Longevity Updated 8 September 2026 6 min read

What does longevity mean?

Written byPurovitalis News

Longevity literally means living a long life. But within health it is about more than reaching as many years as possible. The most important question is: how do you stay active, independent, mentally sharp and vital during those years?

That is why longevity is about the combination of lifespan and healthspan. Not only adding years to your life, but making sure that as many of those years as possible are healthy years.

Definition of longevity: the length of a life, or the ability to live or last for a long time. The word comes from the Latin longaevitas, from longus (long) and aevum (age or lifetime). In a health context, longevity usually refers to living a long life in good health.

Lifespan and healthspan: what is the difference?

Two terms are central:

Lifespan

The total number of years you live.

Healthspan

The years in which you are physically and mentally healthy enough to lead the life you want.

The goal of longevity is to bring those two as close together as possible. You do not just want to grow older, but also to be able to keep travelling, moving, working, living independently and spending time with the people around you.

In short: living well for as long as possible.

Life expectancy vs longevity: what is the difference?

Life expectancy and longevity are often used interchangeably, but they mean different things. Life expectancy is a statistical figure: the average number of years a person is expected to live, based on population data. It differs by country, birth year and circumstances, and it says something about a group rather than about you personally.

Longevity is about an individual life: how long you live and, in a health context, how many of those years you spend in good health. Life expectancy is therefore a starting point, not a ceiling. Your lifestyle influences where you end up in relation to that average.

How much of longevity is determined by your genes?

Genes influence how we age, but they are far from determining everything. A 2022 review estimates that genetic factors explain about 25% of the differences in human lifespan. In people who become exceptionally old, the influence of genetics appears to be greater.¹

A large-scale study with almost half a million participants from the UK Biobank also showed how important our environment and lifestyle are. Factors such as smoking, sleep, social circumstances, exercise and socioeconomic situation were strongly associated with biological ageing and mortality risk.²

You cannot change your genetic predisposition. Many everyday choices you can.

View the research

Longevity starts with your daily choices

Longevity is sometimes associated with extensive blood tests, supplement schedules and advanced technology. But the basics are much simpler.

Keep moving

Regular exercise helps you maintain muscle strength, fitness, mobility and balance. Strength training in particular becomes more important as we grow older. In a study in older adults, six months of strength training led not only to more muscle strength, but also to clear changes in gene activity in the muscles that were linked to mitochondrial function.³

Everything you do during the day counts as well: walking, cycling, taking the stairs and sitting for shorter stretches at a time.

Eat a varied diet

There is no magic longevity diet. Research mainly points towards a dietary pattern with plenty of vegetables, fruit, pulses, wholegrain products, nuts and healthy fats and relatively few highly processed products.

A modelling study on diet and life expectancy shows that long-term changes in dietary pattern can be substantially associated with expected lifespan.⁴

So the strength lies not in one superfood, but in what you eat consistently over the years.

Make sleep a priority

Sleep is closely linked to recovery, memory, metabolism and the immune system. A regular rhythm and enough sleep are therefore part of the basics of healthy ageing.

Stay socially connected

Longevity is not only biological. Social contact, a sense of purpose and involvement with others are likewise associated with health and wellbeing later in life.

Do not smoke and be cautious with alcohol

Smoking is among the clearest modifiable risk factors for health and lifespan. Alcohol also carries health risks. The fact that red wine contains resveratrol, for example, does not make alcohol a longevity strategy.

View 11 practical longevity habits

The science behind longevity

Science is looking ever more closely at what changes in our bodies as we grow older. In doing so, the focus is shifting from treatment alone towards looking earlier at lifestyle, risks and biological processes.

Physician and researcher Peter Attia, for example, focuses strongly on prevention and early insight into health risks. Researchers such as David Sinclair look instead at processes at the cellular level, including epigenetics, sirtuins, mitochondria and NAD+.

Can you measure how you are ageing?

Alongside your chronological age (the number of years since your birth), biological age is increasingly being looked at. With it, researchers try to estimate how the body is functioning compared with others of the same calendar age.

Blood values, epigenetic patterns and other biomarkers, among other things, are used for this.

Online life expectancy calculators can also give insight into the influence of lifestyle. They work with averages and are therefore mainly suited to making trends and points of attention visible, not to predicting your personal lifespan.

Does longevity have to cost a lot of money?

No. Some people invest in wearables, extensive diagnostics, specialised clinics and intensive programmes. But the most important basic principles cost little or nothing:

regular exercise
eating a healthy and varied diet
getting enough sleep
not smoking
limiting alcohol
maintaining social contact
paying attention to stress and recovery

Measurements, guidance and supplements can build on that in a targeted way later on. They do not replace the basics.

Longevity is not a short-term project

In the end, longevity is less about one new technique or one ingredient than about choices you can keep up for years.

A single healthy meal or workout changes little. The difference comes from the sum of exercise, nutrition, sleep, recovery and social connection over months and years. Your age goes up by itself. How you deal with your vitality is to a large extent something you can influence yourself.

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