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March 24, 2015 - September 8, 2018
The provocative results of my four decades of biomedical research, including the findings from a twenty-seven-year laboratory program (funded by the most reputable funding agencies) prove that eating right can save your life.
dioxin, arguably the most toxic chemical ever found.
aflatoxin, a mold toxin found in peanuts and corn,
Aflatoxin has been called one of the most potent carcinogens ever discovered.
Children who ate the highest-protein diets were the ones most likely to get liver cancer! They were the children of the wealthiest families.
It was a 100 to 0 score, leaving no doubt that nutrition trumped chemical carcinogens, even very potent carcinogens, in controlling cancer.
Questioning protein and animal-based foods in general ran the risk of my being labeled a heretic, even if it passed the test of “good science.”
It was important to understand not only whether but also how protein might promote cancer.
Low-protein diets inhibited the initiation of cancer by aflatoxin, regardless of how much of this carcinogen was administered to these animals. After cancer initiation was completed, low-protein diets also dramatically blocked subsequent cancer growth. In other words, the cancer-producing effects of this highly carcinogenic chemical were rendered insignificant by a low-protein diet. In fact, dietary protein proved to be so powerful in its effect that we could turn on and turn off cancer growth simply by changing the level consumed.
But that’s not all. We found that not all proteins had this effect. What protein consistently and strongly promoted cancer?
Casein, which makes up 87% of cow’s milk protein, promoted all stages of the cancer process.
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What type of protein did not promote cancer, even at high levels of intake? The safe proteins were from p...
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New York Times called it the “Grand Prix of Epidemiology.”
people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. Even relatively small intakes of animal-based food were associated with adverse effects. People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease.
The result is massive amounts of misinformation, for which average American consumers pay twice. They provide the tax money to do the research, and then they provide the money for their health care to treat their largely preventable diseases.
“He who does not know food, how can he understand the diseases of man?” —Hippocrates, the father of medicine (460-357 B.C.)
Vascular (arteries and heart) health is possible without life-threatening surgery and without potentially lethal drugs. I have learned that it can be achieved simply by eating the right food.
Contrary to what many believe, cancer is not a natural event. Adopting a healthy diet and lifestyle can prevent the majority of cancers in the United States.
One is considered obese if he or she is carrying more than a third of a person above and beyond a healthy weight.
Both diabetes and obesity are merely symptoms of poor health in general. They rarely exist in isolation of other diseases and often forecast deeper, more serious health problems, such as heart disease, cancer and stroke.
But the most pervasive killer in our culture is not obesity, diabetes or cancer. It is heart disease. Heart disease will kill one out of every three Americans.
The most dramatic recent finding is that heart disease can be prevented and even reversed by a healthy diet.
People who cannot perform the most basic physical activity because of severe angina can find a new life simply by changing their diets.
physician error, medication error and adverse events from drugs or surgery kill 225,400 people per year (Chart 1.5).11 That makes our health care system the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind only cancer and heart disease (Chart 1.4).
Even with the use of approved medicines and correct medication procedures, over one hundred thousand people die every year from unintended reactions to the “medicine” that is supposed to be reviving their health.
The current system has not lived up to its promise. It is time to shift our thinking toward a broader perspective on health, one that includes a proper understanding and use of good nutrition.
the World Health Organization ranked the United States thirty-seventh best in the world according to health care system performance.
The answer to the American health crisis is the food that each of us chooses to put in our mouths each day. It’s as simple as that.
Changing dietary practices will only occur and be maintained when people believe the evidence and experience the benefits.
There are, in effect, two things: to know and to believe one knows. To know is science. To believe one knows is ignorance.”
They included an investigation of liver cancer in Philippine children and their consumption of a mold toxin, aflatoxin22, 23; a nationwide program of self-help nutrition centers for malnourished preschool children in the Philippines24; a study of dietary factors affecting bone density and osteoporosis in 800 women in China23–27; a study of biomarkers that characterize the emergence of breast cancer28, 29; and a nationwide, comprehensive study of dietary and lifestyle factors associated with disease mortality in 170 villages in mainland China and Taiwan (widely known as the China Study).30–33
List of studies conducted upon which the research in this book comes from.
Through all of this, I have come to see that the benefits produced by eating a plant-based diet are far more diverse and impressive than any drug or surgery used in medical practice.
