Over 2,200 years ago, the first Chinese encyclopedic classic - The Annals of Lü Buwei 呂氏春秋 wrote: 今世上卜筮禱祠，故疾病愈來，譬之若射者，射而不中，反修于招，何益於中？夫以湯止沸，沸愈不止，去其火則止矣。故巫醫毒藥，逐除治之．故古之人賤之也，為其末也。《呂氏春秋．季春紀．盡數》. Translated into English, it stated “There is an increase in illness as people resort to prayers and divination that is like moving the target to improve the score of an archer. How could it possibly improve the skill of the archer? To give another analogy, how could one stop a pot of water from boiling if one keeps adding hot water to the pot? What one should do is to turn off the fire instead. That is why our learned ancestors looked down on shaman and medicines for temporary reliefs; they don’t address the root cause of the problems.”
Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Dr. T. Colin Campbell, the Jacob Gould Schuman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry of the Cornell University, did just that. He went after the very foundation of our health and examined the impact of nutrition/diet on our long term health. With rave reviews and half a million copies sold of his 2005 best seller The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health, Dr, Campbell’s advocacy has been drawing a lot of attention. The work also led directly to the drastic change of diets of at least one high profile case – that of the former President Bill Clinton after his second heart surgery in early 2010. Here is the Nov. 2010 Clinton’s interview with CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer on this subject.
So what is this fuss all about? If I can sum it up in one sentence, it is pretty simple and straightforward: Whole food, plant-based diet is good for you. Note plant-based diet does exclude ALL animal products, fish, eggs and dairy products included. The emphasis of whole food is important as well. Highly processed and refined carbohydrates found in white bread, snacks, junk food are NOT whole food and are not good for you.
Being an established and highly respected leading scientist, Dr. Campbell challenged the conventional wisdoms from with-in. He took a revolutionary approach to make sense for us the hopelessly confusing relationship between nutrition, diet and health; something most of us don’t think much of it till we are hit with serious health concerns or if and when we do, we can’t figure out how true each of the contradicting claims is.
Conventional scientific and medical researches focus on isolating individual components/factors and finding combinatorial and statistical relationships between such components and markers/indicators of diseases. Further, for many decades, much of the attention and resources have been directed at research of medicines and technologies that would alleviate acute problems and extend one’s life temporarily as opposed to help preventing diseases and improve our health and quality of life. Take heart disease as an example which is the leading cause of death in U.S., the advances of heart bypass surgery and angioplasty has dramatically reduce the death rate during a heart attack to about 15%. But did you know that “79% of patients showed impairment in some aspects of cognitive function seven days after the operation”, and that benefits of these procedures do not last -“Within ten years, half of the bypass patients will have died, had a heart attack or had their chest pain return.” It is clear that surgery, while saving lives, is not the answer.
What I and many did not know was the impressive finding by few prominent physicians like Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn (formerly with Cleveland Clinic) and Dr. Dean Ornish of U.C. San Francisco in last three decades. They offered convincing evidences that diet and lifestyle changes alone can effectively stop the deterioration and even reverse the coronary heart disease! Dr. Ornish and colleagues published in 1990 their famous Lifestyle Heart Trial (that Bill Clinton cited in his interview above). The results reported that 82% of the heart disease patients in their experimental group that adopted a low-fat vegetarian diet, stopped smoking, took stress management training with moderate exercises showed regression in their heart disease after only 1 year without use of lipid-lowering drugs! By the way, the patients of the control group who received the usual care did not fare too well with worsening chest pains and increased coronary blockage over the same period.
The story did not end with the diet and heart disease. Dr. Campbell presented similarly impressive findings with many chronic health problems such as obesity, type II diabetes, some autoimmune diseases like type I diabetes, Multiple Sclerosis, and some common cancers including breast, prostate and large bowel. While one may argue that for each disease the conditions and component culprits are not exactly the same, one common factor, when looking at the larger picture, emerged consistently that is the linkage to animal-based diet, dairy products included. Indeed, even for the most feared disease of cancer, Dr. Campbell cited studies and experiments that showed certain proteins found in dairy products and animal-based foods promote the growth of tumors. He noted the clear pattern of “nutrients from animal-based foods increased tumor development while nutrients from plant-based foods decrease tumor development.” It is also encouraging to know that compared to bad diet, genetic pre-disposition and occasional exposures to carcinogens are NOT nearly as critical as we might think in the development of cancer.
What does China have anything to do with all these and why was Dr. Campbell book entitled The China Study? It is perhaps not surprising that there have been a lot of arguments and attacks against the findings of benefits of plant-based diet which is difficult to perform large scale epidemiologic study in developed countries like U.S. as one would be hard pressed to find enough samples of subjects with a more plant-based diet. Luckily, in early 80’s, Dr. Campbell, Dr. Junshi Chen (then the Deputy Director of the Institute of Nutrition and Food Hygiene of Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine), and Prof. Richard Peto of the University of Oxford pulled off the famous China-Cornell-Oxford Project in China where diseases of affluence and excess (that is what most of the diseases discussed above!) were not present. With the support of Chinese government, the research team was able to take blood samples and conducted detailed interviews and survey, and performed thorough analysis of the diets, lifestyles and diseases of 6,500 residents - 100 samples from each of the 65 rural counties - across China. The data provides epidemiologists unprecedented opportunities to examine and establish clearly the links between diets and health.
