REPORTER: Nick Lazaredes
VOICEOVER: Sun City, an active new way of life, it's like a resort.
It was back in 1961 that American retirees were first offered a new concept of living to escape the drudgery of old age. With the promise of stress-free communal living and a healthy lifestyle, Sun City was the first retirement village of its kind.
VOICEOVER: There they were, looking 10 years younger than when I last saw them.
53 years on the sales pitch hasn't changed but Sun City has, growing to become one of the largest retirement communities in the world.
WOMAN: You can see we have two libraries, seven recreation centres and, most impressively, 30 churches.
REPORTER: My goodness, that's a lot of churches!
WOMAN: Yes, it is.
I've come here to assess if communities like Sun City and the active lifestyles they provide slow down the ageing process. Bill Pearson is a former union organiser who retired here a few years back.
BILL PEARSON: What studies have shown is that people who engaged in the process of growing old, staying active, staying connected, being linked to other people, ultimately find a less stressful way of living.
For Doctor Jeffry Life, a peaceful retirement at Sun City is the farthest thing from his mind. He's almost 75, with the physical stamina of a man less than half his age. Although he knows he's getting older, Dr Life, a practicing physician, spends little time thinking about death. He's too busy staying young.
DR JEFFRY LIFE, MD: People say, "Why do you do that?" Well, I like it. But then I thought. "I do it because I can". Most people in their 30s and 40ss can't do that. I can.
Hi, I'm Dr Jeff Life. I've been a doctor for 35 years. You may have seen my pictures in national publications and wondered if they're real. Well, I'm here to tell you they are real.
Dr Life, that's his real name, is a celebrity. He's a specialist in a fast growing field of medicine. He calls it age management.
DR JEFFRY LIFE: I think it's important for people to know today, that they don't have to follow the same path as their parents did, that they don't have to age like their parents.
Believe me, it can work for you too.
It's not just a great body that Dr Life is offering. There's a bonus that goes with all that youthful energy.
PAUL THOMPSON, MD: My Libido is like when I was 18 again, so the desire is there constantly.
But there's more to Dr Life's therapy than simply diet and exercise. It's a cocktail of drugs that's highly controversial. Dr Life instructs his patients to inject themselves with human growth hormone or HGH and testosterone, a potent combination he believes staves off disease.
DR JEFFRY LIFE: Low testosterone levels contribute to vascular disease, so we believe that correcting testosterone deficiency and growth hormone deficiencies and the right nutrition and exercise can reverse plaque and that's what we aggressively do. In my case, that's exactly what's happened.
Dr Life claims that he's living proof that maintaining optimum hormone levels really works. His story of how hormones changed his life has resulted in two books and a stint on the New York Times bestsellers list.
DR JEFFRY LIFE: This is about honest to God genuine health! We've been treating thyroid deficiencies for decades because we know it improves people's quality of life, it improves their longevity, so why not do it with the other hormones.
On the Lake of the Ozarks, in the South of Missouri, wealthy Americans from all over the mid-west spend their summers on this man made water park. Meet the Kleppes - Steve Kleppe, 70, and his wife, Shirley, 67.
SHIRLEY KLEPPE: I'm going to live longer than just 10 more years. I'm not going to take that dial, and put it on and say tick-tick-tick-tick. In 10 more years, you're going to be dead. I'm not going to let that happen.
For more than a decade, the Kleppes have been injecting themselves with human growth hormone. They say it has changed their lives.
SHIRLEY KLEPPE: It kind of kick starts your body. You know, it's just like, "boom!" It just really kicks it up.
STEVE KLEPPE: You can take all these things and they're going to help you, but they're not nearly going to help you as much as when your HGH is in balance, and it's at the level it need to be at. So that's the point of the HGH, it's like the master catalyst that makes all the rest work to its optimum.
As the owners of a 28 store food franchise in Arizona, Steve and Shirley admit they're well off, which is just as well because HGH doesn't come cheap.
STEVE KLEPPE: This is an expensive program. I'm sorry, in anybody's book, no matter what part of it, if you do any of it close to what you need to, you're talking thousands of dollars a month.
