The Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research
In 1941, Dr. Royal Lee created the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, a non-profit distributorship of nutrition research and commentary that would soon become the largest clearinghouse of such information in the world. (You can read the foundation’s original mission statement here). As part of the SRP Historical Archives, we include over 200 articles from the original Lee Foundation collection, each identified by an image of the foundation's famous entrance—shown at right along with the disclaimer that accompanied each foundation publication. (Articles in the archives not marked with this icon originate from other publishing sources.) In addition, the summary of many of the Lee Foundation articles include their original "reprint" number as well as the year they were published by the Foundation.
"Disclaimer"
As you read the reprints from the Lee Foundation, bear in mind that according to the FDA nothing in them should be accepted or believed. In fact, here is the agency’s official position regarding the Lee Foundation, as stated in 1963 by Deputy Director of the agency’s Bureau of Enforcement, Kenneth Milstead: “The FDA has evaluated the literature presented by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research and publicly described it as ‘probably the largest publisher of unreliable and false nutritional information in the world.’”
The “false information” disseminated by the Lee Foundation includes articles republished from medical journals, textbooks, health societies, newspapers, and books and other clinical accounts by doctors and dentists who emphasized nutrition in their practice at a time when the FDA believed “it is wholly unscientific to state that a well-fed body is more able to resist disease than a less well-fed body."
SRP offers the Lee Foundation reprints as part of our Historical Archives so that readers themselves can determine the merit of their content. The FDA’s opinion notwithstanding, we believe the information in these pages—much of it as germane today as when it was first published—to be essential for a true understanding of the relationship between food and health.
