Category Archives: Historical Archives

Practical Methods in Preparing Health-Building Foods

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Dr. Royal Lee cooks! In this article the great nutritionist describes nutrient-conserving methods of preparing meats, vegetables, grains, and fruits. He strongly urges using only organically grown foods and reminds readers to eat acidifying and alkalizing foods in relatively equal amounts. “Cereals and grains are all acid. Root and leaf vegetables are all alkalline. Meat and fish are acid. Fruits may be either—apple and grape are most neutral.” Publication source and date unknown.

Postural Hypotension and Functional Hypoadrenia

By Dr. George Goodheart

Summary: In 1920 Los Angeles medical doctor D.C. Ragland published a remarkably simple test he used to assess his patients’ adrenal health. All that was required to perform the test was a means for measuring the patient’s blood pressure and a place where he or she could lie down and then stand up. The procedure took all of a few minutes and quickly revealed whether the patient might be suffering from adrenal fatigue. The medical community, dismissive of the entire notion of subclinical adrenal deficiency, ignored Dr. Ragland’s new assessment tool. The test was readily adopted by a number of chiropractors, however, who recognized the phenomenon of “adrenal burnout” as real and were glad to have an easy method of determining its likelihood. In this 1965 article, famed chiropractor Dr. George Goodheart, the “father of Applied Kinesiology,” discusses Ragland’s assessment in detail, explaining its procedure, the physiology and anatomy behind the test, and various treatments for the condition of “functional hypoadrenia” that it all too often reveals. While the paper is written for a chiropractic audience, the information presented is invaluable to anyone interested in the subject of adrenal health. From the Digest of Chiropractic Economics, 1965. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

Our Teeth and Our Soils

By William A. Albrecht, PhD

Summary: Today, the standard explanation for tooth decay goes something like this: a carbohydrate-rich film develops on the teeth; bacteria in the mouth feed on that carbohydrate; acid produced by the bacteria attack and degrade the teeth. Yet this explanation fails to account for numerous observations regarding cavity development, which, as many nutritionists of the early twentieth century showed, appears to have more to do with systemic nutritional deficiency in the body than a localized pathogenic assault. In this fascinating 1947 article, renowned agronomist Dr. William Albrecht adds weight to the malnutrition theory of tooth decay, correlating regional differences between soil fertility, plant constitution, and dental health in America. In short, he concludes, the more fertile a soil, the fewer cavities in people who eat food grown in that soil. With tooth decay the most common and widespread degenerative disease in the United States—just as it was in Dr. Albrecht’s day—it seems obvious that brushing carbohydrates off of our teeth is not enough to prevent cavities. We need nutrient rich foods, produced by fertile soils, to thwart oral bacteria from proliferating in the first place. From the Annals of Dentistry, 1947. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 37.

Open Letters Concerning Dr. Frederick J. Stare

Various authors

Summary: In March 1957 Modern Nutrition printed the following excerpts from a stunning series of open letters by John Pearmain of the Boston Nutrition Society to Dr. Nathan Pusey, President of Harvard University, regarding “the matter of standards of research under Dr. Frederick Stare,” head of the university’s department of nutrition. Dr. Stare (1911–2002), probably more than any other public figure in U.S. history, was responsible for convincing Americans that sugar and other refined foods are harmless and that whole foods are no more valuable nutritionally than processed ones. “Actually,” he once wrote, “we get as much food value from refined foods that have been enriched as from natural foods, and sometimes more.” Dr. Stare also advised Americans to “eat your [food] additives—they’re good for you” and recommended Coca-Cola as “a healthy between-meals snack.” In the following excerpts, Mr. Pearmain questions the reasons for Dr. Stare’s pronouncements, suggesting it was not the weight of scientific evidence that underlay them but rather the financial might of his department’s funders, which comprised some of the country’s largest food processing companies (including, yes, Coca-Cola) as well as major chemical and drug interests. While these links were carefully kept from the public during Dr. Stare’s lifetime, recently they have begun to come to light, most notably in the 2016 exposé “Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease” in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine. The investigation pieces a paper trail from the Sugar Research Foundation—an industrial benefactor of Harvard’s nutrition department whose advisory board Dr. Stare served on—to research published by Harvard investigators intentionally obscuring evidence against sugar in the causation of heart disease. While the news of influence peddling at America’s most prestigious university came as a shock to many readers, Harvard’s “sugar scandal” is merely the tip of an iceberg of dubious activity by Dr. Stare and his department, as the following letters show. Included after the excerpts is some fascinating commentary by Dr. Royal Lee, a leading proponent of natural food nutrition during the 1950s and strong critic of Dr. Stare. From Modern Nutrition, 1957. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

Poor Soils, Synthetics Produce Inferior Results

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.

