Name: The China Study
Rating: 4.2 (156 reviews)
Author: T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell

What’s in it for me? Challenge what you know about diets and improve your health.

Are you afraid to eat an apple? While this question may sound ridiculous, plenty of people shun carbohydrate-rich foods like fruit because of the “bad rap” that carbs were given in recent years.

This attitude is misguided, as you’ll soon learn in the following blinks. Eating a largely plant-based diet, rich in fruits and vegetables, is exactly what keeps your body healthy.

But how about dairy products and meat? Aren’t these good for us, too?

Not really. These blinks tell the story of a groundbreaking study in China that revealed unequivocally that animal-based proteins harbor scary health risks. In short, you can get all the protein your body needs, feel great and even conquer cancer – if you just eat your fruit and veg.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

how the molecular trigger for cancer is found in cheese;
why a single scientist’s recommendation is to blame for our obsession with protein; and
how eating an apple a day might keep you from going blind.

Good nutrition is essential to staying healthy, as popping pills or vitamins won’t do the job alone.

Medicine has come a long way, but people still get sick – and stay sick – all the time. Why is this the case?

To improve health overall, focusing too much on medical care is a mistake. While it’s important to seek cures to the things that make us sick, finding a precise solution to some of the more complicated illnesses is challenging at best.

For instance, many events that lead to serious disease, such as carcinogenesis – the process by which cancerous tumors are formed – modern medicine has yet to fully comprehend.

What’s more, pushing for more healthcare system investment doesn't necessarily translate into better overall public health.

In fact, the health of Americans has steadily worsened, even though the proportion of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) spent on healthcare has risen by almost 300 percent in the past 40 years!

Since 1970, more people are dying from cancer; and the rate of diabetes among 30- to 39-year-olds rose by 70 percent between 1990 and 1998.

What’s worse, however, is that an overreliance on medicine to remain “healthy” can blind us to its drawbacks.

Consider that approximately 7 percent of hospital patients who take medication as instructed by a doctor suffer severe side-effects – and sometimes even die. In other words, the pharmaceutical industry’s promise of a “magic pill” for health isn not only costly but also dangerous.

A better focus would be improving nutrition. Maintaining a good diet is a proven method of preventing disease. You literally “are what you eat,” since every cell in your body is composed of the nutrients that go into it!

Nutrition thus is the logical cornerstone of good health, not pills or surgery. The best part is, compared to elaborate and expensive medical cures, it’s easier to focus on a healthy diet to prevent disease.

Maintaining a healthy diet has already been shown effective in preventing illnesses such as early-stage heart disease and diabetes – and even cancer.

But first, it’s important to understand what is healthy when it comes to nutrition.

We don’t need to eat nearly as much protein as we think we do, and meat can even make us sick.

Plenty of people worry about eating too much fat or carbs. At the same time, however, we also worry about eating too little protein. But the truth is that we need much less protein than we think we do.

While your body naturally needs some protein to build muscle cells and keep other vital tasks functioning, a little protein goes a long way. In fact, in the nineteenth century, German nutritionist Carl Voit determined that we need to eat no more than 48 grams of protein daily.

A seminal study in China helped researchers make the connection between diet and disease.

In the early 1980s, a group of researchers from Cornell University and the University of Oxford partnered with the Chinese government to conduct one of the largest public health studies ever undertaken.

This groundbreaking research project would come to be known as the China Study.

A plant-based or vegan diet is the smartest choice for a healthy body and mind.

So from these groundbreaking studies, we’ve learned that diets based on animal proteins can promote cancer while diets based on plant proteins can prevent it. The logical conclusion from these findings is to leave cows alone and choose a plate of vegetables for dinner instead!

Eating vegan, or maintaining a diet that is exclusively plant-based, is a good choice both for reducing your risk of cancer and avoiding other health problems.

Key ideas in The China Study

About the Author

T. Colin Campbell is a professor Emeritus at Cornell University and best known as the author of The China Study. Born on a dairy farm, Campbell went on to study veterinary medicine; he holds a doctorate in nutritional science and biochemistry.

A certified family physician and T. Colin Campbell’s son, Thomas M. Campbell II cofounded the Program for Nutrition in Medicine at the University of Rochester. He is both the program director there and at the nonprofit T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies.