Historical Archives

Biography: Harvey Washington Wiley, MD

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.

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Historical Archives

Biography: Sir Robert McCarrison

Author unknown

Summary: Before there was Weston A. Price, there was Sir Robert McCarrison. In the first decades of the twentieth century, this British doctor and officer conducted some of the greatest initial investigations into the effect of diet on health. Studying different subpopulations in India, McCarrison showed that most of the diseases incurred by each population were a result of diet, specifically a diet of processed foods—a result that would later be echoed by Dr. Price’s famous worldwide investigation into traditional versus processed-food diets. Like Dr. Price, Dr. McCarrison bemoaned the disease-causing effects of foods such as refined sugar and flour, and he emphasized the extreme importance of choosing natural foods, including natural fats, over processed ones. In this short biographical sketch, he is quoted, “I know of nothing so potent in maintaining good health in laboratory animals as perfectly constituted food [and] I know of nothing so potent in producing ill health as improperly constituted food. This too is the experience of stockbreeders. Is man an exception to a rule so universally applied to the higher animals?” You can read McCarrison’s landmark 1921 book, Studies in Deficiency Disease—reprinted in its entirety by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research in 1945—in these archives. Multiple original sources.

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Historical Archives

Bleaching of Flour

By E.F. Ladd and R.E. Stallings

Summary: In 1906 the U.S. Congress passed the landmark Pure Food and Drugs Act, the first federal law to directly address the safety of chemical additives in America’s foods. One such additive was the bleach nitrous oxide, a compound used by industrial millers to give wheat flour the ultra white color so prized by consumers at the turn of the twentieth century. In this frank report—published just months after passage of the “national pure food law”—researchers at the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station discuss the negative effects of exposing wheat flour to nitrous oxide, from the destruction of the nutritional value of the flour itself to the occurrence of noxious nitrous by-products in bread made from the flour. The authors also include the results of a survey of the people most intimately familiar with flour bleaching, America’s millers, whose responses reveal the true motive for the practice: to make lower grade flour look—and sell—like higher grade. Thanks to the powerful influence of the millers, the use of nitrous oxide to bleach flour continued after passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act, and in spite of a Supreme Court ruling in 1914 condemning the practice as a violation of the pure food law, the U.S. Department of Agriculture never once has attempted to enforce the court’s decision. This article—one of the oldest in the SRP Historical Archives—is a truly historic document that sets a time and place for the onset of the commercial destruction of America’s food supply. From Bulletin No. 72, North Dakota Government Agricultural Experiment Station, 1906. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1951. 

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Historical Archives

Bread Called Cause of Some Skin Ills

By Helen Bullock

Summary: A newspaper account of a dermatologist’s report that patients with skin disorders showed considerable improvement after eliminating bleached flour products from their diet. Importantly, the dermatologist is referring to the bleach chlorine dioxide, which had replaced the former standard flour bleach of many years, nitrogen trichloride. This article illustrates well the practice of the food processing industry to continue to use a product in spite of concerns about its safety until enough demonstrable cases of harm force its hand. From The Dallas Morning News, 1955. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research. 

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Historical Archives

Breast Feeding

By the United States Department of Labor

Summary: “No single factor exercises a more pronounced influence on the development of the baby and on his health during his entire life than nursing at his mother’s breast.” So wrote the U.S. Department of Labor (USDL) in its landmark Folder 8, an annual report issued from the 1920s through the 1940s encouraging mothers to breast feed their infants and advising them on the best nutrition to support their body in the task. Though, sadly, the government would later abandon its official support of breast feeding, the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research continued to reprint snippets from the USDL’s Folder 8, along with the article “Weaning the Breast-Fed Baby” from Today’s Health magazine, as the single publication presented here. With its emphasis on untainted animal foods, fresh produce, and unprocessed foods, the diet outlined in this classic guide is as sound for nursing mothers today as it was in its day. Multiple sources, published from 1926 to 1962. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 122. 

