Historical Archives

Certain Nutritional Disorders of Laboratory Animals Due to Vitamin E Deficiency

By Alwin M. Pappenheimer, MD

Summary: A fascinating snapshot of some of the early animal research testing vitamin E deficiency. In this 1940 lecture, Dr. Alwin Pappenheimer details the grave and varied muscular and neural dystrophies that result in different species fed a diet lacking vitamin E. The young are particularly susceptible, he notes, often showing no symptoms for months after birth before being suddenly struck with neural or muscular dysfunction—the latter a condition he terms “nutritional muscular dystrophy.” In perhaps the most disturbing finding, a partial vitamin E deficiency in the diet of pregnant rats was shown to affect only the offspring—not the mothers, suggesting that what we today attribute to genetic inheritance is actually a problem of inherited malnutrition. In the words of Dr. Pappenheimer: “The fact that a partial deficiency of vitamin E in the mother may manifest itself only in the offspring seems to me to be one of the most significant lessons that one can draw from this work. May not similar things happen in human diseases and help explain the supposed hereditary or familial character of certain nervous and muscular disorders?” From Journal of the Mount Sinai Hospital, 1941. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 57.

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Historical Archives

The Effect of Aluminum Compounds in Foods

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Aluminum poisoning was an unsuspected cause of degenerative health conditions until Dr. Royal Lee and others of his time exposed the truth. As aluminum cookware and food products containing aluminum, such as baking powder, became more widely used, Dr. Lee and others soon realized the dangers of human exposure to this nonnutritional element. In this classic report, Dr. Lee proposes a mechanism by which aluminum—through upset of the body’s phosphorous-calcium balance—can cause disease via overactivity of one of the two branches of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. Dr. Lee also provides an extensive table listing the symptoms of overactivity of each of these systems—an absolutely essential reference for any health practitioner or student of nutrition. Published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1946.

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Historical Archives

Dr. Frederick Stare’s Funding Exposed

Author unknown

Summary: Dr. Frederick Stare (1910–2002) was the founder and first head of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. A lifelong fighter against the health food industry and the organic food movement, Dr. Stare often served as a government witness against natural-foods advocates, testifying that such proponents were alarmists and frauds. Over the course of his career, Dr. Stare procured massive amounts of funding for Harvard and his own research from food-manufacturing giants such as Coca-Cola, General Foods, and the National Soft Drinks Association. One such “gift” is documented in the newspaper clip here, which was reprinted and disseminated by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research in 1960. Dr. Stare’s support of industrial food manufacturing, including his unwavering defense of the use of chemical additives and preservatives, earned him a reputation among natural-food advocates as a tool of the commercial adulterators of America’s food supply. From the Milwaukee Journal, 1960. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research. 

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Historical Archives

Diet Prevents Polio

By Benjamin Sandler, MD

Summary: Early nutrition research consistently showed that a properly nourished person is highly resistant to infection, whereas a malnourished one is highly susceptible. In this 1951 book, former U.S. naval surgeon Dr. Benjamin Sandler pokes holes in conventional ideas about polio and argues that the best way to have avoided the infectious disease was to eat a low-carbohydrate diet. He presents the evidence that led him to his conclusion and explains why, of all the countries in the world, the United States got hit hardest by the polio epidemic. He also details one of the most intriguing public health experiments in nutrition history, when in the summer of 1948 he convinced newspapers in the polio-ravaged state of North Carolina to publicize his low-carb diet as a means of prevention. Though the experiment was a success—the rate of polio in North Carolina changed from one of the highest in the country to one of the lowest—health officials categorically ignored Dr. Sandler’s work, and, shockingly, his book was later banned by the government. Like so much information suppressed in the early days of nutrition, Diet Prevents Polio holds great truths that merit a full examination in light of current biochemical knowledge. Published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1951.