Plant Protein Producers

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Mushrooms and yeasts take center stage in this article. The high protein content of mushrooms (button mushrooms contain over ten amino acids) as well as their wealth of enzymes and fat-metabolizing compounds (betaine, choline, lecithin) make them an historically prized edible. Yeasts, of course, are responsible for the fermentation processes used to make bread, cheese, and the like, but they are also “superior food sources of valuable nutrients,” says Dr. Lee. “The Oriental food pattern differs from ours because…most of the protein they eat is from plants. They accomplish this largely by the use of molds and yeasts, which produce foods high in quality vegetable proteins.”  From Let’s Live magazine, 1958.

Recent Conclusions in Malnutrition

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this stunning assessment of the widespread yet unacknowledged malnourishment of America, Dr. Royal Lee describes in detail the health effects of eating processed foods as well as the difference between natural and synthetic vitamins. “We have drifted into this deplorable position of national malnutrition quite inadvertently,” he adds. “It is the result of scientific research with the objective of finding the best ways to create foods that are non-perishable that can be made by mass production methods…and distributed so cheaply that they can sweep all local competition from the market. Then, after there develops a suspicion that these ‘foods’ are inadequate to support life, modern advertising science steps in to propagandize the people into believing that there is nothing wrong with them, that they are products of scientific research intended to afford a food that is the last word in nutritive value.” Also included is the infamous advertisement in the Journal of the American Medical Association promoting white bread, the result of a financial arrangement between the American Medical Association and the American Institute of Baking. From a lecture delivered to the American Naprapathic Association Convention. Reprint 30, 1943.

Medical School Team Ties Pancreatic Cancer to Glucose Level

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.

Medical Testament—Nutrition and Soil Fertility

By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD, and Sir Albert Howard

Summary: In 1911 Britain passed its National Insurance Act, a law intended to “provide for the prevention and cure of sickness” of its citizens. Yet despite the bill’s aim, rates of chronic disease proceeded to explode in the country over the ensuing decades. While medical officialdom was at a loss to explain or prevent the events, in 1939 the 600 family doctors of Cheshire county gathered to issue a public “testament” naming both the cause of the new epidemics and the means of their reversal. The physicians, reflecting on nearly three decades of clinical experience, named malnutrition at the hands of industrially processed foods as the common cause of chronic disease while marveling at the “amazing benefits” of switching patients to a diet of nutrient-dense, organic foods. Two researchers instrumental in guiding the doctors to their findings were Sir Robert McCarrison and Sir Albert Howard, both of whom were invited to speak at the famous Cheshire meeting, as recorded here. In their speeches McCarrison and Howard articulate the basic principles of what might be called “ecological nutrition,” that the health of humans depends on the health of the foods they eat, which in turn depends on the health of the soil those foods are grown in and on. With the medical industry still baffled by the cause and prevention of chronic disease, the words of these farsighted researchers offer a blueprint for building true health and wellness in humankind, literally from the ground up. Originally published in New English Weekly, 1939.

Medical Testament of the Doctors of Cheshire, England

By the Local Medical and Panel Committee of Cheshire, England

Summary: This 1939 declaration by the physicians of Cheshire, England, is one of the great documents of nutrition history and a clarion call for preventive medicine in the twenty-first century and beyond. In it the 600 family doctors of Cheshire county lament the failure of their profession to reverse the soaring rates of chronic disease in Britain, naming the reason for the new epidemics in no uncertain terms: “a lifetime of wrong nutrition” in their patients. While medicine’s political institutions were spinning the notion that only total vitamin deficiencies bring illness, such as the lethal scurvy or rickets, many practicing physicians were confirming what decades of experimental research had shown—that the human body is incredibly susceptible to partial deficiencies of vitamins and minerals as well, these lacks manifesting as practically every modern health complaint, from tooth decay to gastrointestinal disorders to chronic fatigue to mental illness. Unless Britain moved from its “white bread and margarine” diet of industrially processed foods to one with food that is “little altered by preparation,” with “no chemical or substitution stage,” and grown in soil in which “the natural cycle is complete,” the doctors warn, chronic disease would only continue to increase in Britain. In 1957 England’s prestigious Soil Association would resurrect Cheshire’s Medical Testament in a declaration of its own, published in the medical journal The Lancet, noting that time had done nothing but affirm the document’s dour predictions while repeating its assertion that whole, organically grown food is not a luxury but a necessity for human health. Over half a century later, with rates of chronic disease ever increasing across the globe, the institution of medicine continues to ignore the prophetic practitioners of Cheshire—at the risk of humanity’s very existence. From the British Medical Journal, 1939. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

