The Raw Apple Cure: How Bircher-Benner Discovered Raw Food

Table of Contents

1. Medicine and Diet in the 1890s
2. A Young Doctor in Aussersihl
3. 1894: Jaundice and the Raw Apple
4. 1895: The Woman With the Stomach Illness
5. From Two Cases to a Theory
6. Older Raw-Food and Vegetarian Ideas
7. The Alpine Herdswoman’s Dish
8. Early Raw-Food Cases and the 1897 Clinic
9. 1900: “Heresy” Before the Zurich Doctors
10. 1927: The Same Society Honours Him
11. How He Told It in London, 1933
12. Key Research Papers
13. Connections
14. Featured Videos

1. Medicine and Diet in the 1890s

To see why a plate of raw apple could start a controversy, it helps to know what doctors of the late nineteenth century believed about food. The medical historians Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen and Albert Wirz, writing in Medical History in 1999, describe a nutritional science built around animal protein. Since the work of Justus von Liebig, Carl Voit and Max Pettenkofer, who laid down the basic principles of metabolism and devised methods of nutritional accounting, meat had been held in especially high regard: those calculations seemed to prove it was the most efficient source of energy and therefore necessary for the working man and anyone who lived an active life. The prosperous classes, the same historians write, believed that their prodigious meat consumption was the very picture of a healthy diet.

Vegetables and fruit sat low in this scheme. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz quote a striking example from Switzerland itself: as late as 1882, the Swiss Federal Inspector of Industries, a physician who had read the scholarly literature of the day, classed vegetables and salads as stimulants whose main value lay in their salt and acid content. A correct middle-class meal of the time began with steaming soup or broth, moved on to a cooked main course of meat, cereals or potatoes and vegetables, and offered salad only as a side dish eaten for variety and pleasure.

For the sick, the rule was cooking. Eklöf describes the “customary cooked diet” that Bircher-Benner’s stomach patient was receiving before he changed it. Bircher-Benner himself, looking back in 1933, put the hospital diet of his youth this way:

“Hospital cookery followed the general deterioration without resistance. To some extent the diet of the sick-room accentuated the errors, by rigorously excluding everything raw, by prescribing overcooked food for diseases of the intestines and stomach, and an albumen-fat diet for diabetes.” — Bircher-Benner, The Prevention of Disease by Correct Feeding (London, 1933)

In the same address he blamed part of this on the new science of germs, saying that “bacteriology has banned raw food and created canning.” In his telling, then, the medicine he trained in did not merely overlook raw food for sick people; it deliberately kept it off their plates.

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2. A Young Doctor in Aussersihl

Maximilian Oskar Bircher was born in Aarau on 22 August 1867, the son of a notary. When he was in his mid-teens his family fell into poverty after his father guaranteed a bad bond, but he was still able to study medicine in Zurich and Berlin, completing his studies in 1891. According to Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz he found the university teaching technical and fragmented, and the teacher who impressed him most was the psychiatrist August Forel, who taught him hypnosis and campaigned against heavy student drinking.

On 1 December 1891 he settled as a general practitioner in Zurich-Aussersihl, an industrial, working-class district. There, his historians write, he gained first-hand knowledge of the problems of the poor. Even as a student he had experimented with natural methods — he used Vincenz Prießnitz’s cold body compresses against his own insomnia — and over the following years he travelled to learn more: to study the water-cure methods associated with Sebastian Kneipp, to hear Wilhelm Winternitz lecture on hydrotherapy in Vienna, and to visit Heinrich Lahmann’s clinic near Dresden, famous for its dietetic therapy.

He married Elisabeth Benner (1872–1945) of Mulhouse in Alsace and joined her surname to his own, becoming Bircher-Benner. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland and German Wikipedia date the marriage to 1893; Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz give 1899. Either way, she was at the centre of the first of the two experiences that turned him toward raw food.

