We Can't Buy Longevity, But We Can Invest In It

You might not want to live forever, but you probably don’t want to die tomorrow. The post-covid era longevity industry has seen a surge in treatments that claim to extend your life and improve its quality, from dubious supplements to full-body MRIs, plasma transfusions, and even expensive longevity club memberships. Only Mark Zuckerberg himself knows how many targeted anti-aging ads promising an elixir of eternal youth I’ve gotten in my thirties.

But all these seductive and flashy offerings have limited or no scientific evidence of efficacy, beyond parting you from your money. What they really offer is the illusion of protection against disease and death - scary topics that are under-discussed and misunderstood by even the most health-conscious among us. And in an age where conversations about health are often more wellness theatre than measure outcomes, as mentioned by wellness entrepreneur Lindsay Jang, it’s never been more important to cut through the noise around what we can do to live longer, healthier lives.

Last week’s Longevity in Focus Summit at Standard Chartered aimed to do just that, with panels on preventative health, social networks, healthtech innovation, the promise of Greater Bay Healthcare, and financial health. I took part in the financial health panel, but I found all the discussions fascinating - here are my key takeaways from the day.

Let’s Start with Outcomes Over Outputs

Have you ever found yourself in the first 15 minutes of a spin class or a run and thought to yourself, “I hate this”? Boston Consulting Group discussed how we focus too often on the inputs of health (better diet, exercise, sleep) rather than the outcomes of longevity. These include living with purpose and joy, staying mentally and creatively stimulated, and maintaining functional ability over time.

These outputs that drive outcomes help us to extend our healthspan, pushing back the years of our lives that we live in disability, which means we can do things we enjoy with the people we love longer. According to a CUHK study in 2020, Hong Kong men spend 25.8% of their lives with disability, and Hong Kong women spend 33.7% of their lives with disability. When we think about longevity, our priority should be how to shorten the gap between our lifespan and our healthspan (years without disability). Living longer in good health comes down to three investments most of us are making too late: our physical health, our relationships, and our financial resilience.

With health advice, tips, and tricks coming at us from all angles, where should we start when it comes to preventing chronic disease that will decrease our quality of life?

When I recorded and consolidated my family history, I found out that almost everyone in my extended family had some form of heart disease. I’m not alone. Dr. Francesco Lo Monaco, Cardiologist and Founder of the National Heart Clinic in London, discussed how warning signs can be ignored before a heart attack.

Heart Disease is the number one cause of death globally (in Hong Kong, it’s number 2 to cancer) and is 80% preventable. In Hong Kong, many people have 三高 (saam1 gou1), the three highs: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar. Although atherosclerosis (the buildup of plaque in the arteries) is the most common cause of heart attacks, more than half of women under 65 who have heart attacks do not have significantly blocked arteries.

When we look at longevity, we need to understand the unique risks for women and men when it comes to heart health. For example, high visceral fat (fat around the internal organs) is directly correlated to low testosterone in men. Estrogen level, which serves as a protective hormone against bad cholesterol, drops after women enter menopause, and Hormone Replacement Therapy is often done too late. A lot of general knowledge about health doesn’t take the nuances around patients’ gender, ethnicity, or genetic background into account. Anca Griffiths highlighted that women were not included in medical trials until 1993, which means that the health data we get back from searches on AI platforms isn’t based on research mostly done on men.

Who amongst us has not delayed a body check? The image above shows that heart disease progresses over decades. To invest our healthspan, we need to be really proactive in managing our heart health by understanding our family history, regularly screening for the three highs, more advanced tests around insulin sensitivity, inflammation markers, and genetic risk if those cholesterol and glucose panels are borderline, and health trackers to monitor our heart trends like V02 max and resting heart rate. We also need to look at one of the key drivers of inflammation and poor health outcomes: stress and loneliness.

How Stress and Loneliness Affect Our Long-Term Health

Despite the strong public and private healthcare, Hong Kongers are more stressed and less happy than we’ve ever been. According to the 2025 AXA Mind Health Report, over 60% of Hong Kong workers report stress levels above the global average, driven by uncertainty about the future (58%), financial and job insecurity (58%), work-life imbalance (53%), and loneliness (45%). We have just slid to the lowest rank (90th out of 146) on the World Happiness Report.

