Introduction by Stephanie Anderson
One of the many things I love about America is our can-do spirit. No matter what obstacles we face, innovative and creative people find solutions to overcome them. We got vacuum cleaners out of this mother of invention. And cars. And baby monitors. Come on, we’re awesome, and we never give up until we fix the problem.
That’s what I immediately loved about Dr. Royal Lee. When it became the norm to start removing critical nutrient chemicals from our whole foods, Dr. Lee didn’t sit back and accept it. He knew this loss would make Americans dumb and dumber as time went on. Dr. Lee wasn’t fooled for an instant when clever marketing— touting convenience above all—became a successful disguise for malnutrition. He devoted his career to fixing it, but it was a hard road to travel.
Even in a “free” country, there are forces that thwart our search for answers and impede our pursuit for solutions. These forces have always been amongst us, and they are stronger now more than ever. You will see this for yourself when you take Dr. Lee’s “Intelligence Test” below. Citing the work of one observant mind after another, he keenly spotted the solutions we needed to save us from ourselves. Dr. Lee was a pioneer, and his fellow trailblazers fought to bring us to the many whole food resources we have today.
Following is an excerpt from Dr. Lee’s “Intelligence Test to Detect How Much You Have Been Brainwashed,” printed in the January/February 1960 issue of his Applied Trophology newsletter. I encourage you to read the full article, available in the SRP Historical Archives.
Intelligence Test to Detect How Much You Have Been Brainwashed
Insidious propaganda is being constantly fed to us by people who profit by our failure to rigidly screen information as to its truth and soundness. Unless we are alert to the process, we accept many palpably fictitious statements as fact and allow ourselves to be swindled right and left, both as to our pocketbooks and as to our very life, health, and existence.
Mark Twain so well expressed it when he said, “The trouble with most people is that they know too many things that ain’t so.”
Here is a questionnaire that will enable you to check on a few facts that are commonly misrepresented.
1. Is it true that we are the world’s best fed nation?
Our propaganda artists in our colleges and federal agencies tell us we are. If we are, why is it that we list heart disease as the major cause of death, while it is rare in China and India? It is so rare, in fact, that Dr. I. Snapper of Brooklyn, after ten years in China, wrote that heart disease was so uncommon in that country that the typical medical student never had the chance to observe a case. Why did autopsies of our soldiers in Korea show that 77 percent were afflicted with severe forms of coronary disease? Yet Korean soldiers had no signs of such a condition. Heart disease appears to be American beriberi, due to white flour, refined sugar, candy, and soft drinks.
2. Is it true that the cause of tooth decay has not yet been discovered?
By no means! Dr. Pickerill of New Zealand in 1911 wrote a book showing that “civilized” refined foods caused tooth decay and that proper diets produced perfect teeth. In India there is tooth decay in only one person in eighty—a thousandth as common as it is here, where the average draftee has twelve cavities. Dr. Harold Hawkins in his book Applied Nutrition showed that we remain immune to tooth decay unless our calcium-phosphorus balance is upset by malnutrition. Dr. Weston A. Price in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration showed that tooth decay is only prevalent where refined foods are commonly used.
3. Is it true that the cause of arthritis is unknown?
That is what our medical authorities tell us, but the fact is that arthritis can invariably be caused in test animals by only one method: feeding them cooked food. The cooking destroys critical amino acids required by bone, without which bone repair and regeneration are impossible. Cooking feed for animals is seldom recommended. In feeding tests on cows, cooking the feed resulted in assimilation of only one-tenth the minerals and one-fifth the protein.1 Test animals put on cooked food or pasteurized milk soon lose their teeth from pyorrhea and die of arthritis, after becoming so crippled that they cannot even move to get food.
4. Is it true that the cause of cancer is unknown?
Cancer is caused by the use of the foods common to civilization, for cancer is unknown to peoples isolated from civilization.
Dr. McCarrison tells that cancer is unknown to the Hunzas of northern India, where only native foods are used.
Dr. Schweitzer tells us cancer was unknown to the African native when he first established his missionary colony there forty years ago, and it was found only after civilized foods followed him.
Steffansson tells us cancer was unknown among the Eskimos until civilized food penetrated the north.
Dr. Weston A. Price tells us that cancer was unknown in villages in the high valleys of the Alps until better highways brought in civilized foods. He tells of Pacific islands where cancer was unknown until sugar plantations were established and civilized foods were introduced.
Dr. Rowntree of Philadelphia showed in 1933 that stale cereal oil could cause cancer in test animals with a 100 percent degree of certainty. Other tests on animals showed that refined foods caused a 90 percent incidence of cancer from implants of malignant tissue, where zero incidence was found in similar implants to animals fed natural, unrefined foods.
