“Health and the Constitution,” “Fraud Orders to Help Bolster Up Fraudulent Foods?” “Malnutrition and Heredity (Unfitting the Unborn),” and “More About ‘Unfitting the Unborn’”
The following is a transcription of the November/December 1961 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories.
Health and the Constitution
By Dr. Royal Lee, 1960
The Constitution guarantees us freedom of religion, but that is about the only liberty left us today. We will analyze here a freedom of opportunity we fail to enjoy, of choosing health-building food.
Back in 1938 the Federal Trade Commission approached Sears, Roebuck and Company with a complaint that they were selling wheat germ oil as a health food for human use.
Sears, Roebuck and Company was forced to sign a stipulation agreeing to discontinue any advertising implying that there was any substantial proportion of persons exposed to a vitamin E deficiency in this country or that an adequate amount of vitamin E was not obtained via the typical diet. (The Federal Trade Commission officially stated that vitamin E was not a competent nutritional treatment for or preventive of diseases or conditions such as loss of weight, retarded growth, weakness, paralysis— particularly infantile—or sterility.)
To constitutionally stop Sears, Roebuck and Compay from selling a food product they claimed was essential to life, the FTC used expert opinions instead of proof. Now we find that the “experts” were wrong.
Here is a report in the Lancet, London, 1940, by Dr. Franklin Bicknell, England’s leading vitamin authority and coauthor of The Vitamins in Medicine: “The discovery of the importance of vitamin E in the treatment of nervous and muscular disease appears to be revolutionary…one of the great advances in general medicine of the century.”
Since then, articles in medical journals tell of countless other conditions that vitamin E has helped: St. Vitus’s dance (Dowd, 1949), menopausal pains (Finkler, 1949), granuloma annulare (Cochrane, 1950), muscular dystrophy (Milhorat, 1949, using new type E). While vitamin E deficiency was established as a cause of cystic fibrosis of infants (Nitkowski, 1956) and retrolental fibroplasia, causing infant blindness, found to be the result of excessive oxidation, a state consequently common to vitamin E deficiency, and the J.A.M.A. reports (October 25, 1941, page 1492) that post diphtheritic paralysis must be considered a specific result of vitamin E deficiency.
At the University of Illinois, professors in their sixties went on extra vitamin E and showed physical endurance greatly enhanced, as shown by unmistakable gymnasium tests under carefully controlled conditions, so dear to the scientific mind.
But the FDA was later reported in a drive to even stop the sale of vitamin E to prevent sterility in cows, bulls, and horses, where the farmer cannot afford to permit malnutrition to cut into his business program. The July 26, 1948, issue of Drug Trade News reported the FDA’s intent to start criminal prosecution of any maker of vitamin E products who claimed it to correct “breeding trouble and sterility in livestock.”
But Dr. Anderson reports in the Journal of Nutrition, Vol. 20, page 433, that evaporated milk causes muscular dystrophy because its vitamin E has been destroyed and that pasteurization also causes a loss of the vitamin. Carpenter and Lundberg, at the University of Minnesota, report that young pig mortality is reduced 50 percent if extra vitamin E is fed the mother during gestation (1949). And Gullickson & Calverley demonstrated that cattle on a reduced vitamin E intake had a 46 percent mortality from heart failure within one year (Annals N.Y. Academy of Science, 1949, Vol. 52, p. 258).
Just why are the federal authorities so hell-bent to put vitamin E into the doghouse? Does it have anything to do with the total destruction of vitamin E in all flour by bleach chemicals? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the FDA has been well controlled by the bleached flour interests—in fact the executive director of the FDA for some years was none other than the legal mouthpiece of Pillsbury Mills, one Bradshaw Mintener?
How many of the 750,000 lives lost per year to cardiovascular disease would have been saved if Sears, Roebuck and Company had not been interfered with by these hatchet men, who use federal police power to promote a racket far worse than Murder, Inc.?
How many blind babies—victims of retrolental fibroplasia—would be living a normal life?
How many victims of muscular dystrophy would be walking?
