Let Food Be Your Medicine
By Doris Grant
Summary: Doris Grant was one of England's greatest proponents of the natural-foods movement. An avid supporter of the Lee Foundation, she wrote many books and lectured widely to teach the British people how to live healthier lives, particularly through their food choices. Strong and active until the end of her life, Grant died in 2003 at the age of 98. This document includes a brief account of her life. From the Cambridge University Medical School Society Magazine. Reprint 123, 1958.
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McCarrison, Sir Robert—Biography
Author unknown
Summary: Before there was Weston Price, there was Sir Robert McCarrison. In the first decades of the twentieth century, this British doctor and officer conducted some of the great initial investigations into the effect of diet on health. Studying different subpopulations in India, McCarrison showed that most of the diseases incurred by each population were a result of diet, specifically a diet of processed foods—a result that would later be echoed by Dr. Price's famous worldwide investigation into traditional versus processed-food diets. Like Price, McCarrison bemoaned the disease-causing effects of foods such as refined sugar and flour, and he emphasized the extreme importance of choosing natural foods, including natural fats, over processed ones. In this short biographical sketch he is quoted, "I know of nothing so potent in maintaining good health in laboratory animals as perfectly constituted food [and] I know of nothing so potent in producing ill health as improperly constituted food. This, too, is the experience of stock breeders. Is man an exception to a rule so universally applied to the higher animals?" Note: You can read McCarrison's landmark 1921 book, Studies in Deficiency Disease—reprinted in its entirety by the Lee Foundation in 1945—in these archives.
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Medical Testament of the Doctors of Cheshire, England
By the Local Medical and Panel Committee of Cheshire, England
Summary: One of the great documents in the histories of both nutrition and medicine. The Local Medical Committee of Cheshire, England—representing the 600 doctors of the county—reviews the doctors' experience over the previous 25 years under the National Health Insurance Act. They concede that they've been unable to make inroads in preventing disease and state why explicitly: "This illness results from a life-time of wrong nutrition!" Citing the soil and farming work of Sir Albert Howard (An Agricultural Testament), they emphasize that good nutrition starts with the health of the soil that plants are grown in. They also review the nutritional research of Sir Robert McCarrison (Studies in Deficiency Disease), whose famous studies in India revealed the critical importance of whole foods, particularly "milk, butter, and fresh vegetables," in preventing disease. The doctors present cases of the deterioration of health in their patients as these individuals consumed the modern English diet, and they point out that the nation's dental and physical health have suffered severely as practices such as the pasteurization of milk, the refining of whole grains, and the consumption of refined sugar have increased. How, they ask, can they carry out their medical mission when the misery they've tried to alleviate will continue as long as the food supply is adulterated? "We conceive it to be our duty in the present state of knowledge to point out that much, perhaps most, of [England's] sickness is preventable and would be prevented by the right feeding of our people." In 1957, the Medical Testament was reprinted in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, signed by an additional 400 dentists and physicians. 1939.
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Vitamin B Complex and the Weak Heart
By William Brady, MD
Summary: Dr. Brady was a medical doctor who wrote a popular syndicated newspaper column in the 1940s and 50s. In this article, he discusses the importance of the B complex vitamers—specifically thiamin (B1), riboflavin (B2), and niacinamide (B3)—in the metabolism of carbohydrates as well as to heart health. Vitamin B supplementation had been shown to reduce or eliminate the need for exogenous insulin in some diabetics, Brady notes, and the critical role of the B complex in the functioning of the heart had been revealed all the way back in the 1920s by the famous nutrition pioneer Sir Dr. Robert McCarrison. Astoundingly, modern medicine still fails to grasp the significance of Dr. McCarrison's findings. From the Waterloo Daily Courier, Iowa, 1947.
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The Wheel of Health
By G. T. Wrench, MD
Summary: The complete book, originally published in England in 1938 and republished by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research in 1945. The Wheel of Health is a master treatise on proper diet—as well as a cogent plea for the full recognition of vitamin values—based on study of the famously healthy Hunza people of what was at the time northern India (now Pakistan). Dr. Wrench credits his interest in the Hunza to the great nutrition pioneer Sir Robert McCarrison (author of Studies in Deficiency Disease, available in these Archives), who studied them extensively. The Hunza "are unsurpassed by any Indian race in perfection of physique," McCarrison said. "They are long lived, vigorous in youth and age, capable of great endurance and enjoy a remarkable freedom from disease in general.'" In addition to the work of Dr. McCarrison, Wrench highlights as well the studies of the great agriculturalist Sir Albert Howard (author of An Agricultural Testament; see also "Natural vs. Artificial Nitrates" in these Archives.) "This small book," one British reviewer wrote, "should rest at the very foundations of one's personal explorations of health and its roots." 1945.
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