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Boomers' New Quest: to Be Forever Young
Insight on the News, June 28, 1999 by Cheryl Wetzstein
Sales are soaring for products and services that promise to delay the aging process, a notion that appeals to America's fiftysomethings. But do these miracle salves really work?
Don't lie about your age. Defy it," actress Melanie Griffith purrs in ads for Revlon cosmetics. The copywriters know their market well: baby boomers entering that period of life rudely known as "over the hill."
Experts predict that boomers will resist heartburn, liver spots and high blood pressure just as vigorously as they did other injustices in life. Their quest for the fountain of youth promises to produce a flood of products, services and advice on staying young and healthy. Already a popular book by Michael F. Roizen teaches readers how to figure out their "real" (hopefully younger) age, while other books tout the joys of living past 100.
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According to RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be? -- which has spent several weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list -- 125 factors can add or subtract months and years from one's calendar age. People live "older" if they smoke a lot, eat poorly, skip exercise, ride a motorcycle (especially without a helmet), drive above the speed limit (especially after drinking) or are bachelors or homosexuals. People live "younger" who floss regularly, own a dog, socialize, have an active sex life (particularly when married), wear seat belts (preferably in a large car) and earn more than $150,000 a year. The maximum lifetime deduction by this reckoning is 26 years. "None of us can be 12 again," says Roizen, a University of Chicago preventive gerontologist. The goal "is to be the youngest old person you can be."
The good news for boomers: Unless their arteries already have calcified or they have had a heart attack, stroke or cancer, "you don't have to pay for the bad behavior you've done," says Roizen. With most lifestyle changes, people reap 90 percent of the benefit within three years of the change. The bad news: Boomers will be avidly attracted to quick fixes and magical cures, especially if touted as having scientific basis.
The big baby-boomer march on aging began in earnest in 1996, when the eldest of the 78 million post-World War II babies turned 50. The number of fiftysomethings is growing so rapidly that demographers claim the American Association of Retired Persons gains a prospective member every 8 seconds.
"People have gotten old before, but never this many people and never this many people with such a high level of education" says Cheryl Russell, author of another book detailing the phenomenon. Given the boomers' total identification with youth, they will "become obsessed with health and prevention of all the infirmities that accompany aging" predicts Russell.
Sales of skin creams, suntan lotions, hair coloring, cosmetics, vitamins and nutritional supplements are soaring, says Russell. From now on, products, techniques and books that "intelligently promise health benefits are going to be very popular" Boomers are likely to be "avid consumers of quick fixes and magical cures" seeking "that magic pill" but too educated to fall for the snake-oil products that appealed to their grandparents. Instead, they will opt for products and techniques that are "quasi-scientific" -- the popularity of Saint-John's-wort, ginkgo and crystals are three examples.
Nevertheless, boomers may luck out by coming into their golden years in a golden age, say medical experts. "In the year 1900, average life expectancy in the United States was 47" writes Christine K. Cassel in The Practical Guide to Aging: What Everyone Needs to Know. Today, life expectancies almost have doubled -- an unprecedented accomplishment "in the history of the human race."
Cassel's guide and other books are aimed at educating baby boomers about the realities of aging, including such distressing topics as dementia, hearing and vision loss and bladder-control problems. But other books are raising expectations about life at 100. "The 21st century will be the age of the centenarian" write David Mahoney and Richard Restak in The Longevity Strategy: How to Live to 100 Using the Brain-Body Connection. Analysts predict 200,000 Americans will live to turn 100 and older by 2020 (current age of these future oldsters: 79).
Thomas T. Perls and Margery Hutter Silver, Harvard Medical School researchers and aging experts, see "greatly extended" life spans for millions of people who will remain lucid, mobile and in good health. They offer a "life expectancy" quiz in their book, Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential at Any Age. Good attitude, genes and nutrition, exercise, stress management and not smoking, they say, all point the way to one day getting one of Hallmark's new centenarian birthday cards.
COPYRIGHT 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
