Chris: So Dr. Campbell, you discovered some amazing things in your research which you described in The China Study. Can you tell our listeners what that process was, kind of the step by step what you found out?

T. Colin: I mean, as I said in my doctor dissertation at Cornell University, I was doing research with my professors on the idea of trying to figure out your more effective ways, productive ways to produce more animal base protein. Then a little later, while being at Virginia Tech, for ten years actually, I got involved in an international program in the Philippians where our charge was to tackle the problems of malnutrition in children. And we generally assumed in those days, and still to some extent these days, children are malnourished, at least nutritionally speaking because they don’t get enough calories or they don’t get enough protein. And the protein things are obviously something we’re very interested in. Now also it was consistent with my training because in my doctor dissertation, as I said, we were trying to figure out ways to promote the greater consumption of protein, especially animal based protein. So we were tackling the problem in part that way in the Philippians. But what I noticed when I was there (Inaudible: 4:07) was that although the vast majority of Filipino’s did not consume as much protein as we did in the West, and of course we thought that we had a better deal here then they did there, where as the majority of people did not consume enough protein. There were a few who did; a few families who were getting protein more or less at levels. But then it also turned out that these were the families who had children for example, who were more than likely to experience liver cancer; primary liver cancer, which is virtually unheard of as far as young people are concerned. It was anecdotal, it wasn’t documented, it wasn’t any of that that kind of thing, it was just something that my surgeon friends told me about when I was working with them. And so it was a bit of dodge with what you’re trying to do because these families consuming more protein, having children, have a greater likelihood of getting more cancer. And that really sounded crazy. But then there was a study that came from Indian with experimental animals that showed in fact, that when they were studying the formation of liver cancer in these rats and they fed the higher levels of protein, these animals, their liver cancers grew faster. And so all of sudden the experimental animal studies were supporting what I was seeing in children. So it was on the basis of those two observations that then I came home instantly and organized a study with National Institutes of Health Funding, Organized Funding for the next twenty seven years working on this question, concerning the effects of protein consumption on the development of a sperm on cancer.