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3. 1894: Jaundice and the Raw Apple

In 1894 Bircher-Benner himself fell ill with jaundice (Gelbsucht), the yellowing of the skin and eyes that signals a problem with the liver or bile. Eklöf records that he recovered after Elisabeth Benner fed him thin slices of apple. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz tell the same story in slightly different words: Elisabeth Benner, “a chemist’s daughter from Alsace,” fed him chopped apples. German Wikipedia adds that he tested the raw diet “in a self-experiment” when he had jaundice.

It was a story he never tired of telling. In the words of his 1999 historians: “Again and again, he told the story of how he had overcome jaundice.” They connect it directly to the muesli he later invented. Instead of apples, his recipe allowed berries or other fruit, but Bircher-Benner chose apples, they write, because they kept fresh even in winter and “because he had himself experienced their curative power.”

• The year. Eklöf gives 1894. English Wikipedia places the jaundice in the first year his clinic was open, which would be 1897; the scholarly account is followed here.
• The form of the apple. “Thin slices” (Eklöf) and “chopped” (Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz) are the two versions in print. Both agree that it was raw apple, prepared by hand so that a sick man could eat it.

Later research on the same subject has looked closely at what an apple contains. Reviews by Boyer and Liu (2004) and by Hyson (2011) catalogue the fibre, including pectin, and the polyphenols such as quercetin, catechins and chlorogenic acid concentrated in the fruit and its peel — the peel that Bircher-Benner later insisted must go into his muesli along with the core.

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4. 1895: The Woman With the Stomach Illness

The second experience came the following year. A woman with a chronic stomach illness had not responded to the usual treatment. Eklöf writes that Bircher-Benner succeeded in treating her in 1895 only after taking the advice of a German naturopath and vegetarian, who told him to try uncooked vegetables and fruit instead of the customary cooked diet. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz describe the adviser as a German vegetarian student, and the illness as “a form of gastritis”; the raw food, they write, was given “with good effect.”

German Wikipedia adds two details to the picture: the woman was severely ill, a patient “for whom his colleagues saw no more hope,” and the raw food he gave her was carefully puréed so that a damaged stomach could take it. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland calls the 1895 episode the “decisive experience” that convinced him of the healing power of raw plant food.

The case mattered precisely because it ran against the rule described in section 1. Stomach and bowel patients were the very people for whom the sick-room diet prescribed “overcooked food.” Bircher-Benner had done the opposite, and the patient recovered.

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5. From Two Cases to a Theory

After these experiences, Eklöf writes, Bircher-Benner began to study the effects of raw food (Rohkost, “raw food”) more closely, and German Wikipedia records that he went on to try the diet on many other seriously ill people. What made his work distinctive was that he did not stop at “it worked.” He wanted to know why raw food should heal when cooked food had not.

His answer drew on physics. In the account of Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz, he based his ideas on the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that energy is lost in each transformation. He reasoned that anything eaten raw had higher energy, and therefore higher nutritive value, than anything cooked, and that every further process lowered it again. Plants, which capture sunlight directly, stood at the top. Eklöf summarises the result: in time he formulated a teaching that the most valuable energy, the energy of sunlight, was found above all in uncooked plant food, which therefore ranked highest on the nutritional scale.

He later described his own path to this idea in his London address:

“Yet, I said to myself, it is impossible that type, constitution and quality of this energy should be of no significance; on the contrary, they must be the decisive element in the effect of food. By intensive study of the theory of energy, I gradually came to realise that nourishing energy must partake of the character of accumulated sunshine stored up in the vegetable kingdom.” — Bircher-Benner, 1933

Notably, he insisted that he reached this conclusion while still eating meat himself: “I also perceived, although I was then a regular meat-eater, that the charging with light must be greatest in the organs of raw edible plants, and least in boiled or roast animal food.” The full theory of food as stored sunlight has its own page on this site (see Connections).

