The Original Bircher Muesli (“d’Spys”) Recipe and History

Table of Contents

1. The Name: d’Spys, the Apple Diet Dish and “Little Mush”
2. The Alpine Herdswoman Story
3. Why the Apple Came First
4. The Original Recipe (1929)
5. Why Condensed Milk, and Why So Few Oats
6. How It Was Served in His Clinic
7. One Dish for the Whole Teaching
8. How the Muesli Changed
9. From Clinic Dish to Swiss Staple
10. Later Research on Muesli, Oats and Apples
11. Key Research Papers
12. Connections
13. Featured Videos

1. The Name: d’Spys, the Apple Diet Dish and “Little Mush”

Bircher-Benner never sold his invention under a catchy name. He referred to it as d’Spys — Swiss German for “the dish” (standard German die Speise) — or, more formally, as the Apfeldiätspeise, the “apple diet dish.” The medical historians Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen and Albert Wirz, in their 1999 study in Medical History, render it as the “dietetic apple dish” and remark that the name “sounds very therapeutic indeed.” That was deliberate: the dish was meant to be the essential part of every diet in his clinic, and he kept the number of different diets as low as possible.

The word that stuck came later and from ordinary speech. Müesli (in Germany Müsli) is the Swiss dialect diminutive of Mus — “pap,” “mash” or “purée” — so the name means roughly “little mush.” Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz give that derivation from a standard German dictionary, and English Wikipedia describes Müesli as an Alemannic diminutive of Mues. In Switzerland the dish became Birchermues or Birchermüesli, “Bircher’s little mush,” after its creator. The Swiss broadcaster swissinfo.ch calls Bircher muesli one of the few Swiss German words to have made it into international use.

The name also became a nickname. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz record that the disciples who tried to live up to Bircher-Benner’s regimen were mocked as “Müslis”.

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2. The Alpine Herdswoman Story

Bircher-Benner had his own account of where the dish came from, and it was not the laboratory. According to German Wikipedia, he liked to stress that his dish was related to the food of the Swiss Alpine herders, and among friends he told how he had stopped at an Alpine hut where the Sennerin — the woman who tends the cows on the high summer pastures — served him and his wife a “rather strange meal” (recht seltsames Essen). English Wikipedia gives the same story: a similar “strange dish” that he and his wife had been served on a hike in the Swiss Alps.

Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz, drawing on an article his son Ralph Bircher published in a Zurich newspaper on 12 March 1944 under the title “How did the Bircher muesli come about?”, and on a later family book by his daughter Ruth Kunz-Bircher, tell it with a careful qualification. Unlike the health foods of his American contemporary John Harvey Kellogg, they write, the muesli “did not originate in a medical practice or a clinical laboratory, but was inspired by a dish which Bircher-Benner was served by a woman cowherd on a hiking tour in the Swiss Alps, or so he claimed.”

Whether or not it happened exactly so, the historians add, the story fits Bircher-Benner’s conviction that rural people in pre-industrial times were much healthier than city people, thanks to their frugal and mainly vegetarian diets. In their reading the muesli was “a reminder of a golden age” when life was in tune with nature. Two details are worth keeping straight: the cook in his story was a herdswoman, not a shepherd, and what she served inspired the dish rather than being copied by it. The recipe he published was his own.

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3. Why the Apple Came First

Bircher-Benner’s recipe allowed berries or other fruit in place of apples, but apples were his choice, and Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz give two reasons. One was practical: apples kept fresh even in winter, so the dish could be served all year. The other was personal: he chose them “because he had himself experienced their curative power.” Again and again, the historians write, he told the story of how he had overcome jaundice when Elisabeth Benner, “a chemist’s daughter from Alsace,” fed him chopped apples. (That episode, dated to 1894 by his Swedish historian Motzi Eklöf, has its own page; see Connections.)

Behind both reasons lay his theory. Bircher-Benner ranked raw plant food as the most valuable nourishment — food that, in his phrase from a 1933 London address, “must partake of the character of accumulated sunshine stored up in the vegetable kingdom.” In his German cookbook he called such unheated, unleached foods Sonnenlichtspeisen, “sunlight foods”:

“Sonnenlichtspeisen möchte ich diese reinen, weder durch Hitze noch durch Auslaugung denaturierten Speisen … nennen.” (“I would call these pure foods, denatured neither by heat nor by leaching, sunlight foods.”) — Bircher-Benner and Max Edwin Bircher, Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse

A raw, freshly grated apple was about as pure an example of such a food as a Zurich kitchen could offer in January. Eberhard Wolff of the University of Zurich, co-curator of a 2010 exhibition at the Swiss National Museum, put it this way to swissinfo.ch: the muesli came about as a way of encouraging people to eat raw food, “as the main ingredient was raw apple, rather than the cereal or yoghurt of today.”

