By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: “The civilized fraction of the human race is committing suicide by its acceptance of synthetic food products.” Perhaps no sentence better sums up the work and life of Dr. Royal Lee, who fought tirelessly to alert the American people that processed, imitation foods such as corn syrup, hydrogenated fats, and bleached flour truly were killing them (and still are), in spite of assurances to the contrary by the country’s food manufacturers and their partners in crime, the FDA. A must read for anyone who wants to see where and how our country’s health went off the rails. From The Value of Lecithin. Publication date unknown.
[The following is a transcription of the original Archives document. To view or download the original document, click here.]Synthetic Foods and Race Suicide[spacer height=”20px”]
The civilized fraction of the human race is committing suicide by its acceptance of synthetic food products. This acceptance is against their will, against their better judgment, and against their sense of taste. Given the opportunity, the average person would never use synthetic imitations of good food, but he has not the chance of choosing. He must eat what is commercially available or go hungry.
What are these synthetic foods? They are in the main of two classes: (1) synthetic sugar, otherwise known as glucose, dextrose, corn syrup, or corn sugar, and (2) synthetic fats, sold as substitutes for lard and butter.
Dextrose is made by using acid (sulfuric or hydrochloric) to convert cornstarch to the soluble carbohydrate form. In this conversion everything of a nutritional value in the starch—the phospholipids, the phytates of calcium and magnesium, the vitamin factors of the B and E complexes—is destroyed. [These nutrients] cannot survive the acid treatment but instead are converted into ill-smelling and dark waste products that must be completely removed by deodorizing and decolorizing treatments with activated carbon and other methods before the snow-white refined residue is ready for doctoring up—as a cane-syrup-flavored blend of “corn syrup” or as a snow-white “corn sugar” (or “white corn syrup”) for adulterating candy and a multitude of canned fruits and other foods.
Dextrose, unless sweetened [by adding] cane syrup or cane sugar, has so little sweetening power that it cannot be used [as a sweetener] in foods on its merits. Sugars are [generally] used as flavoring agents, as sweeteners, not as fillers, except by adulterators who wish to deliberately load a higher priced product with cheating filler that is not readily detected. And for the latter purpose, dextrose is an ideal material. There is always a little dextrose in most foods to start with, so adding more is not an obvious cheat, just as there is a modicum of water in many foods, such as butter, and adding more is a very tempting idea to the cheater. (There are more citations by the pure-food authorities on the offense of adding water to butter than on any other form of adulteration. There is hardly a butter processing firm in the business that has not had its run-ins with the authorities, many as regular as the “pinches” for operating a gambling establishment, where a regularly collected fine is considered equivalent to paying license fees.)
In Canada the food and drug authorities are more strict. Adulteration with dextrose of any food, we understand, is absolutely barred. In this country not only is such adulteration permitted, but the presence of the synthetic counterfeit stuff need not be declared on the label—certainly [an example] of where the food adulterators make our laws and “to the devil with the hindmost.”
Only Natural Carbohydrates Recommended
Dextrose is widely advertised as a “source of energy.” Sure, so is alcohol. But to eat it as food is another matter. The synthetic stuff, in the first place, is not in any way to be considered the same as the natural form found in foods. Dr. Sandler explains the difference in his book Diet Controls Polio and shows how much unnatural counterfeit food components fool our natural physiological controls and create havoc with our defenses against disease. No carbohydrate is legitimate as food unless it carries all the vitamins and minerals originally in it. Otherwise we are cheated of the essential health-building factors that we need to build teeth and bones and to keep our glands and our body in general in normal health. Sure, we can live for a long time on cheat foods; we can cheat our body a lot before a day of reckoning arrives. [But it does come, and] sometimes it arrives quite without warning. Whenever you read of a middle-aged businessman dropping dead from heart disease, you are reading about just such an occasion.
The Value of Lecithin
We hear a lot about cholesterol, too, and its effect on the blood vessels when it accumulates in abnormal amounts. Why this sudden interest? What is the antidote for cholesterol? It happens to be lecithin and other phosphorus compounds, found in all natural fats. But who gets a full schedule of natural fats in his diet today? Our shortenings are synthetic fats, made by treating natural oils with hydrogen at high temperatures and pressures in a retort, as in the production of dextrose from starch.
Also, as in dextrose synthesis, the accompanying mineral and vitamin fractions are converted to evil-smelling, dark materials that again must be carefully removed by filtration through activated carbon and other absorbents. The snow-white stuff that remains is now doctored up to imitate butter, lard, or what have you. The counterfeit fat is then advertised widely as a substitute to undersell the natural food. We even find a widely advertised condensed milk product on the market that has had its butter removed and counterfeit oleo homogenized into the skimmed residue to imitate natural milk. The users are not told what they are getting; neither are they told what they are not getting.
It’s no wonder, when we are being cheated of the normal cholesterol metabolizers, that we start to see an increase in diseases due to excess cholesterol collecting in the tissues. The major use of lecithin is to emulsify fats, as well as cholesterol. The best way to get fat and always feel tired is to eat these counterfeits. Then you will build a great reserve of fat in your tissues and will be totally unable to recall it for use when you need it. You will be in the same fix as a person with a big bank account but with no checkbook to make use of the money. Worse, you will have to carry the unusable deposit of reserve food with you at all times. You cannot give it away, or use it yourself. All thanks to the fellow who thought it a clever stunt to make an imitation food and swindle his fellows. He did not dream of the consequences—consequences that no doubt redounded to his own physical detriment too.
At any rate we know enough about synthetic fats and sugars to want none of them. And more and more people should get wise—before it is too late. Only your own sense of propriety can protect you. The food and drug laws are of little benefit in this instance.
By Royal Lee, DDS. From the book The Value of Lecithin. Publisher and publication date unknown.
