Rudolf Breuss

Rudolf Breuss (June 6, 1899 – May 17, 1990) was an Austrian naturopath and alternative cancer treatment advocate. He promoted the Breuss Cancer Cure (BCC) - a 42-day juice fasting program, widely regarded by medical experts as lacking any scientific basis, and which medical sources have criticized as ineffective and dangerous.

Biography

Breuss maintained that cancer lives on solid foods taken into the body, and that cancerous growths will die if a patient drinks only vegetable juices and herbal teas for 42 days. The Breuss Cancer Cure (BCC) claims to starve cancer cells by not providing solid food proteins, the idea being based on an erroneous assumption that cancer cells can only live on proteins of solid food. The BCC is based on a vegetable juice that consists of 55% red beet root, 20% carrots, 20% celery root, 3% raw potato, and 2% radishes. A 2014 review of cancer diets listed the Breuss diet as having no benefit and the underlying hypothesis is not compatible with scientific concepts of cancer.

In 2020, the Cancer Association of South Africa has stated that, even though a diet based on vegetables is healthy, the Breuss diet "contains no known substances that can ‘cure’ cancer".

Selected publications