The Rife Microscope, or “Facts and Their Fate”

By Dr. Royal Lee and by R.E. Seidel, MD, and M. Elizabeth Winter

Summary: The Rife Microscope is one of the most fascinating and tragic stories in the history of science. Royal Raymond Rife was a genius of optics who in the 1930s invented a revolutionary microscope that identified microorganisms based on a characteristic wavelength of light emitted by each. (Rife discovered these “signature emissions” through use of his scope.) Even more incredibly, Rife observed something that challenges the very basis of medicine’s “germ theory”: Microbes such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi are able to morph into each other depending on the conditions of their environment (which, in turn, are determined in humans largely by nutritional status.) So, instead of the tens of thousands of species of microorganisms considered distinct by conventional science, Rife said, there are really only about ten fundamental forms of microbes, each able to morph into countless numbers of others. Rife not only collaborated with noted bacteriologist Dr. Arthur Kendall of Northwestern University Medical School to demonstrate such transformations, but the two investigators showed they were able to destroy pathogenic forms by radiating them with wavelengths of light in resonance with their signature emission.

When Rife began to publish his findings, he was predictably branded a quack by the medical establishment, which brought its full efforts to discredit and destroy his work. All references and studies involving his microscope were actively barred from medical journals, and any doctor using his microscope was ostracized from the medical community. Yet one article, published in 1944 in the non-medically-controlled journal of the Franklin Institute—one of America’s oldest and most prestigious centers of science—survived. In 1950, the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research re-published the lengthy article, which details the technology behind both the electron microscope and Rife’s Universal Microscope (skip to pages 124–127 for information specifically on Rife’s research), along with several concluding pages of Lee’s own commentary poignantly summarizing Rife’s discoveries. If nothing else, read these final two pages of the document. The implications of Lee’s words, as well as the potential applications Rife’s long lost microscope, are beyond profound. Reprint 47, 1944.

Raw Food Vitamins

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this article from Health Culture magazine, Dr. Royal Lee describes in detail the negative effects of cooking and pasteurizing foods, specifically with regard to the destruction of vitamins, amino acids such as lysine and glutamine, and enzymes such as the phosphatase group, which help free up calcium in raw milk for absorption and aid its digestion (phosphatase is destroyed in pasteurized milk). Phosphatase also neutralizes the infamous compound phytic acid, so abundant in whole grains, that binds minerals and prevents them from being taken up by the body. Lee also discusses the vital role of vitamin E in nutrition. Reprint 30C, 1956.

Interrelation of Soils and Plant, Animal, and Human Nutrition

By Dr. E.C. Auchter

Summary: In this 1939 article from Science magazine, a USDA scientist discusses the budding awareness of the nutritional dependency of the plant on the soil and, in turn, of the animal and human being on the plant, making the health of the soil critical for human wellness. “These developments in the science of nutrition,” Auchter writes, “suggest that we ought to give more attention to producing crops of the highest nutritional quality for man and animals.” Too bad the USDA never took his advice. Reprint 79, 1939.

The Need for Vitamins

By L. Stambovsky

Summary: In this article, written amidst the Great Depression and the outset of World War II, the author describes the vitamin-poor state of the typical American citizen in terms that still apply today. “Quantitatively, most Americans get enough calories in the form of [refined] carbohydrates…But refined sugar and starch, while they are energy sources, provide little or no accessory or vital food factors [i.e., vitamins and minerals].” This basic message sums up the work of many of the early nutritionists, who tried in vain to communicate the fact that nutrient deficiencies are at the root of most modern degenerative illness. Includes an illuminating chart listing various vitamin deficiencies and their associated diseases. From Drug and Cosmetic Industry magazine, 1942. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 31.

Quick, Simple, Valid Urinary Testing Methods

By Dr. George Goodheart

Summary: Dr. George Goodheart, the founder of Applied Kinesiology, reports on interpreting urine analysis in relation to nutritional biochemistry. As a bonus Dr. Goodheart provides a brilliant list of eleven factors that influence the amount and distribution of calcium in the body—required reading for any nutrition practitioner. This was the first of more than fifty articles Dr. Goodheart published in the seminal journal the Digest of Chiropractic Economics, 1964. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

Those “New Foods” Can Kill You

By Jack Denton Scott

Summary: In this 1956 article from the popular magazine American Mercury, author Jack 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, 1956. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 89.

