Ingredients for the Gershon Diet

Created by Dr. Max Gerson, The Gerson Diet uses organic food, coffee enemas, detoxing and juicing as a way to help the body heal. The doctor reported that the diet cured heart disease, tuberculosis and cancer. Dr. Gerson became famous for treating Albert Schweitzer with this diet and curing him of diabetes.

Thinking that packaged and processed foods create degenerative disease led Dr. Gerson, to formulate this diet. His belief was that if you stay close to nature with your eating habits, you will have protection from disease.

Ingredients

For this diet, you juice all day long, using a non-centrifugal juicer. A typical day on the Gerson diet includes 13 glasses of juice made hourly from fresh and organic leafy greens, raw carrots and/or raw apples. You also eat three vegetarian meals of organic fruits, whole grains and vegetables. A plate of salad, cooked veggies with a baked potato, vegetable soup and juice constitute a meal. All day long, you can snack on fresh fruit.

Flax seed oil, taken once at lunch and once at dinnertime, is the only oil you can use. Water is used only for cooking and must be distilled or from a source of reverse osmosis. Allowable fresh fruits are apples, grapes, cherries, mangoes, peaches, oranges, apricots, grapefruits, bananas, tangerines, pears, melons, papayas and plums stewed. Fruit must be organic and fresh. Potatoes, carrots and apples are essential in the Gerson diet.

Forbidden Foods

You may not drink water; it dilutes the power of the juices. Do not use tin foil or plastic because they can contaminate your food. You may not have salt. Do not eat animal fat or protein at the beginning of the diet. Milk and soy grow cancer, according to Gerson, and they are not allowed. Anything that is frozen, canned, bottled, refined, salted, sculptured, smoked or bottled is forbidden. Alcohol, avocado, oregano and anything with baking soda, such as toothpaste or mouthwash, is not allowed. Bakery goods, cucumbers, mushrooms, nuts, peas, pickles, refined flour, spices, sugar and tap water are all not part of the diet. For the first eight weeks, no dairy, fish, meat or eggs are allowed on this diet.

Medications

Therapeutic amounts of minerals and vitamins you need to take for this diet are potassium compound, enemas of coffee and/or chamomile, pancreatic enzymes, thyroid hormone, vitamin B-12, Lugol's solution and injectable crude liver extract.

Gerson discovered that restricting sodium and using high levels of potassium lessened the swelling of tumors and general body edema. Detoxing ingredients, such as castor oil, coffee enemas and digestive enzymes all help to aid the body in eliminating damaged tissue.