Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung: Kollath’s Order of Our Food

Table of Contents

1. The Book of 1942
2. Editions from 1942 to Today
3. “Let Our Food Be as Natural as Possible”
4. Living Foods and Dead Foods
5. The Six Value Grades
6. Full Value and Partial Value
7. What Processing Takes Away
8. The Practical Rules
9. Foundation of Whole-Food Nutrition
10. An Echo of Bircher-Benner’s Sunlight Ranking
11. Later Research on Food Processing
12. Key Research Papers
13. Connections
14. Featured Videos

1. The Book of 1942

The first edition appeared in Stuttgart in 1942 from the Hippokrates-Verlag under the full title Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung. Grundlagen einer dauerhaften Ernährungslehre — “The Order of Our Food: Foundations of a Lasting Science of Nutrition.” The German National Library records that first edition at 87 pages. Kollath was then professor of hygiene and bacteriology and director of the Institute of Hygiene at the University of Rostock.

The book did not come out of nowhere. Kollath had spent more than a decade on nutrition experiments, beginning with his 1926 habilitation on vitamins and the growth of bacteria. The Rostock historian Gunther Viereck writes that from the early 1930s Kollath ran long-term feeding studies on rats, that fresh grain porridge played a large part in those experiments, and that “his findings he worked into a book that appeared in 1942 under the title Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung,” in which he presented the dietary concept of Vollwertkost (“full-value food”).

• A new word. According to Melzer’s history of the whole-food movement, the book is where Kollath used the term Vollwertkost, which he defined as a diet that “contains everything the organism needs for its own maintenance and for the maintenance of the species.”
• Its debt. For the food concept itself, the same history says, he drew mainly on the publications of the Zurich physician Max Bircher-Benner (see section 10).
• The companion volume. In 1950 Kollath published the experimental side of the argument as a separate 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”).
• In the journals. He carried the same ideas into a run of papers after the war: on whole food and its determination by growth and cell replacement (1947), on the importance of the full value of food for hygiene (1949), on the practical importance of auxones for the food industry and especially grain processing (1949), and on the attitude of people toward their food (1955).

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2. Editions from 1942 to Today

The book has stayed in print for more than eighty years. The record below is taken from the catalogue of the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek), which lists each edition with its year, publisher and length. It grew from 87 pages to more than 300 as Kollath expanded it after the war.

The Kollath foundation dates the post-war “new edition” of the book to 1951, which matches the second edition above. The 17th edition carries a commentary on Kollath’s nutrition-science work by the nutrition scientists Bernhard Watzl and Claus Leitzmann.

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3. “Let Our Food Be as Natural as Possible”

One sentence is attached to Kollath’s name more than any other. The Werner-und-Elisabeth-Kollath-Stiftung, the foundation set up by his widow in 1981, gives it in this form:

“Kollath’s central statement was therefore: „Laßt unsere Nahrung so natürlich wie möglich“” — “Let our food be as natural as possible.”

The foundation explains the “therefore”: Kollath, it says, investigated the consequences of food processing and argued that a health-preserving diet should be as close to its natural state, and as little processed, as possible, so that the “full value” of the substances originally present in natural foods is largely kept. He also argued for a preference for plant foods.

Other sources give the motto in slightly different words:

• “lasst eure Nahrung so natürlich wie möglich” (“let your food be as natural as possible”) in the 2001 Lexikon der Ernährung, which calls the motto and his term “full value of food” the foundation of whole-food nutrition.
• “Laßt das Natürliche so natürlich wie möglich” (“leave what is natural as natural as possible”) in Gunther Viereck’s 2012 University of Rostock essay, which takes it as the title of the essay and gives as its source page 274 of Kollath’s 1937 hygiene textbook — that is, five years before Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung.
• The German Wikipedia article on whole-food nutrition describes the motto as an adaptation of a saying of the priest and water-cure healer Sebastian Kneipp, who also called for simple food and wholemeal flour.

