Written by Renee Fitton MS RDN, Longevity Dietitian & Vice President Growth L-Nutra, Host of Almost Forever Podcast
I wasn't expecting crying at a health conference to be part of my week.
But that's the thing about Aspen Ideas Health — it didn't go the way conferences usually go. And by the end of it, I was thinking differently about the most fundamental question in my field: what does it actually mean to live a long life?
The answer, I'm now convinced, is three things. Not two. Three.
More on that in a minute.
What made this conference different
I've been to a lot of health conferences. They tend to follow a predictable format: a sprawling expo hall with brands competing for your badge scan, back-to-back sessions with no breathing room, and a general atmosphere of organized noise. Everyone is there to sell something, and the speakers are often the polished packaging around the sales pitch.
Aspen Ideas Health was something else.
The conference was held in Aspen, Colorado — the venue alone was stunning, which I mention only because it actually mattered. The setting shaped the experience. There was space to think. There were daily walks, guided meditations, and sound baths woven into the schedule alongside the sessions, not as afterthoughts but as part of the architecture of the event.
And the expo hall? It didn't exist. There was limited product hawking, brand banners competing for attention, thoughtful swag bags with only a water bottle, a book purchase credit and a Stelo CGM. Thrive — Arianna Huffington's health company — had a brain health tent running a dozen cognitive optimization protocols, including one of my favorites, Brain HQ, a game backed by 20 years of clinical trials to support improved cognitive health. The food was predominantly plant-based and thoughtfully sourced. (There was also, inexplicably, a hot dog cart at one point. I've been told it signaled some kind of thematic transition. I'm still processing it.)
The attendees were a curated group: government officials, non-profits, physicians, dietitians, and a small number of privately held health companies — Noom, Eli Lilly, a few others, including a health checkup tent by Mount Sinai where I got a skin cancer screening that actually came up positive and prompted me to schedule an appointment with my doctor. People who came to contribute ideas and change the healthcare landscape, not just to close deals.
The whole thing just felt good. Not in a soft, spa-weekend kind of way. In a "these are serious people having serious conversations in an environment that treats their wellbeing as relevant to their thinking" kind of way.
The sessions that stayed with me
The speaker lineup was exceptional. I'll highlight a few.
Jamie Justice (XPRIZE) and Alicia Jackson (ARPA-H) led a session on longevity moonshots — the research investments and breakthrough science being pursued right now to extend healthy human lifespan by decades, not years. ARPA-H is doing particularly exciting work, funding high-risk, high-reward health research the way DARPA funds defense innovation. The ambition in that room was real. The science backing it is real. Most people don't know how close some of these breakthroughs actually are.
Dr. Kris Alexander made the case that video games are a legitimate health intervention — and illustrated it by describing a game he built to sleep-train his daughters, which worked in a single night. His broader point was that interactive technology, done well, can drive health behavior change in ways that lectures and pamphlets simply cannot. I walked away thinking about how much the health industry still underestimates the power of engagement design.
And then there was Steve Burns. Yes, that Steve Burns. Blue's Clues. He gave a session on nostalgia — the science of it, the emotional weight of it, the way it functions as a cognitive and psychological experience that matters more than we typically give it credit for. I don't want to oversell this, but I cried. In a conference chair. In Aspen. Not because I had strong feelings about Blue's Clues (though, I mean, who doesn't), but because he talked about memory, meaning, and connection with a kind of gentle precision that snuck up on me completely.
It was a good reminder that the most powerful sessions often come from the most unexpected places.
I also had the privilege of being recorded on a Noom panel with Daniel Zahler, sharing my perspective on nutrition and behavior change alongside other health leaders like the fabulous Dr. David Katz and Dr. Ami Bhatt. Those cross-sector conversations — where a dietitian, a clinician, a technologist, and a policy maker are all in the same room trying to solve the same problem — are exactly where progress happens.
The number that reframed everything
Across multiple sessions, a few statistics kept surfacing. They're not new, but hearing them in this context landed differently.
There are now 3.5 million people on earth who are 100 years old or older.
We are living approximately 30 years longer than we did a century ago.
And yet, on average, the last 12 of those years are years of poor health.
Let that sit for a moment. We have extended human lifespan dramatically. We have not extended healthspan to match it. We've added decades to life without fully adding life to those decades.
This is the central problem of longevity medicine, and it dominated the conversation at Aspen. The goal — the moonshot that Jamie Justice and Alicia Jackson are literally funding prizes and research around — is to compress that 12-year window of poor health. To die old but not spend years getting there.
But the more I sat with the conversations happening across the conference, the more I felt that we're still missing a third variable.
Lifespan. Healthspan. Wealthspan.
Most longevity conversations are structured around two things: how long you live, and how well you live while you're living it. Lifespan and healthspan. These are the right questions, but they're incomplete.
Because here is what we don't say loudly enough: living longer only works if you can afford it.
Wealthspan — financial wellbeing sustained across an extended life — is the third leg of the stool, and it is consistently the one left out of the longevity conversation. And that absence is not an oversight. It reflects a deeper, uncomfortable truth about who the longevity movement has historically been designed for.
A 30-year extension on life that depletes your savings by year 15 is not a gift. The healthcare costs that compound with age, the years of chronic disease management that drain retirement accounts, the financial stress that is itself a documented health determinant — cortisol, inflammation, cardiovascular risk, cognitive decline — these are not separate from the healthspan problem. They are part of it.
Financial stress shortens healthspan. Full stop. If we are serious about giving people more healthy years, we have to be serious about giving them the economic conditions that make those years livable. That means healthcare access, yes. But it also means financial literacy, long-term care planning, equitable wage structures, and policy that doesn't treat longevity as a luxury good.
The speakers at Aspen who named this directly were the ones I kept thinking about on the plane home. The conversation in longevity medicine is evolving. The best version of that evolution treats lifespan, healthspan, and wealthspan as a unified system — because that is what they are.
What I'm taking home
I left Aspen with a dermatologist appointment to book, a lot of ideas I haven't finished processing, and a renewed conviction that the most important health conversations happen when the people in the room aren't trying to sell you something.
We are living longer. The question is whether we are building a world — in medicine, in policy, in finance, in culture — where those extra decades are actually worth having.
I think we can. I saw evidence of it in Aspen.
More to come.
