The Battlefront for Better Nutrition
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: "Yes, there is a battle going on," Dr. Lee writes in this 1950 article from the magazine The Interpreter. But the war Dr. Lee was referring to didn't involve guns or missiles. It was a contest hidden from public view, waged by industrial food manufacturers and processors against small-scale farmers and the country's nutrition pioneers, who saw firsthand the damage that processed foods were inflicting on the national health. Lee decries the substitution of bleached flour and hydrogenated fats for whole wheat and butter and condemns the FDA for allowing food processors and their paid "experts" to dupe the American public into trading real food for counterfeit. Includes the infamous testimony of Dr. Elmer M. Nelson, head of the nutrition division of the FDA, who in 1949 swore in federal court that "it is wholly unscientific to state that a well-fed body is more able to resist disease than a less well-fed body." Reprint 30E, 1950.
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Bleaching of Flour—North Dakota Bulletin
By E. F. Ladd and R. E. Stallings
Summary: A frank report from 1906 by the North Dakota Agricultural College on the origin and nature of the practice of flour bleaching. After discussing the negative chemical effects of bleaching on flour, the authors include actual responses to questions about bleaching posed to flour millers throughout the Northwest. To quote just one of these dismaying appraisals, "Bleaching is done principally to deceive; it takes the strength from the flour; the loaf of bread is smaller and sickly looking, especially when over-bleached. The process is not beneficial, and while a majority of mills bleach, 99 in every 100 are sorry that bleaching was ever invented." This is a truly historic document that sets a place and time for the decision to begin the commercial destruction of the quality of America's food supply through refining, bleaching, and adulteration. Reprint 1, 1906.
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Calories: Nutritional and Harmful Types
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this powerful article, Dr. Lee declares the "first principle" of nutrition: "Once a foodstuff has acquired a reputation for wholesomeness and health building, it [should] be always supplied in its unadulterated state, and unaltered by improper processing, refining, or aging." Lee goes on to document the negative effects of processed foods such as refined sugar, hydrogenated oils, and refined flour, pointing to their association with heart disease and diabetes years before conventional thinking recognized such links. From Natural Food and Farming. Reprint 30H, 1961.
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Chlorine Dioxide: Bleach in Bread Causes Ills
By Helen Bullock
Summary: A newspaper account of a dermatologist's report that patients with skin disorders showed considerable improvement after eliminating bleached flour products from their diet. Importantly, the dermatologist is referring to the bleach chlorine dioxide, which had replaced the former standard flour bleach of many years, nitrogen trichloride. This article illustrates well the practice of the food processing industry to continue to use a product, in spite of concerns about its safety, until enough demonstrable cases of harm force its hand. From The Dallas Morning News, 1955.
The Composition and Nutritive Value of Flour
By H. M. Sinclair
Summary: An excerpt from a publication of England's Royal Society of Health that discusses the nutrient content of wheat flours produced by various processing methods. While the content is quite technical, more interesting is the Discussion following the main content, on pages 240–242, in which various health practitioners and authorities comment on the consumption of bread made with refined flours in Great Britain. The perils of bleaching, extracting, and "enriching" are all brought to attention, as summed poignantly by Lord Douglas of Barloch: "The composition of flour and bread [is] dictated by commercial and not by dietetic reasons." Sadly, the same can be said for most of the food supply in America today. Title of original source unknown. Reprint 38, 1957.
The Direct Effect of Malnutrition on Tissue Degeneration
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this succinct address to the Seattle Chapter of the American Academy of Applied Nutrition, Dr. Lee touches on some of the major findings of early nutrition science that are still, incredibly, ignored to this day. Topics include the importance of calcium, phosphorus, and raw protein to tooth health; the total destruction of nutrients in bread caused by bleaching; the connection between vitamin E deficiency and heart disease; the dependency of connective-tissue integrity on adequate vitamin C levels; and the various lesions of B vitamin deficiencies. “What lesson can we learn from these few scattered facts…?” Dr. Lee asks in conclusion. “Simply that we must take the trouble in our homes to prepare our foods from the basic materials as far as possible, even to the extent of growing our vegetables and fruits on properly composted soil, if we can. The dividends will be quite possibly 20 years added to our life span, to say nothing of the life added to our years.”
