Dr. Royal Lee, Master of the Nutrition Universe
Food has the power!
Sadly, very few people have heard of the genius of Dr. Royal Lee and are not even familiar with the legacy he gave the world via Standard Process whole food supplements. To be succinct, Dr. Royal Lee was to nutrition what Nikola Tesla was to electricity. Every day new research confirms Dr. Lee’s assertion that a lack of vitamins and minerals from whole foods leads to disease. While this fact may seem obvious to us now, in Dr. Lee’s time making such a claim was in direct opposition to the prevailing opinion of both the medical field and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which declared it “wholly unscientific” that a well-fed body resists disease better than a less well-fed body.
Dr. Lee’s views put him add odds not just with organized medicine and the FDA but also with the food manufacturing industry. Lee’s work threatened the security of these commercial interests, and at their behest government agencies were assigned to discredit him. Throughout his life, Dr. Lee would endure perpetual legal prosecution and shameless character assassination at the hands of these agencies.
Dr. Lee started designing and producing hundreds of nutritional formulas as early as 1929, each created to address a different cause of nutritional deficiency. Working closely with healthcare practitioners, Dr. Lee documented thousands of case studies confirming the apparently miraculous results of his whole food supplements. This was the start of Standard Process.
Why do Standard Process supplements created by Dr. Lee work so well?
He always maintained that the key to nutrition is recognizing what a vitamin really is. From his studies of physics, he knew that the basic axiom of holism—the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—is absolutely critical to understanding how a vitamin interacts with the body. Vitamins, as they appear in FOOD, are NEVER single, isolated chemicals. Drugs are isolated chemicals. This is where the power of whole food supplements rests when comparing them to isolated vitamins, minerals, and drugs.
Instead, they are groups of biochemically interdependent substances that all work together—each cofactor performing a specific function—to deliver a collective nutritive effect to the body. This concept was then and is even more so now, in stark contrast to that of the reductionist-minded chemists, biochemists, and medicine as a whole who believe that nutritional complexes can be reduced to their “most important” parts. To these critics, Dr. Lee would often ask, “Which part of a watch keeps time?” No single part, of course. The various pieces work together to perform a function that transcends that of any of the individual parts. Moreover, only the complete set of parts will perform the function; remove just one of these parts, and the mechanism fails.
