An early example of an unbelievably bad diet was the “mucusless diet,” formulated by a German “professor” Arnold Ehret and published in a 1922 book called Mucusless Diet Healing System: Scientific Method of Eating Your Way to Health. Unfortunately, we don’t know the long-term effects of the diet on its inventor because Ehret died after falling on a curb and hitting his head two weeks after writing the book.
According to Ehret, “Every disease, no matter what name it is known by Medical Science, is Constipation. A clogging up of the entire pipe system of the human body. Any special symptom is therefore merely an extraordinary local constipation by more accumulated mucus at this particular place. Special accumulation points are the tongue, the stomach and particularly the entire digestive tract.” He preached that fruit was the perfect food and along with leafy vegetables was enough to sustain a human being in good health. He also advocated fasting, starting with a two- or three-day fast, and promoted longer fasts (up to forty days) once the body was used to going without food.
Like many other practitioners in the early 20th century, Ehret was fixated on the bowels—his contemporary John Harvey Kellogg, for example, believed that three bowel movements per day were a sign of good health. “The average person has as much as ten pounds of un-eliminated feces in the bowels continually, poisoning the blood stream and the entire system,” wrote Ehret. “Think of it! My ‘Mucus Theory’ and ‘Mucusless Diet Healing System’ stand unshaken; it has proven the most successful ‘Compensation-Action’ so-called cure against every kind of disease. By its systematic application thousands of declared-incurable patients could be saved.”
Whereas conventional doctors of the time—also often fixated on the bowels–treated “clogged bowels” with arsenic preparations, Ehret advocated a strict vegan diet—which may have unclogged those stroppy bowels in the short term, but would starve you if you stuck to it, especially if you also engaged in punishing fasts.
Only fruit and leafy green vegetables were allowed. “All other foods of civilization, without exception, are mucus and acid forming, and therefore are harmful.” Apparently, Ehret’s “scientific” approach failed to realize that our mucous membranes are there for a purpose. . . to produce mucus.
Ehret railed against the “heavy breakfast,” calling it “the worst and by far the most unhealthy habit. No solid food should be eaten in the early morning at all if you desire to secure the best results.” He also warned against taking liquids with foods. “If accustomed to tea or coffee, wait a short while after you have eaten before drinking. Soups should be avoided with meals, as the more liquid taken the more difficult for proper digestion. If a warm drink is desired, for instance, as a breakfast drink during the winter time, make a broth by cooking for a long time different kinds of vegetables, such as spinach, onions, carrots, cabbages, etc., and DRINK THE JUICE ONLY.”
Unfortunately, the mucusless diet did not die with its inventor, but took on a life of its own. Reprinted in 1953, his book is still out there urging a starvation diet as a way to bodily purity. The most famous recent advocate for the diet was Apple CEO Steve Jobs who, for the better part of his life, consumed only fruits and vegetables until his death from pancreatic cancer in 2011.
When Ashton Kutcher, who played the character of Jobs in the eponymous film, tried to follow the mucusless diet, he lost eighteen pounds but he ended up in the emergency room as his insulin levels fluctuated out of control.
https://nourishingtraditions.com/weird-diets/
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