Mesotrophy and Auxones: Kollath's Theory of Semi-Nutrition

Editorial Note — Freedom of Research and the Right to Be Heard. This page documents the research, writings, and claims of Prof. Werner Kollath (1892–1970), the German hygienist and bacteriologist who founded whole-food (Vollwert) nutrition and wrote Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung, in the spirit of open scientific inquiry. The First Amendment’s protection of speech, and the long American tradition of medical dissent that runs from Semmelweis to Barry Marshall to Linus Pauling, exists precisely so that minority and unpopular research can be examined on its merits rather than silenced by institutional consensus. We present his facts and claims as he stated them, attributed to him, drawn from his books and papers and from the historians of his work. Readers are presumed to be intelligent adults capable of weighing evidence, consulting their own physicians, and making informed decisions about their own bodies. This page is provided for educational and historical-record purposes; it is not medical advice and does not endorse self-treatment. Censorship of a researcher is not refutation of the research. — MyHealthcare.com

Behind Werner Kollath’s whole-food teaching stands one scientific idea, worked out over some thirty years of laboratory feeding experiments. He held that an animal — or a person — can be fed every nutrient that science has named, in sufficient quantity, and still not be fully nourished. Food that has been refined, isolated or otherwise reduced to a “partial value”, he argued, lacks a class of growth substances he called Auxone (“auxones”). Living on such food does not produce an acute deficiency disease with a name, like scurvy or beriberi. It produces instead a slow, chronic, non-specific state of half-nourishment, which he named Mesotrophie (“mesotrophy”, or semi-nutrition).

This page follows the theory as Kollath built it: from his 1926 study of vitamins and the growth of bacteria, through the long-term rat feeding studies and the coining of “auxones”, his 1948–1950 papers on splitting the vitamin B complex and on the animal growth factor, to the “mesotrophy complex” of his Munich years and his claim, in 1959, that it applied to human beings. It also records, as history, the discussion his theory drew from other researchers in the 1950s, and a 1950 radiology paper that spoke of a “mesotrophic Kollath syndrome”. Where his papers are known here only by their titles, the page gives the titles and the conclusions he stated in them, and invents nothing about their contents. German titles are translated in brackets.

The 1926 Habilitation: Vitamins and the Growth of Bacteria
From Bacteria to Rats: The Long-Term Feeding Studies
Auxones: Kollath’s “Animal Growth Substances”
Splitting the Vitamin B Complex (1948) and Auxones in Grain (1949)
The Animal Growth Factor and the Conditions for Mesotrophy (1950)
Mesotrophy: A State between Health and Deficiency Disease
Fresh Grain in the Experiments and the Munich Years
The Mesotrophic Complex as Unspecific Chronic Deficiency (1957)
Experimental Mesotrophy and Validity for Humans (1959)
The Discussion His Theory Drew
The “Mesotrophic Kollath Syndrome” in Radiology (1950)
Key Research Papers
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1. The 1926 Habilitation: Vitamins and the Growth of Bacteria

Kollath’s road to mesotrophy began not with food but with a bacterium. In 1923 he became an assistant to Richard Pfeiffer at the Hygiene Institute of the University of Breslau, and took up the organism Pfeiffer had described in 1891 — the “influenza bacillus”, or Bacillus Pfeiffer. The historian Gunther Viereck, writing for the University of Rostock, explains why this was also his entry into vitamin research: at the time, vitamins or vitamin-like substances were suspected to be important growth factors for bacteria. Studying what the bacillus needed in order to grow was a way of studying what vitamins do.

In 1926 Kollath qualified as a university lecturer (the Habilitation) in hygiene and bacteriology with a study titled Vitaminsubstanz oder Vitaminwirkung? [Vitamin substance or vitamin action?], subtitled “a study of the connections between mineral and oxygen metabolism, phosphatides and ultraviolet light, tested on the growth conditions of the influenza bacillus (Bacillus Pfeiffer)”. It was published in the Zentralblatt für Bakteriologie, volume 100, pages 97–145. The question in its title — whether a vitamin is best thought of as a substance or as an action — already points to the way he would later think about food: less as a list of separate chemicals than as a working whole.

