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WOLFGANG LUTZ (27.5.1913 – 19.9.2010)

Wolfgang J. Lutz, Dr med. habil., early pioneer of low carbohydrate nutrition, made an outstanding contribution to medicine. He showed how, with little recourse to surgery or drugs, fundamental improvement could be made to health through diet and demonstrated, inter alia, a probable way of preventing the huge and mounting toll exacted by obesity and diabetes.

Born in 1913 in Upper Austria, Dr Lutz read medicine at Innsbruck and Vienna. After a noteworthy career in scientific research, in recognition of which he was awarded the distinction of Habilitation and a postdoctoral degree in internal and aviation medicine from the University of Vienna, Wolfgang Lutz became a practicing physician.

As a consultant in internal medicine, Wolfgang Lutz turned his attention to the dramatic escalation of degenerative disease. His wide-ranging and penetrating gaze swept from our Ice-Age origins to the modern world and his approach to medicine changed. Taking as his basic thesis that the pattern of our hormonal secretion is still tuned to the largely animal food diet of that distant epoch, Lutz surmised that too large an intake of carbohydrate might disturb the intrinsic harmony of the endocrine system and hence our health, ultimately leading to disease. This caused him, as early as the 1950s, to instigate a diet for long-term use that he felt to be low enough in carbohydrate to be compatible with our genetic inheritance and so restore the missing harmony.

The body’s primary response to an increase in dietary carbohydrate is to increase insulin production. Wolfgang Lutz demonstrated that his obese patients often suffered from an overproduction of insulin and identified a seesawing of compensatory hormonal measures: typically, an increase in insulin, thyroid and adrenal hormones and a decrease in the growth hormone. Sex hormones were also affected. Lutz was the first to describe how these disturbances in hormonal regulation and their very varied repercussions underlay many of the diseases of civilisation (1).

In the early 1960s, Wolfgang Lutz conducted ground-breaking hen-feeding trials, which showed that, in hens, a reduction in carbohydrate - not of fat - reduced the incidence of arteriosclerosis. (Hens like humans had moved from a largely animal to a largely carbohydrate diet and suffered similar changes in their arterial walls in old age.) Reassured by this, together with the relief from pain and inflammation he experienced with his own osteoarthritic hips and the positive results from his growing clinical experience, Lutz was to spend the next forty or so years observing on a wide range of ailments both the immediate results and, when possible, the effect of following his diet for many years.

As it went to the very root of the problem, the simple expedient of sufficient carbohydrate restriction (with no limitation put on protein or fat intake, nor on calories except as a short-term measure for extreme obesity) proved a remarkable therapeutic tool.

Dr Lutz was to find that his low carbohydrate diet was effective with both childhood obesity and with hyperinsulinism (a hormonal pathway to both common obesity and, through exhaustion of supply, to Type II diabetes). Carefully implemented and occasionally with temporary support from drugs, Lutz further demonstrated the benefit of his diet to a wide range of medical conditions from early multiple sclerosis to heart failure, from morbus Crohn and ulcerative colitis to osteoarthritis; he showed it could lower cholesterol levels, normalise high and low levels of blood iron and calcium, ease many problems of reproduction and prevent the vascular complications of adult onset diabetes.

Wolfgang Lutz also found that his low carbohydrate diet brought patients many general improvements amongst which were improved immune function, a calmer nervous system, better digestion, enhanced skin and tissue quality, and a positive effect on overall health. His main book Leben ohne Brot reached its 16th edition in 2007 after being in continuous print for forty years.

Dr Lutz died in Austria in 2010, at 97 years of age.

Books by W Lutz:

Leben ohne Brot, Selecta-Verlag, Planegg bei München, 1967

Internistischer Alltag, Selecta-Verlag, bei München, 1970

Die Lutz Diät, Ariston Verlag, Geneva, 1986

Dismantling a Myth: the role of fat and carbohydrates in our diet, Charles Thomas, USA, 1986

Cholesterin und tierische Fette, SMV Edition, Materia Medica, München,1988

Kranker Magen - Kranker Darm: Was wirklich hilft, SAYLA Fachverlag, Grafelfing, 1995

With Jürgen Schole:

Regulationskrankheiten, Jürgen Schole und Wolfgang Lutz, Ferdinand Enke Verlag, Stuttgart, 1988

With Christian Allan:

Life without Bread: How a low-carbohydrate diet can save your life, Allan C B & Lutz W J, Keats, USA, 2000 In addition, Wolfgang Lutz published over 60 articles.

Books about the life and work W Lutz:

Uncle Wolfi’s Secret, Valerie Bracken, Just Perhaps?, Edinburgh, 2013

My Life without Bread: Dr Lutz at 90, Valerie Bracken, Just Perhaps?, Edinburgh, 2014

Citation (1) Jürgen Schole, Foreword to the 9th edition of Leben ohne Brot