The longevity investor has a golden tip for long life: maintain a routine

About the "Science of Longevity" column

Longevity clinics are opening at a dizzying pace, and billionaires are investing huge capital in new treatments, but what does science really know about quality of life? This weekly column will deal with this industry in all its aspects — from research to the money that drives it.

Four years ago, when Amir Alroy brought the Global Wellness Summit to Israel — an annual conference that brings together business people, government, academia, and science involved in quality of life — the discussion on longevity and extending healthy years of life took up only a small part of it. A year ago, this topic had already taken over the entire conference. It seems that the concept of longevity has taken the place of wellness. The goal is no longer just to live well now, but to live well deep into the future.

"The idea was and remains to look at the health of healthy people," Alroy clarifies in an interview with Globes. "Once upon a time, it had an even less sexy name — preventive medicine. The idea is to act proactively to optimize health at any age, but gradually we understand that to achieve quality of life and good health deep into the future, we need to use not only the tools of the medical world."

Alroy was one of the first investors in Israel to focus on wellness. He started as a personal fitness trainer in the USA and later founded a fitness chain for the affluent population. Gradually, the activity of the institutes spilled over into the health field. In 2018, he founded Wellness Ventures. "We started as an incubator for companies operating in the field between quality of life and health. We invested in 15 companies and gradually became a venture capital fund."

Amir Alroy

Personal: 50 years old, married and a father of five.
Professional: Co-founder of the Welltech Ventures fund, partner in The Wellness Collection venture, director at the Global Wellness Summit. Manages part-time the family fund AYRAD Investments, which invests in high-tech companies.
Something else: Was a personal fitness trainer in the past.

The new luxury

"Health is a status symbol," he says, "and today proactive concern for health is the new luxury. Walking with a continuous glucose monitor, an Oura ring, or a Whoop bracelet — it has become a bit of a thing."

About a decade ago, the Quantified Self fashion flourished. The idea was that continuous measurement of physical performance would lead to far-reaching health insights. We were left with sports watches, but this is not exactly the revolution they dreamed of then. Are we returning to it now?

"Today, the hope has grown that artificial intelligence will be able to turn this information into meaningful personalized recommendations for life. This is already starting to happen in areas like sleep and mental health, alongside fitness, of course. I am a director at a company called Longevity.Ai, which works to collect a variety of data to offer personalized medicine, and they have some impressive partnerships with HMOs and insurance companies. The medical device company Abbott invested in Whoop, understanding the value of this information."

Longevity trends

What other trends do you identify as a longevity investor?

"As part of the field's drift beyond classic health, we see its interface with the physical world, with our environment. Does our home encourage health? Is the home calming, is the air clean? Does the neighborhood encourage movement?

Another trend is the use of music as an interface through which we can influence our health — to calm, to stimulate, to give motivation. I am invested in an Israeli company that connected a mattress to a musical system, and it synchronizes between the musical frequencies and the frequencies that pass through the mattress to create relaxation during sleep and wakefulness.

Another trend is longevity for pets. Americans are going crazy over it. Alongside the influence of the connection with pets on our health, we are talking about the longevity of the animal itself, and this field includes special food, exercise for the animals, monitoring devices, and basically everything we do for ourselves."

Untapped opportunities

Do you identify areas that have not yet become hot but in your assessment are expected to become so?

"I identify opportunities at two interfaces. One is the interface between the longevity field and finance. It is clear that a lot of money and careful financial planning are needed to allow us quality of life deep into the third age, but the question is also how we can engage in managing our finances in a way that calms us and does not harm our quality of life. These are questions that perhaps need to be approached not only from the point of view of finance people, but in cooperation between finance and health people.

Another interface is the family. There is a lot of talk about social connections in the third age and about creating vital communities and preventing loneliness. What is the role of the family in this fabric? How will we manage relationships in the family in a way that increases the quality of life and longevity of all of us? For some reason, this is talked about less."

Home training with feedback

According to Alroy, these new trends are not expected to divert attention from the king and queen of the field — sports and nutrition. "We see a wave of investments in devices that give the convenience of training at home together with the community experience. The pioneer was Peloton, which grew during the coronavirus and then faded, but is still a giant company. Joining it were the company Mirror, which allows training in front of a mirror and receiving feedback, or Amp, which connects strength training equipment to a feedback system that also has humans."

The golden tip

What recommendation for a healthy lifestyle have you learned that people usually don't know?

"Maintaining a routine. This is the non-intuitive recommendation. Our brain may like to see us leave the comfort zone, and the body likes to be challenged in fitness, but it also really likes a routine: sleep at fixed hours, training at fixed hours. If you fly a lot and suffer from jet lag, I recommend entering all this information into artificial intelligence, and it will be able to recommend how to prepare for the trip and how to recover from it."

Between hype and reality

Alroy asks to point out negative trends as well. "As people in the wellness and longevity industry, we encounter real grotesques, which can drive you crazy. People who take more and more supplements, and peptides, and everything that has buzz around it. You must distinguish between what is hype and what is real, and in any case, there will be no benefit if you try to improve too many things at once and in an extreme way."