Historical Archives Archives

Historical Archives

Leukemia in Infants and Young Children: A New Etiological Concept

By W.J. McCormick, MD

Summary: Writing at 81 years of age, the famous Canadian physician W.J. McCormick discusses the relationship between smoking mothers, vitamin C deficiency, and the rising incidence of leukemia in the very young. “This close link [between leukemia and] scurvy seems to have been completely overlooked by modern writers on leukemia,” McCormick says, “the major stress being given to genetic changes in chromosomes, irrespective of possible adverse contributing maternal factors.” Once again, medicine’s myopic view of disease as the result of “bad genes or germs” prevented consideration of malnutrition as a possible cause of an illness barely known to our whole-food-eating ancestors. From the Journal of Applied Nutrition. Reprint 5G, 1961.

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Historical Archives

Let Food Be Your Medicine

By Doris Grant

Summary: Doris Grant was one of England’s greatest proponents of the natural-foods movement. An avid supporter of the Lee Foundation, she wrote many books and lectured widely to teach the British people how to live healthier lives, particularly through their food choices. Strong and active until the end of her life, Grant died in 2003 at the age of 98. This document includes a brief account of her life. From the Cambridge University Medical School Society Magazine. Reprint 123, 1958.

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Historical Archives

Insulin and Cancer

By Samuel M. Beale, Jr., MD

Summary: In 1947 the British Associated Press asked pioneering American physician Dr. Samuel Beale Jr. to write a report discussing his “low-dose” insulin therapy for cancer. The result is the following article, published originally in London’s News Review and later reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research. In it Dr. Beale details the shockingly quick reversal of cancerous lesions in a number of his patients through the combined application of insulin and a nutrient-dense diet. (As this letter attests, Dr. Beale was one of thousands of physicians who relied on Dr. Royal Lee‘s famous raw food concentrates to insure the nutrition of his patients.) While Dr. Beale concedes he does not know the precise mechanism of insulin’s efficacy, he speculates that it is the hormone’s ability to balance the body’s entire endocrine system that is the key factor. In addition he names three “indications of cancer susceptibility” that modern medicine would be wise to revisit: 1) poor sugar handling 2) overalkaline blood, and 3) a disturbed calcium-phosphorus balance in the blood. Dr. Beale practiced medicine for over fifty years and used insulin to successfully treat an array of other diseases in addition to cancer. From News Review, 1947. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

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Historical Archives

How to Prevent Heart Attacks

By Benjamin P. Sandler, MD

Summary: An absolutely gripping book, published in its entirety by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research. Dr. Sandler, a retired naval surgeon and researcher, challenges conventional science’s most basic beliefs about cardiovascular disease. If hardening and blockage of the arteries (i.e., arteriosclerosis) is the reason for heart attacks, he asks, why do many heart attack victims show no evidence of arteriosclerosis upon autopsy? And why do the vast majority of people with significant arteriosclerosis die of non-heart-related reasons? The truth is arteriosclerosis is a “secondary phenomenon, purely incidental, and is not the prime factor initiating [a heart] attack,” Sandler says, who points to dysfunctional blood-sugar regulation as the true cause of heart failure. Based on years of documented clinical work, Sandler reports consistent findings that a high-carbohydrate, vitamin-poor diet—the kind of diet Americans have been eating ever since the wide-scale adoption processed foods at the turn of the twentieth century—significantly weakens the heart and leads to heart attack. He especially warns against the budding advice of the time to reduce animal fat consumption. “To implicate animal foods as the ultimate cause of heart attacks because of their fat content is highly dubious and dangerous and unless absolutely confirmed as the cause…they should not be eliminated from the diet nor even slightly reduced.” Fifty years later, with animal fat still not shown to be linked with heart disease and heart attack rates showing no decline in spite of Americans having reduced their consumption of animal fats significantly, Dr. Sandler’s words ring as true as ever. Note: Be sure to check out the index at the end of the transcription. You’ll be amazed by the breadth of subjects Dr. Sandler covered. 1958.

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Historical Archives

The Influence of Food Cooking on the Blood Formula of Man

By Paul Kouchakoff, MD

Summary: A classic and profound study on the direct effect of cooking food on the human immune system. Presented by Dr. Paul Kouchakoff at the First International Congress of Microbiology in 1930 and later translated and published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, the research focuses on the phenomenon of “digestive leukocytosis,” or the increase and mobilization of white blood cells in response to eating food. Dr. Kouchakoff observed that this immune response occurs only when the food eaten is cooked and, moreover, that processed foods (which are often exposed to high temperatures in their preparation) incite an even graver response than cooked whole foods. Raw foods, on the other hand, not only fail to cause digestive leukocytosis but can prevent cooked foods from causing it if eaten at the same meal. Dr. Kouchakoff spent many years studying the effects of cooked food versus raw food on the human immune system, and it remains a great mystery and tragedy that no one has followed up on his startling findings. From Proceedings: First International Congress of Microbiology, 1930. Translated and reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

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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

