Open Letters Concerning Dr. Frederick J. Stare

Various authors

Summary: In March 1957 Modern Nutrition printed the following excerpts from a stunning series of open letters by John Pearmain of the Boston Nutrition Society to Dr. Nathan Pusey, President of Harvard University, regarding “the matter of standards of research under Dr. Frederick Stare,” head of the university’s department of nutrition. Dr. Stare (1911–2002), probably more than any other public figure in U.S. history, was responsible for convincing Americans that sugar and other refined foods are harmless and that whole foods are no more valuable nutritionally than processed ones. “Actually,” he once wrote, “we get as much food value from refined foods that have been enriched as from natural foods, and sometimes more.” Dr. Stare also advised Americans to “eat your additives—they’re good for you” and recommended Coca-Cola as “a healthy between-meals snack.” In the following excerpts, Mr. Pearmain questions the reasons for Dr. Stare’s pronouncements, suggesting it was not the weight of scientific evidence that underlay them but rather the financial might of his department’s funders, which comprised some of the country’s largest food processing companies (including, yes, Coca-Cola) as well as major chemical and drug interests. While these links were carefully kept from the public during Dr. Stare’s lifetime, recently they have begun to come to light, most notably in the 2016 exposé “Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease” in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine. The investigation pieces a paper trail from the Sugar Research Foundation—an industrial benefactor of Harvard’s nutrition department whose advisory board Dr. Stare served on—to research published by Harvard investigators intentionally obscuring evidence against sugar in the causation of heart disease. While the news of influence peddling at America’s most prestigious university came as a shock to many readers, Harvard’s “sugar scandal” is merely the tip of an iceberg of dubious activity by Dr. Stare and his department, as the following letters show. Included after the excerpts is some fascinating commentary by Dr. Royal Lee, a leading proponent of natural food nutrition during the 1950s and strong critic of Dr. Stare. From Modern Nutrition, 1957. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

The following is a transcription of the original Archives document. To view or download the original document, click here.

Open Letters Concerning Dr. Frederick J. Stare

The open letters from John D. Pearmain, Chairman of the Educational Committee of the Boston Nutrition Society, Inc., to Dr. Nathan M. Pusey, President of Harvard University, contain important information on the matter of standards of research under Dr. Frederick J. Stare, head of the Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health. Complete reprinting of the five letters will not be included in Modern Nutrition; however, copies of the open letters are available at 5 cents each from the Boston Nutrition Society, Inc., PO Box 408, Back Bay Annex, Boston 17, Massachusetts. — Editors, Modern Nutrition

Letter No. 1

Dr. Stare, in public utterances, in writings, and as witness in court cases, has made statements of both a particular and general nature that we believe to be in error and contrary to vital public interest, to wit:

In an article entitled “Are You Being Fooled by the Food Quacks?” in McCall’s Magazine for July, 1955, he and Julia M. Shea of the Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, are quoted as saying in the opening and other paragraphs:

“Parading under the banner of friend to the common man, food quacks would have us believe that our soil is worn out, our food is worthless, and all our people are sick. Nonsense! Look around you…

“A child born today may look forward to seventy years of life. Compare this with the fifty years of a little more than a generation ago. The successful cooperation of agriculture, industry, and the medical profession has produced a nation of healthy people blessed with the best food supply in the world…

“But this progress is endangered by pseudoscientists who call themselves ‘food specialists,’ ‘health teachers,’ or ‘natural farmers.’ They are all ‘food fakirs’…

“A good, varied diet—available from foods that any grocery store can provide—will produce just as good nutritional health as any and all ‘health foods,’ at half the price…

“Refined and processed foods are a favorite target of the ‘food specialist,’ who would have us believe these foods are not nutritious. Actually, we get as much food value from refined foods that have been enriched as from natural foods, and sometimes more. This is not to say that white bread is better than brown bread or vice versa. For all practical purposes, in typical American diets, they are identical in food values. Choose whichever tastes better to you…”

Thus, Dr. Pusey, your grave concern becomes increasingly understandable. The situation takes on shocking gravity when one contemplates that the reading public accepts almost without question the statements of a Harvard Department Head. Yet the public has no way of connecting Dr. Stare’s statements with the fact that such assertions are not arrived at scientifically; do not represent positive freedom to perform “the traditional function of research and teaching in the spirit of truth”; do not represent the results of unbiased research; and were not made by minds “free from enslavement” by the economic forces that donated the funds that made such statements possible. His remarks are definitely slanted in favor of his donors.

As opposed to Dr. Stare’s utterances, we quote Henry W. Trautmann, nationally known MD of Madison, Wisconsin, who said with respect to this matter:

“So-called ‘enrichments’ in foods are enrichments in comparison only with totally devitalized products—not with the original food substance…Every method of refinement, processing, or preparation causes a loss of food value…How have the millers of flour become so wise as to remove all the vital elements from the wheat and then guarantee ‘enrichment’ by adding minute amounts of thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, calcium, and iron? Why these five factors only? There are about twenty trace elements essential for nutrition…”

Royal Lee, DDS, head of the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in an article entitled “Who Does the Law Protect?” in the August 1955 issue of Natural Food and Farming Magazine, says: “We eat counterfeit foods that are insulting imitations of natural products—oleo, synthetic shortenings, and sugars that have no trace of mineral and vitamin factors essential to life; bleached flour products that we know cannot support life; chemical adulterants of all kinds, from coal-tar dyes to illegal bread softeners and mold poisons; oceans of synthetic soft drinks that rob our bodies of bone mineral and lower our resistance; devitaminized and demineralized breakfast foods; and stale cereal products containing rancid oils that cause heart disease, muscular dystrophies and paralysis—and then we pray for help after the day of reckoning has arrived…”

Dr. Agnes Fay Morgan, veteran food research scientist of the University of California, is stated to have “tested the ‘enriching’ vitamins for nutritional value and to have found that her test animals on the ‘enriched’ diet dropped dead long before the ones on the ‘unenriched’ control diet became disabled. They became ‘sedate’ and ‘senile’ on the counterfeit enrichment.”

Adelle Davis, AB, MS, consulting nutritionist, is stated by the same source to have said of this “enrichment” of white bread: “Enriched, yes—enriched like you are enriched when a highway robber takes your money at the point of a gun and then returns to you a dime to buy streetcar fare home.”

Dr. Hindehede, Danish Minister of Foods during World War I, said, “We not only milled our rye to 100 percent (used it all), but we added all our wheat bran to the whole rye bread. The death rate for Denmark for the year October 1917 to October 1918 was 10.4 per thousand. It had never been lower than 12.5” (JAMA, Vol. LXXIV, pp. 381–2, February 1920—before the American Medical Association joined forces with the millers in 1925).

Hippocrates, known as the Father of Medicine, born about 460 B.C., has been held in almost universal veneration by medical men in the ages that have followed. The “Hippocratic oath” is taken by medical men and registered nurses even today at some medical schools. On the matter of natural foods, he is quoted as saying, “Foods must be in the condition in which they are found in nature—or at least in a condition as close as possible to that found in nature.”

On the subject of livestock versus white flour products, Dr. Royal Lee—in a lecture on April 17, 1948, before the American Academy of Applied Nutrition at San Francisco, California—is quoted as saying:

“It was 1946 before the University of Minnesota published results of a test that really caused nutritionists to sit up and take notice. In this test, cattle were fed grain that had been degerminated, like commercial flours. The cattle gained in weight and appeared to all outward indications in good health. But they soon began to drop dead, one by one, with heart failure. It is apparent here that we have the explanation of why heart disease has become the leading cause of death in all countries where the main foodstuff is white flour…the world’s greatest monument to fraud.”

Yet Dr. Stare writes for public consumption: “Actually, we get as much food value from refined foods which have been ‘enriched’ as from natural foods and sometimes more.”

Enriched with what? With synthetic, man-made vitamins, a prolific and most profitable product of the chemical concerns who so richly donate to Dr. Stare’s department. Dr. Stare thus continues to recommend the addition to our breads of individual components of the vitamin B complex in synthetic form, such as thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2), and niacin (B3).

What do scientists who are not controlled by or donated to by the food processors and refiners or the chemical and drug interests have to say on “enrichment” with synthetic vitamins?

In the British Medical Journal for March 31, 1945, in an article entitled, “Imbalance of Vitamin B Factors,” Marion B. Richards, MD, DSc, of the Rowell Research Institute, Aberdeen, Scotland, writes:

“Recent experiments on rats in this institute have produced clear-cut evidence of the advance effects that may be caused by a disturbance of the balance of the vitamin B factors in the diet, and have shown that overloading with one component, B1, can produce a definite deficiency of another component, B6. It is becoming increasingly recognized that in the treatment of pellagrins with nicotinic acid, it is essential to provide other members of the B complex and to prescribe a liberal and well-balanced diet. Our experiments would suggest the necessity for adopting a similar procedure for other B factors and, particularly when B1 therapy is indicated, for supplying the whole B complex instead of the single vitamin…The present results emphasize the need for caution in any attempt to improve the diet of these populations by indiscriminate addition of large supplements of single synthetic B vitamins.”

