The Kollath Breakfast (Frischkornbrei)

The “Kollath breakfast” (Kollath-Frühstück) is the everyday dish that carried Werner Kollath’s whole-food teaching into German kitchens. In its home form it is Frischkornbrei (“fresh-grain porridge”): whole grain, ground just before use, soaked raw in cold water overnight, and eaten in the morning with fresh fruit, a little lemon juice, nuts and a spoonful of cream. Nothing in the bowl is cooked. From 1951 a breakfast under his name was sold through Germany’s health-food shops, and his followers, above all the physician Max Otto Bruker, made a daily fresh-grain dish the centre of their diet.

This page explains what the breakfast is, where it came from in Kollath’s life, why he valued freshly ground raw grain, how the porridge is made in the whole-food tradition that grew out of his work, how it differs from the Bircher muesli it is often confused with, and what the published studies of it — a 1955 survey, two East German dental studies of the 1960s and a 1998 breakfast comparison — looked at. One caution runs through the recipe section: Kollath’s own written recipe has not been found online, so the recipe given here is the one handed down in the Kollath and Bruker whole-food tradition, not his own words.

Table of Contents

  1. What the Kollath Breakfast Is
  2. Origins: From Grain Research to a 1951 Breakfast
  3. Why Kollath Valued Fresh-Ground Grain
  4. The Fresh-Grain Porridge Recipe
  5. Grinding Grain at Home
  6. Kollath Breakfast and Bircher Muesli
  7. The 1955 Survey of Its Effects
  8. The East German Caries-Prevention Studies
  9. The 1998 Breakfast Comparison
  10. Max Otto Bruker and the Daily Fresh-Grain Dish
  11. Later Research on Whole Grain and Teeth
  12. Key Research Papers
  13. Connections
  14. Featured Videos

1. What the Kollath Breakfast Is

The name covers two closely related things. The first is a dish: Frischkornbrei, a cold porridge of freshly ground whole grain that has been left to swell in water for several hours and is then mixed with fresh fruit. Its followers also call it Frischkorngericht (“fresh-grain dish”). The second is a product: from 1951, according to the University of Rostock’s professor catalogue and the German biographical literature, Kollath had a breakfast sold under his name through the Reformhäuser (health-food shops), described there as being essentially Frischkornbrei.

The two are not identical. In the 1998 study described below, the “Kollath breakfast” that was tested consisted of whole wheat flakes as its base — the shop form — whereas the home dish begins with whole kernels ground the same day. What they share is Kollath’s idea: the morning meal should be built on whole grain in as natural a state as possible, eaten raw rather than cooked, and combined with fresh fruit.

Its place in his system is simple. The Spektrum Lexikon der Ernährung sums up his teaching in one line: at the centre of nutrition according to Kollath stand whole grain and milk and milk products (“Im Mittelpunkt der Ernährung nach K. stehen Vollgetreide und Milch(produkte)”). The breakfast puts both in one bowl — raw grain and a little cream.

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2. Origins: From Grain Research to a 1951 Breakfast

The breakfast grew out of Kollath’s laboratory work rather than out of a kitchen. His road into nutrition began in Breslau, where his 1926 Habilitation tested vitamins on the growth of a bacterium; through the 1930s and 1940s he worked on the question of what living cells need to grow, and in 1942 he set out his doctrine of the “full value” of food in Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung (“The Order of Our Food”). The full story of his career is on Werner Kollath: Life and Career.

Grain was central to that doctrine. His papers of the late 1940s make the connection in their titles: “The whole food and its determination by growth and cell replacement” (1947), “The importance of the full value of food for hygiene” (1949), and, addressed to the food industry, “The practical importance of auxones (animal growth substances) for the food industry, especially for grain processing” (1949). In 1950 came his book Der Vollwert der Nahrung und seine Bedeutung für Wachstum und Zellersatz (“The Full Value of Food and Its Importance for Growth and Cell Replacement”), which he described as the experimental foundation of his doctrine.

These were his years in the West after the war. In March 1947 he left Rostock for Hannover, where he worked as a food chemist and consultant for a Hannover biscuit manufacturer; from September 1948 to February 1949 he held a research stay at the Pathological Institute of the University of Stockholm; and from 1949 he had a lectureship (Lehrauftrag) at the University of Freiburg and advised the food industry. In 1951 he retired on health grounds — and that same year, the Rostock catalogue records, his research began to be marketed as the “Kollath-Frühstück” through the health-food shops. He also had animal feeds and probiotic products made on the basis of his research.

The product kept his name in front of the public for decades. When the journal Hippokrates printed a survey of its effects in 1955, and when East German dental researchers studied it in the 1960s, they called it simply the “Kollath breakfast”.

