Pritikin: my ticket to longevity

News on the transatlantic fat front these days is not good. Thirty-one per cent of Americans are clinically obese; at twenty-three per cent, the British are not far behind, with new studies showing that by 2050 nine out of ten adult Brits will be either overweight or obese.

The message is clearly not getting through to those eating high on the processed food chain. Oppressed by affluence and by entropy, the inhabitants of the fat First World are increasingly faced with hard choices for their soft life: either change soon or die early. But how?

"Nobody gets out of life alive," Tennessee Williams said; however, since 1975, in order to improve the odds on long life, over 100,000 mostly ageing, unhealthy, overweight, affluent souls like myself have found their way to Pritikin Longevity Centre­, not so much a fat farm as a boot camp for

hardcore health, which now resides in Miami, Florida.

It houses up to 110 guests at £2,500 a week in peak season (December-March) and £2,000 off-peak. The price is high; but then so are the stakes. How much is getting healthy worth to you?

There are many fine, deluxe American spas - The Golden Door, Canyon Ranch, Two Bunch Palms - which offer a smorgasbord of health regimes and dietary cuisines, but, according to Paul Lehr, Pritikin's president, "Taken together they don't have a study between them. Everybody claims results but they have no proof."

Pritikin, on the other hand, is a science-based enterprise which has more than 110 published scientific papers to substantiate its claims to reverse the metabolic syndrome, that cluster of metabolic related problems - abdominal obesity, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar - any three of which together put an individual at risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, fatty liver, as well as