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4. The Original Recipe (1929)

Bircher-Benner published the dish in Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse (“Fruit Dishes and Raw Vegetables”), the cookbook he wrote with his son, the physician Max Edwin Bircher, for the family’s Wendepunkt publishing house in Zurich. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz quote it from the 10th edition of 1929 (pages 22–23). Their summary is the closest thing we have in English to the printed original: per helping, 200 grams of apple, with only a tablespoon of well-soaked ground oats, some finely grated nuts “for protein and fat,” the juice of half a lemon, and a tablespoon of sweetened condensed milk. The whole apple went in, peel and core included.

The soaking time and the method come from the versions the Bircher tradition has handed down and that Swiss sources print today: the Swiss public broadcaster SRF, German Wikipedia and swissinfo.ch all give the oats as one spoonful soaked for twelve hours in three spoonfuls of water, and all insist that the apple be grated in at the very last moment.

Recipe box: Bircher-Benner’s apple diet dish (one helping)

Method

1. The evening before, put the tablespoon of oats in three tablespoons of water and leave it to soak for about twelve hours.
2. Just before the meal, stir the condensed milk and the lemon juice into the soaked oats to make a thin sauce.
3. Wash the apple but do not peel or core it.
4. Grate the whole apple straight into the sauce, stirring as you go so that the grated apple is coated at once and does not turn brown.
5. Scatter the grated nuts over the top.
6. Serve immediately. SRF stresses that the preparation must happen directly before eating.

Three small differences between the printed sources are worth noting. SRF gives the apple as “two to three small apples or one large apple”; German Wikipedia and swissinfo.ch say about two apples, and German Wikipedia adds “400 g” and a sour variety — more than the 200 g in the 1929 summary. SRF’s ingredient list also includes “honey or sugar,” and English Wikipedia allows cream and honey in place of condensed milk; neither appears in the 1929 summary. The proportion everyone agrees on is the one that matters: a heap of apple, a spoonful of oats. The swissinfo.ch exhibition report adds that the apples were grated “using special grater” — the Bircherraffel, the Bircher grater — and an original grater used by Bircher-Benner was shown at the Swiss National Museum in 2010.

The site’s own food pages favour whole foods and do not recommend sweetened condensed milk; it is reported here because it was in his recipe, for the historical reason given in the next section.

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5. Why Condensed Milk, and Why So Few Oats

For a man who prized food in its natural state, a spoonful of factory-made condensed milk is a surprising ingredient, and Bircher-Benner knew it. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz write that “the Swiss health reformer knew that the use of industrially processed milk went against the grain of his basic argument. Yet he adopted it for reasons of hygiene.” Other sources make the hygiene concrete. German Wikipedia states that he used condensed milk because the unpasteurised fresh milk of his day carried a high risk of tuberculosis, and the swissinfo.ch report on the 2010 exhibition says he advised against milk because it could be contaminated with TB.

The oats were a compromise of a different kind. Bircher-Benner did not think oats were special. According to Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz, citing page 25 of the same 1929 cookbook, he added oats to his muesli “mainly because people thought that they gave more strength than other cereals, which was, as he said, an unfounded belief.” He was, the historians write, “not averse to compromise when it helped him to convey his main point.” (They add their own note that oats do in fact contain more protein than other cereals.) Soaking the oats overnight, rather than cooking them, kept the whole dish raw.

The nuts were there for a reason he could state in the language of nutrition: in the historians’ summary of the recipe, finely grated nuts were added “for protein and fat.” The lemon juice gave sharpness and, as English Wikipedia notes of the method, mixing the apple at once into the lemon-and-milk sauce kept the grated pulp from browning.

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6. How It Was Served in His Clinic

The apple dish was not a breakfast cereal in Bircher-Benner’s sanatorium. It was medicine served as a meal. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz write that it “was conceived as the main dish for breakfast and dinner,” and German Wikipedia records that at the Lebendige Kraft sanatorium, opened on the Zürichberg in 1904, the Birchermus was served as a light, easily digested evening meal. English Wikipedia adds that it was meant to be eaten fresh, immediately before any other dishes in the meal.