In The Avitaminoses, first edition, Eddy and Dalldorf, we find the following:
“A number of reports suggest possible human need for the vitamin (E). The first is the effect of vitamin E rich diets in curing sterility or habitual abortion, and the second that testicular degeneration, similar to that observed in the rat, also occurs in man…The relation of vitamin E to nuclear action has suggested the possible relation of vitamin E to cancer formation. Davidson has reported that mice on a diet high in vitamin E developed a marked resistance to…tar cancer…Adamstone has also reported that chicks fed on a diet from which the vitamin E had been removed showed effects…simulating malignancy.”
Is this why “civilized,” refined foods cause cancer???
Just how much evidence is there to pile up on the criminal responsibility for illegally stopping people from choosing their own foods by the illegal exercise of police power?
Now, finally, in this year of 1960, the FDA has actually ruled that, after all, vitamin E is essential to the human economy. So who can be held accountable for the harm done by the orders of the FTC to stop Sears, Roebuck from saying it was necessary to health—i.e., the truth? All this corrupt misuse of authority would have been avoided if the constitutional rights of the citizen had not been violated, if the FDA had been required to prove Sears guilty of misconduct instead of requiring them to do the impossible—prove that they were innocent.
Fraud Orders to Help Bolster Fraudulent Foods?
From the AMA News, April 17, 1961:
“Fraud Order Issued on Cardiac Society – The U.S. Post Office Department has barred the Cardiac Society, Detroit, Michigan, from soliciting money and taking orders through the mail for a vitamin E preparation, E-Ferol 30 IU.
“The fraud order said the preparation had been falsely represented as therapeutically effective in the treatment and prevention of heart and cardiovascular diseases.
“Campbell C. Calder, the personal attorney for Evan Shute, MD, London, Ontario, Canada, and Carl E. Muir, who had been associated with a vitamin E enterprise in Ontario, were among incorporators and directors of the Cardiac Society. It was formed in April 1955 in Detroit as “The Heart Foundation.” The name was changed several months later.
“The AMA Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry reported unfavorably on vitamin E in several disease categories in J.A.M.A., February, 18, 1950.”
Here we have a situation where the victim must prove himself innocent, for certainly the authorities cannot prove that vitamin E is useless in heart disease. Endocardiograph recordings prove time after time that definite improvement in heart muscle function follows administration of vitamin E. But expert opinion is called on to destroy the business of a perfectly legitimate organization, where facts are not permitted to be heard. By the Alberty decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, expert opinions overrule facts. White is made black by such misrepresentations, fraud committed by government agencies.
Malnutrition and Heredity (Unfitting the Unborn)
Address by Dr. Royal Lee to the San Diego Chapter of the American Academy of Applied Nutrition, February 23, 1950.
Biologists have argued with more prejudice than logic over the question of whether acquired characteristics ever become hereditary. Most of us have heard about the fellow who cut off the tails of mice generation after generation but found the young mice continued to be born with tails, then decided that acquired changes were not transmitted to offspring.
There are a lot of things wrong with that experiment. First, the changes that were made were of external origin, not internal. They were not induced to occur by a deficiency, for example. We know that test animals are born without eyes if carried through a few generations on a vitamin A deficient diet. In fact, children born without one or both eyeballs no doubt owe their predicament to their mother’s failure to get enough of this vitamin, and there are many such examples in institutions for the blind.
Normally, if such individuals were born in any species, they would die by reason of this handicap. But suppose we consider fish living in the dark waters of Mammoth Cave? They would get along as well without eyes as with them. And as a matter of fact, the fish in Mammoth Cave are minus eyes. Maybe they lost them in just that manner.
That method of eliminating eyes is a lot different from the mousetail experiment. It is eliminating the organ by starving it out of existence. The eye needs more vitamin A in its embryonic development than any other structure and is first to suffer in case of deficiency.
At the last meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. T.M. Sonneborn of Indiana University discussed this matter of transmission of acquired characters and admitted the existence of a possible mechanism in the way of the “migratory plasmagenes” of the cell. Up to now American biologists have differed with the Russian Lysenko on this point. The argument, however, has revolved entirely around theoretical propositions, and this is a field where the theories happen to be too incomplete to be important. The facts definitely point to the inheritance of acquired traits.