Nutrition and Glands in Relation to Cancer

By F.E. Chidester, PhD

Summary: The interaction between the nutrients and the endocrine glands comes into sharp focus in this exceptional book, published in its entirety by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research. Dr. Chidester wonderfully compiles and synergizes a wide scope of knowledge concerning cancer research and its relationship to nutrition, in particular with respect to the endocrine glands, discussing specific lesions caused by deficiencies of various vitamins, minerals, and trace minerals. His presentation on iodine alone is worth its weight in gold. While iodine and cancer research is coming into focus only now in the twenty-first century, Dr. Chidester enlightened his readers over six decades earlier. 1944.

View PDFNutrition and Glands in Relation to Cancer

The Systemic Causes of Dental Caries

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Amazingly, Dr. Royal Lee presented this paper in 1923, to his senior class at Marquette University Dental School. In it he brilliantly ties together different lines of research showing a correlation between tooth decay and both systemic vitamin deficiency and susceptibility to infectious disease. The key connection, he says, is the malfunctioning of the endocrine system, brought about by the consumption of a diet high in cooked and processed foods. Such a vitamin-deficient diet, he explains, sets up a vicious cycle: Vitamin deficiency weakens the endocrines; weakened endocrines diminish the body’s ability to resist infection and tooth decay; fighting infection creates a greater need for vitamins; increased lack of vitamins further weakens the endocrines; etc. To avoid this downard spiral and combat cavities in the process, Lee recommends a diet with “as much uncooked food as possible,” including raw milk. This paper, remarkable for its time and just as remarkable today, put Dr. Lee on the map as one of the true giants in nutrition history. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 30A. 

The Role of Some Nutritional Elements in the Health of the Teeth and Their Supporting Structures

By John A. Myers

Summary: A remarkable overview of some of the great, ignored research in nutrition history. First, author John Myers details the pioneering works of Dr. Weston A. Price and Dr. Francis Pottenger Jr., who in the 1930s showed clearly that tooth decay is but one symptom in an overall debilitation of human health brought on by the consumption of processed foods—a degeneration that includes diminished resistance to bacterial infection, onset of any number of degenerative diseases, and the alarming introduction of birth defects and mental illness in offspring of people who eat “modern” foods. Myers then touches on the famous studies of residents of Deaf Smith, Texas, the “county without a dentist,” and shows how these studies were used to justify the mass fluoridation of water in America despite their evidence suggesting something quite to the contrary. Finally, Myers draws form his own twenty-five years of clinical experience to illustrate the obvious practical effectiveness in preventing and reversing tooth decay and other dental disease by supplementing the diet with essential nutrients such as vitamins A, B6, D, and E, the minerals zinc, iodine, and magnesium, and the essential fatty acids. A true classic on alternative health. From Annals of Dentistry. Reprint 107, 1958.

The Scope of Vitamin E

By the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research

Summary: A 19-page booklet produced by the Lee Foundation reporting on the history and clinical applications of natural vitamin E. This is one of the most complete and concise reports on perhaps the most misunderstood vitamin complex: “Four vitamin factors have been isolated in the course of time from the E complex—alpha, beta, gamma and delta tocopherol. Of these, the alpha form has been found the most powerful and is often erroneously considered as the whole vitamin E. Actually the term ‘vitamin E’ should only be used in reference to the element which occurs in foods [since] in its entirety it includes factors not present in alpha tocopherol alone.” In fact, the report concludes, the natural vitamin E complex is “highly intricate, perhaps the most intricate of all [the] complexes” and the four tocopherols should be regarded merely “as factors and not as the entire E complex.” Much of the information in this critical document is completely lost to modern nutrition. 1955.

