Understanding longevity: life expectancy and healthy life years

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 levers compared
7. What nutrition can do in this regard
8. Anti-aging products put to the test
9. Biological age and its limitations
10. What can be determined from 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 translates as long life. As a buzzword, the term represents the idea that people can influence their own aging, as well as a market for tests, products, and programs.

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

Why this is more than a question of wording

A term without an institutional definition can be filled with any meaning. That is exactly what happens in the longevity market: under the same word, exercise recommendations backed by clear evidence appear alongside products with no evidence of effectiveness whatsoever.

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

The definition that actually exists

The Robert Koch Institute explains in its health reporting what healthy life years refer to.

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

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

Life expectancy and healthy years in figures

Four figures from two official sources set 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 the start of retirement, the same sources provide two additional pairs of figures. The Federal Statistical Office gives 21.2 additional years for women aged 65 and 18.0 years for men. The RKI gives healthy life expectancy from age 65 as 10.2 years for women and 9.0 years for men.

Of the remaining good twenty years, roughly ten can therefore be expected to be free of health-related limitations, mathematically speaking. This comparison is our own calculation based on two sources and does not appear in either source as such.

What the 26-year gap means

Subtracting healthy life expectancy 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 provided by any institution.

The scale is nevertheless informative because it shows what this topic is really about. Anyone who talks about longevity and only discusses lifespan is addressing the smaller half of the problem.

The gap is growing

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

For men, the difference is 3.3 years over four years. Life expectancy did not decline to a comparable extent during the same period, which means that 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 say

A decline of several years over a short period suggests a dramatic interpretation. The source provides no explanation for this, and we therefore offer none either.

The method of data collection should be taken into account. Healthy life years are measured through self-reported health-related limitations in everyday life. If the way people answer this question changes, the measure changes too, even though their physical condition may not have changed to the same extent.

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

This has little implication at the individual level. An average describes a population, not a person. What it provides is 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 figure is particularly relevant to this topic. According to the same source, 18 million people worldwide died before the age of 70 from such a disease in 2021, 82 percent of them in low- and middle-income countries.

The quantified individual factors

For individual risk factors, the WHO provides percentages. Elevated blood pressure is considered responsible for 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 people who are sufficiently active.

For alcohol, the WHO reports more than 3 million deaths in 2016, equivalent to approximately 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 affected men.

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

Why these figures belong together

The four quantified factors have one thing in common: they act over decades and without early symptoms. High blood pressure does not hurt, and insufficient physical activity is not noticeable on any single day.

That is precisely where the connection to this article’s subject lies. Factors without early warning signs affect healthy life years before they affect life expectancy. They first shorten functional time and only later shorten total lifespan.

The 3.3-percentage-point decline in smoking prevalence over twenty years also shows how slowly population figures change. At the individual level, a change can happen quickly; in the statistics, the same change takes decades.

Four levers compared

The table places four approaches mentioned in the longevity context side by side. The third column is decisive.

The gap between the first three lines and the fourth is the article’s actual finding. The proven levers have been the same for decades and can be stated in one sentence.

What nutrition can do in this regard

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

What does exist are associations through risk factors. Blood pressure, body weight, and blood lipids are related to diet, and the WHO reports proportions of mortality attributable to these factors. The pathway therefore runs through the intermediate factor, not directly.

Why this distinction matters

A multi-step association cannot be expressed as years per food. Anyone reading such a figure is reading a projection, not a measured value.

That does not invalidate nutrition. It simply sets the claim correctly: it affects factors that are measurably associated with mortality, not a clock that could be turned back.

The chain from plate to metric

The chain can be described in three links. At the beginning is eating behavior; in the middle are measures such as blood pressure, body weight, and blood lipids; at the end is the risk of noncommunicable diseases.

Of the three links, the reviewed institutions quantify the third in particular. The WHO gives 25 percent for blood pressure and describes noncommunicable diseases as the cause of 75 percent of deaths outside the pandemic.

Those who read the chain backward will find the practical approach there. The target is not the individual food, but the value in the middle that can be measured and medically interpreted.

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

Anti-aging products: a fact check

The longevity market relies to a large extent on supplements. We specifically searched for what institutions say about them.

The last paragraph deserves particular attention. It does not describe an absent efficacy signal, but rather a signal pointing in the opposite direction—and it comes from the institution that conducts health technology assessments in Germany.