Gates, in his treatise Human Genetics, accepts the fact that nutritional variations can influence the gene and change structures that are otherwise invariable, even using the instance of where the number of toes of the foot of a guinea pig were altered thereby.1
Certainly, the same environmental nutritional pattern over many generations will accomplish more and more of such changes or a progressive change up to some limitation that may be inherent. Dr. Pottenger in his cat experiments found progressive degeneration becoming more and more serious in each litter, in fact so serious as to limit the number of generations to two or three that could be maintained on the pasteurized milk.2 Here the tendency to develop the deficiency symptoms at an earlier age in each generation was conspicuous, the thing Gates calls “anticipation” and finds common in hereditary defects.
In fact, Gates, in his discussion of the details of hereditary defects such as cataracts of the eye or progressive muscular dystrophy, shows how they are strictly a condition that follows definite laws of genetic transmission and are either Mendelian recessive or dominant characters, while one who is familiar with deficiency disease can see the definite causative effect of deficiency.
For instance, even congenital cataract, while unquestionably an inherited condition, usually shows progressive improvement if the victim is supplied with a high intake of the vitamin C and G complexes. We recall one boy who had to drop out of high school in his first year because of loss of sight; after vitamin treatment, he was enabled to finish and take a job as salesman by keeping up the use of an optimum amount of the vitamins. Without the extra vitamins, his cataract would begin to recur. The improvement in diet changed his future from a ward of the state into that of a useful, independent citizen. Though he born with a susceptibility, it was controllable by diet.
Dr. Davidson, in his celebrated experiments—in which he caused mice to become cancerous on a diet low in vitamins and minerals and then, by feeding them a better nutritional schedule, cured the mice and made the strain immune to cancer—simply proved that a poor diet can cause racial degeneration and a good diet can cause racial regeneration. He was able to cure cancer, not in the individual but in the race, by a better diet.3 And he was able to cause cancer consistently, not in the individual but in the race, by a poor diet.
To get the individual mouse to become cancerous, he had to resort to two causes: poor diet plus a chemical irritant. Since we are all exposed to both influences in more or less degree, it is no wonder that cancer is progressively increasing in all countries where poor diets prevail—all countries where refined sugar, bleached flour, and packaged groceries prevail.
In considering the importance of diet in cancer, it is well to recall the comment Dr. Daniel T. Quigley made at the national AAAN meeting last year, during which he showed many slides of patients before and after surgical removal of cancer. Dr. Quigley found in over thirty years of experience that no patient had had a recurrence of cancer who had followed his dietary recommendations. That is one situation where an ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory.
A recent report by a German doctor named Evers on the treatment of multiple sclerosis is very similar. In treating over 600 cases, this doctor says that the only treatment he found of value was a dietary correction: the use of uncooked foods as far as possible. By this means he could produce progressive improvement in all new cases and at least arrest the progress of the disease in all old-standing cases. Since this disease is of the same order as the progressive muscular dystrophy of hereditary nature that Gates found so definitely carried by genes, we begin to suspect that here is another situation like Dr. Pottenger’s cats or Davidson’s mice.
Gates in fact discusses so many degenerative diseases that are known to be transmitted that we suspect that all degenerative disease is or tends to be hereditary. And we are not alone if we say that all degenerative disease is due to malnutrition. Dr. Jonathan Forman of Ohio is one exponent of this idea, and Dr. C.W. Cavanaugh of Cornell is another. We, of course, have to say that the malnutrition in question may have been acting for many generations.
Cancer today is common in children. Fifty years ago it was just as much less common in children as it was in older subjects. The increased incidence is not confined to old people. There is the same degree of increase in all age groups. The same is true of heart disease. Some professional apologists are telling us that we have more of these diseases today because more people live to the susceptible age. That kind of statement is not founded on fact but on the advertising programs of makers of foods that undermine the public health.
Another disease that is increasing with alarming velocity is diabetes mellitus. Dr. Joslin, in his latest book on the subject, tells us that in another fifty years at the present trend, half the population will be diabetic. He also states that the cause is too much sugar in our diet. Again, it has been statistically proven that diabetes is hereditary.4 So here we have another acquired condition that becomes hereditary.
