HLife | Healthy Living Redefined

If you’ve been living under a nutritional rock and haven’t heard about T. Colin Campbell or his book, The China Study, then let us start by telling you that he is considered the top figure in this country when it comes to nutrition. The China Study, an investigation that has been called “the Grand Prix of epidemiology” by the New York Times and which the book is named after, was a massive scale landmark project between China and the United States that discovered startling conclusions about the link between diet and disease. The research showed the connection between animal protein and cancer, as well as the relationship between diet and diseases like diabetes and obesity, leading Dr. Campbell to the conclusion that, “there is one diet to counteract all of these diseases: a whole foods, plant-based diet.”

T. Colin Campbell is Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, where he taught and conducted research for over 20 years. He has received more that seventy grant-years of peer-reviewed research funding and authored more than 300 research papers. He is a true scientist and speaks with both evidence and integrity. We highly recommend The China Study if you have not read it, as well as his upcoming book, The Master and Slave State, in which he goes into  information control, policy and the ideology behind the current health crisis in this country. We had a candid chat with Dr. Campbell while he was in Los Angeles lecturing and discussing his upcoming film Forks Over Knives (another ‘must’), and we talked about raw foods versus cooked, vitamin supplements, what we should really be eating, and why the majority of the population can’t seem to get it right.

Maryl Celiz: So, why is it that we can’t get the right information about what we should be eating?

T. Colin Campbell: My second book deals with that question. The last third of The China Study talks about my experiences, especially in Washington. I spent about 20 years in various expert panels that, in a nut shell, is a place where scientists are always trying to translate the science into public policy, so it’s the interface between politics and reality/science. Obviously, there are a lot of people that are opposed to this for various reasons, some of them very personal and downright hostile. In many cases, this has to do with the fact that people are part of institutions, the biggest institution of all being industry. Of course, they have their vested interests. So, that’s certainly a factor, a big factor. But I think there’s something more fundamental than that and that is the thesis that I am trying to develop for this book. If we go back 100 or 150 years or even longer than that, to the ancient Greek times, it turns out that, in science, If you wanted to know something about a complex system – and biology is extraordinarily complex, medicine and nutrition too – science demands that you focus your attention and do your research on something very specific. And, what happens in a case like that is, people become specialists on working on a very narrow slice of the pie. And they get disconnected from the larger community – they’ll spend a whole career working on one enzyme, one hormone, and they don’t see the larger vision. And that goes back a long way, Aristotle and Plato debated on this.

Silvie Celiz: What’s the alternative way to thinking about things in this way?

TCC: The alternative way of thinking about this is understanding it in a more holistic way – that things are connected. That’s an idea that is recently accepted by most people in the public – it’s quite appealing, you sort of intrinsically know it – but in science, because of the way it works with focusing on one thing at a time, scientists tend to get disconnected from the idea. And the word holism in science is considered to be a naughty word – they don’t even wanna hear it. I remember one time co-teaching a course at Cornell and kinda getting warmed up to this whole idea and I used that word and was told “you can’t use that word”. And I thought to myself “what’s going on here?”  But I started thinking about this more, and it turns out that the whole medical system is based on this very reductionist idea – not holistic. Now, the medical people in Asia, India and China, ancient times, they thought more holistically, and they spent their practices trying to understand a bit about that, whereas Western medicine went the reduction route. And you can see that in the fact that the medical system we have is focused on the idea that disease is local, specific someplace in your body. So, surgeons had a heyday with cancer, for example, because they said “oh, you can just cut it out”. It was a raging debate in the 1800s and the surgeons had the knives, so they could sort of rule the roost. It was quite bizarre. But then, in addition, the chemists and others also went down that track, and radiation biologists figured if you could just take the chemical and target it to the problem, eventually you’re going to do something. “That’s science, let’s figure out how to target things”. So you hear about this concept of targeted drug therapy. Target and kill the cancer cells. I think this is wrong. Because that’s not what disease is all about. Disease is a lot more stuff going on.

MC: And we also apply the same reductionist concept to plants and take one isolated vitamin, one mineral out of the whole plant and sell it as the thing to take.

