What happens to your financial plan when you live to 100?

Most pension systems were built around an ~80-year life expectancy. Much of today’s financial advice still follows a linear life-stage model. And many businesses have not yet reckoned with the fact that both their customers and their workforce are ageing in ways that will reshape everything.

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, I am joined by Nadine Esposito, founder of Wellthspan Advisory and a senior risk management professional, to unpack why longer lifespans are not just a medical story — they are a planning and financial one, with major implications for strategy and society.

Nadine’s path into longevity came not through medicine, but through risk, ESG, and a deep interest in the health–wealth connection. She introduces the concept of wealthspan planning: moving away from rigid life stages towards a model that accounts for career pivots, caregiving gaps, health shocks and the very real risk of outliving your money and any affordable care options.

We cover

1. The health–wealth connection — why “health is wealth” works both ways and how financial stress and poor health reinforce each other over a longer life
2. What businesses need to wake up to — ageing customer bases are changing consumption patterns across housing, travel, mobility and services
3. The workforce challenge — flexibility, lifelong learning, the rise of the “sandwich generation,” and why simply raising retirement age misses the point
4. Risk in longevity startups — data security, AI-driven health apps, sensitive personal data, and income regulations (including EU AI Act transparency obligations around human–AI interaction)
5. Longevity and inequality — why longer lives may widen the gap without smarte intervention and access

Key takeaways

1. Wealthspan planning replaces linear life-stage models with something far more dynamic and realistic
2. The two-way link between health and finances means you cannot plan one without the other
3. Businesses should start with a longevity maturity and gap assessment — and test whether products and services actually work for older customers
4. Investors should ask harder questions about IT security, regulatory readiness and risk management — not only financial fundamentals
5. Health and financial literacy, prevention, and employer/insurer incentives are among the highest-leverage policy priorities

Links

1. LinkedIn (Nadine): https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadine-esposito-b1804415/
2. Wellthspan Advisory (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/company/wellthspan-advisory
3. Website:

What can a tiny worm tell us about human ageing, and could gut bacteria hold the key to a longer, healthier life?

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, we sit down with Professor David Weinkove: Chair of the British Society for Research on Ageing (BSRA), Professor at Durham University, and Co-founder and CSO of Magnitude Biosciences. David's lab uses the short-lived nematode C. elegans to run fast, rigorous experiments looking for interventions that extend healthspan and lifespan, and the results are pointing in some surprising directions.

We cover how Prof David moved from physics into experimental molecular biology, how his team discovered that bacterial strains and metabolites can dramatically alter how long worms stay active, and what inhibiting bacterial folate synthesis reveals about the biology of ageing. He also explains how worm movement is a practical proxy for healthspan and why that matters for scaling up research.

The conversation gets into the thornier questions, too: when do you need mice, and when might you skip straight to human-relevant models? How do you fund prevention research when the payoff is decades away? And what are the real risks of mandatory folic acid flour fortification, a policy Prof David argues deserves more scrutiny, given potential microbiome effects we don't yet fully understand.

Prof David also unpacks what the BSRA does day-to-day: from connecting researchers and lobbying government to running small grants and building bridges with clinicians and industry, and why he thinks the longevity field's biggest enemy isn't scepticism, it's overpromising.

Plus, we discover the most extreme longevity idea he's ever come across (involving spare parts — we'll leave it there).

Links:

https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/david-weinkove/

Home - Magnitude Biosciences

HOME PAGE - BSRA

https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-weinkove-bab807b

In this episode:

00:00 Welcome to Beyond Longevity + Meet Prof. David Weinkove

02:40 From Physics to Bioscience: Career Origins & Model Organisms

04:29 The Breakthrough: How Bacteria (and Folate) Can Extend Worm Lifespan

09:12 Measuring Healthspan in C. elegans: Movement, Decline & New Tech

10:38 Why C. elegans? Fast Ageing, Whole-Organism Biology & Screening Power

12:19 Worms vs Mice: Similarity to Humans, Ethics, Cost & Experimental Variability

