are also regional differences. The same source reports 57.4 healthy life years for women in the West compared with 53.2 in the East, a difference of 4.2 years.

What the decline does not tell us

A decline of several years in a short time suggests a dramatic interpretation. The source does not provide an explanation for it, so neither do we.

The method of data collection should be considered. Healthy life years are measured through self-reports of health-related limitations in daily life. If the way people answer this question changes, the figure changes too, even if their physical condition has not changed to the same extent.

What the figure does provide is a comparison over time and across regions using the same method. The 4.2-year difference between West and East is robust under this limitation because both were measured in the same way.

For individuals, little follows from this. An average describes a population, not a person. It gives a sense of the scale of the problem, not a prognosis for an individual life.

What people actually die from

The WHO quantifies causes of death worldwide. According to its figures, noncommunicable diseases killed at least 43 million people in 2021, accounting for 75 percent of deaths outside the pandemic.

The age statistic is particularly relevant to this topic. According to the same source, 18 million people worldwide died from such a disease before the age of 70 in 2021, 82 percent of them in low- and middle-income countries.

The quantified individual factors

The WHO reports shares for individual risk factors. High blood pressure is attributed with 25 percent of global deaths from noncommunicable diseases. According to the WHO, people with insufficient physical activity have a 20 to 30 percent higher risk of death than sufficiently active people.

For alcohol, the WHO reports more than 3 million deaths in 2016, equivalent to about one in twenty deaths, and a share of more than 5 percent of the global burden of disease. More than three quarters of these deaths were among men.

For Germany, the Robert Koch Institute reports around 127,000 deaths annually due to the effects of smoking. According to RKI data, smoking prevalence among adults fell from 32.1 to 28.8 percent between 2003 and 2023.

Why these numbers belong together

The four quantified factors have one thing in common: they take effect over decades and cause no early symptoms. High blood pressure does not hurt, and insufficient physical activity is not noticeable on any given day.

This is exactly where the connection to this article's topic lies. Factors without early warning signs affect healthy life years before they affect life expectancy. They first shorten functional years, and only later overall lifespan.

The 3.3 percentage-point decline in smoking prevalence over twenty years also shows how slowly population-level figures change. An individual can make a change quickly, but the same change takes decades to show up in the statistics.

Four Levers Compared

The table compares four approaches mentioned in the context of longevity. The third column is key.

The gap between the first three rows and the fourth is the key finding of this article. The proven levers have been the same for decades and can be summed up in one sentence.

What Nutrition Can Do

We found no figure in any of the sources reviewed for how many years nutrition extends life expectancy. This is an important finding, because such figures regularly appear in longevity articles.

What we do have are associations involving risk factors. Blood pressure, body weight and blood lipids are linked to nutrition, and the WHO cites the share of mortality attributable to these factors. The pathway runs through the intermediate measure, not directly.

Why This Distinction Matters

A link spanning several steps cannot be expressed as years gained from a food. Anyone reading such a figure is reading a projection, not a measured value.

That does not diminish the importance of nutrition. It simply sets the right expectations: it affects factors that are measurably associated with mortality, not a clock that can be turned back.

The Chain from Plate to Measure

The chain can be described in three links. It begins with eating habits, runs through measures such as blood pressure, body weight and blood lipids, and ends with the risk of noncommunicable diseases.

What the institutions reviewed quantify above all is the third link. The WHO cites 25 percent for blood pressure and describes noncommunicable diseases as the cause of 75 percent of deaths outside the pandemic.

Reading the chain backward reveals the practical approach. The target is not an individual food, but the value in the middle, which can be measured and interpreted by a doctor.

This is also why this article does not include a meal plan. A plan without an intermediate measure cannot be checked, but a blood pressure reading can.

Anti-aging products fact-checked

The longevity market relies heavily on supplements. We specifically looked for what institutions have to say about them.

The final paragraph deserves special attention. It describes not an absence of evidence of effectiveness, but evidence pointing in the opposite direction, and it comes from the body responsible for preparing health technology assessments in Germany.

Biological age and its limits

Tests that report a biological age are among the most visible offerings in this market. The term itself has a basis: the MSD Manual describes biological age as the natural changes that occur in the body during aging.

The crucial step lies between the general description and a specific test result. For commercial methods that calculate an age in years from a sample, we found no assessment by any of the institutions we reviewed.

