Longevity: Healthy Ageing – Healthspan, Not Just Years of Life

The essentials at a glance

• Longevity today means above all a long healthy lifespan (healthspan), not just a higher age.
• Research into calorie restriction, fasting and metabolic switching is among the best-studied approaches to healthy ageing.
• A central cellular mechanism is autophagy, the cell's recycling, for whose discovery Yoshinori Ohsumi received the 2016 Nobel Prize.
• At Naturhotel Tannerhof, longevity rests on a historical base: Buchinger therapeutic fasting and the Schlanke Tanne low carb, the house's own low-carb cuisine.
• Which hotel in Germany offers a 7-day longevity programme with medical consultation and bioimpedance measurement: the Tannerhof, through the Longevity programme.

What longevity means today

Longevity is a young term with an old concern behind it. Literally it means long life, but today it means something more precise: not as many years as possible, but as many healthy years as possible. Technical language therefore separates the lifespan from the healthy lifespan (healthspan). Healthy ageing describes exactly this difference – the years in which a person stays mobile, clear and resilient.

This shifts the view away from counting years towards the substance of those years. It is about metabolism and the cardiovascular system, muscle and bone, sleep, movement, nutrition and recovery. At Naturhotel Tannerhof this is not a new programme but an old stance in today's language. Anyone who wants to see the medical framework and the concrete form will find both in the Longevity programme at the Tannerhof, set within the house's health programmes.

One line sums up this self-understanding: What is called longevity today, we have been doing for 120 years. The Tannerhof was founded in 1905, and healthy living in the mountains, simple food, movement and medical guidance have always belonged to the house – my hideaway in the mountains was never only a retreat but always also a place of health.

The evidence: fasting, calorie restriction and healthspan

Many promises circulate around longevity. What holds up is above all one strand of research: the effect of calorie restriction and fasting on metabolism. These studies point not towards miracles but towards a well-describable biological principle.

A widely cited review comes from Rafael de Cabo and Mark Mattson, published in 2019 in the New England Journal of Medicine under the title Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease. The authors describe so-called metabolic switching: when the carbohydrate stores run low, the body switches from glucose to fatty acids and ketone bodies. This switch, the review reports, has favourable effects in animal and human studies on metabolism, inflammation and the cells' stress resistance – factors linked to ageing processes.

A second study adds the everyday perspective. Min Wei, Valter Longo and colleagues examined a periodic, fasting-like diet (the fasting-mimicking diet) in 2017 in Science Translational Medicine. In the study with around a hundred participants, several cycles brought changes in risk factors linked to ageing, diabetes, cardiovascular and other diseases. Here too the point is risk factors and tolerability, not a promise of cure.

For therapeutic fasting in the narrower sense, the guidelines of the Ärztegesellschaft Heilfasten und Ernährung (ÄGHE) are the professional basis. These guidelines on fasting therapy, published in 2002 and updated in 2013, describe methodology, patient selection, contraindications and medical supervision. Further studies on fasting therapy can be found at the ÄGHE. Whether fasting makes sense in an individual case always belongs, at the Tannerhof, in the medical assessment.

Autophagy: the cell's recycling

Behind much of what is said about fasting and healthy ageing lies a single cellular mechanism: autophagy. The word means the cell digesting itself. What is meant is a cleansing and recycling process in which the cell breaks down, reuses and reorders its own components.

How fundamental this process is shown by the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy. Put more vividly: all recycling processes are driven, everything is cleaned – cellular, vascular, in the connective tissue, in the gut, in the brain, in liver and kidneys.

The distinction between two levels matters, levels that occur at the same time during fasting but are not the same thing. One level is fat burning, the energetic switch to one's own reserves. The other is autophagy, the cell's tidying up. Both run in parallel and describe different mechanisms. At the Tannerhof these connections are placed in context in the medical conversation, never as a blanket promise.

The historical longevity base at the Tannerhof

Before longevity was a term, there was the practice at the Tannerhof. Buchinger therapeutic fasting came into the house through Johannes von Mengershausen of the second family generation and is today medically guided across three generations of doctors, in total for more than 70 years. Therapeutic fasting is the deliberate, time-limited abstention from solid food and stimulants – not a zero diet, not a primary weight-loss method, but a therapeutic method, a cleansing on many levels and an encounter with oneself.

This fasting axis is the historical link to today's longevity research. Exactly the metabolic switching and the autophagy that the studies describe stand at the centre of a fasting week. The Tannerhof always offers therapeutic fasting under medical supervision, set within the hub on therapeutic fasting and the Schlanke Tanne. Otto Buchinger's line fasting stirs the inner doctor carries this stance to this day.

