Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

by T. Colin Campbell

ultimately became aware of two things: First, nutrition is the master key to human health. Second, what most of us think of as proper nutrition—isn’t.

sadly, medical schools, hospitals, and government health agencies continue to treat nutrition as if it plays only a minor role in health.

When it comes to our health, it turns out the trump card is the food we put in our mouths each day.

At this point, any scientist, doctor, journalist, or policy maker who denies or minimizes the importance of a whole food, plant-based diet for individual and societal well-being simply isn’t looking clearly at the facts.

For many reasons, we now operate under a paradigm that looks for truth only in the smallest details, while entirely ignoring the big picture.

What we eat, individually and collectively, has repercussions far beyond our waistlines and blood pressure readings. No less than our future as a species hangs in the balance.

We “race for the cure” by pouring billions of dollars into dangerous and ineffective treatments.

We talk about the health-care system in America, but that’s a misnomer; what we really have is a disease-care system.

The United States spends more money per capita on “health” care than any country on earth, yet when the quality of our health care is compared with other industrialized nations, we rank near the bottom.

the data make it clear that none of our advances in medicine deal with primary prevention, and none are making us fundamentally healthier.

What you eat every day is a far more powerful determinant of your health than your DNA or most of the nasty chemicals lurking in your environment.

The ideal human diet looks like this: Consume plant-based foods in forms as close to their natural state as possible (“whole” foods). Eat a variety of vegetables, fruits, raw nuts and seeds, beans and legumes, and whole grains. Avoid heavily processed foods and animal products. Stay away from added salt, oil, and sugar. Aim to get 80 percent of your calories from carbohydrates, 10 percent from fat, and 10 percent from protein.

If the WFPB diet were a pill, its inventor would be the wealthiest person on earth. Since it isn’t a pill, no market forces conspire to advocate for it. No mass media campaign promotes it. No insurance coverage pays for it.

there is some evidence that high-protein diets enhance free radical production, thus encouraging unwanted tissue damage.

It turns out that plants also produce harmful free radicals—in their case, during photosynthesis. To counteract that free radical production, plants have evolved a defense mechanism: a whole battery of compounds capable of preventing damage by binding to and neutralizing the free radicals. These compounds are known, not particularly poetically, as antioxidants.

The excess protein in our diet has promoted excess oxidation, and we no longer consume enough plant-produced antioxidants to contain and neutralize the damage.

eating the WFPB way eliminates the need to worry about the details. Just eat lots of different plant foods; your body will do all the math for you!

Within one to four hours of consuming, for example, a high-fat McDonald’s meal (Egg McMuffin®, Sausage McMuffin®, two hash brown patties, non-caffeinated beverage), serum triglycerides shoot up (increasing the risk of heart disease and diabetes, as well as many other conditions) and arteries stiffen (raising blood pressure). Recovery to normal fluidity takes several hours.

The WFPB diet deals with so many diseases and conditions that you begin to wonder if there isn’t just one basic disease cause—poor nutrition—that manifests through thousands of different symptoms.

The vast majority of medical research looks only at the very specific effects of one element (whether a drug, vitamin, mineral, or procedure such as an operation) on a single symptom or system. Anything else—such as looking at macro differences like lifestyle and diet—is just considered too messy to be reliable.

we need to make nutrition the central element of our health-care system.

we must get away from the “diet” mentality that promotes heroic and unsustainable spurts of healthy eating. Instead of “dieting,” we must change our lifestyle to include a diet that promotes health.

A paradigm can be so all-encompassing that it simply looks like all there is.

A group of Indian researchers had conducted a “gold standard” clinical trial, the kind that isolates one variable and performs a controlled experiment on it.1 The researchers had fed aflatoxin, a powerful carcinogen, to two groups of rats. One group was fed a 20 percent animal protein (casein) diet. The other group was protein deprived, ingesting only 5 percent of their calories from casein. The results? Every single 20 percent protein rat developed liver cancer or cancer precursor lesions. Not a single 5 percent protein rat did.

When I say “protein,” what foods do you think of? Probably not spinach and kale, although those plants have about twice as much protein, per calorie, as a lean cut of beef. No, to most of us in the United States, protein means meat, milk, and eggs.

The word protein gives us a clue as to how deeply we revere our protein: its Greek root, proteios, means “of prime importance.”

The most significant carcinogen, the substance that almost invariably led to cancer at 20 percent of the rats’ diet, was casein, or milk protein. Plant proteins, such as those from wheat and soy, had no effect on cancer development, even at high levels.3

Part of our current paradigm is that bad stuff in the environment causes cancer, and the more enlightened elements involved in the war on cancer seek to reduce our exposure to that bad stuff.

Not part of our current paradigm is that the food we eat is a much more powerful determinant of cancer than just about any environmental toxin.

Even today, it is so heretical that no one wants to say the obvious—that casein is the most relevant chemical carcinogen ever identified.

If you are a reductionist, you believe that everything in the world can be understood if you understand all its component parts. A wholist, on the other hand, believes that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

Wholism does not oppose reductionism; rather, wholism encompasses reductionism, just as each whole encompasses its parts.

Put simply, there are no fixed “edges” within the human body that separate any one part from all the other parts.

food is pretty much the most important topic there is. No food, no civilization. Crop failures, outbreaks of mad cow disease, and contaminated produce could bring our society to its knees very quickly.

Food is as fundamental to our survival as oxygen. But while we all breathe the same air, we have lots of choices when it comes to food, and those choices determine not just how we eat, but also how we utilize our agricultural land, what our government subsidizes, what we teach our children, and what sort of society we create.

nearly everything our society believes about nutrition has reductionist fingerprints all over

an apple does a lot more inside our bodies than all the known apple nutrients ingested in pill form. The whole apple is far more than the sum of its parts.

You probably don’t want to eat foods with long lists of unpronounceable words,