Äldre par på cykel i höstljus

Why We Live Longer, and What Healthy Ageing Actually Depends On

A woman born in Sweden in 1865 lived, on average, to 49. A woman born in 1920 lived to 73. A girl born in Sweden today is expected to reach about 85. Men moved from 46 to 66 across the same two birth cohorts. Those figures come from Statistics Sweden, and the distance between them is the largest health gain of the modern era.

This article is about what lies behind that gain, and about the parts of a long and active life that are decided in an ordinary week: food, movement, sleep and daily nutrition.

Health Royals Peak Performance, supplement with vitamin D3, K2 as MenaQ7, folate as Quatrefolic and omega-3 from algal oil

Healthy years at Health Royals

Peak Performance Formula is our daily multivitamin for women, built around twelve named components: omega 3 from algae with 300 mg DHA, D3, K2, B vitamins as MecobalActive® and Quatrefolic®, and Hytolive® olive extract and Extramel® melon extract at the same doses as in their human studies. DHA contributes to the maintenance of normal brain function.

See Peak Performance, multivitamin for women with omega 3

How long do people in Sweden actually live today?

In 2025 the average life expectancy at birth in Sweden was 85.55 years for women and 82.52 years for men, according to Statistics Sweden.

Five year periods smooth out the noise. Across 2021 to 2025, Statistics Sweden puts life expectancy at 85.1 years for women and 81.8 years for men, an increase of 0.8 years for women and 1.0 year for men compared with 2016 to 2020.

The curve is still rising, slowly, and from the top end. The underlying report notes that the largest contribution to the recent increase comes from deaths avoided between 80 and 89 for women and 75 and 89 for men, and remaining life expectancy at 70 is now 17.92 years for women and 15.84 years for men. The years being added are late ones, which makes their quality the more interesting question.

The averages also hide a geography. In 2021 to 2025, women in Stockholm County reached 86.0 years and women in Norrbotten 83.7; for men the figures were 82.7 and 80.2. A gap of 2.3 and 2.5 years, inside one small, wealthy country with a single healthcare system.

Why has life expectancy in Sweden risen so much?

Mostly because children stopped dying, not because old people became much older.

Statistics Sweden reports that infant mortality fell from roughly 20 percent in the second half of the 1700s to around 0.2 percent in the 2010s. The recent part of that fall is just as steep: 45 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1938, 25 per 1,000 in 1947 and 1.85 per 1,000 in 2021, in the agency's own series.

The arithmetic is where most confusion about longevity begins. Life expectancy at birth is an average over everyone, including everyone who dies young. A death in the first year of life removes roughly eighty years from that average; a death at 82 instead of 85 removes three. Save a hundred infants and the national number moves far more than a year added to a hundred eighty year olds.

So when the Swedish average went from the forties to the eighties, the driver was clean water, sewage systems, vaccination, antibiotics, safer childbirth and better infant feeding, not a longer old age. Maximum human lifespan barely moved; what moved was the share of people who got to use it.

What changed after child mortality had already fallen?

Two things dominate the post war gains in Sweden: fewer people smoking, and much better prevention and treatment of heart disease.

Daily smoking fell from 14 percent of the adult population in 2006 to 5.4 percent in 2024, 5.7 percent among women and 5.0 percent among men, according to the Public Health Agency of Sweden. A separate agency report on living habits dates the decline to the 1980s and notes a steep social gradient: 11 percent among adults with only compulsory education against 3 percent among those with post secondary education.

The fifty year follow up of British doctors by Doll, Peto, Boreham and Sutherland in the BMJ in 2004 found that men born between 1900 and 1930 who smoked cigarettes and continued died on average about ten years younger than lifelong non smokers. Stopping at 60, 50, 40 or 30 gained about 3, 6, 9 or 10 years of life expectancy respectively.

Heart disease is the second story. Björck and colleagues, in the European Heart Journal in 2009, applied the IMPACT model to Sweden between 1986 and 2002. Coronary heart disease deaths in ages 25 to 84 fell by 53.4 percent in men and 52.0 percent in women, roughly 13,180 deaths prevented. About 36 percent of the decrease was attributed to medical treatment and about 55 percent to risk factors falling across the population; lower total cholesterol alone accounted for 39.5 percent of the reduction, and less smoking for 9.1 percent.

