By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this 1963 article, the great holistic nutritionist Dr. Royal Lee touches on two main tenets of his philosophy. First he discusses the supreme importance of soil health, noting that soils across America had become so mineral poor through inferior farming practices that in many places animals could no longer survive on the land. The weakening of livestock as a result of soil degradation is a phenomenon observed throughout history, and many experiments in the early and mid twentieth century showed that animal health—as well as that of plants—could be restored through careful, balanced remineralization of the soils, including in particular application of the trace elements. Ignoring such research, America’s agricultural industry opted for a less natural approach to the soil problem, bulking crop yields by overloading the land with artificial ammonia-based fertilizers and then using chemical pesticides and antibiotics to prop up the sickly plants and animals reared on the imbalanced earth. Dr. Lee then discusses the “great lie” of modern food manufacturing and conventional nutrition: that a synthetically manufactured product, whether food or vitamin, can reproduce the same nutritional effect as something made by nature. This assumption was repeatedly shown by early nutrition researchers to be dangerously untrue, and it lies at the heart of our health issues today. Simply put, humankind does not have the capability of creating what our body requires for real health, be it food or supplement. Synthetics may prop us up in a state of sickly survival, like the poor plants and livestock of industrial agriculture, but they cannot give us true vigor and vitality. From Herald of Health, 1963.
[The following is a transcription of the original Archives document. To view or download the original document, click here.]Poor Soils, Synthetics Produce Inferior Results[spacer height=”20px”]
Simple chemical analysis shows that the trace mineral content of vegetables varies as much as ten to one, or more, depending on the quality of the soil. In the worn-out farms of New England, and to some extent in the Mississippi valley, some land has become so poor that animals cannot be kept alive on it.
Deficiency diseases among animals are multiplying all over the country, calling for more and more veterinary attention. But antibiotics and wonder drugs are being used in the main instead of true remedies.
Chemical fertilizers are unbalanced; the ammonia used to stimulate growth certainly must deplete the soil of other nutrients, removed by the [overgrowing] plants. Liebig, the father of agricultural chemistry, warned against this unbalance.
It is an absolute fact that no synthetic substance has yet been successful in substituting for a natural food component. Drs. Lukens and Dohan of the University of Pennsylvania showed that dextrose (aka glucose, corn syrup, corn sugar), a widely used synthetic food, was the only sugar that would cause diabetes in their test animals. Beyond that, it causes cancer if injected into animal tissues and blocks the assimilation of calcium if fed to babies and children.
Dr. Hardy tells how synthetically made imitations are always optically inactive and useless as food. In fact, in some cases they are poisonous though supposedly chemically identical to the natural product (Collected Scientific Papers of Sir William Bate Hardy, Cambridge University Press, 1936, page 913). Moreover, very recently, Nobel Prizes were awarded to research chemists at Princeton University for their discovery that there really is a demonstrable difference between these supposedly identical substances, due to their difference in origin (one from a living cell, the other from a chemist’s test tube).
By Royal Lee, DDS. Herald of Health, February 1963.
