Suzanne Somers Weighs In
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
—Dylan Thomas
Celebrities sell products. Queen Latifah sells CoverGirl makeup. Snoop Dogg sells Pepsi Max. Shaquille O’Neal sells Comcast cable. And Snooki sells Wonderful Pistachios. And—because we trust celebrities—we buy what they’re selling. Expertise has nothing to do with it. We don’t buy products because we think Queen Latifah is a beauty expert, or Snoop Dogg a beverage expert, or Shaq a media expert, or Snooki a nutrition expert. We buy because we enjoy their acting, singing, dunking, and whatever it is that Snooki does.
Celebrities also offer medical advice. Larry King tells us that ginkgo improves memory; Tom Cruise that psychiatry is a pseudoscience; Roger Moore that duck liver may cause Alzheimer’s disease; and British model Heather Mills that meat stays in our colon for forty years. Indeed, celebrities as diverse as Pamela Anderson, Cindy Crawford, Jude Law, David Beckham, Paul McCartney, Prince Charles, and Cher have trumpeted the benefits of homeopathic remedies for decades.
But when it comes to selling alternative medical products, perhaps no celebrity has been more financially successful than Suzanne Somers.
Somers first appeared as the blonde in the Thunderbird in American Graffiti and as a pool girl in Clint Eastwood’s Magnum Force. In 1978, she got her first big break, landing the role of Chrissy Snow on ABC’s Three’s Company, co-starring Joyce DeWitt and John Ritter. At the beginning of the fifth season, Somers alienated her co-stars. Incensed that male actors like Alan Alda and Carroll O’Connor were making more money, she demanded a pay raise from $30,000 to $150,000 per episode. When the producers refused, Somers boycotted, claiming a broken rib. At the end of the season, she was fired and replaced by Jenilee Harrison. Somers sued ABC for $2 million, unsuccessfully, but she quickly found other work. From the mid-1980s into the 1990s, she starred in the sit-coms She’s the Sheriff and Step by Step. She also performed in Las Vegas. But her most recognized role was as the spokesperson for ThighMaster, “the best way to tone, shape, and firm your inner thighs with just a few squeezes a day.”
In 2001, after undergoing conventional treatment for breast cancer (lumpectomy and radiation therapy), Somers chose an alternative medicine for her post-cancer care. “I chose a nonconventional way to treat my cancer,” she told Larry King. “At the time they said, ‘Okay, here’s what we’re going to do . . . Tamoxifen, which is the after-care drug, which, oh, by the way, is going to make you gain weight. And oh, by the way, you’ll probably get a little depressed for five years.’ And I thought, It just doesn’t sound like a great option. And then I found a medicine that builds up your immune system. And I thought, Build up or poison? So, I decided to go this other way.” Instead of Tamoxifen Somers chose Iscador, an alternative remedy made from mistletoe.
Breast cancer had brought Suzanne Somers into the world of alternative medicine. But it was menopause that made her a crusader.
When it hit me, it was like a Mack truck,” Somers told Oprah eight years after her battle with breast cancer. “It was on my fiftieth birthday. And that began a three-year odyssey of not sleeping, of moodiness, of weight gain, of changes in my hair, changes in my skin.” On the same show, Oprah asked Christiane Northrup, a gynecologist, to explain what had happened. “When someone refers to hot flashes, mood swings, irritability, irregular periods, they’re really referring to the perimenopausal transition. It is usually a five-to-eight-year process, and it begins with the start of irregular periods, usually by age forty-five.” In simple terms, the ovaries stop producing two hormones: estrogen and progesterone. Somers’s description was more entertaining: “Suddenly the Seven Dwarfs of Menopause arrived at my door without warning: Itchy, Bitchy, Sweaty, Sleepy, Bloated, Forgetful, and All-Dried-Up.”
Somers was frustrated by the medical establishment’s inability to provide relief. “As I went from doctor to doctor,” she wrote, “I realized I was on my own. No doctor seemed to understand this passage [into menopause]. . . . I wanted a natural, effective way to deal with this. . . . [T]hen I found the solution—a cutting-edge endocrinologist/anti-aging doctor who prescribed a treatment.” The effect was immediate. “Wow!” wrote Somers. “What a difference in my life. I was sleeping again. I was happy again. I stopped itching, and bitching, and crying, and, best of all, getting fat.” Somers was a convert. She wanted “to scream it from the rooftop.” She wrote books about it. She told Larry King about it on CNN. She told Rosie O’Donnell, who later talked about it on The Joy Behar Show.