15:35 Translating Worm Findings to Humans: Microbiome Links, Exercise Paper & Next Steps

17:52 Funding the Science: UKRI, MRC vs BBSRC, and the Reality of Grant Constraints

20:52 Why Longevity Research Struggles for Support: Messaging, Hype & Prevention

28:39 BSRA’s Mission & the Five Pillars: Public Engagement, Advocacy, Fundraising, Translation

32:01 Breaking Down Silos: Making Longevity Research Useful (and Public)

34:07 Prevention Mindset: Why “Healthier for Longer” Isn’t Instant Gratification

36:15 When to Start Interventions: Metformin, Timing, and Trial Design Challenges

39:39 Why Magnitude Bioscience Exists: Fast Whole-Organism Ageing Screens

41:12 What Companies Test in Worms: From Candidate Drugs to 1,000-Compound Screens

42:48 Folic Acid Fortification & the Microbiome: A Potential Unintended Consequence

45:55 Should Government Engineer Health? Autonomy, Risk, and Public Policy Trade-offs

52:37 Ageing Demographics & the Case for Prevention-First Healthcare Investment

55:59 Making Longevity...

What if the conditions we treat in our fifties and sixties which were set in motion decades earlier, would have been spotted, and shifted, far sooner?

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, I sit down with Dr Mayoni Gooneratne, Founder and Medical Director of Human Health and Skin Fit Clinics, and Vice President of the British College of Functional Medicine. After years as an NHS colorectal and pelvic floor surgeon treating advanced disease, she made a decisive pivot into functional and preventative medicine with a sharp focus on women’s midlife health.

Dr Mayoni is frank about what she sees as the fault lines in modern healthcare: too little time to truly listen, a default toward symptom management over root-cause thinking, and a system designed to meet patients at crisis point rather than upstream. Her own definition of “good medicine” is different: deeper connection, individualised biology, and practical tools that help patients protect their own healthspan.

A major thread is perimenopause — why it is still under-recognised in conventional medicine and, surprisingly, even in the longevity conversation. She links this to the long-standing marginalisation of women in medical research, and the real-world consequences that follow. Her solution starts with “body literacy”: tracking patterns, paying attention to symptoms, using health data intelligently, and becoming an active participant in care and not simply waiting for a label.

We get into the specifics of her clinical approach: detailed history-taking and questionnaires, then targeted testing to confirm or disprove a hypothesis. She explains how she uses broad blood marker panels, aiming for optimal, not just “normal” ranges, stool testing to assess gut function, and nutrigenomics to understand how someone interacts with their environment. For anyone sceptical about functional medicine’s reputation for over-testing, her line is clear: testing should have a reason and early markers (like homocysteine and methylation issues) are worth catching before they become disease.

Her framework comes through in a powerful case study of a woman in her mid-forties post breast cancer treatment. The plan combined structured nutrition changes, Pilates to support bone health, and journaling to work through stored stress and anger, with measurable improvements in sleep and HRV.

Practical advice runs throughout: build a simple morning routine, prioritise nourishing food, choose “joyful movement” over punishment, reduce blue light and phone use at night, and rebuild real-world community. She also shares what she believes conventional medicine needs more of: stronger grounding in biochemistry and physiology, better nutrition education, and a far more serious commitment to women’s health.

Beyond the clinic, Dr Mayoni is also building infrastructure for the field. Through Human Health Professionals, she trains and mentors clinic owners to deliver longevity and wellness services responsibly. She also leads the Future Patient Congress and publishes Future Patient, quarterly, evidence-based resources magazine, designed to make current research more accessible and usable for clinicians and practitioners.

In the rapid-fire round: her single most important longevity adjustment, what she wishes she had known before leaving surgery, and what it really means to extend healthspan - not just lifespan.

BCFM College of Functional Medicine

Human Health™ by The Clinic | Functional Medicine in London

The Clinic by Dr Mayoni - Integrative Skin Care Clinic in London