Historical Archives

Clinical Nutrition (Food Versus Drugs)

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this revealing article from 1948, Dr. Royal Lee calls out organized medicine for deceitfully thwarting the field of clinical nutrition. “This pernicious and corrupt misuse of the facilities of medical education has been [totally] effective in creating the idea that nutritional therapy is futile and leans toward quackery.” Lee goes on to show how medicine became focused solely on therapies involving pharmaceutical drugs, and that it ruthlessly marginalized drugless healing professions through laws preventing the dissemination of information and knowledge. Published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1948.

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Historical Archives

Clarence Darrow on Medical Control

By Clarence Darrow

Summary: Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) was a famous American lawyer known for his wit, his oratory skill, and his defense of liberty and the common man. His most famous trial was the “Monkey Trial” of 1925, in which he defended John T. Scopes and opposed William Jennings Bryan. In this transcript of a radio address, Darrow defends chiropractic and the rights of the public to pursue the healthcare of their choice, rather than be limited to the monopoly of medical practice. “I would have no quarrel with the medical profession if they would leave me alone,” he says. “But I do object to being forced to patronize them.” He adds, “I stand for the right of everybody to regulate his own life for himself, and if he wants to live and die without the aid of the medical profession, he should have the right to do it, and if one should not have that right, it is pretty hard to tell what right we should have.” Timeless words for anyone who prizes liberty and opposes all forms of tyranny. From ABC News, 1928.

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Historical Archives

Case of Dental Caries vs. the Sugar Interests

By Allison G. James, DDS

Summary: The overwhelming case that consumption of refined carbohydrates is the cause of tooth decay is presented by dentist and author Allison James. Even back in 1949, as this article from Journal of the Southern California State Dental Association illustrates, this theory was opposed institutionally by both commercial sugar interests and the profession of dentistry at large. Instead, conventional dentistry continued—and continues today—to blindly follow its eternal mantra: Drill ’em and fill ’em. Never mind why the caries are there in the first place! From Journal of the Southern California State Dental Association, 1949. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 42.

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Historical Archives

Cancer and the Medical Research Business

By Malcolm Lawrence

Summary: This report exposing the corruption and lack of integrity in the cancer-research industry was published under a nom-de-plume (pen name) to protect the author’s status as a medical researcher within the cancer-research establishment. (See the editor’s note preceding the article regarding this.) It describes how natural therapies were never given a chance to demonstrate efficacy, while expensive and toxic chemotherapeutic agents glided right through the research community. Notably, the story of Dr. Andrew Ivy of the University of Illinois and his Krebiozen treatment is told in this historically important document. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research special reprint 5-62, 1962. Original source unknown.

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Historical Archives

Vitamins Are Not Drugs!

By Dr. Simon Benson

Summary: Dr. Benson of the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research responds to an article titled “Are Vitamins Drugs?” in the trade journal The Apothecary. Benson clearly lays out the differences between the therapeutic application of food and food-based vitamins and the use of pharmaceutical medicines. He refutes medical dogma that insists that anything used therapeutically is automatically classified as a drug. (This definition, of course, conveniently puts any substance being used therapeutically under regulatory control of the FDA, even if it’s food.) This is an early and strong defense of natural approaches to healthcare and the freedom of physicians to treat their patients as they see fit, without government interference on behalf of trade groups such as the pharma/medical cartel. From The Apothecary, 1946. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 25.

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Historical Archives

V.E. Irons Conviction Upheld for Warning Americans About Soil and Food Supply

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Dr. Lee comments on a report in the Drug Trade News on the upholding of a conviction of naturalist V.E. Irons. (For details on Irons’s original trial and conviction, see “The Irons Frame-up (Its Whys and Wherefores)” by Morris Bealle.) According to Lee, Irons was convicted essentially for publicizing this statement: “Nearly everyone in this country is suffering from malnutrition or [is] in danger of such suffering because of demineralization and depletion of soils and the refining and processing of food.” While this statement was supported time and time again by early nutrition studies, Irons nonetheless served a year in jail for his proclamation, which, Lee points out, was made in the same spirit of Dr. Harvey Wiley, the original head of the FDA who was ousted by representatives within the government influenced by the food-manufacturing and medical industries. 1957.

