Would you want to live to be 100? It’s a question John Mackey likes to ask people. The founder and former CEO of Whole Foods (he and his partners sold the company to Amazon in 2017 for more than $13 billion) has moved on to his next work chapter with the opening of Love.Life, a sprawling longevity-focused health center in Manhattan Beach, California. The answer most people give Mackey to his question is no, and he has a theory why: We’ve been conditioned to think that to be old must come with a certain degree of decrepitude. So, sure, hitting triple digits is something that many, if given the option, wouldn’t look forward to. But, what if, posits Mackey, those final years of our life weren’t marked by health, mobility, and cognitive issues? Cue The Substance voice: What if you, in your 90s, could feel as good as you did in your 60s? “If you go back and say, would you want to live to be 100 if you could be of sound mind and healthy body until that period of time, then the answer usually changes to yes,” says Mackey.

Longevity—which literally means the ability to live longer, though most of the messaging in this space focuses more on being “well” for longer—is currently the fastest-growing sector of an already booming wellness industry. A 2024 report by global consulting firm McKinsey analyzing the $1.8 trillion wellness market found services and products geared toward longevity to be rapidly on the rise. Of the consumers surveyed (a group that spanned generations and locations), more than 60% considered these longevity services and products to be extremely important and, in 2024, 70% of those in the US purchased more in this area—things like longevity-targeted vitamins, supplements, and nutritional powders; healthy meal kits; and at-home diagnostic kits—than in previous years. According to analysts at Bank of America, the global longevity market is estimated to reach $610 billion this year.

Part of that growth has been the emergence of destinations branding themselves as longevity centers and clinics, where your current health state is measured via diagnostic tests and machines, and a host of treatments—from cold plunges to NAD drips to hyperbaric oxygen chambers—are offered to improve it. The longevity conversation isn’t a new one: Take China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who was so obsessed with living forever that he went hunting for immortality potions and may have died of mercury poisoning. In 1889, acclaimed French neurologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, age 72, began injecting himself with testicular extracts from dogs and guinea pigs for the purposes of rejuvenation. He died five years later, though it’s difficult to say if his experiments were a contributing factor.

What’s different now is that regular people are more open to what might have been previously considered alternative approaches to health than ever before, says Jonathan Leary, a doctor of chiropractic and alternative medicine and the founder of Remedy Place, a “wellness club” with locations in LA and New York. You might have a very good idea why: “Before social media, there was no way to get information about acupuncture or meditation or ice baths in front of so many people’s eyes,” says Leary. Now searches for that information are trending on TikTok (type in “cold plunge” and you get more than 80 million hits). Social media platforms have indeed enabled direct-to-consumer health education, says Andrew Ahn, MD, a physician researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Osher Center for Integrative Health at Harvard Medical School. But just because you saw someone raving about a treatment online doesn’t mean it actually works. “While this democratization of health information has allowed for greater accessibility, it has also introduced misinformation and trends that have not been entirely born out of rigorous evidence,” says Dr. Ahn.

COVID only accelerated the public’s collective interest. “It didn’t matter how much money you had or what your ethno-socio-political background was, COVID set a light bulb off that health trumps everything else in terms of importance,” says Richard Chang, COO at Extension Health, a longevity clinic located in New York City’s West Village. (Of course, there was, and still is, plenty of misinformation and trends not entirely born out of rigorous evidence being spread about COVID under the guise of “alternative medicine” and “wellness” too.) A 2024 NIH analysis confirmed a surge in interest in so-called “complementary health approaches,” like acupuncture and meditation for pain management. Dr. Ahn says he has certainly noticed an uptick in patients inquiring about wellness practices that were once considered “fringe” and secondary to conventional medical care. “I am honestly taken aback by how mainstream integrative treatments have become,” says Dr. Ahn. “Practices like red-light therapy, microbiome [treatments], and psychedelics were once dismissed as lacking scientific credibility. Now they’re widely discussed even in research circles.”

At Love.Life, those who are already fluent in modern wellness-speak have been the earliest adopters, but Mackey thinks that word of mouth will be a powerful tool for broadening their customer base. A few months ago, that customer base also included me. It seems that my journey to Love.Life and into the world of longevity diagnostics came at the right time. A recent study by Stanford Medicine found that biological aging doesn’t necessarily happen in a gradual, linear fashion, but that we experience two periods of rapid change: one around age 44, and the other around 60. And if that’s true, at 46, I’m coming down from the first crest.

What those Stanford researchers found was that among men and women in their 40s, the significant shifts in the body’s molecules were related to cardiovascular diseases; alcohol, caffeine, and lipid metabolism; and skin and muscle. I have felt palpable shifts in some of those things since turning the corner on 40: What I eat and drink has a more immediate impact on me (spice, sugar, gluten, caffeine, alcohol, a.k.a., all the good stuff, does not, shall we say, process as seamlessly as it once did). My skin has started a downward slump, ditto for my energy, focus, and libido. My sleep is erratic and my body shape has morphed, picking up some extra padding that refuses to budge. Which is all to say that I was more than ready to offer myself up for a diagnostic reckoning.

Love.Life’s flagship center is located a few doors down from a Whole Foods on a commercial stretch of El Segundo. The unassuming strip mall location, the bright, airy space, and the cheerful greeting you’ll get from every person there made Love.Life seem refreshingly accessible. The cost of a membership, however, is decidedly not. When I arrive, Christina Miller, MD, who is board-certified in emergency medicine and also happens to be Mackey’s longtime personal physician, asks how I do with blood draws. I’ll be kicking off my visit by giving them 20 vials that they’ll use to evaluate more than 120 biomarkers including blood sugar, metabolic, hormone (thyroid among them), immune, micronutrient, and inflammation markers.