The trend has continued. The National Board of Health and Welfare recorded about 20,300 acute myocardial infarctions in Sweden in 2024 and roughly 4,000 deaths with heart attack as a cause, and its press release on the 2023 figures noted a fall of about 50 percent since 2000 and 40 percent since 2013.

One caveat: the 36 and 55 percent split is a modelling result, not a measurement; the direction is robust and replicated in many countries, the decimals are not to be read literally. The diet side of that story is in what the evidence on an anti-inflammatory diet actually supports.

What can the longevity market actually show?

Lifespan is one of the hardest outcomes to study in people, and the field has shaped its methods around that.

The flagship attempt is TAME, Targeting Aging with Metformin, designed as a six year randomised trial in more than 3,000 adults aged 65 to 79 across 14 institutions, with a composite endpoint of age related disease. According to the American Federation for Aging Research, it has still not launched and is still seeking funding.

The best run human trial so far measured something else. CALERIE randomised 197 non obese adults, mean age 38, to two years of 25 percent caloric restriction or normal eating; the achieved restriction averaged 11.9 percent. The outcome published in Nature Aging in 2023 was not deaths or diagnoses. It was DNA methylation, read through so called epigenetic clocks.

The clocks deserve a short explanation, because they are now sold to consumers as biological age tests. A clock reads chemical tags on DNA at a few hundred selected sites and converts them, through a statistical model trained on a reference population, into a number. Higgins-Chen and colleagues, in Nature Aging in 2022, found that technical noise alone produced deviations of up to nine years between replicate measurements across six prominent clocks; retrained versions brought most replicates within 1.5 years. In CALERIE, two years of caloric restriction slowed one clock, DunedinPACE, by roughly 2 to 3 percent in measured pace of ageing, while two others, PhenoAge and GrimAge, did not move, and the authors wrote that it is unclear whether the change will translate into reduced morbidity and mortality over the long term.

None of this makes the research uninteresting. A trial with death as the endpoint in healthy middle aged people would need tens of thousands of participants and decades of follow up, so the field measures surrogates, and a surrogate is a hypothesis about an outcome, not the outcome. That makes it a young and curious field, and a two year change on a consumer test is best read against the technical noise described above.

What have the large supplement studies actually asked?

A population question: whether a daily pill adds years to a large group of people. It is a useful question, and a different one from the one most people have when they choose a supplement.

The largest recent dataset is Loftfield and colleagues in JAMA Network Open in 2024: 390,124 adults in three prospective US cohorts, a median of 23.5 years of follow up and 164,762 deaths, looking at daily multivitamin use and all cause mortality; the hazard ratio was 1.04 in both follow up periods. The Cochrane review by Bjelakovic and colleagues on antioxidant supplements and mortality pooled 78 randomised trials with 296,707 participants; in those with low risk of bias, beta carotene showed a relative risk for all cause mortality of 1.05 and vitamin E 1.03. High dose antioxidants did not extend life, and on those estimates slightly shortened it, which is why the dose matters as much as the ingredient itself.

The regional longevity stories are shakier than they look, too. An analysis by Saul Justin Newman argues that extreme age records cluster where record keeping is poor: 82 percent of United States supercentenarian records predate state wide birth certification, and the count of supercentenarians falls by about 80 percent per year once complete birth registration is introduced. That work is a preprint on bioRxiv, not a peer reviewed paper, and a serious challenge rather than a settled result; it was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2024, as UCL noted.

What the evidence does show is just as clear, and more useful. Hard outcome data sit behind not smoking, moving, and getting blood pressure and blood lipids measured and treated. And the multivitamin cohorts asked whether a daily pill adds years to a population, not whether an individual is actually getting the vitamin D, folate or omega 3 fatty acids that the reference intakes describe. Those are different questions, and the difference matters for how a supplement should be chosen; it is the question Health Royals starts from.

What can you actually influence in an ordinary week?

The interventions with hard outcome evidence are unglamorous, mostly free and already known to you.