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Historical Archives

The Irons Frame-up (Its Whys and Wherefores)

By Morris Bealle

Summary: Morris Bealle’s newsletter American Capsule News reports on the conviction, fine, and jailing of the great American naturalist Victor Earl Irons for the crime of informing the American people of what was happening to their food supply. “It is obvious that Mr. Irons has committed two ‘unpardonable sins’,” writes Bealle. “The first is distributing vitamins that keep people well and away from drug stores. The second is exposing some of the crimes of the Food and Drug Administration who, as Dr. [Harvey] Wiley said, are lynching, raping and murdering the laws passed by Congress to protect the public from poisoned and adulterated foods.” Irons, like his friend Dr. Royal Lee, warned the public of the depletion of America’s soil, the refining and processing of the basic food supply, and the cause-and effect-relationship of these practices to health. In the case, the FDA marched out five “health authorities” from Harvard, including the infamous Dr. Frederick Stare, to testify to the “fraudulent” nature of Irons’s statements. Irons was convicted on federal charges and served a year in jail. As this report reveals, those pioneers at the vanguard of nutritional knowledge paid dearly for the right to speak out about what was happening to America’s food supply, health, and freedom. From American Capsule News, 1956. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

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Historical Archives

Protest Against Persecution of the Health Movement by the Food and Drug Administration

By Karl B. Lutz, Attorney

Summary: A landmark letter of protest to the U.S. Congress against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s blatant persecution of natural health practices in the United States. First, attorney Karl Lutz outlines some basic tenets of whole food nutrition—principles championed, ironically, by the first head of the FDA, Dr. Harvey Wiley, back in the early 1900s—such as the need to grow foods in mineral-rich soil, to process such foods as minimally as possible, and to keep them free of potentially harmful foreign substances. By 1963, when this letter was written, these principles had been thoroughly abandoned by the FDA, Lutz declares. In fact, he says, the agency had become the very opposite of what Dr. Wiley had envisioned for it. Instead of protecting natural foods and natural food therapies, the FDA had colluded with industrial food processors and institutional medicine to work against whole food nutrition by actively persecuting, prosecuting, and intimidating professionals promoting natural nutritional approaches to health. Lutz singles out the 1939 case of the FDA against Dr. Royal Lee as particularly egregious. “I have examined the records of that suit, and in my opinion as a lawyer with some knowledge of biochemistry, it was one of the greatest miscarriages of justice I have ever seen.” This document is a forerunner, by over a decade, of massive petitioning of Congress for relief from the pharma-medical cartel monopoly, whose agenda in healthcare was—and still is—preferentially enforced by the agencies of the U.S. government. National Health Federation, 1963. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 8-63.

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Historical Archives

No Pure-Food Action Now

By Harvey W. Wiley, MD

Summary: In 1906 the United States Congress passed the country’s first federal “truth in labeling” law, the Pure Food and Drug Act. Among the provisions of the landmark legislation was the prohibition of any food preservative or other additive that could be injurious to consumers. Charged with determining the safety of those food additives was the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, a division within the Department of Agriculture (USDA) that would later become the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The head of the bureau, Dr. Harvey Wiley, adopted a “better safe than sorry” policy, banning any additive that showed a possibility of causing harm. Dr. Wiley’s approach immediately earned him enemies within the food manufacturing industry, which used its influence in the government to circumvent the bureau’s rulings and eventually oust its chief. In 1925 Dr. Wiley struck back, publishing a letter to President Calvin Coolidge in which he admonished the government for its complicity in bypassing the food law and allowing potentially dangerous additives into America’s food supply. After the president demanded an explanation from the USDA, Dr. Wiley wrote the following letter expressing his profound disappointment in the department’s position, which opened the floodgates to a stream of questionable substances in America’s foods that continues to flow to this day. Following Dr. Wiley’s letter are several advertisements for popular foods of the time, showing just how early industrial food processors had infiltrated the nation’s food supply. From Good Housekeeping, 1926.

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Historical Archives

Letter to the Directors of the American Academy of Nutrition

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Dr. Royal Lee, writing on behalf of the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, urges the directors of the American Academy of Nutrition to adopt an official code of principles. Among the principles he suggests are addressing head on controversial subjects such as the pasteurization of milk and fluoridation of water as well as actively countering the trend toward “counterfeit foods” such as corn syrup (glucose), hydrogenated foods, and artificial colors. This is Dr. Lee’s public policy in a nutshell. The Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1957.

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Historical Archives

The Rife Microscope, or “Facts and Their Fate”

By Dr. Royal Lee and by R.E. Seidel, MD, and M. Elizabeth Winter

Summary: The Rife Microscope is one of the most fascinating and tragic stories in the history of science. Royal Raymond Rife was a genius of optics who in the 1930s invented a revolutionary microscope that identified microorganisms based on a characteristic wavelength of light emitted by each. (Rife discovered these “signature emissions” through use of his scope.) Even more incredibly, Rife observed something that challenges the very basis of medicine’s “germ theory”: Microbes such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi are able to morph into each other depending on the conditions of their environment (which, in turn, are determined in humans largely by nutritional status.) So, instead of the tens of thousands of species of microorganisms considered distinct by conventional science, Rife said, there are really only about ten fundamental forms of microbes, each able to morph into countless numbers of others. Rife not only collaborated with noted bacteriologist Dr. Arthur Kendall of Northwestern University Medical School to demonstrate such transformations, but the two investigators showed they were able to destroy pathogenic forms by radiating them with wavelengths of light in resonance with their signature emission.

