Johanna Budwig

by Paul Fassa
Health Impact News

The Budwig Diet for cancer has been around since the 1950s. But it is suppressed and inaccurately marginalized, sometimes even among alternative health writers and practitioners.

Flaxseed oil and cottage cheese for curing cancer? You’ve gotta be kidding!

But it’s no joke, and it’s not a fraud.

Many have been skeptical of the Budwig Diet. Dr. Andrew Weil considered it “fanciful” and without sufficient recorded scientific evidence. Even Mike Vrentas of the Independent Cancer Research Foundation (ICRF) originally thought it was insignificant as an alternative method for curing cancer, at first.

The ICRF is truly independent and sponsors the online Cancer Tutor.

Fortunately, Mike Vrentas’ views changed to the positive after deeper research into the science involved and testimonies from healed former cancer patients around the world. Vrentas and the CancerTutor are now advocates of the Budwig Diet along with several other alternative healing protocols.

Though not the complete diet, the daily medicinal staple of the Budwig Diet does involve cold pressed organic flaxseed oil mixed with low-fat cottage cheese, originally quark, a type of cheese more common in Central and Eastern Europe than North America.

This is not merely a fashionable South Beach type of diet for weight loss. It has cured thousands of not only cancer but other chronic and life threatening maladies as well over the past 50 plus years. The original flaxseed oil mixed into quark was not a culinary quirk presented by a “happy homemaker.”

The Budwig Diet is the result of years of study by an esteemed German biochemist, Johanna Budwig, who was nominated several times for the European version of the Nobel Prize. There are other dietary requirements and prohibitions that are part of her protocol in addition to the mainly medicinal quark/cottage cheese and flaxseed oil mixture.

Freshly ground flax seeds, lots of sunshine, and stress management are also part of Johanna Budwig’s approach to healing the whole person without side effects. More specific details of the Budwig Diet are revealed later in this article.

Johanna Budwig: German Scientist Who Initiated the Classifications of Fatty Acids

As a biochemist and physicist in the early 1950s, Johanna was a senior scientist in the German Federal Health Office. Her task was to help determine what might be appropriate for cancer curing medication from German pharmaceutical companies.

It was around 1951 that Johanna Budwig discovered methods for determining the different properties of fatty acids. Until then, no such classifications of different fatty acids and their metabolic properties existed. She was a pioneering biochemist in the field.

She also had a strong interest in exploring potential dietary pathways for supplying rich infusions into cancer cells. Earlier, in 1936, Otto Warburg received a Nobel Prize for his discovery that cancer cells are unable to survive in an oxygen dense cellular environment.

Because a pharmaceutical company forwarded applications to her for a sulfhydryl group, which are proteins (amino acids) that contain sulfur, Budwig was able to get an overview of the problems involved with oxygenating cancer cells through dietary means.

It was known within medical science circles at the time that sulfur from the sulfhydryl groups was present in all healthy tissues requiring oxygen that were healthy. And it was also known that somehow fats or fatty acids were involved in either enhancing or inhibiting that process of extracting oxygen from those sulfuric proteins and into cancer cells.

Warburg was aware that fats had something to do with inhibiting or enhancing cellular oxygen absorption, but during his time fats were not classified with their biochemical structures and functions within mammalian cellular metabolism.

Since Dr. Budwig was funded by the German government to continue her research categorizing the different properties of fatty acids, she put it all together to determine an oxygenating respiratory dietary pathway for cancer cells’ demise.

Johanna Budwig examined the molecular properties of many fats, determining if they were saturated or unsaturated, isolating omega 6 linoleic acid or linolenic acid omega 3 fatty acids, and if they inhibited or enhanced cellular oxygen absorption. All of these now known categories did not exist before her research.

In 1952, Dr. Budwig submitted a paper on the results of her research, stating:

It is basically proven that highly unsaturated fatty acids are the heretofore undiscovered decisive factor in respiratory enzyme function, i.e. constitute the second part of the ‘equation’ that Nobelist Otto Warburg had been unable to find.

What sounds insignificant to the layman’s ears, is arguably one of the greatest breakthroughs in medicinal science: from that moment onward we have known that the highly unsaturated fatty acid is the decisive factor achieving the desired effect of cellular respiratory stimulation.

Johanna Budwig determined that organic cold pressed flaxseed oil was the most suitable fat to combine with an easy to eat protein-sulfur of quark/cottage cheese for the elusive respiratory enzyme that Warburg had sought. These two disparate foods were able to combine when mixed with an electric hand mixer and create the oxygen within cancer cells for restoring normalcy.

The Budwig Diet was arrived at from extensive research, which was not even possible until her discoveries of how to determine the properties of fatty acids. Cottage cheese/quark with pure cold pressed flax oil for curing cancer is not merely a culinary quirk.

Dr. Budwig studied medicine to authorize her for treating patients without being accused of practicing medicine without a license and became a naturopath in addition to her scientific credentials. She treated over 2500 patients in Germany for over 10 years, mostly cancers along with other diseases, with a 90 percent cure rate.

