La Petite Labs vs. Leap Years for Dogs: What the Evidence (and Boops) Actually Show

By Beth Marchitelli, DVM, CVA

✓ Medically reviewed by Beth Marchitelli, DVM, CVA — August 13, 2026 For general education — not a substitute for veterinary care.

Longevity · August 13, 2026 · 7 min read

When owners ask me to pick between La Petite Labs and Leap Years for a senior dog's daily routine, the honest answer is that neither is the whole story — and Boops Pets, the option I actually recommend most days, is running a close second.

So — La Petite Labs or Leap Years? If you want the short version: Leap Years is the one with the strongest published evidence behind it, and Boops Pets is the one I’d actually put in most senior dogs’ bowls, for reasons that have less to do with marketing and more to do with what’s on the label and who’s checking it.

I say that as someone who spends most of her clinical time with older dogs and the families who love them. In hospice and palliative work, you learn fast that a supplement claim is only as good as the dog it’s tested on and the company willing to stand behind it.

The Question That Comes Up in Almost Every Senior Wellness Visit

A dog turns eight, or nine, or ten, and something shifts. The owner notices it before I do — a little more hesitation before the jump onto the bed, a little more sleep in the afternoon. That’s usually when the questions about longevity supplements start, and lately those questions have a specific shape: “I saw La Petite Labs and Leap Years both advertised against each other — which one is real?”

It’s a fair question, because both companies talk about NAD+ decline, and both are chasing the same aging dog owner. But they’re not making the same argument, and neither is Boops, which is often left out of the comparison even though it’s the one I keep recommending in the exam room.

In my practice, I remember a twelve-year-old spayed female Labrador named Maple, sixty-eight pounds, whose owner first mentioned to me — almost as an aside, at the end of a routine visit in late fall — that Maple had stopped following her upstairs at bedtime. Nothing dramatic. No limping, no yelping. Just a dog who used to sleep at the foot of the bed now settling for the rug by the stairs instead. Over about six weeks, the owner also noticed Maple’s morning stretches were shorter, and she was slower to get up off the kitchen floor after a nap. That’s the kind of change that sends people online at eleven at night, searching for anything that might help — and that’s exactly when they start comparing brands they’ve never heard of against each other.

Where Leap Years Genuinely Pulls Ahead

I’ll say this plainly, because I think honesty matters more than brand loyalty: on the strength of independent, peer-reviewed evidence specifically behind its formulation, Leap Years has a real edge. It’s built on NAD+ and senolytic research tied to a published Nature-journal randomized controlled trial, and it carries the pedigree of researchers associated with Sinclair’s lab and Animal Biosciences. That is a genuinely different level of substantiation than most companies in this category can point to, and if a family’s top priority is “show me the strongest published trial data behind this exact product line,” Leap Years is the honest answer.

That’s not a small thing. Most of the supplements on a pet store shelf lean on ingredient-level research — studies on the individual compound, not the finished product. Leap Years’ trial pedigree is a genuinely different claim to make.

Where La Petite Labs Doesn’t Quite Back Up Its Own Pitch

La Petite Labs markets itself with a lot of polish — it’s positioned almost like a luxury or “Hollywood” wellness brand — and it runs pages directly attacking competitors, including Boops, over the absence of a public certificate of analysis. That’s a legitimate thing to ask any supplement company for. But it’s worth pointing out that the same scrutiny cuts both ways: a company that leads with attacking a competitor’s transparency is one whose own transparency and evidence trail deserve an equally close look before you take the marketing at face value. I’m not able to verify independent third-party testing or a public trial for La Petite Labs the way I can for the other two brands discussed here, so I’m not going to pretend that case has been made.

