Diet and DiseaseThe Connection is Significant!Do You Know who published the most comprehensive study about the relationship between diet and disease?
The Problem is a Medical Crisis! The United States has the highest per capita health care cost for any country in the world, but ranks No. 37 in terms of quality of health care. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight, and more than 15 million Americans have diabetes. Half of all Americans have a health problem that requires taking a prescription drug every week, and more than 100 million Americans have high cholesterol. T. Colin Campbell, PhD, is the project director of the China Study and Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, and has spent over 40 years examining how the connection beween diet and disease has been corrupted by special interests and industries, and largely ignored by the health establishment, despite the fact that proper nutrition can, he says, correct many troubling health trends. Dr. Campbell, with his son Tom, is the author of the recently published book The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health. (http://www.thechinastudy.com) The New York Times has called this study the “Grand Prix of Epidemiology,” and the “most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.” In The China Study, Dr. Campbell details the connection between diet and disease. He says we have the abiliy to reduce and even reverse the risks of heart disease, cancer and diabetes. His book also examines the source of nutritional confusion produced by powerful lobbies, government entities and the food industry. The China Study is not a diet book. Campbell says consumers are bombarded with conflicting messages regarding diet and disease because the market is flooded with popular fad diet books like The Atkins Diet and The South Beach Diet. Instead, his book delivers an insightful message to anyone living with cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and those concerned with the effects of aging. Additionally, he challenges the validity of these low-carb fad diets. “As a taxpayer who foots the bill for research and health policy in America, you deserve to know that many of the common notions you have been told about food, health and disease are wrong,” said Campbell. “I propose to do nothing less than redefine what we think of as good nutrition. You need to know the truth about food, and why eating the right way can save your life.” As a researcher with MIT and Virginia Tech, Campbell worked to promote better health. It was a sharp departure from his upbringing on a dairy farm, and his time at Cornell University “to do doctoral research on how to grow cows more efficiently. Both personally and professionally, I had a typical attitude that almost everyone else has.” Now Campbell has made a complete career reversal: Animal foods “tend to promote the initiation and progression of these serious diseases, whereas plant food tends to prevent these diseases.” Campbell says that his interest in the connection between diet and disease peaked while working in the Philippines to develop a program to feed malnourished children. During this project, Campbell said he uncovered “a dark secret.” "Children who ate the highest protein diets were the ones most likely to get liver cancer. ...” He began to review other reports from around the world that reflected the findings of his research in the Philippines. Although it was “heretical to say that protein wasn’t healthy,” he started an in-depth study into the role of nutrition, especially protein, in the cause of cancer. “I saw this dichotomy emerging between animal protein and plant protein based foods,” said Campbell. “In the China Study, we surveyed a very large population across the entire country and measured many different things. We had the opportunity to compare the relative effects of animal and plant based foods on cancer, heart disease, blood cholesterol, etc.” Two major surveys were made in China in 1983 and in 1989-90, because Campbell thought cancers and various other diseases would vary with geographic localization. He said it made sense to examine these regions to determine the responsible dietary and lifestyle factors. In the 1983 survey, 367 items of information were collected on how people in 138 Chinese villages live and die; 6,500 adults and their families were surveyed. In the 1989-90 survey, more than 1,000 items of information were collected in 170 villages in rural China and Taiwan, involving 10,200 adults and their families. This new data, including a large number of socioeconomic characteristics, was combined with his new survey on causes of death for a population of 100 million (1.4 million death certificates for the years 1986-88). Campbell has continued to gather data from these combined surveys for 20 plus years. “The results we got indicated that relatively small intakes in animal based foods were problematic, as they tended to be associated with the kind of diseases that are common in developed countries. This was also consistent with the patterns that emerged over time in different societies when people change their native diet over to food that was rich in animal foods,” he said. The research project, and now his book, culminates a 20-year partnership of Cornell University, Oxford University and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, regarding diseases and lifestyle factors in rural China and Taiwan. Called the China Study, the project eventually produced more than 8,000 statistically significant associations between diet and disease. The findings? “People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease,” said Campbell. He also discovered that small amount of animal-based foods could be harmful. “We discovered that relatively small intakes of animal food could create a negative effect. Whole plant-based foods had the best health advantage — specifically whole grain cereals, rice and the like, with a minimum of salt, sugar and fat — which is the major message we were relayed in the study.” Campbell regrets that his research, and similar findings by others, continues to be largely ignored by the medical community. “Cancer, heart disease, and other problems would substantially be reduced by people who know of the enormous power of a plant-based food to maintain health and to prevent disease. Similar works entirely consistent with what I found have been done by physicians, but have not been widely acknowledged. And other physicians have not taken kindly to it.”
Source: Dr. T. Colin Campbell, TheChinaStudy.com
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Listen Now to Dr. T. Colin Campbell, a respected health and nutrition researcher, talk about his legendary work…The China Study: Shocking Truths about Diet and Disease.
