Colin Campbell: “Nutrition can create more health than all pills and medical procedures combined”

How to live a quality life – with no diabetes, cardiovasculary disease and cancer? How to cure these diseases? By far, these are the two of the most tormenting questions for contemporary mankind… Up to hundreds of billions are spent every year in search of answers. Yet to no avail. Nevertheless, American biochemist T. Colin Campbell has a simple response: just eat a whole food plant-based diet! His plea is not based on ‘vegan ideology’, but on numerous studies, including the most comprehensive research on the correlation between diet and cancer carried out in China in the early 1980s.

Just like Saul of Tarsus (the future Saint Paul) was a devout Pharisee, trying his best to destroy the Christian ‘sect’ that was threatening the purity of Judaism, T. Colin Campbell – professor of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York – believed that animal proteins were a sine qua non condition of good health. Thus, for most of his 60-year career dedicated to scientific research, he wanted to gather evidence for what seemed an obvious truth to him. 

It seemed impossible to believe anything of the opposite, as he confessed during his first presence in Romania, in May 2016, at the Ultimate Health Experience Conference in Poiana Brașov: “Born in 1934, I grew up on a farm, where I had been milking cows since I was only five years old, ate a lot of dairy, eggs and meat“. 

Later on, in The Philippines, he was part of a team of American physicians attempting to decrease the infant mortality rate by prescribing more protein of animal origin. What else could he support, as long as, for generations, people had been told that nothings else helps better the harmonious growth of children? 

Little by little, througout his career, he became aware of studies linking the intake of animal proteins with the increase of cholesterol and the development of coronary disease and most common types of cancer. Researchers had discovered a possible threat that animal proteins pose to health as early as 1926, yet the scientific community ignored these warnings. 

Dr. Campbell’s own experiments researching the dietary causes of liver cancer would later produce new findings that strongly disagreed with his training and his bias in favour of a diet based on animal proteins. No matter how carefully planned and executed, experiments often produced more questions than answers, Campbell once confessed, and he was eager to get the opportunity to test his hypotheses on a larger scale. 

The China Study 

That chance occurred at the beginning of the 1980s, when he was was among the scientists leading the “China-Cornell-Oxford” study that examined the diets, lifestyle, and disease characteristics of 6,500 people in 65 rural Chinese counties. Funding was provided by Cornell University, the University of Oxford, and the government of China – without any contribution from a pharmaceutical or food company. 

In 2004, The China Study, a book a wrote by Professor Campbell and one of his sons, summarized the discoveries made in China and, by making correlations with numerous other researches, stated that a diet based on animal products (including beef, pork, mutton, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese and milk) is a serious cause of chronic illnesses such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, breast, prostate and bowel cancer. 

Like Saul of Tarsus’ conversion on the road to Damascus, The China Study gives evidence to Campbell’s epiphany: all he had been believing in since childhood was wrong. Instead, Professor Campbell argued that people who eat a whole-food, plant-based/vegan diet – avoiding all animal products and reducing their intake of processed foods and refined carbohydrates – will escape, reduce or reverse the development of numerous diseases.

Five ideas that Dr. Colin Campbell invites mankind to reflect upon 

Cancer can be reversed by nutritional means – vegetal proteins help the human body’s defence mechanisms. 

Heart diseases can be cured by the right food – not only kept under control by various medicines prescribed today. 

Type-2 diabetes can also be resolved – especially since this is a disease of modern civilisation, triggered by an abundance of unhealthy foods on the market. 

Genes are responsible for disease risk – by eating the right food, we can prevent the action of bad genes. 

Nutrient supplements don’t help, but increase health risks – our bodies know better how to extract what they need from whole foods.

Read full article in The Art of Living Magazine no 15 DOWNLOAD