Category Archives: Historical Archives

Historical Archives

Why Dental Caries?

By John Courtney

Summary: For thirty years John Courtney was the head of Research & Development for Standard Process, Inc., the raw-food supplement company founded by Dr. Royal Lee in 1929. In this article, Courtney explains how early nutrition researchers such as Dr. Weston Price showed beyond doubt that tooth decay is the result of a diet deficient in vitamins and minerals. Yes, Courtney says, bacteria attack teeth to cause cavities, but those bacteria wouldn’t get anywhere if the teeth weren’t weakened in the first place by poor nutrition. Moreover, malnutrition also diminishes the bacteria-killing action of the saliva bathing the teeth. Thus, he summarizes, cavities are “due to a deficient diet and a vitamin and mineral imbalance, which in turn, by starving the endocrines, renders them unable to secrete sufficient amounts of the germicidal ferments to prevent dental caries [cavities] and other infectious diseases.” From The Clinical Nutritionist. Publication date unknown. 

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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

Studies on the Detoxicating Hormone of the Liver (Yakriton)

By Professor Akiro Sato

Summary: This article, translated from Japanese, is a rare and important report on studies conducted in Japan in the 1920s on a detoxifying hormone made by the liver called yakriton, a fatty substance that controls the histamine level in the blood. Dr. Royal Lee subsequently made this natural antihistamine and liver decongestant available in the United States under the name Antronex. From the Pediatric Department, Faculty of Medicine, Tohoku Imperial University, Sendai. 1929.

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Historical Archives

The Significance of Nutrition for Preventive Medicine

By Karl Kottschau, MD

Summary: Translated by the Lee Foundation from the German original. In this powerful essay, Dr. Kottschau spells out the principles of whole-food nutrition and calls on German authorities to put the country’s public health before its commercial interests when it comes to the food supply. “From a standpoint of preventive medicine,” he writes, “it must be demanded without the shadow of doubt that the matter of nutrition is discussed in full view of the public and uninfluenced by commercial considerations.” Kottschau then proposes criteria and priorities necessary for the production of truly nutritious food capable of sustaining human health, as opposed to the deficient processed foods responsible for so much of modern illness. “Everybody knows that among civilized peoples nutrition is not what it should be [and] nutrition plays a decisive part in people becoming ill,” he says. Yet “although we know this, and thus it would be our duty to pay maximum attention to this fact, nothing of importance is being done in order to enlighten the masses about the dangers of present-day-civilization diets and to reduce such dangers.” Sadly, Dr. Kottschau’s lament still rings true today. From Research and Science. Reprint 83, 1953.

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Historical Archives

Studies of Vitamin Deficiency

By M.K. Horwitt, et al.

Summary: Report of a controlled study conducted in a state hospital testing the effects of diets deficient in thiamine and riboflavin. Of course this kind of test could never be conducted under today’s ethical standards. Nevertheless, as expected, those who were starved of various vitamins suffered noticeable effects and recovered when they were restored to a proper diet. From Science. Reprint 26, 1946.

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Historical Archives

Why Milk Pasteurization? Sowing the Seeds of Fear

By Jean Bullitt Darlington

Summary: The first of a two-part report examining the bias in the popular press of the 1940s regarding the pros and cons of milk pasteurization. Darlington debunks several famous “scare” myths ballyhooed by the press, presenting each story as it was first reported and then as it appeared after some fact finding. This article, along with its sequel, is full of facts and examples of how health authorities grossly manipulated science and the public fear of food-borne epidemics to silence any support of certified raw milk. Includes eye-opening statistics from the U.S. Public Health Service regarding the number of outbreaks traced to both raw and pasteurized milk from 1922 to 1944. From The Rural New Yorker: The Business Farmer’s Paper. Reprint 28, 1947.

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Historical Archives

Soil: A Foundation of Health

By Arnold P. Yerkes

Summary: Soil is the weakest link in the knowledge-chain of nutritional understanding. This excellent article explains what happened to the greatest soils on Earth and how we have abused them to our own loss. Yerkes, the supervisor of Farm Practice Research for the International Harvester Company, underscores what Dr. Royal Lee and the other great nutritionists of the mid-twentieth century knew to be true: nutrition begins in the soil. Reprint 23, 1946.

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Historical Archives

Sludged Blood

By Melvin H. Knisely et al.

Summary: A comprehensive description of the anatomy and physiology of blood and blood vessels based on 16 years of experimentation and observation by the authors. “Our purpose is to present and define certain properties of normal blood, blood flow, and vessel walls; to offer evidence that these properties are necessary to the normal functioning of the circulatory system; to describe certain visible responses of the vascular system and/or blood to specific stimuli; to describe certain visible pathologic structures and processes; and to define goals now necessary for therapeutics.” From Science. Reprint 35, 1947.

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Historical Archives

What Are Pesticides Doing to Human Beings?

