Is Canyon Ranch longevity program worth the high price?
TUCSON, Ariz. – Let’s get one thing out of the way. You’re going to die.
How and when, though, is hardly a predictable path. Most medical professionals will tell you it is a combination of genetics, diet, exercise and luck. Where you were born, where you live, how you live. But what if you could harness your health down to the most specific lab results? What if you could stave off death a little longer?
That’s what Canyon Ranch, a luxury wellness resort that’s gearing up to launch a longevity-focused retreat, is trying to offer its clientele. Can going there actually lengthen your life? That’s the idea, but you’ll need to fork over thousands of dollars to find out.
The Tucson wellness resort opened its doors in 1979 after original founder Mel Zuckerman wanted to step out of his sedentary lifestyle and teach others to follow suit. It now has five locations across the country.
The company offers plenty of packages − some more affordable than others. It’s starting a new longevity project in November that I had the opportunity to try out called “Longevity8” with eight health pillars: integrative medicine, mental and emotional health, strength and endurance, sleep, flexibility and fitness, spiritual wellness, nutrition and outdoor experiences. The program will cost a whopping $20,000 for single people and $36,000 for couples, offering a combination of seemingly endless spa and wellness services plus a plethora of medical testing including an assessment on a treadmill, cancer screening, a bone density scan and a highly intrusive dietary intake assessment. The goal? To live longer and better.
It makes sense why Canyon Ranch (and everyone else) would want to cash in: The longevity market around the world had a $25.1 billion valuation in 2020. That number is expected to his $44.2 billion by 2030, according to Allied Market Research.
For some guests, the cost is worth it. And there’s nothing wrong with gathering data about your health − if you can afford it. But medical experts caution there are cheaper ways to live a longer and healthier life and perhaps spare yourself some health anxiety in the process.
Paying for peace of mind
It is hard not to drink the Kool-Aid at Canyon Ranch − though sugary beverages aren’t actually on the menu. Guests enjoy all-inclusive healthy meals and snacks of their choice, more-machines-than-you-can-imagine gym equipment, spa treatments and pool time, plus lectures on myriad health topics, workout classes and meditation sessions. It’s really choose-your-own-adventure. A consult with a chiropractor to diagnose any and all joint pain? Check. A visit to a clairvoyant who tells you what to expect in your life over the next six months? Check. A stay at the vitality suite where red light therapy, bougie compression stockings and massage chairs lay waiting for you to try? Check, check, check.
Plus, it’s peaceful. The campus is mostly quiet save for the rippling of a stream and some light pickleball clacking. Butterflies flutter among red and orange flowers that line guest casitas. A mediation sanctuary smells like lavender. Everyone’s friendly but not creepy-friendly. And there’s this perfect protein-enriched peanut butter smoothie on tap that tastes like you’re trying peanut butter for the first time.
The longevity parts of the program, though, are often less “spa” and more “doctor’s appointment.” It suits some more than others.
Otis Greene was happy to once again sip the sweet nectar of Canyon Ranch; he returned for the longevity offerings. He first visited more than a decade ago after finishing chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, stage 4B. A tumor the size of a grapefruit sat at the base of his spine and wrapped around his nerves.
For several years, “my back was on fire, and I just assumed it was because I was just too tied into work,” the 50-year-old business executive from Florida says. Doctors caught his cancer late – meaning an abnormally large, aggressive dose of chemo awaited him. Then radiation nuked anything the chemo might have missed. The treatments depleted his cancer; it also depleted him.
Greene’s doctor recommended he visit Canyon Ranch: “Fly out there to the desert, pay a lot of money and let these guys reset you.” And he did – a combination of mental health, wellness and general life advice that helped him navigate new terrain.
Last month, he returned with his wife and now 18-year-old daughter. He sought a transformative experience for all three of them – but turning 50 was a particular milestone his doctors warned him about. His cancer hadn’t recurred, but secondary cancers tend to appear in years six through 10. He’s been diligent about his health, and he trusts his doctors, but he craved the Canyon Ranch all-hands-on-deck approach. Not just a nutritionist, but advice from an exercise physiologist and a primary care physician, too. It’s what he learned from cancer treatment: It wasn’t just your oncologist taking care of you, but your gastroenterologist and other specialists.
