The GP and the Endocrine Glands
By Dr. Louis L. Rubel
Summary: What might have been history’s great link between nutrition and medicine. This 200-page book by medical doctor Louis Rubel, published originally in 1959 and reproduced in its entirety here, details the clinical symptomatology of various dysfunctions of the endocrine glands and links these dysfunctions to inadequate nutrition. “Many patients would not be suffering from ill health [as a result of glandular dysfunction] had their nutritional intake throughout their formative and adult years been adequate in each of its constituents,” Dr. Rubel writes. Rubel stresses in particular that many conditions encountered daily by the general medical practitioner and considered “mental or emotional aberration” are really the result of endocrine disruption. The causal connection between malnutrition and endocrine dysfunction had first been revealed decades earlier by the great nutrition pioneer Sir Dr. Robert McCarrison, who showed that the endocrine system is actually the first bodily system to feel the effects of malnutrition. While this truth has been observed by nutrition-minded practitioners for almost a century, the medical establishment still tragically fails to recognize it or consider its profound implications. The GP and the Endocrine Glands, 1959.
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Nutrition in Health and Disease
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD
Summary: In this 1936 article from the British Medical Journal, nutrition pioneer Sir Dr. Robert McCarrison lays out some of the basic principles of nutrition—principles that have long been lost by a modern world that has convinced itself that processed foods are sufficient substitutes for whole natural foods. In addition to the fundamental truth that only whole foods can properly nourish the body, McCarrison discusses specific dysfunctions that occur in the two body systems affected most immediately by a poor diet—the gastro-intestinal tract and the endocrine system. 1936.
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Obesity and the Physiology of Osmotic Transfers
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: "Most overweight people have an obviously disordered endocrine balance," writes Dr. Lee in this speculative paper on the nature of weight gain and loss. While historically the thyroid has always been considered the main dysfunctional endocrine gland when it comes to obesity, Dr. Lee points to another player, one "higher up the chain" of the endocrine system—the pituitary gland. With some modern researchers claiming the cause of obesity to be resistance of the pituitary to the hormone leptin, Dr. Lee appears to have been on the right track—once again years ahead of his time. 1954.
Practical Endocrinology
By Henry R. Harrower, MD
Summary: The complete book, originally published in 1932 and reprinted by the Lee Foundation in 1957. In 1916, Dr. Harrower founded the Association for the Study of the Internal Secretions, the first society in the United States dedicated to the study of the endocrines, while also inaugurating Endocrinology, the first periodical of its type. Harrower was a major force in the development of endocrine therapy using glandular extracts and a leading light in the practice of organotherapy. To further this therapy, he founded the Harrower Laboratories Company in Glendale, California. Dr. Royal Lee would later build on Harrower's work in developing the Protomorphogen. In the preface to the 1957 reprint by the Foundation, Lee writes, "No student of the healing arts can fail to consider this book of Harrower's an indispensable reference work, and of absorbing interest in getting the proper diagnosis of the multiple illnesses of a people who are trying out the mass experiment of starving their endocrine glands by the use of foods depleted of essential minerals and vitamins through processing, refining and the progressive depletion of soils." Note: This is a large file. Give it a minute or more to load. Original publication date 1932; republished by the Lee Foundation in 1957.
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Some Interrelations Between Vitamins and Hormones
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. Lee, citing the great British doctor and nutrition pioneer Sir Robert McCarrison, explains the critical connection between nutrition and the endocrine system. "McCarrison back in 1921 told us how the endocrine glands were the first structures to atrophy or degenerate following vitamin and mineral deficiencies. [For instance,] the adrenal glands...stopped functioning and soon became atrophied." McCarrison noted that while the adrenals were usually the first endocrine gland to falter as a result of nutrient deficiency, in time others followed, including the thyroid and the pituitary. As Lee often pointed out, none of this would have been discovered had diets high in nutrient-deficient processed foods not initiated such problems in the human race. 1950.
