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The Battlefront for Better Nutrition
Reprint No. 30-E
Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee 3, Wis.
July 15, 1950

Yes, there is a battle going on between those who are trying to promote better nutrition, and the food manufacturers who insist on making products “worse so that they can be sold for less,” thereby eliminating the competition of more honest and self-respecting producers who would prefer to apply in business the Golden Rule.

These commercial interests have the United States Government on their side, ever since they ousted Dr. Harvey W. Wiley from his job as head of the Food & Drug Administration in 1912. The present head of the Food & Drug Division of Nutrition, Dr. Elmer M. Nelson in a special Constitutional Court in Washington last October testified that: “It is wholly unscientific to state that a well fed body is more able to resist disease than a less well-fed body. My overall opinion is that there hasn't been enough experimentation to prove dietary deficiencies make one more susceptible to disease.” (Washington Post, October 26, 1949.)

This is nothing new for Dr. Nelson. Ten years ago he, with his group of experts, testified in a similar court, that neither degenerative disease, infectious disease, nor functional disease could result from any nutritional deficiency.

For all these years, he has battled for the maker of devitalized foods, tried to stem the tide of public opinion against the use of white flour, refined sugar, pasteurized milk and imitation butter by vigorous prosecution of any maker of any dietary supplement designed to abate the consequences of using such devitalized food, basing his arguments on the thesis that there were no such things as deficiency diseases.

Truly, as Dr. Wiley sadly remarked in his book The History of a Crime Against the Pure Food Law (1930) the makers of unfit foods have taken possession of Food & Drug enforcement, and have reversed the effect of the law, protecting the criminals that adulterate foods, instead of protecting the public health.

Truth Suppressed

Books that have told the story are being suppressed by the use of the copyright law. This includes Dr. Wiley's book, and the three wonderful books by Alfred McCann (The Science of Eating, The Science of Keeping Young, and Starving America). Since the death of their authors, there have been changes in the copyright ownership and complete suppression has followed.

In 1949, for the first time in history, Dr. Nelson's efforts failed to impress the Federal judges sitting in the case. The defendant in this case obtained a permanent injunction against the Food & Drug Administration from any further interference into his business.

This may well be the turning point in the battle against food adulteration. In the past, defendants have been found guilty of violation of the “law”, and fined the limit for daring to assume in their advertising that nutritional deficiency could cause any kind of disease whatever. (For without “functional” changes, there is no evidence of any disease).

Even the Federal Trade Commission has been called in to help protect adulterators. It has issued orders stopping health food exponents and lecturers from intimating that aluminum compounds in foods may be harmful, apparently to protect the makers of aluminum containing baking powders, and makers of aluminum cooking utensils. You may not know that it is impossible to legally get a court review of the arbitrary and despotic orders of the Federal Trade Commission. It has the same complete and absolute power that any totalitarian despot ever had. In the baking powder dispute, the testimony of the defendant who was opposed to alum in foods, and his expert pathologists was so damning to aluminum that it has been apparently suppressed, participants who had copies of the proceedings were warned not to publish them under penalty of jail sentences. This is docket 540, the Averill Report on Aluminum as a Cause of Cancer.

The Federal Trade Commission has also issued orders to makers of natural foods prohibiting them from claiming that natural food factors are superior to synthetic imitations. The penalty for violation of such orders is a ten thousand dollar fine for each and every violation. So you will not be hearing much in the way of sales arguments from makers of better food products where they compete with synthetic substitutes.

Just what is really wrong with white flour, oleomargarine and pasteurized milk?

Vitamin E and Phosphatase

We will only discuss two fractions that are lost by this processing and substitution. These are vitamin E and the enzyme, phosphatase. The bleach and chemicals used to keep bugs out of flour destroy both. Pasteurization destroys phosphatase in milk. Oleomargarine contains no vitamin E as does butter. It also contains a poison, sodium benzoate, as oleo cannot be made to keep without a chemical preservative.