In his book, Dr. Campbell summarized the results of China Study that revealed “plant-based foods are linked to lower blood cholesterol; animal-based foods are linked to higher blood cholesterol. Animal –based foods are linked to higher breast cancer rates; plant-based foods are linked to lower rates. Fiber and antioxidants from plants are linked to a lower risk of cancers of the digestive tract. Plant-based diets and active lifestyles result in a healthy weight, yet permit people to become big and strong.” That is, Whole food, plant-based diet is good for you and (too much) animal-based foods are bad for you.
As I read the book, I wonder how come I did not know about these findings and wisdom? How come my doctors continue giving me prescriptions of wonder drugs for some of my chronic problems and did not pursue with me the possibility of changing diet and lifestyle? If you have similar experiences, we are not alone. In fact, the little dirty secret is that most of our medical doctors are not trained with nutritional sciences and they are as confused as we are!
In his book, Dr. Campbell is critical about the existing medical-health care system and status-quo forces from scientific community, to industries and government. To begin with, it is probably a defect in human nature to dream of finding silver bullets and magical pills that will fix all of our health and longevity problems, ignoring the impact of our daily diets and lifestyle. In reality, such a distorted priority merely offers opportunities for research papers, proposals, and grants to conduct gazillions of experiments and opened the doors to more confusing and conflicting results from observations of seemingly related phenomena from ever-so-slightly-different angles and assumptions. You can find anecdotal stories of turf battles and NIH (Not-Invented-Here, not National Institute of Health) syndromes interspersed throughout Dr. Campbell’s. Worse, business interests take advantage of the confusions and often fund purpose-designed research and lobby school curriculum to advance their agenda. To complete the web, the industry craft clever and misleading promotions under the cover of sciences and health to further maximize their own profits. Do you know that the dietary supplement industry recorded about $20 billion dollars sales in U.S. last year and that the pharmaceutical industry is more than 15 times larger?
Many of us have learned at one time or the other that carbohydrates, proteins, and fats are the basic macro-nutrients that provide our bodies with energy that can be measured in calories. But how many of us know how much calories each of us needs daily to maintain a healthy weight given a particular level and style of activities? And after consulting various tools and tables to find the reference figures, how many of us remember how much calories are in each of the foods we bought, cooked, and consumed? Do you know roughly there are 4 calories in a gram of carbohydrate or protein and 9 calories in a gram of fat? But do you know how many grams of carbohydrate, protein and fat are in a 10 oz. ribeye steak or a bowl of rice you ate? Do you know how many carbohydrate, protein and fat are in a plate of Spaghetti with meatballs you just had? And how does cholesterol fit into all these equations?
Let us say you do know all these number. How does it help you to maintain good health for yourself? Do you know you can have a diet meeting the “recommended” nutrition level and calorie but will kill you? The reality is we do consume foods in whole and not in its components from Vitamins and minerals of A to Z, proteins, carbohydrates, etc. Foods are delivered with their nutrients together in one “package” of various forms and get absorbed and transformed in a not-completely-understood fashion by our wonderful body with a complex adaptive digestion system. Oversimplification can be dangerous and can have unintended consequences. For example, many had been led to believe carbohydrates are bad by the popular low-carb Atkins diet when in fact carbohydrates from fiber rich natural vegetables and fruits are essential for good health. Similarly many, especially those in developing countries, were led to believe that animal-protein is of higher quality and more efficient and desired in bridge the “protein” gap when too much of animal proteins are known to be bad for our bodies. The list goes on and on.
The beauty of Dr. Campbell’s work is that in one fell swoop, he showed us a way out of this maze. He demonstrated that while we may never understand all the interactions and positive/negative effects of component nutrients, we do know for sure that unlike animal-based diets, there is no adverse effect of whole food, plant-based diet in quantity. He argue convincingly that as long as one makes sure that one gets sufficient Vitamin B12 (which can be obtained through supplements), persistent whole food plant-based diet alone can improve one’s long term health significantly, along with moderate exercises and without any health supplements or long term medications. For people who have some of those long term health concerns, there is absolute no reason why one shouldn’t take up on Dr. Campbell’s advice seriously.
It may not be easy to change one’s diet or lifestyle drastically overnight and sustain it when these habits are shaped gradually over decades in social and cultural context. I think one practical way to make the change quickly is to first become what I would call a “Social Omnivore” or a “Home Vegan”. Just like a “social drinker” who drinks on social occasions only, if one eats only whole foods, plant-based diet at home (which is most of the time in my case) and usual diets in social occasions or when eating out (which is infrequent), one can reduce the consumption of animal-based diet down to a very low level by my calculation. I would not be surprised that even with such a modest attempt, one stands to reap most of the health benefits.
I am excited about what I have learned from Dr. Campbell’s book. I am optimistic about the prospect of improving my long term health through changed diet and plan to implement it shortly. Wish me luck. If you are interested in knowing more about this subject but don’t feel like to read Dr. Campbell’s 417 pages 6”x9” book, you may want to watch the newly released 90 minute long documentary movie called Forks Over Knives that traces the journey of Dr. Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. Talk to you soon!
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