Once any cereal food is prepared from the original grain, or the grain processed by any kind of milling, the oils proceed to oxidize and go rancid day by day; their perishability is greater than that of fresh milk. Every bakery should be required to grind their own flour at the time of baking for any product made from cereal sources. We know of no other way to protect the health of the consumer—unless the product is vacuum-packed or gas-packed to prevent the destructive effects of atmospheric oxygen.
Only the original seed can be stored without deterioration, and it must be intact. Hulling or removal of nut shells enhance rancidity and reduce the shelf life. Peanuts quickly go rancid if the red skin is lost. Even shelling corn has an effect. Mexican cooks prefer to shell their own corn to make tortillas; once it is removed from the cob, with the germ on the kernel tip, it has lost its protection and will begin to oxidize.
5. Is it true that depleted soils produce crops that undermine our health and create disease?
Yes, it is a fact as immutable as the axiom “you cannot make something out of nothing.”
Our federal Food and Drug Administration tells us that poor soils simply reduce the quantity of a crop without impairing the quality. There is no scintilla of scientific evidence to support this fraudulent misstatement. (We should have more honest personnel in such critical positions.) All plants absorb mineral elements in a degree proportional to the minerals’ presence. Even gold and silver can be obtained from plants growing in soil containing these elements, and prospectors now use this method to find paying deposits.2
“There are farmers in Illinois who refuse to buy corn from certain sections of their own state…These farmers could not tell you what elements are lacking in this poor corn, but they do know that the animals do not put on weight on such corn as fast as when fed corn grown on better soil.”3
Dr. William Albrecht of the of the University of Missouri has shown that the incidence of dental caries is patterned geographically with the condition of the soil, the greatest decay being where the soils have lost the most in nutritional minerals.4
In actual tests on vegetables from various sources, the amount of manganese in snap beans was found to vary from 2 to 60 parts per million, depending on the soil in which the beans were grown. Manganese activates bone and tooth growth and repair. In one high-manganese area in Texas, the local people were found to experience hip bone fractures at an average age twenty years greater than in the rest of the state. Spinach was found to have from 19 to 1584 parts per million of iron, depending on the soil producing it, and tomatoes vary from 1 to 1938 parts per million.5
6. Is it true that properly fed plants and people resist disease-causing germs and other parasitic organisms better than deficient plants and people?
Yes, very definitely. Dr. Albrecht showed that properly fertilized spinach resisted leaf-eating insects far better than deficient plants. Gyorgy found rats deficient in B vitamins were susceptible to lice. Well-fed rats were immune.6 Pellagra victims were found to harbor intestinal parasites far greater than the normal incidence.7
Where vitamin deficiency is present, lowered resistance to infection is of course characteristic. But where populations have been forced by war conditions to eat less refined food, the health has always improved. (Denmark in 1918 is a conspicuous example.)
7. Why is our own tax money being spent to keep these indisputable facts from us?
It was planned that way back in 1955, when Mr. G. Cullen Thomas, a vice president of General Mills, was chairman of the Citizens Advisory Committee for establishment and enforcement of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.8 Could it have been a coincidence that at this same time Mr. Bradshaw Mintener, a vice president of Pillsbury, was executive director of the Food and Drug Administration in Washington?
These firms mill and sell bleached flour, contaminated with a proven poison and sold in violation of the pure food laws. See Dr. Harvey W. Wiley’s book The History of a Crime Against the Food Law for details. The state of North Dakota back in 1906 proved that bleached flour was adulterated and issued a report.
May we next introduce you to one of their projects: the elimination from the scene of competition those who tell the story of the refined foods and worn-out soils that precondition us to disease attacks and cause us to be the worse fed nation in the world. (We have one-thousand times the tooth decay that countries like India do, for instance.) Those who maintain the position that we are suffering from malnutrition are under attack.
Here is a report from the Drug Trade News, June 3, 1957, regarding this situation:
“Boston– Conviction of a ‘health food’ lecturer on charges of violating the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act by selling misbranded vitamin and mineral products has been upheld in a unanimous decision of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here.
“In an opinion by Chief Judge Calvert Magruder, the court said it found ‘no error’ in a finding of guilty by a district court jury after a three-week trial. The guilty verdict was turned in on all six counts of an information charging V.E. Irons, Inc., and V. Earl Irons with misbranding. The lower court fined the company $1,000 on each count, and Mr. Irons was sentenced to one year in jail on each count, with sentences to run concurrently…
“The FDA contended that the products were misbranded because they failed to comply with its dietary food regulations requiring label statements of vitamin and mineral properties and because false claims were made in literature and in lectures by Mr. Irons.
“As illustrative of the claims called false by the FDA, the court cited one statement that “nearly everyone is this country is suffering from malnutrition or in danger of such suffering because of demineralization and depletion of soils and the refining and processing of foods.’”