The National Malnutrition

By D.T. Quigley, MD

Summary: Daniel Quigley was a physician at the Nebraska College of Medicine who rose to prominence with the 1929 publication of his book The Conquest of Cancer. Like many doctors of the time, his clinical experience led him to believe that malnutrition—due to the replacement of natural foods with industrial ones—was not only more widespread in America than the medical establishment believed, but that vitamin and mineral deficiencies, more than anything else, were responsible for the exploding rates of degenerative illness throughout the country and world. In 1943, after years of observing the successful application of whole food nutritional therapy in his practice, Dr. Quigley published the following textbook through the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research. In it he warns Americans to avoid completely white flour, white sugar, and corn syrup, each of the refined products fostering disease by delivering calories but precious few of the micronutrients needed by the body for proper function and fighting infection. For optimal nutrition Dr. Quigley recommends a diet of raw milk, eggs, whole grains, seafood, organ meats, fresh vegetables, yeast, and butter—a prescription of highly nutrient dense foods that makes just as much sense today as it did then, when these substances were known to nutritionists simply as “the protective foods.” Published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1943.

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Historical Archives

Johns Hopkins: Scientists Trying to Starve Cancer Cells to Death

Author unknown

Summary: “Scientists have observed for more than 70 years that most types of cancer cells are sugar junkies,” begins this synopsis of the famous 1998 study by Dr. Chi Dang of Johns Hopkins University showing that depriving cancer cells of sugar can cause them to self destruct. “When we remove glucose from…cancer cells,” Dr. Dang says, “they commit suicide, basically, as compared with normal cells.” This finding echoes the earlier work of Dr. Daniel T. Quigley, a cancer-expert in Omaha, Nebraska, who years earlier warned of the dangers of a diet high in refined sugar. (See what Dr. Royal Lee had to say about Dr. Quigley and starving glucose out of the body here and here.) For the official Johns Hopkins press release of Dr. Dang’s study, see “Cancer Cells Self-Destruct When ‘Sweet Tooth’ is Thwarted” in these archives. From Johns Hopkins University, 1998.

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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

Report Raps Pasteurization, Artificially Colored Food

Author unknown

Summary: A 1948 newspaper report of Dr. Royal Lee’s presentation to the American Academy of Nutrition in San Francisco. Dr. Lee warns of the health dangers associated with artificial colors added to foods, citing research proving “butter yellow,” a coloring added to margarine, to be carcinogenic. Lee also condemns the pasteurization of milk, citing studies of the damage it caused in animal feeding studies. From NewspaperARCHIVE, 1948.

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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

Studies in Deficiency Disease

By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD

Summary: The complete classic of 1921, as republished by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research in 1945. Dr. Robert McCarrison was knighted in England for his groundbreaking research while serving as a British army surgeon in India during the first two decades of the twentieth century. His landmark investigations into the connection between the diets of various populations in India and their patterns of disease and health gave new insight into the cause and effect of nutrition on health and introduced the world to the amazingly healthy and long-lived Hunza people of the Himalayas. McCarrison set up laboratories in which he studied the effect of various local diets on animals, reproducing nearly the same health and disease patterns in the animals as displayed in the particular populations. Diet, he concluded, was the determining factor in the specific health patterns of each population. McCarrison was also the first researcher to inform the medical world that the endocrine system is the first system in the body to succumb to the effects of malnutrition, carefully demonstrating the lesions in the endocrine glands caused by specific adulterated foods. His work inspired the likes of Royal Lee, Weston A. Price, Francis Pottenger, Jr., and J. I. Rodale. Still remarkably relevant today, this book should be part of the corpus of all colleges of the healing arts. Originally published by Oxford Medical Publications, 1921.

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Historical Archives

The Red Beetroot Juice

By E.L. David

Summary: A report on the nutritional and therapeutic value of beetroot and beetroot juice. The extraordinary array of nutrients in the beet makes it the most nutritious root vegetable, David says, and its value may increase even more when juiced and lacto-fermented. From Let’s Live magazine, 1962.

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Historical Archives

Natural Versus Synthetic or Crystalline Vitamins

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this brief article, Dr. Royal Lee presents his classic metaphor of holistic nutrition likening a true vitamin to a watch. Just as a watch consists of numerous pieces that all work together to perform a function (telling time), a true vitamin is a complex of countless synergistic factors that work together to perform the function of delivering a nutritive effect to the body. And just as separating a few pieces from a watch and expecting them to tell time is absurd, isolating (or synthesizing) a single component of a natural vitamin and expecting it to nourish the body is folly. Vitamin Products Company, 1952.

