HEALTHY AT 100 (19 page)

In his glorification of native peoples, Weston Price urged us back—back to a simpler time, back to a less technological time, back to a time before modernity contaminated our lives and polluted our environment, back to the diets of our ancestors.

But we no longer live in the world of our ancestors. What is available to us is different. Just as each of the intact native peoples Price visited in the 1930s was finely attuned to the foods in their surroundings and had learned to live in harmony with the world in which they lived, we must now learn how to live healthy lives and to eat wisely from the foods that exist in our environment. Certainly his work speaks compellingly to anyone willing to listen about the dangers of white flour, sugar, candy, canned foods, and the other processed foods that caused these people so much harm. It is of great consequence for us to listen, because the majority of the packaged foods screaming at us to buy them from the aisles of our supermarkets, and most of the foods sold in our fast-food chains, are refined, devitalized, and adulterated foods. We must hear what he had to say because 30 percent of the calories in the modern Western diet today come from sugar, and 98 percent of the wheat eaten today in the West is eaten in the form of white flour. The harm done by the movement away from natural whole foods is literally incalculable.

But very few of us can go back to the diets of the ancients. The world has changed irrevocably. Living off wild plants and caribou is not practical in New York City.

We cannot all depend on fish as some native peoples have done, because most of the world’s fisheries are now depleted or in steep decline, and because our oceans and lakes are polluted and many of today’s fish are high in mercury and other toxic contaminants. We cannot all depend on wild game because there is not nearly enough of it, and many species are nearing extinction. We cannot all eat grass-fed beef because there is not nearly enough rangeland to feed our growing numbers. And if we eat commercial beef today we may well be contributing to the destruction of the rain forests and to the extinction of the few indigenous peoples who remain intact.

Like it or not, we cannot go back. Our task is to use our intelligence and discernment to determine the optimal way of life for ourselves, our families, and our societies here and now.

The direction now is not back to a past that can never be again. Our direction is forward. Forward to creating agricultural systems and diets that permit us to live long, vibrant, healthy lives along with the other six billion of us on the planet. Forward to using our wisdom to become better stewards of the planet, to living more lightly on the earth, to reducing our ecological footprint.

Our task is not to return to what Price called “the glory and power of the people who lived proudly in past centuries.”
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Our task is to honor the past, learn from it, and move on toward a healthy and sustainable future.

We must treasure tradition, but we must also embrace change.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.

—Anonymous

T
hings are changing everywhere in the world today, and with astonishing speed. It may be that we see more change in a year today than our distant ancestors saw in a millennium.

Perhaps the place on earth where today’s changes are most pronounced and taking place most rapidly is the nation where there are the most human beings—China. Only twenty-five years ago, for example, private car ownership was prohibited by the Chinese government. But now China is nearly the world’s largest car importer, and every major car and truck manufacturer in the world is rushing to China to set up production lines. The number of cars in China increased a staggering 130-fold between 1980 and 2001.

Not long ago, China had an annual per capita income of only about $200, but now a consumer economy is arising with phenomenal speed. In 1996, China had 7 million cell phones and the United States had 44 million. Only seven years later, China had rocketed to 269 million versus 159 million here.

The largest shopping mall in the United States is the widely heralded
“Mall of America” in Bloomington, Minnesota. But in the last few years four malls have been built in China that are bigger than the Mall of America, and the South China Mall in Dongguan City is three times its size.
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China is not alone. A great many of the world’s peoples seem eager to adopt modernity and become mass consumers as fast as possible. But China is the country where the pell-mell pursuit of consumption is happening fastest, and where the environmental implications are being felt most intensely. China is now dealing with massive and uncontrolled air and water pollution. From the dismal air quality in its cities to the spreading deserts in its northwest, China is a nation with enormous environmental problems.

When so much is changing in our world, and at such a mind-boggling pace, some of us easily forget that the needs of our bodies for fresh air, clean water, exercise, a healthy environment, and wholesome natural food remain essentially the same as they have been for tens of thousands of years. Remarkably, it is a study that took place in China, just as the world’s most populous nation began its recent massive changes, that may hold a key to our understanding how to live the longest and healthiest lives we can. I’m referring to the extraordinary China Study, which
The New York Times
called “the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.”
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How did it happen that in a nation about to embark on such a massive economic and social transformation, the diet and health of an extremely large number of people were studied with a level of depth that is unmatched anywhere in world medical history? It’s an intriguing story.

In the early 1970s, the premier of China, Chou En-lai, was dying of cancer. In the grip of this terminal disease, Premier Chou initiated a nationwide survey to collect information about the extent and location of cancer in China. The result was the most ambitious bio-medical research project ever undertaken, involving more than
650,000 workers. The cancer survey was truly monumental. It catalogued the death rates for twelve different kinds of cancer in more than twenty-four hundred Chinese counties, accounting for 880 million Chinese citizens—96 percent of China’s population.
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The survey found that cancers were vastly more common in some parts of China than in others. This was of compelling interest for two reasons: first, because the difference in cancer rates between some Chinese
counties
was actually far greater than the difference between many of the world’s
nations;
and second, because these differences were occurring in a country where 87 percent of the population belong to the same ethnic group (the Han people) and are genetically quite similar.

