Historical Archives

Recent Conclusions in Malnutrition

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this stunning assessment of the widespread yet unacknowledged malnourishment of America, Dr. Royal Lee describes in detail the health effects of eating processed foods as well as the difference between natural and synthetic vitamins. “We have drifted into this deplorable position of national malnutrition quite inadvertently,” he adds. “It is the result of scientific research with the objective of finding the best ways to create foods that are non-perishable that can be made by mass production methods…and distributed so cheaply that they can sweep all local competition from the market. Then, after there develops a suspicion that these ‘foods’ are inadequate to support life, modern advertising science steps in to propagandize the people into believing that there is nothing wrong with them, that they are products of scientific research intended to afford a food that is the last word in nutritive value.” Also included is the infamous advertisement in the Journal of the American Medical Association promoting white bread, the result of a financial arrangement between the American Medical Association and the American Institute of Baking. From a lecture delivered to the American Naprapathic Association Convention. Reprint 30, 1943.

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Historical Archives

May We Know Our Food

Summary: In 1907 Dr. Harvey Wiley was the most famous food activist in the United States, having helped prod Congress to pass the first federal food purity law in American history, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Dr. Wiley also happened to be the head of the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, the forerunner of today’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and was charged with enforcing the landmark consumer-protection legislation. In this article from the The Pittsburgh Gazette Times, published six months after the law took effect, Dr. Wiley discusses “two ideas kept always in view in all the sections of the act,” that is, the misbranding of foods and the addition of potentially dangerous additives and preservatives to food products. Little did Dr. Wiley know when he wrote this article that his insistence on enforcing these provisions would lead to his dismissal only a few years later, as industrial food manufacturers and their allies within the government succeeded in not only ousting Dr. Wiley from his post but turning the very law intended to protect the country’s foods into a rubber stamp for introducing insufficiently tested chemicals into America’s diet—a mind-boggling political end run that persists to this day. For more on Dr. Wiley and the corruption of the Pure Food and Drug Act, see “Enforcement of the Food Law” and The History of a Crime Against the Food Law in these archives. From The Pittsburgh Gazette Times, 1907.

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Historical Archives

How the Facts Are Suppressed in Connection with Bone Meal

By Alfred Aslander

Summary: In this circular from the Division of Agriculture, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, the author surveys research conducted in Sweden and Switzerland on supplementing the diet with bone meal to prevent dental caries (cavities). He exposes significant design flaws in a study cited by the dental establishment to discredit bone-meal supplementation, and he describes a number of other studies that showed bone meal to be highly effective in preventing tooth decay. He also recounts his thwarted effort to have his own research published by journals beholden to the dental establishment. “At least once upon a time it was considered as an axiom that scientific investigations should aim solely at the pursuit of the truth, and consequently scientific journals should aim at publishing the truth. In this case it seems…[their] aim has been something else.” Note: a year before this article appeared, Dr. Royal Lee introduced a completely raw, cold-processed veal bone meal powder (flour) for use by dentists. Reprint 134A, 1964.

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Historical Archives

Humanitarian Award to Dr. Royal Lee

By the National Health Federation

Summary: He was called “the Einstein of nutrition,” “father of holistic health,” and, simply, “genius.” He was Dr. Royal Lee, lauded in the 1972 book A New Breed of Doctor as “the best informed person on nutrition in America and perhaps even the world.” Yet Dr. Lee was much more than a nutritionist. He was also a highly successful engineer, businessman, farmer, educator, author, and researcher. But perhaps most of all, he was a humanitarian. Dr. Lee genuinely cared about the health and welfare of humanity, earning him legions of devoted admirers. In 1962 the National Health Federation [NHF] awarded Dr. Lee its highest honor, the Humanitarian Award, in “appreciation of his outstanding contribution to the health of America by fearlessly proclaiming and publishing nutritional truth.” The federations’ words were not chosen lightly. The truth that Dr. Lee spoke—about the corruption of the food supply in America at the hands of industrial food manufacturers and their lackeys in both the federal government and the medical profession—put him in the crosshairs of some of the most powerful institutions in the country. Yet Dr. Lee never wavered from his mission to inform the public of what was happening behind the “iron curtain” of America’s food and health, for which he was “loved and respected by thousands of seekers for the truth,” as the NHF declares in this 1962 excerpt from its national newsletter. From The National Health Federation Bulletin, 1962. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

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Historical Archives

Is This Shot Necessary?

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Dr. Royal Lee recalls numerous “miracle drugs” of his day that turned out to harmful or even lethal to many in the population. (With pharmaceutical-related deaths in America numbering in the tens to hundreds of thousands today, this practice has continued unabated.) It is the “cooperation with natural constructive forces” that brings health, Dr. Lee writes, not “drug or poison therapy by which the cell activities are subjected to new and unknown reactions with new and unknown end or side results that…undermine the future welfare of the patient.” This simple, sensible approach, Lee says, is the basis of his Vitamin Products Company, which provided complete, natural vitamins in the form of whole-food supplements. Lee also specifies some of the constituents of the natural vitamin C complex, which in addition to ascorbic acid includes an antihemorrhagic factor, a thrombin synthesis factor, a blood-oxygen factor, and a connective-tissue-integrity factor. From the Vitamin Products Company, circa 1940.

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Historical Archives

Letter to Collier’s Weekly Magazine

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this scathing correspondence to the editors of Collier’s Weekly magazine, Dr. Lee takes the periodical to task for a recent article on “cancer quacks” that appears to have been influenced by forces within organized medicine. Included among Lee’s pointed criticisms is the magazine’s failure to mention that one of the “quacks” it spotlighted had been acquitted and cleared of any wrongdoing by the Federal Trade Commission. 1951.

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Historical Archives

How Our Government Subsidizes Malnutrition and Disease

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this revealing booklet, Dr. Royal Lee describes how institutional policies in the USA were designed to protect the processing and refining—and thus the devitalization—of our food supply. He shows how the producers of processed dairy, grain, fruit, and meat induced the Food and Drug Administration as well as the American Medical Association (AMA) to overlook and even endorse their deadly products. In one astonishing case, Dr. Lee presents an ad paid for by the American Institute of Baking and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (under the direction of the journal’s editor, Morris Fishbein) in which the AMA’s Council on Foods assures readers that “White Bread Is Wholesome”—this at a time when many of those readers, doctor members of the AMA, were privately reporting harmful effects of white bread in their patients. “Few people in the United States are aware,” Dr. Lee writes, “of the ‘iron curtain’ maintained in this country to prevent the food consumer from knowing that he is being sold fraudulent foods, foods that have had the better part of their nutritional value removed or destroyed to facilitate the commercial handling of the foods and to enable big food enterprises to unfairly overpower, by price competition, the smaller ones.” For anyone wondering why modern human beings suffer so much chronic disease and ill health in general, this work leaves little doubt where the blame lies. Published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1949. Multiple original sources.

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Food in the News, Historical Archives

How “Organized Medicine” Is Fighting Vitamins

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this riveting personal account, Dr. Lee describes the legal battle that led him to discover that organized medicine was actively working to discredit and suppress nutritional approaches to health. He also documents evidence of how the medical-pharmaceutical industry had formed what was in essence a cartel aimed at controlling the healing arts and destroying any threat to its control over the nation’s healthcare. 1943.

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