By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this reprint from the magazine Nature’s Path, Dr. Royal Lee rips industrial food manufacturers 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?” Dr. Lee asks. “‘Just a little poison in the flour’….’Nitrates in meat never hurt anybody’….’Aluminum toxic? Are you crazy?'” These are just a few examples, Dr. Lee says, of how large-scale poisoning of the population has been glossed over in America. From Nature’s Path magazine, 1951. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 30F.
It Can Happen Here[spacer height=”20px”]
Various items are appearing in the scientific journals and the newspapers about cholesterol and its bad effects if permitted to collect in the human body. Cholesterol is being blamed for hardening of the arteries and hypertension as well as old age in general. Blakeslee, the Associated Press science writer, called inositol the “youth pill” in a release on September 5th because it is known to aid in cholesterol elimination.
Many persons reading this type of literature become alarmed and try to reduce their cholesterol intake by restricting the amount of eggs, butter, milk, cheese, and fat meats that they eat. They are not aware that these sources of cholesterol also carry the best antidote for it—the phospholipids and lecithins that are always naturally associated with cholesterol—and that the loss of these phospholipids is more certain to cause serious trouble than any excess of cholesterol.
The phospholipids (which include lecithins) in food are a part of the vitamin E complex. The E complex loses as much as 99 percent of its potency if the associated phospholipids are removed along with the other factors. The E complex is also known to facilitate the use of cholesterol by the system. So we can see that a deficiency of vitamin E complex can increase trouble from cholesterol in the tissues. Lecithin as a biochemical balancer for cholesterol is shown by the facts that a high cholesterol content of the tissues predisposes to cancer and a high content of lecithin protects from cancer.
Just how this takes place is explained in more detail in other references. The vitamin E and associated factors seem to act by protecting the chromosome units in the cell. These units are the “blueprints” for the designs of life, the guiding determinants that ensure that the healing or regenerating tissue is like that which is being replaced. If the blueprints are destroyed—say, by oxidation or enzymatic digestion—because the protective phospholipid wrappers are injured by reason of nutritional deficiencies of the vitamin E complex and phospholipids, it is easy to understand why cancer can occur, or why the walls of the blood vessels become patched and degenerated.
Sudden death, that well-established penalty for vitamin E complex deficiency, is now easily understood. A group of twenty-eight cattle put on rations having the E complex removed during the first year of a three-year test lost thirteen of their number by heart failure during this time, for instance.
Whole wheat carries a liberal content of the vitamin E complex and phospholipids. Commercial flour, both white and whole wheat, is treated with oxidizing chemicals in proportion to the vitamins present—four times as much for the whole wheat flour as the white. As a result, test animals die much quicker on commercial “whole wheat” bread than on white bread.
So we can readily see why such foods predispose to cancer, sterility, cardiovascular disease, creeping paralysis, and a host of other chronic degenerative changes. (Vitamin E complex is also essential to the maintenance of the integrity of the insulating films in nerve fibers—the same function as the protection of the chromosome wrappers.)
Bleached Flour
Flour bleaches destroy phosphatase in flour, which otherwise would release inositol during the yeast-raising period of bread making. Therefore, they contribute to all the diseases that are suspected to follow inositol deficiency (arteriosclerosis, fatty degeneration of the liver, susceptibility to cancer, inhibition of lactation in mothers, loss of hair or impairment of its growth, muscular degeneration, and so on).
There is another specific destroyer of phosphatase and phospholipids that should be taken into account. That is the element aluminum. Any form of soluble aluminum is destructive to any phosphorus linkage found in food. When it is desired to observe phosphorus deficiency in test animals, the easiest way to block the assimilation of phosphorus is to give them some aluminum salt in their food. The blood phosphorus drops quickly to a minimum level.
Aluminum has a greater affinity for phosphorus than for any other element except one. That is silicon. So sodium silicate becomes an antidote for aluminum. Sodium silicate is one of the remedies sometimes used to relieve arteriosclerosis. Probably it only functions as such in those cases where the arteriosclerosis is being produced by aluminum poisoning. It is of interest that silica poisoning (silicosis) of the lungs from inhaling silica is being successfully treated by the inhalation of aluminum dust.
