Author unknown
Summary: A 1948 newspaper report of a presentation by Dr. Royal Lee to the American Academy of Nutrition in San Francisco. Dr. Lee warns of the health dangers associated with artificial colors added to foods, citing research proving “butter yellow,” a coloring added to margarine, to be carcinogenic. In addition Dr. Lee condemns the pasteurization of milk, citing studies of the damage it caused in animal feeding studies. From the Mansfield News-Journal, 1948.
[The following is a transcription of the original Archives document. To view or download the original document, click here.]Report Raps Pasteurization, Artificially Colored Food[spacer height=”20px”]
San Francisco (AP) — Pasteurized milk and artificially colored foods are contributing to American dietary shortcomings, Dr. Royal Lee, Milwaukee dentist, asserted Saturday.
Despite the arguments in favor of milk pasteurization, Dr. Lee said in a paper prepared for delivery to the American Academy of Applied Nutrition, the process devitalizes it in some ways and does not prevent some of the diseases attributed to raw milk.
He cited research by Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, a California physician, who he said showed that a pasteurized milk diet impaired the health of cats in a long-term test.
Dr. Lee said other researchers had demonstrated the “basic dishonesty” of arguments that pasteurization is necessary to prevent undulant fever in humans.
Diseases such as heart trouble, cancer, and arthritis seem “unquestionably due to the devitalization of the basic foods flour, sugar, and milk,” he added.
Dr. Lee asserted that the use of Butter Yellow, a chemical dye, to color butter was responsible for some of the increase in cancer. A few years ago, he said, researchers found that butter yellow was a potent agent in the production of experimental cancer, and the practice of using the chemical in butter and cheese was stopped.
Dr. Lee said people might as well eat fats that sell for 10 cents a pound instead of oleomargarine so far as nutrition is concerned. He said oleomargarine was lacking in phospholipids, or fatty substances, which he asserted are protectors of body chromosomes, or hereditary elements in the cells. Butter contains this protective substance, he added.
Author unknown. Mansfield News-Journal, Mansfield, Ohio, April 19, 1948.
