Killing Us Softly

by Dr Paul Offit

  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 B12, 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.”

  Experts 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.

  Although 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.

  Somers 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.

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

  SOMERS: I ask you. Do I look better outside?

  KING: But you could have had work done. And I wouldn’t know that.

  SOMERS: No. This is a real face. This is a hormone face.

  KING: You have not had plastic surgery?

  SOMERS: I have had some fillers.

  KING: What do you mean? Botox?

  SOMERS: 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.

  In 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.”

  Somers doesn’t see it that way. “It is the year 2041,” she wrote. “This is me, Suzanne Somers, at ninety-four years old. I am healthy, my bones are strong; my brain is working better than ever. I wake up happy, excited, and active. Most mornings start with wonderful sex with my one-hundred-and-five-year-old husband, Alan, who has also embraced the same health regimen. I am not one of those ‘old people’ put into a corner or, worse, in a nursing home. Nope, not me, I got it early on. I wanted to live, really live. So I jumped on the fast-moving train of the new medicine and never looked back. My friends laughed at me, called me a ‘nut case’ and a ‘health freak,’ but who’s got the last laugh now?”

  No one can deny Somers her optimism. No one can deny her an interest in living a better, fuller, more productive life. But Suzanne Somers isn’t just a citizen railing against the dying of the light. She’s a paid promoter of a $6-billion-a-year anti-aging industry who hawks products that have no chance of helping and, because they include megavitamins, every chance of hurting—a huckster who wants you to ignore the science. “It is not always easy, certainly from a nonscientist’s perspective, to distinguish between real anti-aging science and the vast array of products, from unproven and untested supplements to self-help books by those who believe that age is just a number and a state of mind,” writes Jacoby. “The last thing marketers want is for the public to make a clear-sighted, evidence-based assessment of whether such potions do anything more than enable denial of the physiological reality and inevitability of aging.”

  Suzanne Somers isn’t the only celebrity to have created a cottage industry of alternative therapies. There is another television and movie star who believed she had found a cure for something the medical establishment had ignored. This time, however, the target audience wasn’t adults with menopause or advancing age; it was parents desperate to find a cure for their children.

  6

  Autism’s Pied Piper: Jenny McCarthy’s Crusade

  When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope?

  —Lance Armstrong

  Jenny McCarthy’s film credits include The Stupids, BASEketball, John Tucker Must Die, and Dirty Love, which she also wrote. More recently, McCarthy has made guest appearances on My Name Is Earl, Chuck, Just Shoot Me! and Two and a Half Men. Her latest book, published in 2012, was Bad Habits: Confessions of a Recovering Catholic.

  On September 24, 2008, Oprah interviewed McCarthy about her book Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds. McCarthy’s son, Evan, had been diagnosed with autism. Like Somers, McCarthy didn’t trust mainstream doctors. They didn’t know what caused autism or how to cure it. McCarthy, on the other hand, knew both. And she was there to tell mothers that it was time to take control. Time to be their own doctor. Oprah agreed. “During a production meeting not long ago,” said Oprah, “one of my producers brought in an unforgettable article from the Boston Globe Magazine about the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever heard of. Right then and there we knew that she was somebody that we had to share with you on our show. Call your friends right now, because this woman, she’s not just a mom—she’s a warrior.” Where doctors failed, Jenny McCarthy and Oprah Winfrey would succeed. And another counterfeit industry was born.

  In 1973, Bernard Rimland, a researcher at the Institute for Child Behavior Research, in San Diego, and the father of an autistic son, wrote a chapter titled “High Dosage Levels of Certain Vitamins in the Treatment of Children with Severe Mental Disorders.” (The book was edited by Linus Pauling.) Rimland believed that large doses of vitamins and minerals could treat autism. He later founded the Autism Research Institute, which spawned Defeat Autism Now (DAN)—a group of clinicians dedicated to the notion that autism could be cured with vitamins and supplements. Where Somers aligned herself with gynecologist Christiane Northrup to promote bioidentical hormones, McCarthy aligned herself with Jerry Kartzinel, a DAN doctor, to promote treatments for autism.

  In 2010, McCarthy and Kartzinel published a best-selling book titled Healing and Preventing Autism: A Complete Guide. Although McCarthy didn’t start the movement to treat autism with biomedical therapies, she did, with the help of Oprah Winfrey, bring it into the homes of tens of millions of Americans. McCarthy, Kartzinel, and doctors affiliated with DAN believed that autism had many causes and many cures. DAN doctors have variously argued that:

  Autism is caused by mitochondrial dysfunction and should be treated with megadoses of vitamins A, C, D, E, K, and the B group, as well as zinc, selenium, calcium, magnesium, chromium, cod liver oil, omega-3 fatty acids, taurine, glutamine, arginine, creatine, carnitine, and coenzyme Q10.

  Autism is caused by food allergies and should be treated by restricting gluten (grains) and casein (dairy). “I started it,” said McCarthy. “In two to three weeks Evan doubled his language.”

  Autism is caused by overgrowth of fungi in the intestine and should be treated with antifungals and cow colostrum. “Once you detox that, these kids are getting better,” said M
cCarthy. “You’re cleaning up the gut. You’re cleaning up the brain. There’s a connection.”

  Autism is caused by heavy-metal poisoning and should be treated with detoxifying therapies such as coffee enemas and intravenous ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA). (In 2005, a five-year-old with autism named Tariq Nadama died of a heart arrhythmia after an intravenous injection of EDTA.)

  Autism is caused by misalignment of the spine and should be treated with vigorous chiropractic manipulations of the head and neck.

  Autism is caused by inflammation of the brain and should be treated with Curcuma longa, a plant from the ginger family.

  Autism is caused by improper digestion of food and should be treated with digestive enzymes. “If our immune system is operating from our gut,” wrote McCarthy, “how can it possibly do its job if it’s filled with poop.”

  Autism is caused by incorrect wiring of the brain and should be treated with electrical or magnetic stimulation.

  Autism is caused by an imbalance of immune cells and should be treated by infecting children with hookworms and whipworms.

  Autism is caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain and should be treated by placing children in hyperbaric oxygen chambers. (On May 1, 2009, a four-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, Francesco Martinizi, died after an explosion in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber caused burns over 90 percent of his body.)

  Autism is caused by a leaky gut and should be treated with probiotics.

  Autism is caused by immune dysregulation and should be treated with intravenous immunoglobulins or stem-cell transplantation.

  Autism is similar to a drug addiction and should be treated with low-dose naltrexone suspended in emu oil. (Naltrexone is used to treat drug dependency.)

  Autism is caused by excessive stimulation and should be treated with marijuana or melatonin.