Feeling 30 years younger has enabled Shirley to pursue her dreams of success in the male-dominated sport of motor racing. No mean feat for a woman in her late 60s.
SHIRLEY KLEPPE: I spend no money on going to doctors. Can you imagine the amount of money people spend going to doctors and hospitals and medicine? We don't do that.
Steve is aware that hormone replacement therapy is widely criticised by the medical establishment but he says they've got it wrong.
STEVE KLEPPE: As it grows in popularity, if that's the right word for it, it's going to change the minds of some of, I believe, the more conservative medical people. I believe it has to.
DR GLENN BRAUNSTEIN, ENDOCRINOLOGIST: These individuals who run these anti-aging clinics, who I consider to be charlatans and hucksters, are selling an effect at a very high price and there's a population out there that says, "Hey, who wouldn't want to be young?"
At Cedars Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, Dr Glenn Braunstein is a tough critic of doctors who offer hormone replacement therapy as a way to prevent ageing.
DR GLENN BRAUNSTEIN: They're potentially giving harmful drugs, for very little benefit, at a great expense and they're taking advantage of people's desire to try to feel younger.
Dr Braunstein is an endocrinologist, an expert on the subject of human hormones. He's dismayed at the growing popularity of anti-aging medicine and the specialists he says are bringing the field of endocrinology into disrepute.
DR GLENN BRAUNSTEIN: I can say that I'm ashamed when I hear of an endocrinologist, a real board certified endocrinologist, staffing an anti-aging clinic.
DR JEFFRY LIFE: We actually have two endocrinologists on our board who oversee what we do, and when we do this special testing for growth hormone deficiency colo-glucodon stimulation test, we send those results to our endocrinologist and she determines from the results if this patient is truly growth hormone deficient.
Human growth hormone is produced in the pituitary gland and it's vital for healthy development. Some children fail to produce the hormone and without intervention will have stunted growth. They're given synthetic HGH to allow them to develop normally.
PROFESSOR JAY OLSHANSKY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO: The main reason I know so much about growth hormone is that I had to give it to my son, I injected him daily for... it must have been five to six years, because he was growth hormone deficient. So, for him, growth hormone was necessary to achieve normal adult height.
Professor Jay Olshansky knows that HGH can be a very useful drug, it helped his son. But, for him, the jury is still out on whether it's safe to use as an anti ageing drug.
PROFESSOR JAY OLSHANSKY: There's a potential danger when you introduce growth hormone into an ageing body. It's a growth agent - our cells are progressing, many of our cells in our body are progressing towards becoming cancerous, so the last thing you want to do is introduce a growth agent into a body where more cells are progressing or have progressed towards a cancerous stage.
Dr Life checks his new patients to measure their existing levels of HGH and testosterone.
DR JEFFRY LIFE: This is what we do on all of our patients.
Levels of these hormones start falling as we get older, that's normal. But Dr Life believes that the ageing process can be slowed by topping up these hormones with injections. US law says it's illegal to prescribe hormone therapy to counter the effects of aging, but not if it's only to correct a deficiency. The question is, what's a deficiency?
PROFESSOR JAY OLSHANSKY: It's funny that you would mention top up because what's top up for you and what's top up for me may be totally different things even if we're the same age. And here's the dilemma - the people who are trying to top off the hormones, whether it be testosterone or growth hormone or whatever it is that they're administering, melatonin, they actually don't know what the hormone level was for that person when they were younger.
For decades, bodybuilders and athletes have known that hormone cocktails including HGH can improve performance. Many of the scandals in the world of sport have arisen from the illegal use of these drugs.
DR JEFFRY LIFE: We've got the athletes that have abused these hormones so people think testosterone replacement therapy, or growth hormone replacement therapy is bad, and they think of in terms of what the athletes have done. They don't think of it in terms of improving their health keeping them out of nursing homes, they don't think of it like that - they need to start thinking of it like that.
