Bircher-Benner’s Raw Food (Rohkost) Therapy

Table of Contents

1. What Rohkost Meant in His Clinic
2. The Three Classes of Food Behind the Diet
3. Raw and Cooked: How Much of Each
4. How a Meal Was Built at the Sanatorium
5. Meat, Salt, Sugar, Alcohol and Drinks
6. Chewing, Grating and the Weak-Toothed Patient
7. The Illnesses He Named in His 1933 London Address
8. The Cases He Showed in London
9. Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse and Eine neue Ernährungslehre
10. Diet Within the Order of Life
11. Later Research on Raw Food Diets
12. Key Research Papers
13. Connections
14. Featured Videos

1. What Rohkost Meant in His Clinic

Bircher-Benner came to raw food through patients, not theory. In 1895, as the Life and Career page tells, he gave a woman with a long-standing stomach illness a carefully puréed raw diet after a German vegetarian suggested it, and she recovered. The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz calls this the “decisive experience” that convinced him of the healing power of raw plant food. From then on uncooked fruit and vegetables were the centre of his treatment.

In his clinic, Rohkost meant the following, in his own words and in his historians’ summaries:

• Fresh fruit, served at the start of every meal. He told his London audience: “I employ the plan of giving fruit at the beginning of every meal.”
• Raw vegetables and green leaves. “Once daily, at the principal meal, a dish of various raw vegetables, prepared as hors d’œuvres and always accompanied by salad of some green leaves, is served.” Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz record that he called green leaves the “key to the whole mystery of nutrition and nutritive value” and fruit “sunlight food”.
• Nuts, oil and honey, which he placed among the highest-value foods (section 2), and finely grated nuts in the muesli.
• Whole grains: wholemeal bread, “finely-ground”, in place of white flour, and soaked oats in the muesli.
• Little or no meat, little salt, and no alcohol (section 5).

Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz sum the plan up as one that “promoted raw food and carbohydrates over cooked food and animal protein, i.e. greens and vegetables rather than bread and meat”. He called it a revolutionary diet. The reason he gave for it was his theory of food as stored sunlight, set out on its own page: Sunlight Food: Bircher-Benner’s Theory of Food as Stored Sunlight.

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2. The Three Classes of Food Behind the Diet

In London in 1933 Bircher-Benner explained that he had sorted all human food into three classes “according to their values as light accumulators”, that is, by how much of the sun’s energy he believed each still held. He gave the list as follows:

• “Class I.—Raw plant organs and products, e.g., nuts, oil, honey, milk from healthy and rightly-nourished mothers and cows. Possibly also raw eggs from healthy and rightly-fed hens.”
• “Class II.—Wholemeal bread, rightly-prepared and cooked vegetable food, cooked milk and dairy produce, cooked eggs.”
• “Class III.—All kinds of meat dishes, canned and preserved food, white flour and white flour products, refined sugar, mushrooms, and so forth.”

He said the idea had come to him at the start of the century, “although I was then a regular meat-eater”: “the charging with light must be greatest in the organs of raw edible plants, and least in boiled or roast animal food.” He said he had reached the same conclusion as McCarrison, whom he called “the English investigator”, twenty years later: that this value “may be reduced by boiling, cooking and pasteurisation; by storage, oxidation and decomposition” and by drying, canning and refining.

The three classes were the working rule of the therapy. Raw plant food was the first class; the cooked plant food and wholemeal bread that still appeared on his menus were the second; the foods he wanted cut back were the third.

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3. Raw and Cooked: How Much of Each

None of the sources consulted for this page gives a fixed ratio of raw to cooked food, such as a percentage or a fraction of the plate. What Bircher-Benner gave instead was a sliding rule that tied the amount of raw food to the seriousness of the illness. In his own words:

“The dietetic therapeutic principle was, therefore, simply as follows: the more severe, the more obstinate, the more constitutional the illness, the more must nutrition belonging to the first class of light accumulators preponderate.”

For the healthy, and for preventing illness, he asked for less: “a carefully adjusted and sufficient increase in the daily diet of light accumulators of the first class, and a considerable reduction of third class accumulators. In practice, this means salad or raw fruit at one or all meals daily.”