TCC: Absolutely. And on that point, the vitamin and supplement industry these days is $24-$25 billion dollars a year. I mean, it’s huge. And I’ve followed it rather closely because, when it had its big impetus in the early 80s, it was at the time that I was on the National Academy of Science Catalog on Diet, Nutrition and Cancer, which was the most publicized report in the NAS history, and we were talking about vitamin intake and discussing amounts of fruits and vegetables and we specifically and explicitly said in our executive summary “this does not apply to individual nutrients”. But at the same time, there were people over here in the commercial sector who wanted to take advantage of our story and would take full page ads in Time magazine and US News and World Report saying “oh, you know, this body decided that vitamin C and vitamin E can prevent cancer”. So, they would run and make a business out of it. They started putting this stuff in pills and making these wild claims, almost obscene. So, I was invited as a key witness for the Academy in hearings held before the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, responsible for keeping some control on these claims. It was an interesting experience, there I could see too the intricacies between what business wants to do and what the facts really are. And I can tell you, business focuses on targeted stuff, and individual chemicals. I have followed the industry over the years because it was my idea at the time, and I made this argument, that these vitamin supplements were not likely to work. Wrong dose, wrong time, out of context – all that stuff. And I created a lot of hostility among some friends who wanted to go down that road.

MC: You mentioned before that patent law plays a role here as well.

TCC: If you work in science, you have to come up with an idea of some kind, that might be useful for the public. It succeeds, basically, because it can make money. We’re living in this kind of system. And so this is the way it is – if you can’t make money with an idea, to be honest, it’s not gonna spread very fast. And the reason for this is that ideas spread as a function of how much resources people have to bring to bear on it, to sell the idea. It’s all about marketing. So, for something to sell and get into the public market place, the only way it can do that is to get some kind of intellectual property protection, copyright, trademark, stuff like this. If you get an idea, it’s gotta be protected. And patent law is such that you have to be very specific about your idea, so you can distinguish it from all the other ideas that were done beforehand. It demands focus – what’s the chemical structure, what’s the exact mechanism, that kind of thing. So, the intellectual property protection business forces this reductionist thinking. And in the scientific arena,  having sat on review panels that decide who gets grants and who doesn’t, the same idea is there: focus your hypothesis, focus, focus. So you’ve got the whole business world and the whole scientific world all into this idea. And that’s why the current medical system is what it is – it’s focused on one drug at a time, doing something specific, which creates enormous confusion and a lot of harm.

SC: What’s your opinion then, if we’re talking about a whole foods, plant-based diet, on chlorella – green algae in powder form granulated in order to break the cell wall for better absorption?

TCC: That’s certainly much more reasonable, because something like chlorella – or a lot of other herbal substances, quite frankly – are made up of tens of hundreds or chemicals working together. It’s really still whole. In China, for example, watermelon is an herb. You know, it’s a food, it’s an herb. SO, when you’re talking about the whole food, chlorella being an example of course, that’s a different situation. In fact, there is a new industry emerging now in this country where instead of taking whole vegetables and fruits, they freeze dry them so they can maintain the biological activity and just dry off the water. You take out the water and the fiber, so you basically get everything in the plant except for the water and the fiber – you concentrate it.  That’s whole foods supplements.

SC: But in reality, we do need the water and fiber.

TCC: Exactly. When you’re consuming a whole food, you get the water, you get the fiber, everything is working together. But, at least with this even if you take out the water and the fiber, you still end up with something, which is better than a single nutrient. It’s a very different situation. It’s a step in between.

MC: There’s a misconception that vegan equals nutrition if you just cut out the meat and dairy, but there are many junk-food vegans out there.

TCC: Absolutely, in fact, most of them are vegan junk foodies, just eating a lot of pasta and stuff like that.

MC: So, can you clarify what is really meant by nutrition in a plant-based diet and what people should eat on a daily basis?

