Medicine: The Better Earth

In Look Younger, Live Longer, Food Faddist Bengamin Gayelord Hauser told his readers that they needed yoghurt, brewers’ yeast, dried skim milk, wheat germ and blackstrap molasses. That was fine for the peddlers of blackstrap (the dregs from the bottom of the refiner’s barrel) and for Hauser: his book sold almost 500,000 copies in the U.S. alone, has been put into 19 languages. Since then, Hauser has gone cosmic. In Be Happier, Be Healthier, out this week (Farrar, Straus and Young; $3), he proclaims the healing powers of the ancients’ four elements—earth, air, fire (the sun) and water.

Author Hauser, onetime Viennese, sometime protege of the late Lady (Elsie de Wolfe) Mendl and dietary adviser to Greta Garbo, has been resting up in Sicily. There, he notes, “people are happier, gayer, they dance more, they have more temperament than people who live in the north where there is so much less sun.” Though Hauser admits “I don’t know beans about medicine or drugs,” that does not keep him from a wild flight of pseudo-scientific fancy: “I often suspect that we will some day discover that the sun’s rays transmit as yet unknown and important vitamins to our internal bodies.” Ergo: take sunbaths.

To get full advantage from the all-embracing, beneficent air, Hauser advocates belly-breathing. For relaxing hydrotherapy, he recommends a sitz bath in every home—”So many do not realize the importance of bathing the vital organs of elimination and reproduction.” To U.S. readers who have nothing but regulation-style bathtubs, he suggests: “Put a small amount of water in your tub and sit in it sideways with your feet hanging over the edge of the tub. The water must not come higher than your hips.”

Hauser is not satisfied with the good earth. He wants a still better earth, or “certified soil,” to which all waste matter, animal and vegetable, is returned so that it need never be denied by “unnatural” chemical fertilizers. He does not explain how a carrot can tell the difference between phosphates from a decaying cat and those from a Swift & Co. container.

Chlorophyll became a fad with no help from Hauser. He now seeks to correct that omission with this recipe for a “chlorophyll cocktail”: into a blender put one cup of unsweetened grapefruit juice, a small handful of parsley, some dark green lettuce leaves and three large stalks of celery. With a flick of the switch, “you have a green-gold cocktail fit for a millionaire.” Author Hauser probably has another bestseller.