"Longevity" Is the Hottest Word in Wellness. It's Also Almost Entirely Unregulated.
There's a certain type of content that has colonised wellness feeds over the last two years. A tech entrepreneur, usually wealthy, usually male, submitting their body to a battery of daily interventions — dozens of supplements, cold plunges, red light panels, plasma infusions, continuous glucose monitors — and publishing the biomarkers to prove it's working. The aesthetic is part laboratory, part lifestyle brand. The philosophy is simple: death is optional if you optimise hard enough.
This is biohacking at its most visible, and love it or hate it, it has done something genuinely useful for the industry: it has made longevity a mainstream consumer category. The Netflix documentaries, the $60 million supplement raises, the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboards — all of it has normalised the idea that aging is something you can actively work on, not just passively experience. Consumer appetite is real, the science underpinning healthy aging has accelerated meaningfully, and the market is responding. The global anti-aging sector is on track to surpass $120 billion by 2030.
But here's where it gets complicated — and where a lot of brands are quietly accumulating risk they haven't fully accounted for.
The word nobody can define
There's a word appearing on seemingly every supplement, skincare product, and wellness device launched in the last two years. Longevity. It sits on packaging the way "natural" did a decade ago — aspirational, emotionally resonant, and almost completely undefined.
And that's the thing about "longevity" as a claim: it sounds like it means everything, while technically committing to almost nothing. That's not necessarily a problem — until it is.
When we say "longevity" is unregulated, we don't mean brands can say anything without consequence. We mean something more specific, and in some ways more dangerous: there's no defined standard for what "longevity" means as a claim, which creates a false sense of freedom.
In the US, the FDA and FTC share jurisdiction over health product claims, and neither agency has established a regulated definition for "longevity." Brands can use the word on packaging and in advertising without triggering the approval requirements that apply to, say, a health claim linking a specific nutrient to a disease outcome. It feels like a green light. And for a while — often right up until an enforcement action or a class action — it functions like one.
What regulators do require, clearly and consistently, is substantiation. The FTC's standard — competent and reliable scientific evidence — applies regardless of how a claim is categorised. So a brand can call its product a "longevity supplement" without pre-approval, but it still needs to defend every implied benefit that a reasonable consumer would read into that language. If your packaging and social channels paint a picture of someone living longer, healthier, and cognitively sharper, those implied claims need evidence standing behind them. The word "longevity" doesn't provide cover — it just obscures the exposure.
There's also a subtler problem that the biohacking aesthetic creates for mainstream brands. When the cultural conversation is dominated by n=1 self-experimentation — one person, no control group, no peer review, measuring everything and concluding it's working — it quietly lowers the bar for what "evidence" looks like. Brands absorb that standard at their peril. Regulators don't.
The ANZ picture is structurally different — and that matters
For brands operating in Australia and New Zealand, the regulatory architecture works quite differently from the US model, and in some respects it's more constraining — even for products that feel low-risk.
In Australia, most supplements and complementary medicines are regulated by the TGA as listed medicines. Listed medicines can only use pre-approved permitted indications from a defined list of around 778 allowable claims — and the TGA has signalled it's actively working to update that guidance. This isn't a system where you can coin "supports healthy longevity" and self-certify your way onto shelves. The indication has to exist in the permitted list, and you need to hold evidence supporting it at time of listing. If you want to make claims that go beyond that list — or reference specific disease states — you're looking at the registered medicines pathway, which requires full TGA evaluation for safety, quality, and efficacy before you can market.
The NMN story illustrates how quickly the ground can shift. NMN — one of the most commercially visible longevity ingredients globally, and a staple of the biohacking supplement stack — only received TGA approval as a permissible ingredient in December 2025. Before that, Australian brands could manufacture it but only for export. Consumers wanting it were largely sourcing from overseas, outside any regulatory oversight. The TGA's approval was genuinely significant, and the first ARTG-listed NMN product is now permitted to make indications around energy production support and general wellbeing. But note what that product can't say: it can't promise extended lifespan, cellular rejuvenation, or reversal of biological age — however much the biohacking conversation might invite those associations.
That gap — between what the ingredient science suggests might be possible and what a brand is actually permitted to claim — is where a lot of longevity brands find themselves in trouble.
The visibility problem
Longevity tends to attract enforcement precisely because of how crowded and high-profile it becomes. Regulators watch categories. When a claim type proliferates across hundreds of brands — and longevity absolutely has — it moves up the priority list.
In Australia, the TGA has already pulled vitamin D products from market for making bone strength claims without adequate evidence. In the US, recent FTC enforcement against stem cell clinics, telehealth providers, and weight loss supplement brands has made clear that being in good company doesn't offer protection. If anything, being in a crowded category where unsubstantiated claims are commonplace increases the likelihood that a regulator or plaintiff's attorney comes looking.
There's also the consumer trust angle. The same cultural moment that made longevity mainstream has also made consumers sharper about the gap between promise and reality. The biohacking aesthetic — all dashboards and biomarkers and confident self-reporting — has trained audiences to expect proof. When the label can't deliver it, the brand pays twice: once with regulators, once with the customer.
What a defensible longevity claim actually looks like
It starts with being honest about what your evidence actually supports — and which regulatory system you're operating in.
In the US, "longevity" as a category identifier might be available, but the real work is one level down: a specific mechanism, a specific population, a specific outcome with a measurable evidence base. In Australia, you're working within permitted indications from the outset — which indications genuinely apply to your product, and do you have the evidence to back them at time of listing?
"Supports healthy cellular energy metabolism" is different from "extends lifespan." "May help maintain cognitive function as you age" is different from "reverses cognitive decline." The first versions in each pair are narrower and less glamorous — but they're also the ones that survive scrutiny, build genuine consumer trust, and don't become a liability when the category attracts the regulatory attention it's clearly heading toward.
The longevity wave is real, and there's genuine opportunity in it across ANZ, the US, and beyond. But the brands still standing in five years won't be the ones who borrowed the most compelling language from biohacking culture. They'll be the ones who asked, early and honestly, whether the evidence actually justified the claim.
Picking the right words isn't the start of the process. It's the end of it.
At Parallaxis, we help health and wellness brands build claims strategies that are grounded in evidence from the beginning — across ANZ, US, and EU regulatory environments. If you're navigating the longevity category and want to understand where your current positioning sits, get in touch.