HEALTHY AT 100 (20 page)

One of the first findings to emerge from the China Study data was that certain groups of diseases often occur in similar economic settings. Scientists have long spoken of two classes of disease: “diseases of poverty” and “diseases of affluence.”

“Diseases of poverty” include infectious diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis, diarrhea, respiratory illnesses, and measles. Diarrheal diseases are seldom fatal in industrial countries, but they claim the lives of millions of children in the developing world. Among well-nourished children, measles is rarely fatal, yet this disease kills some 800,000 children annually, nearly all of them already weakened by hunger. Respiratory illnesses are usually a minor problem in a healthy population, but they take a heavy toll among malnourished people with weakened immune systems.

The China Study made clear that the underlying causes of “diseases of poverty” are actually nutritional inadequacy and poor sanitation. In fact, since it is not poverty itself that causes these diseases, but the lack of clean water and adequate food, it would be more precise to call them “diseases of nutritional inadequacy and poor sanitation.”

Similarly, the China Study demonstrated that the underlying cause of most “diseases of affluence”—including diabetes, coronary heart disease, obesity, and many forms of cancer—is not affluence itself, but rather the nutritional excess that typically accompanies affluence. In fact, so tightly are “diseases of affluence” linked in the China Study data to eating habits that Dr. T. Colin Campbell, the project’s director, has said that it would be more accurate to cease referring to “diseases of affluence” and instead adopt the term “diseases of nutritional extravagance.”
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Noting that the more wealthy and urban Chinese have begun to eat diets higher in oils and animal products, Dr. Campbell explains:

In Shanghai and Beijing eating meat has acquired a certain social cachet. Unfortunately, this gastronomic form of social climbing is just the diet that we now know causes so many of the diseases we suffer from in the West—cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
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After examining a multitude of possible factors, the scientists undertaking the China Study found that diseases of nutritional extravagance were most markedly associated with high blood cholesterol.
You may already know that high cholesterol is a widely recognized risk factor for heart disease. But the China Study found that higher blood cholesterol levels were also consistently associated with diabetes and many cancers.

This dramatic correlation between higher cholesterol levels and what have been known as “Western lifestyle diseases” was found to be consistent even though cholesterol levels in China tend to be lower than are commonly found in the West. In fact, vastly lower cholesterol levels were one of the chief reasons that, at the outset of the China Study, death from heart disease was a stunning 17 times less
frequent in China than in the West. The China Study found that in some parts of China, particularly the southwestern Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Guizhou, heart disease was virtually nonexistent. During a three-year observation period, not a single person died of coronary heart disease before the age of sixty-four among 246,000 people in a Guizhou county and 181,000 in a Sichuan county.
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According to Richard Peto of Oxford University, one of the China Study’s principal investigators, “the Chinese experience shows that most Western coronary heart disease is unnecessary.”
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The primary foods that cause blood cholesterol levels to rise are well known today. They are saturated fats (found mostly in animal products) and hydrogenated fats (found mostly in pastries, cookies, margarines, and other processed foods). And increasingly, as Dr. Campbell makes clear in his outstanding 2005 book titled
The China Study
, animal protein is also being seen as a major cause of high cholesterol.
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Meanwhile, the foods that decrease cholesterol levels are also well known. They are soy products, whole grains, vegetables, and fruits. In general, the higher the intake of fiber (found in unprocessed plant foods but not in any animal products) and legumes (peas and beans) in your diet, the lower the level of cholesterol you will have in your blood.

As a result of the vast amount of information gathered in the China Study, Dr. Campbell came to believe that the scientific evidence indicates a diet based on plant foods with a minimal amount of foods derived from animals as the ideal diet for human beings. In fact, his book
The China Study
is one of the strongest scientific arguments ever amassed for such a way of eating. The China Study itself, remember, had begun in the attempt to understand the reason for the vast differences in cancer rates among Chinese counties. According to Dr. Campbell, the primary answer turned out to be the differences in animal food consumption:

One of the most dramatic findings of the China Project was the strong association between foods of animal origin and cancer.…We found that one of the strongest predictors of Western diseases
was blood cholesterol.…Lower blood cholesterol levels were linked to lower rates of heart disease, cancer and other Western diseases.…As blood cholesterol levels decreased from 170 mg/dL to 90 mg/dL, cancers of the liver, rectum, colon, lung, breast, stomach, esophagus, brain (in both adults and children), and leukemia (in both adults and children) decreased.…It’s not enough simply to make a few small dietary changes to prevent cancer. A major shift towards plant-based foods and away from animal foods is likely to produce much greater benefits.
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If the correlation between cancer and animal food consumption is indeed as powerful as the China Study found, you would expect other studies to find the same thing. It turns out that many have. A study of 122,000 female American nurses, for example, found that those women who ate meat daily were two and a half times more likely to get colon cancer than those women who ate meat less than once a month. In 2001, a comprehensive Harvard review of the research on dairy products and prostate cancer found that those who had over the course of their lives consumed the most dairy products had
double
the rate of advanced prostate cancer and
four times
the rate of metastatic prostate cancer. A high intake of fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, was associated with a lower risk of advanced prostate cancer.
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Other studies, including the famous Physicians’ Health Study, have also confirmed a link between dairy product consumption and prostate cancer. And a study of more than twelve thousand Seventh-Day Adventist men found that those who drank soy milk regularly rather than cow’s milk had a whopping 70 percent reduction in their risk of prostate cancer.
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Today, men in China who are still eating their traditional wholefoods, plant-based diet without any dairy products have one of the lowest rates of advanced prostate cancer in the world. And no one can say these low rates are due to a genetic advantage, because Chinese American men living in the United States and eating the standard
American diet have been shown to have rates ten times as high as their genetic counterparts still eating in the traditional way in China.

