Ragnar Mountain

Ragnar Berg (born September 1, 1873 in Gothenburg , † March 31, 1956 in Borstel near Bad Oldesloe ) was a Swedish chemist and nutritionist.

Berg, the son of the historian and archaeologist Wilhelm Berg (1839-1915), studied from 1891 at Chalmers Polytechnic in Gothenburg, graduating in 1895. He then worked in a factory in Gothenburg and from 1898 at the Chemical Investigation Office in Giessen and in 1899 at the Agricultural Research Institute in Darmstadt. From 1902 he was in Karl Lingner's Central Office for Dental Hygiene in Dresden, where he began working with the dentist Carl Röse, with whom he worked closely in nutritional research. From 1909 to 1921 he headed the laboratory for nutritional physiology in Heinrich Lahmann's homeopathic sanatorium at the Weißen Hirsch in Dresden. In 1921 he was dismissed during the inflationary period because the owners reoriented the sanatorium to more lucrative business areas (gynecology, psychotherapy). Berg conducted further research privately in Dresden. From 1927 he was at the hospital in Dresden-Friedrichstadt, where he headed the physiological department from 1934 to 1945. In 1945 he was back in Sweden in a private laboratory at a hospital in Stockholm (until 1951). In 1954 his wife Ella (whom he had married in 1902 and with whom he had two sons, including the physician Gunnar Berg ) died and he fell ill and moved to live with his son in Germany.

He examined the role of trace elements and minerals (such as calcium, manganese, zinc, copper, gold) in nutrition and showed the pathological consequences of various forms of malnutrition (for example damage caused by nitrogen-containing compounds in the event of a lack of minerals). He frequently undertook self-experiments in nutritional research.

From him comes an acid-base theory of nutrition with appropriate additives (basics), which are supposed to help against acidification , which was quite popular in the 1920s and 1930s and was widely used in alternative medicine (see alkaline nutrition ), but mainly used by nutritionists was and is rejected. In his theory he tied in with the work of Ernst Leopold Salkowski . He later advocated a vegetarian diet.

Fonts

• The influence of scalding on the nutritional value of our vegetable diet, Dresden, 1911
• Food and beverages, their composition and their influence on health, with special consideration of the ash components, Dresden: Holze & Pahl, 1913
• The vitamins: critical overview of the doctrine of the supplements, Leipzig: Hirzel, 1922.
• with Martin Vogel: The basics of a correct diet, Dresden 1930
• Protein requirement and mineral metabolism with the simplest diet, Hirzel 1931
• Deficiency Diseases 1935

literature

• Winfried Pötsch u. a. Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989
• Christian Rummel: Ragnar Berg. Life and work of the Swedish nutrition researcher and founder of the basic diet. (Medical dissertation Dresden 2001). With a foreword by Gundolf Keil. Peter Land, Frankfurt am Main / Bern / Vienna / Oxford / New York 2003 (= European University Papers, Series VII, Department B: History of Medicine. Volume 10).