I remember when my superiors were only reluctantly accepting the evidence of nutrition being able to prevent heart disease, for example, but vehemently denying its ability to reverse such a disease when already advanced. But the evidence can no longer be ignored. Those in science or medicine who shut their minds to such an idea are being more than stubborn; they are being irresponsible.
These futuristic pipe dreams obscure the affordable, efficacious health solutions that currently exist: solutions based in nutrition. In my own laboratory we have shown in experimental animals that cancer growth can be turned on and off by nutrition, despite very strong genetic predisposition. We have studied these effects in great detail and have published our findings in the very best scientific journals. As you will see later, these findings are nothing short of spectacular, and the same effects have been indicated over and over again in humans.
Protein, often regarded with unsurpassed awe, is the common thread tying together past and present knowledge about nutrition.
Protein is the core element of animal-based foods.
Early scientists like Carl Voit (1831-1908), a prominent German scientist, were staunch champions of protein. Voit found that “man” needed only 48.5 grams per day, but nonetheless he recommended a whopping 118 grams per day because of the cultural bias of the time.
Protein, fat, carbohydrate and alcohol provide virtually all of the calories that we consume. Fat, carbohydrate and protein, as macronutrients, make up almost all the weight of food, aside from water, with the remaining small amount being the vitamin and mineral micronutrients. The amounts of these latter micronutrients needed for optimum health are tiny (milligrams to micrograms).
Protein, the most sacred of all nutrients, is a vital component of our bodies and there are hundreds of thousands of different kinds. They function as enzymes, hormones, structural tissue and transport molecules, all of which make life possible. Proteins are constructed as long chains of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, of which there are fifteen to twenty different kinds, depending on how they are counted. Proteins wear out on a regular basis and must be replaced. This is accomplished by consuming foods that contain protein. When digested, these proteins give us a whole new supply of
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About eight amino acids (“colored beads”) that are needed for making our tissue proteins must be provided by the food we eat. They are called “essential” because our bodies cannot make them.
Food proteins of the highest quality are, very simply, those that provide, upon digestion, the right kinds and amounts of amino acids needed to efficiently synthesize our new tissue proteins. This is what that word “quality” really means: it is the ability of food proteins to provide the right kinds and amounts of amino acids to make our new proteins.
Among animal foods, the proteins of milk and eggs represent the best amino acid matches for our proteins, and thus are considered the highest quality. While the “lower quality” plant proteins may be lacking in one or more of the essential amino acids, as a group they do contain all of them. The concept of quality really means the efficiency with which food proteins are used to promote growth. This would be well and good if the greatest efficiency equaled the greatest health, but it doesn’t, and that’s why the terms efficiency and quality are misleading. In fact, to give you a taste of what’s
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We now know that through enormously complex metabolic systems, the human body can derive all the essential amino acids from the natural variety of plant proteins that we encounter every day.
The protein gap stipulated that world hunger and malnutrition among children in the third world was a result of not having enough protein to consume, especially high-quality (i.e. animal) protein.
Looking back on it, this was the beginning of my career focus on diet and cancer. The moment of deciding to investigate protein and cancer was the turning point.
Proof in science is elusive. Even more than in the “core” sciences of biology, chemistry and physics, establishing absolute proof in medicine and health is nearly impossible. The primary objective of research investigation is to determine only what is likely to be true. This is because research into health is inherently statistical. When you throw a ball in the air, will it come down? Yes, every time. That’s physics. If you smoke four packs a day, will you get lung cancer? The answer is maybe. We know that your odds of getting lung cancer are much higher than if you didn’t smoke, and we can
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When the weight of the evidence favors an idea so strongly that it can no longer be plausibly denied, we advance the idea as a likely truth. It is in this way that I am advancing an argument for a whole foods, plant-based diet.
Statistical significance is a measure of whether an observed experimental effect is truly reliable or whether it is merely due to the play of chance. If you flip a coin three times and it lands on heads each time, it’s probably chance. If you flip it a hundred times and it lands on heads each time, you can be pretty sure the coin has heads on both sides. That’s the concept behind statistical significance—it’s the odds that the correlation (or other finding) is real, that it isn’t just random chance.
Oftentimes correlations are considered more reliable if other research shows that two correlated factors are biologically related.
Knowing the process by which something works in the body means knowing its “mechanism of action.” And knowing its mechanism of action strengthens the evidence. Another way of saying this is that the two correlated factors are related in a “biologically plausible” way. If a relationship is biologically plausible, it is considered much more reliable.