Mineralized Garden Brings Health, Acclaim to Kentucky Soil Doctor

By F.A. Behymer

Summary: A newspaper report of soil expert Albert Carter Savage, who in the 1940s warned of the depletion of soil and its effect on the quality of the food supply. Ostensibly about Savage’s prodigious garden, the article presents his ideas for restoring fertility and immunity to agricultural lands. “A program of countrywide mineralization could and would create, within a generation, a new type of human being,” Savage says. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1945. Lee Foundation for Nutrition and Research reprint 14.

A Plan for Testing the Theory of Complete Tooth Nutrition

By Alfred Aslander

Summary: “A tooth is a living tissue; not a dead mineral structure,” writes Swedish researcher Alfred Aslander in this compelling 1964 report. “And a tooth is an independent individual that grows out of the mandible in somewhat the same way as a plant grows out of the soil. The plant receives nutrients from the soil solution, the tooth from the blood stream. The growth of [each is] governed by the same laws of nutrition.” The author proposes, based on animal studies and his own experimentation, that supplementing the diet with bone meal will supply all the nutrients required by a tooth and even outlines a study that would settle the debate about nutrition and dental disease. Too bad no one took him up on it. Report from the Division of Agriculture, The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. Reprint 134B, 1964.

The Physiology of Vitamins A and E

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this article from the Central Florida Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, Dr. Royal Lee gives the background and clinical applications of natural vitamins A and E. Far from the simplistic and deficient modern description of these vitamins as antioxidants, Dr. Lee describes the active and vital role each of these fat-soluble vitamin plays in maintaining and healing tissue. From the Central Florida Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, 1946. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 16.

The Pharmacology of Fluoride

By Gustav Wm. Rapp, PhD

Summary: A fourteen-page paper on fluorine and its effects in the human body. “All cells are affected by fluoride to a greater or lesser degree,” writes Dr. Rapp. “While most of the interest in fluoride as a drug has centered upon its activity on oral structures, there are many other parts of the human body that feel [its] effects [including] the bones…skin, hair, viscera, circulatory system, and genito-urinary system.” Scientifically sound, the author’s discussion raises many troubling questions. From The Bur magazine. Reprint 53, 1950.

Peril on Your Food Shelf

By U.S. Congressman James J. Delaney

Summary: In 1906 the U.S. Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act. Though the bill was expressly intended to keep harmful chemicals out of American mouths, it quickly became a loophole through which the drug and food manufacturing industries could introduce untested substances into homes across the country. In 1937 this laxity culminated in the Massengill Elixir Tragedy, in which 105 people died from drinking a “health tonic” containing diethylene glycol, a lethal industrial solvent commonly used in brake fluid today—this despite Massengill’s internal lab having “tested” the tonic for safety. The disaster forced Congress to revisit chemical additive regulations in 1938 in the form of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which tightened rules for drug testing but still left a wide berth for food additives, the number of which exploded in the 1940s. Finally, in 1950, amid growing public concern, Congress created the House Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products. The chair of that committee was New York congressman James Delaney, who wrote the following disturbing article after heading a year of investigation into the matter. Basically, he tells readers, when it came to testing the long term effects of the thousands of chemicals being added to the nation’s food, there was “no law to compel” manufacturers to make such investigations. Moreover, he says, many chemicals known to be dangerous were ending up on the market nonetheless through continued loose regulation. Referring to the Massengill tragedy, he warns, “There is no legal way at this moment to prevent something like this happening again [but] in food!” To this day food additives in America are tested for safety not by the U.S. government but by the companies that manufacture them. And as the Messengill incident reminds us, safety is found all too easily by those who profit from its discovery. From American Magazine, 1951. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 67.

