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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The China
Study : The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the
Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health by T.
Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II |
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Rating: |
**** |
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(Highly
Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Choices Readers of Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s new
book, The
China Study, will discover a wealth of incontrovertible evidence about
the relationship between diet and health. All the research indicates that
consuming a plant based diet leads to health, while consuming an animal based
diet increases the chances of becoming overweight and encountering disease.
The facts I applaud people for trying
to achieve a healthy weight. I don’t question the worthiness or dignity of
overweight people any more than I question cancer victims. My criticism is of
a societal system that allows and even encourages this problem. I believe,
for example, that we are drowning in an ocean of very bad information,
too much of it intended to put money into someone else’s pockets. What we
really need, then, is a new solution comprised of good information for
individual people to use at a price that they can afford. THE SOLUTION 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. Have you ever known anyone
who regularly consumes fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grain foods—and
rarely, if ever, consumes meats or junk foods like chips, French fries and
candy bars? What is his or her weight like? If you know many people like
this, you have probably noticed that they tend to have a healthy weight. Now
think of traditional cultures around the world. Think of traditional Asian
cultures (Chinese, Japanese, Indian), where a couple of billion people have
been eating a mostly plant-based diet for thousands of years. It’s hard to
imagine these people—at least until recently—as anything other than slender. Now imagine a guy buying
two hot dogs and ordering his second beer at a baseball game, or a woman
ordering a cheeseburger and fries at your local fast food joint. The people
in these images look different, don’t they? Unfortunately, the guy munching
his hot dogs and sipping his beer is rapidly becoming the “all-American”
image. I have had visitors from other countries tell me that one of the first
things they notice when they arrive in our good land is the exceptional
number of fat people. Solving this problem does
not require magic tricks or equations involving blood types or carbohydrate
counting or searching. Simply trust your observations on who is slim,
vigorous and healthy, and who is not. Or trust the findings of some impressive
research studies, large and small, showing time and time again that
vegetarians and vegans are slimmer than their meat-eating counterparts.
People in these studies who are vegetarian or vegan are anywhere from five to
thirty pounds slimmer than their fellow citizens.7-13 In a separate intervention
study, overweight subjects were told to eat as much as they wanted of foods
that were mostly low-fat, whole-food and plant-based. In three weeks these
people lost an average of seventeen pounds.14 At
the Pritikin Center, 4,500 patients who had gone
through their three-week program got similar results. By feeding a
mostly plant-based diet and promoting exercise, the Center found that its
clients lost 5.5% of their body weight over three weeks.15 Published results for still
more intervention studies using a low-fat, whole foods, mostly plant-based
diet: • About
two to five pounds lost after twelve days16 • About
ten pounds lost in three weeks17,18 • Sixteen
pounds lost over twelve weeks19 • Twenty-four
pounds lost after one year20 All of these results show
that consuming a whole foods, plant-based diet will help you to lose weight
and, furthermore, it can happen quickly. The only question is how much
weight you can lose. In most of these studies, the people who shed the most
pounds were those who started with the most excess weight.21 After
the initial weight loss, the weight can be kept off for the long term by
staying on the diet. Most importantly, losing weight this way is consistent
with long-term health. Some people, of course, can
be on a plant-based diet and still not lose Weight. There are a few very good
reasons for this. First and foremost, losing body weight on a plant-based
diet is much less likely to occur if the diet includes too many refined
carbohydrates. Sweets, pastries and
pastas won’t do it.
