‘We want to help you live your ultimate life’: Behind the scenes at Australia’s most exclusive wellness club
By Sarah Berry
It might be an ascension to heaven, but for those entering the exclusive environs of Saint Haven, the heavenly stairway leads downward. An oasis of calm on the surface, there is still a little wildness going on at the multimillion-dollar health club in the Melbourne suburb of Toorak.
In their efforts to be at the cutting edge of preventative and performance medicine, Saint Haven treads the fine line between controversy, “woo”, and innovation.
Tim Gurner (left) and Ben Greenfield of Saint Haven. There are three clubs in Melbourne, with a fourth due to launch in Sydney late next year.Credit:
I am here to meet the popular but controversial US fitness personality Ben Greenfield, who Saint Haven has employed as their Reverse Ageing and Life Optimisation Coach.
He is launching what the club calls their “5 Elements Bio-Hacking protocol”, an extension of their Limitless program, available to existing members for an additional $25,000 annually. Designed as the “ultimate health optimisation and reverse ageing protocol and testing regime”, it includes services such as Prenuvo full-body MRI scan (currently not available anywhere else in Australia), DEXA, Vo2Max, blood and hormone testing, plus a comprehensive training, supplementation, lifestyle, sleep and breathwork plan.
While I wait to meet Greenfield, I am guided through the low-lit, hallowed archways of the club. We tread lightly across the chequered marble floors past rooms with hyperbaric oxygen machines, red light therapy beds, MRI, cryotherapy chamber, translucent-curtained cubbies where people sit nursing IV drips, saunas, an expansive Roman-style bathhouse, a state-of-the-art gym and the candlelit studios for the club’s most popular classes: breathwork and the ethereal sound bath.
“We are a private club for people to surrender and escape from the world,” says owner Tim Gurner, who built the clubs to provide the kind of sanctuary and low-pressure social environment he craved himself.
Sick of becoming so worn out that he would need to go on a health retreat every five months or so, Gurner found that while he would return to work energised, the feeling would return again months later. He wondered why he couldn’t have the refreshed, post-health retreat feeling every single day.
As we walk through a heavy gold door, we pass a large, spherical [gold] sculpture which, I’m told, is their reverse osmosis filter.
The most effective filter for removing forever chemicals from drinking water, reverse osmosis remains an imperfect solution. Expensive and energy intensive, it works by separating clean water from chemicals, which then end up back in the waste water system. This means they potentially leach into groundwater and filter through to crops and animals. Such is the circle of life.
On we go, past an array of serenely smiling linen-clad staff into the club’s private restaurant, where I am handed a whisky glass.
Inside the restaurant at Saint Haven.Credit:
The glass contains the kind of oversize ice cube you might expect with an expensive alcoholic beverage, but here the contents are methylene blue – a former fabric dye and malaria treatment that may have neuroprotective benefits but may also be highly toxic – which is popular among the RFK and Joe Rogan set.
Then there’s the menu.
Amid the organic Milawa chicken omelette, and slow-cooked lamb flatbread with spiced pumpkin yoghurt, there is an Omega-3 avocado toast with mackerel pate and slaw (at $32, it’s much more than the $19 avo toast Gurner advised Gen Ys not to buy if they ever wanted to own a house).
You can pair your avo toast with methylene blue (which, according to the menu, “can improve cognitive function and overall wellbeing”), or, in the spirit of drinking fine water over fine wine, a Three Bays hydrogen water (“It may help reduce oxidative stress and support a healthy inflammatory response across the body”).
For those playing along, hydrogen water is regular water that has been infused with molecular hydrogen gas. Why? Proponents believe it has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. It won’t do anything but your hip pocket harm, though studies evaluating the health claims are small, inconclusive and sometimes contradictory.