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3. Why Kollath Valued Fresh-Ground Grain

Kollath’s reasons follow directly from the scale he laid out in Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung, explained in full on Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung: Kollath’s Order of Our Food. Three of his ideas meet in the porridge bowl.

Living food and dead food

Kollath divided food into Lebensmittel (“living foods”), which still contain their own enzymes — in the language of his day, their own Fermente — and Nahrungsmittel (“nourishment”, dead food), in which these enzymes have been destroyed, mostly by heating. Living foods, he wrote, could claim to be means of maintaining life; dead foods served mainly to still hunger and lacked both the food’s own enzymes and its natural aroma substances. He set the “freshness value” of a food above its “calorie value”: food energy was only a Teilwert (“partial value”), freshness the Vollwert, the full value. Cooked food was in principle only “partial-value”.

Grinding keeps grain alive; heating does not

On his six-grade scale the first three grades are living: natural, mechanically altered (ground or pressed) and fermented. Heated, preserved and isolated foods fill the lower three. A whole kernel is grade one. Grinding it moves it only to grade two — still a living food in his scheme — whereas baking it into bread or cooking it into porridge drops it into the “dead” half. That is why the dish is ground but never cooked: it is about the highest form in which grain can be eaten as a meal.

Auxones and the whole kernel

Kollath coined the word Auxone (“auxones”), by analogy with the auxins of plants, for animal growth substances that he held to be important for cell division, and whose lack he held to cause deficiency disease of varying forms. According to the Spektrum Lexikon der Ernährung, he found that synthetic diets made only of the nutrients known at the time caused long-term damage that was not seen with untreated foods such as whole grain. The chronic half-deficiency he believed followed from “not full-value” food he called Mesotrophie (“mesotrophy”, semi-nutrition); the theory and its experiments are on Mesotrophy and Auxones: Kollath’s Theory of Semi-Nutrition. The foundation that bears his name equates his auxones with what are today called secondary plant compounds.

He kept writing about grain to the end. In 1960 he took up, in Hippokrates, the question of whether grain causes calcium loss because of its phytin (phytate) content; his 1964 book Getreide und Mensch – eine Lebensgemeinschaft (“Grain and Man – A Living Partnership”) carried a study of the causes of dental decay; and his last PubMed-indexed paper (1967) dealt with the phases of the nutritional process and the importance of chewing — something a bowl of coarse raw grain demands.

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4. The Fresh-Grain Porridge Recipe

Please note: Kollath’s own recipe text — from his books or from the leaflet of the product sold under his name — has not been found in any source available online. The recipe below is the fresh-grain porridge as given in the Kollath/Bruker whole-food tradition, taken from German recipe pages that print the “Frischkorngericht nach Dr. Bruker”. It is not quoted from Kollath, and the amounts are theirs, not his.

Ingredient (one helping)AmountSource
Whole grain kernels (wheat, oats, spelt, rye, barley, millet, buckwheat or a mixture)3 tablespoons (about 60 g)Sulzbacher Landfrauen; Lebe lieber natürlich
Cold tap water, unboiledJust enough that none is left the next morning; about 4–5 tablespoons, the grain just coveredLebe lieber natürlich; Utopia
Apple, grated1Sulzbacher Landfrauen; Lebe lieber natürlich
Other fresh fruit of the season, choppedTo tasteAll three
Lemon juiceJuice of half a lemonLebe lieber natürlich
Nuts, chopped or grated“A few”Sulzbacher Landfrauen; Lebe lieber natürlich
Fresh cream (whipped, in some versions)1 tablespoonLebe lieber natürlich; Sulzbacher Landfrauen

Method, as the tradition gives it

  1. The evening before. Grind the whole kernels, coarse or fine as you prefer, immediately before soaking. The Bruker-tradition recipe is emphatic: the grain must be freshly ground every time — “Nicht auf Vorrat mahlen!” (“Do not grind in advance!”).
  2. Soak. Stir the ground grain into a porridge with cold, unboiled tap water — only as much as it will absorb overnight.
  3. Leave at room temperature. Let it stand 5 to 12 hours at room temperature, not in the refrigerator. One version says the soak makes the porridge “pre-digested” and easier to digest.
  4. In the morning. Grate the apple straight into the porridge and fold it in; add other chopped fruit; stir in the lemon juice; top with the nuts and the spoonful of cream.

The grains named in these versions are amaranth, buckwheat, spelt, oats, millet, rye and wheat, singly or mixed. A modern variant (Utopia) keeps the same basic shape — three tablespoons of coarsely ground wheat or oats, four to five tablespoons of water, at least six hours and best overnight, a grated apple in the morning, seasonal fruit and optional chopped nuts — and leaves out the lemon and cream. Nothing is heated at any point, which is the whole point of the dish in Kollath’s scheme.

