The China Study: A compelling book on nutrition

I've just completed The China Study, a compelling book on nutrition. Rather than providing detailed eating advice and recipes of a particular diet, the book draws from hundreds of scientific references to come to some simple conclusions: A whole-foods, plant-based diet is very healthy, and can help to prevent and reserve a number of diseases including cancer, heart disease diabetes and number of auto-immune disorders.

I'll offer three somewhat random points from the book as examples, which you can read below.

One study the author T. Colin Campbell looked at was conducted by Dr. Lester Morrison in the 1940s. Dr. Morrison took a pool of 100 heart attack survivors and divided them into two groups. The control group maintained their normal diet. In the experimental group, meat and dairy consumption was severely reduced. The result? After 12 years, the entire control group had died, while 38% of the people on the low-dairy, low-meat diet survived.

I researched the original source further, and found this reference (search for "Lester Morrison"), which links this doctor with another: Dr. Pritikin. It seems Dr. Pritikin was having heart problems himself, but was able to reverse them by changing his diet, and went on to found his own successful diet system based on the same principles. Pritikin's low-dairy, low-meat system has been given positive endorsements by the USDA and the World Health Organization.

Flipping through the book again, I find a compelling chart on page 170, showing a very strong correlation between meat consumption and female colon cancer, grouped by country. America was shown to second in meat consumption and in our our rates of colon cancer. By contrast, Japan had one of the lowest rates of meat consumption, and extremely low rates of colon cancer as well.

I checked the reference on this one, a report from 1975 entitled: "Environmental Factors and Cancer incidence and mortality" It appears to be frequently cited by organizations like the FDA and the World Health Organization. Examples of correlations with meat and dairy consumption with several other kinds of cancers are given as well. this video features the author speaking about the connection between animal protein and cancer.

Another topic tackled is obesity. The author references five studies showing that vegetarians and vegans tend to be five to thirty pounds slimmer than their fellow citizens. Further, more studies showed that switching to a low-fat, whole foods, mostly plant-based diet, resulted in short and long term weight loss.

I followed up on one of his sources here, too, this time from the British Medical Journal. The article is entitled is Prevalence of obesity is low in people who do not eat meat and is available online.

From reviewing the primary source, I confirmed that in the study vegetarians on and vegans on average had "normal" weights-- dispelling the misconception that this diet might cause weight lose to an unhealthy degree.

What's it mean for me?

I currently have a low-dairy vegetarian diet. It works well for me. I have a "Body Mass Index" in the normal range, and have the strength and energy I want be very active-- doing things like riding a bicycle loaded with camping gear from here in Indiana to Tennessee.

Still, I expect to make some changes to my diet after reading this book, including further reducing my intake of dairy.

A larger impact is that I now have a changed attitude about my diet. I no longer feel like being a low-dairy vegetarian is a fringe choice that happens to "work for me". While I still believe in different strokes for different folks, It certainly seems there is a large body of science support that a whole-foods, plant-based diet is healthy for a lot of people. Perhaps I'll post more notes and recipes on the topic as I travel this path.

For a more traditional review of the book, you might enjoy the review by Sandy Laurie.