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Historical Archives

Butter, Vitamin E, and the “X” Factor of Dr. Price

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Could eating butter prevent hot flashes? Such a suggestion would sound outlandish to today’s nutrition “experts.” Yet not only did researchers in the mid-twentieth century show butter helps counter disorders associated with menopause, but the now maligned food was once regarded as a powerful healer in general, with physicians prescribing it for everything from psoriasis to tuberculosis. The reason for butter’s formerly stellar reputation is simple, explains Dr. Royal Lee in this wide-ranging 1942 publication. Butter is loaded with bioactive fat-soluble vitamins, including vitamins A, D, and E, and as Dr. Weston Price observed in his classic book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, these nutrients are so critical to good health that human populations have historically placed a special emphasis on foods containing them. Butter produced by cows pasturing in the springtime is particularly nutritious, Dr. Lee adds, its deep yellow color indicating a high content of the famous “Activator X,” an elusive fat-soluble nutrient shown by Dr. Price to be essential for moving calcium from the blood into the bones and teeth. Given modern nutrition’s proscription against butter and other animal fats in the diet, it’s no wonder that today America is plagued by osteoporosis and other calcium-related disorders—not to mention the myriad other ailments Drs. Price and Lee would have predicted for a nation starving itself of fat-soluble vitamins. Published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, 1942.

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Historical Archives

Caffeine, Coffee, and Coca-Cola

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this 1957 article form Herald of Health magazine, Dr. Royal Lee discusses the addictive qualities of caffeine as well as the health-busting practice of the originators of Coca-Cola to add extra, isolated caffeine to its popular soft drink. “The effects of drinking caffeine on an empty stomach and in a free state are far more dangerous than drinking an equal quantity of caffeine wrapped up with tannic acid in tea and coffee,” Dr. Lee writes, quoting the first head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Harvey Wiley. As Drs. Lee and Wiley also point out, the practices of Coca-Cola and many other of the country’s food processors were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court early in the twentieth century, but penalties against the companies have never been enforced because of the food manufacturers’ influence within the federal government. From Herald of Health magazine, 1957.

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Historical Archives

Calcium

By Dr. William A. Albrecht

Summary: A comprehensive discussion of the amazing role of calcium in the soil and its effect on crops and animals, written by one of the greatest soil scientists of all time. Dr. Albrecht, who chaired the soils department at the University of Missouri College of Agriculture, is known in the organic farming movement as the “father of soil fertility research.” Born in 1888, he published his first article on soil fertility in 1918 and would publish research papers continually until his death in 1974. Albrecht was a friend of Dr. Royal Lee, and the Lee Foundation published several of his papers, which are available in this archive. From The Land magazine, 1943. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 8.

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Historical Archives

Calcium Therapy in Diseases of the Cardiovascular System

By Edward Podolsky, MD

Summary: Though the “Big Medicine union,” the American Medical Association, would spend the better part of the twentieth century framing nutrition science as quackery, there was a time in the early 1900s when practicing physicians were excitedly—and successfully—applying nutritional therapy in their patient treatment. In this fascinating 1939 review of the worldwide medical literature, doctor Edward Podolsky discusses the therapeutic use of calcium by his colleagues across the globe in treating various heart disorders as well as hypertension. Among the most interesting therapies discussed is the combined application of the plant-derived drug digitalis and the macromineral nutrient calcium—a hint at what might have been had medicine’s authorities embraced nutrition rather than treat it like an enemy, to be undermined and eradicated. From the Illinois Medical Journal, 1939. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 68.