Nutritional Aspect of Dental Disease

By John H. Gunter, DDS, MD

Summary: In this thought-provoking chapter from 1943’s A Guide to Practical Nutrition, physician and dentist John Gunter connects the dots between malnutrition and tooth decay. “It is generally known that inadequate nutrition predisposes to lowered resistance to bacterial invasion,” he writes, and such invasion includes the attack of oral bacteria on teeth. Indeed, he notes, tooth decay and periodontal disease tend to flourish only in populations subsisting on foods of “deteriorated biological value”—that is, foods deficient in vitamin and mineral complexes—such as white flour, white sugar, and the other industrially manufactured foods of modern civilization. Dr. Gunter proceeds to detail the roles played by various nutrients in preventing not just tooth decay but oral disease in general, a list headlined by the vitamins A, B1, C, and D as well as the minerals calcium and phosphorus. While dentistry today sells tooth decay as a story of defenseless teeth being attacked by sugar-loving bacteria, Dr. Gunter’s article affirms what he and many other nutrition-minded dentists of the early twentieth century knew firsthand: a well fed tooth is well protected. From A Guide to Practical Nutrition, 1943. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 115A.

Your Health: What It Is Worth to the Racketeer

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.

The Wulzen Calcium Dystrophy Syndrome in Guinea Pigs

By Hugo Krueger, PhD

Summary: An authoritative, fully-referenced report on the mysterious and famous Wulzen factor, an anti-stiffness nutrient found in the cream of raw milk and in fresh molasses. The author writes, “In 1941 Wulzen and Bahrs reported that guinea-pigs fed raw whole milk grew excellently and at autopsy showed no abnormality of any kind. Guinea-pigs on pasteurized milk rations did not grow as well and developed a definite syndrome, the first sign of which was wrist stiffness. On pasteurized skim milk the syndrome increased in severity until the animals finally died. There was great emaciation and weakness before death.” Doctors such as Royal Lee and Francis Pottenger, Jr., had long studied this anti-arthritic factor, which was never accepted by orthodox medicine and regretfully remains ignored to this day. From American Journal of Physical Medicine. Reprint 81, 1955.

Who Does the Law Protect?

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.

Studies on the Detoxicating Hormone of the Liver (Yakriton)

By Professor Akiro Sato

Summary: This article, translated from Japanese, is a rare and important report on studies conducted in Japan in the 1920s on a detoxifying hormone made by the liver called yakriton, a fatty substance that controls the histamine level in the blood. Dr. Royal Lee subsequently made this natural antihistamine and liver decongestant available in the United States under the name Antronex. From the Pediatric Department, Faculty of Medicine, Tohoku Imperial University, Sendai. 1929.

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.

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.

Why Milk Pasteurization? Sowing the Seeds of Fear

By Jean Bullitt Darlington

Summary: The first of a two-part report examining the bias in the popular press of the 1940s regarding the pros and cons of milk pasteurization. Darlington debunks several famous “scare” myths ballyhooed by the press, presenting each story as it was first reported and then as it appeared after some fact finding. This article, along with its sequel, is full of facts and examples of how health authorities grossly manipulated science and the public fear of food-borne epidemics to silence any support of certified raw milk. Includes eye-opening statistics from the U.S. Public Health Service regarding the number of outbreaks traced to both raw and pasteurized milk from 1922 to 1944. From The Rural New Yorker: The Business Farmer’s Paper. Reprint 28, 1947.

Soil: A Foundation of Health

By Arnold P. Yerkes

Summary: Soil is the weakest link in the knowledge-chain of nutritional understanding. This excellent article explains what happened to the greatest soils on Earth and how we have abused them to our own loss. Yerkes, the supervisor of Farm Practice Research for the International Harvester Company, underscores what Dr. Royal Lee and the other great nutritionists of the mid-twentieth century knew to be true: nutrition begins in the soil. Reprint 23, 1946.

Sludged Blood

By Melvin H. Knisely et al.

Summary: A comprehensive description of the anatomy and physiology of blood and blood vessels based on 16 years of experimentation and observation by the authors. “Our purpose is to present and define certain properties of normal blood, blood flow, and vessel walls; to offer evidence that these properties are necessary to the normal functioning of the circulatory system; to describe certain visible responses of the vascular system and/or blood to specific stimuli; to describe certain visible pathologic structures and processes; and to define goals now necessary for therapeutics.” From Science. Reprint 35, 1947.