Biological age and its limitations

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 decisive step lies between the general description and a specific test result. For commercial procedures that calculate a year figure from a sample, we found no evaluation by any of the institutions reviewed.

What this means for a result

Without institutional evaluation, there is no benchmark against which a number can be interpreted. 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 numbers as findings. The factors in Chapter 5 are quantified; the year figure from an age test is not.

The question that comes before the number

For every test, it is worth asking a question before seeing the result: What would change if the number came out in one direction or the other?

With a blood pressure reading, the answer is clear. An elevated reading leads to medical evaluation, while an unremarkable one leads to the next measurement in a few months. Both cases have a follow-up.

With biological age, this follow-up is missing. Neither a high nor a low value triggers a defined action, because there is no validated procedure behind it. What remains is a number with an emotional impact.

We are not saying that such tests are worthless. 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 can actually contribute in this context. Two levels must be distinguished.

The first consists of the risk factors themselves, above all blood pressure, which the WHO attributes to 25 percent of deaths from noncommunicable diseases. It can be measured at home and interpreted by a doctor, making it the best-established measure in this entire field.

The second level is genetic predispositions. They do not change over the course of life and describe predispositions, not conditions. mybody®x works with a certified specialist laboratory in Germany, performs evaluations in compliance with the GDPR, and has been active since 2016, with direct-to-consumer sales since 2022.

DNA test from saliva

Longevity | ALL IN ONE DNA Test

More than 170 gene variants from a saliva sample, evaluated in 74 analysis reports. What the test does not do: It does not measure biological age, predict life expectancy, make a diagnosis, or extend life. It describes predispositions. The proven levers for healthy years of life are blood pressure, physical activity, smoking, and alcohol.

Price €369.00 As of 11 August 2026; changes possible

Sample type Saliva sample

Processing time approximately 20–25 working days after the sample arrives at the laboratory

Laboratory certified specialist laboratory
Information from the product page, accessed 11 August 2026

About the Longevity DNA Test

Genetic testing for medical purposes in Germany is subject to the Genetic Diagnostics Act, which requires physician involvement and informed consent. Anyone wishing to derive a medical decision from a finding needs medical guidance.

Limitations: what this article does not answer

The gap of approximately 26 and 22 years is our difference calculation based on two sources with different data years: 2024 for life expectancy and 2023 for healthy life years. No institution reports this difference itself, so we identify it as a calculation at every point.

No statement exists at any of the institutions reviewed regarding resveratrol, NMN, or metformin as life-extending agents. 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 evaluated by any of the organizations reviewed. The same applies here: not disproven, but also not confirmed.

Finally, a limitation concerning our own work. This article does not give a figure for how many years a particular behavior extends life. We found no such figures from any institution, and we do not invent them.

What remains of longevity

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

The WHO’s 25 percent refers to a factor that remains symptom-free for a long time. That is precisely why it is the case in which a measurement actually changes something rather than merely indicating something.

The starting point was the question of what significance longevity has for one’s own life. The most robust answer is this: it does not lie in extending the years, but in reducing the gap between them and the healthy ones.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Federal Statistical Office (Destatis): Life expectancy at birth returned to pre-COVID-19 levels in 2024. Press release no. 266 dated 22.07.2025, 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, status 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): Food supplements—what should be considered? – gesundheitsinformation.de

The life expectancies 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 with 82 percent, the 25 percent attributable to blood pressure, the 20 to 30 percent attributable to physical activity, and the information on alcohol come from [3]. The quotation about antioxidant food supplements, the statement on vitamins A and E and beta-carotene, and the note on the recommendation from the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment come from [4]. Additional citations include the approximately 127,000 deaths caused by smoking and the smoking prevalence declining from 32.1 to 28.8 percent, based on publications by the Robert Koch Institute; the definition of healthy ageing from the WHO framework for the Decade of Healthy Ageing 2021–2030; 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 reviewed on 11.08.2026.

mybody®x Editorial & Expert Team

Laboratory diagnostics Nutritional science Blood analysis interpretation Nutrigenetics

This article was created by the mybody®x editorial and expert team. The team combines laboratory diagnostics, nutritional science, and the interpretation of blood analyses. Everyone involved can be found on the authors page.

Published on 10.03.2025 · Last updated on 11.08.2026

The content is for general information purposes and does not replace medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Reference ranges depend on the laboratory, method, and age—what always matters is the information on your test report.