When Rife began to publish his findings, he was predictably branded a quack by the medical establishment, which brought its full efforts to discredit and destroy his work. All references and studies involving his microscope were actively barred from medical journals, and any doctor using his microscope was ostracized from the medical community. Yet one article, published in 1944 in the non-medically-controlled journal of the Franklin Institute—one of America’s oldest and most prestigious centers of science—survived. In 1950, the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research re-published the lengthy article, which details the technology behind both the electron microscope and Rife’s Universal Microscope (skip to pages 124–127 for information specifically on Rife’s research), along with several concluding pages of Lee’s own commentary poignantly summarizing Rife’s discoveries. If nothing else, read these final two pages of the document. The implications of Lee’s words, as well as the potential applications Rife’s long lost microscope, are beyond profound. Reprint 47, 1944.

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Historical Archives

Your Health: What It Is Worth to the Racketeer

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Every misdeed has a history, and the history of the destruction of the American food supply is a story that few know from its beginnings. Yet it’s a story worth knowing because its consequences have been and continue to be indeterminably enormous. In this booklet, Dr. Lee tells the story up through 1940, by which time it was many decades in the making. Lee calls out the entire industrial food and drug business as a racket in which profit, not the health of Americans, dictates public and private policy, and deception about the nutritional value of industrially processed foods is actively practiced. Richly documented with supporting evidence, this booklet is a valuable reference for anyone interested in the true cause of most disease in America—malnutrition as a result of processed and refined foods. 1940.

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Historical Archives

Who Does the Law Protect?

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: An inspired article by Dr. Lee about the irony of praying to God to overcome disease while ignoring the simple laws of health here on Earth. “Man needs no miraculous intervention to have perfect health and happiness,” he writes, “unless he first commits criminal acts of food adulteration and contamination.” Lee explains that there is “a frightful conspiracy to keep the public in the dark about the devastating, death-dealing effects of modern food counterfeits—the synthetic glucose, the synthetic hydrogenated fats, the refined cereals, the refined breakfast foods, the coal tar dyes and coal tar flavors that ensure acceptance of otherwise tasteless and colorless food frauds which destroy human life to the tune of over a million victims a year.” He adds that heart disease—the leading cause of death then as it is today—is so effectively countered by food therapy that “nine out of ten sufferers can be shown by cardiographic sound recordings to respond favorably within ten minutes to natural food products.” Originally published in Natural Food and Farming, 1955.

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Historical Archives

Which to Follow—Food Facts or Theories?

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Dr. Royal Lee illustrates the nutritional dangers of a diet of processed foods through the famous example of New York Senator W.P. Richardson’s hog farm. Richardson, after shifting the diet of his pigs from whole corn and whole wheat to stale white bread and rolls, found the health of the hogs’ offspring to suffer tremendously. “The young pigs developed at only half the usual rate of growth and were subject to many diseases normally foreign to the pig species, particularly pneumonia,” Dr. Lee writes. In addition, the sows “had small liters or aborted.” Dr. Lee notes the similarity between the symptoms of these malnourished pigs and those of the disease-ridden crew of a German warship who’d been reduced to a diet of primarily white flour and sugar. “You do not need to be a professor of biochemistry and medicine,” Dr. Lee opines, to figure out that “lowered resistance caused by a deficient diet is apparently the real cause of most disease.” From Let’s Live Magazine, 1958.

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Historical Archives

The War Between Health Foods and Death Foods

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: If there are “health food stores” today, what motivated their creation? In this article from the 1956 issue of the National Health Federation Bulletin, Dr. Royal Lee recounts some of the events and decisions that paved the way for the appalling condition of the American diet, showing how the processed-food industry and self-proclaimed public and private health authorities sold the health of the American public down the river and branded all opposition to refined foods as faddists, quacks, and racketeers. No one recites this tale better and with more provable facts than Royal Lee. He was there. Reprint 301, 1956.

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Historical Archives

Quacks

By Elizabeth Terry

Summary: In this poignant 1957 article, author Elizabeth Terry recounts stories of the many inventors and investigators throughout history who were initially branded frauds before the merit of their contribution was understood and accepted. Terry cites the Wright brothers, whose first “flying machine” was disbelieved by the popular press in spite of eyewitness accounts filed by their very own reporters, as well as one Joshua Coppersmith, who was arrested in 1865 for demonstrating a device he claimed would “convey the human voice over metallic wires so that it will be heard by the listener on the other end.” Of course, today the telephone and airplane are so common that we tend to forget there was a time when they would have been impossible to imagine. More importantly, we forget that innovators in any field tend to be discredited before they are ballyhooed, and sometimes, as in the case of Dr. Royal Lee and the other pioneers of nutrition, it is many years before the wisdom they offered passes from quackery to common sense. From the National Health Federation Bulletin, 1957.

