Abstracts on the Effects of Pasteurization on the Nutritional Value of Milk
Summary: In the 1930s, many of the first pasteurization laws were passed despite the opposition, on nutritional grounds, of many scientists. This report shows abstracts of various scientific investigations into the effects of pasteurization on milk, which include the destruction of natural antibacterial factors in raw milk; destruction of vitamins A, B, and C; nullification of raw milk's effectiveness in reversing tuberculosis; and so on. While most people today assume that pasteurization makes milk safer, the truth, as these abstracts show, is that it destroys the nutritional value of milk to such an extent that the milk becomes an inherently toxic food, not the healthful one it is in its raw state. Reprint 7, 1939.
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Are We Starving at Full Tables?
Author unknown
Summary: This paper from the late 1940s ties the growing rates of heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and mental illness in America to the widespread malnutrition of its citizens, a result not just of the removal of nutrients during food processing but, more importantly, of the disappearance of trace minerals in its worn-out soils. The paper focuses on an experiment conducted by Dr. Ira Allison and the famous soil scientist Dr. William Albrecht in which diseased cows feeding on mineral-deficient pastures were returned to health through supplementation with trace minerals. This paper might have caused U.S. health officials to recognize that Americans were suffering massive malnutrition in spite of bellies full of industrially processed foods. Instead, tragically, it was ignored. From the periodical Steel Horizons. Reprint 41A.
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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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Breast Feeding
By the United States Department of Labor
Summary: "No single factor exercises a more pronounced influence on the development of the baby and on his health during his entire life than nursing at his mother's breast." So wrote the U.S. Department of Labor in a series of booklets issued from the 1920s through the 1940s encouraging mothers to breast feed their infants. Though the government would later abandon its support of breast feeding, the Lee Foundation continued to print this collection of snippets from the various booklets released by the USDL, which includes diet recommendations for the breast-feeding mother. Fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, eggs, and lean meats are all emphasized—sound nutrition today just as it was then. Reprint 122.
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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.
A Fresh Look at Milk
By Francis Pottenger, Jr., MD
Summary: "There is no question that pasteurized milk and milk from poorly fed cattle produces osteoporosis in the experimental animal." This quote by Dr. Pottenger, whose famous cat experiments in the 1930s established that malnutrition is inherited, sums up the great paradox of pasteurized milk: Americans drink it by the gallon believing they are strengthening their bones, but in truth it does the opposite, as shown by animal experiments going back decades. In this fascinating article, Pottenger discusses a study organized in 1933 by a farmer whose aim was to produce the finest milk possible from his cows. With the aid of a group of scientists, he discovered some basic principles of milk production that have been long ignored by the American dairy industry and health "experts" alike. Not only does pasteurization destroy the nutritional value of milk, they showed, but the health of the cow greatly determines whether the milk she produces is beneficial or deleterious. "When the health of the cattle fails," Pottenger explains, "the nutritional factors of milk will decline and partly metabolized food nutrients will produce sensitizations not only in the cow but in those who use the milk." The implications of this statement are almost beyond belief. Pottenger also describes the long-ignored Wulzen anti-stiffness factor. (For more on this, see "Wulzen Factor" in these archives.) From Modern Nutrition and Annual Review of Biochemistry. Reprint 27A, 1962.
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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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Letter to Directors of American Academy of Nutrition
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. Lee, writing on behalf of the Lee Foundation, urges the directors of the American Academy of Nutrition to adopt a Code of Principles. Among the principles he suggests are addressing, head on, controversial subjects such as the pasteurization of milk and fluoridation of water as well as actively countering the trend toward "counterfeit foods" such as corn syrup (glucose), hydrogenated foods, and artificial colors. This is Lee's public policy in a nutshell. 1957.
View PDF: Letter to Directors of American Academy of Nutrition
Nutritional Approach to the Prevention of Disease
By J. F. Wischhusen and N. O. Gunderson, MD
Summary: "Scientists have been almost entirely preoccupied by the concept that bacteria cause disease, rather than by a much more important concept that adequate nutrition causes good health and relative freedom from disease." This basic principle, stated so eloquently by the authors of this essay from The Science Counselor, aptly defines the divide between the fields of nutrition and medicine. Were we to stop consuming substandard foods such as pasteurized milk and foods grown on soils deficient in trace minerals, the authors explain, then we would not need medical treatments for degenerative diseases such as rheumatism, arthritis, gastro-intestinal disorders, nervous and mental diseases, and cancer because they would be largely non-existent (as they are in pre-industrial societies that stick to their traditional diets). "Remove the true underlying cause of disease, malnutrition," the authors add, "and it will usually be found that the disease germs cannot exist or propagate in an animal body that is healthy." Reprint 48, 1950.