These foods are high in readily digested sugars and Starches and, for the pastries,
oftentimes very high in fat as well. As identified in chapter four, these
highly processed, unnatural foods are not part of a plant-based diet that
works to reduce body weight and promote health. This is one of the main
reasons that I usually refer to the optimal diet as a whole foods, plant-based diet. Notice that a strict
vegetarian diet is not necessarily the same thing as a
whole foods, plant-based diet. Some people become vegetarian only to
replace meat with dairy foods, added oils and refined carbohydrates,
including pasta made with refined grains, sweets and pastries. I refer to
these people as “junk-food vegetarians” because they are not consuming a
nutritious diet. The second reason weight
loss may be elusive is if a person never engages in any physical activity A
reasonable amount of physical activity, sustained on a regular basis, can pay
important dividends. Thirdly, certain people
have a family predisposition for overweight bodies that may make their
challenge more difficult. If you are one of these people, I can only say that
you probably need to be especially rigorous in your diet and exercise. In
rural Keeping body weight off is
a long-term lifestyle choice. Gimmicks that produce impressively large, quick
weight losses don’t work in the long term. Short-term gains should not come
along with long-term pain, like kidney problems, heart disease, cancer, bone
and joint ailments and other problems that may be brought on with popular
diet fads. If the weight was gained slowly, over a period of months and
years, why would you expect to take it off healthily in a matter of weeks?
Treating weight loss as a race doesn’t work; it only makes the dieter more
eager to quit the diet and go back to the eating habits that put them in need
of losing weight in the first place. One very large study of 21,105 vegetarians
and vegans23 found that body mass index was “... lower among those who had adhered to
their diet for five or more years” compared to people who had been on the
diet for less than five years. WHY THIS WILL WORK FOR YOU So there is a solution to
the weight-gain problem. But how can you apply it to your own life? First of all, throw away
ideas about counting calories. Generally speaking, you can eat as much as
you want and still lose weight—as long you eat the right type of food. (See
chapter twelve for details.) Secondly, stop expecting sacrifice, deprivation
or blandness; there’s no need. Feeling hungry is a sign that something is
wrong, and prolonged hunger causes your body to slow the overall rate of
metabolism in defense. Moreover, there are mechanisms in our bodies that
naturally allow the right kind of plant-based foods to nourish us, without
our having to think about every morsel of food we put in our mouths. It is a
worry-free way to eat. Give your body the right food and it will do the right
thing. In some studies, those who
follow a whole foods, low-fat, plant-based diet consume
fewer calories. It’s not because they’re starving themselves. In fact, they
will likely spend more time eating and eat a larger volume of food than their
meat-eating counterparts.22 That’s because fruits, vegetables and
grains—as whole foods—are much less energy-dense than animal foods and added
fats. There are fewer calories in each spoonful or cupful of these foods.
Remember that fat has nine calories per gram while carbohydrates and protein
have only four calories per gram. In addition, whole fruits, vegetables and
grains have a lot of fiber, which makes you feel full22,23 and yet contributes almost no calories to your
meal. So by eating a healthy meal, you may reduce the calories that you
consume, digest and absorb, even if you eat significantly more food. This idea on its own,
however, is not yet a sufficient explanation for the benefits of a whole foods, plant-based diet. The same criticisms I
made against the Atkins diet and the other popular “low-carb”
diets (chapter four) can also be applied to short-term studies in which
subjects consume fewer calories while eating a plant-based diet. Over the
long term, these subjects will find it very difficult to continue consuming
an abnormally low level of calories; weight loss due to calorie restriction
rarely leads to long-term weight loss. This is why other studies play such a
crucial part in explaining the health benefits of a whole
foods, plant-based diet, studies that show that the weight-loss effect
is due to more than simple calorie restriction. These studies document the
fact that vegetarians consume the same amount or even significantly more
calories than their meat-eating counterparts, and yet are still slimmer.11,24,25 The China Study demonstrated that
rural Chinese consuming a plant-based diet actually consume significantly
more calories per pound of body weight than Americans. Most people would
automatically assume that these rural Chinese would therefore be heavier than
their meat-eating counterparts. But here’s the kicker: the rural Chinese are
still slimmer while consuming a greater Volume of food and more calories.
Much of this effect is undoubtedly due to greater physical activity.
.
