Last Updated: Feb 7, 2022

Life Extension has always been on the cutting edge of science, breaking through boundaries of the expected to unveil longer and healthier lives for others. Many of the supplements we see on the market today were formulated by Life Extensions scientific team. Finding new pieces of the puzzle for human health becomes even more essential when most Americans have a vitamin deficiency.

But cutting edge doesnt always mean best for you. We tested Life Extension to see exactly what it is and isnt good for, so you can decide if Life Extension is right for your vitamin and supplement needs.

Editor's Summary

Life Extension makes big promises about the purity and potency of their supplements. A reliable third party generally confirms this high quality, but it may not be universally true. And the flipside of their quality control is reduced selection and somewhat higher cost.

Our Top Picks

Life Extension is known for developing high-quality, pure, and potent nutritional supplements.

Life Extension also offers competitively priced lab testing along with their industry leading vitamins, supplements, hormones, and herbs

Super Ubiquinol CoQ10

Reviewed by Innerbody Research

NAD+ Cell Regenerator

Reviewed by Innerbody Research

Super Omega-3 EPA/DHA

Reviewed by Innerbody Research

How we evaluated Life Extension

In order to give you a complete picture of Life Extensions products and experiences, we considered fundamental factors including your user experience and the quality and variety of products they offer.

8.0 / 10

Life Extension only stocks their own brand of supplements, which is a way to produce consistent quality but also results in a much smaller catalog than their competitors have. However, as the Life Extension Foundation develops new and specific formulas, they carry specialized and hyper-specific supplements and blends that others dont.

7.9 / 10

Life Extension brags about the rigorous testing and quality assurance checks that all of their products go through. Their supplements contain no food coloring or unnecessary additives, and ConsumerLab.com gives them high marks in several categories, but our own testing raised some questions. Based on their rocky history with the FDA, the effectiveness of these supplements may vary more than Life Extension lets on.

8.0 / 10

Overall, Life Extensions products are middle-of-the-road in cost but tend toward the expensive side. All of their vitamins are similarly priced no matter how many pills are in each bottle, so keep an eye on the total pill count before you decide. Their LabCorp lab tests can get wildly expensive depending on what youre trying to find. However, with over 200 different tests to order, you can still find a relatively inexpensive look at your biomarkers. Their rewards program is hefty but costs quite a bit upfront.

8.8 / 10

The catalog is laid out clearly and makes it easy to find what you need with quizzes along the way. It is also relatively easy to get lost in their information pages: you need to jump through hoops to find full detail on their history and services.

9.2 / 10

With multiple methods of communication and specific lines for getting in touch with wellness specialists, Life Extension has made it easy to get exactly the help you need. They hold long hours, so even night owls on the west coast can get assistance. All customer service representatives we spoke with were kind and knowledgeable and those who didnt know an answer for us knew how to get us in touch with someone who did.

Why you can trust our review

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers like you make more informed decisions to live healthier lives. We extensively test each health service we review.

Our team has spent over 147 hours testing and researching Life Extension and its close competitors in order to give you an unbiased exploration of your health supplement options, free of marketing jargon or gimmicks. Through a thorough and deliberate approach to every product we encounter, we evaluate services based on adherence to quality, the latest medical evidence and health standards, and a simple question: would we buy the product or service ourselves if it werent part of our job, and would we recommend it to family and friends?

Additionally, this review of Life Extension, like all health-related content on this website, was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy.

Originally founded as the Florida Cryonics Association in 1977 by a science journalist and a mortician-turned-businessman, Life Extension (renamed in 1980) began as an organization dedicated to extending the human lifespan. However, in more recent years, the organization has split into two halves:

Throughout this article, well refer to the Life Extension Buyers Club as Life Extension, as that is the part of the organization open for us as consumers.

Life Extension boasts a lot of firsts in product development, such as introducing:

They also have studied many new applications of known supplements, including:

Clearly, with such a strong eye for product development, Life Extension offers tons of supplements. They hold all of their products to a high standard, testing and retesting multiple times. They are transparent about their scientific processes and health and safety protocols, to the point that you can call their customer service line to get information on the Certificate of Analysis for any product you want. While their ingredients are sourced globally, almost all of their products are manufactured in the United States.

They also are a preferred brand of the third-party testing organization ConsumerLab.com. ConsumerLab.com has rated Life Extension number one with their top-rated award in three separate categories (omega-3 EPA products, internet catalog, and multivitamins) for five, six, and eight years respectively.

Despite having excellent ratings from third-party testers, Life Extension has a relatively antagonistic relationship and troubled past with the FDA. There have been 56 criminal charges levied against the founders, including distributing unapproved drugs after a warehouse raid from the FDA, but all charges were dropped by 1996. That said, Life Extension was issued a warning in 2017 for claiming that Life Extension products could cure diseases such as breast cancer.