Chris: Twenty seven years. That’s a good chunk of time

T. Colin: Yes, it was. I had lots of students. We had a large number of publications published, I should say, in the very best faculty journals on these studies. And so I really got totally immersed in the whole question concerning the effect of protein on cancer development. Eventually it expanded into the effect of other nutrients as well, on the experimental terminal development too. But in any case, we focused on the question of protein and its ability to modify, if you will, liver cancer development in these rats. Now, it turns out that’s a fairly narrowly focused kind of investigation, but it served the purpose of understanding how cancer works. And also, providers from remarkable findings that I never expected to see involving the interrelationship between nutrition and cancer. There’s no one actually at that time to my knowledge, in fact I know there wasn’t, that was really working on it seriously, on this question. There were a couple of others who were sort of doing a few studies in a more general way of nutrition and that they experimented cancer development. But none of them anywhere near the detail that we were doing. In any case, we really tried to understand what was going on at the biochemical level. So that in a sense I sometimes said like, it’s almost as if I was crawling inside of the cell to see what was going on. First off, we wanted to know whether or not higher protein intake actually did turn on cancer, as the Indian workers had reported; and as I was seeing in children. So we did those kinds of studies. Sure enough it did. There was no question of that, and it was very prominent. The second part of the question that we wanted to address was: if this is so, and it’s a very provocative idea, then how does it work? So you’re looking for this so called explanatory mechanisms, it’s a biochemical mechanism by which it worked. In any case, to make a long story short, we did this study in many different ways. We repeated it many times over. We got to a point where we could basically turn on and turn off experimental cancer development in these animals by fairly modest changes in dietary protein intake; and of course the higher the protein intake, the higher the chance of growth rate. And also, and quite remarkable I think, was the fact that the levels of increase, the amount of increased protein intake required to do this was not that much. And they were levels consistent with the kind of levels of protein that we humans tend to consume. In other words, going from, to be specific, to go from let’s say a protein level of ten percent of total calories, which is enough by the way both for rats and for humans, to go from ten percent to twenty percent, which is not a big increase one would think, but we saw sharp increases in cancer development in that case. If we would drop it we’d sort of see twenty percent for a while, watch the cancer develop, switch the animals over to five percent or ten percent, we’d turn it off. And the most remarkable thing of all was the fact that the Trojan that we were using to turn on cancer was casein; the main protein of cow’s milk. And having been raised on a dairy farm, and believing if I knew anything about nutrition those days and I didn’t know much, but if I knew anything at all, it was the fact that consuming milk was always considered to be a good source of protein. So here it is we’re finding that the main protein in cow’s milk is turning on this experimental test development. Admittedly, it was in from an animal cell, also admittedly, it was for one kind of cancer model as we say in this service. So you can’t get too excited about this in terms of generalizing too far, but I spent much of the lighter half of my career just addressing that question. Is this applicable to humans? And there’s many different ways to consider that question. And my answer is yes, very much so. So it raised a question about the way we think about protein in particular. Proteins (Inaudible: 09:08) to say nothing of the way we actually think about food. Historically, we’ve had a tremendous, I sometimes say, reverence for protein as a nutrient. Many people have often thought through the ages, that if all the nutrients that they’ve heard about or know anything about, or whether they even think about it very much, everybody wants to make sure they get enough protein. And so, that’s driven much of our thinking about nutrition in general, to say nothing about our thinking about protein. Because most people have assumed for a long, long time, that you get your protein by consuming meat, and milk, and eggs. And of course although those foods are rich in protein, there’s no question about that, and there especially rich in the kind of protein that is as we say, biologically speaking, is more efficient, has higher quality, it turns out that we can get all of the protein we really need, in fact we get optimum levels of protein by consuming plant based foods. We start putting in animal protein and we start putting in animal food in order to get that protein that we’ve always for so long revered, as soon as we start doing that, then we tend to decrease our consumption of plant based foods, and in the process we elevator toe anti-depressants within the range that’s consistent with what we were seeing in these prevalent animal studies. So, this story just became deeper and more expansive with the passing of time. We did this study in many ways. And let me go back just to point out one more thing; we were finding that casein, the main protein in cow’s milk could do this. When we replace that as we did in a couple of the experiments, when we replaced it with soy protein or wheat protein, both plant based proteins, they did not do this. They did not elevate cancer growth rate like casein did. Then it came to my attention, a lot of studies that had been done, perhaps in some cases many, many years ago, where casein had been used in experimental animal studies to study other kinds of events, not just cancer, studying events like the blood cholesterol levels for example, or the effects on what we called angiogenesis, the origin of heart disease; or the effects on let’s say something like hormonal distribution, which in turn relates to various disturbing health outcomes; or the effects on acidification, creating a little bit of divinity in the body, which has consequences. As I started looking at this literature, and of course doing some of this ourselves, it turns out this protein effect is wide spread, and not only has affected the increase in cancer growth rates, it has the ability to increase blood cholesterol levels as well. And also, to increase the early formation of what can lead to coronary artery disease, and what can lead to the formation of osteoporosis. And so, the source has become very, very large, the expansiveness becomes very deep, and obviously if I was going to, in my career see these things, which are so at odds with what I had been taught, so at odds with what I personally had done in my early life that obviously I wished I would have change, and eventually I got to a point, as I mentioned earlier, that it was time to sit down and write a book. I had eventually gotten to a point where I had to struggle with this information because it was not the kind of information I intended to get in the first place. There was, we had to acknowledge it and test it in various other ways. I had to say I loved the farm. My farm life from view was the best of my life essentially. I had no problems with that but to come along with information like this. By the time we get around to writing the book, and I did it incidentally with our youngest son who had been a graduate in theatre from Cornell University. He was an actor in Chicago at the time. So he got involved with me too, to write the book to make sure my technical language was in a readable form; did a fantastic job, we worked together. He’s actually now in med school and wants to go back to medicine to relearn his medicine with a different cast to it if you will. So I sit down to write the book. I was almost writing as much for myself, to might understand what it was that I thought I had come to believe, and to gather the evidence, the findings, and stuff that we had produced, to see if I could write it down in a form in which I believed it could tell a story. So that’s what The China Study is really about; is my recounting in many ways of the kind of research findings that I found compelling to finally end up with a story. And one element of all of that incidentally, that was not entirely clear to me as I was doing the book, I should say, was whether or not this all translates into human nutrition. To what extent does this really apply to human nutrition? One way we did that, by the way, we did the China study. That’s where the name comes from. We did this; it’s the most expansive comprehensive study ever done I guess, in the history of medicine. And so we did that study and those results were consistent, remarkable so, consistent with what we found in the laboratory. So, I was putting it all together in the book and tried to, as I say, end up with a story. But then in the process, I was really interested in too, in what about telling my colleagues in medicine. Were there any people around who were maybe doing this kind of thing? Sure enough there were a few, a handful; and they made contact with me. Two in particular were Dr. John McDougal in Northern California, a long time physician who had been doing this kind of thing in his practice and getting really marvelous results. Dr. McDougal is really quite an entrepreneur, creator, and sincere physician who’s been doing this kind of thing. And, so he contacted me. We started a relationship; we’re friends now. He continues to do this. And then there was Dr. Carl Estensin; a famous surgeon that cleared the plague, who at the time was reversing heart disease of all things. And then there was Dean Ornish. Dr. Dean Ornish was specializing out in California. And here were three individuals who I was making an acquaintance with, and hearing their stories, and seeing their remarkable results they were each getting. And then it gradually grew, and grew, and grew. Now, I’m familiar with quite a large number of physicians who are trying this, getting really remarkable results and I just see the seeds being planted in a sense of changing the medical profession led by these pioneers of (Inaudible: 14:50). Dr. Hans Dahl as well. It seems like California has their share of interesting and foreign types of people, but Hans Dahl is associated with Local Lending University there in California has actually devised over the years with his colleagues, a really good community based program. I refer to it as that he’s able to go into communities and organize, and he has done this extensively, I think he has something like 50,000 graduates now in roughly around the United States. But he’s done this really well. He has a group of people that work through a series of lectures and they start measuring something at base line and measuring things in another program. They see the results. It’s kind of an experimental kind of thing. It’s a nice program. So he is doing that. I mean I could go on and on and on, and name quite a number of physician health care providers who have really done quite remarkable things. So that was just sort of a, in many ways, a lunch pen kind of beginning to tie up things for me because I was getting my impressions from the science. And they, in fact, I’m discovering, I’m not a physician of course, what they were doing was doing it with real people. And so when you put these two stories together, wow, this is incredible. And so then you start raising questions, well how come we haven’t known this before? For more interviews on health, mind, body, and spirit, go to Michael Senoff’s

