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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Harvey W. Wiley’s Autobiography: Chemicals in Food (excerpt)
By Harvey W. Wiley, MD
Summary: An illuminating peek at the early—and fateful—politics of food adulteration. From 1906–1912, Dr. Wiley was the head of the USDA's Bureau of Chemistry (later renamed Food and Drug Administration), the department charged with enforcing the country's first food purity law, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. In this excerpt from his 1929 autobiography, Wiley details how the Bureau's authority was illegally usurped by higher-ranking officials within the USDA under the influence of industrial food manufacturers. In one famous case, the solicitor of the USDA forbade Dr. Wiley and other workers of his Bureau from testifying in a federal case in which their testimony would have supported a ban of the food additive sodium benzoate, a compound Wiley and his fellow chemists had determined to be injurious to health yet, sadly, remains one of the most common food preservatives used today. Includes an introduction by Dr. Royal Lee. Special Reprint No. 1-60.
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Health of the American People
By Congressman David S. King
Summary: From the Congressional Record of the 86th U.S. Congress (1959). Utah Congressman David King warns the government that "the progressive deterioration of the condition of our health has been confirmed." He blames our chemically-laden and processed food supply as the source of this trend. "There are many approaches to the prevention and treatment of such complex diseases, but there appears to be one common denominator as the basic cause of degenerative diseases. That one factor is malnutrition." King calls for the creation of a congressional commission to officially investigate the adulteration of America's food supply with additives as well as the fluoridation of public water supplies. Reprint 111, 1959.
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History of a Crime Against the Food Law
By Harvey W. Wiley, MD
Summary: Dr. Wiley was the "father" of the famous Pure Food and Drug Law of 1906 and the first head of what would later become the FDA. The Lee Foundation republished his autobiography after the original manuscript was "lost" by the Macmillan Publishing Company and after the book had conspicuously disappeared from every library in the nation. In it, Wiley sets the historical record straight as to how the food industry corrupted the nation's laws and politicians in order to sell cheap, refined, adulterated, devitalized "foods." The industry's usurpation of federal laws and regulations regarding whole foods is an example of American politics at its worst. Original publication date 1929; republished by the Lee Foundation in 1955.
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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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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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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.
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Letter to the President About Food Additives
By R. W. Dunlap, Assistant Secretary of the USDA
Summary: If you're looking for a smoking gun regarding the adulteration of food in America, this is it. In this letter to President Calvin Coolidge, USDA Assistant Secretary R.W. Dunlap explains that the USDA cannot legally prevent the inclusion of additives such as flour bleach, saccharin, and sulfur dioxide to America's food because of previous rulings made by federal courts, including the Supreme Court, in which such chemicals were pronounced acceptable in small amounts—even if shown to be harmful in and of themselves—as long as no evidence of harm is shown in people who consume the products containing them. These decisions put the onus of proving long-term ill effects of these suspected poisons squarely on the government. With such evidence difficult to show conclusively and requiring years of study (the technology for which not even existing at the time), the basic policy of food adulteration in America came into being: to err on the side of commerce, not public health. As the secretary points out, the opposing, "better safe than sorry" policy of Dr. Harvey Wiley—the former head of the USDA's Bureau of Chemistry (forerunner of the FDA)—would simply not stand up in court, where the decision to allow deleterious additives into the food supply had been stamped firmly into law. 1925.
May We Know Our Food
By Harvey W. Wiley, MD
Summary: In 1907, Dr. Wiley was America's most famous food-purity activist as well as the head of the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry, the forerunner of the FDA. For over ten years, Wiley had fought to get the first food inspection and purity law passed in the United States, and in June 1906 his efforts were rewarded with the Pure Food and Drug Act. In this report from the following year, Wiley comments on the historic law, discussing the "two ideas kept always in view in all the sections of the act," namely the misbranding of food products and the addition of dangerous substances to the food supply. Little did Wiley know that his insistence on enforcing these provisions would lead to his dismissal a few years later, as industrial food manufacturers and their allies within the government succeeded in ousting Wiley and circumventing the law intended to protect America's food supply. For more on Dr. Wiley and the corruption of the Pure Food and Drug Law, see "Letter to the President About Food Additives" and "Letter to the President [by Harvey Wiley]" in these archives. From lllustrated Sunday Magazine, 1907.