Why do we need phosphatase? Simply because without it, we fail to split and assimilate the mineral salts in our foods that are in the form of phytates. No enzyme is naturally secreted in the human intestinal tract that splits phytates although many other animals, including the rat, do have such an enzyme. That is discussed in Hutchinson's Food and the Principles of Dietetics, tenth edition, (Williams & Wilkins), where these authorities claim that no minerals can be assimilated from cereal foods, as a consequence. That is quite right, if we eat such cereal foods with pasteurized milk, and use cereals in which the enzyme content has been destroyed by bleaching chemicals. (Cereal germ and bran are the highest common sources of phosphatase, other than raw milk). The drastic effect of pasteurized milk in causing degenerative diseases in cats was emphatically demonstrated by Dr. Francis M. Pottenger Jr. a few years ago, reported in the American Journal of Orthodontics and Oral Surgery, August 1946. The cats became afflicted with every disease common to man it seemed, gastric ulcers, constipation, arthritis, liver disease, heart disease, and even pyorrhea and mental aberrations.

Bleaching and Pasteurization

Every doctor has wondered why his patients fail to assimilate calcium. He has not been informed that the reason is milk pasteurization and flour bleaching.

He has neither been informed about the 400 percent increase in bleach chemical used to keep the bugs out of commercial “Whole” wheat flour. As a result, in animal tests, where 54% would survive on white bread, on commercial “Whole” wheat bread there were NO survivors. (Reported in the News Letter of the Academy of Applied Nutrition, March 1949).

Wheat flour is almost as perishable as milk, if bleach preservatives are not used, it would have to be distributed from cold storage warehouses.

If milk were not pasteurized, it would have to be clean, and produced under far more sanitary conditions, or its poor condition would be reflected in a curdling before it could be delivered to the consumer. Pasteurization hides this low quality, just as flour bleach hides the musty state of poor wheat. Homogenization is another trick; it permits the mixing of stale milk with fresh, which without homogenizing would exhibit the tell-tale curdling of staleness.

Enriching the white flour to improve its salability is not warranted by animal tests.

In the News Letter report cited above, when the white bread was enriched with synthetic vitamins, the survival percentage dropped from 54% to 49%. So we see that “enrichment” is a colossal fraud.

Pasteurization does not lower the bacteria count of the milk as consumed, for germs grow faster in pasteurized milk than in raw, and the count while cut down by the pasteurization, soon exceeds the figure it had before.

Pasteurization does not control undulant fever, for this disease has been increasing by leaps and bounds where all milk is being pasteurized. It is now known to be a deficiency disease, curable in both man and animal by organic trace minerals. So Pasteurization too, seems nothing more than a colossal fraud.

Now about vitamin E. Cattle fed grains as usual, except that the vitamin E was removed, in a few months, although gaining normally in weight, began to drop dead one by one after exhibiting slight changes in their electrocardiograms that were identical to those in human heart patients. (Science, Oct. 4, 1946.)

Superiority of Butter

Children of adolescent age, fed oleo and butter, side by side, over a few years demonstrated that oleo feeding caused castration of both sexes in a considerable degree, as indicated by excessive height of both boys and girls, greater weight increase in girls than boys, and neutral physiques in both - girls had broader shoulders and narrower hips than normal, boys vise versa. Sex development demands vitamin E, and butter is our main source in the American diet. And we do NOT mean synthetic substitutes for the natural vitamin E complex. Take vitamin E out of its environment by “purifying” it and it loses up to a 99% of its potency, say authorities. You cannot keep time by using the brass out of a watch. You cannot get the normal effect by taking a natural vitamin complex apart either. It is a balanced mechanism as it occurs in food.

Now do you begin to see why heart disease kills more people in this country than any other ailment, and that it is practically unknown in China.

Do you see the vital importance of rigorously examining every article of food you use and of demanding the unprocessed, high quality you are entitled to? That is the only hope we have of escaping what Theodore Roosevelt called “Race Suicide.” It is far later than we suspect in our progress toward the untimely end of all unblissfully ignorant mortals.