Chris: You spent a lot of years in the field of nutrition research.

T. Colin: I’ve got about 20 years involved in national and international food and policy development, being on expert panels and so forth. Sort of having that combination of doing the original research with my many students and other colleagues, and also being involved in, for a bit of sense, translated this information for public consumption, gave me a sort of view that I ended up with, that was traumatically different from what I had started with. And so I decided it was time to write a book.

Chris: Okay, and what was the view that you started with about nutrition?

T. Colin: Well, it was a view that’s fairly tradition, still is traditional in many quarters, but it was a view that the good old American diet was about as good as it could get. It was a diet that was high in protein, plenty of fat, in other words energy rich. Rich in animal based foods too. And that was my own personal diet. That was my own training in my professional life. And it also was the view that ended up focused on the idea that the nutritional affect could be accounted for by understanding the effects of individual nutrients; sort of the independent effects of individual nutrition. That view is the stark contrast of what I believe now. I mean, our research over the years obviously has led me to the idea that, based on all of the evidence that we’ve gathered, that consuming a high protein diet, especially a diet high in animal protein, a diet high in fat and bone and dietary fiber which only comes from plants, that that kind of diet is not good. It really accounts for a very large proportion of the illnesses and deaths that we occur in this country. And so, my view today is basically one that’s focused on consuming plant based foods. Plant based whole foods I should say; vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, as much as possible that are intact form. Those kinds of foods really do have the nutritional qualities, they do some amazing things. They not only prevent future disease problems but they also know now to be able to even reverse some serious diseases in fairly advanced stages. So we’re really talking about, I think, treatment as well as prevention of illnesses.

