Editing Maximilian Bircher-Benner (section)

== Criticism ==

Bircher-Benner held [[Pseudoscience|pseudoscientific]] ideas about nutrition, including [[vitalism]]. He believed that all people including babies should eat only raw food.<ref name="Gratzer 2005">Gratzer, Walter. (2005). ''Terrors of the Table: The Curious History of Nutrition''. Oxford University Press. pp. 197-198. {{ISBN|0-19-280661-0}}</ref> Bircher-Benner developed the idea that cooking deprived foods of their nutritional content and destroyed their "vital substance". He believed that cooked foods leave decay in the digestive tract, that may cause [[autointoxication]].<ref name="Gratzer 2005"/>

Bircher-Benner's work was not recognized by other scientists until the discovery of vitamins in fruits and vegetables in the 1930s.<ref name="Maximilian Oskar Bircher-Benner"/> Because his ideas about nutrition were not supported by the science of his day, he was dismissed as a [[Quackery|quack]] by the medical profession.<ref name="Fitzgerald 2015">Fitzgerald, Matt. (2015). ''Diet Cults: The Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and a Guide to Healthy Eating for the Rest of US''. Pegasus. p. 43. {{ISBN|978-1605988290}} "There was, of course, no evidence that the life force that Bircher-Benner deemed all-important actually existed. His peers in the mainstream medical establishment dismissed the life-force concept as unscientific and branded Bircher-Benner a quack."</ref>  A contemporaneous academic review of Bircher-Benner's cookbook ''Health-Giving Dishes'' claims that the work contains "a mixture of physiological half-truths and fantasies" and concludes that the number of people capable of eating solely raw fruits and vegetables as Bircher-Benner encouraged is limited because only few humans can live as herbivores.<ref name="BMJ"/> [[Thomas Mann]], a well-known novelist, visited the sanatorium and described it as a "health jail."<ref name="Maximilian Oskar Bircher-Benner"/> 

Despite disapproval from others, Bircher-Benner's ideas caught the public's eye and his sanatorium stayed in business until some time after his death.<ref name="Fitzgerald 2015"/>