The Old and the Beautiful

How the boomers' fear of mortality became an $88 billion annual industry.

By Bess Levin

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Weintraub offers a soup-to-nuts accounting of how an $88 billion industry grew out of baby boomers' vanity.

The Bad: Though her book is loaded with examples of malfeasance, Weintraub does not dwell on the science involved in the movement.

The Bottom Line: A great beach read for science laymen.

Reader Reviews

(Changes reference in 9th paragraph to a threatened lawsuit.)

Selling the Fountain of Youth: How the Anti-Aging Industry Made a Disease Out of Getting Old—And Made Billions
By Arlene Weintraub
BASIC BOOKS, 256 pp., $25.95

Has the image of Suzanne Somers having sex at age 94 ever crossed your mind? While it's unusual for people just shy of triple digits to wake up every morning thinking about how healthy and strong their bodies feel, and proceed to engage in "wonderful sex with [their] 105 year-old husband[s]," that's what Somers, now 63, sees in her future.

Could that be your future, too? Of course! All you have to do is suspend any disbelief that the actress and former Thighmaster shill isn't an expert on the inner workings of the body. Then banish all doubt about the soundness of the medical advice she's repeating, and put yourself on a daily hormone regimen of over 60 supplements, creams, and injections. If that's a lot to process, don't worry: It's all laid out in Somers' manifesto, Breakthrough, which spent nearly four months on the New York Times advice books best-seller list. The tome doesn't put much stock in the fact that, according to some doctors, such a regimen may make your hair fall out, require an organ to be removed (admit it: that gallbladder was just taking up space), or leave you susceptible to depression and even cancer. But why should it? We're talking about an opportunity to get carded at a bar seven decades past your 21st birthday.

If you're looking for a more reliable guide to the anti-aging revolution, consider Arlene Weintraub's Selling the Fountain of Youth: How the Anti-Aging Industry Made a Disease Out of Getting Old—And Made Billions. The book, which is based on a cover story Weintraub wrote for this magazine in 2006, traces the anti-aging industry from its salad days in the early '90s to its $88 billion-a-year present. Weintraub chronicles pharmacists mixing up their own concoctions in back rooms, battles between drug companies and large corporations, and the reincarnation of Somers as a poster girl for endless youth. Along the way, she shows how one absurd promise—the ability to stave off the aging process—became a multi-billion-dollar marketing ploy that, according to most business measurements, worked like a charm.

The anti-aging phenomenon started off with understandable intentions. Baby boomers were getting older and didn't like what they saw or how they felt. So when a study was printed in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1990 positing that human growth hormone (HGH), previously used to treat growth disorders in children, could be used on healthy adults to "reverse aging," people took note—and many latched on like junkies.

In 1993 a number of doctors, notably osteopaths Ronald Klatz and Robert Goldman, began injecting themselves (forget mice) with HGH. After they observed, among other outcomes, decreases in body fat and increases in energy, the cat was out of the bag. Paying no attention to a medical Establishment that saw HGH as exceedingly dangerous and unresearched, they and countless imitators opened clinics around the country where patients could pay thousands of dollars to learn how to inject themselves with HGH. If hormones were bad for you or caused cancer, the duo argued, all teenagers would be dead—twisting logic in such a way it's unclear whether they were intellectually dishonest, stupid, or thought their clients just didn't care. Regardless, many didn't.

Klatz and Goldman launched a "medical society" called the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M), whose mission it became to promote HGH and certify doctors in this exciting and lucrative new field. Soon after, they were holding annual conferences in Vegas, charging $4,000 for procedures mainstream science deemed faulty and recommending diets of hormones to replace those gone "missing" during the aging process.

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