The First Health Food Store in America Was Opened by a Naturopathic Doctor in 1896

In 1896, a 24-year-old German immigrant named Benedict Lust opened a small store in New York City. He called it a “Kneipp store,” named after Father Sebastian Kneipp, the German priest whose water cure treatments had saved Lust’s life after conventional doctors gave up on his tuberculosis and sent him home to die.

That little store was the first health food store in America built with that purpose from the start.

Lust didn’t stop there. He opened sanitariums in New Jersey and Florida, founded the American School of Naturopathy in 1901, and published journals in both German and English. He trained in osteopathy, homeopathy, chiropractic, and eventually earned his MD. He gave this new movement a name: naturopathy, a whole system of natural healing that included hydrotherapy, herbal medicine, nutrition, exercise, and what we would now call mind-body medicine.

One of his regular customers at the New York store was Bernarr Macfadden, the man who is widely credited with inventing the physical fitness movement in America.

At its peak, Lust claimed that 40,000 practitioners were practicing naturopathy across the country. For reference, the AMA had about 70,000 members by 1910. Let that sink in.

Naturopathic doctors were on equal footing with conventional physicians, and patients had real choices about how they wanted to heal.

Then in 1910, the Flexner Report changed everything. But that is a story for another post.

Every Whole Foods you walk into, every organic market, and every clean label on every bottle in your cabinet all trace back to one naturopathic doctor in New York City, 130 years ago.

Naturopathic medicine isn’t the alternative. It was the original.

Recommended Reading from the NDNR Archive:

“A Naturopathic Love Story” by Sussanna Czeranko, ND

https://ndnr.com/pediatrics/a-naturopathic-love-story/

“The Trials of Benedict Lust” by Sussanna Czeranko, ND

https://ndnr.com/education-web-articles/past-pearls-the-trials-of-benedict-lust/

“Benedict in Europe, 1907” by Sussanna Czeranko, 

“The White Plague” by Sussanna Czeranko, ND

https://ndnr.com/the-white-plague/

“A Day at the Jungborn” by Sussanna Czeranko, ND

https://ndnr.com/nature-cure/a-day-at-the-jungborn/

Razi Ann Berry Razi is the founder and publisher of NDNR, Journal of Applied Natural Medicine. She co-founded the publication in 2005 and has spent 21 years documenting naturopathic clinical practice read by a vast spectrum of healthcare practitioners.  Her work has been recognized with the Champion of Naturopathic Medicine Award from the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians and the Impact Award for Best Digital Media from the Mindshare Collaborative.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author: Razi Ann Berry