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5. Grinding Grain at Home

Because the recipe begins with whole kernels and insists they be ground fresh each time, the household grain mill (Getreidemühle) became the signature appliance of the whole-food kitchen in German-speaking countries. The idea, in the tradition’s own terms, is that flour or coarse meal (Schrot) ground the same day is still the “living” grade-two food of Kollath’s scale, whereas meal ground in advance and stored has lost its freshness.

The recipe pages describe the practical side without much ceremony:

This site names no mill makers or brands. Whatever the machine, the tradition’s single rule is the one above: grind just before soaking, and only as much as you will eat.

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6. Kollath Breakfast and Bircher Muesli

Kollath built his dietary concept mainly on the publications of the Swiss physician Max Bircher-Benner, and in 1957 he received the Golden Bircher-Benner Medal. Bruker, too, traced his diet to both men. The two breakfasts are therefore relatives, and both are raw. But they are built the other way round. The Bircher dish is described in full on The Original Bircher Muesli (“d’Spys”) Recipe and History.

Bircher-Benner’s apple dish (1929 edition)Fresh-grain porridge (Kollath/Bruker tradition)
Main ingredientApple — about 200 g per helping, grated wholeFreshly ground raw whole grain — about 3 tablespoons (60 g)
GrainOne tablespoon of well-soaked oatsAny whole grain or a mixture, ground just before soaking
SoakingAbout 12 hours in 3 tablespoons of water5–12 hours at room temperature in just enough water
DairyA tablespoon of sweetened condensed milkA tablespoon of fresh cream
SharedRaw, unheated; grated apple added at the last moment; lemon juice; nuts
Underlying ideaRaw plant food as “sunlight food”, the apple at the centreWhole grain as a living food carrying its own enzymes and auxones

Put simply: Bircher-Benner’s muesli was an apple dish with a little grain in it; the Kollath breakfast is a grain dish with fruit in it. The shift reflects Kollath’s own emphasis. Where Bircher-Benner built his teaching around raw fruit and vegetables, Kollath, the grain researcher, put whole grain at the centre of the diet — and he wanted it eaten fresh from the mill.

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7. The 1955 Survey of Its Effects

In 1955 the journal Hippokrates published a short paper by Herbert Warning titled, in PubMed’s English, “Effects of the Kollath breakfast; results of an inquiry” (pages 431–433). As the title says, it reported the results of an inquiry — a survey — into what people experienced from the breakfast. The German-language article has no abstract in PubMed, so its numbers and findings are not given here.

Warning was close to Kollath’s work: in 1963 he edited the collected volume Werner Kollath. Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten (“Werner Kollath: Scientific Papers”). Hippokrates was also where Kollath himself published much of his post-war writing, including his papers on mesotrophy.

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8. The East German Caries-Prevention Studies

Kollath had long linked diet and teeth. In 1948 he wrote on “the importance of diseases of the teeth and the teeth holding system for the systematization of deficiency diseases”, in 1953 on “nutrition and the tooth system”, and his 1964 book on grain and man included a study of the causes of dental decay. In the German Democratic Republic, dentists took the breakfast itself into caries prevention.

Both articles are in German and have no abstract in PubMed, so their study design and results are not summarised here; what the records establish is that East German dental researchers studied the Kollath breakfast specifically as a means of preventing tooth decay, first as caries prevention (1966) and then in clinical studies of its preventive effect (1969).

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9. The 1998 Breakfast Comparison

The one study of the breakfast with a PubMed abstract appeared in 1998 in the Zeitschrift für Ernährungswissenschaft, by P. Leitzmann, W. Heine, K. D. Wutzke and colleagues. Its title: “Comparison of gastric emptying, blood glucose, and oro-cecal transit times after a conventional morning meal and a Kollath breakfast”. Its abstract describes it as follows.

Note what was tested: the flake-based shop form of the breakfast, not the home porridge of grain ground the same day.

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10. Max Otto Bruker and the Daily Fresh-Grain Dish

The person who did most to put fresh-grain porridge on German breakfast tables was the physician Max Otto Bruker (1909–2001). According to German Wikipedia’s account of his life, he worked from 1946 to 1974 as a physician, and from 1949 as medical director, at the Eben-Ezer institution in Lemgo, and there he introduced the whole-food diet after Werner Kollath (“die Vollwertkost nach Werner Kollath”).

