The Medicine Man: The American Medical Association's Campaign Against Natural Food

The AMA's 1959 film "The Medicine Man" discouraged people from eating whole wheat and other healthy foods.

I’ve run into all sorts of unexpected things in the course of my research on organic farming history. Some are funny, some are intriguing, and some are disturbing. And now that I’m up to the late 1950s in drafting my book chapters, I’m in the most disturbing time period of all—when government agencies and trusted scholarly authorities withheld important health information from the public. Unfortunately, one of the organizations most responsible for convincing consumers that organic and natural foods were bad was the American Medical Association. I wish it wasn’t so, but the evidence is there in black and white.

In the late 1950s, the American Medical Association, in collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration, launched a massive educational campaign against “food faddism.” Along with illustrated brochures and interactive displays, the centerpiece of this campaign was a film called “The Medicine Man.” In this film (available on YouTube), a huckster named “Dr. Woulff” tells a group of gullible citizens that “the secret to health is proper nutrition,” then smashes a piece of white bread into a ball and says, "They’ve refined out all the good.” Then, of course, he tells the people to buy his cookbook and dietary supplements.

Cover of an educational packet distributed by AMA, including over a dozen articles discouraging people from eating natural or organic foods.

Smelling a rat, the film’s protagonist (a journalist) decides to ask a medical expert at the university whether Dr. Woulff’s claims have any validity. The researcher, dressed in a white lab coat with lots of beakers and other scientific equipment in the background, says that he’s doing a rat study where one group of rats is being fed white bread and the other group is eating a “special health bread” made from whole wheat flour, a bunch of dehydrated vegetables, bone meal, and sunflower seeds. “I can’t find any differences,” the scientist says. (Real feeding trials, like those done by Sir Robert McCarrison, actually did show that whole wheat was superior.) “There’s a food faddism sweeping the country,” he warns.

Now, there’s no denying that there were some unscrupulous people on the fringes of the organic and natural food movement in the 1950s. One of them, Adolphus Hohensee, was notorious for making claims that his supplements would cure any kind of ailment, eventually landing him an eighteen-month stint in prison for medical quackery. But the AMA could have discredited these unethical opportunists without attacking natural, healthy foods as well. Instead, they did their best to discourage people from eating whole grains and other natural foods.

 “Whole grains, bran, and wheat germ are good foods and may be useful in the diets of those whose digestive apparatus is not irritated by them,” AMA told schoolchildren in a 1958 article titled “Let ’Em Eat Hay. “However, they are not wonder foods and cannot be considered an essential part of all diets.” Another brochure, titled “The Merchants of Menace,” said, “Herbs, unprocessed cereals, and blackstrap molasses do contain some nutrients—plus an unexpected ‘bonus’ of stems, rust, and husks! However, the same nutritional value can be obtained in a standard combination of more palatable, common foods.”

Whether or not it was the AMA’s original intent, the “medicine man” campaign was so successful that an entire generation of Americans grew up thinking that natural, whole foods were unpalatable, expensive, and a sign that someone had been duped into buying them by a real-life Dr. Woulff. An organization supposedly dedicated to protecting the public health discouraged many people from eating healthy food. What I still don’t know is why they did it.