These experiments have been backed up in this country by Dr. Tom Spies and associates (see above), by Agnes Fay Morgan of Southern California University (see Letter No. 2), and recently by Dr. Estelle Hawley, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Nutrition at Rochester University. Dr. Hawley carried out a series of experiments in which so-called ‘enriched’ commercial white bread was fed to one group of rats while another group was fed on bread made according to Dr. Clive McCay’s “Cornell formula.” The rats on the McCay-Cornell bread thrived, as did their offspring and descendants through the fourth generation. The rats on the ‘enriched’ white bread became sickly and starved looking and produced stunted offspring. All died off, and the strain became extinct before the fourth generation.

Incidentally, the McCay-Cornell bread was made of unbleached flour, enriched not with man-made synthetics but with natural foods (wheat germ, soybean flour and dried milk). But the ‘Big Boys’ did not like this type of competition, so they got their gestapo, the Food and Drug Administration, after this Cornell bread, and in 1952 the FDA ruled that bread made according to the Cornell formula was too good to come under its ceiling regulations for quality; hence it was not to be sold in interstate commerce as “white bread.” Thus, the FDA not only tolerates the sale of nutritionally inferior bread that contain poisonous chemicals and synthetic vitamins, but it protects the refiners, the bakers, and the chemical companies from good-bread competition.

What about the poisons contained in so many of these foods available at “any grocery store,” poisons that are put there in defiance of Dr. Harvey W. Wiley’s Pure Food and Drug Law, which is still on the statute books and has never been changed or enforced?

On June 27, 1956, Mr. Folsom, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of this Pure Food and Drug Law, stated:

“A recent compilation shows that approximately 500 chemical materials are being added directly to foods for various purposes. The Food and Drug Administration estimates that about 150 of them haven’t been adequately tested to show that they are harmless.”

In the Consumer Reports for September 1956, we read:

“An important group of chemicals long thought to be safe are synthetic dyes used to color foods, drugs, and cosmetics. Today, sixteen dyes are certified for use in foods. Since 1945 fifteen food dyes have been reexamined for toxic, carcinogenic, or allergenic properties. Only one of these, Yellow No. 5, has been conclusively shown to be harmless. Last year, Orange No. 1, Orange No. 2, and Red No. 32 were decertified as too toxic for use in foods. Orange No. 1 had been widely used in candy, cakes, cookies, carbonated beverages, desserts, and such meat products as frankfurters. Orange No. 2 and Red No.32 were used to color the outer skins of oranges, and during the Christmas season last year, some 150 children were made ill in California as a result of eating popcorn colored with Red No. 32.”

Dr. Pusey, it’s time to pull aside the iron curtain regarding our Pure Food Law and tell the people the truth. Our authority is Dr. Harvey W. Wiley’s own writings.

In 1883 Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, MD, was installed as Chief of the Bureau of Chemistry of the Agriculture Department, a position he held for twenty-nine years. He worked for twenty-three years to secure passage of the Pure Food Law, which Congress did in 1906. The law provided a fine and imprisonment for anyone who added to food or drink any substance that was of a poisonous or deleterious nature. Congress specifically made Dr. Wiley’s Bureau of Chemistry the sole prosecutor, with the final decision in the hands of the courts. As soon as it was passed, all those who stood to be prosecuted started to organize to get rid of Dr. Wiley and his bureau. These interests were so effective in hampering Dr. Wiley that in 1912 he resigned because he believed he could do more outside the government than in it to protect his law and the people.

Dr. Wiley wrote a book and gave it to the printer, but the manuscript ‘disappeared’ and has never been found to this day. He then spent ten years rewriting it and bringing it up to date. Its title is The History of a Crime Against the Food Law. This time he took no chance of the manuscript being ‘lost’ but closely supervised the entire printing. Distribution started in 1929, and never has there been a best seller that disappeared so rapidly from the bookseller’s shelves. Millions of dollars were ready to “gobble it up”—but for destruction, not for reading purposes. In desperation Dr. Wiley put his few remaining books in libraries. They disappeared as freely from there as from the booksellers. Few if any libraries still have them.

No one would believe this could happen in free America, yet it did, and as proof, the book has just recently been reprinted in its entirety without permission of the copyright owners (six years still to run). It may be obtained from the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 2023 West Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Dr. Wiley tells the whole sordid story with documented proof. We quote a few statements from the chapter entitled Passing of the Bureau of Chemistry:

“Those who adulterated our foods and drugs foresaw that if they could cripple the activities of the Bureau of Chemistry, they could save themselves from indictment. They proceeded along successful lines to effect this paralysis. The decisions of the Bureau in regard to proper names and labels were speedily overturned, contrary to the provisions of the law. The Solicitor of the Department and the Secretary [of the USDA] thereof joined in this destruction of the function of the Bureau. Their restrictions and illegal limitations on the Bureau have never been removed, and finally the Bureau itself was sacrificed, crucified, and abolished (page 349).

“Under the administration of the law as now conducted, it is only a ‘so-called’ pure food law. Its activities are confined chiefly to misbranding of foods and medicines. The real Pure Food Law was designed principally to protect our foods from additions of poisons and deleterious substances, a feature that has almost entirely been obliterated by the present administration of the law (page 352).

“Thus it is clearly seen that the chief activities of the present administration are proper branding. The purpose of the law as a health protector is of no importance whatever (page 354).”

Please remember, Dr. Pusey, that the above are not the statements of some “quack” or “fakir” but are quoted from the book depicting the life work and struggle of Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, MD, whose law and memory are today being honored on the fiftieth anniversary with a special U.S. stamp bearing his picture. Ironic, isn’t it, that the very people who destroyed his life’s work—those who administer his law—should now try to cover up their nefarious work by the smoke screen of honoring him.

Now let us look at the three court decisions that would have prevented the rampant poisoning of our foods today had they not been rendered “null and void” by illegal directives of the law enforcement bodies (illegal according to the law and to Dr. Wiley’s book).

In 1917 Charles Evans Hughes of the U.S. Supreme Court gave the unanimous decision that the Coca-Cola producers had added poisons and deleterious substances to the product and remanded it to the lower court for action (Notice of Judgment No. 4801, issued September 18, 1917, page 380). The lower court ordered the seized product forfeited to the government but added that this “judgment of forfeiture shall not be binding upon the said Coca-Cola Co. or its product except as to this cause and the particular goods seized herein.” The Secretary of Agriculture refused to let the Bureau of Chemistry make further seizures or prosecutions, so Coca-Cola goes merrily on with “top sales” of a legally poisoned product, while our people sincerely believe it is a safe product because they think they are protected by a pure food law. Meantime, Dr. Clive McCay of Cornell testified before a congressional committee as to Coca-Cola’s detrimental effects on teeth in that a tooth suspended in it for thirty days will entirely dissolve. Dr. Pusey, who are the “fakirs”?

A second Supreme Court decision, rendered “null and void” by illegal directive, was against the bleaching of flour. The case began in 1910 against the Lexington Milling and Elevator Co. of Nebraska for shipping, interstate, flour that had been bleached with nitrogen peroxide gas. The case went from one court to another, and on February 24, 1914, the Supreme Court gave its decision that it is not incumbent upon the government, in order to make out a case, to establish the fact that the article of food containing added poisonous or other deleterious ingredients must affect the public health; it is only necessary to prove that the added substance is of a poisonous nature and “may” render such article injurious to health. The case was remanded to the lower court for action. Because of World War I, it was not until April 9, 1919, that notice of judgment No. 6380 was entered and the seized product destroyed.

But fifteen months later, on July 30, 1920, an illegal directive of the Agricultural Department (of which the Food and Drug was then a part) was issued, actually reversing this decision and notifying all the millers that “bleached flour may be shipped interstate on condition that it be banded plainly to indicate that it has undergone a process of bleaching.” This directive was a lengthy one, but in substance it said that no prosecutions would be made unless the poisonous substance added actually was proven injurious to health. This was a complete reversal of the purpose of the law and of the Supreme Court decision, which was explicit that the amount added was not important—that the only question was, had any substance been added of a poisonous nature?

This illegal directive was a “GO” signal for all those who wanted to use chemicals. They could now put all the poisons in the food they wished provided they so indicated it on the label. Result: the chemical industry has boomed. Per September 1956 Consumer Reports: “In 1953 the production of ‘surface-action chemicals,’ many of which are used to improve the stability of foods such as bread, cake mixes, and desserts, reached 921,000,000 pounds…” As a result of this illegal directive regarding flour, ‘agene’ was used for thirty years to bleach flour, until the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, found it caused running fits in dogs and affected the mentality of humans. Even then, it took several years before it was abandoned here—to give the chemical interests time to use up their supply and replace it with a chlorine bleach that combines with protein to produce alloxan, the poison used in experimental laboratories to induce diabetes in animals.

