The China Syndrome
…and the real science behind the West’s shocking health statistics
Colin Campbell spoke at the London launch of the Vegetarian & Vegan Foundation because, like us, he believes that animal products are responsible for the West’s worsening health statistics and the antidote is a plant-based diet.
He is eminently qualified to make that judgement as he is professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University, has published more than 300 research papers and was the drive behind the China study, the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Carried out in 1981, its findings should have caused a dietary revolution but didn’t.
With his son Tom, he has now turned the dry statistics of this seminal study into a brilliantly accessible, eminently readable and shockingly revealing book - The China Study (Benbella - available from the VVF).
Colin sets out his stall with some profound statements that challenge common beliefs. Neither synthetic chemicals nor genes are the main cause of cancer; genetic research for cures diverts attention from the cures that already exist; vitamin pills and supplements do not give long-term protection against disease; drugs and surgery don’t cure the diseases that kill most people in the West.
With over 750 references, most from primary sources, he maintains there is no secret about how to reduce cancer, heart disease, strokes, obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, kidney stones, Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune disease and even blindness. It’s diet!
The right diet can get diabetic patients off medication, reverse heart disease, produce better mental performance in old age, reduce the risk of breast and prostate cancer and kidney stones and cut the risk of children developing type 1 diabetes.
And what is the right diet? One rich in fruit and vegetables and the powerful, disease-preventing anti-oxidants they contain, and devoid of animal products - particularly animal protein. Colin’s experimental work illustrates this.
He found that cancer requires the right conditions to grow and some elements of the diet provide exactly the right environment while others slow cancer growth. He called them promoters and anti-promoters and cancer flourishes only when there are more promoters than antis.
By looking at tiny groups of cells called foci - the precursor cells to cancer - he found that their growth and development was almost entirely dependent upon how much protein was consumed and that this growth could be triggered or arrested by varying protein intake.
The protein that Colin used in his experiments was casein - animal protein derived from milk and the more that was ingested, the greater the cancer growth. When the same experiments were repeated with vegetable protein, there was no increase in cancer growth regardless of how much protein was ingested.
The China study itself was a 20-year collaboration between Cornell and Oxford Universities and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine. It used as its basis a monumental Chinese survey of the death rates from cancer and more than 40 other diseases of 880 million people, which revealed where death rates were high and where they were low. Cancer rates in some counties were more than 100 times higher than in others. By visiting 65 selected counties and getting 6,500 adults to fill in questionnaires and provide blood samples, the study still rates as one of the largest ever undertaken.
Colin Campbell stresses the point that despite large variations in Chinese diets, the team were still comparing those rich in plant foods to diets VERY rich in plant foods. Western studies compare diets rich in animal foods to those VERY rich in animal foods.
The shortcomings of this, he maintains, are shown by the famous US Harvard nurses study. This makes comparisons between nurses who eat a high-fat diet and those on a low-fat diet. All, however, eat a diet equally rich and extremely high in animal protein. If protein is so damaging then the lessons offered by this study are severely limited.
What the China study does show is that even small amounts of animal-based foods raise the risk of all Western degenerative diseases. It found that animal protein is even more effective at raising cholesterol levels and than either dietary cholesterol or saturated fat and greatly increases the risk of heart disease. With breast cancer, even unusually low intakes of animal-based foods were strongly linked to the disease. High fibre intake - of which there is none in meat and dairy - showed lower rates of rectum and colon cancer.
‘What are the odds that all these associations (and many others) favouring a plant-based diet are due to pure chance?,’ asks Colin Campbell. ‘It is extremely unlikely, to say the least. Such consistency of evidence is rare in scientific research. It points to a new world view, a new paradigm. It defies the status quo, promises new health benefits and demands our attention’.