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Royal Lee, DDS:
Father of Natural Vitamins
By David Morris, DO
Those of us who have made the transition into the 21st century are
fortunate as we benefit from the numerous inventions and creations from
the past that make our daily existence so much more rewarding and enjoyable.
One of the intellectual giants who contributed to our contemporary high
standard of living and knowledge of human nutrition was Dr. Royal Lee.
Even though his name is known to only a small number of Americans, Dr.
Lee was a researcher, inventor, scientist, scholar, statesman, businessman
and philanthropist of the first order.
Dr. Lee was born on
April 7, 1885 and reared on a farm near Edmund in the southwestern part
of Wisconsin. At the age of twelve he had compiled a notebook on biochemistry
and nutrition by copying definitions from the school dictionary. He
also started collecting books on those subjects that he continued collecting
over the years, resulting in one of the largest individual such collections
in the world. While a student in high school, he taught advanced physics
to a class of fifteen students. Upon graduation he engaged in various
businesses before being drafted by the army to serve in World War I.
At the conclusion of the war and his discharge in 1919, he enrolled
in Marquette University, Milwaukee, where he graduated from dental college
in 1924.
One of his major interests
at university was nutrition. During his senior year he presented a paper
to his class on "The Systemic Causes of Dental Caries" which was written
when he was the ripe age of sixteen. He outlined the relationship of
vitamin deficiency to tooth decay and showed the necessity of vitamins
in the diet for normal functioning of the endocrine glands.
The first of Dr. Lee's
many patents-for a motor speed controller for dentists-was granted in
November 1924. One of Dr. Lee's most important inventions was a speed
governor for electric motors, patented on May 31, 1927. These are needed
wherever precise time intervals or constant speeds must be maintained
for such equipment as radar, calculating machines, food mixers, flame-cutting
machinery, fusion welding equipment, drill presses, telephone equipment
and motion picture sound equipment. When talking pictures came out,
Bell Telephone Laboratories had a speed governor selling for $1,200-Dr.
Lee sold his to them for $3.50. Through the years he acquired close
to one hundred patents in the electrical field.
In the early 1920's,
America faced a new health threat: coronary heart disease. Dr. Lee knew
that the vitamins and other nutrients were removed from flour and rice
by commercial milling, and he believed that this had a bearing on the
subject of heart disease. At about this same time, the scientific community
was able to isolate vitamins and standardize them as drugs. In effect,
the food manufacturers altered and removed the health-sustaining components
from the grains they were milling and then "fortified" the product by
adding synthetic, inert vitamins. Thus, the public was fooled into thinking
they were getting the real thing.
Dr. Lee often ran advertisements
in various newspapers exposing this food fraud. As a result, he spent
a great deal of time in court battling the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA used its full power and unlimited taxpayer resources to brand
Dr. Lee a racketeer because he promoted whole, natural unadulterated
foods with their vitamins and minerals intact.
As far back as 1911,
Dr. Lee had begun a systematic search of medical literature to assemble
facts that could help to establish a rational theory of function of
the ductless glands or endocrine system, a subject that was almost totally
ignored at that time. The culmination of his project came in 1929 when
he was able to produce a food-based, natural state package of nutrients
in the most potent and "bioavailable form" which he named Catalyn. It
was derived from the following whole foods: defatted wheat germ; carrots;
nutritional yeast; bovine adrenal, liver, spleen, and kidney; ovine
spleen; dried pea (vine) juice; dried alfalfa juice; mushroom; oat flour;
soy bean lecithin; and rice bran extract. At the outset his product
was provided at no charge solely for the health and welfare of his mother
and intimate friends. However, because of the remarkable results the
product achieved, the fame of this food concentrate spread rapidly.
The volume of demand reached such proportions that he had to create
a new company, the Vitamin Products Company.