Supporting Medical Testimony

In addition to the online Cancer Tutor and many individual cancer patient testimonies, despite Dr. Weil’s denial, there is medical professional support for the Budwig Diet among M.D.s who use alternative methods for cancer:

Oncologist Dr. Dan C. Roehm M.D., FACP wrote in a July 1990 Townsend Letter for Doctors:

What she [Dr. Johanna Budwig] has demonstrated to my initial disbelief but lately, to my complete satisfaction in my practice is: CANCER IS EASILY CURABLE, the treatment is dietary/lifestyle, the response is immediate; the cancer cell is weak and vulnerable; the precise biochemical breakdown point was identified by her in 1951 and is specifically correctable, in vitro (test tube) as well as in vivo [humans and animals] … . (Emphasis in bold added)

Dr. Robert Wilner, M.D., Ph.D. author of the Cancer Solution published in 1993 offered his confirmation of the Budwig Diet:

Numerous, independent clinical studies published in major medical journals worldwide confirm Dr. Budwig’s findings…. Over 40 years ago Dr. Budwig presented clear and convincing evidence, which has been confirmed by hundreds of other related scientific research papers since, that the essential fatty acids were at the core of the answer to the cancer problem…You will come to your own conclusions as to why this simple effective prevention and therapy has not only been ignored—it has been suppressed! [Emphasis added] (Source)

How the Healing Mix is Prepared

For prevention and early stage cancer, about one tablespoon of flaxseed oil mixed into half a cup or more of cottage cheese or quark. Up to eight tablespoons of the oil should be consumed daily in that mixture by late-stage cancer patients. Whatever mixture amounts are used should be consumed twice daily.

Flaxseed or Linseed oil is delicate and subject to oxidation. It should be purchased from a refrigerated source in dark bottles and kept refrigerated. Flax seeds contain nutrients absent from the oil, that’s why Dr. Budwig included flax seeds ground briefly and consumed immediately with a coffee grinder for using flax in other foods allowed by her diet.

Budwig did not allow supplements with the usual fillers and she discouraged flaxseed oil capsules for similar reasons. One cancer survivor who used the Budwig diet successfully wrote of a friend who had used the oil capsules and died from his cancer. It’s important to create an almost liquid mix using the oil with two (2) percent cottage cheese or quark if you can get it, using an electric mixing wand or stick used for cooking.

The low fat cottage cheese quark substitute is needed for the unique blend of fats in flaxseed oil to provide the sulfur protein compliment that helps create the oxygen enzyme to penetrate cancer cells. If the cottage cheese is too fatty, it tends to overwhelm the proper balance needed for that oxygenating enzyme.

Both the oil and cottage cheese should be organic, untreated, and high quality.

Once made, the mixture should be consumed within 20 minutes and not stored in a refrigerator. But as long as either is high quality and unprocessed, other available options are permissible.

Dr. Budwig also discouraged the use of laetrile with her diet but allowed raw apricot seed kernels that also contain amygdalin, the cancer cell fighting compound used in laetrile. Her recommendations are strict and don’t allow deviation until one is healed from not only cancer but several other chronic diseases as well.

Complete details on the Budwig diet are in the free English language Budwig Center of Spain’s ebook.

It is crucial that one does not deviate from her dietary protocol and stick with it for at least one to three months before expecting results.

Johanna Budwig Background Check

Johanna was born in 1908 and died in 2003 at the age of 95 from complications due to injuries after a fall in her home. As a result of her research from the 1950’s and on, she was nominated for the Alternative Nobel Prize, Europe’s counterpart to the Swedish Nobel Prize, seven times.

In Germany in 1952, she was the central government’s senior expert for fats and pharmaceutical drugs. She’s considered one of the world’s leading authorities on fats and oils.

Naturally, her successful treatment of many cancer patients, some of whom were terminal, led to professional envy in Germany. She was harassed through the German court system a couple of times, and both times the courts favored her. She proceeded to expand her knowledge and legitimacy by getting a doctorate in Natural Sciences to become a Ph.D. Naturopath.

This broadened her understanding of how connected all living things are with bio-electrical energy and sunlight. She talks of how seeds that absorb the sun’s energy, such as flax seeds, connect with the human organism’s innate intelligence to convert bio-electric energy for its organic needs, thus the sunshine exposure to bare skin aspect of her therapy connects with the flax oil and flax seed consumption.

Dr. Budwig considered herself blacklisted because she overtly and publicly opposed chemotherapy and radiation on cancer patients. She also didn’t make friends with cooking and salad oil manufacturers when she started exposing the terrible health consequences of using heated, chemically treated processed or hydrogenated oils that were being foisted on the public from the 1950s on.

Her research has shown the tremendous adverse health effects that commercially processed fats and oils have by destroying cell membranes and lowering the voltage in the cells of our bodies, which then result in chronic and terminal disease.

Now you know the reasons why so many know so little about her, and why her work is marginalized by the powers that be in the medical, pharmaceutical, and processed foods industries. However, this is a proven dietary and lifestyle solution to many modern diseases, especially cancer.

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