Like the rest of us, movie stars grow old and die, but at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, long gone legends of the stage and screen live on in grandeur. The movie business is obsessed with youth and good looks, so it's not surprising that, here in Los Angeles, the anti-aging industry has found a wealthy client base hungry for its product.
DR ALEX MARTIN: This is where we keep our HGH. We like to keep it cool.
Doctor Alex Martin's clinic is in the heart of Hollywood. He calls it the Institute for Regenerative Medicine and top of the list of the drugs he prescribes is HGH.
DR ALEX MARTIN: And if you look at the tip, you see a drop of human growth hormone coming out. As you see, I push the button and the tip on the bottom falls off. So that's how it's delivered. It's quite ingenious and quite effective.
REPORTER: It's a very small amount that's used, is it?
DR ALEX MARTIN: It looks like a small amount, it looks like a tiny drop, but that drop contains millions... I'm sorry, billions of molecules, and enough to be carried by the micro-circulation to every cell in the body.
Like most other anti-ageing doctors, Dr Martin practices what he prescribes.
DR ALEX MARTIN: I personally have been using Human growth Hormone for the past 12 years and I'm in my late 60s. I ski like a 40-year-old, we're living in a wonderful time, a fabulous time, because we're in a golden age. So many of the sciences, from astronomy through medicine, and I think it would be great to be able to see the end of the century.
DR GLENN BRAUNSTEIN: Do I think the anti-aging industry is going to one day find a really well validated study that's going to show that testosterone, DHEA and growth hormone, reverse the aging process? Absolutely not.
Clearly, some ageing movie stars are convinced that the fountain of youth is in a syringe. In February, 2007, Sylvester Stallone was grilled by customs officers at Sydney Airport, after a Rambo-sized cache of HGH was discovered in his luggage. Nick Nolte and Oliver Stone are among other Hollywood celebrities linked to the HGH health fad, but, if extra years are what they're after, Jay Olshansky says they're wasting their time.
PROFESSOR JAY OLSHANSKY: Everyone who's a patient in one of these clinics will die. They will all age, they will all grow old, they will all experience the same diseases as the rest of us, and they will all die.
BILL PEARSON: All capped. All the time! Got a chance here, mate!
Back at Sun City, I've caught up again with retiree Bill Pearson. He's invited me to meet his two best mates. Like many Sun City residents, these baby boomers are hoping for a long and comfortable retirement. And maybe hormone replacement therapy is the way to go.
LYALL: If it allows me to keep paying taxes longer, I'm all for it. Absolutely.
ROGER: Over the years, it does something to your body. Nobody knows what yet, because... In fact, I don't think it's been researched yet.
For Bill, it's not a question of risk or efficacy, but rather price.
BILL PEARSON: Did some research and liked a lot of what I read and was intrigued by the idea of the potential of regaining my youth. I just found the cost to be prohibitive. I mean, you start looking at $6,000-$10,000 dollars a year, it just gets expensive.
It's estimated that 76 million Americans are facing retirement over the next decade. There's no doubt that hormone replacement therapy will look very appealing to many them, if they can afford it. Whether or not it can turn back the clock, it's a rapidly growing branch of medicine and a gold mine for the drug companies.
DR GLENN BRAUNSTEIN: I do think that we should have a really honest discussion about this and the honest discussion is, that there is really no major benefit, there are risks and side effects, it will not deliver what the anti-aging industry has said it will deliver and they are expensive.
DR JEFFRY LIFE: We have the ability today to not follow the same aging pathway that our ancestors did, my whole mission is - for each and every one of us to die at a very, very old age.
MARK DAVIS: Good luck to him with that - the controversial Dr Life with Nick Lazaredes and Nick tells us that an increasing number of Australian clients are also making their way to his clinic. Follow the links on our website for more on the doctor and all of the people in Nick's story. Is the industry full of charlatans and hucksters, as the critics claim? We welcome your comments on our website.
Reporter/Camera
NICK LAZAREDES
Producer
ALLAN HOGAN
Researchers
EVE LUCAS
ASHLEY HAMER
Editor
MICAH MCGOWN