Killing Us Softly (13 page)

S
uzanne Somers's discovery that bioidentical hormones could treat menopause was only the beginning. Soon she realized they could offer more. Much more. “We age because our hormones decline,” she wrote. “Our hormones don't decline because we age.” Bioidentical hormones, argued Somers, could turn back the clock. “You don't want to be sick, do you? You don't want to get fat, shrink, lose your energy, your sex drive, and your brain, or contract any of the diseases that seem to be part and parcel of aging, right? You don't want to end up with bones too feeble to hold up your body. You don't want to walk around with an oxygen tank attached firmly to your back. You don't want to [be] put out to pasture by your family much the same way they do old horses because you are in the beginning of advanced stages of Alzheimer's, do you? But guess what? The second half of your life can be better than the first half. A better life, a healthier life, a life of youthful energy comes from embracing this new medicine. And bioidentical hormone replacement is a big component.” But it was far from the only component.

Somers's anti-aging regimen isn't easy. “When I wake up, I start with estrogen every day of the month,” she explained to Oprah. “Two weeks of every month, I take progesterone. This is my estrogen arm. This is my progesterone arm.” Then she moves to estriol (a form of estrogen). “The other thing that I inject is estriol—two milligrams of this every day vaginally, and I'm not showing you how I do that.” Then Somers swallows pills containing calcium, magnesium, folic acid,
coenzyme Q10, glucosamine, vitamin C, Eskimo fish oil, omega-3 fatty acids, Flora Source, Adrenal-180 (“because my adrenals were blown out”), SAMe, St. John's wort, L-tryptophan, primrose oil, L-glutamine, carnitine, L-tyrosine, L-taurine, lecithin, glycine, phosphatidylserine, Smoke Shield, rhodiola, white tea capsules, Host Defense, Zyflamend, holy basil, Turmeric Force, selenium, zinc, LycoPom, reishi mushroom, cinnamon, LuraLean,
Phaseolus vulgaris
,
Irvingia,
green tea phytosome, curcumin, gamma-linoleic acid, resveratrol, vitamin E, vitamin D, and vitamin K2. She also injects herself with human growth hormone and B-complex vitamins. Then she rubs “a little glutathione cream on the skin on top of my liver to stimulate it.” Finally, just to be sure, Somers takes a multivitamin. Oprah was convinced. “Many people write Suzanne off as a quackadoo,” she said. “But she just might be a pioneer.”

At the end of the day, Suzanne Somers feels like a different woman—a younger, healthier woman. “It has been four years now, and I'm feeling like a thirty-year old,” wrote the sixty-year-old Somers in
Sexy Forever
. “I now realize this is the secret elixir we have all been looking for. People are always saying to me, ‘You look great,' and I can see them studying my face. Best of all, my sex drive is back with a vengeance. I'm in the mood for love. It's so great at this age, after thirty-five years of marriage, to look at my husband and feel all ‘wiggly' inside. And is he ever happy!”

Other celebrities have embraced Somers's regimen, including Simon Cowell. In 2001, Cowell claimed that an intravenous cocktail of vitamins B
₁₂
, C, and magnesium made him look and feel younger. “It's an incredibly warm feeling,” said
Cowell. “You feel all the vitamins going through you. It's very calming.”

E
xperts on aging haven't supported Somers's anti-aging revolution. In 2002, fifty-one of them, led by Jay Olshansky, Leonard Hayflick, and Bruce Carnes, weighed in. Olshansky is a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois and the author of
The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging
. Hayflick is a professor of anatomy at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine and the author of
How and Why We Age
. Carnes is a professor in the department of geriatric medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. “No currently marketed intervention—none—has yet proven to slow, stop, or reverse human aging,” they wrote. “Anyone purporting to offer an anti-aging product today is either mistaken or lying. Systematic investigations into aging and its modification are in progress and could one day provide methods to slow our inevitable decline and extend health and longevity. That day, however, has not arrived.”