At this visit to Canyon Ranch, Greene crawled into a Bod Pod machine that measured his fat. He ran on a treadmill. He did 40 bench presses. A diet assessment. Bloodwork. Continuous glucose monitoring.
Did the cost of it all bother him? “You can pay now, or you can pay later,” Greene says. It’s not cheap. But in Greene’s eyes, you can save now and pay all the drug companies later to treat your symptoms once all your health problems course through you veins. You pay either way.
One of Greene’s liver markers was elevated. His primary care doctor thought it might be an early indicator of gallstones, so now he’ll receive repeat testing. It might be nothing, but “if it ends up being something, I’m gonna be even more grateful that (the doctor at Canyon Ranch) caught it just by including it on a more comprehensive blood testing panel.”
Some guests have found positive signs of cancer markers on the Galleri test Canyon Ranch uses (and confirmed with other testing), which checks for a signal belonging to 50+ cancers, including colon and prostate cancer. A shock, to be sure, but a potentially life-saving one once they sought follow-up testing and care.
‘Longevity is the ultimate human endeavor’
It took Mark Rivers, Canyon Ranch’s CEO, a while to figure out how Canyon Ranch should position itself in the modern longevity space. Thousands of influencers and apps could theoretically tell you how to live your healthiest, longest life. They could do it right from your phone or using the smartwatch you might already be wearing.
“Longevity is the ultimate human endeavor,” he says in an interview from his office at the end of a long conference table. A bit corporate in contrast to the “zen” the resort projects. “It is not an app store download. I realized that for us, we had a strength in that space that many others don’t, just because we’ve got the depth of organization and infrastructure that many don’t.” Board-certified doctors and licensed dietitians make up their staff; more credible than many on social media hawking products.
It makes sense why people are so curious about longevity. There will be more people age 65 and older than 18 and younger by 2034 in the U.S., “which will exert a transformative impact on our society and healthcare system,” says Dr. Bruce R. Troen, director of the Landon Center on Aging, professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. This age group will grow to 80 million in 2040, according to Urban Institute figures. Generally, people are living longer than they were decades ago all over the world; in the U.S., people could expect to live only until 68 in 1950. That expectation was up to 79 in 2019 before falling a few years due to COVID; it’s since ticked up higher again.
“In the last decade or so, tools have been developed to allow us to look deeper into the underlying physiology and biology of aging,” Troen says. “We hope this will permit us to eventually develop targeted therapies to boost both healthspan and lifespan.” Just look at all the biological age testing kits you see floating around.
And people can also find Canyon Ranch-like offerings piecemeal from concierge doctors or via other programs, like at Mayo Clinic.
Still, “for the average person, what is beneficial? Studies have found that lifestyle choices, from smoking to obesity, stress, lack of physical activity and even exposure to pollution can alter healthspan and even shorten lifespan,” Troen says. Many of those same factors can also increase risk factors for a variety of diseases.
The easiest solutions are what you already know: diet, exercise and seeing your primary care doctor, and avoiding smoking, heavy drinking and drugs.
“As I think most will agree, it’s the life in your years, not just the years in your life that matters,” Troen adds.
‘It shouldn’t only be available to the wealthy’
Yes, the tests Canyon Ranch offers have their benefits. But do the benefits outweigh the stress the tests might cause?
If you suffer from health anxiety a full workup like the one being offered by Canyon Ranch may worsen your mental health. On the flip side, it might assuage some of your concerns. “(These programs) largely cater to the worried well,” says Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor of nutrition, food studies and public health, emerita, at New York University. These are “wealthier more educated people who tend to be generally healthy but worry about it.”
Plus Dr. Robert Shmerling, senior faculty editor of Harvard Health Publishing at Harvard Medical School, thinks people often overestimate testing accuracy. “A lot of tests are overrated and over-ordered, and poorly understood by people who are actually on the receiving end of the testing.”
