“A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing”
The following is a transcription of the October 1960 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories.
Also in this issue:
- Action of Vitamin E on the Reticuloendothelial System
- High Points of Calcium Lactate
“A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing”
The old adage above quoted is often cited. Our trouble is often that we think we have a complete picture, when in reality we have only a little knowledge.
In Science News Letter, Sept. 10, 1960, is found the statement that in a carefully conducted experiment, and contrary to previous conceptions, alcohol has been found to have the effect of raising the blood cholesterol.
The four doctors who conducted this test made a mistake that is not uncommon. Blood cholesterol determinations (or any other blood test) must be interpreted carefully, for they do not tell the observer whether the cholesterol they see is due to an unusual release from tissue reserves—cholesterol on the way out—or is due to a block in the elimination route, dammed back as it were, to provide more accumulations in the tissues. One is good, the other bad, but either can be a cause of high blood cholesterol.
Alcohol has always been found to be mildly beneficial to old people and has been considered a cholesterol eliminator. The present test offers no evidence to the contrary. The high blood cholesterol can be due to the slowness of a sluggish liver to keep down the blood cholesterol or because the tissues are releasing more than normal, under the influence of alcohol.
Lecithin is the physiological antidote to cholesterol, as lecithin increases tissue permeability (lowers blood pressure) while cholesterol decreases permeability (raises blood pressure).
Robertson in 1929 reported that cholesterol promotes cancer growth, lecithin inhibits it. (Lecithin is not to be considered harmless as we have seen bad cases of bone decalcification from its excessive use. Like alcohol, lecithin must be used with discretion.)
Cholesterol is a colloidal waste product that is normally eliminated by the liver through the bile route. Colloids cannot be eliminated any other way. Colloidal carbon put into the bloodstream goes out by the bile route. Carbon inhaled into the lungs is picked up by phagocytes, carried to the liver and similarly eliminated.
Gallstones are usually cholesterol precipitated in the gallbladder because of a deficiency of the proper factors to maintain the cholesterol in solution. Beet leaf juice contains these factors, dehydrated beet leaf juice in tablet form commonly relieves gallbladder symptoms with great promptness (Betaris or Betafood tablets).
Bentonite and montmorillonite adsorb cholesterol and aid in its elimination by blocking reabsorption in the intestinal tract. Both these items are known to have a mild and consistent favorable effect symptomatically.
In one test, in a hospital under controlled conditions, bentonite in small dosage caused a progressive and consistent reduction week after week of pathogenic organisms in the bowel contents. Part or all of this may have been by reason of toxin adsorption, the toxins otherwise acting as culture media for pathogenic germs. (Cholacol II contains these adsorbents.)
Cholesterol, a precursor of steroid hormones, is required by the adrenal gland for its function. In Addison’s disease (tubercular adrenal), the blood cholesterol is very low, so cholesterol administration is helpful. Lanolin inunctions provide the most convenient way of increasing blood cholesterol as lanolin is mainly cholesterol. It is now known that licorice tea is also most useful in Addison’s disease.
A low blood cholesterol in some way lowers resistance and is known to predispose to infection.
Amino Acids, Blood Protein, and Blood Tests
A prominent medical man, one who maintained his own clinical laboratory and staff of technicians, once challenged the value of our Protefood because after testing the blood protein of a deficient patient after a few days on Protefood, his blood protein had dropped, though the doctor thought it should have increased. We pointed out the fact that the Protefood provided the missing amino acids (commonly lost in cooking) so that the blood protein became acceptable to the starving tissues, and therefore became depleted faster than before. Here again the wrong one of two possible conclusions was reached.
It is certainly necessary to know whether the protein or cholesterol (or what it may be) is coming or going, when observed in the transportation system, the bloodstream. That is why there is no substitute for clinical experience and careful appraisal of symptoms in addition to laboratory findings.
Did it ever occur to you to realize that there is only one physiological class of remedies—food components? Drugs comprise the other major category of remedies, and no drug is physiological in effect. In fact, it is right there that we have the difference between foods and drugs. Drugs are admittedly in most cases poisons and do harm if used in any excess or in case of a mistake in diagnosis.
When any food factor becomes deficient in supply, symptomatic reactions occur and serve as a warning of later degenerative changes. Protein deficiency may be due to poor assimilation often stemming from low gastric hydrochloric acid, in which case undigested food is observable in the stool.
The condition may go unrecognized even down to the point where the victim is dying from edema and waterlogged tissues with the kidneys and liver failing in their functions. Without protein in sufficiency, these are the first organs to fail. With too much poor-quality protein, these organs are also the first to fail under the overload of toxic wastes from the unusable protein.
Waterlogged victims of protein deficiency will lose water as fast as they are given Protefood. In one case we recall, the patient was given by mistake the recommended daily dosage every hour (4 capsules). He lost around 100 pounds of water in 24 hours.
Like the immediate response of the heart to indicated nutrition, such reactions seem miraculous when compared to drug effects. But it is nothing more than the prompt response of the struggling body to food. We can be at death’s door from starvation and still recover if we get fed in time.