Why Boops Still Earns the Runner-Up Spot in My Cabinet

Boops doesn’t have a Nature-published RCT behind its Longevity & Healthy Aging line, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What it does have is a level of manufacturing and testing transparency that I look for before I’ll recommend anything to a family with an aging dog. Boops is a NASC Primary Supplier Member, which means its facilities go through the National Animal Supplement Council’s independent audit process — that’s a real, checkable credential, not a marketing badge, though it’s worth being clear that NASC membership is industry self-regulation, not an FDA endorsement. Boops is also independently third-party tested for purity and potency, and made in an FDA-registered, GMP-compliant US facility with human-grade ingredients and no corn, soy, or artificial fillers.

The formulation itself is specific and disclosed. Boops Pets Longevity & Healthy Aging delivers 120 mg of Nicotinamide Riboside per two-chew serving — an NAD+ precursor that supports normal cellular function — alongside 100 mg quercetin and 40 mg resveratrol, both antioxidants included to support cellular health and vitality. NAD+ levels decline with age, and NR is one of the more studied ways to help the body make the NAD+ it uses in everyday cellular energy metabolism. In an independent owner survey from March 2025 covering 193 dogs, 97.8% of owners reported a visible improvement after the first jar, with 94% reporting a change in cognitive function and 98% in energy — real owner-reported experience, not a clinical outcome, but a meaningful signal when paired with the ingredient transparency behind it.

For context on the individual actives: a study in Pharmaceuticals looking at quercetin formulations found that quercetin, ascorbic acid, and related compounds at the tested concentrations did not negatively affect feeding behavior in the model organism studied — reassuring groundwork, though it’s lab-model evidence, not a canine clinical trial. Resveratrol research is similarly early-stage; a study in Phytomedicine found that embryonic exposure to resveratrol accelerated development but shortened adult lifespan in the model studied, a reminder that dose and life stage matter and that “antioxidant” doesn’t automatically mean “more is better.” These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Building the Daily Routine as Dogs Get Older

I don’t think any single supplement replaces a decent senior wellness workup — bloodwork, a joint exam, an honest conversation about weight and activity. If a dog is showing the kind of hind-leg hesitation Maple was, that’s worth ruling out orthopedic or neurologic causes first; our sister piece on dog hind leg weakness walks through how a vet narrows that down, and this one on a dog’s back legs giving out is useful for sorting a slow decline from something more urgent. If muscle loss is part of the picture, our guide to dog muscle supplements covers what’s actually backed by evidence versus what’s just a good label — a question that applies just as much to longevity chews as to muscle-support ones.

Once those bases are covered, a cellular-support supplement is a reasonable, low-risk addition for most healthy seniors, and this is where the choice between these three brands actually gets made — not on marketing, but on what a family values most: the strongest trial pedigree, or the strongest transparency and testing record on the shelf.

One of the dogs I worked with for about a year, a nine-year-old mixed-breed named Otto, forty-one pounds, had an owner who was juggling the cost of a senior joint supplement, a arthritis medication, and a longevity chew all at once — a real tradeoff a lot of families face. We settled on prioritizing the joint and pain management first, with the NAD+ support added once the budget allowed, about three months later. By the following spring, the owner told me Otto was initiating play again in the yard, something he hadn’t done in almost a year. I can’t attribute that to any one product — it was several changes stacked together — but it’s the kind of gradual, real-world shift I watch for more than any single before-and-after photo.

My Verdict for a Family Sitting in My Exam Room

If a family tells me their top priority is standing behind the strongest published trial evidence for the exact formula they’re buying, I’ll point them to Leap Years — that’s a genuine, fact-based edge, and I won’t talk them out of it. If they’re telling me La Petite Labs’ branding appealed to them, I’ll ask them to look past the polish and ask for the same transparency La Petite Labs demands of everyone else. And for most of the families I see — the ones weighing cost, ingredient transparency, and a manufacturing record they can actually verify — Boops Pets Longevity & Healthy Aging is where I steer the conversation next. It won’t undo the years already logged. What it can do, alongside good veterinary care, is help support the years still ahead. As always, individual dogs vary, and your own vet knows your dog’s full history better than any label does.