Because Dr. Wiley’s law was never enforced against the big users of chemicals, over 1,000 chemicals have been used, with half discarded and half still in use, 150 of these not tested, and many found poisonous by authorities other than the FDA, some found even carcinogenic (cancer causing).

Of course, the members of the “unholy alliance”—and particularly their gestapo, the Food and Drug Administration—will try to belittle all this as ancient history, maintaining that all this was changed by Congress in 1938. Dr. Pusey, don’t you believe them. For in 1945, the third great court decision was given, which upheld the original Dr. Wiley Food Law and well might have saved our people from consuming untold tons of the most deadly of all poisons had that decision not followed the fate of the others and been rendered “null and void” by another illegal directive.

We refer to the case of the Massachusetts Brewing Co., of Springfield, Massachusetts. Its owner, Mr. Kaufman, used infinitesimal amounts of a deadly fluoride compound to kill the enzymes in its beer so it could be canned or bottled. His competitors, who use the pasteurization method involving heavy expensive equipment, objected, for he could undersell them. The Food and Drug Administration brought suit. The case was tried before Judge Francis J.W. Ford of Boston. In his charge to the jury, Judge Ford, like his two predecessors, interpreted Dr. Wiley’s Pure Food Law as it was written; namely, that it is not necessary that the government prove the amount of substance added actually injured the consumer—it was only necessary to prove that the substance added was of a poisonous nature and could or might be deleterious to health. The verdict was guilty, and Judge Ford imposed a fine of $5,000 on the company and the same on Mr. Kaufman, along with a year’s jail sentence suspended.

Shortly thereafter, the entire Health, Welfare, and Educational Department, of which the FDA is now a part, became completely controlled by the chemical and drug interests and so became the “moving spirit” behind promoting the injection of sodium fluoride, the most deadly of all poisons for which there is no known antidote, into the drinking water of every city and town in the country. How then could the FDA prosecute breweries for doing the same thing? So they issued another illegal directive to all breweries that the law against the use of this deadliest of all poisons, sodium fluoride, would not be operative.

Yet 165,000,000 people believe that we have a food law that protects us against all poisons. Dr. Wiley’s book proves this to be untrue. But because it has been so effectively suppressed for twenty-seven years, neither Congress nor our federal and local jurists are aware that over thirty directives issued by the FDA—or those “enforcing” Dr. Wiley’s law—are actually illegal. Yet those illegal directives have, and are still, daily adversely affecting our national health. Every reader of these open letters should see that copies get into the hands of their congressmen with appropriate comment.

To this problem of untold tonnage of poisons being used in our foods today, the only answer of the Food and Drug Administration is that they are helpless because the present law lacks teeth. Nonsense. The original law is still adequate if honestly enforced. It has plenty of teeth, but the FDA refuses to bite with them—if in “biting” it hurts any member of the before-mentioned “combine.” They have worked with the food processors and the chemical and drug interests against the public for so long now they want to pass the ball back to Congress, for it’s getting too hot to handle. The public would demand enforcement, but because of the “gag rule” by which the press, radio, and television must clear everything pertaining to health, medicine, drugs, or disease with the local AMA agents, we have no freedom of speech or press with which to tell our people the truth. The censorship on these subjects is tighter than it is on politics in Russia. (See Letter No. 4.)

Letter No. 2: Is Science Being Misused?

John D. Pearmain, Chairman of Educational Committee, Boston Nutrition Society, to Dr. Nathan M. Pusey, President of Harvard University. On the matter of standards of research under Dr. Frederick J. Stare, head of the Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health.

Re: Cereal Products vs. National Health

Dr. Pusey, in this second letter we wish to further analyze the utterances of Dr. Frederick J. Stare of your nutrition department, which is largely supported by the food refining and processing companies.

The Woman’s Home Companion, in its December 1951 issue, in a full-page article headed “Don’t Fall for Food Fads,” gave prominence to the following quotation from the “food faddism” address of Dr. Stare, referred to in Letter No. 1. They quote him as saying, “I do not know of any evidence to support the idea that whole wheat products are superior nutritionally in man as compared with enriched flours.”

In an article in McCall’s Magazine for July 1955, among other things, Dr. Stare wrote, “Refined and processed foods are a favorite target of the ‘food specialist,’ who would have us believe these foods are not nutritious. Actually, we get as much food value from refined foods that have been enriched as from natural foods, and sometimes more. This is not that white bread is better than brown bread or vice versa. For all practical purposes, in typical American diets they are identical in food values” (which is nil.—Ed.).

Are these statements arrived at from unbiased scientific research? Or are they an effort on Dr. Stare’s part to satisfy the commercial processors who devitalize American foods and who so lavishly donate to Dr. Stare’s department funds, earmarked to be used under his personal direction? Are his conclusions arrived at in a truly scientific manner, or do they represent innuendos and misstatements, in lieu of facts, designed to lull the public into a false sense of security?

Here are just a few donations to Dr. Stare’s department or to be spent under his direction made between 1950 and 1956. Such gifts would cause anyone’s statement to be prejudiced in favor of the donors. But what of the nutritional and psychological effects of such misstatements on the public?

Donations

Kellogg’s Company	$45,000
National Biscuit Co.	$12,500
Wheat Flour Institute	$5,000
Nutrition Foundation*	$113,000
Sugar Research Foundation	$67,750
(And many others)
Total	$243,250

*Whose board of trustees consists of officials of over forty leading food processing companies.

As opposed to Dr. Stare’s utterances, we quote Henry W. Trautmann, nationally known MD of Madison, Wisconsin, who said with respect to this matter:

“So-called ‘enrichments’ in foods are enrichments in comparison only with totally devitalized products—not with the original food substance. Every method of refinement, processing, or preparation causes a loss of food value. How have the millers of flour become so wise as to remove all the vital elements from the wheat and then guarantee ‘enrichment’ by adding minute amounts of thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, calcium, and iron? Why these five factors only? There are about twenty trace elements essential for nutrition…”

“We eat counterfeit foods that are insulting imitations of natural products—oleo, synthetic shortenings, and sugars that have no trace of mineral and vitamin factors essential to life; bleached flour products that we know cannot support life; chemical adulterants of all kinds, from coal-tar dyes to illegal bread softeners and mold poisons; oceans of synthetic soft drinks that rob our bodies of bone mineral and lower our resistance; devitaminized and demineralized breakfast foods; and stale cereal products containing rancid oils that cause heart disease, muscular dystrophies and paralysis—and then we pray for help after the day of reckoning has arrived.”

Dr. C.W. Cavanaugh of Cornell University is quoted as saying, “There is only one major disease, and that is malnutrition. All other diseases to which man is heir are results of this one major disease.”

Socrates, the great Athenian philosopher, born 470 BC, is widely quoted as saying, “Because they do not study the entire patient, the cure of many diseases remains unknown to the physicians of Hellas (Greece).”

In direct reply to Dr. Stare’s article in McCall’s Magazine for July 1955, Dr. Joseph D. Nichols—President of Natural Food Associates, head of the Ellington Memorial Hospital, Atlanta, Texas, Chairman of the Board, Atlanta National Bank, and fifth-generation farmer with close to 1000 acres under organic (natural) farming methods—has the following to say in the July issue of Natural Food and Farming Magazine:

“My attention has been called to an article in a recent popular magazine that boldly proclaims that you and I are food ‘quacks.’ The article is written by a member of the School of Public Health of a once great university of the East and accuses us of ‘lacking a code of ethics’ and of ‘playing upon human frailties to get money.’

“The magazine calls us ‘quacks’ because we believe that devitalized, demineralized, enriched foodstuffs are worthless. We not only think these foodstuffs are worthless, we believe that many of them are positively harmful. The enriched white bread fed to the American public is a national scandal. First of all, the wheat grown on poor soil and fertilized with water-soluble commercial fertilizer is of low protein content. Then, while in storage, it is sprayed with poison DDT to control the insects.

“The modern flour mill removes the precious vitamins and minerals. It is then bleached with a powerful oxidizing agent, chlorine dioxide (which is poison), and to this lifeless mess a few dead, synthetic chemicals (improperly called vitamins) and inorganic iron are added. And the writer of the article insinuates that this kind of flour has as much food value as natural, organically grown, unbleached stone-ground flour…

“We know that we are a nation of sick people. Our hospitals are crowded to capacity. All the metabolic diseases are increasing by leaps and bounds. Coronary thrombosis is attacking young men in their twenties. Cancer is the leading cause of death in children under fourteen. Diabetes and mental disease are on the increase even in children. And dental caries are rampant!

“The tragedy of our times is that too many so-called experts are teaching falsehoods…In some instances commercial interests have penetrated our universities and have driven the truth from our classrooms…The experts who wrote the magazine article would have you believe that our land is rich, our food is wonderful, and we are a healthy nation. Who do you think is the ‘quack?’”