Just how important it is to eat a plant-based diet to prevent cancer was confirmed in 1997, when the American Institute for Cancer Research issued a major international report,
Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective.
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This report analyzed more than 4,500 research studies dealing with diet and cancer, and its production involved the participation of more than 120 contributors and peer reviewers, including participants from the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Agency on Research in Cancer, and the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

Included in the report was a study by a panel of fifteen of the world’s leading researchers in diet and cancer who reviewed more than two hundred case-controlled studies on the link between fruits and vegetables and cancer. An astounding 78 percent of these studies found fruits and vegetables to have a statistically protective effect in regard to one or more kinds of cancer. Only 22 percent showed no significant link. None showed an increase of cancer with consumption of these foods.

The overall report’s number one dietary recommendation?

Choose predominantly plant-based diets rich in a variety of vegetables and fruits, legumes, and minimally processed starchy staple foods.
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As both the project director of the China Study and the senior scientific advisor to the American Institute for Cancer Research who organized the landmark international report, Dr. T. Colin Campbell knows these studies intimately. As a result of what he has learned, he has become outspoken on the diet-disease connection. He says,

The vast majority of all cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and other forms of degenerative illness can be prevented simply by adopting a plant-based diet.

There is a certain irony in Dr. Campbell’s becoming one of the most outspoken scientific proponents of a plant-based diet. He was raised on a dairy farm and grew up eating lots of meat and eggs. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the ways animal protein could be produced more efficiently so we could eat more animal-based foods. But as he describes in
The China Study
, his remarkable career doing nutritional research at the highest levels convinced him that a diet as low as possible in animal-based products is the healthiest choice. He says he was just paying attention to what the scientific evidence was showing him.

His diet now is 99 percent vegetarian. He and his wife, Karen, have raised five children on a plant-based diet.

The China Study was undertaken just as China was beginning to move from centuries of grinding poverty into a newfound affluence. The study made it clear that there would be immense benefits to this nation of more than a billion people if it would use its new wealth to solve the problems of malnutrition and poor sanitation while retaining respect for a whole-foods, natural, plant-based diet. Such an approach would go a long way toward eliminating the “diseases of poverty” without generating the “diseases of affluence.”

This would have been the wisest approach, but regrettably, it is not what has taken place. Many Chinese today—still carrying memories of food rationing, food lines, and empty, grumbling bellies—are eager to dispense with traditional staples like whole grains and fresh vegetables in favor of the cookies, chocolates, potato chips, jellies, pudding, fried chicken, and burgers that they associate with a more Western and affluent lifestyle. Having for the most part only recently been exposed to such foods, they are easy prey for the advertising and other marketing tactics of the mostly U.S.-based junk food companies, who make it all seem so modern and terrific, and who never seem to get around to mentioning the inevitable health consequences.

Sadly, the Chinese government and people are today not heeding the lessons of the China Study. The nation that spawned the largest
study of diet and health in the history of the world is ignoring its findings. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are abandoning traditional diets rich in fiber and whole grains in favor of diets far higher in sugar and animal fat. The small farms that have long supplied open-air markets are being replaced by vast agribusiness conglomerates that feed ever-larger supermarket chains and fast-food restaurants.

The people of China now have more money, more “stuff,” and more problems. They are increasingly being poisoned by the air they breathe, the water they drink—and the food they eat.

China has traditionally been a vegetarian culture, while hamburgers have long been a defining feature of the U.S. lifestyle. As recently as 1974, the United States consumed close to fifty times more meat than China. But by 2005, the Chinese diet was becoming increasingly similar to the standard U.S. diet, and China was consuming nearly twice as much meat as the United States. In the thirty years between 1974 and 2004, meat consumption in China increased an astonishing 12,700 percent.
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In 1989, Kentucky Fried Chicken became the first foreign fast-food franchise to set up shop in China. McDonald’s and others soon followed. By 2004 there were more than twelve hundred KFC outlets in China—the company was opening nearly one a day—and the CEO of Yum Brands, which owns KFC, was telling
Fortune
magazine that KFC “makes almost as much money in China today as it makes in the U.S.”
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The dietary changes are enormous. While TV commercials starring pop heartthrobs are persuading millions of Chinese teens to drink Pepsi, China’s children are now weaned on cheeseburgers from McDonald’s, pizza from Pizza Hut, and fried chicken from KFC.

While these changes are fattening the bottom lines of multinational corporations, they are also fattening the bottoms of the Chinese. As recently as 1995, only one in ten Chinese was overweight. But today, according to one study, almost a third of all Chinese adults are overweight.
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Amazingly, according to this study,
the number of Chinese who have become overweight in the last decade is greater than the entire population of the United States.

Meanwhile, the number of obese (extremely overweight) and morbidly obese people is increasing, too, and not just among adults. As late as 1995, childhood obesity was virtually nonexistent in China. But a 2000 study by the Shanghai Children’s Health Care Institute found that nearly 10 percent of Chinese children between three and six years old were obese.
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Recent studies are also finding a sharp rise in levels of blood cholesterol throughout China in the last decade, and in the incidence of high blood pressure and diabetes in both children and adults.
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Urban areas in particular are already seeing a dramatic increase in heart disease and cancer.