Cost of Malnutrition

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this creative and forward-thinking commentary on preventive healthcare, Dr. Royal Lee discusses the ways in which proper nutrition saves businesses money by fostering employee health. Getting enough vitamin A complex, for instance, helps maintain the integrity of mucous membranes and thus prevents infection and lost man hours. Sufficient vitamin B complex keeps the nerves and heart functioning properly, while adequate vitamin C complex promotes stamina by optimizing the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood. A proper amount of vitamin D complex prevents cramps, irritability, and bone-calcium loss, and so on. From Let’s Live magazine, 1958.

The Soft-Spoken Desperado: Goldberger

By Paul de Kruif

Summary: Paul de Kruif was an American bacteriologist turned writer who penned one of the most famous popular-science books of all time, The Microbe Hunters. In this gripping excerpt from his later work Hunger Fighters, de Kruif tells the incredible story of Dr. Joseph Goldberger, the physician and epidemiologist of the U.S. Public Health Service charged with resolving the mysterious pellagra epidemic that was devastating the southern United States in the early 1900s. Through keen observation and genuine open-mindedness, Dr. Goldberger discovered and proved that the cause of pellagra is not a microbe—as was fiercely believed by most doctors and scientists of the time—but rather a nutritional deficiency. Dr. Goldberger’s struggle to convince his colleagues of his findings reflects the tremendous sway that “germ theory” held in medicine at the time and which stubbornly continues to dominate the field’s view of health and disease today. De Kruif’s account illustrates well the lengths medicine has always gone to deny and downplay the role of malnutrition in human illness. (On a related note, while medicine today attributes pellagra to a deficiency of the single B-complex vitamer niacin, nutrition investigators of the mid-twentieth century asserted that the cause of the disease is the lack of a complex of compounds that includes not just niacin but numerous cofactors as well. They named this complex vitamin G—the G standing for Goldberger.) From Hunger Fighters, 1928.

Quotations on Vitamins from the United States Department of Agriculture Yearbook for 1939

By the United States Department of Agriculture

Summary: Excerpts from one of the most quotable government documents ever published. In the 1930s, even as the FDA was harassing doctors and companies promoting nutritional therapy, the USDA published independent studies demonstrating the widespread effects of vitamin malnutrition in the American public (proving that not everyone in the department was asleep at the switch as America’s food supply became adulterated, refined, and chemicalized). The USDA Yearbook for 1939 was such a surprisingly candid assessment of nutritional deficiencies in the country that the Lee Foundation published and distributed highlights from it in the form of the booklet shown here. If the statements in the USDA’s yearbook had been published by supplement companies, the FDA would have brought legal actions. Unsurprisingly, reports like this stopped coming out of the USDA in subsequent years. From The United States Department of Agriculture Yearbook for 1939.

Vitamin F and Carbamide in Calcium Metabolism

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: An important article about two of the most overlooked nutritionally and biochemically essential substances in the human body. The roles of carbamide (a.k.a. urea) in denaturing proteins—and thus reducing their antigenicity—and of vitamin F (fatty acid complex) in defusing calcium bicarbonate (ionized calcium) into the cell fluids are virtually lost on orthodox medicine. Yet holistic doctors have repeatedly discovered this article since its publication in 1946 and been amazed at the clinical efficacy of the applied knowledge it presents. From Journal of the National Medical Society. Reprint 20, 1946.

Nutrition and Arthritis

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this monumental 1952 pamphlet, Dr. Royal Lee argues that arthritis is the direct result of nutrient deficiencies brought about by the overconsumption of cooked and processed foods. Insufficient intake of vitamins A, C, and G; various minerals; and the woefully forgotten Wulzen factor—an “anti-stiffness” agent for joints found in raw sugarcane juice and raw cream—all help contribute to the disease, Dr. Lee writes. (Interestingly, while raw cream was shown to prevent joint stiffness in test animals, pasteurized cream provided no such protection, which may explain why arthritis became epidemic in the USA after food processors began pasteurizing the nation’s milk supply.) Dr. Lee not only shows how these deficiencies lead to the arthritis-inducing conditions of acidosis and toxic bowel, he also delineates precise supplement protocols to reverse the arthritic condition, featuring his famous raw food concentrate formulas Betalco and Minaplex (known today as Betacol and Organically Bound Minerals). Dr. Lee also backs up his ideas with several carefully documented case studies showing how patients reversed crippling cases of arthritis using his protocol. This compilation is a tour de force of nutritional therapy—indispensable for all health practitioners and anyone else interested in restoring wellness through diet. From the Vitamin Products Company, 1952.