BEHAR: Are you still in menopause? You used to have hot flashes every day when we were on The View.
O’DONNELL: Done. Started at 41, ended at 44. After I was off The View Suzanne Somers called me up and said, “You know, I have a feeling that some of your rage [can be cured].”
BEHAR: Really.
O’DONNELL: I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” She’s like, “No, really, why don’t you try this.” And I went to one of her doctors, and I have been putting that cream on me for the last four years and I feel a thousand percent better.
BEHAR: And the rage is gone?
O’DONNELL: Kind of.
Then Somers told Oprah about it. “After one day . . . I felt the veil lift,” Oprah wrote in her magazine. “After three days, the sky was bluer, my brain was no longer fuzzy; my memory was sharper. I was literally singing and had a skip in my step.” For Suzanne Somers, Rosie O’Donnell, and Oprah Winfrey, the symptoms of menopause had been cured. What was this wondrous medicine?
Treatment of menopause has undergone several shifts. Initially, the approach seemed obvious: replace estrogen and progesterone. “In the 1960s, a book by Robert Wilson called Feminine Forever became very popular,” Christiane Northrup told Oprah. “It touted the benefits of estrogens as the panacea. Estrogens became the magic bullet that everyone should go on.”
As it turns out, it wasn’t that easy. Although replacement hormones worked, they came with a price. In 2002, investigators from the Women’s Health Initiative—part of the National Institutes of Health—studied the effects of estrogen and progesterone in 17,000 women. Researchers had initially planned to follow women for eight years, but the study was cut short when they noticed a dramatic increase in breast cancer. And it wasn’t only breast cancer; replacement hormones also increased the risk of heart disease, strokes, and blood clots. As a consequence, hormone replacement therapy became something doctors began to fear, not embrace.
Women were at a loss. But Suzanne Somers had an answer—an answer that gave birth to a billion-dollar industry. “What was it that sent those wretched dwarfs packing?” wrote Somers. “Natural bioidentical hormones.” Somers believed that replacement hormones caused heart disease, blood clots, and cancer because they were made by big pharmaceutical companies—they weren’t natural. If women used hormones found in plants—and made by little compounding pharmacies—they could rid themselves of the Seven Dwarfs of Menopause without risk.
Supported by Oprah Winfrey, promoted by Suzanne Somers, and backed by gynecologists like Christiane Northrup, bioidentical hormones have become a national phenomenon. There are, however, a few flaws in the logic.
First, estrogen is estrogen. Whether it’s isolated from soybeans, wild yams, or horse’s urine, it’s the same molecule; the source is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the molecular structure of the final product. “The implication is that [bioidentical hormones are] something better and something different,” said Lauren Streicher, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago. “Chemically, the structure is exactly the same [as] the FDA products.” “Now, repeat after me,” wrote McGill’s Joe Schwarcz. “ ‘The properties of a substance depend on molecular structure, not ancestry. When it comes to assessing effectiveness and safety, whether the substance is synthetic or natural is totally irrelevant.’”
Second, the distinction between Big Pharma and small compounding pharmacies, while appealing to the public, is misleading. “They [bioidentical and conventional hormones] are primarily all made at the same factory in Germany,” says Streicher. “There’s a couple [of large factories] in the United States. They’re the ones that synthesize it from plants and then send it to [small] compounding pharmacies and to the major pharmaceutical companies.”
If bioidentical and conventional hormones are the same products made in the same place, then they probably carry the same risks. “The big marketing approach of the bioidentical industry is that you can have your cake and eat it,” says Wulf Utian, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Case Western University. “That these products are not like those made by pharmaceutical companies. They have all the benefits, but they carry none of the risks. And if you believe in that, you believe in the Tooth Fairy.”
The difference between bioidentical and conventional hormones isn’t that one is natural and the other isn’t. Or that one is safe and the other isn’t. It’s that one is the product of an unsupervised industry and the other isn’t. “There’s this sense that they’re not dangerous,” says Streicher, “that people don’t have to be monitored. I think they should be regulated so we know the quality that you’re getting.” Streicher has reason for concern. In 2001, the FDA analyzed twenty-nine products from twelve compounding pharmacies and found that 34 percent failed standard quality or potency tests. For these reasons, agencies responsible for the public’s health haven’t embraced the bioidentical hormone revolution. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, the American Medical Association, the American Cancer Society, the Mayo Clinic, and the FDA have all issued statements asserting that bioidentical hormones are probably as risky as their conventional counterparts.
Suzanne 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 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 throw-away 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 she includes 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.