With Catalyn becoming
such a success as a multiple raw food concentrate, Dr. Lee began to
produce other specialized products to give doctors nutritional tools
to use in treating their patients. In 1931 he introduced Phosfood Liquid
to support healthy calcium metabolism and sympathetic nervous system
function. By 1934 the demand by physicians convinced Dr. Lee to separate
the various vitamin complexes into separate products (vitamins A through
G) for more precise clinical application. From 1935 through 1939 he
introduced five new products: Drenamin (adrenal support), Organic Minerals
(parasympathetic support), Soy Bean Lecithin, Lactic Acid Yeast (proper
pH for healthy functioning of gastrointestinal system) and Wheat Germ
Oil Perles (one of the richest sources of natural vitamin E complex).
The 1940's saw a wide
variety of specific nutritional products added to the Vitamin Products
Company line. In the 1950s, Dr. Lee developed a type of glandular product,
that he termed protomorphogen extracts, produced by a process he patented.
These were not the normal desiccated glandulars but were uniquely derived
nucleoprotein-mineral extracts that support cellular health.
For almost half a century,
doctors throughout the nation have used Dr. Lee's products with great
success. Today Standard Process, as the company is now known, carries
a line of almost 150 products to serve health professionals and their
patients.
You can see from the
following quote made by Dr. Lee on October 2, 1933 that he was fifty
years ahead of his time in the field of nutrition:
"Candy, all white sugar
or its products, and white flour including its products such as macaroni,
spaghetti, crackers, etc., should be absolutely barred from the diet
of the child. All these are energy-producing foods that contain no building
materials for the body. The consequences of their toleration are susceptibility
to infections, enlarged tonsils, carious teeth, unruly dispositions,
stunted growth, rickets, maldevelopment and very often permanent damage
to many organs of the body (especially the endocrine glands) that depend
upon the vitamin supply for their normal function and development."
In 1941 Dr. Lee organized
the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research under a state charter as
a nonprofit organization. The purpose of the Lee Foundation was to engage
in research and to coordinate and communicate nutritional breakthroughs
from laboratories around the world. The Foundation was the world's largest
clearinghouse for nutritional information for doctors, agriculturists
and homemakers. During its existence the Lee Foundation disseminated
millions of pieces of literature and hundreds of thousands of books
on health and nutrition.
Dr. Lee took time in
1947 to coauthor a book with William Hanson entitled Protomorphology,
Study of Cell Autoregulation, a study of biological growth factors
and a survey of the problems of aging. He also provided moral and financial
support to such organizations as Natural Associates, American Academy
of Applied Nutrition, National Health Federation, and Health Publications,
always championing freedom of choice in "the natural way."
Today, Standard Process,
Dr. Lee's nutritional company, is continuing his tradition of producing
biologically active raw food concentrates. The company organically farms
over one thousand acres of mineral-rich fertile soil, created when the
retreating glaciers moved mountains of earth across the Kettle Moraine
area in Wisconsin. This is where the crops are grown that are used as
ingredients for whole food supplements originally formulated by Dr.
Lee over seventy years ago. These products are recommended and used
by doctors in all fifty states to help balance their patients' body
chemistry and nutritional deficiencies.
Dr. Lee still touches
our lives today. His many inventions in the electrical field add to
the comfort and convenience of our daily existence. His nutritional
discoveries help us to maintain a higher level of health. Dr. Lee was
a stalwart disciple of the principle of free enterprise and individual
liberty. He believed in the application of the golden rule not only
in relationships between individuals but also between nations. He died
on November 1, 1967.
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journal, full of informative articles as well as sources of healthy food.
Copyright Notice: The material
on this site is copyrighted by the Weston A. Price Foundation. Please contact
the Foundation for permission if you wish to use the material for any purpose.
Disclaimer: The information published herein is not intended
to be used as a substitute for appropriate care by a qualified health practitioner.
The Weston A. Price Foundation
PMB 106-380, 4200 Wisconsin Ave., NW, Washington DC 20016
Phone: (202) 363-4394 | Fax: (202) 363-4396 | Web: www.westonaprice.org
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This page was posted on 01 JAN 2000.
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