Kathryn Alexander 

All Gersonites know that the Gerson diet provides sufficient nutrients to enable restoration and a complete healing of the body. In spite of this, there are occasions when a caring family member or medical professional asserts that the Gerson Therapy is too low in protein to sustain a human being, let alone cure one. When you’ve invested so much time and energy in a therapy, and can see that it is working for you – it’s not a pleasant experience being backed into a corner with nowhere to go!  So let’s be in a position of clarity on protein and the Gerson diet.  

Firstly, there is a big difference between a protein-restricted diet and a protein-deficient diet. Let’s start with how much protein we need.  According to current nutritional guidelines, the recommended daily intake (RDI) is 1g of protein per kilogram body weight, which means a 55 kg person would require 55g of protein. This is very easy to obtain from a varied diet.  Animal foods contain between 20-25% protein (meat will deliver 20g/100g protein and cheese 25g/100g); cereal grains average at 12% (dry weight) and legumes at 25% (dry weight). If we take a varied diet which contains some animal protein, grains and legumes – we can see that most foods offer protein and that it is easy to satisfy requirements.

100g meat                                   20.00

2 slices bread                               12.00

50g cheese                                   12.50

50g rice                                         3.25

50g legumes                                12.50

200g yoghurt                                 7.00

50g oats                                        7.10

2 eggs                                         13.00

Total                                          87.35

However, as most nutritionists will be eager to point out, animal protein is “first-class” and of a high quality, while vegetarian protein is “second-class.”  With second-class proteins up to half the protein consumed may be discarded by the body as being unusable. This fact forms the basis of negative assertions about the Gerson Therapy, but as we shall see such opinions taken out of context, is unfounded.

If we take the analogy of writing a book we can easily explain protein requirements.  A book requires a quantity of letters which are assembled into words.  However, the book is generally going to require more of some letters, like the vowels, than the x’s, y’s and z’s. So we have a “letter profile” for the book. The body is similar. Like our 26-letter alphabet, proteins have a 22-amino-acid alphabet. The amino-acids are assembled in particular sequences which make the specific proteins. And like the “letter profile” of a book we have an “amino-acid profile” where we require more of some amino-acids than others.  Animal protein happens to fit the human protein profile - in other words it delivers the amino acids (building blocks of protein) in the ratio we require.  Generally we refine this profile down to eight essential amino acids as the remaining fourteen can be synthesized from these.  On the other hand, vegetable protein does not fit the human protein profile and is often missing one or more essential amino acids (the limiting amino-acids).

What does this mean? Imagine you are going to bake a cake and you require 200g flour, 100g sugar, 100g butter and 2 eggs. However, you find that although you have all the ingredients, you only have 100g of flour. This means that you can only bake half a cake.  This is exactly what happens in the body; unless all the ingredients are present in their correct ratio when required, then the body will use what it has and discard the surplus. It will not wait until the next meal to make good any shortfall. Over a period of years, this type of diet can have an erosive effect on the body which may not manifest until the rate of tissue degeneration starts to exceed regeneration – generally at the age of 40+. 

However, if we mix our second-class vegetable proteins at the same meal, we can often supplement the shortfall. For example both nuts and cereal grains are deficient in the amino acid lysine while legumes are deficient in tryptophan. However, by taking legumes at the same meal as say, rice or nuts/seeds they will supplement each others’ deficiencies and convert the protein value from 55% to 70% - or that of a first-class protein. Additionally, dairy (as in yoghurt) has a special role to play. Although it provides only 3% protein, it is very rich in many of the limiting amino-acids and if taken in small amounts with other vegetable protein, will supplement the profile and further increase the protein value of the meal.

So where does this leave the Gerson Therapy? Well, the good news is that vegetables, unlike grains, legumes and seeds, have a first-class amino acid profile; the bad news is that they deliver only 1.5%-2% - which means that you would need to eat 1 kg of vegetable to ensure 15g-20g protein. But on the Gerson Therapy, we are consuming 3.75kg vegetables in the juices (12 x 250ml juices daily), and a further 2kg in the meals. If we do our calculations using the lower protein value of 1.5% then we see that the Gerson Therapy is far from protein deficient:

5.75kg  x 1.5% = 86.25g protein

The juices yield 56.25g protein in themselves, and if we add in the 200g yoghurt (7g protein) and 50g oats (7g protein) and 2 slices of bread (12g) to the diet we are increasing the total protein to 112.25g/day.  Technically, this would satisfy the requirements of a person weighing 112kg!

It’s important to remember that on the Gerson Therapy you are obtaining your protein from low-protein sources, but by strictly adopting the regime which ensures both the quantity and protein quality, it is impossible to become protein deficient. One of the secrets of the success of this therapy is the type of protein you consume. Protein from other sources (cooked meat/fish, grains and legumes) seems to oppose the sodium/potassium shift and the detoxification process, whereas protein obtained predominantly from vegetables, promotes detoxification and healing.

So next time you are confronted by a doctor, nutritionist or a well-meaning friend, you can now afford to innocently ask them to qualify their stance or, if you want to save yourself time and effort, you can hand them a copy of this article.  

Protein content g/100g (%) in vegetables