Contents in this issue: “The Constipation Syndrome,” “Calcium,” “Influence of Vitamin E on Glucose Metabolism,” “Money Supposedly Collected for Research?” The following is a transcription of the June 1965 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories. The Constipation Syndrome Constipation is a common complaint that many of our […]
Contents in this issue: “Some Facts About Food Fats and Oils,” “More on Linoleic Acid as Obtained from Flaxseed Oil.” The following is a transcription of the April 1965 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories. Some Facts About Food Fats and Oils Fats and oils are indispensable […]
Contents in this issue: “Which Is First—The Disease or the Microorganism?” “The Occurrence of Subcutaneous Sarcomas in the Rat After Repeated Injections of Glucose Solution,” by Tome Nonaka, “Health Appropriation?” “Food Contamination,” “Recent Report Calls U.S. Ill-Fed.” The following is a transcription of the January 1965 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally […]
Contents in this issue: “Some Facts About Food Fats and Oils,” “Sugar: Cause of Coronaries,” “Cause of Death.” The following is a transcription of the December 1964 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories. Some Facts About Food Fats and Oils Fats and oils are indispensable parts of […]
Contents in this issue: “FDA—Protector of the Drug Industry.” The following is a transcription of the July/August 1963 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories. FDA—Protector of the Drug Industry The Food and Drug Administration may have dragged its feet in pulling back thalidomide, but it is waging […]
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this classic lecture to the National Health Federation Convention in Columbus, Ohio, Dr. Royal Lee reveals how organized medicine succeeded in legally hampering drugless therapies through the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which redefined a drug as “anything used to treat, prevent, diagnose, mitigate, or cure a disease.” Given this new definition, Dr. Lee says, “once the drugless practitioner has discovered how to druglessly treat his patient, lo and behold, that remedy now automatically becomes a drug, and he is stopped from its use.” This trick was particularly effective in thwarting the use of whole-food supplements in nutritional therapy, since it made all such supplements potential “drugs” under the law. 1962. Original source unknown.
Author unknown
Summary: A biographical sketch of the famous first chief of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (known at the time as the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry). Dr. Wiley, a product of the populist age, was a champion of consumer safety when it came to the American food supply and was often referred to as the “Father of the Pure Food Law” of 1906. Read about Dr. Wiley’s ascension to power and his much-publicized fall as he fought in vain to keep synthetic preservatives and additives out of the national diet. If Dr. Wiley had had his way, all of America’s food would now be organic. (See also Dr. Wiley’s monumental book History of a Crime Against the Food Law in these archives.) Original source and date of publication unknown.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: By the close of the 1940s, Dr. Royal Lee had seen many “peeps behind…the iron curtain that is so carefully maintained by the makers of fraudulent foods to keep the American people in ignorance as to the real cause of their chronic diseases.” Thus, in commenting on the opinion of a committee who’d concluded, on very little evidence, that fertilizing soil with trace minerals is unnecessary to produce nutritious plants, Dr. Lee could not help but question the motives of the committee’s so-called experts. “Such haste in promoting one side of a vital question that cannot be settled without a great amount of research certainly throws a lot of doubt upon the integrity and honesty of the committee.” Lee would spend the next two decades calling out such formulaic chicanery, the kind of which would later lead to some of the great shams of modern nutrition, including cholesterol theory and low-fat diets. 1949. Original source unknown.
By James C. Thomson
Summary: This article from the Scottish periodical The Kingston Chronicle offers one of the most insightful quotes ever regarding the reality of nutrition, commerce, and science: “When dealing with highly lucrative commercial enterprises based upon dietetic and therapeutic procedures, doctors and analytical chemists are given a clear lead. They know what is expected of them…there is a market for signatures. They have only to indicate a bias in the right direction and everything is made easy. Their investigations are tailor-made and tidy beyond description. Slides and specimens from the laboratories of the cartels are provided for them; meticulously labeled and annotated Petri dishes come to them teeming with unequivocal cultures of all the best microbes. In many cases even their opinions and observations are supplied—typed out all ready for signature.” The author goes on to show how commercial dairy interests used just such tactics to shamelessly demonize raw milk and write pasteurization into the law books of the country for the purpose of profit. From The Kingston Chronicle, 1943. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 28C.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: “Yes, there is a battle going on,” Dr. Royal Lee writes in this 1950 article from the magazine The Interpreter. But the war Dr. Lee was referring to did not involve guns or missiles. It was a contest hidden from public view, waged between the nation’s food manufacturers and its first nutritionists—a war regarding the truth about processed foods. While modern beliefs about diet and health stem largely from the disproven idea that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, the picture looked quite different to America’s nutrition pioneers. These practitioners and researchers, living at a time when industrially processed foods morphed from novelty to staple of the country’s food supply, witnessed firsthand a phenomenon repeated across the globe throughout the twentieth century: wherever processed foods were introduced, the “modern” diseases—heart attacks, cancer, stroke, diabetes, obesity, arthritis, liver disease, ulcers, tooth decay, and so on—soon followed, where they had been virtually nonexistent before. This phenomenon was so obvious and so predictable that only a massive conspiracy between industrial food manufacturers and the federal government, as Dr. Lee bravely outlines in this explosive essay, could hoodwink the American people into believing that processed and refined foods are capable of nourishing the human body. From The Interpreter, 1950. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 30-E.
