Authors: John Robbins
It is unsettling to reflect on what these changes portend for the future health of the Chinese people. Already, cardiovascular disease and cancer have become the leading causes of death among Chinese adults. Like all Asians, the Chinese are acutely susceptible to diabetes and develop the disease at far lower weights than people of other races. Asians, particularly those from Far Eastern nations like China, Korea, and Japan, are 60 percent more likely to become diabetic than whites of the same weight.
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Sadly, we are only seeing the first glimpses of the long-term damage likely to occur. The health impacts of China’s shift away from traditional diets and lifestyles have only just begun to manifest themselves.
There is a sad and eerie resemblance between the food choices increasingly being made in China today and those now being made by the younger generation in Okinawa. In each case, people are eager to consume the high-fat, high-sugar diet symbolized worldwide by U.S.-based companies like McDonald’s, KFC, and Coca-Cola. And in each case, they do so seemingly ignorant of the health implications of the direction they are taking. It is a tragedy of epic proportions that the knowledge and wisdom painstakingly garnered by the China Study, the Okinawa Centenarian Study, and many similar undertakings is not shaping the public policies of these nations, and not entering into the consciousness and affecting the choices of their people.
Americans like to think that because they spend considerably more on healthcare than any other nation in the world, their health is exemplary. But such is far from the case. In fact, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention released a report in 2006 showing that recent immigrants to the United States are far healthier than their U.S.-born counterparts, despite having no health insurance and little access to health care. The study found that when people of African, Asian, and Hispanic descent move to the United States they become progressively less healthy the longer they stay in the country. With each passing year, they become more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. The reason? The diets and lifestyles in the United States are far less healthy than those in many other countries.
As an American, I find it deeply disturbing that a diet that in many ways emanates from my country is causing so many problems, and is spreading around the world. I take heart, though, from the fact that as we work for policy changes that will someday help societies everywhere benefit from the discoveries of the China Study and the Okinawa Centenarian Study, we can as individuals already make use of this vast wealth of information.
When you heed the lessons of the China Study and the Okinawa Centenarian Study, and follow in the footsteps of the world’s healthiest and longest lived peoples, you are taking a major step toward a healthier and more satisfying existence. But your choices don’t affect only your life. You are also joining with the energies of millions of other people who are seeking a healthier way of life, creating a counterforce that can and will alter the course of history.
Most of us, of course, don’t think of ourselves as agents of social change. Few of us dare imagine that by the way we live our lives we can affect the greater stream of events. But each of us does create an impact by how we act, and in the sum of all our actions will be written the story of our time.
Every time anyone challenges the culture of fast food and consumerism that is running amok in our world, a ripple of hope goes forth. As these ripples come together from a million different locations, they create a current that becomes increasingly powerful. When we make a statement by how we live, we set an example that radiates outward, an example that by its authenticity inspires others and helps realign the world.
When you ask that your food be natural, nourishing, and consistent
with the wellness of your body and the wholeness of your spirit, you are taking an important step toward a long and healthy life, but you are doing something more, too. In rebelling against the McDonaldization of the world, you are helping to create a healthier future for all who are yet to come.
And still you may protest, “But what about the person who drinks like a fish, smokes like a furnace, eats like a hog, and is nonetheless 85 years old?” By the same analogy, you may once in a while drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles at 120 miles an hour and still get there—but don’t bet on it. Maybe suicide doesn’t work the first time around, but try again. The odds get better.
—Walter Bortz, M.D., Co-Chair, AMA-ANA Task Force
on Aging, and President, American Geriatrics Society
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n concluding that there are dramatic health benefits to a plant-based diet, the China Study’s Dr. Colin Campbell helps us understand one of the keys to the good health of the world’s longest-lived peoples. And he is in good company. Consider, for example, the extraordinary accomplishments of Dean Ornish, M.D.
Dr. Ornish has been instrumental in bringing diet to the forefront of medical thought. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he has seen his work featured prominently in popular media, including on the covers of
Newsweek, Time
, and
U.S. News & World Report.
Dr. Ornish has succeeded in having his heart disease treatment program covered by more than forty insurance carriers, and his numerous
New York Times
bestselling books have helped millions of people to take charge of their health and improve their lives.
Dr. Ornish’s best-known research is the Lifestyle Heart Trial, in which he treated patients with advanced heart disease not with drugs, but with lifestyle changes alone.
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He put a group of patients on a very low fat plant-based diet for a year, and asked them to stop smoking, to get regular moderate exercise, to spend a half hour a day stretching, meditating, relaxing, or doing some other form of stress reduction, and to participate in weekly psychological and social support groups. Meanwhile, a control group was treated with the standard American Heart Association heart disease program, which includes a significant amount of low-fat animal products and utilizes cholesterol-lowering drugs.
The results revolutionized the treatment of heart disease worldwide. Those patients who completed Dr. Ornish’s experimental program achieved medically unprecedented improvements in health and vitality. On average, their total cholesterol dropped from 227 mg/dL to 172 mg/dL, and their LDL (“bad”) cholesterol dropped even more dramatically—from 152 mg/dL to 95 mg/dL. Furthermore, the frequency, duration, and severity of their chest pain plummeted. The more closely the patients adhered to the lifestyle recommendations, the more their hearts healed. Nearly all of the patients in Ornish’s program not only arrested the development of their heart disease but actually experienced marked improvement. Things not only stopped getting worse; they got dramatically better—something that had never been seen before in the history of heart disease treatment.