. but this comparison is
between average Americans and the least active Chinese, those who do office
work. Furthermore, studies done in Israel24 and the What’s the secret? One
factor that I’ve mentioned previously is the process of thermogenesis,
which refers to our production of body heat during metabolism. Vegetarians
have been observed to have a slightly higher rate of metabolism during rest,26 meaning they burn up slightly
more of their ingested calories as body heat rather than depositing them as
body fat.27 A relatively small increase in metabolic rate
translates to a large number of calories burned over the course of
twenty-four hours. Most of the scientific basis for the importance of this
phenomenon was presented in chapter four. EXERCISE The slimming effect of
physical activity is obvious. Scientific evidence concurs. A recent review of
all the credible studies compared the relationship between body weight and
exercise28 and showed that people who were more physically active
had less body weight. Another set of studies showed that exercising on a
regular basis helped to keep off weight originally lost through exercise
programs. No surprise here, either. Starting and stopping an exercise program
is not a good idea. It is better to build it into your lifestyle so that you
will become and continue to be more fit over all, not just burn off calories. How much exercise is needed
to keep the pounds off? A rough estimate derived from a good review28 suggested
that exercising a mere fifteen to forty-five minutes per day, every day, will
maintain a body weight that is eleven to eighteen pounds lighter than it
would otherwise be. Interestingly, we should not forget our “spontaneous”
physical activity, the kind that is associated with chores of daily life.
This can account for 100—800 calories per day (kcallday).29,
30 People who are regularly “up and about” doing physical things are
going to be well ahead of those who get trapped in a sedentary lifestyle. The advantages of combining
diet and exercise to control body weight were brought home to me by a very
simple study involving our experimental animals. Recall that our experimental
animals were fed diets containing either the traditional 20% casein (cow’s
milk protein) or the much lower 5% casein. The rats consuming the 5% casein
diets had strikingly less cancer, lower blood cholesterol levels and longer
lives. They also consumed slightly more calories but burned them off as body
heat. Some of us had noticed over
the course of these experiments that the 5% casein animals seemed to be more
active than the 20% casein animals. To test this idea, we housed rats fed
either 5% or 20% casein diets in cages equipped with exercise wheels
outfitted with meters to record the number of turns of the wheel. Within the very first day, the 5% casein fed
animals voluntarily “exercised” in the wheel about twice as much as the 20% casein-fed animals.31 Exercise remained considerably higher
for the 5% casein animals throughout the two weeks of the study. Now we can combine some
really interesting observations on body weight. A plant-based diet operates
on calorie balance to keep body weight under control in two ways. First, it
discharges calories as body heat instead of storing them as body fat, and it
doesn’t take many calories to make a big difference over the course of a
year. Second, a plant-based diet encourages more physical activity. And, as
body weight goes down, it becomes easier to be physically active. Diet and
exercise work together to decrease body weight and improve overall health. GOING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION Obesity is the most ominous
harbinger of poor health that Western nations currently face. Tens of
millions of people will fall prey to disability, putting our health care
systems under greater strain than has previously been seen. There are many people and
institutions working to reduce this problem, but their point of attack is
often illogical and misinformed. First, there are the many quick-fix promises
and gimmicks. Obesity is not a condition that can be fixed in a few weeks or
even a few months, and you should beware of diets, potions and pills that
create rapid weight loss with no promise of good health in the future. The diet that helps to reduce weight in
the short run needs to be the same diet that creates and maintains health in
the long run. Second, the tendency to
focus on obesity as an independent, isolated disease32,33
is misplaced. Considering obesity in this manner directs our attention to a
search for specific cures while ignoring control of the other diseases to
which obesity is strongly linked. That is, we sacrifice context. Also, I would urge that we
ignore the suggestion that knowing its genetic basis might control obesity A
few years ago,34-36 there was
great publicity given to the discovery of “the obesity gene.” Then there was
the discovery of a second gene related to obesity, and a third gene, and a
fourth and on and on. The purpose behind the obesity gene search is to allow
researchers to develop a drug capable of knocking out or inactivating the
underlying cause of obesity. This is extremely shortsighted, as well as
unproductive. Believing that specific identifiable genes are the basis of
obesity (i.e., it’s all in the family) also allows us to fatalistically blame
a cause that we cannot control. We can control the cause. It is right at the end of our fork. It’s unlikely that The China
Study will become a popular book. Few readers will want to make the
informed choices that appear obvious from the facts gathered through the
research. You may not like what you read here. You may not want to do what
the data suggest. If you do, you’ll be healthier. Steve Hopkins,
December 22, 2005 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the January 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
China Study.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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