Chris: So you’re saying basically that people’s food intake, their diet can have a big influence on their health.

T. Colin: Absolutely.

Chris: I know a lot of people will go to their medical doctors and I’ve heard people say that they will be told, “Oh, that doesn’t have anything to do with health.” How do you explain that?

T. Colin: Well I explain it first and foremost by the fact that virtually no doctors have any training in nutrition. The subject is really not taught in medical schools. It’s tragic but doctors really have no training. Yet the public inpatient reveres the doctor for all kinds of medical knowledge, and they certainly do have a lot of medical knowledge and they can do a lot of wonderful things, but in reality they have no training in the area of nutrition. Also, at the same time in my own field, we’ve been behind the eight ball as well because we tend to focus on the acknowledge of effects of individual nutrients. And that’s the way we studied these questions, when in fact that’s not really the way nutrition works. So in reality our understanding of nutrition, in my mind, is misguided and misleading, and very confusing for the public. So, just to finish up what I was going to say before, my views today are not based on the independent effects of individual nutrients even though we study them that way. I think of it as the concerted effects of really, virtually countless chemicals in food, many of which we could call nutrients, is the concerted, sort of poly-integrated effect of these chemicals if you will. A couple of other kinds of things too, I mean exercise, sunlight, water, and so forth, if it’s the integrated effects of these things working together, that I find just to be absolutely an awesome display of nature. And so my view is much more attend to what nature has provided us and trying to understand what nutrition can do from that perspective. And when we do it that way, it sounds probably straight forward I guess, but in reality we don’t think of it that way, but when we do think of it that way as I said before, the effects that are produced are really dramatic.

Chris: Dramatic in what ways?

T. Colin: We tend to think of; at least as far as those two believe that diet has found good properties. We tend to think that if you eat the right foods you could prevent for example, heart disease, cancers, and so forth. That idea’s been around quite a long time. Although we think of it fairly superficially because in reality even though we sort of know that consuming vegetables and fruits may prevent certain kinds of cancers that may prevent heart disease, we treat that kind of information rather casually and superficially it seems to me. I mean, a lot of us say it, we’ve heard it many times, and it’s certainly true, but as I mentioned before, what I’m now seeing is that it really has a traumatic effect on preventing virtually all those diseases, and then even still far more. And it also promotes health in a sense that it promotes better physical being, mental shortness I guess you could say. But even more significant than that in many ways, it’s the fact that this same diet has been shown for example, to cure heart disease in fairly advanced stages; and it can cure type two diabetes which is ramped in the country today; it can have a lot to do with reducing obesity that tends to be a forerunner of some of these kinds of diseases. And also has properties of being able to basically control, and may stop the progression of some of the serious autoimmune diseases. And even in many cases, reverse those diseases. So we’re really talking about something that at least to an idea, that has been consistently rejected in the medical community, from their perspective for good reason. But it basically does something like you say, it’s one size fits all if you will, and I know if there’s any physicians listening to me saying that they’re going to think I’m a bit nuts. We don’t know of any medicines for example, that can be used to have multiple effects like diet can. So to say that one size fits all, I don’t mean it that exactly or precisely, but basically this kind of diet basically prevents and or can treat a wide variety of illnesses and can restore health, and it does it for virtually everyone, maybe more so in some than others. And so we are different in that sense, the extent to which we respond to this effect, but what the remarkable idea is that this effect basically restores health to some degree for virtually everyone.

Chris: What is the best diet? What should people be eating if they do have health problems?

