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The China Study: Book Review
May 22, 2005
The China Study:  Book Review

Reviewed by Mark Epstein

As members of the National Health Association, we are very lucky. For nearly 60 years as an organization, we’ve helped people understand that health is the result of healthful living, and we’ve created gatherings and materials to educate each other. Many great health professionals have walked through our doors.

It was about 20 years ago that T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., first spoke at one of our conferences, and we have benefited deeply ever since from knowing each other. Dr. Campbell’s life work has helped us to better understand the nutritional causes of health and disease, and his new book The China Study is a crowning achievement. Brilliantly written, The China Study reads like a spy novel, sharing with us Dr. Campbell’s life journey as a researcher and policy maker.

[T. Colin Campbell] This is a book you’ll want to buy by the case and give copies to everyone you know. If this information is new to you, it will change your life. If you are already familiar with the ideas, this book will ground you with confidence and knowledge like never before.

Here is what others are saying about The China Study…

The China Study gives critical, life-saving nutritional information for every health-seeker in America. But, it is much more; Dr. Campbell’s exposГ© of the research and medical establishment makes this book a fascinating read and one that could change the future for all of us. Every health care provider and researcher in the world must read it.
Joel Fuhrman, M.D., author of the bestselling book, Eat to Live

The China Study is a rare treat. Finally, a world-renowned nutritional scholar has explained the truth about diet and health in a way that everyone can easily understand-a startling truth that everyone needed to know. In this superb volume, Dr. Campbell has distilled, with his son Tom, for us the wisdom of his brilliant career. If you feel any confusion about how to find the healthiest path for yourself and your family, you will find precious answers in The China Study. Don’t miss it!
Douglas J. Lisle, Ph.D., and Alan Goldhamer, D.C., authors of The Pleasure Trap

Foreword from The China Study

Written by John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America, Reclaiming Our Health, and The Food Revolution

If you are like most Americans today, you are surrounded by fast food chain restaurants. You are barraged by ads for junk foods. You see other ads, for weight-loss programs, that say you can eat whatever you want, not exercise and still lose weight. It’s easier to find a Snickers bar, a Big Mac or a Coke than it is to find an apple. And your kids eat at a school cafeteria whose idea of a vegetable is the ketchup on the burgers.

You go to your doctor for health tips. In the waiting room, you find a glossy 243-page magazine titled Family Doctor: Your Essential Guide to Health and Well-being. Published by the American Academy of Family Physicians and sent free to the office of all 50,000 family doctors in the United States, it’s full of glossy full-page color ads for McDonald’s, Dr. Pepper, chocolate pudding and Oreo cookies.

You pick up an issue of National Geographic Kids, a magazine published by the National Geographic Society “for ages six and up,” expecting to find wholesome reading for youngsters. The pages, however, are filled with ads for Twinkies, M&Ms, Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Hostess Cup Cakes and Xtreme Jell-O Pudding Sticks.

This is what scientists and food activists at Yale University call a toxic food environment. It is the environment in which most of us live today.

The inescapable fact is that certain people are making an awful lot of money today selling foods that are unhealthy. They want you to keep eating the foods they sell, even though doing so makes you fat, depletes your vitality and shortens and degrades your life. They want you docile, compliant and ignorant. They do not want you informed, active and passionately alive, and they are quite willing to spend billions of dollars annually to accomplish their goals.

You can acquiesce to all this, you can succumb to the junk food sellers, or you can find a healthier and more life-affirming relationship with your body and the food you eat. If you want to live with radiant health, lean and clear and alive in your body, you’ll need an ally in today’s environment.

Fortunately, you have in your hand just such an ally. T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., is widely recognized as a brilliant scholar, a dedicated researcher and a great humanitarian. Having had the pleasure and privilege to be his friend, I can attest to all of that, and I can also add something else. He is also a man of humility and human depth, a man whose love for others guides his every step.

Dr. Campbell’s new book – The China Study – is a great ray of light in the darkness of our times, illuminating the landscape and the realities of diet and health so clearly, so fully, that you need never again fall prey to those who profit from keeping you misinformed, confused and obediently eating the foods they sell.

One of the many things I appreciate about this book is that Dr. Campbell doesn’t just give you his conclusions. He doesn’t just preach from on high, telling what you should and shouldn’t eat, as if you were a child. Instead, like a good and trusted friend who happens to have learned, discovered and done more in his life than most of us could ever imagine, he gently, clearly and skillfully gives you the information and data you need to fully understand what’s involved in diet and health today. He empowers you to make informed choices. Sure, he makes recommendations and suggestions, and terrific ones at that. But he always shows you how he has arrived at his conclusions. The data and the truth are what are important. His only agenda is to help you live as informed and healthy a life as possible.

I’ve read The China Study twice already, and each time I’ve learned an immense amount. This is a brave and wise book. The China Study is extraordinarily helpful, superbly written and profoundly important. Dr. Campbell’s work is revolutionary in its implications and spectacular in its clarity.

If you want to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast and then take cholesterol-lowering medication, that’s your right. But if you want to truly take charge of your health, read The China Study, and do it soon! If you heed the counsel of this outstanding guide, your body will thank you every day for the rest of your life.

Foreword printed courtesy of Ben Bella Books

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