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Dr. Wiley’s Question Box: Starches and Sugar Are the Principal Sources of Body Fat
By Harvey W. Wiley, MD
Summary: In 1912, Dr. Wiley left his post as head of the USDA's Bureau of Chemistry because of the collusion he witnessed between food manufacturers and agents within the federal government. Unable to effectively enforce the country's first food purity law (passed in 1906), he left the government and joined the private Good Housekeeping Institute in Washington, D.C. From there, Wiley would help develop the famous Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval while also writing for the institute's magazine. In "Dr. Wiley's Question Box," he would answer specific questions from readers about food safety and nutrition. In the excerpt here, Wiley explains a fact that metabologists have known for nearly a century but which conventional nutritionists and doctors have failed to comprehend from then until now: The principal source of fat stored in the body is not dietary fat but sugars and starches (i.e., carbohydrates). While nutrition schools today continue to teach the erroneous notion that glucose from carbohydrates is "the preferred fuel of the body," Wiley points out what people who study metabolism for a living all know: up to 80% of the carbohydrates a person eats are converted to fat by the liver and stored in the body's fat tissue. Fat tissue, in turn, releases fatty acids, which form the majority of fuel calories used by the body’s cells. From Good Housekeeping, 1926.
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Foreword to “Rebuilding Health” by Ebba Waerland
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Ebba Waerland was an internationally famous advocate of natural health from Sweden. The Waerland dietary system—based on whole natural foods—was very popular in Europe. In response to her request, Royal Lee wrote this foreword to the American edition of her book. From Rebuilding Health: The Waerland Method of Natural Therapy. 1961.
Hidden Dangers in White Bread
By James Rorty
Summary: This article of "the suppressed facts" regarding flour bleaching details just why commercial bread in America is "worthless and unsafe." In spite of its tabloid-like style, this 1956 magazine article boasts some solid reporting, recounting the early resistance to flour bleaching by America's millers as well as by Dr. Harvey Wiley, the first head of the Food and Drug Administration. In the end, Dr. Wiley was shown the door and the FDA became abettors of the food processors' actions, hampered, as one "honest but resigned" FDA official says in the article, by the onus on the administration to prove a substance is harmful before it can legally bar it from manufacturing. "We've practically got to produce a corpse before we can claim they're poisoning your food," the FDA agent adds. The author also discusses the history of nitrogen trichloride, which was used to bleach bread in America for 40 years until it was finally shown in studies to cause fits in animals. While the use of the old bleach was discontinued, the process of bleaching was not, and the author excoriates the FDA for allowing the use of a new bleach, chlorine dioxide, that it admits is toxic but "probably safe as normally used" (which, of course, is what it had said about nitrogen trichloride.) A great article debunking the myth of America as the "best-fed nation on Earth." From the National Police Gazette. Reprint 75, 1956.
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An Honest Loaf: Fresh, Stone Ground Bread
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Although the oil in wheat is extremely beneficial, it is also extremely delicate, writes Dr. Lee, making whole wheat flour "as perishable as milk." Truly nutritious bread can only be made with flour that is within hours of being ground. Because of this super quick rancidification of the oil in wheat, virtually all commercial "whole wheat" breads are of dubious nutritional value. The surest way to get the true benefits of wheat, Lee writes, is to buy a home flour mill and bake your bread with freshly ground flour. From Let's Live magazine, 1958.
How Our Government Subsidizes Malnutrition and Disease
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this booklet, Dr. Lee describes how government policies were designed to protect the adulteration and devitalization of basic foods. He details many examples of such practices, showing how the producers of processed dairy, grain, fruit, and meat induced the medical community to overlook and even endorse their deadly foods. Lee even presents ads in medical journals—paid for by industrial food processors—that brazenly endorse processed foods such as white bread. Lee writes, "Few people in the United States are aware of the 'Iron Curtain' maintained in this country to prevent the food consumer from knowing that he is being sold fraudulent foods, foods that had the better part of their nutritional value removed or destroyed to facilitate the commercial handling of the food, and to enable big food-enterprises to unfairly overpower by price competition the smaller ones." He adds, "The millers and bread makers do not know the trail of wreckage which they have left in the wake of their mineral contempt. They do not know how they have burrowed into the vitality of human life while it is still in the mother's womb. They do not know to what extent they have been responsible for tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, scrofula, measles, scarlatina, anemia, etc." Special Bulletin 1-49, 1949.