Various authors
Summary: In the late 1940s, the Drosnes-Lazenby Naturopathic Clinic in Pittsburgh began reporting some amazing results regarding cancer treatment. After the founders of the clinic successfully reversed tumors in guinea pigs using the secretion of a specially developed microbial culture, they began administering the treatment to people who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Remarkably, many of the individuals—given no chance to live by conventional medicine—recovered. With the work fully supervised and documented by medical doctors, the clinic approached the American Cancer Society (ACS) to do more extensive testing of its treatment. Astoundingly, the ACS, without investigating the clinic’s patient cases or analyzing the microbial secretion, proceeded to publicly denounce the Drosnes-Lazenby treatment as a hoax. The ACS then banded with the American Medical Association to “inform” physicians and their patients that the Drosnes-Lazenby treatment had been “thoroughly investigated” and that the clinic operators were effectively frauds and profiteers (neglecting to mention that the clinic was not even charging for its services). Yet, as this collection of writings published in 1950 by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research attests, the successes of the Drosnes-Lazenby Clinic were well documented, revealing just how far the conventional cancer-treatment industry has gone to protect its “turf” against competition—regardless of the consequences. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprints 18E and 8-50A, 1950. Multiple original sources.
By Harvey W. Wiley, MD
Summary: In 1906 the U.S. government passed the Pure Food and Drugs Act, the first federal law aimed specifically at ensuring the purity of America’s food supply. It wasn’t long before the industrial food industry—with the help of its connections in the federal government—found its way around the legislation. In this letter to President Calvin Coolidge, Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, the chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) charged with enforcing the act, calls the U.S. government to task for turning a blind eye to various cases that appeared to squarely violate the law. Dr. Wiley’s protestation (an expanded version of which appeared as “Dr. Wiley to the President” in the September 1925 issue of Good Housekeeping) caused such a stir that it prompted a reply to the president by the acting secretary of the USDA. Together, these two letters show precisely how food manufacturers and federal courts colluded to thwart the intent of America’s food purity law, allowing additives of unproven safety to become forever part of the nation’s food supply. 1925.
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.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this thunderous letter to President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Royal Lee calls the president’s attention to a grand jury investigation of corruption within the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The real problem, Dr. Lee explains, is that both the FDA and the U.S. Department of Justice had been infiltrated by the American Medical Association (AMA), an institution that was brutally—and illegally—wielding its influence to wipe out competitors and establish the medical approach as the only “legitimate” healing art in the United States. Dr. Lee reminds the president that the AMA was convicted for such monopolistic behavior twenty years earlier, when it was found guilty of violating the federal antitrust laws, and that it would continue to conduct such behavior if it were not legally thwarted. An amazing piece of history that speaks to what might have been. 1962.
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.
By R.W. Dunlap, Assistant Secretary of the USDA
Summary: If you’re looking for a smoking gun regarding the chemical adulteration of food in America, this is it. In this 1925 letter to President Calvin Coolidge, the acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Agrculture (USDA) admits that the department cannot legally prevent the addition of chemical additives of unknown safety to America’s food supply. The reason, he says, is that certain federal courts pronounced such chemicals acceptable if no evidence of harm is shown in people who consume foods containing small amounts of them. Not only did the courts’ decisions put the onus of proving long-term ill effects of suspected poisons squarely on the government, but with such evidence nearly impossible to show conclusively and requiring years of study (the technology for which not even existing at the time), the basic policy of food adulteration in America was set: to err on the side of commerce, not public health. As the secretary points out, the opposing, “better safe than sorry” policy of Dr. Harvey Wiley—the former head of the USDA’s Bureau of Chemistry (forerunner of the FDA) who publicly criticized the federal rulings as violating the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act passed by Congress—would simply not stand up in court, where the decision to allow deleterious additives into the food supply had been finagled into 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.
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.
By the Vitamins Product Company
Summary: During World War II, government-enforced price controls dictated what various items and commodities could be sold for. When federal agents prosecuted Dr. Royal Lee for selling the famously nutritious whole-wheat flour from Deaf Smith County, Texas, at a cost beyond the control price for ordinary flour, Dr. Lee fought back in federal court and won, as described in the newspaper account preserved here. Also included is a commentary on the incident by Dr. Lee, attributed to his business The Vitamin Products Company. From The Milwaukee Journal, 1946.
By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Publishing this piece was a tremendous act of courage by Dr. Royal Lee. In it, he exposes the methods used by government agencies to suppress the natural-nutrition movement and subordinate nutritional science to medical consensus in spite of the fact that medical authorities have never trained in nor respected the field of nutrition. In fact, these authorities have historically acted as apologists for food adulterators and persecutors of whole-food advocates. Lee also debunks FDA attack statements on “food faddists” and organic-farming advocates. Published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1957.