Gerhard Volkheimer

Gerhard Volkheimer
Born
Died
Nationality	German
Education
Occupation	Gastroenterologist
Known for	Rediscovery and characterization of persorption of microparticles across the gut wall
Notable works	"Persorption of Particles," Digestion (1968)
Website

Gerhard Volkheimer was a German gastroenterologist at the Charité hospital in Berlin who, in the 1960s, rediscovered and extensively documented "persorption": the passage of intact, undigested food and environmental microparticles (starch granules, pollen, cellulose fibers, and other hard particles) through the intestinal wall directly into the blood, lymph, and even cerebrospinal fluid.

Early life

Detailed biographical records of Volkheimer's early life are not readily available.

Education and career

Volkheimer managed the laboratories for experimental gastroenterology at the Charité, one of Berlin's leading medical institutions, while also maintaining a gastroenterological practice at Bayerischer Platz in West Berlin. His experimental studies on the enteral assimilation of microparticles ran from 1959 to 1967, work that was possible only until 1967 given the political conditions of the divided city.

Notable/unique

The phenomenon Volkheimer studied, later called the "Herbst-Volkheimer effect" after Ernst Herbst's original 19th-century observation, showed that solid, hard microparticles ranging roughly 5-100 microns in size, including starch, cellulose, iron particles, charcoal, pollen, spores, and plastic globules, are routinely and regularly absorbed from the digestive tract into systemic circulation, crossing the epithelial lining paracellularly with the help of gut motor activity. In laboratory animals, he found starch granules in the blood, lymph, bile, and cerebrospinal fluid after they were fed raw starch, and mice fed raw starch showed a markedly accelerated aging process; dissection revealed a multitude of starch-grain-blocked arterioles throughout every organ, each blockage killing the cells dependent on that vessel's blood supply.

Connection to Ray Peat's work

Ray Peat treated Volkheimer's persorption findings as evidence that could have led, a century and a half earlier, to a proper scientific study of allergy and immunology in relation to the digestive system, had the original 19th-century observations of food particles in blood and urine not been dismissed by prevailing preconceptions about bodily structure and function.

Volkheimer found that mice fed raw starch aged at an abnormally fast rate, and when he dissected the starch-fed mice, he found a multitude of starch-grain-blocked arterioles in every organ, each of which caused the death of the cells that depended on the blood supplied by that arteriole.

— Ray Peat

Volkheimer immediately recognized that the presence of food particles in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid needed to be investigated, because of the circulatory and immunological implications. Volkheimer was concerned about the health implications of the persorption of alien particles even before our endogenous particulate regulatory system had been recognized.

— Ray Peat

Peat directly quoted Volkheimer's own summary of the phenomenon in his article on Carrageenan: "Solid, hard microparticles, such as starch granules, pollen, cellulose particles, fibres and crystals, whose diameters are well into the micrometre range, are incorporated regularly and in considerable numbers from the digestive tract. Motor factors play an important part in the paracellular penetration of the epithelial cell layer."

The same 1960s period in which Volkheimer rediscovered persorption in the West also saw North Korean researcher Kim Bong-han report a "third vascular system" carrying DNA-containing particles, a finding almost completely ignored outside a small circle of acupuncturists.

Death

Death details are not established in available sources.

Published works

• "Persorption of Particles," Digestion 1 (1968)
• "Persorption of microparticles," Pathologe 14(5) (1993)

See also

• Ray Peat
• Kim Bong-han
• Carrageenan