Spring Chicken Read online

  But what about the “medically proven” part? Can HGH really “reverse aging,” as Klatz’s book claims? Is it really the magic key? Certainly, cheating athletes from Lance Armstrong to Alex Rodriguez seemed to think it did something for them. And Somers is certainly not the only Hollywood type to partake. Sylvester Stallone was busted with a suitcase full of the stuff a few years ago, for example, and the late model/actress Anna Nicole Smith was also an HGH user when she died in 2007 at age 39.

  “I’ll tell you why I took HGH in the first place,” a sixtyish man identified as a “longtime Hollywood filmmaker” told Vanity Fair in 2012: “I love fucking.”

  Better advertising than that cannot be bought. Between 2005 and 2011, U.S. growth-hormone sales soared 69 percent, to $1.4 billion, according to an investigation by the Associated Press. Nobody knows how much more is imported illegally from China, India, and Mexico. The big numbers belie the fact that HGH is extremely difficult to prescribe legally. The hormone is FDA-approved only for a narrow set of fairly rare conditions, including “short stature” in children and wasting in AIDS patients. Off-label prescribing, for conditions not specified in the drug’s FDA approval, is officially frowned upon; indeed, HGH is governed by stricter rules than pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, largely to prevent abuse by athletes. The anti-aging docs get around that by diagnosing their patients with something called adult growth-hormone deficiency, a vaguely defined condition that could be applied to nearly all older people, since growth hormone declines naturally from about age twenty onward. Pfizer was fined almost $35 million in 2007 for illegally promoting off-label use of HGH, but that was a drop in the bucket compared with its sales. According to the AP, “At least half of [2011’s] sales likely went to patients not legally allowed to get the drug.”

  More recently, the federal government has begun to crack down, launching stings on anti-aging clinics like the one in Miami that was frequented by Rodriguez. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the A4M folks were reluctant to talk about HGH on the record. Actually, “reluctant” is putting it mildly: Their PR woman casually mentioned that the organization might consider suing me, the way they did to Jay Olshansky. The heat was on. So I flew to Las Vegas to meet with the most outspoken growth-hormone user I could find: the famous Dr. Life.

  If you’ve ever flipped through the back pages of an airline magazine, you’ll recognize Dr. Life: He’s the balding, smiling grandpa with the implausibly muscled torso. Amazingly, Dr. Life is his real name: Aged seventy-five, but built like a twenty-five-year-old Chippendale’s dancer, Dr. Jeffry Life is the public face of a Las Vegas–based company called Cenegenics, which operates more than twenty anti-aging clinics nationwide.

  In person, Jeff Life is down-to-earth, friendly, and every bit as pumped as his famous portrait, which hangs in his office, in Cenegenics’ white marble palace of a headquarters building, about twenty minutes from the Las Vegas Strip. His celebrated biceps bulge under the sleeves of a simple black T-shirt as he leans back in his chair and puts his feet up on the desk, which is perfectly clean. The shelves are occupied by copies of his two best-selling books, The Life Plan and Mastering The Life Plan. This does not look like an office where a lot of actual work happens; it’s good to be Dr. Life.

  One other thing I notice is that while his torso says gay porn star, his face and hairline say Larry David. He has clearly not had any plastic surgery or even hair transplants. He looks his age, except for the huge pecs. This makes me want to like him, but for different reasons than I wanted to like Suzanne Somers.

  On the other side of his office hangs another large framed photo, of a dumpy, beer-bellied guy, slumped on a sailboat on a muddy lake. That, too, is Dr. Life. Or rather, it was. When the picture was taken, he was a fifty-seven-year-old family doctor in northeastern Pennsylvania, with a lousy marriage, a flabby gut, and a boozy thirst. He didn’t know it yet, but he was well on his way to Type 2 diabetes, and he already had coronary artery disease. A couple of years later, as he tells it, a patient happened to leave a copy of a bodybuilding magazine in his waiting room, and he took it home and read it cover-to-cover.