Overweight and Underweight as Manifestations of Idioblaptic Allergy

By Arthur F. Coca, MD

Summary: The Journal of Immunology was launched in 1916 and has been a leading publication in its field ever since. If you look up information about the journal’s founder, Dr. Arthur Coca, you will discover some impressive things. After receiving his MD at the University of Pennsylvania and working at the Cancer Institute of Heidelberg, Germany, Dr. Coca joined Cornell University Medical College as an instructor in pathology and bacteriology before becoming a professor of medicine at Columbia’s medical school and, finally, serving as honorary president of the American Association of Immunologists until his death in 1959. What you won’t find in a typical biography of Dr. Coca is mention of the Coca Pulse Test, a simple self-health tool the physician developed to detect “nonreaginic” food allergies, that is, food allergies that are not rooted in an antigen-antibody reaction. Because modern medicine refuses to acknowledge the existence of nonreaginic food allergies, it must ignore the greatest finding of one of its most renowned immunologists. Fortunately, in the following article, you can hear all about such food allergies—as well as how to use the pulse test to determine them—straight from Dr. Coca’s mouth. Moreover, you will discover the same surprise he did in treating his patients: If pulse-accelerating foods are removed from the diet, the body often moves naturally to its normal weight, requiring no caloric or other restriction other than avoiding the allergenic foods. Careful study of the information presented here may well save you, a loved one, or a client, if you are a health practitioner, from years of misdiagnosis and misery. From the Journal of Applied Nutrition, 1954. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 100.

May We Know Our Food

Summary: In 1907 Dr. Harvey Wiley was the most famous food activist in the United States, having helped prod Congress to pass the first federal food purity law in American history, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Dr. Wiley also happened to be the head of the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, the forerunner of today’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and was charged with enforcing the landmark consumer-protection legislation. In this article from the The Pittsburgh Gazette Times, published six months after the law took effect, Dr. Wiley discusses “two ideas kept always in view in all the sections of the act,” that is, the misbranding of foods and the addition of potentially dangerous additives and preservatives to food products. Little did Dr. Wiley know when he wrote this article that his insistence on enforcing these provisions would lead to his dismissal only a few years later, as industrial food manufacturers and their allies within the government succeeded in not only ousting Dr. Wiley from his post but turning the very law intended to protect the country’s foods into a rubber stamp for introducing insufficiently tested chemicals into America’s diet—a mind-boggling political end run that persists to this day. For more on Dr. Wiley and the corruption of the Pure Food and Drug Act, see “Enforcement of the Food Law” and The History of a Crime Against the Food Law in these archives. From The Pittsburgh Gazette Times, 1907.

Maternal Malnutrition and Fetal Prenatal Developmental Malformation

By Howard H. Hillemann, PhD

Summary: A thoroughly researched report on the birth and developmental defects known to result from specific nutrient deficiencies in human and test-animal mothers during pregnancy. Professor Dr. Howard Hillemann of Oregon State College covers deficiencies of vitamins A, C, and E, fats, carbohydrates, the B complex vitamers (including folate), protein, calcium, phosphorous, and manganese. Includes 61 references. Published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, reprint 66A, 1956.

Our Daily Bread

By Julian Pleasants

Summary: If you want bread done right, make it yourself, commands author Julian Pleasants in this stirring 1949 declaration of nutritional self-reliance. Pleasants wrote this article not long after the federal government had launched  its “enrichment” program, mandating the addition of synthetic B vitamins to all white flour in the country despite “little direct experimental evidence to demonstrate the value of such a proposal,” as the editors of the science journal Nutrition Reviews put it. The author recounts the evolution of commercial bread making, detailing how each “advancement” in flour milling meant a further decline in the nutritive value of the end product, culminating finally in the Frankenstein’s monster that is enriched white bread. “The completely ridiculous idea of taking out the best parts of the wheat berry and then adding a few of them back, in synthetic form,” he writes, “was only a stall of the milling industry to keep from being forced into the production of a decent whole wheat flour.” Such a depressing result is inevitable, he adds, when the standards of food production are “set by the end of trade rather than by the end of use.” Only concern for your own health and that of your loved ones combined with personal know-how and effort can produce a true staff of life, Pleasants opines—a sentiment applicable not just to the making of bread but to the task of nourishment in general. From Integrity magazine, 1949. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 44.