From 1929 he published in the Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie, beginning with a paper on the group of water-soluble vitamins and their relations to one another. His early life and career are told in full on Werner Kollath: Life and Career.

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2. From Bacteria to Rats: The Long-Term Feeding Studies

With time, Viereck records, animals took the place of bacteria as Kollath’s test subjects, and vitamin-deficiency disease came to fill more and more of his research. He approached it, in Viereck’s words, holistically, in the spirit of the saying that the whole is more than the sum of its parts: he assumed that these diseases could not be traced only to the absence or presence of particular vitamins and substances, but arose from the interplay between them, or from forces still to be discovered. The observations he made in his feeding experiments drew him further into the field of nutrition.

From the early 1930s he ran long-term studies on rats, using specially composed feeds. According to Viereck, the basic “mesotrophy diet” was made up of:

ether-purified casein (milk protein);
rice starch;
peanut oil and beef tallow;
cellulose;
vitamin B1 (thiamine);
potassium and zinc salts.

Kollath used this basic diet as a background against which the effect of substances added to it could be studied. Viereck summarises what he reported: the animals looked healthy from the outside, but as the feeding went on, disorders of metabolism set in that led to an increase in chronic disease. Out of these results Kollath developed the experimental model of mesotrophy — in the summary of the nutrition scientists Bernhard Watzl and Claus Leitzmann, quoted by Viereck, “a state of life at the border between health and illness”.

Kollath himself linked these findings to the growth of the young animal and to the steady replacement of the body’s cells. His 1947 paper was titled [The whole food and its determination by growth and cell replacement], and his 1950 book set out the “experimental foundations” of the same idea: Der Vollwert der Nahrung und seine Bedeutung für Wachstum und Zellersatz. Experimentelle Grundlagen [The full value of food and its importance for growth and cell replacement: experimental foundations].

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3. Auxones: Kollath’s “Animal Growth Substances”

As one result of these studies, Kollath presented in 1942 the concept of Auxone. The German Lexikon der Ernährung (“Lexicon of Nutrition”, Spektrum, 2001) defines the word as a term coined by Kollath, by analogy with the plant growth hormones called auxins, for Tierwuchsstoffe — “animal growth substances” — that are important for cell division and whose absence from the diet causes deficiency diseases of varying form.

The same entry states the observation that led him to the idea. Kollath had found that synthetic diets made up only of the nutrients known at the time (1942) caused damage to health over the long term — the state he called mesotrophy — and that this damage was not seen with untreated foods such as whole grain. Something in the whole food, he reasoned, was missing from the synthetic diet, and the named nutrients alone could not account for it. Viereck adds that in Kollath’s scheme it was these cell-multiplication substances that first made certain special actions of vitamins possible, and that at one stage he hoped he might have come upon a new group of trace elements.

In the doctrine of Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung (“The Order of Our Food”, 1942), auxones are the reason the grade of a food matters. Only food left as far as possible untreated, he held, contained enough of them; cooked food was in principle only teilwertig, “of partial value”. His six-grade scale of foods is set out on Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung: Kollath’s Order of Our Food.

Later writers have tried to say what the auxones correspond to in today’s terms. The Lexikon der Ernährung describes them, on present knowledge, as a combination of the B vitamins other than thiamine, secondary plant compounds and some trace and ultratrace elements. The Werner-und-Elisabeth-Kollath-Stiftung, the foundation set up by his widow, equates them with what are today called secondary plant compounds. The term itself, the lexicon notes, did not come into general use.

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4. Splitting the Vitamin B Complex (1948) and Auxones in Grain (1949)

After the war, settled in Hannover and then in Freiburg, Kollath returned to the theory in a run of short papers. Their titles show the direction of his thinking.