By Granville F. Knight, MD

Summary: From a California physician comes this remarkably lucid discussion about pesticides and their use in America. “Under the present laws,” Dr. Knight writes, “any company wishing to use a new chemical in or on food is not required to first consult with the Food and Drug Administration relative to merits or potential harmfulness.” Indeed, he adds, any “partially tested pesticide may be manufactured, advertised, sold, and widely used!” (Sadly, this policy remains true today.) And what about concerned citizens and scientists who had the courage to speak out against America’s mammoth agribusiness and their untested pesticides? “‘Hysterical alarmists’ is the quaint description applied to…those who even suggest that the public is being harmed,” Knight says. Articles like this served as an early warning to America’s homemakers about the chemicalization of the food supply and sowed the seeds of today’s organic-foods movement. From Modern Nutrition magazine. Reprint 86, 1952.

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Historical Archives

What About Trace Minerals?

By Ed Rupp

Summary: This 1949 article from a Missouri farming journal describes some breakthrough research on trace minerals being conducted in the state at the time. Specifically, undulant fever (brucellosis) is shown to be successfully treated with trace-mineral therapy. The article goes on to describe the loss of nutrients through pasteurization of milk and other so-called modern food processing methods. From the Missouri Ruralist. Reprint 41, 1949.

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Historical Archives

The Well-Fed Tooth

By Fred Miller, DDS

Summary: “America is a nation of ‘candyholics’ and soft drink addicts, of food adulterators, processors and refiners,” writes Dr. Fred Miller in words that ring as true today as in 1946, when he wrote them. “Having practiced dentistry for more than thirty years I am thoroughly convinced—speaking from the biological point of view, not the moral aspect—that refined white flour and its products—bread, crackers, cookies, pastries —and refined sugar and its products—candies, hard candies and soft drinks—are doing more harm in this country than hard liquor.” A great historical overview of the state of malnutrition in America from a frontline dentist. From The Land magazine. Reprint 49A, 1946.

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Historical Archives

The Schizophrenic Pattern

By Dr. George Goodheart

Summary: In spite of nearly a century of medical investigation, schizophrenia remains a baffling disease in both its cause and treatment. While pharmaceutical drugs have long been the backbone of conventional therapy, such drugs tend to simply mitigate symptoms of the illness while often inducing severe side effects. In this fascinating article from 1970, acclaimed chiropractor and nutritionist Dr. George Goodheart—the father of Applied Kinesiology—presents an alternative therapy for the disease that combines upper spinal adjustments with dietary supplementation with niacin and/or niacinamide (aka “vitamin B3”). In a wide-ranging discussion, Dr. Goodheart details the characteristic responses of schizophrenics to muscle testing along with the origins of the “adrenochrome hypothesis” of schizophrenia, which proposes that the disease is caused by psychopathological metabolites of adrenaline that are degraded in normal individuals but remain unmetabolized in schizophrenics (and can be broken down by niacin). While medicine currently discredits the adrenochome hypothesis, over the years many healthcare professionals—both alternative and conventional—have reported positive results in treating schizophrenia with niacin, suggesting that while the mechanism originally proposed by adrenochrome hypothesis may not be entirely accurate, the therapy suggested by the theory is effective nevertheless. From The Digest of Chiropractic Economics, 1970.

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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

Salt of the Earth

By E.R. Yarham

Summary: To modern medical thinking, salt is a health menace. As in most things nutritional, medicine doesn’t have a clue. In this article from World Science Review, E.R. Yarham discusses the absolute necessity of (whole) salt for people who eat an agriculturally based diet heavy in cooked foods. “Only where men live mainly on milk and flesh—the latter consumed raw or roasted—is it possible to go without ordinary salt,” he writes. Yarham recounts the experiment of a doctor and three students who deprived themselves entirely of dietary salt. Within a week “cramp developed in the muscles, and the experimenters suffered from excessive fatigue and a general sense of exhaustion.” Yarham presents numerous historical examples of the value of salt both nutritionally and monetarily, including the famous custom of Roman soldiers being paid in salt, a practice from which the word salary evolved. Reprint 99, 1958.

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Historical Archives

A Rapid and Simple Lingual Ascorbic Acid Test

By W.M. Ringsdorf, Jr., DMD, and Dr. E. Cheraskin, MD, DMD

Summary: Dr. Royal Lee and other early nutritionists maintained that ascorbic acid is only one of the many components constituting the natural vitamin C complex—and not necessarily the functional one at that. On the other hand, ascorbic acid serves as a useful biomarker for determining the level of vitamin C complex in the body. Acknowledging that subclinical vitamin C deficiency is common, the authors outline a fast and inexpensive method of determining plasma and intradermal levels of vitamin C in an individual. From GP, journal of the American Academy of General Practice, 1962. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 124.

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Historical Archives

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.

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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

Vitamins in Dentistry

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: A classic Royal Lee document, read before a New York dental group in 1940. In it Dr. Lee outlines how far the understanding of nutrition and dental health had come and how poorly the dental profession had stayed current with this advance of knowledge. He cites many examples—fully referenced—of the direct effect of nutrients on dental health. A great paper if anyone bothered to read and understand it. “Drill ’em and fill ’em” was the dental mantra then, as it is today. Reprint 30B, 1940.

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