T. Colin Campbell on the Benefits of a Whole Foods Plant-Based Diet

President Clinton credits T. Colin Campbell with helping him regain his health. What about yours? "The China Study" by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II offers convincing evidence that eating whole foods, at least 90% from plant-based sources, generally lowers the risk of contracting heart disease, cancer, and a host of other lifestyle illnesses.

Having grown up on a dairy farm, Campbell once believed in the virtues of the Standard American Diet. After conducting years of research, including one set of studies linking cow's milk with cancer, Campbell has since become a strict vegan.

Meet T. Colin Campbell at the World Veg Festival, held in San Francisco October 1 and 2. For details see Healthy Living Mart.

BART BRODSKY: I saw you on Bill Maher [HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher] the other day.

T. COLIN CAMPBELL: I'm sorry about that.

BB: It was quite amusing.

TC: Those kind of structured things are not exactly suitable for me. I don't want to make excuses, really but I messed up to begin.

BB: I thought you made your points, and Maher was kind of sympathetic. Of course, comedy isn't the same as serious discussion. So, let me ask a couple serious questions. I was very impressed when I read The China Study. It moved me from being more of a carnivore to almost a vegan. Not exclusively vegan, but much closer now. This book convinced me more than any other book I've ever read, with the possible exception of John Robbins' first book, offering an incredible array of evidence supporting a plant-based diet. Tell us how The China Study came about.

TC: I had been working in the field for quite a number of years, mostly doing laboratory based research. In 1980 I had the opportunity to take into my laboratory the first senior scientist from China visiting the United States, Dr. Chen. When he was here we learned what his government was releasing involving their study of mortality in China for the years 1973 to 1975. It was very impressive, and it showed that cancers tended to occur in some places in much higher levels than in other places. So, Dr. Chen and I then talked about doing a study to go there and see why that was so. Then we engaged a really brilliant statistician at the University of Oxford, Sir Richard Peto. So we became a team and organized a study with funding from the National Institutes of Health, and also funding in kind from the Chinese government. This is actually the first research project done between the United States and China—of any kind. We did that in the fall of '83, early '84, actually collected a massive amount of information. Actually selected from 65 representative counties around the country, actually surveyed 130 villages, and an appropriate number of people from each village. It became the most comprehensive study taken on the relationship between lifestyle and disease.  We collected blood samples and urine samples and food samples, asked questions and so forth. And eventually there were about two dozen laboratories in fourteen countries that participated, analyzing things. By 1988 or 1989 we had screened the data and cleaned up the data, so to speak, and published this rather large monograph in 1990. That was featured in the New York Times as a cover story. And from that massive body of evidence, we started analyzing bits of it to see if we could see something in there, particularly as to whether or not the evidence in China among humans was consistent with what I had been getting in the laboratory up until then.

BB: For those of us who aren't researchers, what did you conclude? What is the healthiest diet?

TC: A whole foods, plant based diet. Practically speaking, vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes. Things like that. And also at the same time, not adding back stuff like salt, sugar, and fat, which are food items that really kind of hook us into consuming high fat, highly sweet, highly salted foods. From that perspective, it was really quite substantial, because most people don't [eat that way.]

BB: Yes

TC: I also learned about Dr. Esselstyn [Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr,], whose name you may know. He's a long time surgeon who had, on his own account, organized a study of about eighteen of his patients who had heart disease, and was basically trying on them the same diet I found [best] from The China Study. It was interesting because he came to that point of view on his own. I came to my point of view on my own. We used two different approaches.

BB: Was his study before or after Dean Ornish's? [Ornish proved that coronary artery disease could be reversed by following an ultra-low fat vegetarian diet combined with meditation, exercise, and family support.]

TC: Actually he started before and was much longer lasting. Ornish published his study just after one year of working with these people. Esselstyn's now has gone on for 26 years.

BB: I take it that the results are similar.

TC: I find Esselstyn to be much more convincing because he did not use stress reduction techniques or procedures. He did not talk about exercise.  His entire effort was focused on diet.

BB: That's interesting. In an interview with Dr. Ornish I asked him why he hadn't broken out specific factors such as stress and exercise. He was resistant to do that, preferring to take a holistic approach. His philosophy is to do everything he can for his patients, but from a scientific point of view it I think it confounds the statistics.

Regarding diet, there are a growing number of flexitarians such as myself, who will occasionally eat a little meat but are largely vegan or vegetarian in most of our meals. Did you study any purely vegan populations in The China Study?