Because the FDA doesnt regulate supplements, it is illegal for companies like Life Extension to claim that supplements will treat, diagnose, prevent, or cure diseases. Life Extension can be grandiose at times in their product descriptions, so take their word with a grain of salt.

Who could benefit from using Life Extension?

Anyone currently taking a supplement or looking for a new brand with excellent customer service and strong science may find that Life Extension fills their supplement needs. With their heavily scientific focus, those who are otherwise skeptical of supplements (based on ingredients or lack of mandatory testing) could also find their worries soothed by Life Extensions up-front policies and detail-heavy pages. Its easy to go down long, winding roads reading through Life Extensions various pages.

Despite being so scientific, Life Extension takes the time to break down their science thoroughly and with minimal jargon. Its clear that this organization was founded in part by a science journalist.

As with all supplements, if youre taking any medications or have any medical conditions, consult with your doctor before beginning a new supplement. There are lots of interactions between supplements and medications, some of which can be fatal. Vitamin K can reduce the effectiveness of blood thinners, for example, and kava can cause liver damage. Supplements are not substitutes for conventional medications, as they cannot cure, diagnose, prevent, or otherwise treat diseases.

Lab tests are only available in the continental United States (except for Maryland) and Anchorage, Alaska. If you live in New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, or Massachusetts, you will have to go through your preferred medical providers blood-testing lab rather than LabCorp.

Life Extensions catalog

A vast majority of Life Extensions products are supplements. There isnt an option to peruse all of their vitamins and supplements at once, but there are several smaller ways you can break down their catalog. You can search by type of product, which includes:

Shop Supplements

You can also sort by health goal, including:

There is a lot of overlap between categories. Some supplements can be found in multiple categories with different purposes, but for the most part, each category has five to fifteen distinct supplements specific to the aim of the category. Every page includes a short quiz for you to take, which judges your current health background and health goals and then recommends products for you.

A vast majority of these are softgels or vegetarian capsules, meaning they are specifically designed to break down quickly in the body for apt absorption. The sizes and doses found in each bottle depend on the supplement itself. Every supplement is sold in counts of 30, up to 300 pills per bottle. A few supplements offer multiple doses or sizes, but most only come in one dose and size.

Insider Tip: Based on our testing, we would recommend opting for supplements that dont arrive in tablet form. Tablets generally make it harder for your body to absorb the nutrients, and Life Extensions tablets did not disintegrate in our lab tests nearly as thoroughly or quickly as competitors tablets. Sticking with softgels or capsules is more reliable.

You can buy bottles either individually or in a multipack bundle with four bottles at a slightly discounted price.

Aside from supplemental vitamins and minerals, Life Extension offers a limited catalog of edible products. These are specifically from the Life Extension brand and focus much more on potential health benefits than other supplement companies that also sell diet products. These include:

If youre looking for supplements to add to your weight loss or athletic regimen, Life Extension also has nine different diet and weight loss supplements. For the most part, these are supplements that promote satiety, decrease appetite, and encourage the breakdown of stored fat with mostly scientifically proven ingredients. There are no products with popular but unproven ingredients.

Shop Supplements

Life Extension also offers a handful of products for skin, nails, hair, and oral care. These include supplements like collagen and biotin and probiotic lozenges for both throat health and overall oral health.

Surprisingly, Life Extension has a robust catalog of skincare products akin to something youd see in a mainstream skincare brand. They offer:

Many of these products are aimed at those who are on the older side of things. Given their history and original goals of eradicating aging and preventing death, this makes sense: protect your skin as well as your insides from the sands of time. These products have common, proven ingredients to help your skin flourish, such as hyaluronic acid and vitamin C.

If youre not sure what your skin needs, Life Extension also offers a quiz to dive deeper into your current skincare routine (if you have one) and your overall skin needs. It recommends products for you based on your results so you can dive into your own testing experience.

Not sure if Fido or Fluffys food is giving them the right nutrients? Life Extension has your furry friends back, too, with a mix of advanced multi-nutrient formulas for both dogs and cats. Both dog mix and cat mix are sold in 100-gram bottles for easy addition over the top of your pets normal food. They contain dozens of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, and probiotics not common in pet food but essential to their overall health. In other words, they help provide things your pet might otherwise be missing.

These pet care supplements are well-balanced mixes for adult pets who are average-sized. Life Extension recommends their serving sizes for six- to nine-pound cats and approximately 30-pound dogs, so scale accordingly if your pet is larger or smaller than that.

