By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. Royal Lee was one of the original fighters against the bleaching and refining of flour products. He considered it a national crime, and spoke out about it tirelessly from the early 1920s through the end of his life. In this article, aimed at homemakers, Dr. Lee gives a brief history of the practice of flour bleaching as well as the noble efforts to stop it. He also highlights the discovery by scientists that the chemicals involved in flour bleaching were deadly. “It seems that English investigators have found that the bleaching chemical universally used in this country for many years has been found poisonous enough to kill dogs in a few weeks if they receive the bleached flour, or bread made from it.” 1947.
Let This Be a Lesson to Us[spacer height=”20px”]
In Science News Letter of November 29th is a prize example of how government bureaucrats smoke screen themselves when caught red-handed.
“Disease Threat Averted,” headlines in Science News Letter say. “A story of fast action by government, industry, and medical scientists against a disease and hunger threat.” It seems that English investigators have found that the bleaching chemical universally used in this country for many years has been found poisonous enough to kill dogs in a few weeks if they receive the bleached flour or bread made from it.
“No hint of any damage to humans from this flour has come in all the years that it has been used,” says the article, following with this: “Meanwhile with the idea that harm might come to humans eating (bleached flour) over a lifetime, the milling and chemical industries are vigorously seeking a substitute for nitrogen trichloride.”
More than a hint has been available to government authorities ever since 1919. A unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court should be something more than a hint for the Food & Drug Administration when it said:
“…it is intended that if any flour, because of any added poisonous or other deleterious ingredient may possibly injure the health…it shall come within the ban of the statute.”
Further it said:
“Congress has here in this statute definitely outlined its inhibition against a particular class of adulteration.” (Meaning the ‘bleaching’ of flour)
And [as for] the flour in question, 625 sacks of bleached flour were ordered “confiscated and utterly destroyed” because “the statute condemns the adding of poisonous substances to articles of food such as flour.” (Notice of Judgment 6380)
Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, the head of the original Food & Drug Administration, set up by the 1906 Federal Law, started this prosecution in 1910. Before the case had gone far, Dr. Wiley had been pried off his job very obviously because he wanted to protect the public health by stopping dangerous adulterations of common foods, adulterations that were for the sole purpose of defrauding the buyer but highly profitable to the seller! (See Ladd & stallings report on Bleached Flour of 1906, North Dakota Agricultural College for facts on this.)
Dr. Wiley wrote the whole story of the political corruption and crooked manipulations in the Food & Drug Administration in his book, now suppressed by the present copyright owners, entitled The History of a Crime Against the Food Law, published by himself in 1929.
The copyright law is here perverted to cover up corruption. The law enforcement officers who are supposed to enforce the law as established by decisions of the supreme court ever since April 1919 have collected their salaries for enforcing the law but have taken orders from the food adulterators instead.
Dr. Wiley was eased out because he tried to:
1. Stop the adulteration of flour with poisons, misnamed “bleach,” used to keep insects out of the flour and used in all flours, white or whole wheat, with one or two exceptions. Similar preservatives, deadly to insects and affecting the vitamin content and flavor, are used almost universally in all packaged cereals. This practice is as reprehensible as the old system of preserving milk with sodium fluoride or formaldehyde, chemicals now relegated to such uses as cockroach poison and embalming fluid.
2. Stop the use of habit-forming drugs in soft drinks. Here he really ran into a buzz saw. His efforts were never of the slightest effect. No successor has had the temerity to bring up the matter again. Read his book for particulars. (If your library has not destroyed it).
3. Stop the use of aluminum salts in baking powder. Dr. Wiley merely tried to follow the same policy as various foreign countries where aluminum salts had been rigorously outlawed as food ingredients, because it has the same effect as lead poisoning, only slower.
4. Stop the use of poisonous sulfites and sulphur dioxide in dried fruits.
5. Stop the use of saccharine as a fraudulent sweetener in food products.
6. Stop the misrepresentation of synthetic foods like glucose as “corn syrup” to imply that it was a natural product. (Glucose has since been proven to cause diabetes in animal tests, see Science, February 14, 1947.)
Dr. Wiley tells how report after report by his department experts were pigeon-holed and hidden from public knowledge so that the poisoning of the public for profit could be continued without interruption.
Were it not for the article “Agenized Flour” in the London publication Nature of June 1947 of the poisonous effects of commercial flour bleaches, the matter would be still as obscurely hidden as it was when Dr. Wiley was muzzled and discredited by the crooks in power. They are still in power.
If you think this kind of meddling with your basic foods is not important, read the attached reprint from Science showing how cattle fed supplements of processed grain (like all grocery store cereals) began to drop dead one by one in their pastures as they grazed, without showing any external signs of disease. And heart disease is the leading cause of death in this country but practically unknown in China, where these products are not available.
If you have any desire for more proof of the rascality of the politically controlled “guardians” of Public Health, ask for the following booklets:
1. Your Health and What It Is Worth to the Racketeer
2. Reprint of Mrs. Darlington’s articles in the Rural New Yorker on the pasteurized milk racket.
3. An Appeal to Congress
4. Reprint of Ladd & Stallings “Report on Bleaching of Flour.” (1906)
By Dr. Royal Lee, Box 267, Elm Grove, Wisconsin. December 15, 1947.