On the matter of increased life expectancy in United States, Dr. Norman Joliffe, in a paper in the New York State Medical Journal of September 15, 1955, stated, “Although in America today life expectancy at birth is near the best of any civilized country in the world…at the age of forty, life expectancy is near the bottom…”

Or, stated another way, Dr. W.H. Sebrell Jr., Director of the National Institute of Health, is quoted by Life Laboratories, Inc., as saying, “The improvement in life expectancy from birth is over twenty-eight years; from age fifty, it is only one-and-a-half years.”

President Truman really gave us the lowdown on this “better health” controversy when in 1950 he was honoring a lady for her fifty years of service in the U.S. Public Health Department. He said that in 1900m when she entered the service, twenty-nine babies out of each one hundred died the first year, while in 1950, when she was retiring, only five died the first year.

In other words, this whole popular conception that as a nation we are healthier today than fifty years ago is largely a myth. What it actually means is that science, the doctors, and better sanitary conditions have stopped the terrific mortality of babies and have almost wiped out the contagious diseases that took so many children under fifteen years. But those over the age of fifty have profited little by medical science, while those over sixty are far worse off because of the degenerative disease, stemming primarily from malnutrition due to our over-refined, deficient, demineralized, and devitalized foods.

Dr. Pusey, who is giving the facts? Has Dr. Stare given any? Or does he rely entirely on Harvard prestige to sustain his unsubstantiated public utterances? Just who is “lacking a code of ethics” and just who “is playing upon human frailties?” Is it Dr. Trautmann, Dr. Lee, Agnes Fay Morgan, Adelle Davis, and Mr. Truman, or is it Dr. Stare, whose department must depend for financial support on these various commercial interests that have destroyed the natural value of our foods? Just who are the fakirs?

Dr. Pusey, a careful appraisal of Letters Nos. 1 and 2 confirms your grave concern, when you stated: “All is not well. The greatest threat to the free, disinterested, and lively play of mind…seems to come not from the church or state but from…forces and concerns largely economic. Universities are not the creatures of modern industrial society, nor should they be enslaved to that society. This danger, as it now presents itself to us in a new form, is apt to grow as colleges and universities look increasingly to government and business for the sustenance they must have to stay alive.”

Yes, Dr. Pusey, you have diagnosed the situation very accurately. But this danger seems unalterable and unavoidable. It is malignant, because, like a cancerous growth, it is spreading. As long as donations to our universities can be earmarked for profit motives instead of unbiased research, the life of our nation is at stake.

The real question, Dr. Pusey, is, “How long can the prestige of Harvard continue when we see not only ‘truth crushed to Earth,’ but we see such writings and statements of Dr. Frederick Stare destroying the heart and sinews of the greatest nation this world has ever seen? We see his sworn testimony in court upholding basic unscientific statements that are sending men to prison who try to expound the real truths. We find Dr. Stare using the great name of Harvard to uphold the purveyors of foods and poisons that slowly and insidiously are destroying our people, more surely than could any foreign enemy. Abraham Lincoln said that this nation will never be destroyed from without; if it is ever destroyed, it will be from within.

Dr. Pusey, this nation needs your help, now! It is later than you think.

Boston Nutrition Society, Inc.
By John D. Pearmain, Harvard ’13
P.O. Box 408, Back Bay Annex, Boston 17, Massachusetts

Letter No. 3: Civilization vs. Survival

Re: Sugar vs. National Health

Dr. Pusey, this is our third discussion of the part Dr. Frederick J. Stare is playing in promoting the continued sale of the “counterfeit” foods that are such contributing factors to the ever increasing degenerative diseases. In this issue we want to discuss white sugar, which Dr. Stare so eloquently defends. The unjust part is that the public does not know that the second-largest single contribution to Dr. Stare’s Department is from the sugar interests. Their donations alone from 1950–56 totaled $61,500. The public believes what Dr. Stare writes and says because he heads a department at Harvard, but would they believe him if they knew just why his public statements are colored and present no “facts” but only innuendos, designed to counteract genuine scientific evidence against “the sugars”?

In McCall’s Magazine of January 1956—in an article read and approved by the Committee on Nutritional Education of the Nutrition Foundation and entitled “Bread, Potatoes, and Sugar: Fiend or Friend?”—Dr. Stare writes the following:

“Sugar is a quick energy boon and pleasant to take—

“Sugar does not contain any appreciable amount of vitamins and minerals, furnishing calories only…Even people on a severe reduction diet can afford to put a teaspoonful of sugar in their tea or coffee three or four times a day…”

Actually, Dr. Stare says nothing, nor does he give facts. But he does tell the American people to go ahead and use white sugar and three or four teaspoonfuls daily is using it “abundantly.” This widely publicized statement of course repays the sugar interests, who “abundantly” contribute to Dr. Stare’s department. Incidentally, the large donations of the Sugar Foundation are earmarked for his personal direction. (And isn’t it a fact that Dr. Stare helps write the ads for the Sugar Foundation?)

It is such statements, widely publicized from a department head of Harvard University, that keep our people in ignorance of the truth and lead them to believe that all is well with our white sugars and our refined foods.

But what are the true, substantiated facts with regard to our refined sugars? An entire book could not do justice to all the scientific work that has been done yet never reaches the eyes of the public because of a “gag rule”—about which more later. But here are just a few facts to counteract Dr. Stare’s comforting endorsement of the most devastating foods we consume.

One hundred years ago, we consumed 10 lb of sugar per capita. Today we use 103 lb per capita, being one of the world’s largest users. Sugar represents about 9 percent by weight of total food consumed.

The American Medical Association’s Handbook of Nutrition, 2nd edition (page 635) states: “White sugar contributes only calories to the diet. It is clear that the present large consumption of sugar is disadvantageous in that it means a smaller consumption of nutritionally superior foods…”

With respect to such other foods that might be expected to offset to some degree this excessive use of sugar, the Food Research Division, Bureau of Chemistry and Soils, U.S. Department of Agriculture, in Bulletin No. 242, in an article titled “The Consumption and the Mineral and Vitamin Content of Selected Foods” (including sugar, white flour, rice, corn meal, lard, refined oil, etc.), has this to say: “The foods listed…are relatively low in mineral content and in vitamins, yet they furnish more than 70 percent of the average American caloric requirements of 3,000 calories per capita per day…”

Again, contrary to Dr. Stare’s statement, already quoted, to the effect that “we are a nation of healthy people, blessed with the best food supply in the world,” the National Council’s 1945 Bulletin No. 109 of the Food and Nutrition Board, in which 189 research reports and surveys from coast to coast are correlated, summarizes by saying, “All evidence is in agreement that deficiency states are common among the population of the United States…”

Royal Lee, DDS, head of the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, says, “Most of us do not realize that our bones suffer as much from sugar eating as our teeth. We wind up with false teeth, but we cannot get false bones…”

In an article in Health and the Soil, fall issue, 1951 (Edinburgh, Scotland), regarding (white) sugar vs. tooth decay, Dr. C.D. Hearman, lecturer on dentistry at the University of Melbourne, Australia, is quoted as saying:

“If people banned refined sugar from their diets, they would practically eliminate dental decay. Figures showed that about 97 percent of preschool children in Australia suffer from dental decay, this being because the average Australian diet contain too many acid-forming, refined carbohydrates…Consumption of sugar (in Australia) has risen to the alarming figure of 131 pounds a year, per head—seven times as much as the people of Italy and Spain consume…Contrary to general belief, sugar does not provide energy unless certain vitamins are present in sufficient quantities to complete metabolism.”

(White sugar contains neither vitamins nor minerals—nothing but carbon.)

Dr. Hearman is further quoted as saying that the human body can obtain all the sugar it needs from fresh fruits, vegetables, milk, and honey in small quantities. He described an experiment on eighty-six Bowral children who had eaten a sugarless diet since 1942. The whole group of children had fewer cavities than can be found in one jaw (half the set of teeth) of the average Australian child.

In this same issue of the magazine Health and the Soil, Dr. Ellis, Dean of the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Toronto, Canada, and a graduate of the University of Adelaide, South Australia, is quoted as telling 1,000 dentists at the Twelfth Australian Dental Congress at Sydney University that “research was beginning to show a relationship between high sugar consumption and the incidence of polio and rheumatic fever.”

Benjamin Sandler, MD, author of the book Diet Prevents Polio, states: “Polio epidemics are unknown in countries with low sugar consumption. Polio epidemics have occurred throughout the world in past years only in those countries with high per capita sugar consumption. The greater the sugar consumption, the more severe the epidemic.”

Dr. Sandler preceded the above statement by quoting Dr. A.B. Sabin, in an article in the June 28, 1947, issue of the American Medical Journal, as saying, “No circumstance in the history of poliomyelitis is so baffling as its change during the past fifty years from a sporadic to an epidemic disease…

“Advanced sanitation and hygiene have helped prevent diseases such as typhoid fever, cholera, malaria, and tuberculosis,” continues Dr. Sandler. “The fact that polio has not been prevented by advanced sanitation and hygiene indicates that its incidence is controlled and influenced by factors quite different from the factors that bring about the spread of typhoid and other diseases…

“Advanced sanitation and hygiene are to be found in the richer countries, and one of the unfortunate evils that accompany wealth is the consumption of sugar in the form of luxury foods…Poor countries cannot afford luxury foods, sanitation, and hygiene. That is how I would explain the greater incidence of polio in countries with advanced sanitation and hygiene…

“Dr. Sabin tells how polio occurred among American troops in China, Japan, and the Philippines in spite of the fact that there were no outbreaks of polio at the time among the native children and adults in those areas in which the troops were located. A report on polio in the Philippines in 1936 stated that sixteen of seventeen patients with the disease in Manila were Americans.

