From Thighmasters to Nanobots: A Timeline of Suzanne Somers, Inc.

Next week, Suzanne Somers — hot-panted sitcom star turned “scientist� — will release her 22nd book: Bombshell, Explosive Medical Secrets That Will Redefine Aging. The Three’s Company and Step by Step star began her second career as a health-advice-touting licensing juggernaut 21 years ago with her endorsement of the Thighmaster; since then, she has been an unstoppable (and real doctors have tried!) hawker of diet books, jewelry, fashion, nutritional supplements, cancer cures, and now a guide to reversing the aging process through the simple fix of taking massive doses of synthetic hormones and ingesting 60 vitamins a day. How did Somers go from enacting bawdy mix-ups at the Regal Beagle to an author with nearly 10 million books in print? As this timeline will tell you, she did it through a shrewd mix of home shopping, vaginal injections, and pseudo-scientific claims that make real doctors feel faint. 

The success of Somers’s toning products turned her into something of a fitness guru, so she branched out into several diet books, including 1999’s Eat Great Lose Weight and 2001’s Somersize Desserts. She’s also written two memoirs, and even a book of poetry called Touch Me: The Poems of Suzanne Somers; while those tomes didn’t automatically lead to more products, the diet books did. Somers sells cookware, a sugar substitute called Somersweet (a necessary ingredient for most of her recipes), and a superfruit dietary supplement.

Her Somersweet sugar substitute apparently taught her that her acolytes would put just about anything into their system that she recommended. And so she began touting the glory of hormones. She started talking about her love affair with these injectables while publicizing her new book, The Sexy Years, and she currently links to an array of hormones on her site, including this handy-dandy ProFem progesterone cream. In 2009, she told Oprah that she injects a plant-based form of estrogen directly into her vagina every day, and it’s going to help her live “to 110.� Many doctors have declared her methods risible — some have called it “medical malpractice� — but have these naysayers tried shooting up estrogen into their vaginas? We thought not! And so Somers the true believer continues to attach her name and likeness to scads of hormones that are meant to make you feel “healthy and sexy.�

In 2009, Somers solved a problem that has long confounded those vaginal-injection-fearing fuddy-duddies in the traditional world of medicine: curing cancer. Her book, Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer—And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place, released that year, claimed to have the answers to curing the disease without chemo, radiation, or sometimes even surgery. In fact, Somers claims that she cured her own “full body cancer� this way. Again, the doubting Thomases with their “MDs� and “actual backgrounds in scientific fact� came out against it, calling it “quackery and medical pseudoscience.� At least Ann Curry asked Suzanne the tough questions when she had her on the Today show that year.

In her latest book, Bombshell, Somers promises to reveal the true fountain of youth to readers. Apparently this fountain is filled with nanobots, “small ‘robots’ the size of blood cells, [that] will be injected into the human bloodstream to clean the blood supply and literally wipe out today’s most feared diseases.� We hope these nanobots are powered by Thighmaster technology and injectable through the vagina, for these are the building blocks of Somers science.