Bircher-Benner recast the value of food as an energetic quantity, an “active force” he discussed in the language of the second principle (second law) of thermodynamics, with foods arranged in a hierarchy of “order” and raw plant food at the top. The claim, stated in the title and substance of his 1939 work The essential nature and organisation of food energy and the application of the second principle of thermo-dynamics to food value and its active force, is mechanism-only and is classified as refuted: nutritional science does not rank foods by a thermodynamic “active force”, and the second law of thermodynamics does not assign a living energetic value to food in the way the doctrine asserts. The hierarchy was a theoretical construction, not a measured property. The energetic theory was not recognised by official medicine in Bircher-Benner’s time (swissinfo.ch 2025), and historians of medicine treat his dietetics as a health-reform moral physiology rather than as validated science (Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz, Medical History 1999).