Source: BBC

Bombarded with adverts promising a longer, healthier life, BBC News Los Angeles correspondent Peter Bowes goes in search of eternal youth.

Dr Jeffry Life, a Las Vegas-based age management doctor, is 74. He has the body of a man half his age. In fact he has a level of muscular definition that many men never achieve.

Genial, soft spoken, bald and lean, Life, who practised family medicine for much of his career, is a poster child for the longevity business.

He was in his late 50s when he realised that as a paunchy middle-aged man, he could drop dead at any time.

“I had really got out of shape, got a lot of body fat and was heading down a disastrous course of diabetes and heart disease,” he says.

Inspired by a muscle magazine that someone left in his examination room, Life decided to get in shape. He started an intensive regime of working out at the gym and within a year transformed his body.

In 1998 he entered a competition, the Body for Life contest, for people who have made dramatic changes to their physique. To his surprise he won first prize in the section for 55-year-olds and older.

“It changed my life and I felt great,” he says.

But as he got older he says he noticed that he was losing ground and finding it more difficult to maintain a lean body. While in his 60s, he visited Las Vegas for a medical conference and was introduced to Cenegenics, an age management company that aspired to make its patients “look and feel years younger”. He went on to become a senior partner.

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