“In 1945 there were 246 cases of polio, with fifty-two deaths among American troops in the Philippines, according to reports to the Office of the Surgeon General. And since the end of combat in the Philippines, polio has been among the leading causes of death in American troops; yet checks have revealed no outbreaks of polio among the surrounding native population.

“Dr. Sabin also witnessed an outbreak of polio in the summer of 1946 among American marines stationed in the Tientsin area of North China…(but) there were no outbreaks of polio among the natives at the time. (Corresponding annual sugar consumption of Asian natives equaled approximately 13 lb.)

“Thus, I submit, polio occurred among the Americans and not the natives because the natives did not consume the amount of sugar that the American troops did…

“I would say that polio is more prevalent during the summer because of a change in the host. This change is a chemical one, namely, an increased incidence of low blood sugar, brought on by an increased consumption of sugar in the form of cooling foods and beverages and perhaps a reduction of protein foods. Excessive physical exertion incidental to summer outings and vacations may further predispose to low blood sugar…”

In Dr. Sandler’s book Diet Prevents Polio (Benjamin P. Sandler, Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee, Wisconsin), we find an abundance of scientific and clinical evidence that polio can be prevented by eliminating refined sugars. Dr. Sandler gives clinical evidence in abundance for any unbiased individual to prove that refined sugars cause polio by lowering the blood sugar level.

Thus, Dr. Pusey, the above offers facts plus abundant scientific and clinical evidence to refute Dr. Stare’s “comforting innuendos” regarding white sugar, statements we believe are designed to offset the real truth and thus repay the sugar refiners for their $61,500 contribution to Dr. Stare’s department. But the sad part of the picture is that Dr. Stare’s remarks, which say nothing, are far more potent than all the evidence that sincere scientists are able to accumulate. Why? Because:

Dr. Stare is speaking for the Nutrition Department of Harvard University, located at the medical center of the world.
Dr. Stare’s department has received donations of $2,400 per year over the past three years, or $7,200, from McCall’s Magazine. There must be a reason. Could that reason be due to an interlocking of directors and hidden stock ownership between the drug interests and the magazine? Whatever the reason, Dr. Stare is thus given immediate access to the press so he may come to the rescue of the refiners and adulterators of our foods whenever true scientific facts happen to slip through the press “gag rule” to the detriment of his donors.
Because of (a) the prestige of the name of Harvard (b) an immediate access to the press, and (c) the powerful financial and personal backing of the over fifty of America’s leading food, drug, and chemical concerns that constitute the Nutrition Foundation, all linked for one common purpose, Dr. Stare’s department and his utterances are used by the “old guard, Fishbein-type leadership” of the American Medical Association and its gestapo, the Food and Drug Administration, to establish that indefinite and elusive but most powerful weapon that they call the consensus of medical opinion. Dr. Stare’s public utterances, however, we do not believe represent the opinions of those sincere doctors who have made Boston the medical center of the world.

By means of this “so-called” consensus of medical opinion, local medical societies and the FDA can win court cases and bring pressure and legal action against doctors of every healing art and against anyone else who dares to tell the public the truth about our refined, devitalized, demineralized, and chemically poisoned “counterfeit” foods.

By means of this “so-called” consensus of medical opinion plus the witness-stand testimony of Dr. Stare and his cohorts, the Food and Drug Administration has been able to:

Stamp out opposition—through fines and federal imprisonment of men who write or quote honest scientific facts detrimental to the special, privileged purveyors of the “counterfeit” foods—on the grounds that these teachings do not conform to this “so-called” consensus of medical opinion.
Keep the people in ignorance and satisfied with their poisoned, adulterated foods by continued and repeated brainwashing to the effect that there is no evidence to indicate:

- That the American people are suffering from deficiency disease.
- That the soil is becoming depleted and is producing foods low in protein.
- That a carrot grown on poor or chemically treated soil is less nutritious than a carrot grown on organically treated rich soil.
- That a person eating natural, organically grown foods is any more resistant to disease than a person eating the rank and file of devitalized, demineralized, chemically adulterated foods found in any supermarket.
- That refined sugars cause tooth decay and polio or contribute to our degenerative diseases.
- That cancer or heart disease are on the increase. (The AMA is maintaining to the last ditch that the seeming increase is due to improved methods of recording death certificates.)
- That food has anything to do with our increase in degenerative diseases.
- That our national health is on the decline.

So, Dr. Pusey, it is indeed evident that “all is not well,” when we see Harvard University used as the springboard for the destruction of our nation for the profit motive.

Boston Nutrition Society, Inc.
John D. Pearmain Harvard ’13
P.O. Box 408, Back Bay Annex, Boston 17, Massachusetts

Letter No. 4: Can 150,000,000 People Be Wrong?

Re: National Food Deficiency, Synthetics, and the “Unholy Alliance”

Dr. Pusey, in this, our fourth letter, we intend to prove our contention that Dr. Stare’s nutrition department is doing more to destroy this country than will ever be done by communism. Our people have freedom of speech and press with which to fight the latter, but they have no such freedom on the subjects of health, food, drugs, or disease.

Dr. Stare’s public utterances, writings, and court testimony are all designed to uphold the business status quo by belittling the devastating effects of our denatured, counterfeit, and poisoned foods and by ignoring the increase of degenerative diseases. We can understand this attitude when we read that he received in the past six years $378,000 in gifts, largely marked for his personal direction, from the very commercial interests who stand to profit most by keeping our people in ignorance as to the truth about those foods and our national health.

Dr. Stare writes, “The successful cooperation of agriculture, industry, and the medical profession has produced a nation of healthy people blessed with the best food supply in the world.” (See Letter No. 1.) Against this statement we read from Harper’s Magazine, September 1951, in an article by James A. Rorty: “The humblest Indians and mestizos (in Mexico) often suffer less from malnutrition than does the average middle-class family in the United States.”

This is the story in brief of a long-term study participated in by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Dr. Robert S. Harris, head of its Nutritional Biochemical Laboratories, and the United Fruit Company.

“The studies were made to determine food values in terms of protein, vitamin, and mineral energy content. ‘The idea,’ Harris said, ‘was to determine, first, what a country had in the way of plant food resources…next, what the people were actually eating…and, then, what was their nutritional and health status?’

“The MIT-United Fruit study showed that, despite their poverty, the humblest Indians and mestizos often suffer less from malnutrition than does the average middle-class family in the United States…’The superior nutritive value of their foods,’ writes Harris, ‘and the unspoiled dietary habits and customs of the people are two important reasons for their superior status.’

“A year later, the same group of technicians—as a preliminary to the establishment of a Mexican school lunch program—conducted a clinical study of 1,000 schoolchildren in one of the poorest districts of Mexico City. The families of the children averaged seven persons, and they subsisted on a total family income of about 64 cents a day. To the surprise of the investigators, these poverty-stricken Mexicans showed less evidence of malnutrition deficiencies than did Michigan schoolchildren…

“Analysis by Dr. Harris’s group of all the foods of the Otomis—Indians dwelling in the arid Mezquital Valley north of Mexico City—showed that, like the slum dwellers of Mexico City, the Otomis were obtaining nearly adequate quantities of all nutrients except riboflavin. In fact, their nutrition was definitely superior to that of the average person living in the Boston and New York areas of the United States.”

From the book Diseases of Metabolism, containing articles by twenty of the most famous medical men in America, we quote from an article by Dr. Tom D. Spies, MD, Chairman of Department of Nutrition and Metabolism, Northwestern University Medical School, and Professor of Nutrition and Metabolism, Hillman Hospital, Birmingham, Alabama:

“Investigation of the diets of large groups of people, correlated with laboratory studies and direct examination, has led to the startling observation that the margin of safety against deficiency diseases is narrow rather than broad—that the presence of nutritional inadequacy is widespread and not limited to the lower economic group. As information is increasing, it is found that relatively few people in the United States consistently eat diets that are adequate in all respects” (page 555).

“A noteworthy paper by Baker, Wright, and Drummond traces the increasing use of white flour to the introduction of silk-bolting cloth in 1840 and of roller mills in 1870 to satisfy greater demand. They estimate that ‘the best-fed members of the population today are getting twice as much vitamin B1 as people on a low income level yet consume less vitamin B1 than the parish poor of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.’ We are realizing more and more that decertification of grain is dangerous, that there must be some change in milling methods. Greater care in guarding against loss of vitamins and minerals through processing, marketing, and storing of foods would undoubtedly improve the quality of many diets” (page 557).

