Inside the Swiss clinic that promises to help you live longer
“Which would madam prefer?” Elizabeth Taylor’s waiter asks her in the 1973 film Ash Wednesday. “Perrier, Vichy, Apollinaris or Crodo?”
“Well,” deadpans Taylor, looking down mournfully at her meal — alcohol banned as part of the miracle treatment in a Swiss clinic that will restore her youthful beauty — “whichever goes best with roast beef.”
Beyond my own neat little Swiss table for one, a trim green lawn slopes down towards the lake, the gentle blue of which terminates in the Dents du Midi, dusted with snow, askance in the distance.
Back to the carrot: was a carrot ever so delicious? I had expected the dietary strictures of my time at CLP to be the biggest bore. In fact, they were the opposite. Lunch and dinner were three-course meals that were inventive and delicious. (Evidently not everyone felt so. Midweek, two teenagers from a large extended family turned up to lunch with two big McDonald’s bags.)
In absolute truth, after just four days, I had not felt healthier or fitter in months. I was sleeping deeply and well. And yet . . .
The evening before I left, I stayed up late in my room, trawling the internet for articles on ageing and the point of all this. There is a moral question, of course, about having so much money that you can buy treatments that will, in promise at least, take a class of humans closer to becoming demigods. But even before that, I think, comes that hoary old cliché of whether a longer life, or even a more beautiful looking one, is a better one.
None of us wants to feel old. The cure can’t be found in a syringe, a pill or a pot of cream, the longevity (née wellness), industry now knowingly tells us. But I’m yet to be convinced we’ll find it in a diet, or a lifestyle, either, regardless of how meticulously crafted and how expensive to maintain they are.
Sam Jones is the FT’s Austria and Switzerland correspondent
Details
Sam Jones was a guest of Clinique La Prairie (cliniquelaprairie.com). A five-day detox-reset, including accommodation, costs from SFr9,800 or £8,800
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This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Sam Jones