  A few issues later, he decided to enter a contest sponsored by the magazine, offering a prize to men and women who most dramatically remade their bodies by working out with weights. His girlfriend, Annie, now his wife, snapped a “before” photo in his paneled basement. Then he joined a gym, and hired a trainer and nutritionist, and pumped iron like mad. Twelve weeks later, he sent in his “after” picture, which is also framed on the wall. The beer-bellied putz on the sailboat had been transformed into a basement Schwarzenegger, even more ripped than in the famous ads. He won the “Body-for-Life” contest, but he had also changed his own life. In twelve weeks, he had become practically a different person.

  “This is incredible,” I say.

  He nods. “I tell people, if I can do this, anybody can do this,” he says. “I am not special. In fact, I have inherited bad genes, and I have trumped my genes. I am actually a fat person in a lean body.”

  But—as you might have guessed by now—exercise and eating right are not his only secrets. He kept training intensively, but by the time he reached his mid-sixties, he felt he was losing ground. “I was still going to the gym and trying to eat good, but I was gaining back my belly, and I was losing muscle mass and strength,” he says. In 2003, he attended a Cenegenics conference in Las Vegas, where he learned about the importance of “healthy hormone levels.” He stayed an extra day to undergo Cenegenics’ $3,000 initial patient evaluation, which included blood tests, fitness tests, and various body scans to determine his body composition and to detect cancers.

  The blood tests showed he was at the lower end of the normal range for testosterone and growth hormone, even for his age. His new Cenegenics doctor started him on a regime that maintained his intensive weight-lifting workouts, but added twice-weekly testosterone shots, plus a daily injection of HGH. “I started to feel better within two weeks,” he says.

  Within a year, he had moved to Las Vegas, where he soon became Cenegenics’ poster boy and a protégé of its founder, Dr. Alan Mintz, a former radiologist and competitive weight lifter who was then in his early sixties. Mintz himself was an outspoken advocate for and enthusiastic user of human growth hormone, as well as other things. According to one story, Mintz had once run the New York Marathon while carrying syringes loaded with painkillers (because of an injured knee).

  The other pillar of Dr. Life’s program, is, of course, a rigorous-bordering-on-brutal workout program, alternating between intense strength training and equally intense cardio—riding a Lifecycle (no relation) while watching DVDs of action shows like Breaking Bad. He’s got two stents, because of the coronary disease, but hasn’t let that stop him. He eats a sensible diet—tonight’s dinner will consist of a skinless chicken breast, brown rice, and broccoli—and he gave up drinking years ago. “You can’t drink alcohol and look like I do,” he acknowledges. (Note to self.)

  But he still insists the injections are essential. “I realized that the missing link was hormones,” he says. Without growth hormone, “I am absolutely, 100 percent sure that I would not look like I do, feel like I do, act like I do, or think like I do.”

  Which sounds fantastic; sign me up to look like Dr. Life when I’m seventy-five. But as I dug into the actual scientific research on human growth hormone—and the recent history of Cenegenics itself—I found that the controversial drug is not quite the Fountain of Youth that many people believe it is. Far from it; in fact, many scientists believe that it may even help accelerate the aging process.

  Amazingly, much of the hype for HGH is based on a single, small study that was published in 1990—and which has since been disowned by the journal where it appeared. In the study, a researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin named Daniel Rudman gave HGH injections to a dozen patients over sixty with below-average levels of growth hormone for their age. After six months of thrice-weekly injections, plus a modest workout program, Rudman fo
und that the men had gained more than ten pounds of “lean body mass” (aka muscle), while losing nearly eight pounds of their fat.

  Up to that point, recombinant HGH had been an obscure little drug, known mainly to pediatricians who treated children with growth deficiencies. After the study appeared, the adult-growth-hormone market exploded almost overnight. Finally, a drug had been “scientifically proven” to increase muscle mass while making fat disappear. Ron Klatz gratefully dedicated Grow Young with HGH to Rudman—but Rudman himself, who died in 1994, was horrified by the way his work was misused. His tiny study was cited in so many ads by mail-order pharmacies and sketchy anti-aging clinics that in 2003, the New England Journal of Medicine took the unusual step of denouncing its own publication, in a strongly worded editorial: “Although the findings of the study were biologically interesting, the duration of treatment was so short that side effects were unlikely to have emerged, and it was clear that the results were not sufficient to serve as a basis for treatment recommendations.”