Yet Dr. Stare writes for public consumption, “Actually, we get as much food value from refined foods that have been ‘enriched’ as from natural foods and sometimes more.”

What do scientists who are not controlled by or donated to by the food processors and refiners or the chemical and drug interests have to say on “enrichment” with synthetic vitamins?

Thus, Dr. Pusey, we find Dr. Stare’s nutrition department “abundantly” backed by the chemical and drug interests and the national food processors, who donated from 1950 to 1956 as follows:

Chemical concerns Dupont, Merck, and Upjohn: $50,250
The Sugar Foundation, composed of the sugar interests (the second largest contributor): $67,750
The Nutrition Foundation (the largest contributor): $113,000. Dr. Store’s article in McCall’s Magazine, January 1956 (see Letter No. 3), in bold type called attention to the statement “Approved by Committee on Nutritional Education of the Nutrition Foundation.”
Other contributions largely from food processors: $147,000

The total: $378,000.

Just what is this Nutrition Foundation, whose so-called Educational Department “approves” Dr. Stare’s writings? It consists of about forty-five of the leading food processing, chemical, and drug companies, represented officially by the chairman of the board or other leading executive of each. Some members of this Nutrition Foundation are as follows:

Armour and Co., Abbott, Inc.
Sugar Refining Co.
Baker Laboratories
Campbell Soup Co.
Gelatine Co.
Coca-Cola Co.
Continental Baking Co.
Corn Products Refining
Curtis Candy Co.
General Foods Corp.
General Mills Co.
Gerber Products Co.
H.J. Heinz Co.
Kellogg Co.
Libby, McNeil and Libby
Knox Gelatine
Merck and Co.
National Biscuit Co.
National Dairy Prod.
Nestles Co., Inc.
Pepsi-Cola Co.
Pet Milk Co.
Pillsbury Mills, Inc.
Quaker Oats, Inc.
Standard Brands
Sunshine Biscuits, Inc.
Swift and Company
Welch’s Grape Juice

Dr. Pusey, we doubt if you realize that your university, through Dr. Stare and his so-called “nutrition” department, has been used as a base of operations for the destruction of our two most cherished possessions, namely, a) our basic freedoms of speech and press and b) our national health.

As proof of (a), we refer you to a speech by Arthur I. Connell, then the American Legion National Commander, on January 28, 1954, before the Veterans Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, in which he deplored the existence of a “code of operation” that provides that newspapers and radio and television stations shall clear “all matters of health or medical news” through established medical channels before proceeding to publication or broadcast.

The code reads: “A list of current spokesmen of the state medical society shall be supplied to representatives of the press and radio (also television stations) and shall be kept up to date.

Commander Connell said, “This code is in reality a contract that has had the practical effect of suppressing presentations to the public of many facts in the controversy over medical care for America’s twenty-one million ex-service men and women.” (Obviously, the “gag rule” applies equally to our entire population.)

Thus, we have the food processors and refiners, the chemical and drug industry, the “old guard, Fishbein-type leadership” of the American Medical Association, and the controlled press, radio, and TV—with the Food and Drug Administration acting as their tool and gestapo—all joined in one giant conspiracy to brainwash our people and keep them in ignorance by destroying their constitutional freedoms. And it’s all done for a profit motive and at the expense of our national health.

Dr. Pusey, it wouldn’t require much thinking on the part of the average layman, if he knew who was supporting your nutrition department, to see why the members of this “unholy alliance” would logically work together. One group, the food processors, destroys our foods, thus causing malnutrition and disease. The chemical and drug interests and the members of the American Medical Association, in turn, all stand to profit most when disease is greatest. The press is controlled through voluminous advertising and by the AMA’s gag rule. All have the blessings of the Food and Drug Administration, which has played along with big business—in complete disregard of the public health—ever since they kicked out Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, the originator of the Pure Food and Drug Act.

By the destruction of our freedom of speech and press, the public can get but one side of the health, disease, and “counterfeit” food picture. Dr. Stare, as the mouthpiece for that combine, is keeping our people satisfied with and in ignorance of the effects of these deficient and poisoned foods. This process of national health destruction will go on, Dr. Pusey, as long as you permit Dr. Stare’s department to be financially supported by the very groups most interested in keeping our people in ignorance as to the rising tide of chronic degenerative diseases and their underlying cause.

Dr. Pusey, your public utterances have sincerely pointed out this danger. But are you fully cognizant of the fact that this situation can completely destroy this nation and is a far greater menace than hydrogen bombs, guided missiles, or communism?

Boston Nutrition Society, Inc.
by John D. Pearmain, Harvard ’13.
P.O. Box 408, Back Bay Annex, Boston 17, Massachusetts

Letter No. 5: Lincoln Said That If This Nation Is Ever Destroyed, It Will Be from Within, Not from Without

Re: Poisons and “The Crime Against the Food Law,” by Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, MD

Dr. Pusey, in this, our fifth letter, we hope to show how Dr. Stare and his commercially backed nutrition department are not a nutrition department at all, in the true sense of the word, but rather a propaganda smoke screen to keep our public sold on the products of those very interests whose profit motive (we should really say “counterfeiting motive”) definitely takes precedence over the future welfare of this nation. Here we refer to:

The food refiners and processors
The chemical interests
The drug interests
The American Medical Association, and
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration—the gestapo of the combine.

Let us examine again Dr. Stare’s statement in McCall’s Magazine, July 1955, when, in trying to disparage those who are fighting our “counterfeit” foods, he wrote (see Letter No. 1):

“Parading under the banner of friend to the common man, food quacks would have us believe that our soil is worn out, our food is worthless, and all our people are sick. Nonsense! Look around you!

“A good, varied diet—available from foods that any grocery store can provide—will produce just as good nutritional health as any and all ‘health foods.’

Such juvenile claptrap is an insult to the intelligence of any public school nutritionist and certainly unbecoming of the head of the nutrition department of a great university that dominates the medical center of the world and dictates the “consensus of medical opinion,” by which the bosses of the American Medical Association—using the Food and Drug Administration as their gestapo—wield more power than the Congress and all departments of the Executive Branch combined in preventing a thorough investigation of the truth about our foods and our health. Yet what can one expect of Dr. Stare when not one of the combine enumerated above will permit the real truth to be told.

On June 27, 1956, Mr. Folsom, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of this Pure Food and Drug Law, stated: “A recent compilation shows that approximately 500 chemical materials are being added directly to foods for various purposes. The Food and Drug Administration estimates that about 150 of them haven’t been adequately tested to show that they are harmless.”

In the Consumer Reports for September 1956, we read:

Dr. Pusey, it’s time to pull aside the iron curtain regarding our Pure Food Law and tell the people the truth. Our authority is Dr. Harvey W. Wiley’s own writings.

Dr. Wiley tells the whole sordid story with documented proof. We quote a few statements from the chapter entitled Passing of the Bureau of Chemistry:

“Thus it is clearly seen that the chief activities of the present administration are proper branding. The purpose of the law as a health protector is of no importance whatever (page 354).”

But fifteen months later, on July 30, 1920, an illegal directive of the Agricultural Department (of which the Food and Drug Administration was then a part) was issued, actually reversing this decision and notifying all the millers that “bleached flour may be shipped interstate on condition that it be banded plainly to indicate that it has undergone a process of bleaching.” This directive was a lengthy one, but in substance it said that no prosecutions would be made unless the poisonous substance added actually was proven injurious to health. This was a complete reversal of the purpose of the law and of the Supreme Court decision, which was explicit that the amount added was not important—that the only question was, had any substance been added of a poisonous nature?

Yet 165,000,000 people believe that we have a food law that protects us against all poisons. Dr. Wiley’s book proves this to be untrue. But because it has been so effectively suppressed for twenty-seven years, neither Congress nor our federal and local jurists are aware that over thirty directives issued by the FDA—or those “enforcing” Dr. Wiley’s law—are actually illegal. Yet those illegal directives have and are still daily adversely affecting, our national health. Every reader of these open letters should see that copies get into the hands of their congressmen with appropriate comment.

Dr. Pusey, is further proof needed that the food processors, the chemical and drug interests, the “old-guard, Fishbein-type” leadership of the American Medical Association, and the Food and Drug Administration are all tied into one giant, unholy alliance to protect each other and to maintain greater business profits in utter disregard of the health of our nation? Is further proof needed that Dr. Stare’s nutritional department is the keystone supporting this nefarious structure? The “combine” supports him, and he supports it—by his continued assurances that “all is well with our foods” and “we are the best-fed nation on Earth,” and all who disagree are “quacks” and “fakirs.”

As long as Dr. Stare’s unscientific nutrition department can create a false, biased, “bought and paid for” consensus of medical opinion with which to prosecute and imprison those who sincerely oppose it, just so long will the power of this combine prevail. Unless the mouthpiece of this unholy alliance can be silenced, this nation is doomed! Dr. Pusey, it’s your move.

