Dr. Johanna Budwig was a German research chemist who spent much of her adult life studying oils with cancer curing in mind. She knew that cancer happens when oxygen is deficient in the body and she knew that plants create oxygen from carbon dioxide and the sun’s photons. So a plant oil contains oxygen that the plant stored in its leaves. But our body cells take in only nutrients that are water-soluble or have been somehow made water-soluble.
How to make a plant oil water-soluble was the problem she was addressing when she devised the combination of quark (cottage cheese) and flaxseed oil.
Dr. Johanna Budwig
Photo from a Google search
She first chose flaxseed oil because she knew that it was very high in oxygen and in Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids (she herself had discovered these fatty acids) and that most people are out of balance with these oil components. She thought that flaxseed oil could help correct that nutritional problem by providing both Omega 3 and Omega 6 in good proportions.
Then she cast around for a food high in sulphur. Being a top-notch biochemist, she knew that blending sulphur with the flax oil would make it water-soluble so that it could enter body cells and bring its oxygen in with it. After much experimentation, she settled on a precise way to combine these two ingredients.
The Right Proportions
To achieve the chemical change where the oil becomes water-soluble, we need to combine these ingredients in a two-to-one ratio: two units of cottage cheese to one of flax oil. The units can be tablespoons, 1/4 cups, 1/2 cups, or any other convenient thing — it depends on how much of this blend you want to end up with. For a cancer patient, the daily dose is six tablespoons of oil with twelve of cottage cheese. Personally, I use half that amount at a time and some days do it once, other days twice.
How to Blend the Ingredients
Do not put them in a blender. To cause the chemical change to happen, the mixing needs to be done with a hand-held blender. Not a whisk or a rotary mixer. An electric hand-held blender provides the best speed of mixing and within about a minute causes the oil to disappear into the cottage cheese. When you see that the oil is all or mostly invisible, set the bowl aside for five to eight minutes. After this little interval, you might notice that some oil has seeped out and the mixture needs more blending. Less than a minute more will finish the blend; but if it doesn’t, add a little cottage cheese and blend some more. You now have a thick or thickish pudding (depending on how moist the cottage cheese was).
Enhancing the Pudding
Unadorned, this blend has a slightly cheesy taste. Once the chemical change has happened, you can add anything at all to it without undoing the change. Many cancer sufferers add ground flaxseeds to it and little or nothing else. You can also make it a savory dish or a sweet one. I like to divide the blend in half, adding savory items to one half and fruit to the other. For example, I fry up a mix of vegetables, add a spoonful of Bragg’s Aminos and maybe some herbs or spices, sometimes a bit of canned salmon or sardines, and gradually add this to the blend, stirring and tasting to keep the mix no hotter than tepid.
In the sweet half, berries are great against cancer, but any fruits that you like will work. If you’re a chocolate freak like me, you can chop up some dark chocolate (at least 70% dark, says my German cancer doctor) and also use some coconut cream, tahini, whatever mix appeals to you. As long as you blended the basic pudding fully, the oil will stay put as part of the cottage cheese. For me, this all makes a full two-part meal as it’s high in protein, but of course, you can also have a salad or whatever seems necessary to you.
Budwig Blend Caveats
- By itself, this blend is not a cure for cancer. It needs to be eaten with a supporting anti-cancer diet and Dr. Budwig went on to devise such a diet.
- Flaxseed oil is fragile because it goes rancid at room temperature. So don’t buy it from a store shelf — buy it from a store refrigerator. If a store has it on a shelf, there’s no telling how long they might have left it sitting out in the sun while the staff took a coffee break. A store that refrigerates it will surely have handled it wisely on arrival.
- Keep your flaxseed oil refrigerated; don’t let it sit around on the counter while you answer the phone. Also replace the bottle’s cap immediately after using the oil as air causes rancidity — as does light, which is why it’s always sold in a dark, non-translucent bottle.
- You might wonder about adding fruit to the blend if you have cancer. Doesn’t fruit sugar, fructose, feed cancer? This is controversial. I’ll blog about it later. If you worry about this, just use blueberries or green apples, which are relatively low in fructose.
- Once your Budwig Blend is ready to eat, don’t delay beyond about 15 minutes. Eat it fresh. And leftovers do not keep well for a later snack.
You can read more detail about all of the above in My Cancer Survival Saga And How You Could Star in Yours.