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.
View PDF: The Battlefront for Better Nutrition
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.
View PDF: Calories: Nutritional and Harmful Types
Cholesterol and Its Control
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this 1956 article, Dr. Lee emphasizes the importance of cholesterol to health, calling it "a fatty substance that is important in human tissues." Lee condemns both hydrogenated fats and refined vegetable oils for aggravating cholesterol balance and enumerates the nutrients in unrefined vegetable oils that are lost during processing, including the all-important fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K as well as the essential-fatty-acid complex vitamin F. From Natural Food and Farming, 1956.
View PDF: Cholesterol and Its Control
Diet Frights—Sign of the Times
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: "How long will it be before we realize the simple truth that the health of every individual depends upon his nutritional status?" So writes Dr. Lee in making the obvious (yet still ignored) correlation between the emergence of heart disease, cancer, and other "modern" diseases and the devitalization of our food supply through processing and refining. Refined sugar, in particular, deserves much blame for the cellular starvation behind the diseases of modernity. From Let's Live magazine, 1958.
View PDF: Diet Frights—Sign of the Times
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.”
View PDF: The Direct Effect of Malnutrition on Tissue Degeneration
Diseases of Faulty Nutrition
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD
Summary: Dr. Robert McCarrison is one of the true giants of early nutrition research. As a member of Britain's Indian Medical Service in the first decades of the twentieth century, he conducted the first studies demonstrating the effects of vitamin-deficient diets on animal tissues and organs—at a time when little or nothing was known about the vitamins. In this 1927 excerpt from the transactions of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, McCarrison peppers the pages with memorable quotes, setting the basic principles of nutrition that, were they ever heeded by his fellow physicians, would have changed the way medicine is practiced today. "Obsessed with the idea of the microbe," he writes, "we often forget the most fundamental of all rules for the physician, that the right kind of food is the most important single factor in the promotion of health and the wrong kind of food the most important single factor in the promotion of disease." In particular, McCarrison focuses on the "minor manifestations" of vitamin deficiency as harbingers of disease with which every good doctor should be familiar. "I emphasize these minor manifestations of malnutrition because they represent the beginnings of disease, and their recognition is, to my way of thinking, vastly more important than that of the wreckages of health, which even the man in the street can see, though his name for them may be less sonorous than our own." You will find much more about and by this true pioneer of nutrition within these archives. From Transactions of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, England, 1927.
View PDF: Diseases of Faulty Nutrition
Do You Want to Lose the Hair on Your Chest? Butter vs. Margarine
By Dr. Royal Lee and unknown author
Summary: Two documents contrast the incredible nutritional value of butter with the equally incredible lack of nutritional value of "oleomargarine" (what we call simply margarine today). In particular, the relationship between vitamin E and pubescent development is discussed, with Dr. Lee reminding readers that "sex development demands vitamin E, and butter is our main source in the American diet." Lee presents photos of boys and girls demonstrating the failure of sexual differentiation to occur as a result of nutrient starvation. He also discusses the vital roles of the vitamin F and D complexes—both found naturally and in their entirety in butter but not in margarine—in assimilating and distributing calcium in the body. From Iowa Business and Industry, 1953, and the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1948. Reprint 59.
View PDF: Do You Want to Lose the Hair on Your Chest? Butter vs. Margarine
Dr. Brady’s Health Talk
By William Brady, MD
Summary: Dr. Brady was a medical doctor with a popular syndicated newspaper column in the 1940s and 50s. Here he discusses the link between physical degeneration and nutritional deficiencies resulting from the consumption of refined and processed foods. While we tend to think of the poor as most prone to malnutrition, Brady points out, in his characteristically biting manner, that it is actually the wealthy in America who are most susceptible. "Most Americans, particularly the well-to-do class, suffer from poor nutritional condition and are too dumb to realize what ails them," he writes. For "anyone who purports to be informed," Brady recommends as required reading the books Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston Price, Studies in Deficiency Disease by Sir Robert McCarrison, MD, and The National Malnutrition by Dr. D.T. Quigley. Sound advice still. Note: The last two books are available, in their entirety, as free downloads in these archives. The first is available for sale in the Products section of SeleneRiverPress.com. From the Lincoln Sunday Journal And Star, Nebraska, 1950.
View PDF: Dr. Brady’s Health Talk
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.
Foreword to “The Real American Tragedy” by C. Edward Burtis
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. Lee's foreword to a book about the tragedy of the American food supply and diet. The foreword includes succinct examples illustrating the tragic consequences of an adulterated food supply. From The Real American Tragedy. 1960.
View PDF: Foreword to “The Real American Tragedy” by C. Edward Burtis
Fundamentals of Nutrition
By N. Philip Norman, MD
Summary: A respected, well-published New York medical doctor questions why physicians have so long ignored the fundamental connection between nutrition and good health and discusses the essential requirements for producing nutritious food—from the soil and farm to the grocery store and kitchen table—as well as the various ways in which the American food supply has been compromised. "The medical and dental professions [have] failed to oppose the wholesale adulteration of our food supply, thereby allowing the insidious extension into our food culture of processed foods whose nutritional value was never questioned, until after the damage was done." Kind of says it all. From the American Journal of Orthodontics and Oral Surgery, 1947.
View PDF: Fundamentals of Nutrition
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.
View PDF: Health of the American People
Honey in Nutrition
By William Miller
Summary: An excellent overview of the value of raw honey. Miller compares the nutritional qualities of this extraordinary food, manufactured by bees for millions of years, to those of refined sugar. His conclusion? They're complete opposites nutritionally, with honey providing vitamins, minerals, and other factors critical for life and white sugar providing nothing more than empty calories. Reprint 119, 1955.
View PDF: Honey in Nutrition
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.
View PDF: How Our Government Subsidizes Malnutrition and Disease
How Synthetic Poisons Are Sold as Imitation Natural Foods
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: The title of this work speaks for itself. Lee includes in this report the story of how synthetic vitamin D caused widespread harm at the time, and he explains how synthetic vitamins are crude and incomplete imitations of natural vitamin complexes formed in the living cells of plants and animals. The science of the optical rotation of polarized light passing through a substance is used to expose and explain some of the essential differences between natural vitamin fractions and synthetic ones. 1948.
View PDF: How Synthetic Poisons Are Sold as Imitation Natural Foods
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.
View PDF: It Can Happen Here: Vitamins, Cholesterol, Inositol, Aluminum
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
Margarine: A Counterfeit Food
By Kenneth de Courcy, Editor
Summary: An article from the World Science Review detailing the history and production of margarine. The descriptions here show clearly what an unnatural, man-made substance margarine really is, devoid of the organic, nourishing, life-sustaining qualities that qualify something as food. Reprint 106, 1957.
View PDF: Margarine: A Counterfeit Food
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.
View PDF: McCarrison, Sir Robert—Biography
Medical Testament—Nutrition & Soil Fertility
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD, and by Sir Albert Howard
Summary: A report on speeches given by Sir Dr. Robert McCarrison and Sir Albert Howard in support of the Medical Testament of the Doctors of Cheshire, England, a declaration of the county's 600 physicians that prevention of disease would be impossible if people continued to eat a diet high in processed foods. (You can read the doctors' pronouncement in these archives under the title "Medical Testament of the Doctors of Cheshire, England.") McCarrison and Howard touch on their extensive research in India and lay out two of the fundamental principles of nutrition: (1) only a diet of whole, natural foods can truly nourish the human body and (2) the nutritive value of natural foods, in turn, depends on the health of the soil it is grown in or on. From The New English Weekly, 1939.
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.
View PDF: The Menace of Synthetic Foods
Nutrition and Health
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD
Summary: Dr. McCarrison, the famed nutritional researcher knighted for his work in India (which culminated in the classic reference Studies in Deficiency Disease, available in these archives), gives a lecture to London schoolchildren about diet and nutrition. He recounts his famous rat-feeding studies mimicking the diets of differing populations in India and, based on the results of his studies, gives his prescription for a basic healthful diet: freshly milled grains, raw milk and milk products, legumes, fresh vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. Reprint 43, 1937.
View PDF: Nutrition and Health
Nutrition and National Health: The Cantor Lectures
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD
Summary: In this in-depth lecture before the Royal Society of Arts, Dr. McCarrison discusses conclusions and observations of his pioneering research as Britain's former Director of Research on Nutrition in India and its implications for the health of Britain's population. "The greatest single factor in the acquisition and maintenance of good health," he says, "is perfectly constituted [i.e., whole, natural] food." 1936.