That is how it was planned by Thomas and Mintener. That is why you find it very difficult to get any facts connected with the frightful extent of disease created by synthetic, refined, adulterated, poisoned, deficient foods that kill at least one million of our good people every year.
That is why we have campaigns to medicate our water with fluorides to reduce tooth decay. While we are fighting the unconstitutional medication of the water, we are diverted from thinking about the cause of the tooth decay, and every year of delay means a respite from law enforcement for the violators.
The political powers that be are so effective in suppressing the facts that no university dares to properly educate their students. No medical college dares to teach the facts of life as we here set them forth. The MD graduate thinks he is a superman armed with wonder drugs, with which he goes forth to fight malnutrition, not even knowing a starving patient when he sees one.
More complications and bureaucratic skullduggery have occurred in enforcing the food and drug laws than in any other field. In one case the Food and Drug Administration prosecutor had the effrontery to threaten to force the victimized defendant to pay back every cent he had received for his products to the buyers even though not one had filed a complaint of dissatisfaction. The big offense was that the seller had tried to make a product to compensate for the shortcomings of white bread.
With medical and dental college authorities and federal judges too timid to be honest, our only recourse is to get the facts left available to us and try to act on them to the best of our ability.
You wonder how the courts can be perverted to hand down crooked decisions—such as the one confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court that holds that the testimony of a government expert supersedes proven facts established by the defense, in a case where some victim was being crucified for telling the lifesaving truth where the shortcomings of bleached flour are involved (the Alberty case).
Water fluoridation is a prize example of such wholesale skullduggery. The FDA has ruled that fluorides cannot be added to a food supplement because, having no nutritional effect, it would be a drug and not permissible as a food additive (the Nutrilite decision).
This, of course, would rule fluoride out as a water additive too. So, to create a climate for its promotion as a water “enricher,” the old gag of citing expert opinions instead of facts is resorted to. Dr. Frederick Stare of Harvard recently referred to fluoride added to water as a trace mineral of nutritional effect. When we asked him to refer us to the scientific evidence establishing this new finding, he quoted another “expert” opinion, because of course no actual evidence is available. (Quite the contrary: in a recent, careful test, fluorides were found to be without a trace of nutritional effect.9)
Further, President Eisenhower’s doctor does not permit the use of fluoridated water in the White House because of the still unanswered questions as to harmful effects. (We can give you a copy of his statement if you want to see it.) That attitude is reasonable in view of the fact that natural fluoride in water (calcium fluoride) is one-seventieth as poisonous as the sodium fluoride commonly added.
And we must not overlook the gimmick of changing the definitions of foods and drugs to make it simpler to hook the unsuspecting victim who discovers a market for good food among the teeming millions whose lives are shortened by adulterated white bread.
In the 1938 revision of the federal pure food law, anything used to diagnose, prevent, relieve, or cure a disease became a “drug.” Textbooks always had defined drugs as anything other than food that is used as medicine and stressed the fact that most drugs were poisons. Dr. Harvey Wiley [father of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act] went to great lengths in his book The History of a Crime Against the Pure Food Law to show how wonder drugs and poisons were opposite to foods. We cannot live without foods, and we cannot live with drugs—the lethal dose of one is the normal dose of the other.
Dr. Wiley opposed the addition of any drug or poison to food in any amount whatsoever on the premise that many poisons were harmful in proportion to the amount used, even in traces. Now, with all foods (except those with no food value that cannot prevent a deficiency disease) classified as drugs, if a claim is made that a food will prevent a deficiency disease, the seller is subject to prosecution and a year in jail. A maker of whole wheat bread received this sentence after being convicted of falsely labeling the bread “a drug” by claiming health-building qualities for it (a true claim).
When such a conviction is consummated, the newspapers are given detailed releases designed to do as much damage as possible to the reputation of the victim. Totalitarian skullduggery is always like this. No one has any sympathy for the crook found guilty of “false and fraudulent labeling.”
Continue reading here.
References
- Morrison, F.B. Feeds and Feeding, 19th Edition.
- Scientific Monthly, Vol. LXXV, No. 1, p. 28, July 1952.
- Yerkes, A. Soil: A Foundation of Health. International Harvester Company Publication. (Copy free upon request from Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Reprint 23.)
- “Our Teeth and Our Soils.” Annals of Dentistry, December 1947.
- Bear, F.E. Determinations. Rutgers University.
- American Medical Association Journal, 257, July 16, 1938.
- Seale, Harris. Clinical Pellagra, p. 317. C.V. Mosby Company, 1941.
- Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Law Journal, 452, August 1955.
- Journal of Nutrition, August 1958.
- Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Law Journal, pp. 369–370, June 1955.
- Dunner, C.W., President, Food Law Institute. Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Law Journal, p. 661, 1955.
Images from iStock/SvetaZi (main), Cemile Bingol (post). Dr. Harvey Wiley post from SRP.