That order was a principle, not a habit. Bircher-Benner’s menus, the historians write, inverted the middle-class meal of his day, which began with steaming soup and ended with fruit or cake. His began “with a bowl of fresh fruit or some Müsli,” followed by a plate of raw vegetables as the main course, then a cooked dish, and only then dessert. He explained the rule himself in his 1933 address to the Food Education Society in London:

“In practice, this means salad or raw fruit at one or all meals daily. I employ the plan of giving fruit at the beginning of every meal. The empty stomach likes and digests the fruit better than when full and—what is most important—the appetite for cooked food is gradually reduced.” — Bircher-Benner, The Prevention of Disease by Correct Feeding (London, 1933)

In the same passage he praised the way an abundance of raw food “stimulates thorough mastication, demands thorough mastication,” and invoked Horace Fletcher, the American champion of slow chewing. A dish of finely grated apple fitted that teaching for sick patients: raw, yet easy to eat.

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7. One Dish for the Whole Teaching

“The Müsli in itself,” Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz write, “combined all the elements of the radical doctor’s teachings on nutrition.” Three of those elements show clearly in the bowl.

• Raw before cooked. Everything in the original dish was uncooked: fresh fruit, soaked rather than boiled oats, raw nuts. It was the first-class “sunlight food” of his theory in edible form.
• Wholeness. “He insisted again and again,” the historians write, “that it was essential to add not only the finely grated apple pulp to the Müsli, but every bit of the apple, including the peel and the core.” In the same spirit his raw-vegetable platter was a mixture of chopped leaves and grated roots. Food, for him, was a unity not to be taken apart.
• Frugality. “The original Müsli was a frugal dish, and intentionally so.” A small bowl of fruit, a spoon of grain and a few nuts was the opposite of the rich meat-centred dinner his prosperous patients were used to.

He also made a striking claim for it. According to the same historians, Bircher-Benner claimed that the muesli’s nutritional content “was as close to mother’s milk as could be.” In his 1933 ranking of foods, milk “from healthy and rightly-nourished mothers” stands in his first class of “light accumulators” alongside raw plant foods, nuts, oil and honey.

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8. How the Muesli Changed

The dish did not stay as he wrote it. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz point to what they call an irony: “Müsli became popular only when its cereal and sugar content was increased. It thereby changed back into a form of cold cereal mixture not unlike the porridge which had been a traditional staple in much of the pre-industrial West.” They contrast the original, whose main ingredient was fresh fruit, with “most of the pre-packaged Müslis sold in supermarkets.”

The sources trace the changes in stages:

• The milk. German Wikipedia records that with popularity came recipes that departed from the original: condensed milk was replaced by fresh milk, yoghurt or cream.
• Cream and sugar. swissinfo.ch writes that by the 1950s and 1960s the dish had extra ingredients such as cream and sugar — additions that, it notes, “were against Bircher-Benner’s ideas.”
• Packaged dry mixes. German Wikipedia dates industrially made dry mixtures to the early 1940s. Some contained dried apples, milk powder, cereal flakes, sultanas and hazelnuts; others contained only cereal flakes, with a note on the packet that fresh fruit should be added. In time, the dry mix replaced the soaked oats in many kitchens. swissinfo.ch calls industrially produced muesli with dried fruits “far from the doctor’s original idea.”
• Oats as the main ingredient. Today, English Wikipedia describes packaged muesli as a loose mixture of mainly rolled oats or other cereal flakes with dried fruit, nuts and seeds, often with honey or other sweeteners — and notes that when such a mixture is bound with sweetener and oil and baked, it becomes granola.
• Overnight oats. English Wikipedia observes that the original method of soaking oats overnight has returned in the English-speaking world under the name “overnight oats,” and that cafés use the label “Bircher muesli” for dishes with grated fresh apple and lemon — usually, it adds, a marked modification of the original rather than a faithful reproduction.

In short, the apple-to-oats ratio turned upside down. The dish he built around 200 grams of raw apple became, for most of the world, a box of grain.

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9. From Clinic Dish to Swiss Staple

Before it travelled, the muesli conquered Switzerland. Bircher-Benner promoted his apple diet dish in his many lectures on raw food, and German Wikipedia credits the countless cookbooks and writings of the Bircher family with its first breakthrough in the German-speaking world. Two of those books were by his sisters, who ran the sanatorium’s kitchen and household: Alice Bircher’s Diätetische Speisezettel und fleischlose Kochrezepte (1906) and Berta Brupbacher-Bircher’s Wendepunkt-Kochbuch (1927).

By the 1920s the dish was on the menus of vegetarian restaurants. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz write that after 1927, when the Zurich medical society that had once called him a quack heard his work honoured, doctors at the local children’s hospital began using raw food diets, and muesli “was adopted in cookbooks as a light and healthy dish in everyday menus”; the growing number of women office workers between the wars, they add, increased the demand for light meals.