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Historical Archives

The Menace of Synthetic Foods

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: “There is only one test for safety and wholesomeness in food,” Dr. Royal Lee proclaims in this succinct overview of his nutritional philosophy. “That is the test of time. The test of a long history of use, over many generations of life.” Dr. Lee expounds on the ill effects of processed foods, which were pushed hastily onto the market by industrial food processors seeking immediate profit. He cites evidence that bleached flour produces headaches, diarrhea and depression; corn syrup causes diabetes; and hydrogenated fats help cause heart disease. Dr. Lee also documents the negative effects of synthetic isolated vitamins, the “jackpot in synthetic foods.” Includes also a report on chicanery regarding food additives at the Food and Drug Administration from one of the most outspoken watchdog publications of its day, Morris Bealle’s American Capsule News. 1957.

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Historical Archives

It Can Happen Here

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this reprint from the magazine Nature’s Path, Dr. Royal Lee rips food processors for adding poisonous additives and preservatives to their products and selling them as harmless to an unsuspecting public. Nitrates in meat, bleach in flour, and aluminum exposure are highlighted. “Are we…witnessing the crumbling of our civilization by reason of the compromise with principle that is being made by the guilty parties who have so thoroughly sold the public health down the river?” Lee asks. “‘Just a little poison in the flour’….’Nitrates in meat never hurt anybody’….’Aluminum toxic? Are you crazy?'” Just a few examples, Lee says, of how large-scale poisoning of the population has been glossed over in America. From Nature’s Path magazine. Reprint 30F, 1951.

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Historical Archives

Practical Endocrinology

By Henry R. Harrower, MD

Summary: The complete book, originally published in 1932 and reprinted by the Lee Foundation in 1957. In 1916, Dr. Harrower founded the Association for the Study of the Internal Secretions, the first society in the United States dedicated to the study of the endocrines, while also inaugurating Endocrinology, the first periodical of its type. Harrower was a major force in the development of endocrine therapy using glandular extracts and a leading light in the practice of organotherapy. To further this therapy, he founded the Harrower Laboratories Company in Glendale, California. Dr. Royal Lee would later build on Harrower’s work in developing the Protomorphogen. In the preface to the 1957 reprint by the Foundation, Lee writes, “No student of the healing arts can fail to consider this book of Harrower’s an indispensable reference work, and of absorbing interest in getting the proper diagnosis of the multiple illnesses of a people who are trying out the mass experiment of starving their endocrine glands by the use of foods depleted of essential minerals and vitamins through processing, refining and the progressive depletion of soils.” Note: This is a large file. Give it a minute or more to load. Original publication date 1932; republished by the Lee Foundation in 1957.

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Historical Archives

The Wheel of Health

By G.T. Wrench, MD

Summary: The complete book, originally published in England in 1938 and republished by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research in 1945. The Wheel of Health is a master treatise on proper diet—as well as a cogent plea for the full recognition of vitamin values—based on study of the famously healthy Hunza people of what was at the time northern India (now Pakistan). Dr. Wrench credits his interest in the Hunza to the great nutrition pioneer Sir Robert McCarrison (author of Studies in Deficiency Disease, available in these Archives), who studied them extensively. The Hunza “are unsurpassed by any Indian race in perfection of physique,” McCarrison said. “They are long lived, vigorous in youth and age, capable of great endurance and enjoy a remarkable freedom from disease in general.'” In addition to the work of Dr. McCarrison, Wrench highlights as well the studies of the great agriculturalist Sir Albert Howard (author of An Agricultural Testament; see also “Natural vs. Artificial Nitrates” in these Archives.) “This small book,” one British reviewer wrote, “should rest at the very foundations of one’s personal explorations of health and its roots.” 1945.

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Historical Archives

The Vitamins and Their Clinical Applications

By Dr. W. Stepp, Dr. Kuhnau, and Dr. H. Schroeder

Summary: An extremely rare, comprehensive book on vitamin therapy that Dr. Royal Lee had translated from German and published in the United States. The authors, German research physicians, recognized the therapeutic aspects of vitamins beyond treating the frank deficiency diseases (e.g., scurvy, rickets, etc.) associated with them. “In view of the newly acquired knowledge of the frequency of hypovitaminoses [vitamin deficiencies] and of the susceptibility of patients with avitaminoses to all sorts of diseases [beyond frank deficiencies], the importance of a sufficient vitamin supply must not be underestimated in our patients.” This book is an indispensable collection of gems containing some of the lost knowledge of vitamin therapy learned in the years of the twentieth century before World War II, when vitamin research was independent, vigorous, and fresh with the insights of recent discovery. Includes numerous charts, graphs, references, and appendices. 1938.

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Historical Archives

The Trace Elements

By Warren L. Anderson

Summary: A three-part report on the important effects of trace minerals in soil, livestock, and humans. At the time of these articles, in 1949, the macro minerals—calcium, phosphorus, and potassium—were fairly well understood in terms of plant growth. On the other hand, the trace minerals, e.g., iodine, zinc, copper, manganese, iron, etc., were poorly understood until research like this began to appear. The role of trace minerals in the formation of nutrients such as cobalt and vitamin B12 had only just been discovered. This knowledgeable author shows the insidious effects and unsuspected diseases in plants, livestock, and humans caused by trace mineral deficiencies. From Hoard’s Dairyman magazine. Reprint 71, 1949.

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