TCC: We have so many different plants to eat, so, rather than getting caught up in talking about vegetables and fruits – and some of them can be both – I just like to sort of go back and think about it in a natural sense: Why don’t we just eat some roots, and some stems, and some leaves, and some flowers – so you have all these different opportunities for all these different kinds of plants. Different plants offer different kinds of nutrients.  The stuff that’s in the tubers and the roots, is really loaded with starch – like potatoes – because the plant is storing energy for the next generation. So, we need that kind of energy, we eat the roots. We can also get our energy from other forms of storage – I’m thinking of nuts and seeds. They are pretty high in fat, and that’s a form of energy, so some of that is just fine. And then, at the same time, the really big bang for the buck is to eat the part of the plant that’s colored – the green, the reds, yellows and stuff like that. Because the color that is the part of the plant actually comes from chemicals – it has this double bond system, which gives some color, but also shares the property of being an antioxidant. So, now we have a lot of antioxidants all over the place. If you look at if in that context of using the whole plant, concentrating as much as you can on the plants that are colored, especially the greens, because if there is one food group that really is pretty special, it’s the green, the leafy part. And, I should say, things like the cauliflower, things like the flowers, the buds, because they’re kinda loaded up too with a lot of antioxidant activity. There are reasons that these plants create these antioxidants, quite frankly, in certain parts of the plant, especially in the part of the plant that’s taking in the sun rays, ‘cause that in turn is going to create excess of oxidation, and the plant and Nature have very nicely done this where it packs all the chemicals around there as scavengers of these free radicals that might occur during photosynthesis. So we got all these different plants that  you can eat, we know what we should be doing – we need some energy, we need some fiber for the intestinal tract.

SC: You mentioned roots, flowers and stems – sprouts are comprised of all three of these. Are they pretty special?

TCC: Yes. Sprouts are very good because at that point in time you have that young seed growing and really taking advantage of the young, rich nutrient storage it had when it was first starting. So you get a fairly rich supply of nutrients at that point in time. And if its sort of sticking it’s head out and gathering some sun at that point in time too, then you’re really gonna get a nice supply of antioxidants as well. So, I have every reason to believe that sprouts are pretty nutritious.

MC: So, you have all these things to eat. Now, how do you eat them? How do you cook them for the most nutrition – and should you even cook them?

TCC: I think it’s a good idea to include a lot of raw foods, it makes common sense because that is the native form of everything, and you destroy some things at the point of cooking. So, we have salads, which are a great thing. The raw food people who want to have 100% raw foods – that doesn’t work too well for too long, I think. For one thing, by doing that, they can’t consume the grains, because they require some cooking. So that rules those out, which means they have to rely on another source of energy, like a lot of nuts and seeds. And that’s distorting the total package, in a way. So, some of my physician friends end up getting  some raw food people that do it for two or three years – and they end up with some problems.

SC: How does it distort the package? Is replacing some carb energy with too many nuts providing too much fat?

TCC: When we eat food, we need energy. We need a certain amount of calories. So, the question is, where do we get it from? We can get it from all kinds of parts, but it;s better to get it from carbohydrates. And that’s gonna be present in the seeds and the tubers. But not many people wanna eat a raw potato.

SC: Have you?

TCC: I’ve eaten a raw potato before without any problems, but, you know…it’s not my favorite food. On the other hand, as a matter of fact, potatoes that are raw and are exposed to the sun a little bit, you can get this greenish part of the skin, and that produces alkaloids, which are a bit poisonous. So, it’s not the greatest idea to count on eating raw potatoes. So, potatoes, the starchy part of the plant, need some cooking. Grains, wheat, barley, corn, that kind of stuff need some cooking. Raw food people can’t go there, for the most part. They can get rolled oats or something like that, but mostly what they do is they turn their attention to consuming all this fat. And that’s what I mean when the diet becomes a bit distorted. So, I think cooking is not bad. It’s a good idea and most people like to have something cooked.

MC: What does get destroyed when cooking?

TCC: It depends on how much you cook it and if you’re cooking with really high heat, over an open fire for example, you might get, not only destruction of things that you want to get, but you may also get the formation of charred material, which of course is not the greatest thing in the world. That’s one problem with overcooking. The other is overcooking in a pot, which is usually boiling and stuff like that. If you cook it for too long on too high, you will likely destroy some of the nutrients, and when you throw the water out, you’re throwing away a lot of the nutrients.

SC: What happens to amino acids when cooked?

TCC: They tend not to be destroyed, but what is somewhat de-natured is the protein. Proteins are big molecules and they’re made up of a whole lot of different amino acids, so when you add heat to this or put it in acid or alkaline conditions, the protein, which otherwise has a very nice biological activity, ends very different, because you’re breaking up a bunch of bonds. The whole molecule of a protein like an enzyme, for example, has a very unique configuration. The shape of it is extremely important in terms of determining its ability to catalyze a reaction. And it’s held in this configuration partly because loose chemical bonds tend to attract one part of the amino acid sequence to another part, and that’s how bonds form. The cooking process, as well as our digestive process, tend to break down everything into the individual amino acids.