The historian Motzi Eklöf describes how this worked at the sanatorium. Patients, in her words (translated from the Swedish), “ate according to an individually set diet plan, with raw food as the main food”; they usually received raw food at first, and later sometimes also a “normal diet”. In the cases he showed in London (section 8), the sickest patients lived for months “principally on a diet of raw vegetables and fruit” or on “an almost exclusive diet of raw vegetables and fruit”. He also warned of a hard “transition period”: treating patients this way, he said, had taught him “all the difficulties of the human constitution under a changed dietary and all the critical healing processes of the transition period”.

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4. How a Meal Was Built at the Sanatorium

At the Lebendige Kraft sanatorium the raw-food diet turned the usual meal upside down. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz describe the well-to-do meal of around 1900: steaming soup or broth first, then a cooked main course of meat, cereals or potatoes and vegetables, with perhaps some salad “as an accompaniment”, then dessert. Bircher-Benner’s menus, they write, “begin with a bowl of fresh fruit or some Müsli. This was followed by a plate of raw vegetables as the main course before a cooked dish was served, which might or might not have been vegetarian.” Only the dessert stayed where it was.

A day’s meals therefore ran in this order:

1. Fruit or muesli first. The muesli, which he called d’Spys (“the dish”) or the “dietetic apple dish”, was “conceived as the main dish for breakfast and dinner”. It was mostly raw apple, grated whole with peel and core, with a spoonful of soaked oats, grated nuts, lemon juice and a little condensed milk. The recipe and its history are on The Original Bircher Muesli Recipe and History.
2. The raw vegetable platter as the main course: in the historians’ words, “a mixture of chopped leaves and grated roots with their different textures, nutritive properties and colours”, always with a green-leaf salad.
3. A cooked dish of “rightly-prepared, conservatively-cooked vegetables and potatoes, with as little meat as possible”, with wholemeal bread. He thought cooking “at best a necessary evil” and asked for gentle methods: slow cooking over low heat, and steaming rather than frying.
4. Dessert, unchanged from the ordinary meal.

He explained why fruit came first: “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.” White-flour dishes, when they were served, came “with plenty of green vegetables or tomatoes, as in Italy”, and tinned or preserved food was “used rarely and only in the absence of fresh”.

The kitchen itself was a family affair. His sisters Alice Bircher and Berta Brupbacher-Bircher, who ran the clinic kitchen, turned his ideas into menus, and his daughter Ruth Kunz-Bircher later adapted the menus and the cuisine. He kept the number of different diets as low as possible, with the muesli as the core of every one.

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5. Meat, Salt, Sugar, Alcohol and Drinks

Meat. Meat dishes were in his third, lowest class. On his menus meat was kept to “as little … as possible”, and the cooked dish “might or might not have been vegetarian”. As a polemicist he compared meat to soot-caked coal in a furnace belching fumes, a dirty and inefficient fuel. He told his London audience about his own habits plainly: “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.”

Salt. He said the diet “may readily be enjoyed with a minimum addition of cooking salt”. He listed “the accumulation of cooking salt in the tissues” among the hidden harms of faulty nutrition, and complained that refined cooking salt had been “made to cover all kinds of deficiencies in the food”.

Sugar and white flour. “The consumption of sugar, sweet cakes and pastry is curtailed.” Refined sugar and white flour were both in his third class.

Alcohol and stimulants. He said the diet “involuntarily reduces the desire for alcohol and harmful condiments”, and of himself: “I have not taken alcohol for forty years.” Alcohol, coffee, chocolate and tobacco were forbidden at the sanatorium, and he condemned coffee, tea, chocolate and other “stimulants” in his writing.

Drinks and raw juices. Because the raw diet holds so much water, he said, “it does not produce thirst”, and those who live on it “drink either very little with meals or nothing at all. By drinks are meant here, water, non-alcoholic fruit or grape-juices and harmless kinds of tea.” Fruit and grape juice are the only juices named in the sources consulted. Separate raw-juice courses and fasting days are not described as part of his own regime in any of the sources fetched for this page, so they are not included here.

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6. Chewing, Grating and the Weak-Toothed Patient

Bircher-Benner saw chewing as part of the treatment. “The abundance of raw foodstuffs stimulates thorough mastication, demands thorough mastication and thorough mastication accomplishes wonders,” he said in London. “To bolt food in accordance with old habit, is to court failure.” He cited the American chewing advocate Horace Fletcher: “On the ordinary diet, Horace Fletcher’s teaching is usually forgotten: not so on this diet.” He added that a person who listens to the sense of taste “speedily learns not only to choose his food wisely, but also not to eat too much”.

Many patients could not chew raw food well, and the clinic grated, chopped and puréed it. His very first raw-diet patient, in 1895, received her food carefully puréed. For readers at home he pointed to his cookbook: “How to prepare raw diet in view of the defective powers of mastication, so general nowadays, is shown in a small book, ‘Fruit Dishes and Raw Vegetables’” (section 9).

The clinic also examined patients’ mouths closely and treated the teeth where needed, Eklöf notes, because “oral sepsis” was then thought to be the root of much ill health.

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7. The Illnesses He Named in His 1933 London Address

On January 6, 1933, Bircher-Benner told the Food Education Society at University College London that he had treated “during the last 35 years all the diseases of nutrition” in his sanatorium on this principle, “under exact conditions of chemico-physiological control and medical supervision, with the help of all factors of physical and psychical therapy and diminishing as far as possible the use of drugs”. He then gave the results he claimed, in these words:

“To give a few examples: in 95 per cent. of cases, the most obstinate chronic constipation disappears within from five days to four weeks. Parodontosis is arrested, many cases of rheumatism are cured. Chronic eczema is healed and, with sufficient perseverance, psoriasis. The disease of high blood pressure is favourably affected to an otherwise unknown degree. Herter’s infantilismus (cœliac disease) is completely cured. Better results are attained by this treatment than by any other in cases of heart affections and disturbances of the circulation. Gout, obesity and diabetes are affected in an equally favourable way. Migraine, Graves’ disease (exophthalmic goitre), many cases of asthma and hay fever are usually cured entirely. The power of resistance against catarrhal diseases increases. The favourable influence of this diet is also evident in tuberculous diseases. A similar basis underlies the Gerson-Herrmannsdorfer-Sauerbruch diet.”

Earlier in the same address he listed what he called the diseases of nutrition, grouped by organ. Among them, in his words: under the digestive organs, “Dental disease in its three forms”, chronic catarrh of the stomach, “Intestinal and duodenal ulcer. Colitis. Habitual constipation. Appendicitis”, and “Diseases of the liver and pancreatic gland”; under the circulation, “Degeneration of the heart muscles, angina pectoris. High blood pressure”, Raynaud’s disease and arteriosclerosis; “The majority of genuine chronic kidney diseases” and kidney stone; skin diseases including “many forms of chronic eczema, prurigo, psoriasis”; goitre, Graves’ disease and myxoedema among the glands; and under metabolism, “Gout, obesity and diabetes are caused exclusively by malnutrition.”

From these cures he drew a conclusion about prevention: “if, through such an extensive correction of nutrition, in many cases with almost mathematical precision, healing is possible, this indicates that by means of adequate alteration in the same direction, prevention is possible.” The constipation claim is the one he quantified most exactly; for the condition itself see Constipation.

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8. The Cases He Showed in London

The printed address reproduces the lantern slides he showed, with his captions. Several describe raw-food treatment directly:

• A child with coeliac disease (“Herter’s infantilismus”), whom he called “one of the most serious diseases of childhood”. After five months in a children’s clinic on “a most careful diet” the child was still very ill; “then after eight months of an almost exclusive diet of raw vegetables and fruit, the child was cured”. Beside the slide he cited a 1928 book by Guido Fanconi, chief of the Zurich children’s clinic, on treating intestinal infantilism with fruit and vegetables. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz note that doctors at the local paediatric hospital began to use raw-food diets in their prescriptions in these years. (See Celiac Disease.)
• A young woman with myxoedema and eczema, ill from her fifteenth year. “On my advice, she had for eight months lived principally on a diet of raw vegetables and fruit. She has become lively.” He reported both conditions cured.
• Gum disease (parodontosis), shown by X-ray, “cured by a vegetable diet with much raw food during 9 months”.
• A uric-acid test at the sanatorium. “In June, 1930, 71 patients in my Sanatorium had for four days a raw vegetable diet deficient in purins. In the great majority of cases, instead of a lowered proportion of uric acid in the blood, there was a considerable increase.” He read this as uric acid stored in the tissues being released, one of the “hidden processes” of what he saw as long-incubating nutritional illness.

These are his own case reports and his own interpretations, given as he gave them.