From the Boston Nutrition Society, Inc.
John D. Pearmain, Chairman, Educational Committee

By John D. Pearmain, John D. Pearmain, Chairman, Educational Committee, Boston Nutrition Society, Inc. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research from Modern Nutrition, The Monthly Magazine of the American Nutrition Society, March 1957, 10651 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles 64, California.

Counterfeit Foods and the Men Who Front for Them: Supplementary Comments to the Pearmain Letters

Supplementary article from Dr. Royal Lee:

The Real Overlords Who Rule America (with an Iron Hand)

When newspaperman Hearst recently interviewed the strong man of Russia, Khrushchev, he reported Khrushchev’s comment that we were not a democratic or representative form of government, but that our voters were so “intimidated and mentally dominated by the wealthy owners of the press, radio, television, magazines, books, and so forth that they didn’t think for themselves. Nor did they—the workers and voters—yet realize how they were being duped.”

Khrushchev could have gone further and related how Congress has authorized the delegation of totally unconstitutional power to various czars in various fields of control, giving them the opportunity to levy taxes (such as labor union dues and membership fees in professional organizations) under penalty of being barred from normal practice of their trade or profession. These strongmen (Fishbein, Petrillo, Beck, Reuther, Lewis, etc.) correspond to the lords and other friends of the king in the old days, to whom was delegated the job of holding their subjects and followers in line politically, and who paid for these privileges by supporting the top despot in his plan of subjugation by their control of their own concession in the general plan of exploitation of the common man.

In foods and nutrition, the strongmen keep under cover, these owners of the various counterfeit food industries. The group that promotes fluoridation, as an example, is powerful enough to force all dental colleges to endorse its obviously crooked program of mass medication to treat malnutrition—poisons to medically treat starvation symptoms. Its control of the instruments of intelligence is so perfect that when the Milwaukee voters were considering fluoridation, the leading newspaper (the Milwaukee Journal) refused to even sell advertising space to the opposition, much less allow news space to be used to give both sides.

During the next few months, Time magazine (February 1, 1954) put the face of Harry Grant (the character who operates the Journal) on its cover with an editorial write-up praising the Journal as “one of the best newspapers in the U.S.” and that it “had run more advertising than any other paper in the world.” Time stressed the Journal’s pretended policy of giving its readers “all sides” of every public question. What could be more dishonest?

Here is exactly what Khrushchev was talking about. The influence of the promoters of water fluoridation reaches into every newspaper in the land as well as every dental college—to corrupt its policymakers and readers and students and in fact the entire institution, whether a college or newspaper.

In Canada their supreme court has concluded that water fluoridation is a practice beyond the power and authority of the state to perform (being mass medication, a vicious invasion of the citizens’ rights). In our country, court action to protect the citizens rights has dismally failed, thanks to the corruption of justice by the despots here referred to.

Counterfeit foods represent the biggest industrial group in this country. The flour millers; the makers of hydrogenated fats; the makers of oleo; the makers of synthetic sugar (glucose, corn syrup, dextrose); the makers of breakfast foods and refined cereals; the makers of candy and soft drinks containing ingredients of refined and synthetic source—all are in the category of counterfeiters, who must have corrupt protection from the government and must keep their nefarious operations a secret from their victims.

These counterfeit food promoters so cleverly intersperse their crooked propaganda into scientific articles that it takes a careful search to untangle the truth from the lies—like the case in which aluminum salts were fed to test animals and the results were reported to show that the effect was negligible and aluminum was proved to be nontoxic, yet an antidote to aluminum compounds had been included in the animal feed. See Lee Foundation Report No. 5—price 5 cents—for particulars.

In the current Journal of Nutrition, the same is perpetrated regarding hydrogenated fats. Hydrogenated fat was fed to test animals, and no undue rise in blood cholesterol was shown. But the animals were fed raw whole wheat meal as a part of their basic diet. Whole wheat contains the vitamin F and E complexes, which prevent any cholesterol rise from the use of hydrogenated fats. In making such tests, purified diets must be used to show what specific action is produced by the test substance. Any natural, unrefined food will save the lives of the test animals by correcting the deficiency created by the counterfeit food. Certainly, the experienced research personnel who directed this work knew better than to make such a mistake. (See Journal of Nutrition, October 10, 1957, page 241).

This leads us to the conclusion that it was intended to cloud the issue, to give the counterfeit food racketeers an opportunity to cite “scientific evidence” that their stuff was “harmless.” All hydrogenated fats (in fact, all refined or synthetic foods) are illegal from one point alone: they have been so processed as to lose vitamin and mineral value, for which there is a federal penalty of $5,000 for each offense. A product might be “harmless” but still be nutritionally useless and a fraud.

This article really should have been entitled “How Freshly Ground Whole Wheat Protects Against the High Blood Cholesterol Due to Hydrogenated Fat.” This is a good example of a “controlled test”—controlled to show that black is white. Prostituted science. For more on this subject, ask for a copy of the “Pearmain Letters”—free to educators and doctors.

In the same issue of the Journal of Nutrition, page 273, is a report that tells the truth about the same situation. Natural, unrefined oils were shown to reduce the high blood cholesterol of animals fed cholesterol or cholesterol-raising fats. These animals had been fed purified rations of known composition with no natural, unrefined foods to protect them from the effect of the cholesterol or cholesterol-promoting factors.

These tricks of crooked research workers are common in scientific literature. No honest tests of pasteurized milk on children or test animals can be found in the textbooks of medical and dental colleges, for instance. Pasteurization causes constipation, loss of teeth, liver disease, bone disease, and arthritis.

Undulant fever is due to trace mineral deficiency, but to maintain the farce that pasteurization is necessary to control it, phony “research” was framed to show that trace minerals were not involved (J.A.M.A., October 17, 1953, pages 643–645). There was no effort to control the trace mineral intake of the controls. The formula found clinically effective by the proponents of the method [was not tested]. Nevertheless, conclusions were set forth in very conservative scientific language to the effect that “supplementation of a practical dairy ration with trace elements, recommended by the supporters of the efficacy of such products, has neither a prophylactic nor a therapeutic effect on the course of experimentally induced bovine brucellosis.” There are two gimmicks evident here:

Both control and treated animals were fed iodine supplements. The normal trace mineral formula includes iodine, therefore it should not have been fed to the control animals.
The brucellosis culture was instilled into the eye of the test animals, by which method one would expect a higher incidence of infection than if incurred in the natural way.

This was a “controlled test” but so controlled as to give the result desired by the promoters of the “infection theory” as distinguished from the proponents of the deficiency theory.

One may well ask, “Why is pasteurization so bitterly defended if it is scientifically wrong?” There are two very good reasons. First, pasteurization permits the handling of such dirty milk that it would curdle on its way to the consumer if not pasteurized. (It’s the old story of making cheap, low grade stuff look like high grade food—the same fraud as practiced in flour bleaching.) Second, by manipulation of pasteurizing laws, large cities have prices on milk and cream that are much higher than in small towns a few miles away. (In one case bakeries paid $4.00 per gallon for cream in Milwaukee, while in towns 30 miles away the same cream—pasteurized locally—was available at $2.50 per gallon.)

The national milk overlords, like Dave Beck, seem to have their special ways of maintaining their despotic tax collecting privileges.

In Italy and Germany, as soon as it was proven that the bleaching of flour destroyed vitamins, laws were changed outlawing the practice. In Canada and the U.S., we still poison our citizens with flour bleach. It helps to kill about a million victims a year in this country. Heart disease is the most common reaction. Of course the hydrogenated fats and hypercholesteremia are aggravating factors too, but the value of wheat germ vitamins, particularly, the E complex, is bitterly denied by all political henchmen of the flour milling industries. Read the story of the Shute Brothers in Canada for an idea of the chicanery involved.

The billions of dollars tied up in these counterfeit food rackets of course is the power back of these influences. As Khrushchev says, victims fail to realize “how they are duped” until it is too late, in most instances, to guard themselves against the consequences of the deception. Would a communist state be much worse than our corrupted capitalism? I am for capitalism, which is just another word for liberty (meaning the right to use the results of my own labor as I please), but to be a slave to a crew of cutthroat racketeers is just as bad here as it would be in any other country. For confirming evidence of the foregoing, see:

Dr. Harvey W. Wiley’s book The History of a Crime Against the Food Law (Lee Foundation, Milwaukee)
Maurice Natenberg’s The Legacy of Dr. Wiley (Lee Foundation).

You will be amazed to see how food and drink racketeers have corrupted courts and enforcement agencies all the way up to the White House. Truly, we are unaware of how we are being duped, as Khrushchev says.

Men such as Harry Grant, fishing from the Gulf Stream in his 72 foot yacht, enjoy incomes of fabulous figures for duping us—for helping to maintain an iron curtain between us and the truth. They maintain the iron curtain that bars the truth from publication through their control of the news publishing industry. They are the despots and overlords of today, earning their fat incomes by maintaining a tight censorship on the news of malnutrition while advertising the phony counterfeits that destroy our health.