The difference in cancer rates between counties was staggering. Some counties, for example, had death rates from colon cancer that were twenty times greater than those of other counties. Similar differences were found for breast cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, and many other forms of cancer. The counties with the highest rates of some cancers had rates that were more than a hundred times greater than were found in the counties with the lowest rates of these can-cers.
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These are truly remarkable figures. To put them into perspective, consider the great interest in why Long Island has an increased rate of breast cancer. Many tens of millions of dollars have been spent and countless person-years of labor have gone into investigating why two counties on Long Island have rates of breast cancer that are 10 to 20 percent higher than the New York state average. In China, by comparison, the survey found that some counties have breast cancer rates twenty times (2,000 percent) higher than others.

The world medical community wanted to know what was going on in China. Why was there such massive variation in cancer rates among different Chinese counties? What could account for such phenomenal variation in cancer rates among genetically similar people? What could explain the fact that men in one part of China die from cancer of the esophagus 435 times more frequently than men in another part? And why was overall cancer so much less common in China than in the United States and other Western nations?

Medical authorities throughout the world understood that the answers to these questions, if they could be determined, would not only be of great value to the Chinese people. They would be of tremendous value to the entire world.

In 1983, seven years after Premier Chou died of liver cancer, and as a direct extension of the nationwide cancer survey he had instigated, the China Study was begun. It was to become the most ambitious international scientific inquiry undertaken in medical history dealing with lifestyle factors and human health.

The China Study was in every way an international endeavor. It was a collaborative effort between Cornell University in the United States, the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and Oxford University in England. And it was headed jointly by Dr. Junshi Chen, deputy director of the most significant government diet and health research laboratory in all of China; Dr. Junyao Li, one of the authors of the Chinese nationwide Cancer Atlas Survey and a key scientist in China’s Academy of Medical Sciences; Professor Sir Richard Peto of Oxford University, considered one of the premier epidemiologists in the world; and Dr. T. Colin Campbell, co-author of the landmark U.S. National Academy of Sciences report “Diet, Nutrition, and Cancer.”

Dr. Campbell was chosen to be the project director. His credentials were impressive: As well as being co-author of the National Academy of Sciences report, he was author of more than three hundred scientific papers, and he was the senior science advisor to the American Institute of Cancer Research / World Research Fund.

Funding for this massive enterprise was shared by the nations involved. Much of the initial funding came from the U.S. National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health. The Chinese Ministry of Health pitched in by paying the salaries of more than 350 health workers who, armed with computers and faxes (the China Study introduced the first fax machine into China in 1985), proceeded to generate the most comprehensive data base ever compiled on the multiple causes of disease.

The world medical community realized that the China Study represented a once-in-the-history-of–humanity opportunity. In the 1980s, China was a perfect “living laboratory” for studying diet and disease patterns, unparalleled anywhere else in the world. This was because the Chinese still tended to spend their entire lives in the same area.

China was perhaps the last place in the world where such a study could be undertaken. In the Western world, many of us move frequently, and our food comes from all over the world. But China in the 1980s still offered the possibility of studying vast numbers of people who had lived in only one area for their entire lives. At that time, more than 90 percent of the adults in the counties studied still lived in the area where they were born.

Furthermore, these people had eaten food from the same area their whole lives. And the differences in diets between even neighboring regions in China was great. If your only experience of Chinese food comes from Chinese restaurants in the West, you might not realize how greatly diets in China vary from one region to another. Villagers on the mountainous north bank of the Yangtze River, for example, have for many generations relied mainly on steamed breads and sweet potatoes. Only fifty miles away, however, on the rich farmlands to the south, villagers have long depended primarily on rice.

The China Study sought to discover whether the varying diets in different parts of China would correlate to the widely varying death rates from cancer and other diseases. To find out, researchers launched the most widespread and massive international scientific investigation ever devised.

Researchers went into sixty-five counties across China, administering diet and lifestyle questionnaires and collecting urine and blood samples from tens of thousands of people. They recorded everything families ate over a three-day period and analyzed food samples from marketplaces around the country.

The counties that were studied stretched across the entire Chinese land mass, from the far northwest to the southern coastal region to Taiwan. Researchers traveled for days across rough terrain in order
to reach nomads on the Soviet border and villagers in an oasis near the Gobi desert.

Altogether, twenty-four provinces (out of twenty-seven in all of China) were selected for the China Study, representing a vast range of climates and topographies. Some were in the semitropical coastal areas of southeast China. Others were in the frigid areas in the northeast part of the country near Siberia. Some were located in the arid regions near the northern steppes. Still others were in high mountainous areas in the Himalayas.

The counties chosen also had widely varying population densities. One remote county near the Gobi desert had only twenty thousand nomadic residents. Another county, on the outskirts of Shanghai, was home to 1.3 million people.

The number of skilled person-hours put in by health professionals involved in this study was immense. To attempt anything remotely resembling the China Study in the West would have been prohibitively expensive.

When the China Study was at last finished, researchers had a study that was utterly unmatched in its quality and comprehensiveness. They had what
The New York Times
described as “the Grand Prix of epidemiology.”
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