Book Review 1All of us have a friend or family member who suffers from diet-related diseases like diabetes, cancer or heart disease. Can we really continue to turn a blind eye to evidence that may radically change our lives for the better? With the right tools we can take back the power and become our own primary care providers.
The most important question when assessing any piece of research is to know who authored it. Dr. T. Colin Campbell is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University. He has more than seventy grant-years of peer-reviewed research funding. Remember that peer-reviewed research funding is the gold-standard for ensuring honesty and transparency in the research process. Dr. Campell has authored more than 300 research papers in more than forty years of research.
“By any number of measures, America’s health is failing. We spend far more, per capita, on health care than any other society in the world, and yet two thirds of Americans are overweight, and over 15 million Americans have diabetes, a number that has been rising rapidly. We fall prey to heart disease as often as we did thirty years ago, and the War on Cancer, launched in the 1970s, has been a miserable failure.
Half of Americans have a health problem that requires taking a prescription drug every week, and over 100 million Americans have high cholesterol. To make matters worse, we are leading our youth down a path of disease earlier and earlier in their lives. One third of the young people in this country are overweight or at risk of becoming overweight.
Increasingly, they are falling prey to a form of diabetes that used to be seen only in adults, and these young people now take more prescription drugs than ever before. These issues all come down to three things: breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
--The China Study, Introduction
The China Study is the result of 20-year project jointly arranged through Cornell University, Oxford University and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine. The New York Times described the book as the “most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.”The China Study examined "more than 350 variables of health and nutrition with surveys from 6,500 adults in more than 2,500 counties across China and Taiwan." Researchers sought to compare disease rates in China and Taiwan with those in rich Western countries. They wanted to know why Americans and other Western populations die of cancers and cardiovascular disease while the Chinese and Taiwanese almost never did at the time of the study.
The book’s authors claim to "conclusively demonstrate the link between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes, and cancer." But don't take their word for it. Judge for yourself.
Among the claims the book makes:
•Drugs and surgery don’t cure the diseases that kill most Americans.
•The genes that you inherit from your parents are not the most important factors in determining whether you fall prey to any of the ten leading causes of death.
•Vitamins and nutrient supplements do not give you long-term protection against disease.
•Type 1 diabetes, one of the most devastating diseases that can befall a child, is convincingly linked to infant feeding practices.
•Heart disease can be reversed with diet alone.
•Breast cancer is related to levels of female hormones in the blood, which are determined by the food we eat.
•Your doctor probably does not know what you need to do to be the healthiest you can be.
In Dr. Campbell's own words:
“What made [The China Study] especially remarkable is that, among the many associations that are relevant to diet and disease, so many pointed to the same finding: people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. Even relatively small intakes of animal-based food were associated with adverse effects. People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored. From the initial experimental animal studies on animal protein effects to this massive human study on dietary patterns, the findings proved to be consistent. The health implications of consuming either animal or plant-based nutrients were remarkably different.”
When someone of Dr. Campbell's credentials makes the above claims you might want to pay attention. And he’s not the only one. In the following weeks we’ll bring you more doctors, scientists and authors who represent the very best in the American spirit. Do yourself a favor and check them out. It’s your life we’re talking about here. So be well little cell.
The China Study website: www.thechinastudy.com/about.html