In the only test known to us that purported to show that animals were unharmed by feeding aluminum salts, sodium silicate was administered in their “mineral ration,” and it served as an antidote. Rat poison is harmless too under similar circumstances. Soluble aluminum salts are poisonous to plants, too, but most soils have enough silica to control their effects.
The notorious incidence of ill health in the “baking powder belt,” where hot biscuits and corn bread are made with alum baking powder, is a national disgrace. The victims of such poisoning surely act as if the insulation on their nerve trunks are faulty. Very often they have not the energy to lift a hand—typical “mountain boys” who let Grandma do all the work. We call it “pellagra,” but we never have found the remedy to control it properly. Certainly, various better food components do a lot of good. But the real answer is not in sight. It is a conspicuous fact that foods high in phospholipids—eggs, wheat germ, milk—are essential in the treatment of pellagra. [Yet] no vitamin pattern alone is able to cure the disease.
Alum is used in baking powder simply because it reduces the cost to about one fifth of that of a tartrate powder. (Tartrates are grape by-products.)
The substitution of synthetic fats for natural ones, such as oleo [margarine] for butter, has brought into use another large group of cheating foods. Synthetic fats lack the phospholipid content of natural fats, and so they must contribute to premature aging, cardiovascular disease, sterility, sudden death, and cancer. They are also suspected of causing the partial castration of both sexes, making boys develop into sissies and girls into narrow-hipped, broad-shouldered freaks that can only bear babies by the cesarean route and are about as capable of nursing the new arrival as the father.
These remarks may sound very cynical and harsh to the uninitiated. Please believe me when I say that they are not intended to be more than a plain report of the facts. When we are faced by an unscrupulous situation, we had better recognize the facts. To gloss over their harshness is to really become one of the “poor, deluded souls.”
The makers of flour bleached with poisonous bug-killing chemicals are advertising a product unfit for food. No flour miller I have met eats the stuff himself. Drop in any mill and ask the superintendent about it. Read the answers to the questionnaire sent out in 1906 by Ladd and Stallings to the millers. Even in those days they admitted flour bleaching was a dishonest fraud—long before the facts were known about its poisonous effect.
These bleached-flour makers know their business would be difficult to carry on in competition with small, local mills if they did not use bug-killing bleach. Why is its use continued in spite of the law? Why is the law not rigidly enforced? Their attitude is well expressed by the writer of the history of the Washburn-Crosby Company in the book “The Medal of Gold” (William D. Edgar, The Bellman Co., Minneapolis, 1925, p. 40):
“Those who mourn for old-process flour, as for the unattainable, and lament the lack in modern flour of the old, ‘nutty flavor,’ may find consolation in the knowledge that this delectable flavor was not imparted by the method of grinding but by the crease dirt adhering to the wheat from the field in which it was grown and not removed by the old process. They can easily secure the long-lost flavor that they crave by simply mixing a small quantity of ordinary earth, well powdered, with the beautiful wholesome white flour they find on the market. Street dust would answer the purpose admirably and probably add somewhat to the nuttiness they yearn for, or think they do.”
Commercial “whole wheat flour” is far worse than the white. It is so much more saturated with bleach poison to block bug infestation that test animals die far quicker on whole wheat bread than on white. That is why most of us shudder at the idea of eating commercial, “sawdust” flavored bread. Certainly our sense of taste warns us of the unfitness of this “food.”
Diet and Cancer
Few people are aware that there is much evidence pointing to the conclusion that predisposition to cancer may follow the use of improper and devitalized foods. Dr. Davidson of Winnipeg proved that with animal tests years ago. His work was ridiculed and suppressed. Dr. Daniel Quigley of Omaha, a veteran cancer surgeon and author of The Conquest of Cancer by Radium and Other Methods (F.A. Davis Co., 1929), stated in a lecture in Los Angeles two years ago that in his thirty-odd years of practice he had never observed recurrence of cancer in patients who avoided devitalized foods after elimination [of the cancer] by surgery or radiation.
