Fertilehealthy

This is without a doubt the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted.  The New York Times called this investigation the “Grand Prix of all epidemiological studies”.  Beg, borrow or steal buy it!

Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. has been at the forefront of nutrition research for more than 40 years.   He is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University and Project Director of the China-Oxford-Cornell Diet and Health Project, the culmination of a 20-year partnership between Cornell University, Oxford University and the Chinese Academy of Preventative Medicine.

Dr. Campbell received his master’s degree and Ph.D. from Cornell, and served as a Research Associate at MIT.  After 10 years on the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition at Virginia Tech, he returned to the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell in 1975.

He has spent his professional life researching the effects of nutrition on long term health, particularly on the cause of cancer.  He has conducted original research both in laboratory experiments and in large-scale human studies; has received more than 70 grant-years of peer-reviewed research funding, mostly from the National Institute of Health, lectured extensively and has published more than 300 research papers.  He has also received several awards for his work.

Dr. Campbell’s book, the China Study (co-written with his son, Tom), while highly scientific, is an easy and engrossing read.  Not only does he give the results of his studies, but he explains how the studies were designed and conducted.

Early in his career as a researcher at MIT and Virginia Tech, Dr. Campbell worked to promote better health by eating more meat, milk and eggs - so-called high-quality protein.  Having grown up on a farm, he was happy to believe that the American Diet was the best in the world.

Yet, while working on a project in the Phillipines, trying to figure out why so many children who had been given this “superior” diet, were being diagnosed with liver cancer, he uncovered a truly astonishing truth.  Children who ate the highest protein diets were the ones most likely to get liver cancer.  Other reports from around the world confirmed his findings.

Although it was “heretical” to say that protein wasn’t healthy, he began an in-depth study into the role of nutrition, especially protein, in the cause of cancer.  In laboratory tests, cancer could be arrested and even reversed by reducing dietary protein, especially animal protein.

This led to the China Project, which ran for 20 years and surveyed diseases and lifestyle factors in rural China and Taiwan.  China was an ideal testing ground for this project because the people in one area of China ate a certain diet and the people just a few hundred miles away may eat a completely different diet.  Unlike in the West, where we all eat very similarly, rural China is a “living laboratory” for studying the complex relationships between diet and disease.

The China Project was valid because it studied populations with a full range of dietary possibilities, from a completely plant-food diet to diets that included large amounts of animal foods.  As a result of significant regional differences in the way people eat, there were dramatic differences in the prevalance of disease from one region to another, and certain cancer rates varied by several hundredfold.  All in all, the project produced more than 8000 statistically significant associations between various dietary factors and disease.

The findings cannot be ignored:  “The people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic dissease…  People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease,” says Dr. Campbell.

The book also examines the source of nutritional confusion produced by powerful lobbies, government entities and opportunistic scientists.  Having served on various nutritional  and policy-making commitees and boards, Dr. Campbell has first-hand experience of what goes on behind the scenes.  The truth will shock and dismay you.

Dr. Campbell also touches on two physicians who have been treating their patients according to these principles for years: Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, a renowned surgeon and preventative cardiologist who has been successful in helping his patients reverse catastrophic heart disease through nutrition and Dr. John McDougall.  Their stories show what doctors who veer from the current acceptable medical treatments of drugs and surgery are up against.

This is not a diet-book or a “plan”, although people who heed the advice lose weight without having to count calories.  This is scientific evidence.  We may not like it, but the truth boils down to 8 principles:

1.  Nutrition represents the combined activities of countless food substances.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  What this means is that the chemicals we get from the food we eat are engaged in a series of reactions that work in concert to produce good health.

2.  Vitamin supplements are not a panacea for good health.  All supplements have side-effects and the dangers of a Western diet cannot be overcome by consuming nutrient pills.

3.  There are virtually no nutrients in animal-based foods that are not better provided by plants. 

4.  Genes do not determine disease on their own.  Genes function only by being activated, or expressed, and nutrition plays a critical role in determining which genes, good and bad, are expressed. 

5.  Nutrition can substantially control the adverse effects of noxious chemicals (carcinogens).

6.  The same nutrition that prevents disease in its early stages (before diagnosis) can also halt or reverse disease in its later stages (after diagnosis).

7.  Nutrition that is truly beneficial for one chronic disease will support health across the board.  Which means that the diet that protects you against cancer will keep your heart healthy, stabilize your weight, balance your hormones, retard aging and prevent bone-loss.

8.  Good nutrition creates health in all areas of our existence.  All parts are interconnected.  Our food choices have an incredible impact not only on our metabolism, but also on the initiation, promotion and even reversal of disease, on our energy, on our physical activity, on our emotional and mental well-being and on our environment.

As I said at the start, everybody needs to read this book and spread the word.