The exact mechanism by which an acquired trait can become hereditary is in fact fairly well established. It seems that each specialized cell of the body produces continually and discharges into the bloodstream what might be called blueprints, which guide or determine the nature of regenerating new cells that can assimilate these specialized organic substances that act as blueprints. Biologists call these factors determinants, and there is clear evidence that the germ cells of the sex glands obtain these determinants from the bloodstream and pack them into the chromosomes, where they can in turn accomplish their function of determining the characteristics of the offspring as they unfold during the development of the embryonic tissues.
It is now easy to see that if both parents are lacking in the specialized cells of the islets of Langerhans, for example, then the offspring of such parents is bound to have either a weakened group of these islets or none at all, depending on the severity of the parent’s disability. It is of further interest to find that these determinants owe their specific nature to the pattern of trace minerals they are composed of.5
Therefore, trace mineral deficiency, it is evident, can act also to impair hereditary transmission. And because these trace minerals in the determinants are combined organically into protein linkages, it is evident that the nature of these minerals in our foods can be of vital importance. Compost gardening, in building up the organic mineral levels of the soil, is here justified, and its results explained.
Cobalt is one mineral element required in remarkably small amounts, but it has to be in the organic combination now known as vitamin B12. Our authorities of a few years ago were sure that cobalt was not an essential part of the human diet. Today they are just as sure that we cannot live without it. We soon develop pernicious anemia if we fail to get this vitamin.
It is of interest to find that hybrid corn does not have any vitamin B12 or other cobalt compounds in its germ, while ordinary corn grown on the same soil carries definite amounts of cobalt in its ash.6 Since hybrid corn does not need to form germ tissue to grow offspring, it can put all its energy into producing more of the other elements of the seed—certainly a wonderful example once again of the ability of man to create quantity at the expense of quality, to make a product “worse so it can be sold for less.”
These determinants as chromosome components also require the presence of certain vitamins to ensure their preservation and integrity. Vitamins A and E are vitally essential. In fact, it has been observed that in E deficiency the chromosomes of the cell disintegrate. No wonder vitamin E is necessary to promote either cell growth, cell division, or tissue repair. Without the vitamin E, there are no determinants to guide the job of reconstruction.
The importance of vitamin E in heart disease is easy to understand. The heart is the hardest working organ of the body and needs the most efficient repair service. The sudden death of persons with no previous sign of heart disease, so common today, has been duplicated in test animals deprived of vitamin E.7 The bleaching chemicals used in all refined flour are specific destroyers of this vitamin because they are oxidizing agents. And they destroy not only the vitamins but also the enzymes.
The importance of the enzyme content of foods has been recently emphasized8 because it has been found that unless the enzymes of bran or raw milk are present in the intestinal tract, the human economy fails to assimilate the minerals in our food. Again, the determinants are starved and impaired. It is quite probable that this enzyme loss in the pasteurized milk is responsible for the terrific degeneration of succeeding generations of Dr. Pottenger’s cats. Our children are being unnecessarily subjected to the same identical influence, with identical results.
Cancer is a disease in which the cells change into other than the original types. Just what could bring this about better than the deficiency of the various factors needed to maintain the integrity of the determining blueprints that carry the inheritable traits? Deficiency of vitamins A and E and various minerals have been known to contribute to cancer. A more complete discussion of this probability is in Protomorphology.4 Without the protective vitamins, the chromosome degenerates and falls back into a more primitive and simpler structure, the cells change accordingly, and a cancer takes the place of the original tissue.
By reason of the loss of the inherited blueprints, the cell has forgotten its responsibilities and its ability to coordinate its activities with the rest of the body. It becomes a new and parasitic colony, composed of cells that have lost their record of heredity and their sense of obligation to the social order of the parent organism, taking their food supply as usual from the efforts of associated structures but failing to perform their function in return, instead using all food available to promote their own growth alone.
Cancer in the case of Dr. Davidson’s mice was an acquired trait that was transmitted to offspring, which on the poor diet became 100 percent cancerous, each individual dying of cancer instead of old age. Gates concludes (in his review of the genetic background of cancer in human patients) that susceptibility to cancer is in a large part determined by inherited traits.