  Too late. The horse had already fled the barn, and it was jacked up on HGH. But as I found on further research, HGH may not exactly live up to its hype. While it does appear to increase muscle mass and vaporize body fat, it does not appear to increase actual muscle strength. Lifting weights (and taking testosterone) do improve strength; also, weight training and vigorous exercise like sprinting have been shown to increase growth-hormone levels naturally. So does deep sleep. Which made me wonder whether Dr. Life really needed the stuff: He eats well, doesn’t drink, and exercises vigorously, doing a mix of strength training and aerobic conditioning. Perfect. Does he really require help?

  He insists that he does: Growth-hormone injections are the only way a guy his age could look like… Dr. Life. But unfortunately, it does other things, too. Growth hormone has been linked to a long list of side effects that include edema, joint pain (including carpal tunnel syndrome), and a much-increased risk for glucose intolerance and even diabetes in older patients, particularly men. As for the long-term effects, it’s hard to say. Unlike with estrogen, there are no large, long-term clinical trials of HGH use in older adults, in part because it’s technically illegal to use it for anti-aging purposes, but also because neither the pharmaceutical companies who make the stuff nor the doctors who prescribe it have shown any enthusiasm for such a study. So their millions of patients are essentially experimenting on themselves, just like Suzanne Somers (and Brown-Séquard).

  For a while, I considered doing the same thing, signing up for testosterone-replacement therapy and possibly even taking some human growth hormone, just to see how it would feel. I even had myself tested, but found that my testosterone levels—not to brag—were already pretty high. Growth hormone remained intriguing, however. But it didn’t take long for me to discover some compelling lab science that explained why taking more of it might not be such a great idea. Lab science, and also the movie The Princess Bride.

  Let’s start in the lab, with this fun fact: The longest-lived mice ever observed in a laboratory actually had no growth-hormone receptors in their cells. They had been genetically modified to be immune to the juice. Wrap your head around that for a minute. No growth hormone, longer life. This phenomenon was first discovered by a postdoctoral student named Holly Brown-Borg, who was sorting through a batch of mice, picking out older animals for an aging study she had planned, when she noticed that many more of the older mice were of a type called “Ames Dwarf,” which had a strange mutation that knocked out their growth-hormone receptors. She took a census and found that the dwarves seemed to live longer than the others. “It was like wow, maybe growth hormone has something to do with it,” says Brown-Borg, now a professor at the University of North Dakota.

  Long story short: She and her mentor, Andrzej Bartke of the University of Southern Illinois, found that growth hormone and longevity were actually inversely related. Some strains of growth-hormone “knockout” mice have lived nearly twice as long as normal mice, or almost five years. They are much less likely to develop the diseases of old age, like cancer, which means they really are aging more slowly. Meanwhile, mice that have been bred to produce extra growth hormone tend to live only about half as long. All of which suggests that excess growth hormone might be unhealthy. So why shoot up with more of it?

  “I wouldn’t take growth hormone as an older person,” says Brown-Borg. “It accelerates aging, if anything, in the long term. I don’t understand why people would even think of taking it.”

  I can: Users seem to think HGH makes them feel younger, at least for a while. But so would getting a pair of nipple rings. In the long run, neither choice is particularly wise.

  For more evidence, you need look no farther than the local dog park. Small dogs like Chihuahuas can live for fifteen years or more, while Great Danes rarely live longer than seven or eight. The reason for their vast difference in size comes down to a single gene for insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), the messenger that tells our cells to grow and divide (and which works hand in hand with growth hormone). The bigger dogs produce more IGF-1, while the small dogs have had it winnowed out of them, through hundreds of years of selective breeding. Could that also explain why the smaller dogs, with less growth hormone and less IGF-1, almost always live longer than bigger dogs? And does the same hold true for humans?

