Re: Paul Bragg. High on Water have you seen this. It was posted on CureZone. Your thoughts please.

Introduction

When I was twelve, my father discovered a booklet that saved his life, which prescribed a live food diet to reverse hardening of the arteries, and it did. That booklet was later banned in the United States. When I was seventeen, my father brought home a book that prescribed a holistic health regimen that was based on live food, pure water, exercise, sunshine and fasting. The book was Paul Bragg’s magnum opus, The Miracle of Fasting. It was generally my final influence in matters of holistic health.

I recently encountered allegations that Bragg lied about his age, claiming that he was fourteen years older than he actually was. I was shocked, but it resolved several aspects of Bragg’s life’s story that made me wonder over the years. In addition, I had doubts about how his legacy was being handled.



Bragg’s Claims – His Health Advice

When I first read The Miracle of Fasting in 1975, Paul Bragg was still alive and living in Hawaii. He died the next year. There are two lines of Bragg’s claims that this essay will address:

The validity of the health regimen that Bragg promoted;

The validity of his life story, which he used as proof that his regimen worked.

The validity of Bragg’s regimen, in light of what appear to be fabrications about this past, should only be verified by independent means, and is somewhat beyond the scope of this essay, but not entirely. As I recently reread parts of The Miracle of Fasting, much is consistent with alternative and (increasingly) mainstream health literature, as well as with the personal experiences of others and myself.

I began a fasting regimen after reading The Miracle of Fasting, but abandoned Bragg’s Water Fasting advice after six years, and have done juice fasts ever since. Other parts of Bragg’s regimen did not work for me. One of the Bragg Empire’s bestselling products is Bragg Liquid Aminos, which is essentially soy juice. I had some about twenty years ago, got sick from it, and have never had it since. I dare not even consume soy sauce.

To revisit the booklet that saved my father’s life, live food is obviously what all animals are designed to eat, including humans. Humanity’s ancestors began evolutionary adaptations as they left the trees and learned to walk erect. The dietary adaptations of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle were highly significant, including the addition of more flesh and cooking food. The Domestication Revolution introduced radical changes in the human health regimen, including the development of seed and root crops and milk products, sedentary living, new diseases and the beginning of economic, political and social hierarchies – in short, civilization. The Industrial Revolution introduced even greater divergence from our evolutionary heritage, and obesity has become epidemic in the West. Americans are history’s fattest and most sedentary humans, with two-thirds of us dying of easily preventable degenerative diseases, with arterial disease and cancer being the most prominent.

Bragg was far from alone in advocating live food, fasting and exercise as preventives and cures for civilization’s diseases. Bragg’s most impressive pupil is Jack La Lanne, who is ninety-two years old today and still vigorously exercises and weight trains for two hours each morning and strikes muscleman poses. If Bragg was not living proof of the validity of exercise and nutrition, La Lanne is.

I first read about how fluoride was a poison by reading Bragg’s The Shocking Truth about Water. I have largely consumed purified water for the past thirty years, being very strict in my late teens, when I went years without drinking tap water.

The water fasting, sunshine, vinegar, soy juice and other aspects of Bragg’s regimen I have my doubts about. They may have validity, but people should independently investigate such health practices, and in fact all health practices, both orthodox and alternative, to see what works best for them.



Bragg’s Claims – His Life’s Story

Bragg made a set of claims to support his health advice’s validity, which comprise this essay’s central focus. The story repeatedly told in Paul Bragg’s books and interviews, and promoted by Patricia Bragg for many years, is related below.

Bragg was born in 1881 and raised on the family homestead in Virginia.[1] His great grandfather was Confederate Civil War General Braxton Bragg.[2] Bragg said that his diet was “terrible,” with about 90% of it coming from a frying pan.[3] At age sixteen, Bragg developed tuberculosis. After being given four months to live by his doctors, Bragg was taken by his nurse to the Swiss tuberculosis clinic founded and run by Dr. August Rollier. Bragg was cured by Rollier’s treatment, which was based on live food, sunshine, fasting and exercise, with many health miracles attending his recovery. Bragg then devoted his life to what cured him and became a real-life superman. He was able to help his sister, Louise, attain glowing health after she had been sickly for her entire life. She then led a “fairy-tale” existence after Paul improved her health with his regimen.[4] He wrestled in the Olympics in 1908 and 1912, fought in all the major battles of World War I, played tennis with Teddy Roosevelt and taught Teddy’s sons boxing, met most of the U.S. presidents since then, and founded the first American health food store in Los Angeles in 1912.[5]

Bragg then became the health consultant to the stars, with clients such as Gloria Swanson, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Clint Eastwood and Elizabeth Taylor. In his later years, his daughter Patricia was his assistant. Bragg moved to Hawaii in the 1960s and promoted his longevity, saying that he planned to live to be 120 years old. He swam and exercised for hours each day, and was living proof of his regimen’s validity. There are many newspaper articles on Bragg in his later years.[6] In them, Bragg makes many claims, including his 1881 birthday.

Six months before he died, Bragg was injured in a drowning incident in Hawaii. His health declined after the incident, while he kept up his speaking tours. While in Miami on tour, he collapsed and died of a heart attack on December 7, 1976, at age ninety-five.[7] On his death certificate, on which Patricia Bragg is listed as the informant, Paul's birthday is documented as February 6, 1881, and his state of birth as Virginia.[8]

That is quite a story. Unfortunately, recent research into Bragg's past reveals that very little of the above story appears to be true.

More here:
http://www.ahealedplanet.net/bragg.htm