The forces of heredity definitely tend to inflict on unborn children the penalties of poor judgment and carelessness that their mothers and fathers exercised in selecting their food. These penalties accumulate, each generation paying a greater price in lost health. A race that fails to take notice of dietary problems soon dies out. Dr. Weston A. Price found in his travels and studies of primitive peoples that they had accumulated a remarkable folklore of nutritional information, passed down from generation to generation.9 Now we can see that this is not so remarkable. The existence of the people he studied is actually dependent on that folklore. Those families who failed to accurately transmit this information, to take the trouble to learn the necessary facts of life, dwindled into nothing. We think we are of higher intelligence but are actually being subjected to that same test.
References
- Gates, R.R. Human Genetics, Vol. 1, p. 30. Macmillan and Company, New York, 1946.
- Pottenger, Francis M., Jr., MD, FACP. “The Effect of Heat-Processed Foods and Metabolized Vitamin D Milk on the Dentofacial Structures of Experimental Animals.” Jol. Orth. and Oral Surgery, 32(8):467–485, August 1946.
- Davidson, J.R., MD. “Cancer: A Nutritional Deficiency.” Question Mark Magazine, February 1943. Published by the Science Department, University of Manitoba.
- Lee and Hanson. Protomorphology. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee 3, Wisconsin, 1947.
- , pp. 14–15.
- Personal communication from Ernest Halbleib, McNabb, Illinois.
- Gullickson, T.W., and Calverley, C.E. “Cardiac Failure in Cattle on Vitamin E-free Rations as Revealed by Electrocardiograms.” Science, 104(2701):312, October 4, 1946.
- Hutchison, Williams, and Wilkins. Food and the Principles of Dietetics, tenth edition, p. 109. 1948.
- Price, Weston. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. American Academy of Applied Nutrition, Los Angeles, 1938.
More About “Unfitting the Unborn”
Former president Herbert Hoover, in a radio interview on November 6, 1955, stated that the effects of starvation on a population created such mass damage that such people became a continuing liability to the world—that to save them, you had to get them young, before irrevocable changes in their bodies had occurred, and that otherwise they “became the parents of the world’s bandits and gangsters.”
I know of no one who has had a better opportunity to see malnutrition in action. Children can be born with warped minds as well as warped bodies as a result of ignorance of what honest food might be, and who has tried to live by eating counterfeits and imitations.
A good example is the retrolental fibroplasia that today is the main cause of infant blindness. The cause is unquestionably bleached flour. Bleach destroys vitamin E, so essential to prevent waste of oxygen in the tissues and prevent oxidation where it is not wanted. Exposing the baby to oxygen, as is common with premature infants, precipitates the condition. It can be prevented by a better intake of vitamin E in test animals (Annual Review of Biochemistry, p. 478, 1955).
A recent article in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition (July/August 1955) concludes with the comment, “The pathological states observed in vitamin E deficiencies have been suggested to result from the action of lipid peroxides on sulfhydryl-sensitive enzyme systems.” It is significant that the best remedy to save eye tissue from developing opacities after injury is sulfhydryl, known to all eye doctors.
The author of this article calls attention to the fact that lipid peroxides have also been found present in human venous diseases (Edwin L. Hove, Anti-Vitamin E Stress Factors as Related to Lipid Peroxides, page 328).
Whether or not you lost the sight of an eye after an accidental injury might depend on how much you had been cheated by counterfeit food makers, it appears. And the eyesight of your baby might be just as much a similar matter of how much the mother had been cheated in buying her food.
The tragic circumstance is accentuated by the fact that these defects, a result of malnutrition, tend to be hereditary and require a number of well-fed succeeding generations to eliminate the tendency. This was well demonstrated in my paper “Malnutrition and Heredity (Unfitting the Unborn).”
More evidence is available today. In Science (November 9, 1951, p. 479) you will find an article showing how the deficiency of only one of the B complex vitamins can cause the following congenital abnormalities: facial, cranial, and eye deformities, umbilical hernias, hydrocephalus, exencephalus, anencephalus, abdominal herniations, harelip, polydactylism, syndactylism, retardation in growth, misshapen bones, cleft palate, absence of ossification centers, and other deformities. Drug Trade News of May 25, 1952, reports cleft palate and skeletal deformities from riboflavin deficiency (page 36). Also note comment on page 308, Annual Review of Biochemistry, 1935.
