The China Study
August 16, 2010 by dr. lam · 6 Comments
I first heard about The China Study from a colleague of mine in the Entrepreneur’s Organization at a recent event. He said he had become a complete vegetarian because of it. Mentally, I sort of scoffed at it. A month later I did a hair transplant on a patient who had lost 137 pounds over the past 15 months and attributed his change of lifestyle to this book, The China Study. He underwent his hair transplant procedure on his birthday but instead of receiving a gift he gave me a gift of this book, which over the course of the past two months I have finally finished reading. It has changed my view on a ton of things in life.
For those who followed my blog last year realized that the book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan was a game changer for me. I have lost 35 pounds over the past year and a half owing a lot to Pollan’s writings. The China Study for me is the next phase in my journey, one that I have not entirely embraced because the message is utterly radical and difficult to digest, pun intended.
The author, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, was raised on a farm in which he drank a quart of milk each day and chowed down on steak or at least hearty meat almost daily. He has since over his life completely abandoned all animal proteins including dairy products (yes that means poultry and fish too) because of the findings he made in one of the largest if not the largest epidemiological study in history, the China Study.
I will not be able to summarize all of the findings in this book but encourage anyone and everyone to read this book even if you do not intend to be vegetarian. At least get the opinion of what is written so that you can make smart choices for yourself and for your family. What is interesting is that many people may assume that Campbell is a vegetarian because of animal rights. That is far from the truth. He got his PhD from Cornell University where he was studying how to maximize feeding of animals but he conducted animal studies to find out how to do so. He says that he had no way of getting around these animal studies to find his remarkable results that he did. Whether you agree or disagree with animal studies is not the point here.
What he found was that rats given a 20% animal-protein diet versus a 5% animal-protein diet and then exposed to a common mold fungus aflatoxin had 100% cancer rate in the former group and 0% in the latter. He argues that these were not extreme examples as you would find in the saccharine research done on lab rats where the equivalent in humans would be similar to ingesting pounds of saccharine every day for years, which would probably give anyone cancer. By the way, I have given up any artificial sweeteners last year because I think they are terrible for the body but that does not really matter for the purpose of this blog.
From this initial finding, he went on to evaluate the population in China, which he asserts is a relatively homogenous population, especially compared to the diverse genetic stock of the United States. He isolated out rural populations and standardized for multiple factors like sedentary lifestyle, job type, etc. He found that the populations that digested a higher proportion of animal proteins (which by the way is far lower than what we Americans eat) had a considerably higher incidence of cancer and heart disease than the sector that did not. In short, animal-protein digestion whether in dairy or in its native form is one of the principal causes of heart disease and cancer. So those on the Atkins Diet think twice. Campbell argues you can lose weight if you restrict your calorie intake even if you are eating cardboard and worms but that does not mean that it is healthy for you, i.e., the Atkins Diet yields weight loss through calorie restriction eating terrible stuff for your body. That is how it works.
He argues against moderation stating that the American Heart Association advocates a blood cholesterol level of below 200. He asserts that 35% of heart attacks occur in those individuals whose cholesterol falls between 150 to 200. He says that most of America is beholden to special-interest food groups who have made it okay to eat bad food and to get away with it. He finds that cancer rates are caused almost entirely by diet and only reflects a genetic predisposition of 2 to 3%. Only 2 to 3% of cancers are genetically related??? Difficult to believe.
Heart disease begins early. He cites the examples of young GIs who were killed during the Korean War and whose hearts in their early twenties were opened up. They were already fully clotted with plaques and arterial disease. He says that cancers are not only caused by diet, they are greatly accelerated by it. Eating a whole foods, plant-based diet not only slows down cancer, it can reverse it. Eating an animal-rich, protein-heavy diet can cause and accelerate cancer.
He believes that a strict vegetarian diet can reverse many of the trends in heart disease and cancer that plague Americans today. He does state that unfortunately many vegetarians are not that healthy because they eat fried foods rather than a “whole foods”, plant-based diet, which he sternly warns should be the diet for everyone. Unfortunately, we physicians charge for pills and are beholden to major pharmaceutical companies for our education so we are “pill this” and “pill that” instead of seeing that the fundamental change lies in diet, diet, diet.
Another interesting finding in the book is that cow’s milk is dreadful for you, and I don’t care if you are taking unpasteurized, raw milk. He argues the casein protein is a major cause of problems for cancer and heart disease. In fact, he says that babies under the age of 2 who have a familial predisposition toward Type I diabetes should not be fed cow’s milk because there is a virus in it that attacks the pancreatic islet cells and can make a child permanently insulin dependent.
I honestly believe that the reason why men’s lifespans are shorter than women’s is that we simply do not care about diet as much as women do. I have certainly been a culprit of this. Am I a strict vegetarian? No, not at all. Not yet at least. I still eat meat, etc. I have changed almost all my breakfast and lunches though to vegetarian and half of my dinners. I think it is a good start. If you asked me a year ago if I would become a vegetarian I would have laughed violently. Now I am not that certain. I want to live a long, healthy life free of “diseases of affluence”. For those who do not buy these ideas, I encourage you to read this book. It might change your brain as much as it has mine. I realize how controversial this topic is for many of you out there, but I felt a burden to my readership to publish this information even if I am assailed for doing so.