The China Study And Its Implications For Our Health
The China Study is a compilation of 20 years of research done by Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine. It found more than 8000 associations between diet and diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
The study found that “[p]eople 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. These results could not be ignored,” according to Dr. T. Colin Campbell, one of the principle authors of the book The China Study. He was accompanied by Jacob Gould Schurman, and his son Thomas M. Campbell II.
The China Project (upon which the book by Dr. Campbell was named) surveyed the death rates over 20 years for 2400 counties and 880 million Chinese citizens. Most of the citizens lived in rural areas, had lived there their entire lives, and ate food that was produced locally. This helped the study because they were able to isolate groups that ate mostly plant protein from those with more access to animal protein sources. They found that there is a direct relationship between eating animal protein and the risk of getting breast, prostate, and bowel cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, autoimmune disease, obesity, degenerative brain disease, and macular degeneration. Not only will consuming animal products lead to an increased risk of getting those diseases, but eating a plant-based diet will lower the risk of those diseases. In fact, adapting a diet without animal protein not only reduces your chances of getting those illnesses, but it also can help to reverse the effects of them once you already have the diseases. I remember when I first learned that smokers who quit tobacco could reverse their lung damage. The same concept applies to meat-eaters. Once they stop eating meat products, their risk for disease decreases steadily.
The China Study is particularly fascinating to me because Dr. Campbell started his career working to promote eating more animal protein, as he was taught and fully believed in his youth. I think many vegans can relate to that because most of us grew up on meat products, and until we learned more about their affects on our body, we ate a great deal of them.
Dr. Campbell later took part in a research project on malnourished children in the Philippines to find out why so many of them developed liver cancer. The project assumed that the children were not eating enough protein, but they found out that the kids eating the most protein were the ones with the highest risk of cancer. A lot of their protein came from milk.
These findings forced him to reconsider his prior notions on nutrition and to do research on other countries about the role of nutrition on cancer. In one of his experiments, he was able to find that rats who ate casein (a milk protein) for 20% of their diet grew tumors. When the rats were given only plant-based diets, the tumors got smaller. When they went back to the casein diet, they tumors grew larger. Dr. Campbell kept looking at dairy products and found they are linked to Type 1 diabetes, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colorectal cancer. In countries where people don't consume much dairy, their rates of those cancers are much lower.
Back to the book's research... In The China Study, the authors talk about how people with the highest blood cholesterol levels have the highest risk of the typical diseases found in those same countries. Those with the lowest blood cholesterol levels have the lower rates of the same illnesses.
Even in China, where cholesterol levels overall are much lower than in Western countries, when a group was found with high levels of blood cholesterol, the group had the highest incidence of Western diseases. The diseases were much rarer in China than in Western countries at the time of the study.
Once they found this, they then found that blood cholesterol levels were in direct correlation to diet. They show several studies that indicate that animal protein increases blood cholesterol levels. Plant-based proteins contain no cholesterol, and actually help to reduce the amount of cholesterol that the body produces. Also, though saturated fat raises cholesterol, it doesn't do it as much as animal protein does.
How does this apply to our lives? The funny thing about The China Study was that even though the people studied eat far less animal protein than Americans, there was a still a direct correlation. The rural Chinese eat about 10% of their calories from protein, but only about 10% of their protein comes from animals. That means about 1% of the calories in a typical Chinese diet come from animal protein.
Now apply that info to the typical American diet. The average American eats about 15% of calories from protein, and 80% of the protein is from animals. That means about 12% of the calories in the typical American diet are from animal protein. That is a huge difference and so scary!
In the China Study, the authors use the information from the China Report to determine that the less animal products one consumes, the greater the health benefits. They also say that the "optimum percentage of animal-based products is zero, at least for anyone with a predisposition for a degenerative disease.”
Diseases of affluence: *many cancers
Diseases of poverty: *pneumonia Dr. Campbell says the diseases of affluence could be called "diseases of nutritional extravagance" because they are related to eating extravagantly.
In the Good Nutrition Guide section of The China Study, the authors recommend a diet based on whole grains and plant foods. They give solutions on changing from a traditional diet to a healthier, plant-based diet. One thing I like about this section is that it emphasizes that The China Study is not a diet book, and it says that you can eat as much as you like, of the right foods, and just avoid the wrong foods.
They also list their "Eight Principles of Food and Health": 1. Nutrition represents the combined activities of countless food substances.
The last section of the The China Study, "Why Haven't You Heard This Before?" talks about why Americans are not familiar with the truth about diet and information. Dr. Campbell even gives personal examples of others trying to silence his own research. We see instances of information manipulation in our daily lives, but are unaware of them. The book talks about powerful lobbyists, companies, and even government agencies that work to prevent normal people from learning about what food is actually good for them. The food industry works hard to prevent their products from being labeled as unhealthy. When you think about the wealthy corporations and how much money they would lose if people switched to more plant-based diets, you can imagine how much money is spent preventing the release of information about the health hazards of those foods. The medicine and surgery industry is said to be extremely focused on the money-makers, which are more drugs, rather than on curing the diseases. Many studies show that good nutrition can actually cure some diseases, but there those who produce these studies are often shunned from medical establishments like some kind of witches.
“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,” said Dr. Campbell.
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