Excerpt: Address delivered by Royal Lee before the Massachusetts Osteopathic Society
May 22, 1949
The Importance of Vitamin E
The next effect of cooking is to destroy in part if not wholly the oxidizable factors in foods, that is, cooking “burns” the food factors that the body ordinarily oxidizes. Heat speeds up oxidation, and so turns food to ash before it gets into the stomach.
The major function of Vitamin E seems to be to protect
certain factors in the tissues from oxidation. These factors include known vitamins as well as some that are unknown.
Among the newly discovered factors lost by oxidation is a vital part of vitamin E that seems to be necessary to protect us from such seizures of nervous pains like the doloroux and angina pectoris. Dogs fed white bread develop what veterinarians call running fits, and soon die. These fits are no doubt seizures like tic doloroux or angina pectoris, and cause the animal to go into the frenzy we call “fits.”
The human victim is as ignorant of the cause of his agony as the dog, but when we read the morning paper and read that Mr. Well-Known-Business Man died from a heart attack at the age of forty-eight and seemed normal at his work the day before, we can draw our own conclusions.
Especially when we find that cattle too will drop dead just as suddenly if fed grain that has lost its anti-oxidant Vitamin E by removal of the germ. We believe the deaths were due not directly to the lack of the Vitamin E but to the loss of the oxidi-zable factor that the E was protecting.
That is why there has been such variable results in heart disease from the use of the Vitamin E (as alpha tocopherol). What the victim really needs is the oxidizable factor itself, once it has been destroyed.
See Vitamin E – The Truth in Information Depot)