Here is a food company official who discovers the nature of counterfeit fat. These synthetic counterfeits are sold under the false and fraudulent label “vegetable shortening.” Just because the stuff is made from a vegetable oil is no justification for the “vegetable” label on the finished synthetic product. The molecular structure of the oil has been changed, and the mineral and vitamin content has been practically eliminated—bleaching and deodorizing performed to deceive the buyer into thinking the stuff is wholesome (where even the raw material usually is not; any rancid or stale vegetable oil can be cleaned up for “food” use by this method).

It would be just as reasonable to call a slab of iron a “Cadillac” if it had been made by melting down junk Cadillac cars. Or to call vitamins made synthetically from coal tar “purely vegetable” because coal is vegetation (or had been).

Flour millers in 1906 admitted that flour bleaching was a fraudulent practice (see Lee Foundation Reprint No. 1, 5 cents) and expected that the 1906 Pure Food Law would stop its use, but the profits appeared to be too big. We still have no enforcement of the law, even after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the millers. (See Dr. Wiley’s report on this in his book in the last chapter. Reprint free on request.)

Hydrogenated shortenings have been with us for fifty years. They are illegal insults to any intelligent person, just as fraudulent as green-dyed shavings flavored with new-mown-hay perfume would be to a horse. Why are these phony substitutes so bad? Simply because they cause cardiovascular disease and sudden death. Most people do not know what has happened to them when they incur the penalty of using counterfeit foods. They assume it is just their fate to develop the illness, and the “iron curtain” proceeds to keep the truth from penetrating. They claim that we must have “controlled tests” before we can suspect counterfeit foods of being dangerous, even though they are illegally made and sold.

Mr. Thompson (see article following*) cites the “lack of ready reference material” of the fatty acids as to their essentiality to health. It is this “lack” that we cite as a planned proposition. When vitamin F (the essential fatty acid complex) was first discovered, even though ample evidence was available that the vitamin complex was necessary to calcium metabolism and to prevent prostate disease, both the Journal of the American Medical Association and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as the Federal Trade Commission, took steps to decry the importance of these factors and tell the public, “Vitamin F does not exist.” Do you see what we mean by that iron curtain?” (See Vitamin News, June 15, 1934, and Lee Foundation Report No. 1, 1941.)

The Food and Drug Administration has been particularly watchful of any claims that vitamin E or vitamin F are necessary in the human diet. Twenty years ago, Sears-Roebuck was stopped by federal authorities from selling wheat germ oil with claims that it was needed by the human body. Now that Dr. H.J. Deuel and his associates have shown that hydrogenated fat without its vitamin content is perfectly good food if fed along with fresh whole wheat meal (as per reference quoted), we can see how the suppression of data on the need for the vitamins E and F of the wheat germ oil are so important to the law-defying flour millers. We can see why the use of vitamin E in the treatment of heart disease is on the black list of “organized medicine.” (This story is well told in the McLean’s Magazine reprint—free on request.)

On page 190 of Vitamin News, you will find reproductions of heart sound recordings showing how the whole wheat vitamins restore heart disease indications to normal and how a missing second sound due to vitamin F deficiency may be restored in a few minutes by a dose of the vitamin.

Dr. Deuel is well known for his championship of oleomargarine. The congressional inquiry on oleo some years ago brought out the fact that Dr. Deuel’s tests in feeding animals oleo and showing their good health was accomplished by another clever gimmick—that of feeding casein instead of a purified amino acid pattern. Casein—from milk—contains the lipoprotein component that eliminates the need for the special vitamin and phospholipid complex of butter. Biochemists all know that lipoproteins can substitute for essential fats in the diet and to make a fair test for the merits of any fat, no lipoprotein can be permitted in a control diet.

Just where the line can be drawn between ignorance and design in these gimmicky tests is impossible. As one food reform writer commented, “To suggest impropriety anywhere arouses as much indignation as to question the chastity of a bride at a wedding.” Take the question I sent to the Saturday Evening Post when they printed an article stating that fluorine is a “nutritional trace mineral.” The question was referred to the author, who became too indignant to offer an answer. I still am without one from the Post.

On a previous occasion, when an article by Dr. V.H. Dietz was reprinted and sent to all the dentists in the U.S. by the pro-fluoridating interests, I wrote Dr. Dietz and asked him when and where that interesting fact had been established (that fluorine was a nutritional substance). His reply was that it was a typographical error that had crept in during the abridgment of the article by the editor. He replied, “In the words of our good friend Dr. Ray Girardot, ‘I didn’t know the gun was loaded.”’

But regardless of the honesty of Dr. Dietz, the fluoridators made good use of the “typographical error.” Their whole campaign is based on such chicanery, the legal status of which was exploded by the Canadian Supreme Court, while the biological status was exploded by Dr. McCay of Cornell.

Dr. McCay reported in the January issue of Gerontology that rats fed [water fluorinated at] one part per million for their entire life span developed in their later months loss of teeth and kidney poisoning, while rats on the same diet without fluoridated water of one part per million retained all their teeth and had healthy kidneys. Eighty years are necessary to repeat this test on man. Meanwhile, the entire prestige and influence of the American Dental Association and other professional organizations is being used to intimidate and mentally dominate our whole population, to where they cannot think for themselves—as per comrade Khrushchev’s very expressive and very timely comment to Mr. Hearst.

Recommended reading: “Establishing Science by Edict” and “How Food Additives Endanger Your Health.” by Edith Kermit Roosevelt.

By Dr. Royal Lee.

*Following is the article referenced above by Dr. Lee:

Fats in Foods—Shortening vs. Oil

By John E. Thompson, President-General Manager, Reliable Packing Company. Reprinted from the publication Food Processing, October 1957.

Chicago, Ill.—Discussion seems to get hotter and hotter day by day on the subject of harmfulness of fats in the human diet. Food Processing has, as usual, done an exceptionally good job of keeping the readers informed regarding the outcome of current research and the opinion of the experts in the field. May I contribute a discordant note to your “Letters from Readers” column. There is a point in the articles that have been published that I feel has, through misemphasis, created a serious misimpression. Secondly, I have a suggestion to offer with regard to the sort of public relations approach that the food industries might take in this matter.

Regarding the articles that have appeared, certainly, adequate reference has been made to the saturated fatty acid content of the various meat fats and to the saturated fatty acid content of lard as a cooking fat and shortening. Also, plenty of reference has been made to the lack of saturated fatty acids and presence of high levels of unsaturated fatty acids in vegetable oils.

Judging from comments of members of my own household, neighbors in my community, and friends, with whom I have discussed the “fats in foods” matter, I find that these people are almost universally of the impression that the term “vegetable oils” and the term “vegetable oil shortenings” are practically synonymous. Obviously there is a drastic difference in the saturated fatty acid content and unsaturated fatty acid content of a crude vegetable oil (i.e., cottonseed oil or soybean oil) and the “all hydrogenated” shortenings prepared from these same oils. Because this difference has not been specifically emphasized in the popular articles that have appeared, I fear the public is acquiring a serious misconception.

In fairness to the very competent authors of the Food Processing articles, it should be emphasized that they have not made any misstatements. You have always selected men of very high integrity. Perhaps the fault lies in the lack of ready reference material on the fatty acid content of hydrogenated vegetable oil shortenings.

It is a fact, however, that an enormous tonnage of fats is treated by hydrogenation each year, to reduce the content of unsaturated fatty acids and increase the content of saturated acids. Practically all vegetable oil shortenings are so processed. Some fraction of the animal fat shortenings are also hydrogenated. These hydrogenated fats are used in the preparation of baked foods, confections, and the like. Some of these hydrogenated fats are consumed in the home in form of retail packaged hydrogenated vegetable oil shortenings.

Let’s not do anything further to build on the mistaken notion that hydrogenated vegetable oil shortenings are the same as vegetable oils. Here then is my suggestion for a public relations program by the food processing industries. Encourage the consumption of a well balanced diet, with emphasis on the “protective foods” (foods with relatively high contents of protein, vitamins, and minerals) and the avoidance of “empty calorie foods” (foods composed mainly of refined sugars, starches, and fats, which do not contain commensurate quantities of proteins, vitamins, and minerals).

This article and preceding ones published as single publication, Form RD-187, by Dr. Royal, circa 1957.

Royal Lee
Box 267
Elm Grove, Wisconsin
Price – 50 cents

Historical Archives

Open Letters Concerning Dr. Frederick J. Stare

Open Letters Concerning Dr. Frederick J. Stare

Letter No. 1

Letter No. 2: Is Science Being Misused?

Letter No. 3: Civilization vs. Survival

Letter No. 4: Can 150,000,000 People Be Wrong?

Letter No. 5: Lincoln Said That If This Nation Is Ever Destroyed, It Will Be from Within, Not from Without

Counterfeit Foods and the Men Who Front for Them: Supplementary Comments to the Pearmain Letters

The Real Overlords Who Rule America (with an Iron Hand)

Fats in Foods—Shortening vs. Oil

Patrick Earvolino, CN

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