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6. Older Raw-Food and Vegetarian Ideas

Bircher-Benner was not the first European to argue for a plant diet. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz place him inside a natural-health and life-reform movement (Lebensreform, “life reform”) that was already some seventy years old when he began, and that had grown by the 1890s into a real mass movement with its own associations and magazines. Within it, strict vegetarians around the turn of the century based their theories on Pythagorean teachings — after the ancient Greek sect named for the philosopher Pythagoras, which had advocated ethical vegetarianism and rejected animal sacrifice. The preacher Eduard Baltzer (1814–1887) had marshalled hygienic, ethical and economic arguments against meat-eating. “Thus, when Max Bircher-Benner started his career,” the historians write, “he did so at a time of heated debate within the mass movement for vegetarianism and natural healing.”

Yet he kept his distance from that movement. According to the same historians he refrained for decades from any normative statement about eating meat, fought the scientists on their own ground with thermodynamics rather than ethics, and “hardly ever” acknowledged a debt to other health reformers; he wanted to be recognised as a scientist among scientists. Only in 1927, when he was almost sixty, did he make his own abstention from meat public, and then he gave ethical reasons “in line with the traditional arguments of the Pythagoreans.”

We did not find, in the sources fetched for this page, a passage in which Bircher-Benner himself cites Pythagoras, so we do not attribute one to him. The thinkers he did name in his 1933 address as forerunners whose work was unfairly ignored were nineteenth-century and modern ones: Alexander Haig in England, Heinrich Lahmann in Germany, and Eijkman, whose discovery that the silvery membrane of the rice grain prevents beriberi was, he said, “received with scorn and mockery.”

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7. The Alpine Herdswoman’s Dish

The apple cure has a second origin story, the one Bircher-Benner told about the muesli itself. According to German Wikipedia, he liked to stress that his dish was related to the food of Swiss Alpine herders, and among friends he would sometimes tell how he had stopped at an Alpine hut where the Sennerin — the woman who tends the cows on the Alpine summer pastures — served him and his wife a “rather strange meal” (recht seltsames Essen). That dish of ground grain, fruit, milk and chopped nuts is said to have inspired his recipe.

Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz, drawing on an account his son Ralph Bircher published in a Zurich newspaper in 1944, give the same story with a careful qualification: unlike other health foods of the era, 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 true or not, they add, the story fits his conviction that rural people in pre-industrial times were healthier than city people, thanks to their frugal and mainly vegetarian diets.

Two points about this story are worth keeping straight. The cook was a herdswoman, not a shepherd. And the finished dish he called d’Spys (Swiss German, “the dish”) or Apfeldiätspeise (“apple diet dish”) was built around the raw apple, not the grain: as later published, 200 g of apple per helping, grated whole with peel and core, with only a tablespoon of soaked oats, some grated nuts, the juice of half a lemon and a spoonful of condensed milk, which he used for reasons of hygiene. The recipe and its history have their own page (see Connections).

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8. Early Raw-Food Cases and the 1897 Clinic

The raw-food cases soon outgrew a general practice. In late autumn 1897 Bircher-Benner opened a small private clinic on the Zürichberg, which the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland describes as a private clinic for dietetics and physical healing methods. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz call it “a clinic with seven beds for alternative medicine in an affluent residential part of Zurich,” and write that it was such a success that he soon had to move and expand. Eklöf describes it as a small private clinic with room for only a few patients. German Wikipedia adds that he also ran a central bath-house for physical therapy in the city centre with a colleague.

That same year, Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz note, he ordered a medicinal bath developed by the American physician John Harvey Kellogg, his older contemporary at Battle Creek — a sign of how much the young clinic still relied on water and physical treatments alongside the new diet. The regime he developed combined raw food with long morning walks, sleep, fresh air, sunlight, exercise and abstinence from stimulants.

How strict was the early raw diet? German Wikipedia, citing a later book by Ruth Bircher, records that for certain chronic diseases he used an exclusively raw diet for a few weeks, followed by a gradual move to a plant-only and then a lacto-vegetarian whole-food diet. In 1904 the growing practice moved up the hill to the larger sanatorium Lebendige Kraft (“vital force”), which by 1914 had room for eighty in-patients; the sanatorium has its own page.