Somers doesn't take these criticisms lightly. Seeing a conspiracy among greedy pharmaceutical companies and uneducated, brainwashed doctors, she wrote, “In medical school the students receive very little instruction in endocrinology, and only four hours in how to prescribe hormones. If a doctor isn't curious, then his or her information comes primarily from the drug companies themselves. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the information doctors get in a monthly throwaway magazine from the pharmaceutical companies would most likely be slanted; it is, after all, a business.”

There is one thing, however, that Suzanne Somers is right about: we do live longer than we used to. And it's because she and many others offer advice like eat lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise, get plenty of sleep, don't smoke, avoid sugar, and reduce stress. People don't live longer because they've changed the way they
age
; they live longer because they've changed the way they
live
. But when Somers claims to slow or reverse the aging process, she enters a world of fantasy. She's not the first. Both Alexander the Great and Ponce de León searched for the legendary Fountain of Youth; and celebrities and healers posing as experts have been touting their magic elixirs ever since. It's an easy market. Everyone wants to live longer. “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work,” said Woody Allen. “I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Today's hucksters are no different from those found at sideshows a hundred years ago. Like Somers, they claim the only reason their therapies haven't entered the mainstream is that Big Pharma doesn't want them to. “The reason for the continued use of synthetic hormones,” writes Christiane Northrup, “is that naturally occurring compounds cannot be patented. Therefore, using them has not been in the financial interest of drug companies.” Somers and Northrup cast themselves in the same role: David versus Goliath. They're the little guys trying to help people stay young, while drug companies are the evil giants interested only in profit. Promoters of anti-aging medicines, through their websites, DVDs, books, and pamphlets, invariably advertise their products using a phrase they know will work: “what the pharmaceutical companies don't want you to know.”

The irony is inescapable. For one, the anti-aging business has profits rivaling those of many pharmaceutical companies,
making a fortune for its promoters. Suzanne Somers is an industry. On her website, she promotes only one brand of vitamins, supplements, and minerals: RestoreLife. There's RestoreLife Formula Essential Mineral Packets, Supplement Starter Kit, Resveratrol, Omega-3, and Vitamin D3, as well as RestoreLife Digest Renew, Bone Renew, Calm Renew, Natural Sleep Renew, and Sexy Leg Renew. Somers sells her own brand of foods, cooking utensils, and sweeteners (SomerSweet), as well as skin-care, weight-loss, and detoxification products. She sells nanotechnology patches to control appetite. All these products have made Suzanne Somers a multimillionaire. She's in the anti-aging business. And so are the doctors and compounding pharmacies she promotes in her books and on her website.

A
lthough anti-aging gurus rail against mainstream medicine for not being on their side, their biggest problem is that science isn't on their side.

Olshansky, Hayflick, and Carnes argue that the biggest reason we age is oxidation, which releases free radicals that damage DNA. As DNA mutations accumulate, cell functions are impaired, causing an increased vulnerability to infection and disease. At the heart of the problem are mitochondria, small organelles in every cell that release free radicals while converting nutrients to energy. Because converting nutrients to energy is necessary for life—and because that process produces the free radicals that eventually kill us—we are, in effect, born to die. “It is an inescapable biological reality,” they wrote, “that once the engine of life switches on, the body inevitably sows the seeds of its own destruction.”

Olshansky, Hayflick, and Carnes published their critique of anti-aging medicines in
Scientific American
in 2002. At the time, they knew that supplemental antioxidants like selenium, beta-carotene, and vitamins A, C, and E had been proposed to counter the damaging effects of free radicals. Although studies of antioxidants were just getting started, and they didn't yet know the results, what they wrote was an ominous predictor of the future: “Antioxidants constitute one popular class of supplements touted to have anti-aging powers. Proponents claim that if taken in sufficient quantities, antioxidant supplements will sop up the radicals and slow down or stop the processes responsible for aging. But eliminating all free radicals would kill us, because they perform certain necessary intermediary steps in biochemical reactions.” And that's exactly what happened. Studies have now shown that people who take large quantities of vitamins and dietary supplements with antioxidant activity are more likely to have cancer and heart disease and die sooner. “People might try a putative anti-aging intervention thinking they have little to lose,” they wrote. “They should think again.”