If youre going to optimize your health, it helps to know where youre starting. Life Extension offers the opportunity to order virtually any lab test that the popular brand LabCorp offers. Thats 230 tests in every form:

You can do blood tests at home if they are finger-prick tests, but larger blood tests must be done in any of LabCorps blood labs. Most of these labs are walk-in, but you can make an appointment for yourself on LabCorps website to save yourself some time as people with appointments get prioritized. With over 2,000 locations around the United States, youll be able to find a location near you.

Because youre ordering these tests through Life Extension, you cannot pay with insurance. Costs can get prohibitively expensive, but if you dont need to test your allergies by season or a complete blood youth panel (which costs over $800), you can find tests for single vitamins or biomarkers for as low as $20.

After you get your test results back through Life Extension, they recommend you call their Wellness Specialist line to review your results and answer any questions. However, if you have a primary medical provider, we recommend you let them know of your results so that they have a complete picture of your medical health.

Life Extension offers a monthly magazine that you can subscribe to through their site. This magazine is designed to keep you up to date like a blog, giving information about organic food and fitness alongside their standard science-heavy information. They list scientific study results relevant to their services from the past month and innovative treatment protocols and medical findings. Each magazine is about 100 pages long and is accessible both in hard copy and PDF.

If its your first time checking out the LE Magazine, you can get the latest issue for free without a subscription. You can either order this to your home as a physical copy or download it as a PDF. As such, there is never any cost to read the magazine. Just be sure to save it every month so you can stay up to date.

Disease Prevention and Treatment

Life Extension very literally wrote the book on using vitamins and supplements to improve your health. First launched in 1997, Disease Prevention and Treatment is now in its sixth edition and is offered online for sale. It is one of the most comprehensive textbooks available for disease treatment and management. A hard copy of the most recent edition costs $59.95 through Life Extensions site but can be found for much less elsewhere.

This textbook is immense, with over 1,600 pages on uncommon strategies and innovative approaches to improving health and disease outcomes. The book claims that procedures using their supplements can cure diseases such as cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and neurological disorders, implying that this information is hidden from the mainstream. They back up many of their 131 treatment protocols with scientific studies and aim to have the most comprehensive and recent guide to self-protection.

However, Disease Prevention and Treatment has also run into some problems with the FDA. In their 2017 letter to Life Extension, the FDA mentions that the book suggests brain tumors can be cured with specific Life Extension diet and nutritional supplements (alongside the medical oncology standard of care). This assumption of curability seems to be a trend among care suggestions in the book.

Keep in mind that all claims of treating, curing, mitigating, or preventing disease with supplements cannot be verified because we dont yet have the verifiable scientific knowledge to know if its true, despite the scientific studies they leverage. If you have concerns about specific medical issues or symptoms you are experiencing, talk first with your preferred medical provider. Life Extensions processes may work for you but clear it first to ensure the best possible outcome for your health.

Health and Wellness Market

Life Extension has one retail location in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Their Health and Wellness Market has several components:

Events at the lecture hall happen occasionally but never without lots of advertising and the potential of joining clinical research studies at the market.

The grocery store carries other brands of supplements and health foods beyond Life Extension, including Jarrow, Garden of Life, Nutiva, and Bobs Red Mill. If youd like to order a blood test through LabCorp, you can have it done there. While you might not get your results the same day, they have Wellness Specialists on location. You can bring any of your Life Extension results in, and theyll gladly sit down with you to help interpret your results.

Currently, the Health and Wellness Market is available by appointment over the phone only. It is open:

The LabCorp lab has more limited hours, closing at 2:00 PM on weekdays and 1:30 PM on Saturdays, and is closed on Sundays.

Science of Life Extensions supplements

Breaking down Life Extensions scientific merit gets complicated fast. They appear extremely scientific and accurate from the outside, with extensive testing and high ratings from third parties. After all, the other half of Life Extension is the Life Extension Foundation, a long-standing research and testing organization.

There are frequent mentions of scientific studies on product pages without ever linking or citing them, but they also claim that they can predict or unlock things years in advance of mainstream sciences understanding. Some of this is legitimate, and some of it stretches the boundaries of truth a bit.

What this means for their products is that most have an inherently experimental edge. Life Extension takes pride in their ability to be groundbreaking, but they dont always acknowledge that experimental doesnt mean better, but no one wants you to know. Experimental simply means something new, whether its a known ingredient in a new application or a new formula altogether.

Thankfully, Life Extension makes their science clear. Virtually every page on the site has scientific information woven throughout, from product pages to blogs. A vast majority of their known-ingredient supplements are dosed properly based on daily intake recommendations, unlike some large supplement retailers.

