By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. Royal Lee at his prescient best. Anticipating ideas such as the glycemic index and insulin resistance by about four decades, Dr. Lee laments the negative effects of high-glycemic foods such as refined sugar, which “disturb the body mechanisms,” he says. From Let’s Live magazine, 1958.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. Lee lays out the case against sugar in this article from the Journal of the American Academy of Applied Nutrition. In particular, he lambastes corn syrup, or pure glucose chemically derived from cornstarch, for being too quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, thus overstressing the pancreas and wreaking havoc on the body’s insulin-response system. Astute readers will realize Lee is essentially anticipating the creation of the glycemic index, which measures how fast and how hard the carbohydrates we eat hit the bloodstream in the form of blood sugar. “There is a very good reason why starches are better than sugars as energy foods,” he says. “It is because they are assimilated slower than the sugars, and thereby fail to overload our pancreatic function of supplying insulin.” Reprint 30D, 1950.