I look up to see the hulking figure of Greenfield sauntering in from the club’s gym. We clink blue methylenes (though Greenfield wouldn’t mind if it did contain whisky – he’s an advocate of “microdosing” alcohol) and within minutes he’s telling me about the Botox and stem cell injections he’s had into his penis to improve erections and sexual performance.
The context is that while the affable 44-year-old former Ironman athlete is sometimes wildly experimental with his own body, he sticks to evidence-based innovation and practices when consulting to businesses such as Saint Haven.
This is lucky, given Greenfield (whose fans include former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and music producer Rick Rubin) is of the school of thought that vaccines cause autism, vegetable oils are inflammatory, and exposure to our technological devices cause a metabolic “firestorm” and DNA damage (hence he uses grounding mats, for which there is limited evidence).
“Ben has tried literally everything, and some unbelievably extreme things,” admits 43-year-old Gurner, also a fan of microdosing, but in his case it’s microdosing testosterone.
Gurner says he spoke with “all the top biohackers in the world”, not because he wants to live to 500 as it has been reported (“I never said that”): “I’d love to live as long as possible, but most importantly, be able to enjoy every minute of it feeling as good as physically possible.”
He ultimately aligned with Greenfield: “[He is] someone who believes in what I do and what our brand believes in, which is the balance of nature, grounding, earth, spirituality, with the latest biohacking.”
Breathwork and sound bath classes are the club’s most popular.Credit:
Greenfield is as passionate about being barefoot in nature, spending “spiritual” Sundays cold-plunging into the Spokane river, and spending time with his kids, as he is about working out and experimenting with boundary-pushing biohacking approaches, such as platelet-rich plasma therapy (PRP) and exosomes.
At Saint Haven, there are plans for exosomes and PRP to be on the menu.
PRP injections are used for injuries and joint repair while exosomes, small sacs produced by the cells, play a crucial role in cell-to-cell communication for hair growth, and skin rejuvenation.
There is also an IV menu of vitamin Bs, zinc, vitamin C, magnesium and glutathione, biotin, taurine and L-carnitine and NADs (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) for people with low levels.
“We’re the only business I know that actually tests your NAD levels,” says Gurner of the molecule involved in DNA repair and other processes. “So like anything, if you have excess NAD and you pump more into your system, it actually has the negative effect.”
Later, I ask longevity expert Professor Luigi Fontana from the University of Sydney Charles Perkins Centre for his hot take on the treatments.
“At present, there’s no robust scientific evidence that the IV vitamin/mineral combinations described meaningfully influence ageing or longevity,” Fontana says.
There is some interesting animal evidence for taurine in ageing, adds Associate Professor Lindsay Wu of the Laboratory for Ageing Research at UNSW, but it’s new, and in lab mice rather than humans.
PRP injections remain an area of active research, but current findings are conflicting, Wu says. And NAD?
“Maintaining NAD levels is going to be very important for health in old age, as there is genuinely a decline,” he says. However, there are different ways to boost NAD.
“One strategy you see is to use intravenous injections with high doses of NAD. The problem is that NAD itself is too big to actually get into cells, so it just floats around in the circulation without actually getting into cells that need it.”
There is more evidence for use of the precursors (NR, NMN, nicotinamide, niacin) compared to the IV injections, says Wu.
I wonder aloud to Gurner about the efficacy of various biohacking techniques. At Saint Haven they emphasise sleep, a whole foods diet, stress relief, physical fitness and spending time with those we love. These are fundamental aspects of good health, yet less than 10 per cent of Australians achieve them.
Why not focus simply on these? Isn’t the rest just superfluous, if not risky?
He disagrees. But then, the 90 per cent (or perhaps even the 99 per cent) is not his target market.
“We’re very serious about changing our members’ lives,” he says. “This isn’t a marketing ploy with some pretty pictures and pretty designs. This is about real efficacy, even to the point when through our membership onboarding, you need to have a goal. We don’t want you if you just want to come and sip a latte in the front room.
“We want to help you live your ultimate life.”
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