When I was a kid in the 1960s, I remember watching Jack LaLanne’s TV show and trying some of the exercises. As part of my ongoing effort to maintain my health as I age, I’ve been reading up about him and the “physical culture” movement from which he drew his inspiration.
LaLanne’s long career as an advocate for healthy lifestyle practices is remarkable and admirable, but like all people he was a product of the ideas of his time, compounded with some mythmaking that went along with his campaigns to market himself and his ideas. One of those myths may be the claim that he was a sickly, unhealthy youth until a lecture on nutrition from Paul Bragg “saved his life.”
LaLanne Before the Legend
Bragg was a natural health advocate and entrepreneur, known for promoting apple cider vinegar, fasting, juicing, and messages against processed foods. He was also an anti-vaccinationist who falsified multiple facts about his own life to bolster his image as a health expert. For example, Bragg claimed to have been born in 1881 when actually he was born on February 6, 1895. This fiction enabled him to pretend that he lived a healthy life into his 90s when in fact he died at age 81. His health advice included numerous elements of food faddism, such as his claim that tonsillitis is caused by eating “mucus forming food,” that cancer is caused by “gooey, slimy foods” and that colds are caused by consuming white bread and ice cream. Bragg was also prosecuted on multiple occasions for selling products based on fraudulent and unfounded health claims, such as “Glantex,” a patent medicine that he said could make people feel 20 years younger; “Bragg’s Grass Tablets”; and “Bragg’s O.K.-Lax,” a “miracle substance” that supposedly cured asthma and diabetes but was merely an amalgam of ground leaves, bark, roots, fruit, and a laxative.
LaLanne said he was 15 years old when he heard Bragg’s lecture that supposedly turned his life around. Until then, he said, he lived on sugar and junk food that made him sickly, pimply, and 30 pounds underweight. He needed a back brace, had poor eyesight, and couldn’t play sports. That changed, he said, when his worried mother dragged him to a Paul Bragg lecture at the Women’s Club in Oakland, CA, where Bragg told him that he was treating his body as a garbage can. The lecture prompted him to turn his life around and become the paragon of strength and fitness that the public knew.
The problem with this story is that it does not jibe with other known facts about Jack LaLanne’s early life. The lectures that Paul Bragg gave at the Women’s Club in Oakland happened in October 1930. However, an enterprising researcher reviewed the Berkeley Daily Gazette from the years when LaLanne was living as a child in Berkeley and discovered stories about his athletic accomplishments in high school. During the 5 to 10 months before Bragg’s supposedly life-saving lecture, LaLanne participated in football, baseball, wrestling, and track and field. One of the Berkeley Daily Gazette articles, from April 25, 1930, mentioned that LaLanne, who would have been 15 years old at the time, wrestled as a representative for the Berkeley YMCA and “reached the finals” in the 126-pound class, not the 90-95 pound underweight kid he later claimed at to be that age.
There is no documented evidence that Paul Bragg and Jack LaLanne met each other prior to the late 1950s when they both had exercise and health programs on Los Angeles television. The first time that LaLanne ever publicly mentioned attending Bragg’s 1930 talk was in 1959. After that date, however, he repeatedly praised Bragg as a mentor and inspiration. In 1975, he told People magazine that if not for Bragg’s speech, he would have been dead by age 16.
Perhaps LaLanne really did hear Bragg speak when he was young and merely misremembered some of the details. It’s also possible he embellished the story to create a compelling narrative that would help sell his ideas about diet and exercise. Before-and-after stories are a common trope in fitness circles. Charles Atlas advertised his “dynamic tension” exercise system with cartoons showing a skinny kid who bulked up with exercise so he could punch out a bully on the beach. Richard Simmons built his career as a fitness celebrity with stories about how he overcame obesity, as did Jillian Michaels of “The Greatest Loser” fame.
Vitamins by the Hundreds
Regardless of whether LaLanne’s “origin story” was accurate, his admiration for Paul Bragg was undoubtedly genuine. Some of his own health advice echoed Bragg’s focus on diet and nutrition, but LaLanne focused more on exercise and stuck closer to accepted medical science. He shared Bragg’s enthusiasm for juicing, fasting and natural foods but did not oppose vaccines, nor did he sell apple cider vinegar and patent medicines.
This does not mean that all of Jack LaLanne’s dietary advice was something you’d want to adopt personally. I’ve reviewed some of his personal nutritional choices, and they seem both unnecessarily severe and sometimes less than healthy. Here’s how he described his post-workout breakfast drink in a 1984 interview with Playboy magazine:
Mainly, I have about 400 vitamin supplements for breakfast right after I work out. I put them in a blender and make a high protein drink. I use a quart of carrot and celery juice, half and half, then put in 2 heaping tablespoons of wheat germ, 2 more of high strain brewers yeast, then a heaping tablespoon of bone meal and a banana. Then I put in 100 liver-yeast tablets, 15,000 milligrams of vitamin C, 2000 units of B, some boron and some zinc, also 75 alfalfa and kelp tablets.