  Certainly, excess growth hormone was not a good thing for André the Giant, the beloved pro-wrestler-turned-actor. He suffered from a rare condition called acromegaly, which is caused by a benign tumor on the pituitary gland, causing it to produce too much growth hormone. (The motivational speaker Anthony Robbins has the same condition.) He towered well over seven feet tall and weighed more than five hundred pounds in his prime; talk about “big-boned.” He lived like a giant, too: When he wasn’t knocking the pancake makeup off Hulk Hogan or walking away with The Princess Bride, he could reputedly put away more than a hundred beers at a sitting. That may have helped hasten his untimely death in 1993 at just forty-six, but people with acromegaly often die fairly young.

  One reason may have to do with cancer. Excess growth hormone is known to stimulate the proliferation of cancer cells, although it’s not known whether growth-hormone users are at greater risk for contracting cancer, since the proper studies have not been done. There are some troubling cases. In 2003, a fifty-six-year-old California woman named Hanneke Hops came to Cenegenics for anti-aging treatments, because she wanted to keep enjoying her active lifestyle, running marathons and riding horseback. Like many if not most other Cenegenics patients, she was given growth-hormone shots, which can cost from $1,000 to $2,000 a month (for the shots, the required tests, and office visits). She lost sixteen pounds right away. “It makes me feel good,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle. But her treatments did not last long, because six months later she was dead, her liver riddled with malignant tumors. Her family claimed the growth-hormone treatments caused or accelerated her cancer, but Dr. Mintz insisted they had not.

  A few years later, Mintz was profiled by 60 Minutes, which was investigating the controversy around anti-aging medicine—but before the story could air, Mintz, too, had died under mysterious circumstances. At first, the company had said he had suffered a heart attack while lifting weights, but it later emerged that he had succumbed to complications from a brain biopsy. The biopsy had come out clean, the company insisted. But no autopsy report has ever been made public, so the true cause of his death in 2007, at the not-so-old age of sixty-nine, may never be known.

  What is clear is that aging is a lot more tricky than most people realize—and that simply putting something back, like growth hormone or whatever supplement happens to be trendy at the moment, isn’t going to solve the problem, any more than Séquard’s Elixir did. There’s no quick fix, despite what the many hucksters at the A4M meeting were offering: the hormone-replacement regimens, but also the brain-wave tuners, the hyperoxygenated sleeping chambers, and the seemingly endless array of supplements, all promising to clean up this or that unfo
rtunate side effect of growing old.

  “Imagine you have a symphony written by Mozart,” says Valter Longo, a professor of biology at USC and a leading researcher on aging. “Taking growth hormone or a supplement or whatever is like someone going to the cello player and saying, ‘Can you just make it a lot louder?’ Chances are, it will screw things up.”

  Still, Brown-Séquard was on to something important—and so, in their own deluded ways, are Suzanne Somers and Dr. Life. An older body is fundamentally different inside from a young one.

  In the early 1970s, a German-born scientist named Frederick Ludwig at the University of California–Irvine showed how important this is, in a novel and radical experiment: He sliced open the right side of a three-month-old rat, and the left side of another rat that was about eighteen months old, the equivalent of a sixty-year-old person. He then stitched the two animals together, from shoulder to flank, like Siamese twins. He did this, again and again, until he had 235 pairs in different combinations: old with young, old with old, young with young.

  The technique was called parabiosis, and if it sounds like something from Brown-Séquard’s day, that’s because it is: It dates from the 1860s, when a French physician named Paul Bert first joined two albino rats together. He discovered that the two animals’ circulatory systems joined up, so the same blood flowed through both bodies. Since then parabiosis had been used to study the immune system, kidney function, cancer, and the effects of radiation. Ludwig’s question was elegantly simple: What would happen if you hooked up an old animal to a source of young blood?