An Interview with Dr. T. Colin Campbell by Barbara Ferguson Kennedy
“The United States is in the midst of a medical crisis. It has the highest per capita health care cost in any country in the world, but ranks number 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.”
Dr. Campbell
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., is the Project Director of the China Study and Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University. He has spent 30 years examining how nutrition is 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 Thomas, 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. The New York Times called the 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 nutrition and heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, and also its ability to reduce or reverse the risk or effects of these deadly illnesses. 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 health and nutrition 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.
“After a long career in research and policy-making, I have decided to step ‘out of the system.’ I have decided to disclose why Americans are so confused,” said Campbell. “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.”
“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, who granted this telephone interview to Health Science during his nationwide book tour, said his interest in health and nutrition 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.”
What made the China Study particularly unique, he said, “is that we focused on several things at once, such as blood, urine and food on all different kinds of diseases.”
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 local regions to determine the responsible dietary and lifestyle factors.
In the 1983 survey, 367 items of information were collected on how people lived and how they died in 138 rural Chinese villages; 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+ 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 one 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 8000 statistically significant associations between various dietary factors 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 amounts 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, and the minimal consumption of animal- based food, 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 plant-based food to maintain health and to prevent disease. Similar work has been done by physicians that was entirely consistent with what I found, but their work has not been widely acknowledged, and other physicians have not taken kindly to it.”
Campbell cites the example of Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, a surgeon at Cleveland Clinic, a leading coronary hospital in the U.S. “He took on 18 seriously ill heart patients who, between them, had had 49 serious coronary heart problems over the previous 8 years. Those 18 people, who were not expected to live that much longer, went from 49 coronary events in that last 8 years to zero coronary events over the next 20 years.”
“Dr. Esselstyn showed that he could use a whole, plant- food diet to treat a serious disease such as heart disease, reverse it, and cure it. Most people would think that’s impossible, but that is what he did,” said Campbell, adding that his medical accomplishment gained little recognition. “Compare this to a drug that was only 1/10 as good as this dietary effect, and it would make headlines in all the national papers.”
“I’ve learned of other physicians who similarly treated patients for various types of ailments, such as rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and respiratory problems and, to some extent, cancer, diabetes, and obviously, obesity. Some of these ailments are usually fatal, others are morbid, and they cause a lot of problems. When these doctors treated their patients the same way, with a plant-based diet, they were able to cure them of their
problems.”
“The results they were getting were entirely consistent with what I had found in my research,” said Campbell.
©Copyright 2005. All Rights Reserved. Health Science is the publication of the National Health Association. This article reprinted from the Spring 2005 issue.