And what about the control group who followed the American Heart Association program? They did not fare nearly as well. Their chest pain became worse in frequency, duration, and severity. While Ornish’s experimental group experienced a 91 percent reduction in the frequency of chest pain, the control group had a 165 percent rise. Further, their bad-cholesterol levels were significantly higher than in Ornish’s experimental group, while the blockages in their arteries also increased.
More than two thousand patients have now completed the Ornish program in hospitals throughout the United States. Most have been able to avoid coronary bypass surgery and angioplasty by making
lifestyle changes, thus saving enormous amounts of both suffering and money. Highmark Blue Cross/Blue Shield cut their costs in half in the first year, and Mutual of Omaha saved $30,000 per patient in the first year.
The bottom line, and the reason why more than forty U.S. insurance companies now cover all or part of the Ornish program, is that only one out of every six patients on the American Heart Association program can expect to achieve discernible heart disease reversal, while on the Ornish program, with its very low fat and plant-based diet, three out of every four patients can expect such life-changing results.
A common misconception about Dean Ornish’s work is that he recommends a very low fat diet for everyone. Actually, his studies have shown that a whole-foods plant-based extremely low fat diet (along with other lifestyle modifications) works miracles for reversing heart disease (and also prostate cancer). However, if your goal is simply to lose a few pounds or drop your cholesterol, then it’s not necessary to cut your fat that low. Besides, simply focusing on how much fat you eat and trying to get it as low as possible can lead you astray, because the type of fat you eat is every bit as important as the amount.
In February 2006, massive media attention focused on the results of the Women’s Health Initiative dietary modification study. If you believed the headlines, you would have thought low fat diets had been found to bestow no advantages at all. But if you read past the headlines, you’d have learned things were not that simple.
For one thing, the study didn’t distinguish between fats that are beneficial and those that are harmful. For another, the study participants who were eating a “low fat diet” didn’t reduce their consumption of fat very much. Twenty-nine percent of their diet was comprised of fat, not the study’s goal of 20 percent. And even this may have been an overestimation, since people often say they are following a healthier diet than they really are. Remarkably, the comparison group reduced its consumption of fat nearly as much.
It was deeply unfortunate that many people got the impression from the headlines that dietary and other lifestyle changes don’t actually
matter that much, when in fact they matter greatly. In 2005, for example, the landmark INTERHEART study of more than 29,000 men and women in 52 countries found that nine factors related to diet and lifestyle accounted for 94 percent of the risk of a heart attack in women and 90 percent of the risk of a heart attack in men. This was seen in all geographic regions and in every racial and ethnic group worldwide.
Less well known than Dr. Ornish, but equally convinced of the health advantages of a plant-based diet, is Cleveland Clinic general surgeon and researcher Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. Writing in
The American Journal of Cardiology
, Dr. Esselstyn describes his twelve-year study in which, as he puts it, “patients became virtually heart-disease proof” while eating a diet with almost no animal products.
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All of the patients in Esselstyn’s study had severe heart disease at the outset, yet after twelve years on his program, 95 percent of them were alive and well. How sick were they to begin with? The eighteen patients in Esselstyn’s study had experienced forty-eight serious cardiac events between them in the eight years before they joined the study. But in the twelve years of the study, the seventeen patients who stayed with the program experienced a grand total of zero cardiac events.
Is a diet with very few animal products too extreme for most people to follow? Esselstyn doesn’t think so. He writes:
Some criticize the plant-based diet as extreme or draconian. Webster’s dictionary defines draconian as “inhumanly cruel.” A closer look reveals that “extreme” or “inhumanly cruel” describes not plant-based nutrition, but the consequences of our present Western diet. Having a sternum divided for bypass surgery or a stroke that renders one an aphasic invalid can be construed as extreme; and having a breast, prostate, colon or rectum removed to treat cancer may seem inhumanly cruel. These diseases are rarely seen in populations consuming a plant-based diet.
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Similarly, Dr. Dean Ornish reflects,
I don’t understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it’s medically conservative to cut people open or put them on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives.
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In November 2005,
National Geographic
published a cover story that echoed its influential articles of the 1970s. Titled “The Secrets of Living Longer,” the lead article featured three contemporary groups of long-living people, those from Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, and Loma Linda, California, all of whom eat a plant-based diet. At the conclusion of the issue,
National Geographic
summarized the “secrets of long life” in two words: “Go vegetarian.”
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Similarly, the researchers who conducted the 25-year Okinawa Centenarian Study strongly advise, “Minimize your animal food con-sumption.”
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As Dr. Ornish explains, “Animal products are the main culprit in what is killing us. We can absolutely live better lives without them.”
In suggesting that animal-based foods should to a large degree be replaced by plant-based foods, doctors like T. Colin Campbell, Dean Ornish, and Caldwell Esselstyn may seem to be on the margins of current Western society, particularly in a day when so many have been drawn to the short-term promises of the Atkins diet and its low-carb relatives. But unlike Dr. Atkins, these doctors and their ideas are fully supported by the medical literature, and what they propose has been demonstrated to work over the long term.
I’ve had the privilege of knowing each of these doctors (Ornish, Esselstyn, and Campbell) as a personal friend, and I know that each of them is lean and thriving on the plant-based whole-foods diets they espouse—diets which are strikingly similar to those on which the elder Okinawans, the Abkhasians, the Vilcabambans, and the Hun-zans have long thrived. I also know that each of these doctors consumes at least occasional small amounts of wild fish. In this, they are in accord with traditional wisdom, for no society has ever, to my knowledge, sustained itself for long exclusively on plant foods. There
may have been some traditional cultures whose only animal product consumption consisted of grasshoppers, beetles, grubs, or other insects, but all have partaken of at least a minimal amount of animal foods.