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Historical Archives

Calories—Nutritional and Harmful Types

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: One of the truly perplexing assumptions of conventional nutrition is that industrially refining and processing a food has minimal effect on the food’s nutritional value. Look through the history of scientific studies on diet and health, and rarely will you find a distinction made between pasteurized and raw milk, bleached and unbleached flour, refined and unrefined vegetable oil. Yet the chemical and thermal mauling of the food supply is precisely at the root of our ill health, writes Dr. Royal Lee in this 1961 manifesto of holistic nutrition. The reason for mainstream nutrition’s blind spot when it comes to food processing, Dr. Lee explains, is its tendency to view foods solely in terms of calories—the measure of how much fuel a food supplies. Because processing and refining do not tend to alter the caloric content of foods, we have allowed uncontrolled damage to be done to the foods’ noncaloric elements—the vitamins, minerals, and countless other known and unknown cofactors that spur the thousands of biochemical reactions required to repair and sustain the body. The result of this destruction is a sea of “foodless calorie products” that, while giving the illusion of sustenance, fail on the most basic level to sustain human health. From Natural Food and Farming, 1961. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 30H.

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Historical Archives

Can Cancer Be Cured?

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this thought-provoking article from 1950, Dr. Royal Lee quotes physician L. Duncan Bulkley to challenge modern medicine’s belief that cancer is a localized disease—the cells of a specific tissue or organ going haywire for no apparent reason—and not, as was widely believed historically, the result of a systemic disorder within the body, such as that caused by a nutritional deficiency. “The present status of the ‘cancer problem,'” Dr. Bulkley opines, “is to decide between two quite opposite positions: First, a hypothetical and problematical view of a local, independent, unexplainable, autonomous decision of certain cells to take on and continue a destructive course—for which immense research has failed entirely to find any reason. Second, the simple and rational belief that a perverted nutrition—perhaps of long standing—influences certain cells to depart from their normal mode of action and take on an abnormal activity, pursuing a malignant and destructive course that is naturally kept up by the continued metabolic disturbance.” Unsurprisingly, Dr. Lee adds, most of the successful alternative treatments of cancer reported at the time involved a radical shift in diet, from one of deficient, processed, chemical-laden products to a regimen of whole, natural, highly-nutrient-dense foods. Dr. Lee even outlines what such a diet might look like, placing particular emphasis on the consumption of raw foods. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research publication 12-50, 1950.

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Historical Archives

Cancer and the Medical Research Business

By Malcolm Lawrence

Summary: This report exposing the corruption and lack of integrity in the cancer-research industry was published under a nom-de-plume (pen name) to protect the author’s status as a medical researcher within the cancer-research establishment. (See the editor’s note preceding the article regarding this.) It describes how natural therapies were never given a chance to demonstrate efficacy, while expensive and toxic chemotherapeutic agents glided right through the research community. Notably, the story of Dr. Andrew Ivy of the University of Illinois and his Krebiozen treatment is told in this historically important document. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research special reprint 5-62, 1962. Original source unknown.

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Historical Archives

Cancer Cells Self-Destruct When “Sweet Tooth” Is Thwarted

Author unknown

Summary: In this 1998 press release from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, hematologist Dr. Chi Dang discusses his famous study demonstrating that cancerous cells self-destruct when deprived of their main fuel, the sugar glucose. While Dr. Dang’s report was big news to the conventional medical world, it would have come as no surprise to many nutrition researchers of the mid-twentieth century, particularly to cancer expert Dr. Daniel Quigley of the University of Nebraska College of Medicine, who once proclaimed that no cancer patient he had ever treated “showed any material improvement unless the diet was so arranged that sugar [glucose] disappeared from the urine.” Sadly, Dr. Dang, a medical researcher, does not appear to even consider the obvious implication of both his and Dr. Quigley’s work—that cancer might be effectively treated by the simple nutritional therapy of eliminating refined carbohydrates from the diet—but instead proffers the development of a pharmaceutical drug as a solution to “the glucose problem.” In speculating about such a drug, Dr. Dang unfortunately repeats a misconception that runs rampant in both conventional and alternative healthcare—that the human brain can use only glucose as fuel. Though science has known this claim to be untrue since the 1960s (fat derivatives can be used just as well if not better), it continues to be purported today by even the most educated practitioners. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 1998.

