T. Colin Campbell Quotes

The evidence cited here represents only an infinitesimally small fraction of the total number of interactions operating every moment in our bodies. Clearly, the common belief that we can investigate the effects of a single nutrient or drug, unmindful of the potential modifications by other chemical factors, is foolhardy. This evidence should also make us extremely hesitant to "mega-dose" on nutrients isolated from whole foods. Our bodies have evolved to eat whole foods, and can therefore deal with the combinations and interactions of nutrients contained in those foods.

No chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein.

Instead, the secret of health has been in front of us all along, in the guise of a simple and perhaps boring word: nutrition. When

I have come to see that the benefits produced by eating a plant-based diet are far more diverse and impressive than any drug or surgery used in medical practice. Heart diseases, cancers, diabetes, stroke and hypertension, arthritis, cataracts, Alzheimer's disease, impotence and all sorts of other chronic diseases can be largely prevented. These diseases, which generally occur with aging and tissue degeneration, kill the majority of us before our time.

worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco industry.

physicians, Drs. Bill Castelli, Bill Roberts and Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., that in their long careers they had never seen a heart disease fatality among their patients who had blood cholesterol levels below 150 mg/dL. Dr. Castelli was the long-time director of the famous Framingham Heart Study of NIH; Dr. Esselstyn was a renowned surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who did a remarkable study reversing heart disease (chapter five); Dr. Roberts has long been editor of the prestigious medical journal Cardiology. BLOOD CHOLESTEROL AND DIET

If you flip a coin three times and it lands on heads each time, it's probably chance. If you flip it a hundred times and it lands on heads each time, you can be pretty sure the coin has heads on both sides. That's the concept behind statistical significance - it's the odds that the correlation (or other finding) is real, that it isn't just random chance.

In short, it is about the multiple health benefits of consuming plant-based foods, and the largely unappreciated health dangers of consuming animal-based foods, including all types of meat, dairy and eggs.

I know of nothing else in medicine that can come close to what a plant-based diet can do. In theory, if everyone were to adopt this, I really believe we can cut health care costs by seventy to eighty percent. That's amazing. And it all comes from understanding nutrition, applying nutrition, and just watching the results.

Even rational, data-driven scientists could be sent into prolonged states of hysteria when presented with evidence that their favorite foods might be killing them.

When absurdities get repeated often enough, they start sounding like truth.

Every kilogram of beef requires 100,000 liters of water to produce. By comparison, a kilogram of wheat requires just 900 liters, and a kilogram of potatoes just 500 liters.

First, nutrition is the master key to human health. Second, what most of us think of as proper nutrition - isn't.

That's another pitfall of reductionism: Until scientists have the means to isolate and measure things, they insist those things don't and can't exist, and anyone who says otherwise is ignorant an superstitious.

Nutrition is not a mathematical equation in which two plus two is four. The food we put in our mouths doesn't control our nutrition - not entirely. What our bodies do with that food does.

Good health is about being able to fully enjoy the time we do have. It is about being as functional as possible throughout our entire lives and avoiding crippling, painful and lengthy battles with disease. There are many better ways to die, and to live.

The solution to losing weight is a whole foods, plant-based diet, coupled with a reasonable amount of exercise. It is a long-term lifestyle change, rather than a quick-fix fad, and it can provide sustained weight loss while minimizing risk of chronic disease.

These findings - the contents of Part II of this book - show that heart disease, diabetes and obesity can be reversed by a healthy diet.

Perhaps it is a testament to the power of modern marketing savvy that an obese man with heart disease and high blood pressure became one of the richest snake oil salesmen ever to live, selling a diet that promises to help you lose weight, to keep your heart healthy and to normalize your blood pressure.

Other countries spend, on average, only about one-half of what the U.S. spends per capita on health care. Isn't it reasonable, therefore, for us to expect our system to rank above theirs? Unfortunately, among these twelve countries, the U.S. system is consistently among the worst performers.