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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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New Cancer Menace in Foods & The Terrible Truth about the Meat You Eat
By George McGrath
Summary: Two articles reprinted from 1958 editions of the National Police Gazette. While the national mainstream media of magazines, newspapers, radio, and TV parroted government proclamations that Americans were the best fed people on Earth, it was often left to the fringe media and publications to expose the most overlooked and underreported story of the twentieth century: the destruction of the food supply and health of the American people and civilized world. The Police Gazette, published from 1845 to 1982, was viewed as a sensational, tabloid-like monthly, but sometimes—between the police stories of murder and outlaws—the paper gave journalists a chance to publish important stories that were being ignored by the "respectable" press. Challenging conventional glorification of modern medicine and the American food supply, these two articles report on suppressed studies of man-made carcinogens routinely added to foods for the convenience of the manufacturer, including artificial colors, dyes, surfactants, humectants, anti-foaming agents, emulsifiers, dispersants, preservatives, paraffin waxes and petrolatum-like materials, chemicals added to smoked meats, plastic sausage-casings, and so on. (Also mentioned are toxic containers and linings used in canning and packaging as well as particularly dangerous estrogen-related hormones added to animal feeds that years later would be irrefutably linked to cancer in humans.) For many Americans, this was the first news that such substances were being added to their food, and the authors blast the FDA for failing to stop such practices in spite of decades of scientific warning. These two articles are historical documentation of how this land "of milk and honey" became a country of doctors, hospitals, drugs, and disease care. Reprint 18-C, 1958.
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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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Peril on Your Food Shelf
By U.S. Congressman James J. Delaney
Summary: From the famous New York congressman who chaired the House Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products and who authored the Delaney Clause, which banned chemical food additives proven to cause cancer in animals. In the article, Delaney warns the American people that their food supply is not protected by law from adulteration with potentially lethal additives, as is commonly assumed. "Under the present setup," he writes, "the Food and Drug Administration can act legally only after the food product has been put on the market." While chemicals that cause immediate poisoning are generally known and prohibited, there is "no law to compel testing new chemicals to determine what the cumulative effect would be over a period of time" (a policy that remains to this day). As a result, "many chemicals are used with no real knowledge of what they will do to the human system." Delaney presents several instances of disaster and near disaster resulting from the unregulated use of chemical preservatives and other artificial additives in the American food supply. From American Magazine. Reprint 67, 1951.
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Pure Food and Pure Fraud
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. Royal Lee recognizes the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Food and Drug Administration (originally called the Bureau of Chemistry) by citing the failure of its mission to protect the food supply from nutritional destruction. He recalls the noble vision of its founder, Dr. Harvey Wiley, who fought for decades to create the agency, only to see it usurped by powerful business and political interests. Lee writes, "In the midst of public praise for Wiley's pioneering and public thanksgiving over the (supposed) fact that foods, drugs and cosmetics are pure and truly labeled, we are likely to overlook the way in which Wiley's work has been perverted. We may remain ignorant of the way in which the FDA protects the food, drug and cosmetic industries, and the medical monopoly, at the expense of the public it is supposed to serve. We may forget that Wiley himself was ousted for trying to stand up against these powerful interests." This is a rich historical document alerting the American people to a matter on which they had been—and continue to be—intentionally and systematically deceived. From the periodical Liberation, 1957.
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Those New Foods Can Kill You
By Jack Denton Scott
Summary: In this 1956 article from the popular magazine American Mercury, Scott warns the public of the toxic stew that accompanies each bite of the modern diet. DDT and DES lead the list of hundreds of chemicals contaminating America's food supply, either coming from the farm or added by food processors. With regulation of these chemicals admittedly lax (see "The Peril on Your Food Shelf" by congressman James Delaney, chairman of the House Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products during the 1950s), the American public had become one giant guinea pig colony for the alliance between the chemical and food industries. Articles like these led to the popular revolt in the 1960s and 70s against commercially grown foods and the phony health experts paid by the food industry to assure America that it was the best-fed nation in the world with the safest food supply. From American Mercury. Reprint 89, 1956.
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