When the antiaging and longevity scientist David Sinclair first published his personal anti-ageing supplement stack, I thought it was unusually credible. He was a Harvard scientist telling us about a regimen that appeared to follow directly from his own scientific research: boosting NAD+, activating sirtuins, engaging AMPK pathways and combining these with lifestyle choices like fasting and exercise. At the time, I thought it was coherent, mechanistic and based on a specific theory of ageing.
Years later, however, my confidence has largely evaporated: not because the individual supplements lack antiaging benefits, but because the stack itself has become unstable.
His supplement regimen has changed repeatedly, often on a yearly basis. Supplements are added, removed, reintroduced and removed again. Each change is presented as refinement, but taken together they raise an uncomfortable question: if the science was really driving these decisions, why is there so little convergence?
Ageing science in humans moves slowly, and evidence accumulates over long timeframes. Annual reversals in personal supplement protocols are, therefore, unlikely to be based on decisive new human data. Instead, they show something else: a continual hypothesis-cycling based on animal studies, in-vitro work and emerging trends in the longevity community. While this kind of evidence is useful for research exploration, it is not strong enough to justify confident, frequently changing supplement prescriptions.
This emphasises an important distinction that often gets forgotten in longevity discussions: mechanistic plausibility is not the same as validated intervention. Many of the supplements Sinclair currently takes (NMN, resveratrol, spermidine, fisetin and berberine) have very plausible anti-ageing mechanisms. Some even have sound and encouraging early data. But plausibility alone does not explain why a protocol should keep mutating if it is truly evidence-led. In longevity supplement science, recommendations gradually narrow as weak candidates are discarded and strong ones remain. What we see here is not narrowing, but frequent rotation.
Also, most anti-ageing interventions act slowly, if they act at all, over years, not weeks or months. By frequently changing his supplement protocol, Sinclair undermines the very possibility of knowing whether any individual intervention is doing anything meaningful.
Another factor is Sinclair’s evolving public role. Early on, he spoke primarily as a scientist. Over time, he has also become a central figure in the longevity influencer community. That brings different incentives: visibility, novelty, relevance and personal branding around “what I take”. In that environment, his frequent supplement updates signal progress and authority, even when the underlying evidence has not meaningfully changed.
None of this means Sinclair is acting in bad faith. It just mean that his supplement stack should be understood for what it is: a personal supplement regime experiment that he is conducting on himself, which is continually revised, and is exploratory rather than definitive. It is not a scientifically validated anti-ageing protocol, and it should not be seen as one.
The irony is that his original stack inspired confidence precisely because it appeared stable and theory-driven. Its constant evolution has had the opposite effect.