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Historical Archives

Cancer Loves Sugar

By the Wellness Directory of Minnesota

Summary: A great primer on how cancer cells feed and what they will do to the body in order to get the glucose they must have to survive. “Knowing that…cancer needs sugar, does it make sense to feed it sugar?” the authors ask. “Does it make sense to eat a high-carbohydrate diet?” This article is a great complement to Patrick Quillin’s “Cancer’s Sweet Tooth,” also available in the these archives. From the Wellness Directory of Minnesota, 1995. 

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Historical Archives

Cancer: A Collagen Disease, Secondary to a Nutritional Deficiency?

By W.J. McCormick, MD

Summary: Could a lack of vitamin C be the reason cancer spreads within a body? Nutrition-savvy physician W.J. McCormick thought so, and in this fascinating article from the April 1959 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics, he explains why. McCormick begins by citing the long-known observation that cancer tends to take root mainly in areas of the body that have become depleted in collagen—the elastic connective tissue responsible for “cementing” cells in their place. As collagen diminishes, he says, cancerous cells become free to exercise their natural “amoeboid activity” and move to other parts of the body (i.e., metastasize). Since the body requires vitamin C to produce collagen, Dr. McCormick argues, it stands to reason that a deficiency of the vitamin enables the spread of cancer—a notion supported by the fact that cancer patients tend to be severely depleted in the nutrient. Given the facts, McCormick concludes, the reason for the activity of many carcinogens—including cigarette smoke—may lie in their tendency to destroy the C vitamin. From the Archives of Pediatrics, 1959. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research. 

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Historical Archives

Cancer: A Nutritional Deficiency

By J.R. Davidson, MD

Summary: A Canadian physician reports on his fascinating animal and human research that led him to conclude that nutritional deficiency is at the root of cancer development. “For some 45 years I have been interested in the study of cancer. I have come to the conclusion that cancer is due to deficient diet, and that, if steps are taken to see that everyone eats the proper food, the disease can be first controlled and finally eliminated.” Discussing his experiments in detail, Dr. Davidson makes a strong case in defense of his hypothesis. Published by the Science Department of the University of Manitoba. Reprint 18, 1943.

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Historical Archives

Cancer: Its Cause, Its Prevention, Its Cure

 By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: In this report from the late 1940s, Dr. Lee reviews some successful alternative treatments of cancer and emphasizes the importance of avoiding processed foods in both preventing and reversing the disease. In particular, he cites the works of Drs. Max Gerson of New York and D.T. Quigley of Omaha who famously reported that no case of cancer he had ever treated improved unless “the diet was so arranged that sugar disappeared from the urine.” In addition to refined sugar, Dr. Lee also names bleached flour and nitrite-preserved meats as likely cancer culprits. Published by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, circa 1949.

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Historical Archives

Cancer’s Sweet Tooth

By Patrick Quillin, PhD

Summary: “It puzzles me why the simple concept ‘sugar feeds cancer’ can be so dramatically overlooked as part of a comprehensive cancer treatment plan,” writes Dr. Patrick Quillin in this stirring article from the April 2000 issue of Nutrition Science News. Quillin, recounting the discovery by Nobel laureate Dr. Otto Warburg that cancer cells feed exclusively on glucose, discusses his own experience in working with over 500 cancer patients as the director of nutrition for the Cancer Treatment Centers of America. Limiting sugar consumption and keeping one’s blood-sugar level within a narrow range, he says, “can be one of the most crucial components of a cancer recovery program.” That barely any of the four million cancer patients in America receive this information as part of their treatment is nothing short of scandalous. From Nutrition Science News, 2000.

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Historical Archives

Carbohydrate Not Essential

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: “What is refined sugar?” Dr. Royal Lee asks in this provocative excerpt and then answers, “It is pure carbohydrate. [And] is carbohydrate an essential food, a food component without which we could not live? It certainly is not.” Today people are picking up on the fact that while there are essential fats and there are essential amino acids (the building blocks of proteins), there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. The content here is excerpted from the 1952 article “This Molasses War—Who Is Prevaricating,” in which Dr. Lee expounds on the critical difference between whole-food sweeteners and refined ones. From Let’s Live magazine, 1952. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

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