The billion-dollar longevity industry has a recurring problem: The people selling you health advice are often more interested in taking your money than in getting the science right. Consider three recent examples.

The first and, to my mind, the worst is Dr. Mark Hyman, who is one of the most visible figures in the industrial free-for-all known as Big Longevity. He runs a branded website, co-founded the online wellness platform Function Health and has published a shelf's worth of best-selling books. Hyman is not obscure, and his newsletter reaches a large audience that trusts him.

Recently, subscribers woke up to an email titled "A Non-Negotiable in My Healthy Aging Routine." The subject was C15:0, a saturated fatty acid found in full-fat dairy that some researchers believe may offer health benefits. Hyman was promoting a synthetic version called fatty15 — a supplement he happens to have a financial relationship with.

Here is what the science actually shows: The two largest, most credible studies on C15:0 found that people with higher levels in their blood tend to have lower rates of heart disease and diabetes. Those people were eating full-fat dairy, not taking a synthetic capsule, and the association could reflect dozens of other dietary habits. The leap from "dietary correlation" to "buy this supplement" is not supported by the evidence.

Hyman made it anyway.

C15:0 may turn out to have real benefits. The supplement may eventually be validated. But when a doctor markets a product using claims that outrun the science, that is a longevity scam — not because the product is necessarily worthless, but because the presentation is dishonest.

The second example involves Katie Couric Media. Couric built her reputation as a broadcast journalist. She still trades on that credential, which creates an expectation that her media company observes basic journalistic standards — distinguishing, for example, between reporting and advertising. That standard was not met in a recent "review" headlined: "I've Tried Countless Wellness Products — This One Is Different." The article reads like marketing copy that's trying to sound like journalism. In this case, the product being promoted was again fatty15. The piece offered no independent evaluation, no "but on the other hand ... ", no disclosure sufficient to alert a reader that they were looking at sponsored content dressed as journalism. When a trusted name uses the architecture of reporting to move product, readers are being misled about the nature of what they're reading.

Katie Couric should give her readers more respect than that.

The third example is more institutional and, therefore, in some ways, more troubling. The University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine published an article under the headline "Could diet soda increase dementia risk?" It was a head-turning question, and it generated the attention the school's communications team was presumably after. The problem was buried roughly 15 paragraphs in: when researchers repeated their analysis excluding participants who already had obesity or diabetes — two conditions strongly associated with both diet soda consumption and dementia — the association between diet soda and dementia disappeared entirely. In other words, the study's own authors found that their headline finding did not hold up once they controlled for the most obvious confounding variables.

The dramatic claim was the hook; the quiet retraction was the fine print. A university medical school is not a supplement company. It does not have a product to sell. But it does have a reputation to build and research attention to attract, and those incentives, it turns out, can produce the same distortions.

Academic medicine should be better than that.

What these three cases share is a willingness to exploit the trust of people who are genuinely trying to make good decisions about their health. The longevity industry is particularly well-positioned to do this because its customers tend to be motivated, educated and concerned enough to seek out expert guidance. They're extra-ready to be told by a seemingly credible source that a supplement or treatment will work.

And that's why we all need what I call longevity literacy.

Longevity literacy — the ability to distinguish evidence-based claims from marketing dressed as science — is now a mandatory skill for anyone over 50. It requires reading past headlines; checking whether a doctor promoting a supplement has a financial relationship with the company making it; and understanding the difference between an observed dietary association and a randomized clinical trial.

And it means recognizing that a peer-reviewed publication is not a guarantee of integrity.

None of this involves cynicism, by the way. It requires only the same critical reading that was once considered the basic equipment of an educated consumer. The longevity industry has grown faster than its accountability structures. Until that gap closes, the burden falls on all of us.

To find out more about Paul Von Zielbauer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Gülfer ERG?N at Unsplash