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Features
The Elements of a Healthy Lifestyle:
A Conversation with Patricia Bragg, ND, PhD
by Elyssa Paige
With a mind-boggling array of diets, supplements and fads that promise health and long-lasting energy, we may be left scratching our heads wondering what the best path to wellness really is. The answer remains as simple as ever: Rather than a quick-fix, vibrant health can only come with a lifestyle grounded in healthy food, clean air and water, exercise and a positive attitude.
The news is hardly new. In the early 20th century, Paul C. Bragg, ND, PhD pioneered a healthy way of life based on natural live foods, introducing the first health food stores in America. Attracting Olympic athletes, royalty and celebrities to his lectures and fitness programs, he developed health products from liquid amino acids to sea kelp seasonings. Walk into any health food store and you’ll be sure to discover an abundance of Bragg health products on the shelves. Today his daughter, Patricia Bragg, ND, PhD, continues his legacy as a worldwide health crusader. Together they co-authored 10 “self-health” books, including the widely 
acclaimed Bragg Healthy Lifestyle and The Miracle of Fasting. Patricia Bragg is a dynamic health educator and life extension nutritionist who offers health and fitness seminars around the world, as well as on TV and radio. With a 110-acre campus and organic farm in Santa Barbara, a 550-acre farm in Hawaii, and an 80-acre organic lemon and tropical fruit farm in the tropics of Australia, (which is off the grid and solar powered), Patricia Bragg walks her talk every day with amazing vitality, inspiring everyone she meets. It was an honor to speak with her recently about how we can connect to the elements, return to nature and take charge of our health.
Vision Magazine: What is the key to the Bragg Healthy Lifestyle?
Patricia Bragg: The Bragg Healthy Lifestyle is this: You are what you eat, drink, breathe, think, say, and do. It’s as simple as that. Most people jam their mouths with a lot of junk food and then they wonder why they get sick, age early, and die young. With your knife and fork, you can literally be digging your grave. Therefore we teach people to be their own health captains and to guard what they put into their mouths and into their bodies.
VM: How is connecting to the earth element an important aspect of health?
PB: My father was the first one to promote organic gardening. He inspired Rachel Carson, who wrote the wonderful book, Silent Spring, which alerted people to the dangers of DDT [a pesticide subsequently banned in the United States in 1972] and the toxins that they spray on food. Pesticides kill the bugs; what do you think they’re doing to you?
Eat organic fruits and vegetables! If you want to be well and live long, you must work to create your own Garden of Eden to the best of your ability wherever you live! I believe in survival gardens. You can grow food on your windowsill, on your back porch, or in community gardens. I grow my own artichokes, asparagus, squash, tomatoes, celery, lettuce of all kinds, mung beans—you name it, I grow it. I say, go organic don’t panic!
VM: How about the importance of the water element?
PB: God gave us all this wonderful water. In over 15 trips around the world, I’ve seen nations where all they have is rainwater. They don’t know about fluoride, chlorine and all the toxins added to the water in the United States. They just drink rainwater distilled by the heavens. That’s the way it’s been around the world since the beginning of time.
In the old days they had water diviners who would break a twig from a tree, go along the ground, and soon the twig would start shaking, indicating the possibility for a well. Any time my father got property, he would have the diviner come first because he wouldn’t buy property unless it had water. And I did the same when I got my property in Australia.
Pure water is the essential fluid required for life and health. People who ingest a sufficient amount of the right kinds of liquids (distilled or purified water, fresh organic fruits and vegetables and their juices) have better health, body functioning and circulation overall, which are most important to super health and long life. The body is 70 percent water and it runs all your machinery: heart, circulation, digestion, bones and joints, muscles, metabolism, assimilation, elimination, sex, glands, nerves, and energy. I believe that the water you drink makes or breaks you. It’s as simple as that.
VM: What ignited the fire in you to help people discover vibrant health?
PB: My mother was in an automobile accident and I came into the world three months early. I believe that my will to live, share and be part of a great crusade to make this a healthier world is the fire ignited within me. I feel ageless. I have more energy than some of the college students and young people who work for me. I wake up at 5 a.m. with joy in my heart and energy galore. I earn my sleep with activity, exercise and being a health crusader, and at night I sleep like a baby. I’m basically a vegetarian; the [factory farmed] animals are all sick and drugged. I’ve never had a cup of coffee and I don’t use salt; I get natural sodium from food. I have never taken an aspirin and I laugh when people say, “Patricia what do you do if you get a headache?” I don’t get headaches. You bring headaches upon yourself [through] the way you eat, lack of exercise, and lack of deep breathing.
VM: Can you talk more about deep breathing and the importance of the air element?
PB: Air is so vitally important. We are breathing machines. I believe that if you work in an office, whether you’re a dentist, a doctor, or an engineer, you should buy yourself an air purifier. Your lungs are so important; guard them!
Oxygen is the invisible staff of life. Unfortunately, Americans are shallow breathers. You know when you’re running to catch a plane at the airport and you get a stitch in your side? That’s the air pushing down and trying to open up the unused area of the lower part of your lungs.
I believe in deep breathing. When you pump a generous flow of oxygen into your body, every cell comes alive! Oxygen stimulates your logic and intelligence. The more deeply and fully you breathe, the greater your power of concentration, the more your creative mind will assert itself and the further you will travel to higher levels on the physical, mental and spiritual planes.