In later research on the same subject, German nutrition scientists surveyed people who had lived long-term on raw food diets, recording changes in body weight and menstrual patterns (Koebnick and colleagues, 1999) — one of the first modern looks at a strict version of the diet Bircher-Benner used in his clinic.

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9. 1900: “Heresy” Before the Zurich Doctors

In 1900 Bircher-Benner presented his theory to the local medical society in Zurich. It was printed that year as “Erste Mitteilung über eine neue Ernährungslehre” (“First report on a new theory of nutrition”) in the Correspondenz-Blatt für Schweizer Ärzte. (Some popular accounts place a lecture in 1897; the sources used here all give 1900.)

The reaction was hostile. Eklöf writes that his colleagues considered he had now left the domain of science, and that his son Ralph Bircher later described the episode as an “excommunication” by the scientists. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz go further: “the medical establishment reacted with horror,” and his dietetic notions “were treated as heresy and quackery by his colleagues.” He stood firm, they write, claiming that his ideas rested on the latest discoveries of natural science, above all the second law of thermodynamics.

Why such a strong reaction? The historians answer that his diet “turned prevalent bourgeois culinary values upside down” and “contradicted the medical thinking of the day, which stressed the value of animal protein above all else.” For decades afterwards, Eklöf writes, he worked as an outsider to the medicine and the middle-class culture of his time, a culture that treated meat consumption as a measure of a people’s level of civilisation. Some secondary sources say he was expelled from the medical association; no scholarly source we found says so, and we do not repeat it.

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10. 1927: The Same Society Honours Him

The turn came with the vitamins. “Repudiated in 1900 by his colleagues,” Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz write, “Bircher-Benner felt vindicated when, in the 1920s and 1930s, nutritionists established that the vitamins and minerals discovered in ever greater numbers by chemists were essential for human health, not least the vitamin C in fresh fruit.” Eklöf makes the same point: with the discovery of vitamins in the 1920s he could explain the energy-richness of uncooked plant food in new terms, and as vitamins and minerals became known he gained a certain recognition among colleagues, and more doctors began to use raw food.

In 1927 came a symbolic reversal. A young colleague honoured Bircher-Benner’s work in a speech before the same local medical society that, in the historians’ words, “had accused him of quackery a quarter of a century earlier.” Doctors at the local children’s hospital also began to use raw food diets as part of their prescriptions, and muesli began to appear in ordinary cookbooks as a light and healthy dish.

The same year, aged nearly sixty, he publicly declared himself a vegetarian, for ethical reasons. Four years earlier, in 1923, he had founded the monthly journal Der Wendepunkt im Leben und im Leiden (“The Turning Point in Life and in Suffering”), which carried his ideas to a wide circle of doctors and lay readers.

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11. How He Told It in London, 1933

On 6 January 1933 Bircher-Benner addressed the Food Education Society at University College London, and the society printed the talk as The Prevention of Disease by Correct Feeding. It is one of the few places where his account of his own discovery survives in English in his own words. Interestingly, in this address he does not tell the jaundice or apple story; he tells the story of an idea. He describes his theory as having enabled him “to find and put together the curative diet for diseases of nutrition, at least 15 years before the results of new research on this subject were published,” and calls the light-charging of food “the quintessence of the theory of nutrition which I discovered at the beginning of the century.”

He presented the vitamin science of the 1920s as confirmation. By following the laws of energy, he said, he had reached the same conclusion as the investigator McCarrison did twenty years later: that the value of food “may be reduced by boiling, cooking and pasteurisation; by storage, oxidation and decomposition.” And he looked back on more than three decades of clinical work: “According to this principle, I have treated in my sanatorium during the last 35 years all the diseases of nutrition … under exact conditions of chemico-physiological control and medical supervision.”

