The Brandt Grape Cure

regimen · 1925–1940

category:regimen

delivery:A five-phase dietary regimen set out in Brandt's 1928 book The Grape Cure: a two-to-three day water fast with a daily enema; one to two weeks of eating only grapes (one to three ounces every two hours, seven meals a day, or unsweetened grape juice for weak patients); then fresh fruit, tomatoes, and sour milk or cottage cheese; then raw foods; then a mixed diet of one fruit for breakfast, a cooked lunch, and a salad supper. For external cancers she recommended grape poultices, juice compresses, gargles, enemas, or douches. Distributed through Brandt's own book, the Harmony Healing Centre in New York, health food stores, and 'drugless practitioners' and health spas of the period (Quackwatch).

price tier:not classified

era:1925–1940

current status:historical

regulatory:unregulated

SHORT PITCH (AS SOLD)

Fast, then eat nothing but grapes for a week or two: the grape's 'antiseptic' and 'magnetic' properties dissolve malignant growths and eliminate the toxemia that causes disease.

THE ACTUAL EVIDENCE

The American Cancer Society's own professional-journal review, 'Grape Diet' (CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, 1974), found no evidence of benefit, and Quackwatch records that the American Cancer Society reached the same conclusion on repeated review in 1965, 1971, 1974, and 2000: no evidence of benefit against human cancer or any other disease. Grapes contain no chemical agent shown to dissolve tumors; the diet is deficient in most essential nutrients and, by Brandt's own description, is a form of starvation that can cause the still-alarming weight loss she asserted was desirable. The Federal Trade Commission ordered the operation's specific health claims discontinued on March 15, 1940, and the California Cancer Advisory Council obtained a cease-and-desist order against a practitioner prescribing the diet for cancer in 1962.

PRACTITIONERS

Johanna Brandt

CASES

brandt-grape-cure-1925-1940

CLAIMS

A diet of grapes alone dissolves malignant growths and cures cancer: Brandt 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.' refuted
The Grape Cure also demonstrated effectiveness against arthritis, diabetes, gallstones, cataracts, ulcerated stomach, tuberculosis, and syphilis, and relieves complaints of the stomach, bowels, and liver through the 'strongly antiseptic' organic acids of the grape. refuted
Most diseases originate in the intestine and are caused by poisons from uneliminated waste (auto-intoxication); grapes are 'the most magnetic food,' and every tendril of the grape is 'a living receiver of cosmic magnetism', clearing this toxemia and rebuilding tissue. refuted

SOURCES

NOTES

The Brandt Grape Cure held that most disease originates in the intestine from uneliminated waste, that grapes are a uniquely powerful antiseptic and solvent able to dissolve “morbid and malignant growths”, and that a graduated fast-then-grapes-only regimen would eliminate that toxemia and restore health. It sits in this archive’s autointoxication-and-purification tradition, the same causal logic that ran through James Morison’s vegetable pills, Linda Hazzard’s fasting cure, and Kellogg’s Battle Creek regimen. Unlike most of that tradition, the Grape Cure was aimed specifically at cancer, joining the marketplace of privately controlled, testimonial-driven cancer remedies (Krebiozen, the Hoxsey tonic) that repeatedly drew regulatory conflict rather than clinical proof. The Federal Trade Commission ordered its specific misrepresentations stopped in 1940; the American Cancer Society reviewed and rejected the underlying claim on four separate occasions between 1965 and 2000.