German Wikipedia records that for a time it was truly popular only in Switzerland, and that from the 1940s and 1950s it was eaten regularly as the evening meal — in households and also in the kitchens of prisons, homes, monasteries and the army. swissinfo.ch likewise writes that by the 1940s it was “a popular family supper dish.” English Wikipedia notes that it was eaten as a Schweizer Znacht, a “Swiss supper,” rather than as breakfast.

How Swiss is it now? German Wikipedia counts Müesli, together with chocolate, among the Swiss specialities that have spread far beyond Switzerland, and calls muesli an essential part of European breakfast culture. It also found its way back to where its creator worked: Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz wrote in 1999 that muesli was then common in almost every cancer sanatorium.

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10. Later Research on Muesli, Oats and Apples

Bircher-Benner made his case for the apple dish in the language of energy and sunlight. Later researchers have studied the same foods with the tools of modern nutrition science. This section describes that research neutrally; note that most of it studied modern, oat-based muesli rather than his apple-first recipe.

Muesli studies

• Raw grain muesli and blood sugar (1987). At the University of Giessen, Sichert-Oevermann, Leitzmann and colleagues compared a usual diabetic breakfast with an unheated whole-grain cereal of the same energy content in seven people with type 2 diabetes; the cereal gave a flatter, lower blood-glucose curve. In healthy people, a raw wheat preparation produced much flatter glucose and insulin curves than heated ones.
• Muesli versus cornflakes (1992). In Geneva, Golay and colleagues gave fourteen insulin-treated type 2 diabetic patients muesli or cornflakes at breakfast for two weeks each; after the muesli period, insulin levels and day-long blood glucose were lower.
• Muesli with oat beta-glucan (2008). Two Swedish trials tested a muesli product enriched with oat beta-glucan. Granfeldt and colleagues found that 4 g (but not 3 g) of beta-glucan lowered glucose and insulin responses to a bread breakfast in healthy people; Hlebowicz and colleagues found that 4 g lowered the blood-glucose response without changing the rate of stomach emptying or satiety.
• Long-term observation (2018). In the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health, Quatela and colleagues followed mid-aged women for twelve years; breakfast cereal in general was not linked to diabetes, but muesli consumption was associated with lower odds of developing it. The authors caution that this may partly reflect the kind of person who eats muesli.
• Genetic analysis (2024). Park and colleagues used Mendelian randomization on UK Biobank data and found that genetic proxies for muesli intake were associated with lower coronary artery disease risk, with blood acetate — a product of gut bacteria — as a possible mediator. They called for randomized trials.

Oats

The best-studied component of oats is beta-glucan, a soluble fibre in the cell walls of the grain. A 2011 review by Othman, Moghadasian and Jones summarised its cholesterol-lowering properties and the health claims approved for it in the United States in 1997 and the United Kingdom in 2004. A 2014 meta-analysis of 28 randomized trials by Whitehead and colleagues found that 3 g or more of oat beta-glucan a day lowered LDL cholesterol by about 0.25 mmol/L and total cholesterol by about 0.30 mmol/L, without changing HDL cholesterol or triglycerides. One tablespoon of oats, the amount in Bircher-Benner’s original, holds far less beta-glucan than these daily doses; the oat-heavy modern muesli is closer to what was tested.

Apples

Apples, the main ingredient of the original, have been reviewed in detail. Boyer and Liu (2004) described apples as a rich source of phytochemicals — quercetin, catechin, phloridzin and chlorogenic acid among them — and noted that epidemiological studies have linked apple consumption with reduced risk of some cancers, cardiovascular disease, asthma and diabetes. Hyson (2011) reviewed apples and their components, including fibre and polyphenols, in relation to human health. Gerhauser (2008) reviewed laboratory, animal and population research on apples, apple juice and apple components in cancer prevention, and noted that some constituents, the triterpenoids, are found in the peel. The peel that Bircher-Benner insisted on grating in, and which most later recipes left behind, is where much of this research has looked.