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4. Living Foods and Dead Foods

The book’s first division is between two German words that ordinary speech uses almost interchangeably. Kollath gave each a strict meaning:

• Lebensmittel — literally “means of life,” here “living foods.” In his definition a Lebensmittel is “living food” that still contains its own Fermente (enzymes).
• Nahrungsmittel — literally “means of nourishment,” here “dead foods” or mere nutriments. A Nahrungsmittel, as Melzer summarises Kollath, is “dead food in which these enzymes have been destroyed — mostly by heating.”

In the book itself (pages 15–17 of the 2005 edition, as quoted in German Wikipedia) Kollath drew the consequence. Living foods, he wrote, “can with very great probability and with justice claim to be ‘means for the maintenance of life’.” Dead foods serve “in the first place for satiation, that is, for the removal of hunger.” What dead foods lack, he wrote, is “not only the food’s own enzymes, but also the natural aroma substances with their immediate effects during the taking of food.”

The line between the two halves is therefore not between plant and animal, or between good and bad ingredients. It is the moment a food stops being alive — in Kollath’s account, above all the moment it is heated.

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5. The Six Value Grades

Each half is split into three. Kollath called the six steps Wertgruppen (“value groups”); later writers adopted the term Wertstufen (“value grades”). The first three are living foods, the last three dead foods. German Wikipedia gives the list from pages 32 onward of the 13th edition (1987); Viereck’s essay gives the same six in slightly fuller wording.

The grade 1 list is from pages 50–51 of the 13th edition, as given in German Wikipedia; the grade 1 and grade 6 examples in quotation marks are from the Lexikon der Ernährung. A dash means none of the sources consulted for this page gives an example for that grade.

Three features of the table matter for reading it:

• Every grade holds every kind of food. All six grades include foods of plant and of animal origin, and drinks as well.
• Fermentation keeps food alive. A fermented food stays on the living side of the line, in grade 3, because fermentation works through living enzymes rather than destroying them.
• Some placements are specific. Later summaries of the full table note that Kollath placed heated muscle meat and fruit juices in grade 4, blanched legumes in grade 1, and mussels in grade 2.

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6. Full Value and Partial Value

The table rests on a second pair of words. Against the Kalorienwert (“calorie value”) by which the nutrition science of his day measured food, Kollath set the Frischwert (“freshness value”). In Melzer’s summary of his teaching:

• Teilwert (“partial value”) is the energy content of a food — what it yields as fuel.
• Vollwert (“full value”) is its freshness — everything the living food still carries beyond its calories.
• Cooked food was, in his view, in principle only teilwertig (“of partial value”).

Viereck puts the practical side in the same terms: Kollath recommended eating the “full-value” living foods of grades 1–3 and advised against the “partial-value” dead foods. A food could be rich in calories and still be of partial value; a whole diet built from partial-value foods would, he argued, keep a person fed but not fully nourished. That state between health and illness he later named Mesotrophie (“mesotrophy,” or semi-nutrition) — the subject of its own page in this series.

The term “Vollwert” outlived the book. The Kollath foundation credits him with coining the phrase “Vollwert der Nahrung” (“the full value of food”), and it is the root of the German words for whole-food nutrition used today.

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7. What Processing Takes Away

Why should a heated or refined food be worth less if its calories and its known nutrients are still there? Kollath’s answer, as the sources record it, named several things that processing destroys or removes:

• The food’s own enzymes. This is the defining loss: heat destroys the Eigenfermente (“own enzymes”), and with them the food crosses from living to dead. In the 17th edition (page 49, as quoted in German Wikipedia) he called heating “the most important practical method of preservation,” through which “aroma substances and the food’s own enzymes are destroyed.”
• Aroma substances. He counted the natural aromas of fresh food as part of its value, for their “immediate effects” while eating.
• Essential ingredients in general. Viereck summarises the book’s view that through the handling and processing of food, essential ingredients “would be destroyed or limited in their effectiveness.”
• Auxones. Only largely untreated foods, Kollath held, contained enough of what he called Auxone — “animal growth substances” named by analogy with the plant growth hormones (auxins), which he believed were needed for cell division. The Lexikon der Ernährung records that he had found synthetic diets made only of the nutrients known around 1942 caused long-term harm not seen with untreated foods such as whole grain. In 1949 he wrote specifically on the importance of auxones for the food industry and for grain processing.
• The vitamins known and unknown. Kollath came to nutrition through vitamin research, and from 1929 published on the water-soluble vitamins. The Lexikon says that, in present-day terms, his auxones can be described as a combination of B vitamins other than thiamine, secondary plant compounds and some trace and ultra-trace elements; the Kollath foundation equates them with what are now called secondary plant compounds.

On fibre, the record is more specific than the usual summary. Viereck lists the base diet of Kollath’s rat experiments: ether-purified casein, rice starch, peanut oil, beef tallow, cellulose, vitamin B1, and potassium and zinc salts. Fibre in the form of cellulose was therefore already in the deficient diet. The factor Kollath was looking for was something else that whole, untreated food supplied — Viereck notes that eating fresh grain porridge led to a decline or healing of the chronic disorders the base diet produced.

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8. The Practical Rules

The table turns directly into advice. The rules the sources attribute to Kollath are short:

1. The less processed, the better. The lower the degree of processing, the higher the value of the food.
2. Living before dead. Eat mainly from grades 1–3; advise against the partial-value foods of grades 4–6.
3. Plant before animal. Plant foods are in principle ranked above animal foods.
4. Raw before cooked. Raw food (Rohkost) is ranked above processed food.
5. Whole grain and milk at the centre. The Lexikon der Ernährung sums up nutrition according to Kollath as centred on whole grain and on milk and dairy products.
6. Quality of production, and the whole. Viereck adds that, for Kollath, the quality of how food is produced and a holistic approach were also decisive.

A fixed share of raw food is often quoted with whole-food nutrition — “about half the daily food unheated.” In the sources consulted for this page that figure belongs to the later Giessen school of Vollwert-Ernährung (section 9), not to Kollath’s own book, so it is not given here as his rule.

The most famous practical result of the book was a breakfast: from 1951 a fresh-grain porridge known as the Kollath-Frühstück (“Kollath breakfast”) was sold through health-food shops. It has its own page, The Kollath Breakfast (Frischkornbrei).

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9. Foundation of Whole-Food Nutrition

German Wikipedia states that the book “is regarded as the foundation of whole-food nutrition,” and the movement that followed took its vocabulary from it:

• Max Otto Bruker (1909–2001), a physician, built a diet in the 1960s on Kollath’s model and from 1966 called it vitalstoffreiche Vollwertkost (“whole food rich in vital substances”) — a joining of Kollath’s term with the collective word Vitalstoffe. Bruker and the dentist Johann Georg Schnitzer both named Kollath as their inspiration.
• The Giessen school. From the late 1970s nutrition scientists around Claus Leitzmann at the University of Giessen, with Karl von Koerber and Thomas Männle, developed Vollwert-Ernährung (“wholesome nutrition”) on the basis of Kollath’s concept, first in a 1981 book. They reduced his six grades to four, from “not or minimally processed” (highly recommended) to “excessively processed” (not recommended), and added ecological, economic and social dimensions. In English, Leitzmann (2005) and von Koerber, Bader and Leitzmann (2017) describe the concept, whose principles include a preference for plant foods and for minimally processed foods.
• The foundation. The Werner-und-Elisabeth-Kollath-Stiftung, founded in 1981, exists to promote scientific work in holistic nutrition and health research and to keep and develop his scientific legacy.

The whole line of descent is traced on Werner Kollath’s Whole-Food Legacy.