When the kidney is breaking down from arginase deficiency, the albuminuria is as promptly controlled with Arginex. Nephrosis is this condition.
Cooking destroys certain amino acids, and the presence of glucose or sugar hastens this destruction.1 Milk powder if made from pasteurized milk has been found to cause tooth decay.2 Free amino acids are less efficiently assimilated than food proteins.3 That finding tells why no hydrolysate of a protein has survived the clinical test.
Cooked proteins cause tooth destruction and bone disease (pyorrhea, arthritis) because the specific amino acids needed to maintain and repair these structures are gone. The doctor who wants to quickly replace these nutrient factors must resort to tablets of veal bone extract prepared without heat to provide the necessary organic nutrition. Biost tablets or Ostogen wafers [Calcifood Wafers] will usually tighten up loose teeth in days, and in two weeks the X-ray often shows definite bone regeneration. It is the protein matrix of bone that is being furnished here, not the calcification minerals.
Cows fed cooked food can only assimilate one tenth the minerals present and one fifth the protein.4 And the cow probably has a far better digestive system than man, with her five stomachs and each with its special enzyme pattern.
Did you ever try a drink made by soaking Deaf Smith County whole wheat overnight and liquefying it in milk and raw honey, or with a raw fruit juice, or banana. Nothing is more satisfying than natural raw food.
Speaking of honey, honeycomb is full of vitamin F, the calcium assimilating, anti-allergy, anticholesterol vitamin. The beeswax of the comb is loaded too with the Wulzen factor, the principle in raw cream that is lost in pasteurizing and that prevents arthritis in test animals.5 Its equivalent in vitamins is Super-Eff or Eff-Plus capsules. It is known to increase blood phosphate and block the deposition of calcium where it should not be, as in bursitis or osteoarthritis.
In his book Folk Medicine, Dr. Jarvis extols comb honey, but all his indications for its use show it is the Wulzen factor and vitamin F in the honeycomb that is doing the work.
As summed up in their article “Research Approach to Atherosclerosis” (J.A.M.A., 161:536, 1956) by Katz et al.:
“It is this unbalanced diet (with 60 percent of its calories from hydrogenated fats and refined carbohydrates)…that, by altering cholesterol-lipid-lipoprotein, lipoprotein metabolism, creates decisive prerequisites on a mass scale for the ready genesis of atherosclerosis in the American population.”
Just another way of saying that our 750,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease is malnutrition in action, just as preventable as scurvy or beriberi. Malnutrition is a fact carefully suppressed to protect big business. All news items for public consumption are screened to imply that “research has not yet arrived at a conclusion, so in the meanwhile eat as you have been!”
Here is a sample by Dr. Frederick Stare of Harvard:
“Whether we should use one of the vegetable oils for all cooking (in place of hydrogenated-synthetic fat) is still a very much unsettled subject. Personally, we feel that using a little less total fat, regardless of kind, makes sense.”
—From Stare’s column “Food & Health,” July 31, 1960.
I would say it makes sense only to the makers of the synthetic counterfeit fat. And to Judas-Goat Stare, who leads us to the slaughter.
The public should be told how cardiovascular diseases due to malnutrition are the easiest to treat, once the cause is recognized, far more so than the dental and bone disease where irreversible changes have occurred.
References
- Annual Review of Biochemistry, Vol. 20, p. 327.
- American Jol. Clinical Nutrition, p. 362, July/August 1955; Nutrition, Vol. 63, No. 1, pp. 107–117.
- Biol. Chem., 210:340, 1941.
- Morrison’s Feeds and Feeding, 19th Ed. p. 257.
- “The Anti-Stiffness Factor,” Vitamins & Hormones, Vol. 8, pp. 69–126.
“Perfection does not exist; to understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; to expect to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.”
—Alfred de Musset
Action of Vitamin E on the Reticuloendothelial System
After parenteral or oral administration of a-tocopherol to twenty patients with reduced circulation in the limbs, diffusion of trypan blue was increased, showing stimulation of the reticuloendothelial system. M. Elliott. (This shows how vitamin E helps muscle cramps, no doubt by its influence on cholesterol.)
—Emilio Boschi (Ost. cir. Padova, Italy), Atti. Soc. Med. Chir. Padova 29, 197–202,1951.
High Points of Standard Process Nutritional Adjuncts
Calcium Lactate: Growing children need this product constantly. The excess phosphoric acid in cereal foods demands calcium in the blood as bicarbonate to balance it in bone building and in muscle function. Low calcium bicarbonate results in nervous energy in excess, the type of child that cannot sit still, and in acute deficiency results in fever, calcium deficiency fever being very common in children, often only one degree or so, but consistent. In this situation, the victim is susceptible to virus infection, colds, polio, children’s disease in general. Calcium lactate and natural vitamin C complex (with its tyrosinase, the adrenal activator) promotes immediate relief, even if acute infectious disease is present. Often a little potassium bicarbonate is highly beneficial as potassium deficiency causes adrenal inhibition.
