Whole Quotes

“It’s never too late to start eating well. A good diet can reverse many of those conditions as well. In short: change the way you eat and you can transform your health for the better.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Every kilogram of beef requires 100,000 liters of water to produce. By comparison, a kilogram of wheat requires just 900 liters, and a kilogram of potatoes just 500 liters.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“So removing vitamin E from its context within plant foods is like sending a general into battle without any troops.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Western culture is hell-bent on ignoring, disbelieving, and, in some cases, actively twisting the truth about what we should be eating—so much so that it can be hard for us to believe that we’ve been lied to all these years.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“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.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“With industry's sales and marketing machines cloaked in mantles of charitable virtue, no wonder most Americans don't realize that the junk that passes for food is in fact the biggest contributor to our health crisis, and the junk that passes for medicine keeps us just well enough to continue to spend on both the food and the medicine.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Nutrition is not a mathematical equation in which two plus two is four. The food we put in our mouths doesn’t control our nutrition—not entirely. What our bodies do with that food does.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn but to unlearn. —GLORIA STEINEM”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“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. There’s just too much good evidence to ignore anymore.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Side effects of those very same prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer. That’s right! Prescription drugs kill more people than traffic accidents. According to Dr. Barbara Starfield, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2000, “adverse effects of medications” (from drugs that were correctly prescribed and taken) kill 106,000 people per year.5 And that doesn’t include accidental overdoses.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“By now, I hope you recognize this as one more example of the reductionist paradigm at work, even when it's couched in natural and alternative terms. As we saw in chapter ten, one of the major problems with modern medicine is its reliance on isolated, unnatural chemical pharmaceuticals as the primary tool in the war against disease. But the medical profession isn't the only player in the health-care system that has embraced this element of reductionism. The natural health community has also fallen prey to the ideology that chemicals ripped from their natural context are as good as or better than whole foods. Instead of synthesizing the presumed "active ingredients" from medicinal herbs, as done for prescription drugs, supplement manufacturers seek to extract and bottle the active ingredients from foods known or believed to promote good health and healing. And just like prescription drugs, the active agents function imperfectly, incompletely, and unpredictably when divorced from the whole plant food from which they're derived or synthesized.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“You can’t patent a recommendation to eat lots of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. So there’s no incentive for industry to invest in such research and no incentive for researchers to study and validate such claims.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“These days, the supplement industry has the process down to a “science.” New scientific research on single nutrients generalizes in a very superficial way about their ability to promote human health. Companies put these newly discovered “nutrients” into pills, organize public relations campaigns, and write marketing plans to encourage a confused public to buy.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“First, nutrition is the master key to human health. Second, what most of us think of as proper nutrition—isn’t.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Let’s start with the most prominent ecological crisis of our time: global warming. When you look seriously at the numbers, you find that switching from a meat-based to a plant-based diet would do more to curb and reverse global warming than any other initiative.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“We’ve discovered that cow’s milk protein at reasonable levels of intake markedly promotes experimental cancer growth, which is outside of the nutrition paradigm. We’ve discovered that experimental cancer growth can be turned on and off by altering practical levels of nutrient intake, and can be treated by nutritional means, which is outside of the cancer treatment paradigm.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Truly winning the war on cancer requires individual responsibility for our food choices; as long as we wait for the next pharmaceutical breakthrough or genetic engineering miracle to save us, we won’t use the considerable power we already possess to end this scourge. In”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Real” scientists investigate parts, not wholes. But this diminishes the goals of true science. What most scientists are doing today really should be called technology, not science.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“That's another pitfall of reductionism: Until scientists have the means to isolate and measure things, they insist those things don't and can't exist, and anyone who says otherwise is ignorant an superstitious.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Even rational, data-driven scientists could be sent into prolonged states of hysteria when presented with evidence that their favorite foods might be killing them.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“a well-conceived experiment was like setting the table beautifully and inviting Truth to dinner.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Focusing on individual nutrients, their identities, their contents in food, their tissue concentrations, and their biological mechanisms, is like using math and physics to catch balls. It’s not the way nature evolved, and it makes proper nutrition far more difficult than it needs to be. Our bodies use countless mechanisms, strategically placed throughout our digestion, absorption, and transport and metabolic pathways, to effortlessly ensure tissue concentrations consistent with good health—no database consultation required. But as long as we let reductionism guide our research and our understanding of nutrition, good health will remain unattainable.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“The evidence cited here represents only an infinitesimally small fraction of the total number of interactions operating every moment in our bodies. Clearly, the common belief that we can investigate the effects of a single nutrient or drug, unmindful of the potential modifications by other chemical factors, is foolhardy. This evidence should also make us extremely hesitant to “mega-dose” on nutrients isolated from whole foods. Our bodies have evolved to eat whole foods, and can therefore deal with the combinations and interactions of nutrients contained in those foods.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“there is almost no direct relationship between the amount of a nutrient consumed at a meal and the amount that actually reaches its main site of action in the body—what is called its bioavailability.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“started to see that none of the accepted “causes” of cancer, in the absence of a high-animal-protein diet, mattered that much. Not genetics, not chemical carcinogens like AF,”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Population studies begun forty to fifty years ago show that when people migrate from one country to another, they acquire the cancer rate of the country to which they move, despite the fact their genes remain the same.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“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.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Instead, the secret of health has been in front of us all along, in the guise of a simple and perhaps boring word: nutrition. When”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“a lot of so-called health breakthroughs are not nearly as impressive as their marketing makes them appear. While it may be good business to spin the numbers to increase sales, it isn’t good science. One”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition