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The following is a transcription of the October 1961 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories. An Open Letter to Senator Kefauver Senator […]
The following is a transcription of the May 1957 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories. Also in this issue: Tip of the Month (Menopausal […]
The following is a transcription of the April 1957 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories. Also in this issue: Vitamin B Complex in Diabetes […]
The following is a transcription of the March 1957 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories. Also in this issue: Tip of the Month (Virus […]
The following is a transcription of the February 1957 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories. Also in this issue: New Aid for Incurable […]
By Nancy Appleton, PhD
Summary: You’ve heard that sugar can suppress the body’s immune system, but did you know it interferes with the absorption of calcium? How about that it can cause food allergies, depression, and cancer of the breast, ovaries, and prostate? Or that sugar can reduce the good cholesterol in your blood and increase the triglycerides, two of the strongest indicators we have of heart disease risk? Despite the massive commercial campaign to paint refined sugar as harmless—or at worst merely “empty calories”—hoards of scientific evidence indicate that it is far worse than that. In this startling list, Dr. Nancy Appleton documents 124 ways in which sugar has been scientifically implicated as a poison to human health, complete with 124 reputable references to back up her claims. From nancyappleton.com, 2004.
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. Royal Lee in making the obvious—yet still criminally ignored—correlation between the emergence of heart disease, cancer, and other “modern” diseases and the introduction of industrial food processing and refining, which turned white sugar, white flour, and hydrogenated fats into the foundation of our food supply. “Is any satellite, atomic bomb or guided missile so likely to jeopardize our health as the certainty that insidious food tampering assuredly sucks away, like greedy quicksand, at the very foundation of our health?” Dr. Lee asks ominously. From Let’s Live magazine, 1958.
By Harold Lee Snow, MD
Summary: “Excessive use of of refined sugar in the United States has become a serious nutritional problem.” You might think these words were uttered by some holistic nutritionist of today, but they are actually the first sentence of this remarkable article from 1948 by physician Harold Snow. Backed by 56 peer-reviewed references, Dr. Snow discusses in detail many of the seen and unseen dangers of refined sugar that have been criminally ignored for decades. Rashes, infections and allergies in children; arthritis, neuritis, and rheumatism; digestive dysfunction; hyperinsulinism; acidosis; and acne are just a few of the dangers of sugar identified by science, Snow says. “If one can avoid eating refined sugar,” he concludes, “one can expect more vibrant health, and a longer life with greater freedom from some of the acute and chronic diseases and complaints which many modern doctors are unable to diagnose or to treat successfully.” From The Improvement Era magazine. Reprint 126, 1948.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Every misdeed has a history, and the history of the destruction of the American food supply is a story that few know from its beginnings. Yet it’s a story worth knowing because its consequences have been and continue to be indeterminably enormous. In this booklet, Dr. Lee tells the story up through 1940, by which time it was many decades in the making. Lee calls out the entire industrial food and drug business as a racket in which profit, not the health of Americans, dictates public and private policy, and deception about the nutritional value of industrially processed foods is actively practiced. Richly documented with supporting evidence, this booklet is a valuable reference for anyone interested in the true cause of most disease in America—malnutrition as a result of processed and refined foods. 1940.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: An inspired article by Dr. Lee about the irony of praying to God to overcome disease while ignoring the simple laws of health here on Earth. “Man needs no miraculous intervention to have perfect health and happiness,” he writes, “unless he first commits criminal acts of food adulteration and contamination.” Lee explains that there is “a frightful conspiracy to keep the public in the dark about the devastating, death-dealing effects of modern food counterfeits—the synthetic glucose, the synthetic hydrogenated fats, the refined cereals, the refined breakfast foods, the coal tar dyes and coal tar flavors that ensure acceptance of otherwise tasteless and colorless food frauds which destroy human life to the tune of over a million victims a year.” He adds that heart disease—the leading cause of death then as it is today—is so effectively countered by food therapy that “nine out of ten sufferers can be shown by cardiographic sound recordings to respond favorably within ten minutes to natural food products.” Originally published in Natural Food and Farming, 1955.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: If there are “health food stores” today, what motivated their creation? In this article from the 1956 issue of the National Health Federation Bulletin, Dr. Royal Lee recounts some of the events and decisions that paved the way for the appalling condition of the American diet, showing how the processed-food industry and self-proclaimed public and private health authorities sold the health of the American public down the river and branded all opposition to refined foods as faddists, quacks, and racketeers. No one recites this tale better and with more provable facts than Royal Lee. He was there. Reprint 301, 1956.