The address also contains the most personal passage in the record, his own diet history, offered because patients always wanted to know whether the doctor followed his own teaching:

“I, myself, follow this diet strictly. … Until my thirtieth year, I ate meat daily, preferably twice a day, then for a further 26 years twice a week, and for the last 9 years I have taken no meat at all. I have not taken alcohol for forty years. My family also goes my way.” — Bircher-Benner, 1933

And he drew the lesson for medicine as a whole: “let the doctors give the example! But for that, the first necessity is that medical students should be trained in dietetics.” The man whose stomach patient had been on an “overcooked” diet in 1895 closed the circle by asking that the next generation of physicians be taught what he had learned from an apple and a sick woman.

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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. Melzer J, Melchart D, Saller R. [Development of ‘Ordnungstherapie’ by Bircher-Benner in naturopathy of the 20th century]. Forsch Komplementarmed Klass Naturheilkd. 2004;11(5):293-303. — PubMed PMID: 15572870
3. Eklöf M. [They searched help across the borders. Patients from Sweden in Switzerland at Dr Bircher-Benner’s health resort in 1928-1939]. Lakartidningen. 2008;105(3):147-50. — PubMed PMID: 18290517
4. Bircher-Benner MO. [Why natural food?]. Veg Bode. 1948;51(9):132-4. — PubMed PMID: 18099596
5. Koning MW. [Dr. Bircher-Benner’s diet]. Veg Bode. 1948;51(9):137-40. — PubMed PMID: 18099597
6. Bircher W. [Are Waerland and Dr. Bircher-Benner]. Volksgesundheit Bad Hombg. 1947;40(7):235-7. — PubMed PMID: 20258547
7. Kunz-Bircher A, Liechti-von Brasch D. [Clinical significance of fresh food]. Hippokrates. 1956;27(22):705-13. — PubMed PMID: 13384929
8. Leitzmann C. Vegetarian nutrition: past, present, future. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014;100 Suppl 1:496S-502S. — PubMed PMID: 24898226
9. Koebnick C, Strassner C, Hoffmann I, Leitzmann C. Consequences of a long-term raw food diet on body weight and menstruation: results of a questionnaire survey. Ann Nutr Metab. 1999;43(2):69-79. — PubMed PMID: 10436305
10. Boyer J, Liu RH. Apple phytochemicals and their health benefits. Nutr J. 2004;3:5. — PubMed PMID: 15140261
11. 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

PubMed Topic Searches

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Bircher-Benner
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=raw+food+diet
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=vegetarianism+history+nineteenth+century
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=apple+polyphenols+health

Further Reading

• 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
• Bircher-Benner M. Erste Mitteilung über eine neue Ernährungslehre [First report on a new theory of nutrition]. Correspondenz-Blatt für Schweizer Ärzte. 1900;30(12):382.
• Eklöf M. Vegetarisk (rå)kost och det reformerade livet: Maximilian Bircher-Benner och de svenska hälsokoströrelserna [Vegetarian (raw) food and the reformed life: Maximilian Bircher-Benner and the Swedish health-food movements]. Lychnos. 2005. tidskriftenlychnos.se
• Jagella-Danoth C. Bircher-Benner, Maximilian Oskar. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz. hls-dhs-dss.ch
• Friedli P. Bircher-Benner, Maximilian. Neue Deutsche Biographie 2 (1955). deutsche-biographie.de

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Connections

• Dr. Max Bircher-Benner and the Raw Food Cure
• Max Bircher-Benner: Life and Career
• Sunlight Food: Food as Stored Sunlight
• Bircher-Benner’s Raw Food (Rohkost) Therapy
• The Original Bircher Muesli
• The Lebendige Kraft Sanatorium
• Apples
• Apple Pectin
• Jaundice
• Bilirubin, Jaundice and Why Skin Turns Yellow
• Hydrotherapy
• Max Gerson
• Nutrition and Orthomolecular Pioneers

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