Free radicals aren't the only reason we age. In the early 1960s, Leonard Hayflick, then a scientist at the Wistar Institute, in Philadelphia, received fetal cells from an elective abortion performed in Sweden. Hayflick took the cells and bathed them in nutrient fluid in his laboratory. He wanted to see how often the cells would reproduce. What he found surprised him. No matter how attentive he was—no matter how many growth-promoting substances he put into the nutrient fluid—cells reproduced about fifty times before dying. Leonard Hayflick had proved what German biologist August Weissmann
had postulated eighty years earlier: “Death takes place because cell division is not everlasting but finite.”

Although the relative contributions of oxidation and limited cell division to mortality are unclear, one thing is certain: Suzanne Somers's herbs, coffee enemas, and glutathione liver rubs don't address the fundamental reasons for how and why we age.

S
omers has written many books, with her picture on every cover. She's beautiful. In fact, she doesn't look any older than she did when she played Chrissy Snow on
Three's Company
. Remarkable, given that she was in her thirties then and is in her sixties now. But pictures can be deceiving. And because Somers's anti-aging medicines have no hope of reversing or slowing the aging process—and because she's in the business of saying they do—she has no choice but to resort to Plan B. On October 14, 2006, Somers appeared on
Larry King Live
to promote bioidentical hormones.

K
ING
: In addition to feeling good inside, do you look better outside?

S
OMERS
: I ask you. Do I look better outside?

K
ING
: But you could have had work done. And I wouldn't know that.

S
OMERS
: No. This is a real face. This is a hormone face.

K
ING
: You have not had plastic surgery?

S
OMERS
: I have had some fillers.

K
ING
: What do you mean? Botox?

S
OMERS
: Yes. Yes. Everybody does that.

“Today, we have available to us new techniques for youthfulness such as fillers like collagen and Botox,” writes Somers. “The face-lifts of old look strange and outdated, and today's advantages used in moderation can help you maintain a youthful appearance without looking ‘strange.' The object is to look natural.” And if Botox and collagen don't work, Somers suggests shocking your face with electrical currents. “I have a thing called a FaceMaster,” she told Larry King, “which I have been using for fourteen years. I hate to be self-serving, but I sell it on suzannesomers.com. It's a microcurrent face-lift machine … and it pumps up the muscles under your skin.”

So, after all that, after taking dozens of vitamin, supplement, mineral, and herb pills every day, after rubbing estrogen and progesterone on her arms and glutathione over her liver, after injecting hormones and coffee into unnatural places, Suzanne Somers resorts to the one thing that can actually make her look younger: Botox. A direct contradiction to everything she's been preaching. It's hard to make the case that people should live naturally when you're injecting one of the most powerful toxins known to man (botulinum toxin) directly into your face. (Botulinum toxin is so powerful that as little as 0.00000001 grams can paralyze facial muscles.)

In February 2011, Somers's story took another bizarre turn. During an appearance on a Canadian talk show, fans noticed that her appearance had changed dramatically. “Suzanne's face looks very puffy and her lips look like sausages,” said Tony Youn, a plastic surgeon in Detroit who had viewed pictures of Somers. “Those are the telltale signs of a stem-cell face-lift, in which doctors inject fat and stem cells under the skin.” Stem-cell face-lifts are not approved in the United
States. In 2012, Somers used stem cells to reconstruct her breasts.

I
n a way, it's all kind of sad—our unwillingness to accept getting older. “Anyone who has not been buried in a vault for the past two decades is surely aware of the media blitz touting the ‘new old age' as a phenomenon that enables people in their sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and beyond to enjoy the kind of rich, full, healthy, adventurous, sexy, financially secure lives that their ancestors could never have imagined,” wrote Susan Jacoby in
Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age
. “At eighty-five or ninety—whatever satisfactions may still lie ahead—only a fool or someone who has led an extraordinarily unhappy life can imagine that the best years are still to come.”