Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

by T. Colin Campbell

Most people in the medical community of practitioners and researchers do not regard looking for global mechanisms of health and disease as proper science. Before admitting nutritional medicine to the “legitimate disciplines” club, they would want to know the precise details of how such a complex system works for each disease event. Short of that, they would insist on identifying the “active agents” of food, rather than simply accepting that the food itself is what’s good for us. Of course, they are asking for something that is impossible, at least when it comes to nutrition—we don’t know exactly how it works, because we cannot identify all the parts, what they do, and how they do it. We just know that it does work. The medical community often cites the mantra that there is no such thing as “one size fits all,” revealing their inability and abject refusal to fully embrace the idea of complexity and its implications. Nature does a far better job of arranging for proper biological functioning than we like to admit, and once we accept the ability of the body’s infinitely complex system to attain and maintain health, then the one-size-fits-all philosophy begins to make sense. We can imagine “one size” being whole, plant-based foods, with an almost infinite number and variety of parts acting harmonically as one,