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Historical Archives

Civilization and Cancer

Compiled by Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: One of the absurdly ignored facts of nutrition history is that preindustrialized tribal societies—eating their traditional, whole-food diets and no processed foods—experienced practically no cancer whatsoever. Here Dr. Royal Lee presents excerpts of communications by field doctors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reporting a virtual lack of cancer in various nonindustrialized populations, including the famed Hunza of western Asia, natives of Brazil and Ecuador, and myriad Native American tribes. Also included is a clip reflecting a telling, dirty secret of modern nutrition research: test animals to be induced with cancer are fed processed-food diets because it’s so much harder to bring the disease about in animals that are eating whole foods. While there are surely other factors involved in the development of cancer, one of the best defenses against the disease, as this article affirms, is a diet of whole, unprocessed, “uncivilized” foods. From Natural Food and Farming, 1960 and 1962. (Excerpts originally compiled by Dr. Royal Lee, 1959.) Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

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Historical Archives

Intervertebral Disc Lesions: A New Etiological Concept

By W.J. McCormick, MD

Summary: In this remarkable 1954 article, Canadian physician W.J. McCormick presents physiological and biochemical principles that go to the core of orthopedic medicine, chiropractic spinal care, and osteopathy. While many health experts fail to understand the ultimate cause of connective-tissue decay, McCormick is clear: “The most definitely established physiological function of vitamin C is that of assisting in the formation of collagen for the maintenance of stability and elasticity of connective tissues generally, and this would include the bones, cartilages, muscles, and vascular tissues…In deficiency of the vitamin, instability and fragility of all such tissues is believed to be caused by the breakdown of ‘the intercellular cement substance’ (collagen), resulting in easy rupture of any and all of these connective tissues, which would include the intervertebral discs.” As Dr. McCormick emphasized throughout his life, the effects of subclinical scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) cannot be understated, though they are often overlooked. From the Archives of Pediatrics, 1954. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 5D.

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Historical Archives

Chlorophyll for Healing

By Lois Mattox Miller

Summary: Reader’s Digest editor and medical writer Lois Mattox Miller details some of the amazing health-promoting properties of chlorophyll. “Distinguished medical specialists report that in 1200 recorded cases they have seen chlorophyll combat deep-lying infections, cleanse open wounds, relieve chronic sinus conditions, and banish common head colds. More remarkable, they say, is the way it accomplishes these things—speedily and effectively, with none of the harsh, irritating effects common to most antiseptics.” Miller discusses theories as to why chlorophyll is so effective, focusing on its similarity to hemoglobin in blood (the two molecules are essentially the same except iron is at the center of hemoglobin, whereas magnesium is at the center of chlorophyll) to explain its documented ability to stimulate the formation of red blood cells in animals. From Science News Letter, 1941. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 84. 

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Fresh from the Press, Historical Archives

Deaf Smith’s Secret: An Explanation of the Deaf Smith Country

By A.W. Erickson

Summary: With tooth decay ravaging virtually every town and city in mid-twentieth-century America, the inhabitants of one region remained famously free of cavities. The oral health of Deaf Smith County, Texas, was so legendary, in fact, that rumor had it one could grow a new set of teeth just by moving there. Of course this was just fancy, but it bespoke Deaf Smith’s reputation as a place “where the best man develops,” with residents boasting not just superior dental health but overall health as well. In this captivating booklet, crop reporter A.W. Erickson reveals Deaf Smith’s secret to be the food grown on its extraordinarily mineral-rich soil and water. Erickson, detailing how unique climatic and geographical factors result in the continual deposition of myriad minerals across Deaf Smith’s farmland, affirms one of the great discoveries in early nutrition research and the reason why organic farming is so important today: human health is only as good as the land we grow our food in. Published by Field Notes Crop Reporting Service, 1945. (For a comprehensive look at the connection between human health and soil health, see Empty Harvest by Bernard Jensen and Mark R. Anderson.)

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Historical Archives

Dr. Harvey W. Wiley on Chemicals in Food

By Harvey W. Wiley, MD, and Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: An illuminating peek at the early, fateful politics of food adulteration in the United States. From 1906 to 1912, Dr. Harvey Wiley was the head of the Bureau of Chemistry within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The Bureau, which would later become the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was assigned the task of enforcing the country’s first federal food purity law, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. However, as Dr. Wiley explains in the following excerpt from his 1930 autobiography, his agency’s authority was quickly and 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 the Bureau from testifying in a federal case in which their testimony would have supported a ban of the food additive sodium benzoate, a compound Dr. Wiley and his colleagues had determined to be injurious to health. Sadly, this poisonous compound remains one of the most common food preservatives used by industrial food manufacturers. Includes an introduction by Dr. Royal Lee. From Harvey W. Wiley—An Autobiography, 1930. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research special reprint No. 1-60.

