Author unknown
Summary: A 1948 newspaper report of Dr. Royal Lee’s presentation to the American Academy of Nutrition in San Francisco. Dr. Lee warns of the health dangers associated with artificial colors added to foods, citing research proving “butter yellow,” a coloring added to margarine, to be carcinogenic. Lee also condemns the pasteurization of milk, citing studies of the damage it caused in animal feeding studies. From NewspaperARCHIVE, 1948.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. Royal Lee recalls numerous “miracle drugs” of his day that turned out to harmful or even lethal to many in the population. (With pharmaceutical-related deaths in America numbering in the tens to hundreds of thousands today, this practice has continued unabated.) It is the “cooperation with natural constructive forces” that brings health, Dr. Lee writes, not “drug or poison therapy by which the cell activities are subjected to new and unknown reactions with new and unknown end or side results that…undermine the future welfare of the patient.” This simple, sensible approach, Lee says, is the basis of his Vitamin Products Company, which provided complete, natural vitamins in the form of whole-food supplements. Lee also specifies some of the constituents of the natural vitamin C complex, which in addition to ascorbic acid includes an antihemorrhagic factor, a thrombin synthesis factor, a blood-oxygen factor, and a connective-tissue-integrity factor. From the Vitamin Products Company, circa 1940.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this brief article, Dr. Royal Lee presents his classic metaphor of holistic nutrition likening a true vitamin to a watch. Just as a watch consists of numerous pieces that all work together to perform a function (telling time), a true vitamin is a complex of countless synergistic factors that work together to perform the function of delivering a nutritive effect to the body. And just as separating a few pieces from a watch and expecting them to tell time is absurd, isolating (or synthesizing) a single component of a natural vitamin and expecting it to nourish the body is folly. Vitamin Products Company, 1952.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: “There is only one test for safety and wholesomeness in food,” Dr. Royal Lee proclaims in this succinct overview of his nutritional philosophy. “That is the test of time. The test of a long history of use, over many generations of life.” Dr. 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. Dr. Lee also documents the negative effects of synthetic isolated vitamins, the “jackpot in synthetic foods.” Includes also a report on chicanery regarding food additives at the Food and Drug Administration from one of the most outspoken watchdog publications of its day, Morris Bealle’s American Capsule News. 1957.
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.
By Dr. Royal Lee, Herbert C. White, and Arnold P. Yerkes
Summary: The Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprinted these three articles by leading natural-health authorities of the time to counter the “America is the best fed nation on earth” propaganda coming from government agencies and the commercial food industries. From soil destruction and depletion to food processing and synthetic vitamins, the three authors cogently expose the frauds, lies, and myths perpetrated by the “death-food industry,” so described by Royal Lee. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research special bulletin 1-52, 1952. Multiple original sources.
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 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.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Before there was high-fructose corn syrup, there was just plain corn syrup—the original synthetic sweetener, created by chemically decomposing cornstarch into glucose molecules. Dr. Harvey Wiley, the first head of the federal Food and Drug Administration (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 human engineering. In this 1958 article from Let’s Live magazine, Dr. Royal Lee cites a seminal experiment 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, whereas refined cane sugar was not. Dr. Lee adds that animal-feeding studies and clinical trials had shown that corn syrup “contributes to cancer, diabetes, hypertension, lassitude, brain fatigue, overweight, irritability, and mental depression; it impairs the assimilation of calcium; and it destroys vital amino acids if they are cooked in its presence.” Finally, Dr. Lee excoriates the FDA for failing to force manufacturers to distinguish between synthetic corn syrup and natural sweeteners on food labels, a deceit that bespeaks the agency’s transformation from consumer watchdog, under Dr. Wiley’s leadership, to the guardian of food manufacturing interests that it is today. From Let’s Live magazine, 1958.
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.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this paper on the relationship between cooking fats and blood cholesterol, pioneering nutritional therapist Dr. Royal Lee emphasizes the importance of phospholipids in the former for metabolizing the latter. While natural, unrefined oils such as crude peanut oil contain such phospholipids, he says, synthetic hydrogenated fats do not (because they are destroyed in the manufacturing process). Dr. Lee cites studies in which a diet of high-fat, high-cholesterol foods cooked in unrefined natural oil led to a decrease in blood cholesterol, whereas a diet of foods cooked in hydrogenated fats raised it. From Vitamin Products Company, circa 1956.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this scathing correspondence to the editors of Collier’s Weekly magazine, Dr. Lee takes the periodical to task for a recent article on “cancer quacks” that appears to have been influenced by forces within organized medicine. Included among Lee’s pointed criticisms is the magazine’s failure to mention that one of the “quacks” it spotlighted had been acquitted and cleared of any wrongdoing by the Federal Trade Commission. 1951.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Many people know white sugar and white flour are refined products, but what about distilled or otherwise “purified” water? Although deionization or reverse osmosis can remove potential pathogens, it also takes away the minerals found in “unrefined” sources of water that are so critical to human health. Possibly the most important of these minerals, Dr. Lee says, is calcium bicarbonate, a form of calcium that has the rare distinction of being easily absorbed by the human body. Other benefits such as natural bacterial antigens, which help build our immune system, and the absence of fluoride make natural, unrefined spring or well water the ideal drink for the human body. From Let’s Live magazine, 1958.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this revealing booklet, Dr. Royal Lee describes how institutional policies in the USA were designed to protect the processing and refining—and thus the devitalization—of our food supply. He shows how the producers of processed dairy, grain, fruit, and meat induced the Food and Drug Administration as well as the American Medical Association (AMA) to overlook and even endorse their deadly products. In one astonishing case, Dr. Lee presents an ad paid for by the American Institute of Baking and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (under the direction of the journal’s editor, Morris Fishbein) in which the AMA’s Council on Foods assures readers that “White Bread Is Wholesome”—this at a time when many of those readers, doctor members of the AMA, were privately reporting harmful effects of white bread in their patients. “Few people in the United States are aware,” Dr. Lee writes, “of the ‘iron curtain’ maintained in this country to prevent the food consumer from knowing that he is being sold fraudulent foods, foods that have had the better part of their nutritional value removed or destroyed to facilitate the commercial handling of the foods and to enable big food enterprises to unfairly overpower, by price competition, the smaller ones.” For anyone wondering why modern human beings suffer so much chronic disease and ill health in general, this work leaves little doubt where the blame lies. Published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1949. Multiple original sources.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this riveting personal account, Dr. Lee describes the legal battle that led him to discover that organized medicine was actively working to discredit and suppress nutritional approaches to health. He also documents evidence of how the medical-pharmaceutical industry had formed what was in essence a cartel aimed at controlling the healing arts and destroying any threat to its control over the nation’s healthcare. 1943.