What a result like this means

Without an institutional assessment, there is no benchmark against which to interpret a number. A result showing a biological age of 45 instead of 52 is therefore neither confirmed nor disproved. It is unevaluated.

In practice, this means not treating such figures as findings. The factors in Chapter 5 are quantified; the year given by an age test is not.

The question that comes before the number

With any test, it is worth asking a question before seeing the result: What would change if the number came out one way or the other?

With a blood pressure reading, the answer is clear. An elevated reading leads to a medical assessment; a normal one means taking another measurement in a few months. Both cases have a clear next step.

With biological age, there is no such follow-up. Neither a high nor a low value prompts a defined action, because there is no validated method behind it. What remains is a number that affects your mood.

We are not saying that these tests are useless. We are saying that we found nothing about their validity from the relevant authorities, and that a number without a benchmark is no basis for a decision.

What can be determined about your own body

The question remains: which measurements actually contribute anything in this context? Two levels need to be distinguished.

The first is the risk factors themselves, foremost among them blood pressure, which the WHO says accounts for 25 percent of deaths from noncommunicable diseases. It can be measured at home and assessed by a doctor, making it the best-documented measure in this entire field.

The second level is genetic predispositions. They do not change over a lifetime and describe tendencies, not states. mybody®x works with a certified specialist laboratory in Germany, processes data in compliance with the GDPR, and has been active since 2016, with direct-to-consumer sales since 2022.

Genetic testing for medical purposes in Germany is subject to the Genetic Diagnostics Act, including a requirement for physician involvement and informed consent. Anyone wishing to make a medical decision based on a finding needs medical guidance.

Limitations: what this article does not answer

The gap of around 26 and 22 years is our calculation of the difference between two sources with different data years: 2024 for life expectancy and 2023 for healthy life years. No institution reports this difference itself, so we label it as a calculation every time.

None of the institutions reviewed has made a statement about resveratrol, NMN, or metformin as a means of extending life. We therefore present them neither as an option nor as disproven, but as unevaluated.

Commercial methods for determining biological age, for example through DNA methylation, have not been assessed by any of the organizations reviewed. The same applies here: not disproven, but not confirmed either.

Finally, one limitation on our part. This article does not give a figure for how many years a particular behavior extends life by. We found no such figures from any institution, and we do not make them up.

What remains of longevity

If you take one number away from this article, let it be your blood pressure. It is the only measure in this entire field for which an institution cites a specific share of mortality and which you can measure at home.

The WHO’s 25 percent refers to a factor that goes unnoticed for a long time. That is exactly why this is a case where measuring it actually changes something, rather than merely showing something.

It began with the question of what longevity means for your own life. The most evidence-based answer is: it is not about adding years, but about narrowing the gap between them and the healthy years.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Federal Statistical Office (Destatis): Life expectancy at birth returned to pre-COVID levels in 2024. Press release No. 266 of July 22, 2025, data year 2024 – destatis.de
2. Robert Koch Institute (RKI): Healthy life years, Federal Health Reporting, data year 2023 – gbe.rki.de
3. World Health Organization (WHO): Noncommunicable diseases, fact sheet, as of 2024, data from 2021, as well as the fact sheets on physical activity and alcohol – who.int
4. Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG): Dietary supplements – what should you know? – gesundheitsinformation.de

Life expectancy figures of 83.5 and 78.9 years, as well as the figures from age 65 onward, come from source [1]. The verbatim quotation defining healthy life years, the figures of 57.1 and 56.7, the figures from age 65 onward of 10.2 and 9.0, the decline between 2019 and 2023, and the regional difference of 4.2 years come from [2]. The 43 million deaths and 75 percent, the 18 million premature deaths and 82 percent, the 25 percent relating to blood pressure, the 20 to 30 percent relating to physical activity, and the information on alcohol come from [3]. The quotation on antioxidant supplements, the statement on vitamins A and E and beta-carotene, and the reference to the recommendation of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment come from [4]. Also cited: approximately 127,000 deaths caused by smoking and the decline in smoking prevalence from 32.1 to 28.8 percent, from publications by the Robert Koch Institute; the definition of healthy ageing from the WHO framework for the Decade of Healthy Ageing 2021 to 2030; and the description of biological age from the MSD Manual (2021). Information on price, scope, sample type, and laboratory comes from the mybody®x product page, accessed on 11.08.2026. All sources were accessed and checked on 11.08.2026.