Scientist shares key findings of nutritional research

By Deborah O’Neil

A lifetime of nutrition research has led preeminent scientist T. Colin Campbell to a startling conclusion that would upend the diet of most Americans and potentially reverse the nation’s deadliest diseases.  Animal protein, which takes center stage on most dinner plates, says Campbell, is giving us cancer and heart disease and making us fat. Switch to a vegan diet of plant based foods – no meat, no dairy — and you will live longer and healthier.

Campbell shared his research and his message with FIU students, faculty and staff Oct. 16 as part of the 10^th Annual Joan and Harry B. Smith Lecture Series sponsored by the Wertheim College of Medicine.

“What I’m talking about is provocative,” Campbell said. “But I have seen some really remarkable things that I would argue ought to make nutrition at the center of the practice of medicine.”

Campbell is a professor emeritus at Cornell University and the project director of the landmark research project and book known as “The China Study.” The study is considered the most comprehensive research ever conducted on health and nutrition. The result of a 20-year partnership between Cornell, Oxford University and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, the China Study involved an examination of the lifestyles of more than 800 million people in 2,400 counties in China.

The study found a distinction between “poverty diseases” that occur most commonly among the poor who consume few animal products and more plant-based foods and “affluent diseases” that plague those who can afford to eat more animal products. Diseases of the poor include pneumonia, intestinal obstructions, and diseases of pregnancy and childbirth.

On the other hand, the study found that more affluent people have far higher rates of colon, breast and lung cancer, leukemia, diabetes, coronary disease and liver disease. The chief correlate of the affluent diseases, says Campbell, is cholesterol. And the more animal protein present in a diet, the higher cholesterol in the individual.

It’s this link between animal protein and disease that leads Campbell to say such surprising things as, “Breast cancer is a nutritional disease.”

Campbell’s interest in nutrition and disease was piqued early in his career while he was working in the Philippines to improve the health of malnourished children. The children consumed 30 to 40 percent less protein than a typical American child.

“The important thing about the project was to make sure the children got enough protein,” he said. “There was a lot of attention given to the idea that there was a protein gap in the world.”

Along the way, Campbell began to hear that children were developing primary liver cancer, a disease that typically strikes in middle age. He noted at the time that the children developing liver cancer were from those families that ate the most protein.

Next, a study conducted in India compared cancer rates between animals that were fed a normal animal protein intake of 20 percent of diet and those fed a restricted protein diet of 5 percent. The results were shocking. Every single animal eating more protein got liver cancer. However, none eating less protein got cancer.

“They didn’t need a statistician to tell them it was significant,” Campbell said. “The more protein, the more disease.”

Campbell then began a series of studies that yielded similar findings.  In looking at the lifespan of animals fed either a 5 percent animal protein diet or a 20 percent protein diet, he found those eating minimal protein were healthy and lively after two years. The ones eating more animal protein all died. He discovered that changing protein intake would change cancer growth.

“We could dramatically turn on and turn off cancer growth,” he said, by increasing and decreasing protein intake.

While animal protein appears to be the culprit in disease, Campbell’s research has also found that the protein found in soy and wheat does not increase disease. He advocates a plant-based diet of whole foods. Campbell also cautions against the lure of substituting vitamin supplements for whole foods.

“If you take nutrients out of food and put them in a pill, they don’t work,” he said.

Campbell said the conclusions of his research were counter-intuitive to him, a farm boy who grew up milking cows. He struggled with some of the implications of his findings, but says his family has embraced a plant-based diet.

“I don’t like to proselytize. I don’t want to preach,” he said. “I just want to be a scientist and let you decide.”