  • Do not smoke, and if you do, stop. On the British doctors figures, stopping at 40 recovers about nine of the roughly ten lost years.
  • Move. The World Health Organization recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity per week for adults, and notes that insufficiently active people have a 20 to 30 percent increased risk of death compared with sufficiently active people.
  • Get blood pressure and blood lipids measured, and treated if they need it. Falling cholesterol was the single largest modelled contributor to the Swedish coronary mortality decline.
  • Protect sleep and manage chronic stress, which shape the behaviours above more than they act directly. We have written about that loop in our piece on cortisol, skin, sleep and energy.

The 2.3 and 2.5 year gap between Stockholm and Norrbotten is the reminder here. It tracks income, education, smoking and access to care.

Food belongs on the list as well, and here the everyday question gets specific. The national dietary survey, which we have gone through in our article on what Riksmaten found, shows that many adults in Sweden fall short of the reference intakes for vitamin D, folate and iron, with selenium as a fourth. Those are not longevity findings; they concern whether ordinary bodies get the nutrients they run on, and that question has a clearer answer.

What may be said about those nutrients in the EU is narrow and specific. Under Commission Regulation (EU) No 432/2012, "Vitamin D contributes to normal muscle function" and "Vitamin D contributes to the maintenance of normal bones". "EPA and DHA contribute to the normal function of the heart", with the consumer informed that the effect is obtained with a daily intake of 250 mg of EPA and DHA. "Niacin and vitamin B12 contribute to normal energy-yielding metabolism, and niacin, folate and vitamin B12 contribute to the reduction of tiredness and fatigue." Those are statements about normal function in a body that gets enough, not about years of life.

That narrowness is a help rather than a disappointment. It separates what a nutrient does in a body that has enough of it from what no one can promise about the length of a life. Healthy ageing, in the sense that matters on a Tuesday, sits on the first side of that line: being able to feel well, function and stay active for a long time.

That is the sense in which Health Royals uses the words, and it is why we are not a longevity company. We are a supplement company for beauty, hair and wellbeing, and our approach to the nutrient part of the list above is fewer jars, more thought: rather than one jar per ingredient that happens to be discussed this year, a single daily supplement built around what Swedish diets more often run low on, each ingredient chosen for a stated reason, from a named manufacturer, at a dose with a nutritional or scientific rationale. For us, the ingredient cannot be separated from its source, manufacturer and studied dose.

Peak Performance is our example of that thinking. It is a multivitamin for women with omega 3 from algae, twelve named constituents, each with its amount on the label. OMEGATEX® algal oil at 500 mg gives 375 mg of omega 3, of which 300 mg DHA and 50 mg EPA. Vitamin D3 sits at 25 µg and vitamin K2 at 90 µg as MenaQ7®. Folate is 200 µg as Quatrefolic® 5-MTHF and vitamin B12 10 µg as MecobalActive® methylcobalamin, then thiamine 1.1 mg, niacin 16 mg, chromium 20 µg, zinc 5 mg as L-OptiZinc® and selenium 27.5 µg. Two plant extracts complete the list: Hytolive® olive fruit extract at 150 mg, giving 15 mg hydroxytyrosol, the daily amount used in its randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled human study, with 450 mg extra virgin olive oil, and Extramel® melon extract at 10 mg, a source of SOD, at the dose used in two placebo-controlled human studies in which perceived stress, fatigue and sleep-related problems were measured, which we have written about separately. The dose logic is deliberately uneven: the two plant extracts sit at their studied dose, the vitamins and minerals at a nutritional level chosen for daily use over years.

It is built for the routine: the amber glass jar with its scent core is made to stand on the kitchen counter rather than in a cupboard, and the subscription sends the jar once and refill pouches after that, two jars a year instead of twelve, because a daily supplement only counts on the days it is taken.

Our wellbeing page collects how we think about dosing and sourcing. We have done the selection so that you do not have to. Peak Performance carries the omega 3, vitamin D, folate and the other nutrients above at the amounts listed, with the doses and their reasons published. If the check holds, you can stop looking.

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Further reading

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