By LaLanne’s own admission, this concoction was “one of the worst tasting health drinks you could have, but I still drink it, because it’s the perfect breakfast.” Current medical science would disagree. Taking hundreds of pills daily, including megadoses of vitamins, is not recommended and in fact creates risks of health issues such as kidney stones or toxicity. His vitamin C dose of 15,000 mg/day was eight times what is considered a safe dose. Bone meal, which was once popular in health circles, is now discouraged due to risks of lead and mercury contamination among other issues. LaLanne saw himself as a practitioner of natural health, but his concoction is about as unnatural as you can get.
Later in life, LaLanne’s description of his dietary regimen changed. In his nineties, he said he was eating two meals daily. His breakfast consisted of hard-boiled egg whites, a cup of broth, oatmeal with soy milk, and seasonal fruit. He also ate salads with fish, raw vegetables and fresh fruit with “natural grains, beans, brown rice, lentils, wheat.” This diet sounds healthier than the bone meal and liver-yeast blend-ins, if not entirely satisfying to someone who enjoys tasty food. Throughout his life, he was obsessively disciplined about both his diet and exercise. He claimed in 2010 that he last ate a dessert in 1929, and he is even quoted as saying, “If it tastes good, spit it out” — a mindset that reflects extreme asceticism, not scientific reasoning.
The Legend Endures
I hate criticizing the guy at all, though, because Jack LaLanne is someone I genuinely admire. Maybe his diet regimen was imperfect, but his exercise habits were exemplary. He was charming, charismatic and sincere, and he made fitness fun. His wife Elaine frequently joined him on his TV show, along with their dog, Happy. His personal life choices may have been too demanding for most people, and some of his dietary advice may have been food faddism, but his lifetime of discipline clearly paid off. He lived a long and healthy life, and even Olympic athletes and Arnold Schwarzenegger were awed by his strength and endurance when they joined him in workouts.
I think he also deserves a lot of credit for popularizing fitness training, although he is sometimes credited for things that he didn’t actually do. Some people think “jumping jacks” were named after him, but that’s not true. According to his Wikipedia entry, LaLanne “opened the nation’s first modern health club” in 1936, but in fact gymnasiums and YMCAs existed even in the 19th century. Wikipedia also states, correctly, that “LaLanne designed the first leg extension machines, pulley machines using cables, weight selectors, and many other inventions, none of which he patented, that are now standard in the fitness industry.” However, these innovations are part of a longer tradition that began before him and from which he benefited when he began his exercise journey. Alan Calvert, who founded the “Milo Bar-Bell” company in 1902, was a pivotal figure in the development of American weight training decades before Jack LaLanne was even born. Calvert invented equipment, published books and a magazine that popularized scientific training methods, and counseled thousands of customers and subscribers about how to build their physiques.
Jack LaLanne, however, is the first person who used the then-new medium of television to reach millions of people with advice to exercise and eat well. I think he deserves special credit for taking his message to women. His daytime show was popular with stay-at-home housewives at a time when women were mostly being told that strength training would make them unattractive and unfeminine. He explained how women could exercise at home using everyday items like chairs and towels. He reframed the idea of strength and fitness as foundations for beauty, health and self-respect. “If you have a few extra pounds around the tummy, if you’re hanging and sagging and you don’t have the pep and energy you should have, well, we’re going to work this thing out together,” he said. “I’m gonna show you how to normalize that weight of yours, how to firm yourself up and how to regain and recapture that loss of vigor, that enthusiasm, that zest and pep that you once had for living, and I’m going to show you how to get rid of those aches and pains, because the only thing we’re going to do, students, we’re going to assist nature.”
Before his death in 2011 at the age of 96, LaLanne liked to joke, “I can never die; that would ruin my image!” According to his family, he had been performing his daily two-hour workout routine the day before his death. He had been sick for a week but refused to see a doctor. Perhaps he would have lived even longer if he had gotten treatment for the pneumonia that killed him, but 96 years is still a damn good run. Of course, his older brother Norman lived 97 years on a fitness regimen that consisted largely of golf and martinis, so his longevity probably had a genetic assist. However, Jack’s wife Elaine is still alive today at the age of 99. Unlike Jack, she eats a piece of cake once in awhile, but she still starts every day with a workout. Speaking at a fitness conference in August, she quoted one of Jack’s favorite bits of advice: “Exercise is king and nutrition is queen. Put them together and you have a kingdom.”
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