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9. Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse and Eine neue Ernährungslehre

Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse (“Fruit dishes and raw vegetables”) was the practical book of the raw-food therapy, written by Bircher-Benner with his son, the physician Max Edwin Bircher, and published by the Wendepunkt house in Zurich. It had reached its tenth edition by 1929, and that edition carries the original muesli recipe on pages 22–23. In English it was Fruit Dishes and Raw Vegetables, which the Food Education Society sold in London as “containing practical instruction in the preparation of a raw and a mixed diet” and called “an established favourite upon the society’s stalls”. A Swedish translation, Råkost och fruktdiet för friska och sjuka (“Raw food and fruit diet for the healthy and the sick”), appeared in Stockholm in 1931; according to his son Ralph Bircher, cited by Eklöf, the book was translated into ten languages besides Swedish. The year of the first German edition is not confirmed in the sources fetched for this page.

In this book he gave raw food a name of its own. A Vienna library leaflet quotes the passage:

“Sonnenlichtspeisen möchte ich diese reinen, weder durch Hitze noch durch Auslaugung denaturierten Speisen, diese echte Kraftquelle der Geschwächten, diese unscheinbaren und doch so mächtigen Heilmittel für Kranke, diese zuverlässigen Schutzengel der Gesunden, diese Bewahrer gesunder Zähne, leistungsfähiger Verdauungsorgane, einer sauberen, farbenfeinen Haut und ursprünglicher Widerstandskraft gegen jegliche Infektion nennen.”

In English: he wished to call these pure foods, denatured neither by heat nor by leaching, Sonnenlichtspeisen (“sunlight foods”): a true source of strength for the weakened, an unassuming yet powerful remedy for the sick, reliable guardian angels of the healthy, and keepers of sound teeth, working digestive organs, clean and fine-coloured skin and natural resistance to every infection. The same passage continues that the value of uncooked food rests on two things: the fullness and wholeness of the nourishing forces nature put into it, and its power to make good the harm people have done to their health through mistakes in eating.

Recipes from the clinic kitchen also appeared in a separate book, his sister Berta Brupbacher-Bircher’s Wendepunkt-Kochbuch (1927), and earlier in his sister Alice Bircher’s collection of diet menus and meatless recipes (1906).

Eine neue Ernährungslehre (“A new theory of nutrition”, Zurich, Wendepunkt, 1924; fourth edition 1928) set out the theory behind the diet for the general reader. Its title echoes his 1900 paper to the Zurich doctors, “Erste Mitteilung über eine neue Ernährungslehre” (“First report on a new theory of nutrition”), the lecture that his colleagues rejected. Among his other writings on the therapy were Kurze Grundzüge der Ernährungs-Therapie (Berlin, 1903), Ernährungskrankheiten (1928) and Vegetabile Heilkost (“Vegetable healing diet”, 1933). The full list is on Max Bircher-Benner: Books, Successors and Legacy.

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10. Diet Within the Order of Life

Bircher-Benner never treated with food alone. In London he described his cures as made “with the help of all factors of physical and psychical therapy”. At the sanatorium the raw-food diet sat inside a strict daily regime: a long walk in the forest before breakfast, sun, light, air and water baths, exercise, gardening, massage for some, relaxation, regular sleep and early nights, and what Eklöf calls (in Swedish) “an ordered rhythm of the day and way of life”. The doctor was an authoritative guide and the patient an active partner in the change.

In 1937 he named the whole system Ordnungstherapie (“order therapy”). Melzer, Melchart and Saller (2004) show that the term and its definition are his: health is order and harmony in the body, the mind, the surroundings and the course of the day, and illness follows disorder. Nutrition is the first of his rules of conduct, alongside the skin (light, air and water), breathing, movement, the rhythm of life and the life of the mind; Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz call them his “Nine Laws of Order”. In this scheme the raw-food diet is the dietary law of a larger order. See Ordnungstherapie: Bircher-Benner’s Laws of Order for Health, and for the water treatments, Hydrotherapy.

He also asked doctors to live the diet themselves. “Let the doctors give the example!” he told his London audience. “I, myself, follow this diet strictly”, adding that patients tried to find out through nurses and servants whether he secretly ate meat and drank wine, and that “my family also goes my way”.