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Historical Archives

Pure Food and Pure Fraud

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this 1957 article, Dr. Royal Lee reflects on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Food and Drug Administration—originally called the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry—by detailing the corruption that transformed the agency from watchdog of America’s food supply to lapdog of the country’s food manufacturing, medical, and pharmaceutical industries. Dr. Lee recalls the noble vision of the FDA’s founder, Dr. Harvey Wiley, who fought for years to establish federal oversight of food safety and purity in America, only to see the agency he helped create become corrupted, quickly and secretly, by a confluence of commercial and political interests. Dr. Lee writes: “In the midst of public praise for Wiley’s pioneering and public thanksgiving over the (supposed) fact that foods, drugs, and cosmetics are pure and truly labeled, we are likely to overlook the way in which Wiley’s work has been perverted. We may remain ignorant of the way in which the FDA protects the food, drug, and cosmetic industries and the medical monopoly at the expense of the public it is supposed to serve. We may forget that Wiley himself was ousted for trying to stand up against these powerful interests.” This is a rich historical document alerting the American people to a matter on which they had been—and continue to be—intentionally and systematically deceived. From Liberation magazine, 1957. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 94.

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Historical Archives

The Progressing Totalitarian Takeover in the USA (in the Area of the Healing Arts)

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: “We shall here confine our discussion to the loss of liberty in connection with the choice of our doctor, and his loss of liberty in the choice of a method of treatment of our ills.” Dr. Royal Lee defends alternatives to medicine and reveals the sinister methods used by organized medicine to entreat the government to squash any competing approaches to health. Dr. Lee wrote this courageous piece after more than 30 years of fighting the corrupt system of the medical/pharmaceutical monopoly, condoned and enforced by governmental agencies. With medicine still enjoying a near monopoly in the minds of the public as the only “legitimate” healing art, this article shows for the historical record how the medical industry unscrupulously secured its place in our society and then entrenched its own definition and self-serving standards of what is science and what is quackery. 1962.

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Historical Archives

Practical Methods in Preparing Health-Building Foods

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Dr. Royal Lee cooks! In this article the great nutritionist describes nutrient-conserving methods of preparing meats, vegetables, grains, and fruits. He strongly urges using only organically grown foods and reminds readers to eat acidifying and alkalizing foods in relatively equal amounts. “Cereals and grains are all acid. Root and leaf vegetables are all alkalline. Meat and fish are acid. Fruits may be either—apple and grape are most neutral.” Publication source and date unknown.

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Historical Archives

Open Letters Concerning Dr. Frederick J. Stare

Various authors

Summary: In March 1957 Modern Nutrition printed the following excerpts from a stunning series of open letters by John Pearmain of the Boston Nutrition Society to Dr. Nathan Pusey, President of Harvard University, regarding “the matter of standards of research under Dr. Frederick Stare,” head of the university’s department of nutrition. Dr. Stare (1911–2002), probably more than any other public figure in U.S. history, was responsible for convincing Americans that sugar and other refined foods are harmless and that whole foods are no more valuable nutritionally than processed ones. “Actually,” he once wrote, “we get as much food value from refined foods that have been enriched as from natural foods, and sometimes more.” Dr. Stare also advised Americans to “eat your [food] additives—they’re good for you” and recommended Coca-Cola as “a healthy between-meals snack.” In the following excerpts, Mr. Pearmain questions the reasons for Dr. Stare’s pronouncements, suggesting it was not the weight of scientific evidence that underlay them but rather the financial might of his department’s funders, which comprised some of the country’s largest food processing companies (including, yes, Coca-Cola) as well as major chemical and drug interests. While these links were carefully kept from the public during Dr. Stare’s lifetime, recently they have begun to come to light, most notably in the 2016 exposé “Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease” in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine. The investigation pieces a paper trail from the Sugar Research Foundation—an industrial benefactor of Harvard’s nutrition department whose advisory board Dr. Stare served on—to research published by Harvard investigators intentionally obscuring evidence against sugar in the causation of heart disease. While the news of influence peddling at America’s most prestigious university came as a shock to many readers, Harvard’s “sugar scandal” is merely the tip of an iceberg of dubious activity by Dr. Stare and his department, as the following letters show. Included after the excerpts is some fascinating commentary by Dr. Royal Lee, a leading proponent of natural food nutrition during the 1950s and strong critic of Dr. Stare. From Modern Nutrition, 1957. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

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