VM: Why do you think fasting is an important aspect of good health?
PB: The cover of our book, The Miracle of Fasting, says, “Proven throughout History for Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Rejuvenation.” Every religion has their time of fasting—a physical, spiritual, mental and emotional purification. Paracelsus, a 15th century physician and the father of body chemistry, said, “Fasting is the greatest remedy, the physician within.” When a baby doesn’t feel good and you try to feed it, it will spit the food out at you. It’s the same with animals. Fasting is God’s and Mother Nature’s way of cleansing and purifying the body. It’s like an internal shower.
The human body is a miracle. I’m five-feet tall and I have 70 trillion cells. You take Lou Ferrigno, The Hulk—who changed his life as a teenager with the Bragg Healthy Lifestyle—he’s big and tall, so he probably has 100 trillion cells. When you fast, do you know what all those cells do? They clap! They can clean house now! They don’t have to digest, assimilate and eliminate all the food they’re overloaded with.
Mike Love of The Beach Boys read The Miracle of Fasting and said that it changed his life. The Beach Boys were using drugs and alcohol. Mike Love got the book shoved into his chest by a fan as he was getting on a plane in Sydney, Australia over 30 years ago. He read it, followed it and now says, “Thanks to Bragg Fasting Book and Healthy Lifestyle, we are now healthy, fit, singing better and staying younger than ever!”
VM: What are some simple steps that we can take to become healthier?
PB: God gave you a computer: your brain. What you put into your brain—your thoughts and actions—is very important, so have healthy, happy thoughts. Words are living. What you say is important. If you send garbage out of your mouth, you get garbage in your life. Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it good, is it kind, is it necessary?
As for the rest of your body, you can either use your 640 muscles or lose them. I earn my food every day through exercise, deep breathing, good posture, and never sitting with my legs crossed. Every one of us has a major artery in the back of each knee. Women wonder why they get varicose veins when for years they’ve been sitting with their legs crossed like a pretzel. We need circulation! All of you right now, feel your nose. Is it warm? Do you know how it got so nice and warm? Blood circulating! People tell me, “Oh, Patricia, I feel so cold.” Get out and exercise, do your deep breathing, do stationary jogging. I haven’t sat down since I started talking to you! I’m doing stationary jogging right here. With every jog, my 70 trillion cells are thanking me, they’re getting a massage! Do you know what a massage does? It gives you good circulation, which is one of the keys to good health. Your heart is the master pump. It works night and day for you. And when it stops, you’re gone, so be good to your heart!
Once again, use good posture, don’t sit with your legs crossed, lift your chest up, give your heart plenty of room, and women: Never wear a bra—they’re killers! Read the book, Dressed to Kill, by Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer, which says that in a survey of nurses, the ones who wore wired bras got breast cancer. Wow! Right now grab your wrist and hold it tight—it hurts doesn’t it? No wonder breast cancer is rampant in women around the world who wear tight wired bras for hours and hours. You see what happens when you cut off circulation—disaster! What happens in a stagnant pond? It gets thick and breeds mosquitoes. All you gals out there, guess what? I’ve never worn a bra. I do breast exercises everyday and my breasts haven’t fallen. Women write to me and say, “Patricia, I feel so great, I threw my bras away!”
VM: What are some other testimonials that have stood out for you?
PB: We get testimonials every day. We just got one from a man who saved his life from cancer of the prostate. He said we changed his whole lifestyle by fasting, getting off the dead, garbage food, and living a healthy life. We kept JC Penney going almost to 100. We took Conrad Hilton dying in the hospital at 80 and gave him 20 more years of life. And Dr. C. Everett Koop, the retired Surgeon General, said that my father did more for the health of America than any one man he knew of.
Kathy Smith, who sold more exercise videos than any one person, was 19 when she came to Hawaii. Her mother had died and her life was in limbo when she went to my father’s free exercise class, which is still going on Monday through Saturday 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. at Fort DeRussy lawn, Waikiki Beach. Kathy Smith said that her life changed on that day, thanks to Paul Bragg.
The Miracle of Fasting has even been the number one health book for over 35 years in Russia. That’s the book that changed the life of Dick Gregory, who weighed 350 pounds, drank two-fifths of whiskey a day, smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and did every kind of drug. He said, “The Miracle of Fasting inspired me to become healthy, trim, and fit. I finished eight Boston Marathons. I was an unhealthy 350 pounds and now I’m a healthy 150 pounds, lean, trim and a health crusader.”
VM: What is the most important health tip that you can give?
PB: Get back to Mother Nature and live in simplicity. Keep your life as simple as one, two, three. Exercise and earn your food. Get away from dead food, especially sugar and white bread, which is the staff of death, and start eating organic whole grains. Drink eight glasses of purified water a day and in three of them, add one to two teaspoons of Bragg Organic Apple Cider Vinegar. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, used apple cider vinegar in 400BC to detox, cleanse and heal his patients.
I feel that everyone should learn to be their own health captain and take control of their lives. Plan, plot and follow through. No one knows how you feel but you. Life is the most priceless treasure on this Earth! You have that treasure. Within you lies the mental power to be anything you want to be. It’s up to you!
For more talks with Patricia Bragg, the latest health news, free product samples, daily affirmations, Bragg health products, books, and more, visit www.bragg.com. Follow Patricia on www.twitter.com/patriciabragg or be her friend on www.facebook.com/patriciabragg and www.myspace.com/patriciabragg.