SC: Then is it a good thing to cook beans, for example, so that the stuff is already broken down somewhat?

TCC: You can make that argument, yes. As a matter of fact, I think it’s soy beans and a couple of other things that if you don’t cook, you can end up with some materials in there that are a little bit toxic. And so, if you destroy those toxic materials, it’s a good idea. So, arguments can be made, like you’re suggesting, for some cooking. I think though when you just sort of look at it in the general sense, our diets should certainly be comprised to a large extent of some fresh salads and fruits. Not cooking them is a good thing. With the cooking, a couple of cautionary things: We shouldn’t cook things and then throw away the water. Quite frankly, you’re just losing all the water soluble vitamins and good stuff in there and it’s better to have vegetable stock and use it some place else if you’d like. Or just don’t overcook. So, what it just comes down to is light cooking – the wok idea is not a bad idea – and maybe even doing this (this is kind of neat too) without frying foods, ‘cause then you’re sopping up a bunch of oil, corrupting things. It might be better to just sauté things in water.

SC: So, oils under heat, even those like coconut oil with a high heat point – better not to heat them if we’re talking about optimal nutrition?

TCC: Yes, exactly.

MC: What happens to animal protein during digestion?

TCC: We’re able to still break it down into individual amino acids. The whole putrefaction thing is something quite different, it’s when animal flesh lies around and decays and that doesn’t necessarily happen in our intestines, but what can happen is that it can get compacted, so it hangs around our intestines longer, and that’s not a good idea. Plus there’s constipation, to be honest about it. And the other thing is that the amino acids that are present in the animal foods too, have some properties that are not so good – a little more sulfur amino acids, which in turn, when that gets metabolized, creates sulfate ions. Sulfate is an acidic ion, so you end up getting a more acidic type of tissue, and that’s not good. So, we can think of a lot of reasons that animal proteins aren’t very good, other than putrefaction.

SC: Some people believe that combining rice and beans also creates sulfur/harmful byproducts. Is that true?

TCC: I’m not a big fan of food combining either. The macrobiotic diet will talk about that, some others too. I think food combining is becoming too specific without the evidence. We sometimes get caught up in too much detail – two parts of this, two parts of that- but we didn’t do that in evolutionary times. If we eat just a variety of things – variety is a good idea – then nature takes care of itself.  I don’t know the evidence, the science, to suggest whether this combination or that combination is better or this time is better than that time. It’s too much to figure out.

MC: What about deficiencies in a plant-based diet? People talk about B12, calcium.

TCC: Calcium is a no-no, there’s no calcium deficiency on a plant-based diet. B12, yeah, it turns out that people who eat that way for long periods of time, you will see the B12 go down in the blood. And so the range of B12 in vegans is pretty consistently lower than omnivores. And the range that was considered to be normal up until fairly recently was 250-800 or so, that was omnivores. And what we see in vegans is a range of maybe 150-300, so there’s a tendency for it to be lower. Well, because we get to caught up in numbers and just accept history and never question it, we tend to think “oh, it’s gotta b 250 and above” and anybody below is in trouble. So, most vegans are urged to take some sort of supplement. And, my argument – and I was discussing this at a medical conference yesterday – is that, we already know from history that ranges are devised in certain periods of information, but generally reflecting what we’re doing at the time. So, if we’re mostly consuming animal foods when all of this information was being put together, that happens to yield 250-800. Now we’re going over to plants and starting to discover people with less B12 – maybe that’s the normal. Maybe that’s what it should be.

SC: The same thing happened with cholesterol.