The ideal human diet looks like this: Consume plant-based foods in forms as close to their natural state as possible ("whole" foods). Eat a variety of vegetables, fruits, raw nuts and seeds, beans and legumes, and whole grains. Avoid heavily processed foods and animal products. Stay away from added salt, oil, and sugar. Aim to get 80 percent of your calories from carbohydrates, 10 percent from fat, and 10 percent from protein.

The health care establishment is structured to profit from chemical and surgical intervention. Diet still takes the back seat to drugs and surgery. One criticism that is constantly leveled at the dietary argument is that patients will not make such fundamental changes. One doctor charges that Dr. Esselstyn's patients change their eating habits simply because of Esselstyn's "zealous belief."47 This criticism is not only wrong and insulting to patients; it is also self-fulfilling. If doctors do not believe that patients will change their diets, they will neglect to talk about diet, or will do it in an off-handed, disparaging way.

Let's start with the most prominent ecological crisis of our time: global warming. When you look seriously at the numbers, you find that switching from a meat-based to a plant-based diet would do more to curb and reverse global warming than any other initiative.

For an enzyme to be functional, it must fold into a precise three-dimensional shape. How such a complex folding can take place remains a mystery. A small chain of 150 amino acids making up an enzyme has an extraordinary number of possible folding configurations: if it tested 1,012 different configurations every second, it would take about 1,026 years to find the right one. . . . Yet, a denatured enzyme can refold within fractions of a second and then precisely react in a chemical reaction. . . . [I]t demonstrates a stunning complexity and harmony in the universe.21

These studies showed that people who migrated from one area to another and who started eating the typical diet of their new residency assumed the disease risk of the area to which they moved.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

By now, I hope you recognize this as one more example of the reductionist paradigm at work, even when it's couched in natural and alternative terms. As we saw in chapter ten, one of the major problems with modern medicine is its reliance on isolated, unnatural chemical pharmaceuticals as the primary tool in the war against disease. But the medical profession isn't the only player in the health-care system that has embraced this element of reductionism. The natural health community has also fallen prey to the ideology that chemicals ripped from their natural context are as good as or better than whole foods. Instead of synthesizing the presumed "active ingredients" from medicinal herbs, as done for prescription drugs, supplement manufacturers seek to extract and bottle the active ingredients from foods known or believed to promote good health and healing. And just like prescription drugs, the active agents function imperfectly, incompletely, and unpredictably when divorced from the whole plant food from which they're derived or synthesized.

Casein, and very likely all animal proteins, may be the most relevant cancer-causing substances that we consume.

Men with the highest dairy intakes had approximately double the risk of total prostate cancer,

Nutrients from animal-based foods increased tumor development while nutrients from plant-based foods decreased tumor development. In

There is almost no direct relationship between the amount of a nutrient consumed at a meal and the amount that actually reaches its main site of action in the body - what is called its bioavailability.

Scientists can argue philosophy all day long, but what really counts is evidence. This begs the question: What counts as evidence? What ways of looking for answers are considered good or bad science? Which methods are appropriate for what subjects of exploration? The answers to these questions are themselves quite subjective, even if science believes itself to be an objective, value-free pursuit. They depend heavily on the questions being asked, and also on how the answers are sought.

The national debate on health-care reform wildly misses the mark, with Democrats and Republicans alike arguing about who's going to pay rather than about what would actually make people healthy.

You can't patent a recommendation to eat lots of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. So there's no incentive for industry to invest in such research and no incentive for researchers to study and validate such claims.

There's only one thing that we have to do in life, and that is to die.

Cows' milk protein may be the single most significant chemical carcinogen to which humans are exposed.

And as a nutritional researcher, I was surprised at first by the popularity and commercial success of the low-carb diet, especially given its serious flaws. The research on high-protein, high-fat diets has consistently demonstrated that they have disastrous health effects and fail to secure compliance and long-term weight loss.

The people who eat the most animal protein have the most heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

Excessive animal protein is at the core of many chronic diseases.