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Historical Archives

The History of a Crime Against the Food Law

By Harvey W. Wiley, MD

Summary: Dr. Harvey Wiley was the “father” of the famous Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906—the first law passed by the U.S. government to ensure the safety of the nation’s food supply—and he was also the first head of the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, the federal agency charged with enforcing the law (an agency that would later become the U.S. Food and Drug Administration). In this book, which Dr. Wiley courageously published himself in 1929 and was later republished by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Dr. Wiley sets the historical record straight as to how the industrial 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. Originally published by H.W. Wiley, 1929; republished by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1955.

View PDF: The History of a Crime Against the Food Law

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Historical Archives

Cancer: A Nutritional Deficiency

By J.R. Davidson, MD

Summary: A Canadian physician reports on his fascinating animal and human research that led him to conclude that nutritional deficiency is at the root of cancer development. “For some 45 years I have been interested in the study of cancer. I have come to the conclusion that cancer is due to deficient diet, and that, if steps are taken to see that everyone eats the proper food, the disease can be first controlled and finally eliminated.” Discussing his experiments in detail, Dr. Davidson makes a strong case in defense of his hypothesis. Published by the Science Department of the University of Manitoba. Reprint 18, 1943.

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Historical Archives

How Antibody Attacks Cells

By Dr. Robert Dourmashkin

Summary: In the 1940s Dr. Royal Lee developed the Protomorphogen Theory through his pioneering recognition of the autoimmune disease process. This article, from a 1964 issue of New Scientist magazine, is among this first to photographically document the cellular destruction caused by a host’s own auto-antibodies. From New Scientist, 1964. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 141.

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Historical Archives

How and Why Synthetic Poisons Are Being Sold as Imitations of Natural Foods and Drugs

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: It is obvious why companies would opt for selling synthetic vitamins (made in a laboratory) over natural ones (found only in food): the former have a considerably higher profit margin. But just how synthetic vitamins became equated with natural ones is downright perplexing, given that there are such obvious and important differences between the two. In this profound report, Dr. Royal Lee presents some long-ignored distinctions between vitamins as made by nature and vitamins as made by human beings. For one, he points out, a natural vitamin is never a single compound, but rather it is a conglomerate of substances—or a “complex”—that work together to deliver a nutritive effect to the body. A synthetic vitamin, on the other hand, is merely one compound in such a conglomerate that has been deemed, somewhat arbitrarily, the “active” ingredient of the complex. Moreover, such an active ingredient, when produced in the lab, is never an exact replica of its natural counterpart but instead is often a mirror opposite of it, with very different and possibly toxic biochemical functioning. That these facts continue to be ignored—that synthetic vitamins are not recognized as crude and incomplete imitations of natural ones—is truly one of the great scandals of modern nutrition. Published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1948.

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Historical Archives

Hope in Cancer Research

By U.S. Senator Charles W. Tobey

Summary: This excerpt from the 1952 Congressional Record shows just how far back alternative approaches to cancer have met opposition from the medical establishment, even when the evidence for the effectiveness of such approaches came from medical doctors themselves and was brought to public light by a U.S. senator. Senator Tobey’s remarks are a scathing indictment of the monopolistic, profit-driven motive of organized medicine. From the Congressional Record of the 82nd U.S. Congress, 1952. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 18-A.

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Historical Archives

Hidden Dangers in White Bread

By James Rorty

Summary: This article of “the suppressed facts” regarding flour bleaching details just why commercial bread in America is “worthless and unsafe.” In spite of its tabloid-like style, this 1956 magazine article boasts some solid reporting, recounting the early resistance to flour bleaching by America’s millers as well as by Dr. Harvey Wiley, the first head of the Food and Drug Administration. In the end Dr. Wiley was shown the door, and the FDA became abettors of the food processors’ actions—hampered, as one “honest but resigned” FDA official says in the article—by the onus on the administration to prove a substance is harmful before it can legally bar it from manufacturing. “We’ve practically got to produce a corpse before we can claim they’re poisoning your food,” the FDA agent adds. The author also discusses the history of nitrogen trichloride, which was used to bleach bread in America for 40 years until it was finally shown in studies to cause fits in animals. While the use of the old bleach was discontinued, the process of bleaching was not, and the author excoriates the FDA for allowing the use of a new bleach, chlorine dioxide, that it admits is toxic but “probably safe as normally used” (which, of course, is what it had said about nitrogen trichloride.) A great article debunking the myth of America as the “best-fed nation on Earth.” From the National Police Gazette, 1954. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 75. 

