THE VITA-VEG DAYS

In the 1920s, Los Angeles teemed with diet gurus promising not just better health but eternal youth and transcendent vitality. It wore its crown with careless ease, as if it had always been the exotic diet capital of the world.

But just 20 years earlier, the capital had been, of all places, a small town in Michigan named Battle Creek. That was where John H. Kellogg had built a famous sanitarium on the goodness of grain.

Two of Kellogg’s grain products have conquered the world. One is cornflakes. The other is granola, originally a brand name belonging to Sanitas, the Kellogg health food company. Sanitas advertised its granola, which was in effect a rich cookie crumbled and served as a breakfast cereal, as “a delicious, digestible, fattening food.” (At the time, most diets were designed to increase your weight. Reducing diets didn’t come in till the ‘20s.)

All this had been heady, cutting-edge stuff in its time, but after all, the Kellogg diet was sober lacto-ovo vegetarianism. In the 1920s, Southern California food gurus were preaching wild, radical diets that viewed grain with suspicion--even considered it a leading health menace.

Basically, they said, you should eat nothing but fresh fruits and vegetables. And let’s face it, Battle Creek--fresh produce could be hard to find in, say, Michigan in the depths of February, whereas it was available year-round in Southern California (like sunbathing, another of their favorite prescriptions).

Did the gurus come here for that reason, or were they just exploiting the specialites de la region? Whatever the reason, by the late ‘20s, Los Angeles, and particularly Hollywood, had stores where you could get fig coffee, grain-free uncooked pies, alkaline bread, non-devitalized vegetable salt and even bubbling oxygenated tooth powder. For decades afterward, “Hollywood” (as in “Hollywood bread”) would be a shorthand term for exotic diet food.

It was obvious how this happened. In the ‘20s, Southern California was a favorite retirement destination--the land of sunshine, where Midwesterners could spend their golden years without ever having to shovel another sidewalk. The retirees had an obvious interest in health. But film actors were even more keenly interested.

The movies had created a totally new kind of celebrity. If you were the most famous actor on Broadway, perhaps tens of thousands of people had seen you, but even a middling film star was known to millions all over the world. Unfortunately, this dizzying mass adulation was fickle. The camera has no pity; a close-up shows flaws nobody would ever get close enough to notice in a stage actor.

And once you lost your looks, you were on the scrap heap. Hollywood’s feverish quest for youth had begun.

The scholarly grand old man of L.A. food gurus was Otto Carque (1867-1936), some of whose books were still in print as late as the 1970s. Like the other local diet proponents, he prescribed exercise, fresh air and nude sunbathing for nearly every complaint, but his personal theme was alkalinity.

Before scientists started to unravel the mystery of metabolism in the 19th century, doctors had usually thought of diet in terms of balancing abstract principles such as heat versus cold or moisture versus dryness. To Carque it was alkalinity versus acidity, and modern people were in constant danger of excessive acidity. Even breakfast cereal was troublingly deficient in alkalinity.

The main sources of alkalinity (which to him meant the presence of sodium, potassium or metallic minerals such as iron and copper) were fruits--conveniently, for Southern California, including citrus fruits. Carque was rather peeved with people who couldn’t see that lemon juice was alkaline.

Salt was a possible source of sodium, of course, but not so fast with that salt shaker--ordinary table salt, even if it was made from sea salt rather than rock salt, “consists of crude particles too coarse and large to be taken up by the blood corpuscles,” Carque wrote. To be assimilated by the body, salt had to be derived from plant products.

Others took up the vegetable salt idea during the ‘20s and warned that “inorganic salt” caused rheumatism, eczema and tuberculosis. Fortunately, L.A. health stores stocked nearly a dozen brands of vegetable salt at the time, including Eka-Salt, Nu-Vege-Sal, Vita-Veg and Sal-Ray.

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Arnold Ehret, who died in 1922, spent only the last 10 years of his life in Los Angeles but left a vigorous following--his book “The Mucusless Diet” has been in print ever since the early ‘20s. Like many a deviser of a radical diet, Ehret was plagued with multiple ailments until he underwent a crisis and developed his own regimen of exercises and diet--basically, taking no food but grape juice--which gave him a sense of supernatural energy. These days, a psychologist would probably suspect that his complaints had been at least partly psychosomatic.

Ehret’s regimen was something close to religion. In the “Message to Ehretists” that concludes his book, he wrote, “ ‘Eat your way into Paradise physically.’ But you cannot pass the gate, watched over by the angel with the flaming sword, until you have gone through the purgatory (cleansing fire) of fasting and diet of healing.”

The basis of his doctrine was that food was not a physical necessity. Fruits and (non-starchy) vegetables were allowable pleasures, he held, but the real source of physical vitality was not food at all but the mysterious Power of life. The formula was V=P-O: Vitality equals Power minus Obstruction.

And Obstruction was constipation, the source of every disease. Ehret believed that a large mass of fermenting, undigested food remains in the stomach for decades if you eat mucus-forming foods, which are basically anything that feels sticky: above all milk, eggs and grain (remember the stickiness of dough).