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10. An Echo of Bircher-Benner’s Sunlight Ranking

Kollath’s six grades have an older relative. Around 1900 the Zurich physician Max Bircher-Benner had ranked foods into three classes by how much stored sunlight he believed they carried — raw plant foods first, wholemeal bread and cooked vegetable foods second, meat dishes, canned food, white flour and refined sugar third. His theory is set out on Bircher-Benner’s Theory of Food as Stored Sunlight.

• The same two rules. Both rankings put plant above animal and raw above cooked. Kollath spread them over six grades instead of three, and replaced Bircher-Benner’s physics of stored light with biology: living enzymes and growth substances.
• A documented debt. Melzer’s history states that for the food concept itself Kollath drew mainly on Bircher-Benner’s publications. He was in contact with Bircher-Benner and published in Bircher-Benner’s journal Der Wendepunkt — including, in 1946, a paper there on “imperfect life” and a new physiological way of life.
• Recognition. In 1957 Kollath received the Golden Bircher-Benner Medal of the International Society for Food and Vital-Substance Research.

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11. Later Research on Food Processing

Modern nutrition science does not use Kollath’s terms “living food” or “auxones,” but the question at the centre of his book — whether the degree of processing matters for health, beyond the nutrients a food contains — has become a major research subject. The best-known modern scale runs parallel to his grades:

• NOVA (2018). Carlos Monteiro and colleagues describe NOVA, a food classification “based on the nature, extent and purpose of food processing,” whose best-known feature is the category of ultra-processed food and drink products: formulations made mostly from industrial sources of energy and nutrients plus additives, which they describe as energy-dense and poor sources of protein, dietary fibre and micronutrients. NOVA was developed independently; the parallel with Kollath’s grades is one of approach, not of descent.
• A controlled feeding trial (2019). Kevin Hall and colleagues at the US National Institutes of Health gave 20 adults an ultra-processed or an unprocessed diet for two weeks each, matched for presented calories, sugar, sodium, fibre and macronutrients, and let them eat as much as they wished. On the ultra-processed diet they ate about 500 kcal a day more and gained 0.9 kg; on the unprocessed diet they lost 0.9 kg.
• An umbrella review (2024). Melissa Lane and colleagues pooled 45 meta-analyses covering almost ten million people. Greater exposure to ultra-processed food was directly associated with 32 of the 45 health outcomes studied, with the strongest evidence for cardiovascular death, type 2 diabetes and common mental disorders; the authors rated the quality of much of the evidence low or very low under GRADE.
• Whole grain and fibre (2019). A Lancet series of reviews by Andrew Reynolds and colleagues, drawing on 185 prospective studies and 58 trials, found 15–30% lower all-cause and cardiovascular mortality and lower rates of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and colorectal cancer among the highest fibre consumers, with whole-grain intake showing similar findings.

The site’s page on ultra-processed foods follows this research further, and whole grain versus refined wheat looks at what milling removes from the grain.