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Historical Archives

The Heart in Chronic Malnutrition

By J. Higginson, A.D. Gillanders, and J.F. Murray

Summary: A comprehensive review, reprinted from the April 1952 issue of the British Heart Journal, documenting heart lesions caused by malnutrition among Bantu adults in South Africa. In all twelve fatal cases studied, “the hearts were dilated and hypertrophied,” the authors note—a “distinctive pathological pattern” they attributed squarely to malnutrition. Specifically, the high-carbohydrate Bantu diet, along with B vitamin deficiencies, are implicated. From the British Heart Journal, 1952. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 74.

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Historical Archives

Health of the American People

By Congressman David S. King

Summary: In this powerful 1959 speech before the U.S. House of Representatives, Utah Congressman David King warns our government that “the progressive deterioration of the condition of our health has been confirmed,” blaming the negative trend on the country’s chemically-laden and overly processed food supply. “There are many approaches to the prevention and treatment of…complex diseases,” King says, “but there appears to be one common denominator as the basic cause of degenerative diseases. That one factor is malnutrition.” Representative King calls for the creation of a congressional commission to officially investigate the adulteration of America’s foods as well as the fluoridation of public water supplies. Unfortunately—and predictably—the congressman’s calls went ignored. From the Congressional Record of the 86th U.S. Congress, 1959. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 111.

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Historical Archives

He Enriches Soil for Crops That Go into Vitamin Pills

By John T. Alexander

Summary: A bittersweet newspaper account of a man who remineralizes soil using special organic composts, developed with the help of nutritional and agricultural scientists, to grow crops for concentration into whole-food supplements. On the one hand, the story is exciting and inspirational, revealing the difference that well-mineralized, well-bacterialized soil makes in the nutritional quality of foods grown in it. On the other hand, this is a sad reminder of the path industrial agriculture in this country did not take, opting instead for producing nutrient-deficient plants from sapped soil propped up with artificial fertilizers. Includes the famous quote by Dr. C.W. Cavanaugh of Cornell University: “The fact is there is only one major disease—and that is malnutrition.” From The Kansas City Star, 1952. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 55.

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Historical Archives

Have We Forgotten the Lesson of Scurvy?

By W.J. McCormick, MD

Summary: A Canadian medical doctor recounts the history of scurvy and its prevention, including a fascinating report by British medical officer James Lind, who describes his famous experiment of 1747 in which he cured sailors of the disease by feeding them fresh oranges and lemons. While full-blown scurvy had been virtually eliminated in twentieth-century America thanks to the widespread availability of citrus fruits, Dr. McCormick makes the case that subclinical vitamin C deficiency was a causative factor in many modern disorders, including rheumatoid arthritis, heart attack, cancer, pneumonia, and even stretch marks in birthing mothers. Failure to recognize the tissue dysfunction in these disorders to be the result of vitamin C deficiency has led medicine to devise countless unsuccessful approaches to what appear to be largely matters of starvation. From Journal of Applied Nutrition, 1962. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 5H.

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Historical Archives

Germs: Cause of Disease?

By William Miller

Summary: In this 1955 article from Health Culture magazine, Miller revives the Pasteur–Bechamp debate, or, as he calls it, “one of the greatest though little known controversies in the history of science.” In the late 1800s, Louis Pasteur proposed that specific “bad” microbes, or germs, cause infectious disease. His colleague biochemist Pierre Bechamp thought “infection” had more to do with the environment within the host organism than with specific microorganisms. Miller says that Bechamp might have been right after all, citing observations made using Royal Rife’s famous Universal Microscope, which appeared to show species of microbes  morphing into other species depending on the chemical nature of their environment. (For more on Rife and his work, see “The Rife Microscope, or ‘Facts and Their Fate’.”) From Health Culture, 1955. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 77.

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