In December 1948, in the journal Ärztliche Forschung, he argued [About the need to split the term vitamin B complex]. The “vitamin B complex” was, at the time, a single label for the whole group of water-soluble factors found together in yeast, liver and the outer layers of grain. Kollath’s title states his position: that one name was hiding several different things, and that it needed to be broken apart. His own research since 1929 had concerned exactly this group of water-soluble vitamins and their relations to one another.

In January 1949 he carried the idea from the laboratory to the mill. In the Zeitschrift für Lebensmittel-Untersuchung und -Forschung (a food-science journal) he wrote on [The practical importance of auxones (animal growth substances) for the food industry, especially for grain processing]. The title makes his claim plain: if auxones are real, then how grain is milled and processed decides whether they reach the eater. The same year, in the Zentralblatt für Bakteriologie, he set the whole question in the frame of his own discipline with [The importance of the full value of food for hygiene] (1949) — the full value of food, that is, as a matter of public health and not only of individual diet.

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5. The Animal Growth Factor and the Conditions for Mesotrophy (1950)

In July 1950 Kollath brought the two halves of his theory together in one paper, again in the Zentralblatt für Bakteriologie: [Chemical nature of the animal growth factor, and conditions prerequisite to the development of mesotrophy (semi-nutrition)]. The title joins the cause and the effect. On one side stands the “animal growth factor” — his auxones — and the question of what kind of chemical substance it is. On the other stands mesotrophy, and the conditions under which it develops when that factor is lacking.

Here the two ideas become one theory: mesotrophy is, in Kollath’s account, the state that arises when food lacks the animal growth substances. The same year saw his book Der Vollwert der Nahrung und seine Bedeutung für Wachstum und Zellersatz, which he presented as the experimental basis of what he called his Vollwertlehre, his doctrine of full value.

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6. Mesotrophy: A State between Health and Deficiency Disease

The word Kollath chose says what he meant. Classical vitamin research knew two states: the healthy animal on a complete diet, and the animal with a recognisable deficiency disease when one vitamin was withheld. Mesotrophie — from the Greek for “middle” and “nourishment”, rendered in PubMed’s English as “semi-nutrition” — named a third state between them. The animal is neither starving nor showing a named deficiency disease; it eats food of “partial value” and lives on in a chronic, non-specific half-deficiency, which over time leads to chronic disease.

In June 1952 he set out the idea for physicians in the journal Hippokrates under the title [Mesotrophy, a clinical and physiological problem]. The title claims two things at once: that mesotrophy is a physiological state, demonstrable in the laboratory, and that it is a clinical problem, something a doctor would meet in patients. In the same issue the journal printed a tribute to him on his sixtieth birthday.

Kollath did not keep the rat model separate from human life. Viereck records that he equated the rat diet and its effects on the animals with the usual, largely industrially manufactured food of human beings, and with the diseases of civilisation — overweight, diabetes and high blood pressure. His ground for this, Viereck explains, was the likeness he saw, as a trained physician, between the organ changes of chronically ill people and those of his animals. His writing on the diseases of civilisation is gathered on Kollath on Diseases of Civilisation, Teeth and Gut Flora.

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7. Fresh Grain in the Experiments and the Munich Years

If refined food caused mesotrophy, what reversed it? In Kollath’s experiments the answer was fresh grain. Viereck writes that fresh grain porridge played a large part in the trials: Kollath had observed that feeding it led to a decline, or a healing, of the chronic diseases the mesotrophy diet had caused. For that reason cereals came to take an important place in his later research — and, from 1951, in the “Kollath breakfast” of freshly ground grain that was sold through Germany’s health-food shops. The breakfast is described on The Kollath Breakfast (Frischkornbrei).

The experiments did not stay in one place. From September 1948 to February 1949 Kollath held a research stay at the Pathological Institute of the University of Stockholm, where the same kind of basic diet was used. After his retirement on health grounds in 1951, he spent the years 1952 to 1956 on animal experiments at the University of Munich, undertaken, according to the historian Jörg Melzer, to support his hypothesis of mesotrophy caused by food that is not “full-value”. The detailed design of the Munich series is not given in the sources read for this page; it is reported here only by its dates, its purpose and the titles of the papers that came out of it.