Pasteurised Milk: A National Menace (Scotland)
By James C. Thomson
Summary: This article from the Scottish periodical the Kingston Chronicle offers one of the most insightful quotes ever regarding the reality of nutrition, commerce, and science: "When dealing with highly lucrative commercial enterprises based upon dietetic and therapeutic procedures, doctors and analytical chemists are given a clear lead. They know what is expected of them...there is a market for signatures. They have only to indicate a bias in the right direction and everything is made easy. Their investigations are tailor-made and tidy beyond description. Slides and specimens from the laboratories of the cartels are provided for them; meticulously labeled and annotated Petri dishes come to them teeming with unequivocal cultures of all the best microbes. In many cases even their opinions and observations are supplied—typed out all ready for signature." The author goes on to show how commercial dairy interests used just such tactics to shamelessly demonize raw milk and write pasteurization into the law books of the country for the purpose of profit. Reprint 28C, 1943.
Pasteurization & Colored Food
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: A 1948 newspaper report of Royal Lee's presentation to the American Academy of Nutrition in San Francisco. Dr. Lee warns of the health dangers associated with artificial colors added to foods, citing research proving "butter yellow," a coloring added to margarine, to be carcinogenic. Lee also condemns the pasteurization of milk, citing studies of the damage it caused in animal feeding studies. From NewspaperARCHIVE, 1948.
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Why Milk Pasteurization? Part I
By Jean Bullitt Darlington
Summary: The first of a two-part report examining the bias in the popular press of the 1940s regarding the pros and cons of milk pasteurization. Darlington debunks several famous "scare" myths ballyhooed by the press, presenting each story as it was first reported and then as it appeared after some fact finding. This article, along with its sequel, is full of facts and examples of how health authorities grossly manipulated science and the public fear of food-borne epidemics to silence any support of certified raw milk. Includes eye-opening statistics from the U.S. Public Health Service regarding the number of outbreaks traced to both raw and pasteurized milk from 1922 to 1944. From The Rural New Yorker: The Business Farmer's Paper. Reprint 28, 1947.
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Why Milk Pasteurization? Part II
By Jean Bullitt Darlington
Summary: Part II of a two-part series examining the myths and politics of milk pasteurization. In this article, Darlington reviews the efforts of the U.S. Public Health Service to strong arm communities throughout the country to adopt pasteurization, and he also examines closely the nature of milk production, pointing out that with the technology and equipment available at the time, safe raw-milk production was not just feasible but preferable. "Pasteurization is destructive of many of the essential nutritional values in milk. The only possible defense that could ever have been offered for [it]," the author concludes, "is that it did act as a temporary expedient pending the acquisition of more knowledge of methods insuring [sic] a safe and clean supply." With even better methods available today, the prohibition in many states of the sale of raw milk speaks less to public safety and more to the commercial dominance of the pasteurized milk industry. From The Rural New Yorker. Reprint 28-B, 1947.
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Wulzen Calcium Dystrophy Syndrome in Guinea Pigs
By Hugo Krueger, PhD
Summary: An authoritative, fully-referenced report on the mysterious and famous Wulzen factor, an anti-stiffness nutrient found in the cream of raw milk and in fresh molasses. The author writes, "In 1941 Wulzen and Bahrs reported that guinea-pigs fed raw whole milk grew excellently and at autopsy showed no abnormality of any kind. Guinea-pigs on pasteurized milk rations did not grow as well and developed a definite syndrome, the first sign of which was wrist stiffness. On pasteurized skim milk the syndrome increased in severity until the animals finally died. There was great emaciation and weakness before death." Doctors such as Royal Lee and Francis Pottenger, Jr., had long studied this anti-arthritic factor, which was never accepted by orthodox medicine and regretfully remains ignored to this day. From American Journal of Physical Medicine. Reprint 81, 1955.
Wulzen Factor Brief
Author unknown
Summary: The facts behind the Wulzen factor—a nutrient found in raw cream and cane juice—have been lost to modern science. Also known as the "anti-stiffness factor" because it combats arthritis and relieves pain, swelling, and stiffness, the Wulzen factor was considered an actual vitamin by a number of early investigators, but it was never accepted as such by medical or government "authorities." To acknowledge it required the admission that the pasteurization of dairy products was a causative factor in arthritis, and such an admission would never be made by those who so vigorously promoted and enforced pasteurization laws. This excerpt is a brief reference point for discussion; see the subject "Wulzen Factor" in these archives for more-complete articles on the subject. Original source unknown. Reprint 27A, circa 1962.
View PDF: Wulzen Factor Brief