Eventually Ehret concluded that fasts of more than 40 days were a bad idea. And he even came to tolerate rye, whole wheat or bran bread, as long as it was toasted to reduce its mucus-forming powers. But until his death he continued to denounce the “exploded germ theory,” the idea of blood circulation and the whole medical concept of metabolism.

He held that a healthy, fasting individual could broadcast and receive electrical “love vibrations” through the hair, which may have particularly endeared him to the longhairs of the late 1960s. When it became obvious that his book was mostly being bought by hippies, the old cover photo of Ehret, looking intense in a neat vandyke beard, was replaced by a drawing of a man with huge masses of hair and the dreamy look of a misunderstood prophet.

Another L.A. diet teacher, Frank McCoy, also preached fasting and had a theory of obstruction parallel to Ehret’s, but to McCoy it was not clogged intestines but a congested blood stream that was the source of disease. He also worried about fermentation in the stomach and warned against eating yeast-risen bread unless sliced thin and toasted--in this case, not to prevent mucus but to kill the yeast that McCoy imagined was still lurking in it.

The notion that certain foods should not be eaten together was widespread at the time; it’s still alive in diets such as the New Beverly Hills Diet. One popular theory--you still sometimes hear it--was that it’s bad to eat proteins and carbohydrates at the same meal (unfortunately, many foods contain both). McCoy’s twist was that it was fruit and starchy foods that should never be mixed.

His ideal food was raw greens. Bananas, garlic and onions were very bad for you, and Swiss chard should only be eaten in moderation. Unlike Ehret, he had no problem with milk--in fact, it was the only liquid food he advised. And some meats were OK, such as mutton, Belgian hare and Salisbury steak.

Ideas like these were not at all outside the mainstream in California. During the ‘20s, Los Angeles Times diet columnist Philip M. Lovell denounced the erroneous “calorie theory” of nutrition and claimed that every fruit, vegetable and legume is nutritionally balanced in itself. He preached against salt, pepper, vinegar and Worcestershire sauce. “A cold,” he wrote, “is nature’s acute method of toxin elimination.”

The most enduring of the food gurus was Paul C. Bragg, who lived well into his 90s. In fact, he argued that with proper diet you should be able to live forever. He actively cultivated Hollywood and numbered quite a few entertainers among his followers, as does his daughter, Patricia Bragg, who maintains a Bragg Web site today (https://www.bragg.com). His best-known follower is fitness advocate Jack LaLanne.

Like Ehret, Bragg suffered from multiple illnesses until he devised his own regimen to turn his body, as he put it, into “an ageless, tireless, pain-free citadel of glowing, radiant health.” His photos show an aggressively vigorous man with a blazing, faintly wolfish smile, much like the Juiceman of recent infomercial fame. (For that matter, Bragg claimed to be the first person in this country to import German-made juicers.)

His theme was fresh, “non-devitalized” foods, which he believed to contain an active life force. The ideal was raw fruits and vegetables. Meat was, by definition, the most devitalized food of all (he once claimed it was 60%-65% uric acid), but canned vegetables were just as bad. He recommended waiting 15 minutes after eating fresh fruit before eating cooked food, because its vitality would interact harmfully with the devitalized stuff.

Bragg thanked Carque and Lovell in his books and agreed with them on some points. For instance, he advised that bread always be toasted. But to Bragg’s way of thinking, this was not because of mucus or yeast but because grain was acid-forming. Toasting cured this by converting the starch to dextrins (which are gluey; bad luck for Ehret’s idea of reducing mucus by toasting). Bragg sold his own brand of ready-toasted dextrinated meal through health stores.

At least, this was what he was saying early in his career. His self-published “Live Food Cookbook and Menus” (1930) has chapters with stark titles like “No Meat,” “Poisonous White Sugar,” “Salt--the Enemy of Life,” “Dairy Products Are Not Human Food” and “Don’t Use Condiments” (meaning salt, spices, vinegar and pickles, because they are acid-forming).

But in 1947, the mainstream publisher Alfred A. Knopf put out an extensively revised edition of Bragg’s cookbook in which much of the extremism of the ‘30s disappeared. Meat had become acceptable, though still not when preserved or fried. Canned vegetables were now OK; Bragg gave recipes for health canning.

And vinegar, one of those forbidden condiments, eventually became a cure-all to Bragg. He may be the ultimate source of those articles about vinegar’s miraculous powers that show up in supermarket tabloids every year or two.

Altogether, L.A. had a wonderful panorama of diet gurus in the ‘20s. Nearly all of them taught something of value (vegetables are indeed good for you, and the fresher the better; you shouldn’t eat too much meat or even carbohydrates; and so on), even though their tunnel vision might distort it beyond recognition.

What’s amazing is how often they agreed on their prescriptions--toasting bread, for instance--while totally disagreeing on the reasons for them.

It was the Zeitgeist speaking, and it was saying, “Adios, Battle Creek--hello, L.A.”