These are a few of the penalties Mother Nature exacts for your departure from her plan and pattern of living and the use of counterfeits of natural foodstuffs. These consequences are biological time bombs that we fix for ourselves. No sudden death from heart disease occurs unless there is a great contribution by accumulated food deficiencies. We let the counterfeit food promoter tell us that “there is no proof that there is any need for vitamin E complex” or whatever other vitamin is under discussion. Certainly there never can be any such proof until we put a few hundred human guinea pigs into cages and destroy them by an artificial deficiency. That dastardly liar who makes such a statement should be shipped to the Siberian salt mines. I know of no more acute punishment. He deserves the worst, for he is selling us down the river for his own measly welfare.
We can put you or any other subject in a chair and record your heart sounds on a tape and read off the various serious deficiencies just as easily as we can record the sound of a ball bearing in a machine and tell the operator just how many more months of service he is going to get. The same machine will do both jobs.
If one fraction of the E complex is seriously lacking, the second sound of the heart (in some microphone positions) may be entirely lacking. Supplying the victim with a tablet or two of this vitamin will bring back the sound in a few minutes.
Another fraction of the E complex has exactly the effect of nitroglycerin on the vascular system and relieves angina pains as quickly as the drug. But it is a physiological remedy, for which nitroglycerin is a poor substitute.
Another fraction of the B complex will correct skips, extra systoles and fibrillation, often in minutes. Another may stop valve leakages by restoring normal tone to the heart muscle, and again the change may take only a few minutes.
There can be no argument as to these results. They correct the damages of starvation, and unless they are corrected, the patient is in danger and is dying by inches. It is all so totally unnecessary.
Everybody today is becoming cholesterol conscious; cholesterol in excess in the blood is so commonly a contributory cause of cardiovascular disease. Again, it is now discovered that a high blood cholesterol can be caused by one thing—the use of synthetic fats in the diet. Feeding hydrogenated fat to rabbits, chickens, or humans, the result is the same: a doubling of blood cholesterol.
How to reduce blood cholesterol? Simply use unrefined vegetable oils instead of the synthetic counterfeit, and the blood cholesterol may drop below normal.1
It has been said that it is the vitamin F content of the natural oil that is effective. We believe that is true, but do not confuse vitamin F with “unsaturated fatty acids.” Such fatty acids may not have any vitamin activity. Only fresh extracts with no taint of rancidity can be expected to be of value. They must be made from sources of known clinical effectiveness. If you really want a good vegetable oil with natural vitamin content, you will have to liquefy sesame seed in a liquefier and extract the oil in a small press or centrifugal juicer. (The juicer bowl will have to be lined with filter paper.)
All oils in the stores (except an unrefined oil in a health food store) have been refined and heat-treated to the point again of such diminishing nutritional value as to be pathetic. Olive oils may be the exception. Gallstones are cholesterol, and olive oil dosage has been a remedy of long repute, though much maligned as a “quack remedy” by the surgeon. There is also something in beet leaf juice that helps eliminate gallstones, or at least to eliminate any symptoms of trouble. Two ounces of beet leaf juice, cooked or raw, twice a day (best in tomato juice), has immediate effects.
Natural fats with a highly protective action against cholesterol are found in avocado, all raw nuts, olives, however prepared, raw peanut butter (made by liquefying raw peanuts in a liquefier with a little mustard and thousand island dressing or grating in a nut flaker and mixing separately), liquefied sesame seed (available as “tahini” in food stores, a staple Armenian and Turkish food), and in all freshly ground cereals, whether whole wheat, rye, or rice. (Beware of rice unless you know the source. We find all store-bought rice, except that in some health food stores, is treated with methyl bromide, a poison that will remain absorbed in some degree if once exposed. We suggest you get organic rice directly from growers advertising in Prevention or Natural Food and Farming.)
1. Kinsell and Michaels. Federation Proc., 661, June 1955; F.A. Kummerow. Food and Nutrition News, p. 1, October 1955.
“Knowing that vitamins act as components of enzymes in the body, we may visualize a vitamin deficiency and a defective gene having identical effects and leading to the same congenital abnormality.”
—“Maternal Nutrition and Child Health,” Bulletin of the National Research Council, No. 123, p. 131, November 1950.
