AGING BULL : When Will We Stop Looking for Youth in All the Wrong Places?

So now it’s chromium.

How many thousands of people dropped their newspapers right where they stood and drove off, still in their bathrobes, to bang on the doors of health food stores before 8 o’clock one fine fall morning because of the following news story?

Dietary supplements of the metal chromium can extend the life span of rats by more than one-third and may have similar effects in humans, a researcher has found.

Oh, yawn. Another fountain of youth. Another elixir of the ages.

Just a few weeks before, it was the miracle of beta carotene, remember? With Vitamins C and E, it defends your arteries from the heartbreak of rancid fat deposits.

Before that, red wine was the ne plus ultra--good and good for you, lowers your cholesterol and your inhibitions. The wine shops couldn’t keep vin ordinaire on the shelves.

Then it was olive oil. All those thin Italians, with arteries as uncluttered as the L.A. River--there’s a reason.

Then oat bran, eaten by the feedbag-ful by all the best people.

And the vogue for garlic, the natural antibiotic.

In England, it’s royal jelly. The sun may have set on the British Empire, but it jolly well won’t set on you if you faithfully take our royal jelly, produced by British bees.

But back to chromium. “This is not a wonder drug,” another researcher warned.

Researchers always say that. This is science, with all its caveats and control groups. Do people ever listen? Hardly. Hundreds will dose themselves with thousands of times more chromium than the RDA. And some fool will mistake chrome for chromium and be out there licking Chevy bumpers because he thinks it’ll add a few candles to the last low-cal, sugar-free, salt-free, whole-grain birthday cakes of his miserable life.

Carry this forward a few years. More research, more miracles.

Dinner. A chic restaurant in Santa Monica--but that goes without saying, doesn’t it? Chromium picolinate and beta carotene a la maison, in garlic and olive oil. Presentation as artistic as all get-out. A good Merlot and, for dessert, royal jelly en gelee. Back at home, you stretch out and finish reading that article, “Immortality--What Does It Do to Home Equity?”

I don’t mean to knock anybody’s work, but while it is encouraging that 80% of the rats dosed with more chromium lived a year longer than rats that got less chromium . . . so what? They’re still rats, aren’t they?

What was it that Marine sergeant at Belleau Wood shouted as he led his troops over the top--”Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” Pose that question in 1992, in just about any nine-double-o ZIP code, and the answer is “Hell, yes!”

But I suppose they felt the same 100 years ago. Those snake-oil potions and tonics were full of stuff like uva-ursi extract (which sounds to me like bear ovaries) and podophyllin, from mandrake root, which once was credited with mystical properties because it was shaped like a man and supposedly cried out as it was yanked from the earth. No wonder men aren’t vegetarians.

We’ve always longed for some alchemy to turn decrepitude into vigor. We do it now with science--but always eagerly, without reflection on the benefits of age, on the tradeoff of wisdom for callowness.

The cautionary tales run from the Brothers Grimm to Stephen Vincent Benet and Rod Serling: Can’t get something for nothing. Can’t best the devil at the bargaining table. There’s always a catch.

In one Greek myth, they did beat the house. Baucis and her husband, Philemon, play unwitting host to Zeus and Hermes, sharing with the gods the little they have. For their hospitality, the couple get one wish. Here it is: not youth, not riches, no tawdry bargaining for a few extra years. All they want is to grow old and die together.

Now, isn’t that sweet?

Yes, it is. In fact, it’s very sweet. Now shut up and pass the Cabernet.