The Brandt Grape Cure

A spy’s second act

It was midwinter in the Transvaal when Johanna Brandt left home for the United States, her husband away on church business and her children seeing her off at a dusty provincial railway platform. Her departure fell on the 4th of July, 1927 — a coincidence of scheduling, she wrote, but one she read as a good omen for the country she meant to reach. After lectures in Bloemfontein and Cape Town, she sailed for England on the Windsor Castle; delays in England and Europe meant she did not reach New York until the end of November 1927. It was not her first brush with public drama. Born Johanna van Warmelo in Heidelberg, Transvaal, in 1876, she had published a 1913 memoir, The Petticoat Commando, describing her own account of intelligence and courier work for the Boer side during the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and time connected to the Irene concentration camp near Pretoria; a 2021 Wellcome Collection article independently calls her an “Afrikaner Nationalist and spy”, corroborating that this reputation was publicly attached to her.

By her own account, and per Quackwatch, gastric trouble had dogged her since around 1916, shortly after her mother died of cancer, and she spent nine years experimenting with fasting to treat it. In November 1921, doctors at a Johannesburg hospital took X-rays that a surgeon read as showing a fibrous growth dividing her stomach; he recommended immediate surgery, which she refused, fasting instead for three weeks on water alone. She wrote that a follow-up X-ray six months later showed no trace of the growth, but that pain persisted for three more years until 1925, when she added a diet of nothing but grapes and, within six weeks, declared herself completely healed. She held no medical degree; Quackwatch reports that her book states she acquired a “doctor of naturopathy” degree and an honorary “PhN” (philosophy of naturopathy) through a six-month course at the First National University of Naturopathy. On the strength of her own account, and no independent confirmation that she ever had cancer at all (she described no biopsy, before or after), she set out to bring the discovery to a country she believed would embrace it.

A cure sold at the corner health store

Brandt’s grape cure was not gated behind wealth or a private clinic. She published the regimen in a book sold openly, opened the Harmony Healing Centre in New York City to promote it, and, per her own text as quoted by Quackwatch, directed readers to buy grapes, grape juice, or unsulfured raisins at any health food store; where fresh grapes were unavailable, sweetened grape juice supplemented with raisins would do. In her own period, she wrote, the diet was also administered by “drugless practitioners” and at health spas — a broad, low-barrier distribution channel, not a restricted one. Bernarr Macfadden’s Evening Graphic ran part of her story in 1928, extending her reach to his mass physical-culture readership.

An antiseptic solvent and cosmic magnetism

Brandt’s stated mechanism combined two unrelated ideas. The first was the period’s standard auto-intoxication doctrine: that most disease originates in the intestine, caused by poisons from waste the body fails to eliminate. The second was explicitly occult: she wrote that grapes are “the most magnetic food,” and that every tendril of the grape is “a living receiver of cosmic magnetism.” She wrote, “The grape is highly antiseptic and a powerful solvent of inorganic matter deposits, fatty degeneration, morbid and malignant growths. It acts as a drastic eliminator of evil while building new tissue.” She claimed that “abnormal growths, cancers, tumors, ulcers, abscesses and fibrous masses seem to be dissolved by the powerful chemical agent in the grape” (Quackwatch, quoting Brandt’s book). The American Cancer Society’s and Quackwatch’s reviews found no evidence supporting either the intestinal-toxin-clearing or the magnetism mechanism Brandt proposed. The regimen was also, on Brandt’s own description, a form of induced starvation: in advanced cases, she wrote, reducing the patient “to a virtual skeleton” was how the disease was overcome, since “there is nothing left for the cancer to live on” once that point was reached.

From book sales to a cease-and-desist order

Brandt earned from selling the book itself, and founded the Harmony Healing Centre in New York City to promote it. The American Medical Association’s records, as summarized by Quackwatch, show the Centre was charged by state officials with practicing medicine without a license. F. W. Collins, styling himself “dean” of the First National University of Naturopathy in Newark, New Jersey, then announced his institution had taken over as the Centre’s headquarters. The Centre was later reopened under Jessie Springer, who distributed Brandt’s book and advertised that she had grape juices and grape concentrates for sale, alongside claims that most disease originates in the intestine, that grapes dissolve mucus, that constipation underlies most malignant growths, and that salt, inorganic drugs, and patent medicines cause cancer. The Federal Trade Commission found these advertising claims to be misrepresentations and, on March 15, 1940, ordered them discontinued (Quackwatch, citing JAMA 116:2525, 1941). In 1948 the U.S. Postal Service barred use of the mails to advertise several “health books” as fraudulent, in a period Quackwatch’s account places within the same regulatory scrutiny of the grape-cure marketing. That same year, back in South Africa, a Cape Town City Hall handbill advertised a Nature Cure Cancer Crusade meeting on 21 April 1948 with Brandt as speaker, inviting medical authorities to investigate a claim of having successfully combated cancer over the previous thirty years, and advertising her book as being in its fourteenth United States edition and for sale on-site in English and Afrikaans. Bernarr Macfadden, who had first popularized Brandt’s story in 1928, went on in 1950 to post a $10,000 bet for anyone who could prove grapes did not cure cancer; within a year, his own Physical Culture Library Service had stopped filling mail orders for The Grape Cure or its own grape pamphlet after the Post Office Department objected.

Reviewed and rejected, four times over

The American Cancer Society’s own professional-journal review, “Grape Diet” (CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, 1974), is one of at least four occasions — 1965, 1971, 1974, and 2000 — on which the Society examined the grape cure and, per Quackwatch’s summary of those reviews, found no evidence of benefit against human cancer or any other disease. In 1962 the California Cancer Advisory Council voted for a formal finding of fact against prescribing grapes or grape products for cancer and obtained a cease-and-desist order against a chiropractor who had been doing so. By 1950 the Harmony Centre no longer appeared in the New York telephone directory, and a 1954 source cited by Quackwatch placed Johanna Brandt back in South Africa as a missionary. She died in January 1964. Grapes do contain compounds, resveratrol and proanthocyanidins among them, still studied for possible preventive effects in unrelated research, but Quackwatch’s review, echoing the American Cancer Society, concludes there is no reason to believe Brandt’s diet will ever be found useful for any purpose, and that her recommended regimen — nutritionally deficient and capable of causing constipation, diarrhea, cramps, and undesirable weight loss in cancer patients — is “a form of starvation” she herself described as intentional.