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8. The Mesotrophic Complex as Unspecific Chronic Deficiency (1957)

By the mid-1950s Kollath was speaking no longer simply of “mesotrophy” but of a “mesotrophy complex” — a cluster of changes rather than a single sign. In May 1957 he gave it its fullest definition in Hippokrates: [Mesotrophic complex as unspecific chronic deficiency condition].

Each word of that title carries part of his theory:

Complex — not one lesion but a pattern of changes appearing together in the animal.
Unspecific — not traceable to the lack of a single named vitamin, as scurvy is traced to vitamin C, and therefore not cured by adding back any one of them.
Chronic — developing slowly, over the long term, in animals that look healthy from outside.
Deficiency condition — caused, nonetheless, by something missing from the food: in his account, the auxones of untreated whole food.

Two months earlier, in March 1957, he had published a short piece in the same journal under the plain title [Was I mistaken?] — his answer, in the form of a question, to the discussion his theory had by then drawn (see section 10).

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9. Experimental Mesotrophy and Validity for Humans (1959)

In 1959 Kollath published two long papers in Hippokrates that, between them, state the whole theory from the laboratory to the patient.

The first, in January 1959, was titled [Validity of the mesotrophy complex for humans] (pages 97–104). Its title states the claim he had been working toward since the 1930s: that the state he had produced in rats was not a laboratory curiosity but held for human beings too. The second, in April 1959, was titled simply [Experimental mesotrophy] (pages 265–273) — a return to the animal evidence on which the theory rested, after the Munich series of 1952–1956.

Taken with the 1957 definition, these papers mark the mature form of the theory. In Kollath’s view, a diet of refined, isolated and “partial-value” foods, lacking the growth substances of untreated whole food, produces over years a chronic, non-specific state of half-nourishment, demonstrable in the animal and, he held, present in people — and fresh, whole grain and food left as natural as possible are its remedy. His last PubMed-indexed paper, in 1967, turned to the act of eating itself: [The phases of the nutritional process; on the significance of mastication].

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10. The Discussion His Theory Drew

A theory that claimed a new class of essential substances, and a new disease state, drew replies from other researchers, and Kollath answered them in print. The record in the journals of the 1950s runs as follows.

Gillnäs (1955). The Swedish physician Torsten Gillnäs published an article on the experiments, including those carried out in Stockholm. In July 1955 Kollath replied in Ärztliche Forschung with [Remarks on the article of Gillnäs].
Kolwel-Kirstein, Bayerle and Katzenberger (1956). In May 1956 G. Kolwel-Kirstein, H. Bayerle and V. Katzenberger published [Experimental study of Kollath’s mesotrophy theory] in Ärztliche Forschung, testing the theory in experiments of their own. Kollath’s [Reply to foregoing article on the mesotrophy complex] followed directly after it, in the same issue.
Kollath (1957). His short paper [Was I mistaken?] appeared in Hippokrates in March 1957.
Kühnau (1960). In April 1960 J. Kühnau published [Is there a mesotrophy in humans? Critical observations on W. Kollath’s theory of mesotrophy] in Hippokrates — a response to the question of human validity Kollath had raised in 1959.

The discussion went beyond single papers. From the 1950s, German Wikipedia records, several colleagues and the German Society for Physiological Chemistry raised objections, among them whether mesotrophy was a specific disease picture at all. This page records the exchange as part of the history of his theory; the papers on each side are listed below for readers who wish to read them.

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11. The “Mesotrophic Kollath Syndrome” in Radiology (1950)

Kollath’s idea also travelled beyond Germany. In April 1950 E. Ingber published a Spanish-language paper in the journal Día Médico titled [Radiology applied to preventive medicine; the radiological equivalents of the clinical Bircher-Benner syndrome, the bradytrophic Bouchardat-Grote-Gaethgens syndrome and the mesotrophic Kollath syndrome; the concept of capillary pathology].