T. Colin: Well plant based and also intact foods. Things like vegetables, grains, fruits, legumes and so forth. And as I say, I’m talking about whole foods, intact foods. What I mean by that is that I’m not talking about the kind of diet where you take something out of plants, like sugar, or white flour, or allegedly the good oil of plants, or the so called poly and saturated oils. I mean if you take those things out of plants and then turn around and put that back into a dish and mix them all up and make them into a recipe you can end up with a donut or danish and that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s what processed food is. It may be a plant base but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about whole foods. Then we consider this question about what really is whole foods? I’m talking about good fresh whole foods. And of all the plants that seem to be the most remarkable is the ones that are colored; the leafy vegetables especially. The green, yellow, red, if you will. The color that’s imparted to the plant is actually attributed to chemicals in the plant whose chemical structures are such that they tend to be antioxidant in nature. And so foods that tend to act as antioxidants, we now know from a lot of scientific evidence that that tends to repress the development of cancer and perhaps even reverse cancer. It tends to repress the formation of heart disease. And of course this also discussed a lot in regards to it tends to recharge aging. So antioxidants are good and antioxidants come in large measures of food. The colored decibels in fruits, so the leafy vegetables if you will, are especially good in that regard. And they should be whole because when I say whole or intact in a sense I’m not saying you have to eat the food just as it is, I mean you could obviously dice it, cut it up and cook it to some extent and things like that, I’m just talking about using the whole plant however it ends up being used. The reason for that in large measure is the fact that in that case you’re sort of maintaining the integrity of all the chemicals in that food as they are consumed simultaneously. There’s something about this that when we’re consuming the food that contains all of this stuff at the same time, as we do in whole food, that’s when we get the best of fats. So it’s important to look at it that way.

Chris: I just know there’s just large numbers of people that are not eating that way and how do you get them to change?

T. Colin: Well first off, the recommendations that have been made over the years about consuming x number of servings of vegetables and fruits if you will; I have never really very much liked that kind of recommendation. First off, the recommendation is kind of superficial and are not recommending that many servings in any case; five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, or nine servings, whatever. That puts numbers on things; it quantitates what we’re supposed to be doing. And people don’t think that way first off. My recommendation just in that regard is to say make up as much of a diet as possible in the form of plant based foods, number one. And keep a good variety and consume the foods in the intact form I said before. But here’s an important point: For someone who might be interested in doing this, when they try it, initially and for a while, they’re not necessarily going to become that comfortable with it because the taste that we have, by consuming as I said the good old American diet, that high protein high fat diet, we’ve become accustomed to those tastes over the years. And so in fact, in some case we’ve become addicted to those tastes. And so by switching over to the type of diet I’m talking about initially, maybe the first three days or so is not going to be that exciting necessarily. That’s just the way we behave. But what we do know from scientific evidence is that our taste preferences change; they really change. And so, to give a couple of specific examples: if we’re accustomed to consuming a high salt diet and we switch to a low salt diet, we crave the salt taste, and so we find it a little difficult for a while. It takes about a month or so to sort of de-adapt the preference for high salt. In a case with fat, another example, we’re accustomed to consuming high fat diets. And high fat diets do really impart a lot of flavor and carry certain substances that we like, and it gives us a certain feel to the food that we like. It also is an addictive king of response. It actually changes our brain chemistry by consuming a high fat intake. And so, if we go to a low fat diet suddenly, which I’m advocating obviously, people will say things like, “Oh, it doesn’t have a taste,” “I don’t really like this,” “this is rabbit food,” and such. But quite frankly it turns out that with fat it may take a few months to sort of de-adapt and become accustomed to the low fat taste. And by the time they get to the low salt, low fat, and also get your taste buds changed, then you look back and you can’t figure out why in the world you ever ate that other stuff in the first place. But this is what people don’t do. They don’t seem to understand that the little patience that can get rid of those old taste preferences all of a sudden discover some new tastes. And also discover that the variety of food that one could have by going here is much, much greater than what they’ve been accustomed. I mean the variety of plant based food dishes is basically infinite.