Applied Trophology, Vol. 5, No. 10
(October 1961)

“An Open Letter to Senator Kefauver,” “How Our Government Subsidizes Malnutrition and Disease,” and “We Can’t Believe It”

The following is a transcription of the October 1961 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories.

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An Open Letter to Senator Kefauver

Senator Estes Kefauver
Lookout Mountain
Chattanooga, Tennessee

Dear Senator Kefauver:

In your investigations of the FDA and the American drug industry, you should look into the obvious conspiracy between the makers of counterfeit foods, the American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, and the FDA to suppress facts that are of most vital importance in improving our public health situation.

That conspiracy seems to have started back in 1925, when Morris Fishbein offered his assistance to the flour millers to promote bleached flour products, at that time beginning to show serious evidence of a deficiency of essential vitamins. (See attached copy “How Our Government Subsidizes Malnutrition and Disease,” Appendix A.)

Since there is a federal law that provides heavy fines for selling a food that has lost essential nutritional values by any processing methods, the sale of white flour is in violation of the law. The use of flour bleaches has long ago been proven also to be a violation of the pure food law (see Lee Foundation Reprint No. 1, Ladd and Stallings).

The flour industry would have to decentralize and go back to the practice of providing in each village freshly ground flour to comply with the law. Freshly made flour is more perishable than milk and loses 10 percent of its essential vitamin content per day after grinding. Our incidence of heart disease, we can prove, is a direct result of this law violation—750,000 deaths per year. In China, where such stale cereal foods are not used, heart disease is practically nonexistent. (See Snapper, Chinese Lessons to Western Medicine, 1941, Interscience, page 160: “The rarity of coronary thrombosis in North China is the more striking because the increase of the frequency of this affection in America and Europe is appalling.”)

Dr. Harvey W. Wiley in his book The History of a Crime Against the Food Law, page 382, tells the “Pathetic Story of Bleached Flour” (copy attached)—how bleached flour was an obvious violation of the 1906 Pure Food Law and how the flour millers circumvented any enforcement through political influence. The consequences of this circumvention were not known at that time. Today we can give you a sketchy survey:

1. Even without the use of poison bleaches, the oxidation of essential vitamins causes stale flour to be a menace to health. (Hogs fed any ground cereal feed more than thirty days old are susceptible to pneumonia, otherwise immune.)
2. The addition of oxidizing bleach to cereal products causes a chemical conversion of xanthine (a nutritional component) into alloxan, a deadly poison that in one dose can render a test animal permanently diabetic. This fact has been known since 1882; first reported by Fischer (Annalen, 215, 253). Diabetes in this country is increasing faster than any other disease. Statistical experts tell us that in a few years, at the present rate of increase, our people will all be diabetic.
3. Almost every patient with heart disease responds favorably to vitamin concentrates made from wheat germ. (See attached lecture of Leo Rhodifer to the Flying Osteopathic Physicians Association.) With heart disease the leading cause of death in this country—whereas it is practically nonexistent in China, where no bleached flour is available—might it not be a good idea to have the law enforced as it should be, without political interference?

I might go further into the carcinogenic rancid oils in stale cereal and show how cancer follows the use of bleached stale flour—cancer being unknown in central Africa when Dr. Schweitzer first set up his missionary hospital but followed the introduction of “civilized” food. Unknown among the Eskimos, according to Stefansson, becoming prevalent only after the introduction of “civilized” food. How Dr. Rowntree produced cancer in 100 percent of his test animals with a few doses of rancid cereal oil in 1933, but no more research on this important subject was ever instituted, in spite of the millions spent in trying to find a magic remedy for cancer. (See The Vitamins in Medicine, 2nd edtion, Bicknell and Prescott, page 735.)

Rancid oils are definitely linked with cancer, though the subject is most religiously avoided in the censored medical literature. (See Oberling, The Riddle of Cancer, Yale University Press, 2nd edition, page 112.) And the peroxides created by flour bleach are listed as carcinogens by Biesele in his book Mitotic Poisons and the Cancer Problem, 1958, Elsevier Publishing Company.

Here we have the spectacle of an illegal industry with enough power to corrupt the federal government agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the FDA—even to the extent of getting the vice president of Pillsbury Flour Mills (Bradshaw Mintener) appointed as the executive director of the FDA. During his regime, he prosecuted Earl Irons, who received a year jail sentence for telling the truth about refined foods as above documented. Irons’s prosecution was a good example of the subversion of federal authority as the hatchet department of the phony food racket. Racketeers must have their murder department to intimidate their opponents, and here is a case where the federal courts are being used for the purpose. (See enclosed leaflet on Irons’ case.)