TCC: It used to be that the normal range for cholesterol was 200-300. Now we know that’s not true. People started eating plants and all of a sudden normal is less than 200. In my early days, if you got cholesterol less than 200, it was considered a problem, it was even said to increase suicide rate. All these crazy things. Eventually, they started coming to their senses, especially when they discovered the statins and that they can reduce cholesterol level. So now they want to reduce the cholesterol levels and make sure they’re even lower so you have to take a statin. So, these ranges shift in time, and it’s a challenge to the medical doctors to stop and think about it: The only thing that really matters is not necessarily the range that you happen to see when you’re measuring the blood, but basically what is happening at the end of the day. If you really had a serious vitamin B12 deficiency, you would have a condition that is called parasthesis – tingling in the fingers – or you would have some kind of anemia. If that’s the case, then next question is, is that more common in vegans than in omnivores? We don’t know that. I’d like to see a little more systematic research to accept that. The argument is always “B12 doesn’t grow in plants”. Well, it doesn’t grow in animals either -it’s created by bacteria. And we have bacteria in our gut, and in the soil too, so, if you have good organic soil, the plant will take up some of the stuff and get it. There are people who say there’s also active B12 and inactive – but active for what? If you really look at the basic science, you find a lot of gaps in knowledge. If you want to play it safe, then you can take a B12 supplement now and then, if you want.

MC: Or throw a little dirt in your food.

TCC: Or just don’t wash the organic stuff very well.

MC: I know that you are largely funded by the National Institutes of Health, the authority here, and I’m wondering – what is their stand on a plant-based diet?

TCC: I’m glad you asked that because it’s a real sore point. I consider nutrition to be THE premiere science in medicine – end of story. And there’s nothing that can touch it – if we understand it. We don’t understand it. People in my community of research don’t understand it. People in the medical practitioner community don’t understand it, we talked about that before, how there is no nutrition course requirement in medical school. And NIH is the premiere research funding agency in the world, it has the most money, has a great track record, is highly respected. It’s made up of 27 institutes, centers and programs, on cancer, diabetes, etc…Not one is called the Institute of Nutrition. The head of the NCI and the head of the Heart and Lung would say “oh, we got nutrition built into our fabric, in our system, in our research”, but when they asked them what percent would you actually say is focused on nutrition, they would give a figure of 2% or 3%. And the others don’t have any, so it’s just limited to a couple of the institutes, and only 2%-4%. And most of that is actually spent on clinical trials – where they spend a lot of the little money testing the ability of single nutrients, like “does vitamin C stop colon  polyps?” It’s done with an eye on the corporate sector – that’s what it’s about: What can we put into a pill and see if it works. And it’s just ridiculous. And to add insult to injury, since the director of an institute has to be a medical doctor, that means it has to be someone who is not trained in nutrition, by default. I have served on NIH review committees and it became very clear to me that they were consistently very opposed to nutrition – even though they use the word a lot, they don’t seriously study it. My book is about having these kinds of experiences.

SC: When is it coming out?

TCC: I’m hoping later this summer.

SC: How do we change things and how did we get here in the first place?

TCC: I’m trying to address it in my book – and so far my colleagues in the sciences can’t argue with it – and it really comes down to this: We have lost respect for nature. We over-name things, we over-quantitate things. We live that way, partly because that’s the way our brains work, maybe we just can’t think in this kind of context – but we have to. That’s the way nature is and until we recognize that this is what life is all about, we’re not gonna make a lot of progress. What we’re going to do is continue to make a lot of money, and let the rich get richer and let the rest of the people serve as slaves. That’s one title I’m considering: The Master and Slave State. We’re focused on money, greed and competition, and the people who really want to go down that route become very hostile when you challenge them.

MC: The truth is that health is power, and if everyone has health/power, then who is left to rule, right?

TCC: Yeah, I say it’s “wealth for the few at the expense of health for the many”. It’s really what it’s all about. To come back to your question of HOW we do this – establishment does not understand nutrition, and whether they know it or not, they are consistently trying to keep this information from the public. So, I say, first of all, it’s about information control – let’s face it. And I show how industries have devised systems to keep things under control. Registered dietitians, for example, are the only ones allowed to practice nutrition professionally. There’s licensing, and the ones who are controlling the licensing is the American Dietetic Association. And the ADA is a front for the dairy industry, for crying out loud. Two years ago, I was invited to give a keynote there and we were given our registration bags and there on the outside it says “ADA partners” and you see The National Dairy Council, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola. So I just took a picture and I just showed the others and I said “look at this criminal outfit”. They are the ones that not only control who is allowed to talk about food because of the licenses, but they also control the curriculum in universities as to what courses you have to take to get and RD. So, all the Registered Dietitians in this country are working with a corrupt organization and getting trained in an area of nutrition that is controlled. When I tell them this, a lot of dietitians get upset, but all of a sudden they realize that they’ve been had. And the public has really been had.