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: “We shall here confine our discussion to the loss of liberty in connection with the choice of our doctor, and his loss of liberty in the choice of a method of treatment of our ills.” Dr. Royal Lee defends alternatives to medicine and reveals the sinister methods used by organized medicine to entreat the government to squash any competing approaches to health. Dr. Lee wrote this courageous piece after more than 30 years of fighting the corrupt system of the medical/pharmaceutical monopoly, condoned and enforced by governmental agencies. With medicine still enjoying a near monopoly in the minds of the public as the only “legitimate” healing art, this article shows for the historical record how the medical industry unscrupulously secured its place in our society and then entrenched its own definition and self-serving standards of what is science and what is quackery. 1962.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this 1963 article, the great holistic nutritionist Dr. Royal Lee touches on two main tenets of his philosophy. First he discusses the supreme importance of soil health, noting that soils across America had become so mineral poor through inferior farming practices that in many places animals could no longer survive on the land. The weakening of livestock as a result of soil degradation is a phenomenon observed throughout history, and many experiments in the early and mid twentieth century showed that animal health—as well as that of plants—could be restored through careful, balanced remineralization of the soils, including in particular application of the trace elements. Ignoring such research, America’s agricultural industry opted for a less natural approach to the soil problem, bulking crop yields by overloading the land with artificial ammonia-based fertilizers and then using chemical pesticides and antibiotics to prop up the sickly plants and animals reared on the imbalanced earth. Dr. Lee then discusses the “great lie” of modern food manufacturing and conventional nutrition: that a synthetically manufactured product, whether food or vitamin, can reproduce the same nutritional effect as something made by nature. This assumption was repeatedly shown by early nutrition researchers to be dangerously untrue, and it lies at the heart of our health issues today. Simply put, humankind does not have the capability of creating what our body requires for real health, be it food or supplement. Synthetics may prop us up in a state of sickly survival, like the poor plants and livestock of industrial agriculture, but they cannot give us true vigor and vitality. From Herald of Health, 1963.
By Elizabeth Crown
Summary: In 2000 a team of researchers at Northwestern University Medical School published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that showed a clear correlation between elevated levels of blood sugar and the risk of dying of pancreatic cancer. Since pancreatic cancer is difficult to diagnose and thus usually fatal when detected, too late, this article suggests a hopeful measure of prevention—controlling one’s blood sugar level by limiting consumption of sugar and other high-glycemic foods. From the Northwestern University Observer, 2000.
By Surgeon Captain T.L. Cleave, MD
Summary: In 1974 Dr. Thomas L. Cleave, Surgeon Captain of the British Royal Navy, wrote the brilliant but virtually ignored text The Sacharrine Disease: Conditions Caused by the Taking of Refined Carbohydrates Such as Sugar and White Flour. Decades before that, Dr. Cleave wrote this thirty-page article urging the medical profession to reconnect with the natural laws of health from which humankind evolved, specifically by promoting the consumption of whole, natural foods over the processed and overcooked products of commercial food manufacturing. Citing the work of Weston A. Price as an example of understanding natural law, Dr. Cleave argues that industrialized food production caused cheap, processed, carbohydrate-based foods to predominate in the modern diet, resulting in consequences for human health that have been nothing less than disastrous. From the Journal of the Royal Naval Medical Service, 1956. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. Lee lays out the case against sugar in this article from the Journal of the American Academy of Applied Nutrition. In particular, he lambastes corn syrup, or pure glucose chemically derived from cornstarch, for being too quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, thus overstressing the pancreas and wreaking havoc on the body’s insulin-response system. Astute readers will realize Lee is essentially anticipating the creation of the glycemic index, which measures how fast and how hard the carbohydrates we eat hit the bloodstream in the form of blood sugar. “There is a very good reason why starches are better than sugars as energy foods,” he says. “It is because they are assimilated slower than the sugars, and thereby fail to overload our pancreatic function of supplying insulin.” Reprint 30D, 1950.
By Don C. Matchan and Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: This report on a 1962 lecture by Dr. Royal Lee—essentially about the connection between illness and refined cooking oils—is a rally call for the American people to eschew the processed foods that were destroying their health and return to a diet of nutritious, whole foods. Dr. Lee excoriates the leaders of conventional nutrition at the time for actively promoting the consumption of processed foods, specifically calling out the head of Harvard’s Department of Nutrition, Dr. Frederick Stare, for accepting a million-dollar grant from food-processing giant General Foods. Dr. 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.