It is an unbelievable situation, but it is understandable when the magnitude of the counterfeit food industry is taken into account and the billions of dollars involved. It includes the synthetic food industry—an industry that most people do not know exists because of fraudulent advertising—in which the products are camouflaged as natural foods.

The first one to become important was the “corn syrup” and “corn sugar” referred to in Dr. Wiley’s book (page 310), in which Wiley shows how it is an ideal adulterant of foods—cheap and relatively tasteless. Used continuously since that time as a dried fruit adulteration, for example. Later, Wiley’s fears that it was diabetogenic were confirmed by Lukens and Dohan at the University of Pennsylvania (1946). As a diabetogenic factor, it should be barred from any use whatever in food.

The hydrogenated fats are another tremendously profitable counterfeit food industry. While synthetic and unacceptable as food by this reason (no synthetic substance has yet been made that could qualify as food, says Sir William Hardy, the great English biochemist—see attached reprint of his), they are commonly falsely labeled as “vegetable shortening.” Though they are made from vegetable oil, they are still synthetic because the natural oil molecule is broken and reassembled into new combinations.

Meanwhile, practically all the vitamin content is destroyed. And the oil is commonly rancid, unfit for any food use unless refined and deodorized, after which it is still unfit for food, since a refined substance is not food under any honest definition. As a matter of fact, the American grocery store has only two unrefined oils—sesame oil and olive oil. All the rest contribute to the 750,000 deaths per year of heart disease, since natural oils all contain cholesterol eliminators (the phospholipid group) that are lost in refining.

Unless we as a nation correct these abuses and criminal activities, we shall cease to exist. Our national enemies will find us so soft and diseased that they can walk in without a fight. Is it possible, Senator Kefauver, to get this done in spite of the political influence of the billion-dollar industries that would have to die to permit the rest of us to live?

That is the real question before us. May we offer our help?

Very truly yours,
Royal Lee, DDS
PO Box 267
Elm Grove, Wisconsin

RL:LK
Encl.

• “How Our Government Subsidizes Malnutrition and Disease,” Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Special Bulletin 1-49.
• North Dakota Agricultural College Bulletin, No. 72, “Bleaching of Flour,” Lee Foundation Reprint No. 1.
• “Protecting the Pilot’s Heart with Better Nutrition,” Leo M. Rhodifer.
• Drug Trade News, June 3, 1957—Irons’s Case.
• “Collected Scientific Papers of Sir William Bate Hardy,” Lee Foundation Reprint No. 117.
• “How and Why Synthetic Poisons Are Being Sold as Imitations of Natural Foods and Drugs,” Lee Foundation Report No. 6.
• The History of a Crime Against the Food Law, Harvey W. Wiley, MD.
• The Real American Tragedy, C. Edward Burtis.
• Van-P Folder dated 2-24-61.

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How Our Government Subsidizes Malnutrition and Disease

Reprint of Appendix A, Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research Special Bulletin 1-49.

We offer below the published statement of Dr. Arthur J. Cramp of the Department of Investigation (and Propaganda) of the American Medical Association, in which he offers the influence of the Journal of the American Medical Association to help sell the idea of devitalized food products not only to the public but also to the members of the American Medical Association. (This was made to Dr. Barnard of the Baking Institute and reported in Baking Technology, January 1925.)

“I have wondered recently whether you have ever thought of suggesting to the organized bakers of the country that there is very real need for an educational campaign on the part of the modern baker directed first toward the medical profession and, second, toward the general public on the subject of white bread.

“As you probably know, the medical profession has a very poor opinion of ordinary white bread and loses no opportunity of depreciating it when dietetic questions are raised. The food faddists and fakers have of course been most virulent against white bread. But it is an unfortunate fact that the medical profession itself has rather taken the attitude that there is a certain degree of soundness in the denunciation against this article of diet and instead of attempting to correct the impression has let it stand.

“I believe the baking industry would do itself a service if it undertook to carry a campaign directed first to the medical profession and later, if necessary, to the public direct on the facts regarding white bread as made today by the more progressive and farsighted members of the baking industry.”

This offer was accepted. Up to that time, the huge baking and milling industry had paid no tribute to the American Medical Association. Dr. Cramp saw a marvelous opportunity to sell both the public and members of the association “down the river” at a fat profit, and the deal went through.

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We Can’t Believe It

We have been reading (in many publications) that we Americans actually have to guard against being overnourished! Webster defines nourishment as follows: “To feed or sustain (any plant or animal) with substances necessary to life and growth.”

The record yearly output for tranquilizers, sedatives, stimulants, and other drugs and medicines, plus record costs for medical care, hospitalization, plus the high rate of deaths from cancer and heart diseases would seem to contradict such claim of oversupply of nutritional elements necessary to help keep the body in good repair and normal function.

—Modern Nutrition, Vol. 13, No. 5, May 1960