In Shmerling’s eyes, the average person doesn’t need most of the tests Canyon Ranch offers. And then there’s the ethical quandary. Most people who are getting these tests won’t need them. But those who may benefit likely won’t get them. Is there a way to reconcile that?
“I’d love if it could apply to everybody, right?” says Rivers of his program at Canyon Ranch. “People who have access to health care can go see different doctors and specialists. But sometimes, it could take months to see somebody, and you have to go to the east side of town and then the north side of town. And you kind of don’t get it all together in one place, which I think is part of our secret sauce.”
Shmerling argues, “If this (testing) was really important for everybody to have, then it shouldn’t only be available to the wealthy. It should be available to everyone, should be covered by insurance, etc.” Canyon Ranch doesn’t accept insurance, citing its lack of administrative infrastructure to process claims and the low reimbursement rates insurers often offer.
What happens when we go ‘looking for diseases or problems’
There are, of course, incidental findings that show up when people allow themselves to be analyzed like this.
“The popularity of total body MRIs now – that’s looking for preclinical cancers, really,” says Dr. Douglas E. Vaughan, professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the director of the Potocsnak Longevity Institute. “And do we all walk around all the time thinking about things that haven’t come to the surface yet? That’s what this this sort of comprehensive screening is about. Looking for diseases or problems before they overtly manifest.”
“What we do here is we find ways that people can be more in control and be proactive and take charge of their health by knowing ‘these are the things that I need to address,'” says Dr. Diane Downing, a physician at Canyon Ranch. “Because often a primary care doc, they may look at labs and say, ‘Oh, well, you know, your glucose is trending up a little bit,’ or ‘you’re a little bit above the range. But you’re not diabetic, so let’s not worry about it.’ No, now is when we should worry about it, so that we can nip it in the bud and and look at what we can do so that we don’t continue to progress toward chronic diseases.”
What’s “normal” for an age group or population might not necessarily account for any genetic predispositions or other factors. Those who go through Canyon Ranch’s “Longevity8” program will also have genetic testing.
Still, “I really take some of these things with a grain of salt,” says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, associate professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
To keep in mind:We all know physical fitness is crucial. But how many days weekly should you work out?
‘This place just calms me down’
Susan Cowan, a 65-year-old from Hawaii, first visited 30 years ago as a graduate student. A former collegiate volleyball player, she hiked her way into exhaustion and rewarded herself with spa treatments. Now, her perspective has shifted. Within the last few years, her husband was diagnosed with ALS and died, and she sent her son off to college. She lost her “me” time.
“I’m an empty nester. I don’t want to retire, and this place just calms me down,” she says, sitting on a cozy outdoor couch below the soft sounds of wind chimes. “I get my endorphin rush, and then I just get my calm time to pause and figure out what’s my next chapter.” That chapter includes thinking about longevity.
She’s leaned heavily into a “Zone 2” mindset, which basically translates to a moderately challenging workout for a longer period of time. That meant she stopped running. “I started walking. I started totally not caring about competing or any of that stuff anymore. It was more like, ‘OK, I need to be smarter.'”
What is mindfulness?Try this meditation to calm down and be present
What’s the end goal?
Dr. Margarita Terrassa, an OBGYN who was at Canyon Ranch this summer, encourages her patients to check it out.
But “you cannot just think ‘I’m going to go there and everything is going to be figured out for me and I’m going to come back every so often,’ ” she says. “I think you need a good medical team (at home)… to kind of follow up with what they have done, because, if not then you’re going to create that medical anxiety.”
Everyone is bound to have flaws, too. “I very rarely run into a patient that you’re not going to find something,” Stanford says.
Beth Madison has been coming to Canyon Ranch since the ’90s. After her recent 80th birthday, she went with a few goals in mind: “I want to be vibrant and moving fast, and I need to get some flexibility back.”
She’s eager to know what the future holds.
“At some point you just say, ‘This is it. This is your new normal. Deal with it,’ and I need some help knowing.”
The reporter on this story received access to these services from Canyon Ranch. USA TODAY maintains editorial control of content.
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