Pritikin: my ticket to longevity

News on the transatlantic fat front these days is not good. Thirty-one per cent of Americans are clinically obese; at twenty-three per cent, the British are not far behind, with new studies showing that by 2050 nine out of ten adult Brits will be either overweight or obese.

The message is clearly not getting through to those eating high on the processed food chain. Oppressed by affluence and by entropy, the inhabitants of the fat First World are increasingly faced with hard choices for their soft life: either change soon or die early. But how?

"Nobody gets out of life alive," Tennessee Williams said; however, since 1975, in order to improve the odds on long life, over 100,000 mostly ageing, unhealthy, overweight, affluent souls like myself have found their way to Pritikin Longevity Centre­, not so much a fat farm as a boot camp for hardcore health, which now resides in Miami, Florida.

It houses up to 110 guests at £2,500 a week in peak season (December-March) and £2,000 off-peak. The price is high; but then so are the stakes. How much is getting healthy worth to you?

There are many fine, deluxe American spas - The Golden Door, Canyon Ranch, Two Bunch Palms - which offer a smorgasbord of health regimes and dietary cuisines, but, according to Paul Lehr, Pritikin's president, "Taken together they don't have a study between them. Everybody claims results but they have no proof."

Pritikin, on the other hand, is a science-based enterprise which has more than 110 published scientific papers to substantiate its claims to reverse the metabolic syndrome, that cluster of metabolic related problems - abdominal obesity, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar - any three of which together put an individual at risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, fatty liver, as well as increasing the chance of several types of cancers, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's disease.

The template for metabolic reversal was the centre's namesake and founder, Nathan Pritikin who in 1956 at the age of 41 was told he had terminal coronary heart disease and was sent home to die.

Pritikin, an engineer by profession, would not accept the diagnosis; he set about studying cultures with low incidents of heart disease. "He was essentially his own guinea pig," Lehr said of Pritikin, who finally died at the age of 69 from leukaemia. "He essentially reversed himself."

By 1975, Pritikin had established his residential program of nutrition, exercise and lifestyle education. In 1977, when CBS's 60 Minutes did a TV show on Pritikin and followed a few heart disease clients who had been written off by their doctors only to improve dramatically under his regime, the centre was launched.

Pritikin's longest residential client - a Boston lawyer who arrived in a wheelchair weighing 350lb - left two years later mobile, healthy, and weighing 170lb. For guests staying three weeks the results are no less startling; in a sample of 4,587 people, the programme showed an average drop of 23 per cent in total cholesterol and a 23 per cent drop in LDL 'bad' cholesterol. Triglycerides were reduced 33 per cent; 83 per cent lowered their blood pressure to normal levels and an average weight loss was 12lb.

In terms of long-term weight loss, a sampling of 4,500 who followed the Pritikin weight plan of low fat and high-fibre foods for an entire six-year study lost on average 66lb and kept the weight off.

Inevitably, these results have caught the attention of other indulgent far-flung communities. Next year, the Pritikin plan is being franchised in India and Singapore; Lehr is also in talks with the governments of Japan and the UAE. "We've been sort of right for 30 years," Lehr said. "The World Health Organisation and the Institute of Medicine and now the US Department of Agriculture have come closer to the Pritikin guidelines. Ours are more stringent." (Pritikin also recently bought back the rights to its prepared food brand from Quaker Foods because, according to Lehr, "they didn't meet our health guidelines." )

The Pritikin guidelines include fat content (no more than 15 per cent of total calories); sodium (1,200-1,500mg per day, approximately three-quarters of a teaspoon from all sources); and sugar (less than 4 per cent of total calories, about one tablespoon per 1,000 calories).

"People like to hear good news about their bad habits," Lehr said. "If you read the South Beach Diet marketing - 'Lose all the weight you want, no exercise' - it's not true. The Atkins Diet is 'eat all the meat and cheese you want'. It's just not true."

What doesn't lie is the blood's chemistry. At the beginning and end of the week, each guest's blood is taken and sent to a diagnostic lab. It is then later deconstructed at length with the client by a team of doctors who counsel them twice a week. The numbers powerfully focus the mind both on the need for change and, as they improve, on the need to stick with the programme.

What would my numbers show? I thought ruefully as I stepped on Pritikin's electronic scale last month. I was a 66-year-old man who still felt young, who wasn't looking for retirement, who ached for more and a better life, who still wasn't ready to give up anything but bubble gum and hard times. I weighed in at 200lb; my girth was 43 inches. In two weeks, I thought, this will be changed. How will my body respond?

In Pritikin's sedate residential setting of the Turnberry Isle Club - which in the early 1970s housed Miami's hottest disco - the denizens were now obsessed with getting it off instead of getting it on. But the scene was no less intense. After all, there's no drama like the drama of life and death.
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