TC: Actually, I don't even use the word vegan or vegetarian because I really don't support what most of those people do. It was I who came up with that really awkward term, "whole foods plant based diet." I did that because I was working at NIH at the time on review panels determining which kind of research grants get funded and which ones don't. I was the only nutritionist, and I didn't like the words vegan and vegetarian, because 90% of the vegetarians are still using dairy and oftentimes a fair amount of eggs and fish, and so the nutritive composition of that diet is not that different. And as a result, one can't expect it to be much benefit because it the nutritive composition that really determines the final outcome.

BB: I'm a little confused when you say the nutrient composition. Because, clearly, the rural Chinese in your study that were eating more grains and less fats had lower rates of cancer and heart disease. But they still had some animal [nutrient] sources.

TC: Let me go back to that just a minute. First, let me tell you why I don't put too much stock in studies of vegetarians. I also don't put much stock in studies of vegans. Vegans, for sure, are not using animal foods of any kind. But their problem is that because they arrived at that decision for purely ideological reasons, not for scientific reasons, what they're doing is avoiding animal foods but end up eating too many processed foods just as long as they don't have animals in them. Processed foods are high in fat, salt, and sugar. So, whereas they may have gained quite a bit on one hand, on the other hand they lost a lot of it. In general they are healthier, but not a whole lot healthier. So, I really want to focus on the word "whole." And plant based. Whole, plant based foods. And add the additional caveat "without adding salt, sugar, fat, or oil."

BB: Yes.

TC: So, to come back to your question concerning did we really look at vegans and were those people available in China, no. Strictly speaking, people eating just as I am suggesting—it wasn't looking at a select group of people doing something and comparing one with another. That wasn't the design of the study. What was the design of the study was we had 130 villages and we collected extensive information on every village. And then we looked at correlations between all manner of things. We measured 367 different items of information, much of the nutritional effects, some which were viral, some which were chemical. We had about four different disease rates. So we had that mammoth body of data, of course, also on the diet/lifestyle side, to compare with outcomes on the other side of the equation. So, by looking at correlations—we ended up with about 100,000 correlations, by the way.

BB: Oh, my gosh!

TC: Computers were just becoming available at that time.

BB: Let me try my question from another approach. Assuming I'm eating a whole foods, plant-based diet and I'm trying to avoid extra salt and sugar, if I occasionally eat a little bit of meat, is that going to do me harm or do me good?

TC: Well, my answer is based on looking at the odds, not speaking in absolute terms. It depends on your predisposition for getting some of those diseases. It turns out that a small percentage of people can smoke till they're 90 or 95 without getting lung cancer. But, I'm more worried about the other 90 to 95 percent. The same thing is true for food. I'm convinced that some people can just eat all the wrong foods. You probably know someone like that.

BB: Would you always consider meat the wrong food?

TC: Yeah. I would.

BB: Were you a vegan before the study, and are you---

TC: No. I was actually a bit antagonistic to those communities. I was actually raised on a dairy farm. And I milked cows and all that. And when I went away to graduate school it was based on the idea of trying to show that consuming foods high in protein, especially animal protein, was really the best of the best. I guess I assumed right at the beginning that the best diet was the good old American diet. [As a graduate student] I got into a fairly substantial research program. I was gathering information over the years, [coming to my current position] after some struggle inside my mind—

BB: I can imagine

TC: After a while we discovered we could turn on and turn off cancer development, external cancer development in these animals. And we turned on the cancer, and it was very robust. And the main protein was cow's milk, casein. And we could not turn it on with wheat protein, soy protein. Or we could reduce the total protein intake. And so, we put all the information together, and then we started looking at what accounts for this, what's the mechanisms, and so forth and so on. That story eventually became really convincing.

BB: So, do you personally eschew all animal products in your diet?

TC: Yes, I do. I've been doing that for about 20 years. My wife, obviously, was very attentive to what I was doing, and she turned out to be terrific in gradually changing our diet. We started changing our diet in 1980, and by 1990 we completely had changed.

BB: For the most part, you'd urge most people to follow that path?

TC: Yes.

BB: You're featured in a new documentary, Forks Over Knives. What's the main message?

TC: Well, that movie does feature my work and the work of my friend, Dr. Esselstyn, and added to that the comments and experiences of some other people, too. The main message is that the best diet, the one that creates the most health for the most people, and the most profound kinds of health, is the kind of diet that we're talking about, a diet that is whole foods and plant based.

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BB: I can't thank you enough for your time, Dr. Campbell. I'm convinced that reading The China Study has definitely added years to my life, and I look forward to seeing Forks Over Knives.