View PDF: Nutrition and National Health: The Cantor Lectures
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.
View PDF: Nutrition in Health and Disease
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.
On Carbohydrates
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: "What is refined sugar?" Dr. Lee asks in this provocative article and then answers, "It is pure carbohydrate. Is carbohydrate an essential food, a food component without which we could not live? It certainly is not." Today people are picking up on the fact that while there are essential fats and there are essential amino acids (the building blocks of proteins), there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Think about that. From Let's Live magazine, 1952.
View PDF: On Carbohydrates
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.
View PDF: Our Daily Bread
Poor Soils, Synthetics Produce Inferior Results
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this short report, Dr. Lee touches on two pillars of his nutritional philosophy. First, that the amount of nutrients in a food depends heavily on the quality of the soil it is grown in or raised on. Second, that processed and or chemically derived foods, such as corn syrup (aka "glucose" or "dextrose"), are critically inferior to real, whole foods for nourishing the body. From Herald of Health, 1963.
The Primary Cause of Disease
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. Lee lays out a basic principle of his nutritional philosophy—the idea that bacterial infection is usually a secondary result of malnutrition. Properly nourished bodies, naturally stronger and well defended, are much better equipped to resist invasion of pathogens, which are always around us, Lee explains. A weaker, malnourished body, on the other hand, is much more susceptible to a successful attack by foreign invaders. From Let's Live magazine, 1958.
View PDF: The Primary Cause of Disease
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.
View PDF: Pure Food and Pure Fraud
Rancid Oil and Disease
By Dr. Royal Lee and Don C. Matchan
Summary: Ostensibly about the connection between illness and refined cooking oils, this interview is a rally call by Dr. Lee for the American people to eschew the processed foods that were destroying their health and return to a diet of nutritious, whole foods. Lee excoriates the leaders of conventional nutrition at the time for actively promoting the consumption of processed foods, specifically calling out Dr. Frederick Stare, head of Harvard's Department of Nutrition, for accepting a million-dollar grant from food-processing giant General Foods. Stare, who also received funding from Coca-Cola and the National Soft Drinks Association, was largely responsible for the deception that refined sugar is harmless, saying it was "not even remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health." Later, Stare and his department would also lead the charge in discrediting Dr. Robert Atkins and other proponents of low-carbohydrate diets. From Herald of Health, 1962.
View PDF: Rancid Oil and Disease
Recent Conclusions in Malnutrition
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this stunning assessment of the widespread yet unacknowledged malnourishment of America, Dr. Lee describes in detail the health effects of eating processed foods as well as the difference between natural and synthetic vitamins. "We have drifted into this deplorable position of national malnutrition quite inadvertently," he adds. "It is the result of scientific research with the objective of finding the best ways to create foods that are non-perishable that can be made by mass production methods...and distributed so cheaply that they can sweep all local competition from the market. Then, after there develops a suspicion that these 'foods' are inadequate to support life, modern advertising science steps in to propagandize the people into believing that there is nothing wrong with them, that they are products of scientific research intended to afford a food that is the last word in nutritive value." Also included is the infamous advertisement in the Journal of American Medical Association promoting white bread, the result of a financial arrangement between the American Medical Association and the American Institute of Baking. From a lecture delivered to the American Naprapathic Association Convention. Reprint 30, 1943.
View PDF: Recent Conclusions in Malnutrition
The Science of Eating
By Alfred McCann, MD
Summary: In this excerpt from Dr. McCann's 1918 book The Science of Eating, the author first outlines an animal-feeding experiment for schoolchildren to conduct in order to observe firsthand the effects of nutrient-deficient foods on the health and resistance to disease of animals (and, by implication, of humans). Then, in the section titled "Famine Due to Artificial Sugar," McCann, who saw clearly that modern methods of food production were leading to the destruction of the nation's health, precociously asserts that many of what were formerly thought of as infectious diseases were actually the result of vitamin deficiency. In presenting a nutrition-based hypothesis explaining the cause of infantile paralysis (polio), he also offers some keen insight into the origins of the disease. "These briefly stated scientific facts lead me to believe," he concludes, "that close scrutiny of the food of the children afflicted may lead to the discovery of a dietetic cause of infantile paralysis.'' 1918.
View PDF: The Science of Eating
Sidelights on Glucose
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Before there was high-fructose corn syrup there was just plain corn syrup, the infamous sweetener made by chemically decomposing cornstarch into glucose molecules. Dr. Harvey Wiley, the original head of the FDA, rightfully claimed that use of the word "corn" in describing this imitation food was fraudulent, since it implies naturalness in what is clearly a product of chemical engineering. Dr. Lee cites a seminal experiment conducted by by Drs. Lukens and Dohan at the University of Pennsylvania in which corn syrup (i.e., glucose) was shown to cause diabetes in test animals while refined sugar was not. He adds that animal-feeding studies and clinical trials have shown that glucose "contributes to cancer, diabetes, hypertension, lassitude, brain fatigue, overweight, irritability, [and] mental depression, impairs the assimilation of calcium, and destroys vital amino acids if they are cooked in its presence." Lee also chastises the FDA for helping sell the misconception that corn syrup is a natural product. From Let's Live magazine, 1958.
View PDF: Sidelights on Glucose
The Significance of Nutrition for Preventive Medicine
By Karl Kottschau, MD
Summary: Translated by the Lee Foundation from the German original. In this powerful essay, Dr. Kottschau spells out the principles of whole-food nutrition and calls on German authorities to put the country's public health before its commercial interests when it comes to the food supply. "From a standpoint of preventive medicine," he writes, "it must be demanded without the shadow of doubt that the matter of nutrition is discussed in full view of the public and uninfluenced by commercial considerations." Kottschau then proposes criteria and priorities necessary for the production of truly nutritious food capable of sustaining human health, as opposed to the deficient processed foods responsible for so much of modern illness. "Everybody knows that among civilized peoples nutrition is not what it should be [and] nutrition plays a decisive part in people becoming ill," he says. Yet "although we know this, and thus it would be our duty to pay maximum attention to this fact, nothing of importance is being done in order to enlighten the masses about the dangers of present-day-civilization diets and to reduce such dangers." Sadly, Dr. Kottschau's lament still rings true today. From Research and Science. Reprint 83, 1953.
View PDF: The Significance of Nutrition for Preventive Medicine
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.
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.
View PDF: The Special Nutritional Qualities of Natural Foods
Studies in Deficiency Disease
By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD
Summary: The complete classic of 1921, as republished by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research in 1945. Dr. McCarrison was knighted in England for his groundbreaking research while serving as a British army surgeon in India during the first two decades of the twentieth century. His landmark investigations into the connection between the diets of various populations in India and their patterns of disease and health gave new insight into the cause and effect of nutrition on health and introduced the world to the amazingly healthy and long-lived Hunza people of the Himalayas. McCarrison set up laboratories in which he studied the effect of various local diets on animals, reproducing nearly the same health and disease patterns in the animals as displayed in the particular populations. Diet, he concluded, was the determining factor in the specific health patterns of each population. McCarrison was also the first researcher to inform the medical world that the endocrine system is the first system in the body to succumb to the effects of malnutrition, carefully demonstrating the lesions in the endocrine glands caused by specific adulterated foods. His work inspired the likes of Royal Lee, Weston A. Price, Francis Pottenger, Jr., and J. I. Rodale. Still remarkably relevant today, this book should be part of the corpus of all colleges of the healing arts. Originally published by Oxford Medical Publications, 1921.
View PDF: Studies in Deficiency Disease
Studies of Vitamin Deficiency
By M. K. Horwitt et al.
Summary: Report of a controlled study conducted in a state hospital testing the effects of diets deficient in thiamine and riboflavin. Of course this kind of test could never be conducted under today's ethical standards; nevertheless, as expected, those who were starved of various vitamins suffered noticeable effects and recovered when they were restored to a proper diet. From Science. Reprint 26, 1946.
View PDF: Studies of Vitamin Deficiency
Sudden Death
Author unknown
Summary: In this newspaper report, Dr. Lee explains that the reason so many Americans are dying of heart disease is basic malnutrition. Pointing his finger directly at refined-carbohydrate foods, he says, "Most fuel-supplying foods like cereal and flour and sugar products on the market today have been depleted of vitamin B, vitamin C, and minerals vital to the rebuilding of the body tissue and muscle." He adds that overcooking foods is also critical in destroying the vitamin power of foods. From the Evening Sentinel, Michigan. 1949.
View PDF: Sudden Death