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11. Later Research on Raw Food Diets

Bircher-Benner’s raw-food teaching travelled with his patients. Eklöf’s studies of the sanatorium records found that Swedes were its third-largest group of patients, and that in 1936 a Swedish physician, Ingeborg Kjellin, reported in the Swedish medical journal on German hospitals using vegetable and largely raw diets that took Bircher-Benner’s sanatorium as their model. In 1956 A. Kunz-Bircher and his niece Dagmar Liechti-von Brasch, who carried the clinic on, published on the “clinical significance of fresh food”.

Later researchers have studied raw-food diets on the same subject, although the diets studied are usually all-raw or nearly all-raw, whereas his clinic served raw food beside wholemeal bread and cooked vegetables:

• A 1985 report in the Southern Medical Journal looked at the effects of a raw food diet on high blood pressure and obesity (Douglass and colleagues).
• A German research group studied people who had eaten a raw-food diet for a long time. A 1999 questionnaire survey examined body weight and menstruation (Koebnick and colleagues); a 2005 paper reported favourable LDL cholesterol and triglycerides together with raised plasma homocysteine and low HDL cholesterol; and a 2008 paper reported favourable plasma beta-carotene and low plasma lycopene.
• A 2005 study in the United States measured bone mass in people on a long-term raw vegetarian diet and found it lower (Fontana and colleagues).
• A 1999 German dental study examined tooth erosion in people living on a raw food diet (Ganss and colleagues).

The nutrition scientist Claus Leitzmann (2014), reviewing the history of vegetarian nutrition, lists Bircher-Benner among its prominent figures, beside Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg. The full references are below.

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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 (posthumous reprint of his text)
5. Koning MW. [Dr. Bircher-Benner’s diet]. Veg Bode. 1948;51(9):137-40. — PubMed PMID: 18099597
6. Kunz-Bircher A, Liechti-von Brasch D. [Clinical significance of fresh food]. Hippokrates. 1956;27(22):705-13. — PubMed PMID: 13384929
7. Leitzmann C. Vegetarian nutrition: past, present, future. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014;100 Suppl 1:496S-502S. — PubMed PMID: 24898226
8. Douglass JM, Rasgon IM, Fleiss PM, Schmidt RD, Peters SN, Abelmann EA. Effects of a raw food diet on hypertension and obesity. South Med J. 1985;78(7):841-4. — PubMed PMID: 4012382
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. Koebnick C, Garcia AL, Dagnelie PC, Strassner C, Lindemans J, Katz N, et al. Long-term consumption of a raw food diet is associated with favorable serum LDL cholesterol and triglycerides but also with elevated plasma homocysteine and low serum HDL cholesterol in humans. J Nutr. 2005;135(10):2372-8. — PubMed PMID: 16177198
11. Garcia AL, Koebnick C, Dagnelie PC, Strassner C, Elmadfa I, Katz N, et al. Long-term strict raw food diet is associated with favourable plasma beta-carotene and low plasma lycopene concentrations in Germans. Br J Nutr. 2008;99(6):1293-300. — PubMed PMID: 18028575
12. Fontana L, Shew JL, Holloszy JO, Villareal DT. Low bone mass in subjects on a long-term raw vegetarian diet. Arch Intern Med. 2005;165(6):684-9. — PubMed PMID: 15795346
13. Ganss C, Schlechtriemen M, Klimek J. Dental erosions in subjects living on a raw food diet. Caries Res. 1999;33(1):74-80. — PubMed PMID: 9831783

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=raw+vegetables+fruit+intake
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=history+of+vegetarianism

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. — archive.org
• 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
• Bircher-Benner M, Bircher ME. Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse [Fruit dishes and raw vegetables]. 10th ed. Zurich: Wendepunkt; 1929. Passage “Sonnenlichtspeisen” quoted in a Wienbibliothek leaflet — digital.wienbibliothek.at
• 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.
• Jagella-Danoth C. Bircher-Benner, Maximilian Oskar. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, 1999 (edited 2010). — hls-dhs-dss.ch

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Connections

• Dr. Max Bircher-Benner and the Raw Food Cure
• Life and Career
• The Raw Apple Cure
• Sunlight Food Theory
• The Original Bircher Muesli
• The Lebendige Kraft Sanatorium
• Ordnungstherapie (Order Therapy)
• Books, Successors and Legacy
• Max Gerson
• Apples
• Spinach: Cooking vs Raw
• Constipation
• Celiac Disease
• Nutrition and Orthomolecular Medicine

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