Life Extension has repeatedly gotten in trouble for claiming that their products can cure or treat diseases, and we found some of this language still lingering on the site. They also offer headlines like 4 Reasons Why Everyone Should Take Our Amino Acids, which is troublesome simply because supplements are a deeply personal health matter. Not every vitamin or supplement will work for every person, despite what their advertising might say.

Life Extension also offers a blog for science news and health news. The Health News blog is small but posts new articles frequently. These articles go into some detail on anti-aging, nutrition, and vitamins. Each piece is written by experts and scientifically reviewed by medical professionals, much like our own. A typical article goes through a recent scientific study, breaking it down into easy-to-understand language and then explaining how that might apply to you and how you could apply those findings to your life.

For example, one article discusses a study on how better diet quality correlates to decelerated biological aging, specifically a DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet that discourages the intake of processed foods. Though it has a punchy title, the article itself is clearly written and includes a list of their references for all to see. This transparency of outside research isnt something you see throughout most of the site, so its a handy look into Life Extensions processes.

There are also consumer alerts, which provide links to short articles on topics that may impact your rights to purchase substances that Life Extension sells. However, the most recent consumer alerts were in October 2019, with only seven articles in the current section, which dates back to 2015.

The navigation for their scientific research page is not particularly clear. They have multiple landing pages that look different, but all link to the same thing; it appears as though theres a newsletter you can subscribe to, but clicking the link just takes you back to the blog.

Do Life Extensions tablets disintegrate?

For any pill or supplement to work, it needs to both disintegrate (crumble into small pieces) and dissolve (combine with liquid) after its been taken. The rate of disintegration and dissolution depends on the supplement, how soluble it is, the ingredients, and hundreds of other factors. However, the fact still stands: your body cant use a supplement if it isnt absorbed into the bloodstream before being excreted. Tablets, or hard pills, are notorious for not disintegrating or dissolving correctly, as other forms have specific mechanisms built in to help.

There is no formal federal testing agency for verifying whether or not supplements actually work. Instead, we took matters into our own hands and created an artificial stomach-like environment to test some of Life Extensions most popular tablet supplements for proper disintegration. This allows our testing team to check Life Extensions disintegration quality.

Our testers received their boxes of product in Life Extension branded cardboard packaging with inspirational quotes on the inside folds. The bottles themselves were packed tightly and efficiently with Life Extension branded tissue paper and appeared to have been packed with care.

None of the supplements we tested fully disintegrated over the course of our experiment. Some mostly disintegrated but left a full-length sliver of material by the end; some barely began flaking when the experiment was over. Considering Life Extension promotes consistent, high-quality testing, we were truly surprised by these results. These findings mean that there is a chance that these supplements may not be adequately absorbed by your body when you take them. Based on our testing, we would recommend opting for supplements that dont arrive in tablet form.

Life Extension is relatively middle-of-the-road when it comes to how much youll have to pay for their products. While not horribly expensive, they arent necessarily cheap either. A majority of their supplements cost between $10 and $30 for a single bottle, though they can cost as much as $75 or as little as $4. Of course, these bottles also have anywhere between 30 and 300 capsules, so in some cases, you can get a lot more product for a lot less money.

Their other major product LabCorp blood, saliva, breath, urine, and fecal tests is considerably more expensive across the board. These can cost between $20 and over $800, depending on the size of the panel and what you are hoping to have tested. While there arent any observable trends between the testing methods, tests for single vitamins or biomarkers cost around $47. Panel tests, or those which look at more than one element of your health, sit around $150. The more complex the test, the more it will cost.

If you know youll be purchasing the same product from them repeatedly, it might be worth it to sign up for an autoship subscription. Autoship will get your product shipped to you in monthly intervals without having to reorder it, with the bonus of free shipping. They will always update your order to automatically pay the lowest price possible and have the most recent formulations.

If you know youll be shopping from Life Extension regularly, they offer a paid rewards program called Premier Rewards. After paying an annual $49.95 subscription fee, youll unlock:

Youll also receive a one-time $50 credit to your account to offset the first years subscription fee. Every purchase you make will add LE Dollars to your account, where every dollar spent is a dollar added. You can then redeem these LE Dollars to use on other Life Extension products.

Premier Rewards are also available internationally for a slightly higher $59.95. However, not every perk is available in every country, so make sure that youll be able to get what you want before registering.

If you arent interested in the Premier Rewards program, every purchase you make with an account will still earn 2% of the orders cost in LE Dollars with every purchase.

Life Extension offers two platforms to contact customer support: phone and in-browser chat.

Originally posted here:
Life Extension Reviews | Everything You Need To Know - Innerbody

Comments are closed.