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It Can Happen Here: Vitamins, Cholesterol, Inositol, Aluminum
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this reprint from the magazine Nature's Path, Dr. Royal Lee rips food processors for adding poisonous additives and preservatives to their products and selling them as harmless to an unsuspecting public. Nitrates in meat, bleach in flour, and aluminum exposure are highlighted. "Are we...witnessing the crumbling of our civilization by reason of the compromise with principle that is being made by the guilty parties who have so thoroughly sold the public health down the river?" Lee asks. "'Just a little poison in the flour'....'Nitrates in meat never hurt anybody'....'Aluminum toxic? Are you crazy?'" Just a few examples, Lee says, of how large-scale poisoning of the population has been glossed over in America. From Nature's Path magazine. Reprint 30F, 1951.
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The Menace of Synthetic Foods
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: "There is only one test for safety and wholesomeness in food," Dr. Lee proclaims in this overview of his nutritional philosophy. "That is the test of time. The test of a long history of use, over many generations of life." Lee expounds on the ill effects of processed foods, which were pushed hastily onto the market by industrial food processors seeking immediate profit. He cites evidence that bleached flour produces headaches, diarrhea and depression; corn syrup causes diabetes; and hydrogenated fats help cause heart disease. Lee also documents the negative effects of synthetic isolated vitamins, the "jackpot in synthetic foods." 1957.
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One Poison for Another: White Bread
By the Whole Food Society of England
Summary: A British perspective on the bleaching of flour in the year 1955. At that time, a new flour bleach, chlorine dioxide, was being introduced because the old bleach, nitrogen trichloride, or agene, had been shown to clearly be a nerve toxin in dogs. The authors point out that the official ban of agene came ten years after the results of the dog experiment were made known and five years after an announcement by the country's Ministries of Food and Health officially condemning the substance. Why the long delay between identifying agene as a poison and barring it from the market? Simple, the article says: the millers needed time to come up with a new bleach. Rather than putting public health at the forefront and discontinuing the practice of flour bleaching altogether, the government and milling industry decided to continue the process because bleaching makes flour look appealing. Thus, after feeding the public for decades an additive whose safety had always been questionable, a new questionable additive was selected, and the bleached-flour industry kept rolling right along. From The Farmer. Reprint 78, 1955.
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Our Daily Bread
By Julian Pleasants
Summary: Pleasants, echoing the findings of Dr. Weston Price (who found that traditional diets ward off disease), implores families to continue to bake their own bread and thus ensure their own well being. "The knowledge which enabled man to destroy the integrity both of bread and of human health," he says, "developed far more rapidly than did the knowledge of how to maintain their integrity." From the magazine Integrity. Reprint 44, 1949.
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The Special Nutritional Qualities of Natural Foods
By Dr. Royal Lee and Jerome S. Stolzoff
Summary: In this famous report, Lee and Stolzoff contrast the characteristics of real food with those of their crude artificial imitations. “Because of the denaturation of foods by refining and processing, we are overeating the fattening and energy-producing components in foods and literally starving for the vital vitamin and mineral factors, which have become far scarcer and more difficult to obtain than at any time in the history of the human race.” Still ahead of the times, this report is as important now as it was in its day. Includes a referenced chart of 147 diseases associated with various vitamin defeciences. 1942.
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Trace Elements and Biodynamic Agriculture
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: By the close of the 1940s, Dr. Lee had seen many "peeps behind...the iron curtain that is so carefully maintained by the makers of fraudulent foods to keep the American people in ignorance as to the real cause of their chronic diseases." Thus, in commenting on the opinion of a committee who'd concluded on very little evidence that fertilizing soil with trace minerals is unnecessary to produce nutritious plants, Dr. Lee could not help but question the motives of the committee's so-called experts. "Such haste in promoting one side of a vital question that cannot be settled without a great amount of research certainly throws a lot of doubt upon the integrity and honesty of the committee." Lee would spend the next two decades calling out such formulaic chicanery, the kind of which would later lead to some of the great shams of modern nutrition, including cholesterol theory and low-fat diets. 1949.
White Flour Poisons: Let This Be a Lesson to Us
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. 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.