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Key Research Papers

1. Kollath W. [Imperfect life; discovery of a new physiological way of life]. Wendepunkt Leben Leiden. 1946;23(2):38-44. — PubMed PMID: 20277819
2. 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
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. [The attitude of man toward his food; a contribution to attitude research]. Hippokrates. 1955;26(22):661-8. — PubMed PMID: 13294716
7. Kollath W. [The phases of the nutritional process; on the significance of mastication]. Int Z Vitaminforsch. 1967;37(2):212-25. — PubMed PMID: 5595593
8. Leitzmann C. Wholesome nutrition: a suitable diet for the new nutrition science project. Public Health Nutr. 2005;8(6A):753-9. — PubMed PMID: 16236212
9. 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
10. Leitzmann C. Vegetarian nutrition: past, present, future. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014;100 Suppl 1:496S-502S. — PubMed PMID: 24898226
11. Monteiro CA, Cannon G, Moubarac JC, Levy RB, Louzada MLC, Jaime PC. The UN Decade of Nutrition, the NOVA food classification and the trouble with ultra-processing. Public Health Nutr. 2018;21(1):5-17. — PubMed PMID: 28322183
12. Hall KD, Ayuketah A, Brychta R, Cai H, Cassimatis T, Chen KY, Chung ST, et al. Ultra-processed diets cause excess calorie intake and weight gain: an inpatient randomized controlled trial of ad libitum food intake. Cell Metab. 2019;30(1):67-77.e3. — PubMed PMID: 31105044
13. Reynolds A, Mann J, Cummings J, Winter N, Mete E, Te Morenga L. Carbohydrate quality and human health: a series of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Lancet. 2019;393(10170):434-445. — PubMed PMID: 30638909
14. Lane MM, Gamage E, Du S, Ashtree DN, McGuinness AJ, Gauci S, Baker P, et al. Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes: umbrella review of epidemiological meta-analyses. BMJ. 2024;384:e077310. — PubMed PMID: 38418082

PubMed Topic Searches

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Kollath+W%5Bau%5D
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=wholesome+nutrition+Giessen
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=NOVA+food+classification+ultra-processed
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=food+processing+degree+health+outcomes

Further Reading

• Kollath W. Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung. Grundlagen einer dauerhaften Ernährungslehre. Stuttgart: Hippokrates-Verlag; 1942. 17th unchanged edition, Stuttgart: Haug; 2005 (ISBN 978-3-8304-7210-0). Deutsche Nationalbibliothek catalogue records
• Watzl B, Leitzmann C. Eine Kommentierung der ernährungswissenschaftlichen Arbeiten von Werner Kollath. In: Kollath W. Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung. 17th ed. Stuttgart; 2005/2013. pp. 289ff.
• Melzer J. Vollwerternährung. Diätetik, Naturheilkunde, Nationalsozialismus, sozialer Anspruch. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag; 2003. pp. 207–282.
• Werner-und-Elisabeth-Kollath-Stiftung. Stellungnahme zur Person Werner Kollath – Konsequenzen für die Kollath-Stiftung. deutsches-stiftungszentrum.de (PDF)
• Viereck G. „Laßt das Natürliche so natürlich wie möglich“ – Der Hygieniker und Ernährungswissenschaftler Werner Kollath (1892–1970). In: Boeck G, Lammel HU (eds.). Die Universität Rostock in den Jahren 1933–1945. Rostocker Studien zur Universitätsgeschichte 21. Rostock; 2012. pp. 107–113. rosdok.uni-rostock.de (PDF)
• Lexikon der Ernährung. “Kollath” and “Auxone.” Heidelberg: Spektrum Akademischer Verlag; 2001. Kollath · Auxone
• “Werner Kollath” and “Vollwerternährung.” German Wikipedia, citing the 13th (1987), 16th (1998) and 17th (2005, 2013) editions and Melzer 2003. Werner Kollath · Vollwerternährung
• Pollmer U, Warmuth S. Lexikon der populären Ernährungsirrtümer. Munich: Piper; 2006. pp. 324ff. (source of the grade placements of meat, juices, legumes and mussels, as cited in German Wikipedia)

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Connections

• Prof. Werner Kollath and Whole-Food Nutrition
• Werner Kollath: Life and Career
• Mesotrophy and Auxones
• The Kollath Breakfast (Frischkornbrei)
• Kollath on Diseases of Civilisation, Teeth and Gut Flora
• Werner Kollath’s Whole-Food Legacy
• Bircher-Benner’s Theory of Food as Stored Sunlight
• Bircher-Benner’s Raw Food (Rohkost) Therapy
• Dr. Weston A. Price
• Ultra-Processed Foods
• Whole Grain vs Refined Wheat
• Fermented Foods
• Dietary Fiber
• Nutrition and Orthomolecular Pioneers

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