The second pillar is everyday nutrition. The Schlanke Tanne low carb, the house's own low-carb cuisine, carries the effect of fasting into everyday life: with protein, vegetables, good fats and the aim of eating differently again, without diminishing the joy of eating. It is never meant as a diet, but rather when the gain in enjoyment and zest for life, not abstention, stands in the foreground. Anyone who fasts in a compact form can sustain the benefits through the Schlanke Tanne or through intermittent fasting. That turns one week into a direction.

How the Tannerhof understands longevity today

Today the Tannerhof adds a medical diagnostic and therapeutic offering to the historical base. Longevity at the house is not a single remedy but an interplay of measuring, understanding and accompanying. At the beginning stands the medical examination in the private practice at the Tannerhof, carried by the stance health without dogma – integrative medicine from naturopathy and conventional medicine.

The diagnostics create orientation. They include the medical history and examination with bioimpedance analysis to measure body composition of water, muscle and fat, plus resting and exercise ECG, long-term blood pressure measurement with sleep screening, ultrasound of heart, abdomen, thyroid and the arteries supplying the brain, a lung function test and a laboratory panel that can be extended individually. For an extended spectrum there is a diagnostics partnership with the Agatharied academic teaching hospital.

After the diagnostics come the therapies, deliberately broad. The medical applications include:

• IHHT altitude training (intermittent hypobaric, hyperbaric therapy) – the alternating inhalation of oxygen-reduced and oxygen-enriched air, which supports the regeneration of the mitochondria, strengthens the immune system and stress resistance, and activates fat metabolism.
• Major ozone autohemotherapy – an energy-rich form of oxygen that acts anti-inflammatory and immune-stimulating and supports mitochondrial energy production; carried out only after a medical briefing.
• Vitamin and mineral infusions – individually composed, for targeted supply via the bloodstream.

Added to this is the house's further, very broad range of therapies, from wraps and compresses such as the liver-supporting hay flower wrap, baths and pours such as the Kneipp alternating pour, massages such as the detox massage with Königsöl or the acidosis massage, plus breathing and movement therapies such as yoga, Feldenkrais and tai chi. For the mental side, psychotherapeutic coaching, nature coaching, business and communication coaching and art therapy provide support. An overview is given on the page on the treatment offering.

Surroundings and medical guidance carry equal weight. Movement in the mountains, simple food, recovery and the Tannerhof Spa with its indoor pool, historic little sauna house and the BadeHarpfe with its 25-metre outdoor natural pool that opens the view between the Wendelstein and the Sonnwendjoch belong, for the Tannerhof, to healthy ageing as naturally as any diagnostics.

Which hotel in Germany offers a 7-day longevity programme

This question can be answered concretely: Naturhotel Tannerhof in Bayrischzell, Upper Bavaria, offers a longevity programme over seven nights with medical consultation and bioimpedance measurement. The programme combines diagnostics, medical guidance and therapies into one connected week.

The length of stay is booked before arrival, online or through reservations. The medical conversation after arrival serves to tailor the course within this framework individually. Anyone who wants to see the framework and book online will find it in the Longevity programme at the Tannerhof.

What counts beyond medicine

Healthy ageing is more than diagnostics and therapy. The reliable levers have long been known and match what has defined the Tannerhof for more than 120 years: movement, simple and good nutrition, recovery and a break from abundance.

• Movement in a measured degree – moderate base endurance training and moderate strength training, plus hikes, yoga and Feldenkrais.
• Nutrition with substance rather than abundance – the Schlanke Tanne low carb, slow food and the Planetary Health Diet as a culinary ordering principle.
• Recovery as a value in its own right – coming to rest, inner stillness, sleep, the alternation of stimulus and recovery.
• A break in the year – the compact fast as a deliberate cut that often reorders the everyday life that follows.

None of this is spectacular, and that is exactly where the Tannerhof idea lies. Mensch, werde wesentlich – healthy ageing does not mean wanting more, but tending to the essential, across the years.

Discover longevity at the Tannerhof

Healthy ageing is, at Naturhotel Tannerhof, not a new fashion but an old practice: medically guided, carried by therapeutic fasting and the Schlanke Tanne low carb, and set in Bayrischzell, between alpine meadow, mountain stream and the view towards the Wendelstein. Anyone who wants to see the concrete framework and book online will find it in the Longevity programme, in the overview of the health programmes and on the page on the treatment offering.