The title is notable for what it groups together. It treats Kollath’s mesotrophy as a named clinical syndrome — the “mesotrophic Kollath syndrome” — alongside a syndrome named after the Swiss raw-food physician Max Bircher-Benner, on whose writings Kollath had built his diet concept, and the “bradytrophic” (slow-metabolism) syndrome associated with the names Bouchardat, Grote and Gaethgens. Its stated aim was to find the radiological equivalents of these states, using imaging in the service of preventive medicine and linking them to a concept of capillary pathology. The paper shows that by 1950 the term mesotrophy had entered the international literature as a clinical idea carrying Kollath’s name. Bircher-Benner’s own teaching is described on Bircher-Benner’s Raw Food Therapy.

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Key Research Papers

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
Kollath W. [About the need to split the term vitamin B complex]. Arztl Forsch. 1948;2(23):161-3. — PubMed PMID: 18125200
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
Kollath W. [The importance of the full value of food for hygiene]. Zentralbl Bakteriol Orig. 1949;153(1-2):43-60. — PubMed PMID: 18114869
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
Ingber E. [Radiology applied to preventive medicine; the radiological equivalents of the clinical Bircher-Benner syndrome, the bradytrophic Bouchardat-Grote-Gaethgens syndrome and the mesotrophic Kollath syndrome; the concept of capillary pathology]. Dia Med. 1950;22(15):549-52. — PubMed PMID: 15414739
Kollath W. [Mesotrophy, a clinical and physiological problem]. Hippokrates. 1952;23(11):293-300. — PubMed PMID: 12989830
Kollath W. [Remarks on the article of Gillnäs]. Arztl Forsch. 1955;9(7):II/76-7. — PubMed PMID: 13248761
Kolwel-Kirstein G, Bayerle H, Katzenberger V. [Experimental study of Kollath’s mesotrophy theory]. Arztl Forsch. 1956;10(5):II/51-4. — PubMed PMID: 13326707
Kollath W. [Reply to foregoing article on the mesotrophy complex]. Arztl Forsch. 1956;10(5):II/54-5. — PubMed PMID: 13326708
Kollath W. [Was I mistaken?]. Hippokrates. 1957;28(5):149-50. — PubMed PMID: 13428217
Kollath W. [Mesotrophic complex as unspecific chronic deficiency condition]. Hippokrates. 1957;28(9):267-71. — PubMed PMID: 13438447
Kollath W. [Validity of the mesotrophy complex for humans]. Hippokrates. 1959;30(2):97-104. — PubMed PMID: 13640466
Kollath W. [Experimental mesotrophy]. Hippokrates. 1959;30(7):265-73. — PubMed PMID: 13653605
Kuehnau J. [Is there a mesotrophy in humans? Critical observations on W. Kollath’s theory of mesotrophy]. Hippokrates. 1960;31:213-23. — PubMed PMID: 14412508
Kollath W. [The phases of the nutritional process; on the significance of mastication]. Int Z Vitaminforsch. 1967;37(2):212-25. — PubMed PMID: 5595593

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Mesotrophy and Auxones: Kollath's Theory of Semi-Nutrition

Table of Contents

1. The 1926 Habilitation: Vitamins and the Growth of Bacteria

2. From Bacteria to Rats: The Long-Term Feeding Studies

3. Auxones: Kollath’s “Animal Growth Substances”

4. Splitting the Vitamin B Complex (1948) and Auxones in Grain (1949)

5. The Animal Growth Factor and the Conditions for Mesotrophy (1950)

6. Mesotrophy: A State between Health and Deficiency Disease

7. Fresh Grain in the Experiments and the Munich Years

8. The Mesotrophic Complex as Unspecific Chronic Deficiency (1957)

9. Experimental Mesotrophy and Validity for Humans (1959)

10. The Discussion His Theory Drew

11. The “Mesotrophic Kollath Syndrome” in Radiology (1950)

Key Research Papers

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