We know that peoples who have no access to the devitalized foods of civilized man have little cancer. Dr . Weston A. Price, in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, tells us of many cases where cancer appeared soon after the introduction of white flour and white sugar into territories where these food products had been unknown.
Dr. Duncan Bulkley, author of another book on cancer (End Results of the Medical Treatment of Cancer, 1928) and founder of the New York Skin and Cancer Hospital, considered wrong diet the cause of cancer and improved diet a most important part of the treatment.
Some terribly malign influence is obviously blocking progress towards any intelligent investigation of the nutritional deficiencies that may predispose cancer. Dr. Davidson of Winnipeg was ridiculed as another deluded soul when he asked for government money to further investigate the nutritional cause of cancer after he proved that mice could be made susceptible to cancer by a poor diet and again made immune by improving the diet.
Millions of dollars are available to discover a fancy synthetic drug to cure disease, but not a cent [is allocated] to really locate the cause if it happens to be poisoned bread, poisoned meat, synthetic sugar, counterfeit butter, or other devitalized foods.
The sulfa drugs, so highly publicized, have been found toxic and are now known to be effective simply by their effect of mobilization of vitamin C into the blood from the tissue reserves. Few victims of sulfa poisoning escape serious kidney damage. The use of the real [causal] agent, vitamin C complex, is still too simple and natural a proposition to accept—even with penicillin now suspect because it sensitizes the patient and a new shot may be causative of anaphylactic shock.
Streptomycin no sooner was announced, with great fanfare, as a new answer to the problem than it was found to destroy the innervation of the balancing mechanism of the inner ear, rendering the victim as badly symptomatic of syphilis in the tertiary stage as any victim of this disease was ever able to demonstrate.
Cortisone, the newest wonder drug—intended to supply synthetically an adrenal hormone to substitute for the loss of the patient’s own glands, which have been starved out of commission by devitalized foods—has already reported to have caused kidney stones, mental derangements, and diabetes if used for any length of time.
Medical literature, censored as it is, keeps these facts pretty well hidden from the public eye. A continual array of new and phony remedies is paraded before the public, each one announced with all the new releases so characteristic. After the public has bought and poisoned itself with millions of dollars worth [of the new drug], it is found wanting and soon is relegated to the limbo of forgotten things. Viosterol, one great promotion, poisoned unaccounted numbers of children before it blew up in a cloud of litigation dust.
Are we probably here 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? “Just a little poison in the flour…Nitrates in meat never hurt anybody…Aluminum toxic? Are you crazy?”
This is one simple, concrete example of how it can happen here!
By Dr. Royal Lee. Reprinted from Nature’s Path, April 1951, by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.
References
[Note from Dr. Lee:] We have been asked for references supporting the statement about lecithin, cholesterol, and cancer on page 1. These are given below.[spacer height=”20px”]“The high cholesterol concentration of food has been frequently observed to promote the growth of inoculated tumors…the significant observation was made that excessive cholesterol in the diet increased the formation of metastases… diets poor in cholesterol resulted in a lower number of takes in tumor inoculation (of test animals).”
—Stern and Wilhelm, The Biochemistry of Malignant Tumors, pp. 408–409 (Reference Press, 1943)
“The tumor-inhibiting effect that was observed following…administration of phospholipids and lecithin in animal experiments was, however, less pronounced than the opposite action of cholesterol…Paralleling the growth inhibition of the tumors, lecithin injections were also followed by an increase in the carcinolytic power of the serum.”
— Ibid, pp. 142–143
“Solvents such as lecithin, cephalin, and anhydrous lanolin inhibit the action of carcinogens…”
—Peller, Cancer in Man, p. 80 (International Universities Press, NY, 1952)
“The administration of emulsified cholesterol by direct injection into the primary tumor (of a test animal) greatly accelerates its growth…This observation was subsequently verified in a striking manner…The animals, after inoculation (with a strain of carcinoma that had never been known to yield metastases)…were fed a diet to which cholesterol had been added to the extent of 200 mg per week. No less than 104 out of 116 animals that were thus treated developed metastases, or secondary growth at points remote from the site of inoculation.”
— Robertson, Principles of Biochemistry, p. 614 (Lea & Febiger, 1924)
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