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Key Research Papers

1. Meyer-Renschhausen E, Wirz A. Dietetics, health reform and social order: vegetarianism as a moral physiology. The example of Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867-1939). Med Hist. 1999;43(3):323-41. — PubMed PMID: 10885127
2. Bircher-Benner MO. [Why natural food?]. Veg Bode. 1948;51(9):132-4. — PubMed PMID: 18099596
3. Koning MW. [Dr. Bircher-Benner’s diet]. Veg Bode. 1948;51(9):137-40. — PubMed PMID: 18099597
4. Leitzmann C. Vegetarian nutrition: past, present, future. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014;100 Suppl 1:496S-502S. — PubMed PMID: 24898226
5. Sichert-Oevermann W, von Koerber K, Bretthauer B, Leitzmann C, Laube H. [Blood glucose and insulin levels in healthy persons and diabetics after intake of coarse wholemeal preparations, especially fresh grain muesli]. Dtsch Med Wochenschr. 1987;112(51-52):1977-83. — PubMed PMID: 2826098
6. Golay A, Koellreutter B, Bloise D, Assal JP, Würsch P. The effect of muesli or cornflakes at breakfast on carbohydrate metabolism in type 2 diabetic patients. Diabetes Res Clin Pract. 1992;15(2):135-41. — PubMed PMID: 1563329
7. Granfeldt Y, Nyberg L, Björck I. Muesli with 4 g oat beta-glucans lowers glucose and insulin responses after a bread meal in healthy subjects. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2008;62(5):600-7. — PubMed PMID: 17426742
8. Hlebowicz J, Darwiche G, Björgell O, Almér LO. Effect of muesli with 4 g oat beta-glucan on postprandial blood glucose, gastric emptying and satiety in healthy subjects: a randomized crossover trial. J Am Coll Nutr. 2008;27(4):470-5. — PubMed PMID: 18978166
9. Quatela A, Callister R, Patterson AJ, McEvoy M, MacDonald-Wicks LK. The protective effect of muesli consumption on diabetes risk: Results from 12 years of follow-up in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health. Nutr Res. 2018;51:12-20. — PubMed PMID: 29673540
10. Park JK, Petrazzini BO, Bafna S, Duffy Á, Forrest IS, Vy HM, et al. Muesli Intake May Protect Against Coronary Artery Disease: Mendelian Randomization on 13 Dietary Traits. JACC Adv. 2024;3(4):100888. — PubMed PMID: 38737007
11. Whitehead A, Beck EJ, Tosh S, Wolever TM. Cholesterol-lowering effects of oat β-glucan: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014;100(6):1413-21. — PubMed PMID: 25411276
12. Othman RA, Moghadasian MH, Jones PJ. Cholesterol-lowering effects of oat β-glucan. Nutr Rev. 2011;69(6):299-309. — PubMed PMID: 21631511
13. Boyer J, Liu RH. Apple phytochemicals and their health benefits. Nutr J. 2004;3:5. — PubMed PMID: 15140261
14. Hyson DA. A comprehensive review of apples and apple components and their relationship to human health. Adv Nutr. 2011;2(5):408-20. — PubMed PMID: 22332082
15. Gerhauser C. Cancer chemopreventive potential of apples, apple juice, and apple components. Planta Med. 2008;74(13):1608-24. — PubMed PMID: 18855307

PubMed Topic Searches

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Bircher-Benner
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=muesli
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=oat+beta-glucan+cholesterol
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=apple+polyphenols+health

Further Reading

• Bircher-Benner M, Bircher ME. Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse [Fruit dishes and raw vegetables]. 10th ed. Zurich: Wendepunkt; 1929. pp. 22–25 (the recipe, as cited by Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz).
• Bircher-Benner MO. The Prevention of Disease by Correct Feeding. Address to the Food Education Society, University College London, 6 January 1933. London: Food Education Society; 1933. Wellcome Collection copy: archive.org/details/b33426624
• SRF Radio SRF 1. Birchermüesli – das originale Rezept. srf.ch
• Leybold-Johnson I. Sun, mountains and Bircher muesli. swissinfo.ch, 27 March 2010. swissinfo.ch
• Leybold-Johnson I. Bircher muesli’s forgotten champion. swissinfo.ch, 10 November 2010. swissinfo.ch
• Wienbibliothek digital. Leaflet quoting “Sonnenlichtspeisen” from Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse. digital.wienbibliothek.at
• Wikipedia (German). Müsli. de.wikipedia.org

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Connections

• Dr. Max Bircher-Benner and the Raw Food Cure
• Max Bircher-Benner: Life and Career
• The Raw Apple Cure
• Sunlight Food: Food as Stored Sunlight
• Bircher-Benner’s Raw Food (Rohkost) Therapy
• The Lebendige Kraft Sanatorium
• Apples
• Apples: Polyphenols and the Peel
• Apple Pectin
• Oats
• Oats: Beta-Glucan and Cholesterol
• Hazelnuts
• Almonds
• Nutrition and Orthomolecular Pioneers

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