Bruker traced his teaching essentially to Bircher-Benner and Kollath, and named his own version vitalstoffreiche Vollwertkost (“whole-food diet rich in vital substances”): whole-grain products, freshly ground where possible, fruit, vegetables, salad and untreated nuts, with butter and cream allowed and cold-pressed oils. In his book Unsere Nahrung – unser Schicksal (“Our Food, Our Fate”) he made the daily fresh-grain porridge a fixed part of that diet. He saw his own contribution chiefly in spreading these ideas and in solving what he called the “tolerance problem” (Verträglichkeitsproblem) — how people with sensitive digestions could eat such food. He also used Kollath’s word for the active substances he believed were lost when fruit was pressed into juice: auxones.

In 1978 Bruker founded the Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsberatung (Society for Health Counselling), which trains “health counsellors” in his diet. Through its courses, and through cookbooks and recipe pages of the kind quoted in section 4, the “Frischkorngericht nach Dr. Bruker” is the form in which the fresh-grain porridge is most often printed today. His wider legacy, and the Giessen school’s later Vollwert-Ernährung, is traced on Werner Kollath’s Whole-Food Legacy.

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11. Later Research on Whole Grain and Teeth

Two of the subjects Kollath wrote about in connection with grain have since been studied on their own terms.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Kollath W. [The whole food and its determination by growth and cell replacement]. Z Gesamte Inn Med. 1947;2(1-2):31-6. — PubMed PMID: 20254358
  2. Kollath W. [The importance of diseases of the teeth and the teeth holding system for the systematization of deficiency diseases]. Dtsch Zahnarztl Z. 1948;3(9-12):373-81. — PubMed PMID: 18884452
  3. Kollath W. [The importance of the full value of food for hygiene]. Zentralbl Bakteriol Orig. 1949;153(1-2):43-60. — PubMed PMID: 18114869
  4. Kollath W. [The practical importance of auxones (animal growth substances) for the food industry, especially for grain processing]. Z Lebensm Unters Forsch. 1949;89(1):38. — PubMed PMID: 18224939
  5. Kollath W. [Chemical nature of the animal growth factor, and conditions prerequisite to the development of mesotrophy (semi-nutrition)]. Zentralbl Bakteriol Orig. 1950;155(8):383-91. — PubMed PMID: 14782660
  6. Kollath W. [Nutrition and the tooth system; general review with special reference to vitamins]. Dtsch Zahnarztl Z. 1953;8(11):Suppl 7-16. — PubMed PMID: 13068115
  7. Warning H. [Effects of the Kollath breakfast; results of an inquiry]. Hippokrates. 1955;26(14):431-3. — PubMed PMID: 13251667
  8. Kollath W. [Doses corn cause calcium depletion because of its phytin content]. Hippokrates. 1960;31:155-6. — PubMed PMID: 14410720
  9. Künzel W, Maiwald HJ. [Caries prevention with Kollath breakfast]. DDZ. 1966;20(13):409-12. — PubMed PMID: 5220841
  10. Kollath W. [The phases of the nutritional process; on the significance of mastication]. Int Z Vitaminforsch. 1967;37(2):212-25. — PubMed PMID: 5595593
  11. Maiwald HJ, Bronisch D, Künzel W. [Clinical studies on the caries preventive effect of the Kollath breakfast]. Dtsch Stomatol. 1969;19(1):52-6. — PubMed PMID: 5253901
  12. Leitzmann P, Heine W, Wutzke KD, von Bismarck P, Dorlöchter L, Miera O, Bührlen M, Cornelissen BW, Höcker C. [Comparison of gastric emptying, blood glucose, and oro-cecal transit times after a conventional morning meal and a Kollath breakfast]. Z Ernahrungswiss. 1998;37(1):31-7. — PubMed PMID: 9556865
  13. Slavin J. Whole grains and human health. Nutr Res Rev. 2004;17(1):99-110. — PubMed PMID: 19079919
  14. Leitzmann C. Wholesome nutrition: a suitable diet for the new nutrition science project. Public Health Nutr. 2005;8(6A):753-9. — PubMed PMID: 16236212
  15. Sheiham A, James WP. Diet and dental caries: the pivotal role of free sugars reemphasized. J Dent Res. 2015;94(10):1341-7. — PubMed PMID: 26261186
  16. von Koerber K, Bader N, Leitzmann C. Wholesome Nutrition: an example for a sustainable diet. Proc Nutr Soc. 2017;76(1):34-41. — PubMed PMID: 27502053

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Kollath+breakfast
  2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Kollath+W%5Bau%5D
  3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=whole+grain+breakfast+postprandial+glucose
  4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=wholesome+nutrition+Giessen

Further Reading

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Connections

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