Costs have so consistently outpaced inflation that we now spend one out of every seven dollars the economy produces on health care

Furthermore, a pattern was beginning to emerge: nutrients from animal-based foods increased tumor development while nutrients from plant-based foods decreased tumor development.

I don't care if you eat worms and cardboard; if you eat 35% fewer calories, you will lose weight and your cholesterol levels will improve50 in the short run, but that is not to say that worms and cardboard form a healthy diet.

Foci development was almost entirely dependent on how much protein was consumed, regardless of how much aflatoxin was consumed!

Casein [the main protein found in dairy], in fact, is the most 'relevant' chemical carcinogen ever identified; its cancer-producin g effects occur in animals at consumption levels close to normal-striking ly unlike cancer-causing environmental chemicals that are fed to lab animals at a few hundred or even a few thousand times their normal levels of consumption.

The problem is that we are asking the wrong questions - questions based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the wholistic nature of nutrition. We're asking, "How much vitamin C are we getting?" when we should be asking, "What foods should we be eating to support our bodies' ability to maintain health?

Focusing on individual nutrients, their identities, their contents in food, their tissue concentrations, and their biological mechanisms, is like using math and physics to catch balls. It's not the way nature evolved, and it makes proper nutrition far more difficult than it needs to be. Our bodies use countless mechanisms, strategically placed throughout our digestion, absorption, and transport and metabolic pathways, to effortlessly ensure tissue concentrations consistent with good health - no database consultation required. But as long as we let reductionism guide our research and our understanding of nutrition, good health will remain unattainable.

In brief, the relationship between amount consumed and amount used for virtually all nutrients is not a linear relationship.

Usually, the first thing a country does in the course of economic development is to introduce a lot of livestock. Our data are showing that this is not a very smart move and the Chinese are listening. They are realizing that animal-based agriculture is not the way to go ... We are basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant food and minimizing our intake of animal foods ...

Plant- and animal-based foods are hugely different in terms of their nutrient contents, and watching what foods you consume is far more important than obsessing over calorie-counting without respect to where those calories come from.

A plant-based diet is more likely to produce good health and to reduce sharply the risk of heart problems, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, gallstones, and kidney disease.

Everything in food works together to create health or disease. The more we think that a single chemical characterizes a whole food, the more we stray into idiocy.

One way to identify the optimal human diet, pretty obvious to all but fundamentalist reductionists, is to survey and compare populations as they already exist, and see what they eat and how healthy they are.

In one study of ten countries,14 a higher consumption of calcium was associated with a higher - not lower - risk of bone fracture (Chart 10.3

The distinction between government, industry, science and medicine have become blurred.

What is clear is that diets naturally high in fiber and low in animal-based foods can prevent colorectal cancer.

With industry's sales and marketing machines cloaked in mantles of charitable virtue, no wonder most Americans don't realize that the junk that passes for food is in fact the biggest contributor to our health crisis, and the junk that passes for medicine keeps us just well enough to continue to spend on both the food and the medicine.

The increasing fascination with and funding of genetic technology is simply another medical dead end, another reductionist rabbit hole that will lead us no further toward preventing and reversing chronic illness.

You can't be protein deficient without being calorie deficient because even if you take the foods that have the least amount of protein in them, let's say potatoes, for example, or rice at 8 or 9%. That's the figure we more or less need.

Once people start introducing animal products into their diet, that's when the mischief starts.

Physician error, medication error and adverse events from drugs or surgery kill 225,400 people per year (Chart 1.5).11 That makes our health care system the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind only cancer and heart disease (Chart 1.4

It's never too late to start eating well. A good diet can reverse many of those conditions as well. In short: change the way you eat and you can transform your health for the better.

We need to make nutrition the central element of our health-care system. Furthermore,

At this point, any scientist, doctor, journalist, or policy maker who denies or minimizes the importance of a whole food, plant-based diet for individual and societal well-being simply isn't looking clearly at the facts. There's just too much good evidence to ignore anymore.

Real scientists investigate parts, not wholes. But this diminishes the goals of true science. What most scientists are doing today really should be called technology, not science.