Hong Kong PolyU School of Nursing Professor Jed Montayre’s presentation on Social Fraility started with a story about how he would encounter panicking patients in the hospital who didn’t have anyone close to them to check on their cat. It’s quite heartbreaking to hear, and it reflects his research that 6 in 10 participants showed signs of social vulnerability in Hong Kong. This social vulnerability means that those social connections have eroded, which threatens to shorten their healthspan and can lead to disability within 2-4 years.

The extent of the social frailty is measured by general resources, social participation, interpersonal connectedness, and self-management capacity (what someone feels capable of doing). When Jed spoke about interpersonal connectness, he emphasized that having meaningful conversations deepens those relationships. We talk about longevity in aspects of health and wealth, but we should reflect on how we can make our interpersonal relationships long-lasting and meaningful. I think this is a missed opportunity from the pandemic. Because we wanted to move so badly, we missed an opportunity to talk about the loneliness, the vulnerability, and uncertainty of not knowing when it would end or how it would impact us, and how our perspectives and values changed post-pandemic.

L–R: Haymans Fung (Global Head of Wealth and Retail Banking Marketing, Standard Chartered), Nicole Denholder (Founder, Sophia), Wayne Fong (Head of Corporate Affairs, Prudential Hong Kong)

In Sickness and In Health: How we can mitigate financial risks when it comes to your family, our wealth, and our health

We can’t prepare for the things that we don’t talk about, and nothing is more treacherous to discuss than money, illness, and the worst-case scenarios. In our Financial Health panel, we discussed the pitfalls of when you are not proactive about planning for yourself and your family’s future regarding investment, insurance, and family caregiving.

What if you get made redundant without your private insurance, and then you get a diagnosis that you have to pay out of pocket for?

What happens if you let your husband manage all your investments and end up like the average woman with 1 million USD less in their retirement than their male counterparts?

What happens if your parent gets a dementia diagnosis and you don’t have power of attorney, medical documents, and you’ve never spoken with anyone in your family about how best to caretake?

In Sunlife’s 2026 Women’s Wealth in Focus report, 90% of women expect to support parents’ current or future eldercare, but only 26% are saving 10% of their income for it.

Wayne Fong, Head of Corporate Affairs at Prudential, discussed how you need to have your own individual health insurance plans because we risk losing our health insurance if we lose our role.

As Tricia Yap, Founder of Limitless Health, said, “fix the roof while the sun is shining.” When we are healthy and it’s smooth sailing, now is the time to be proactive about our future planning and to initiate the conversations with our family before a crisis strikes.

At CrossGen Health, I am making sure you have consolidated all the medical, legal, and financial documents and that you have aligned expectations about the future of caregiving with your parents, siblings, and spouse. I consult adult children on what they need to know, questions they need to ask, and how to ask them in a way that builds trust and intimacy.

We also talked about compound interest and how we build wealth over time by investing early. Compound interest is not just for our Interactive Brokers account but for our health, our relationships, our careers, our hobbies, and our interests. When we think about longevity, we should consider if we are investing our time and energy in the right places for the future we want.

Here are a few steps you can take this week:

Message a friend or a family member: “Just texting to check in and see how you are doing.”

Cash in on your company’s insurance policy for a body check and schedule it for sometime in the next month.

Join Hong Kong’s Money Action Club for financial accountability circles to help achieve your goals

Circling back to BCG’s presentation on outcomes, we need to look into the crystal ball and imagine what we want our future selves’ lives to look like. For me, I want to have a great tennis slice like my grandma in her senior tennis league, or shoot hoops like the retiree in his 80s who plays basketball in his Lakers jersey at Blake Garden. I want to learn and experience completely new things in my later decades, like when my dad taught himself to play the flute and came to Asia for the first time at 67. Whatever age you are now and whatever place you are in your life, you can start investing in the next decades today.

If this resonated and you're not sure where to start with your own aging parents, that's what I do.

A big shoutout to Maaike Steinbach from FemTech Future, Anca Griffiths, and OM Health and Standard Chartered for hosting such an amazing event.