The Rich Roll Podcast - China Study Critics & How Plant-Based Nutrition Can Prevent & Reverse Disease

Episode Date: April 7, 2014

This week we hit a huge milestone – 2 MILLION DOWNLOADS!  Wow. I was blown away when we hit 1 million after about a year since we started this experiment. Then just five months later, we hit the second million. I am beyond words. I love doing the podcast, love it. I do this for you. So it means more than you can imagine that it has found a passionate and loyal audience. With utmost sincerity, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and promise to honor your commitment to the show by striving to always do better and be better. In honor of the milestone, I thought it appropriate to bring you one of my most compelling and important interviews to date. A conversation with a man I owe my life. A man whose studies, books and tireless advocacy have transformed countless lives across the globe. A man absolutely instrumental in paving a path for my own personal transformation – a journey that begins and ends with my adoption of a plant-based diet. T. Colin Campbell Dr. Campbell may not have invented the whole food plant-based diet, but he is most certainly the regal lion of the movement, pioneering it from fringe acceptance to modern age, widespread mainstream adoption. He is best-known as the author of The China Study*, one of the most important, ground-breaking, massively best-selling books ever written on health & nutrition. More recently, Dr. Campbell published an important follow up, Whole: Rethinking The Science of Nutrition*. But even if you have not read either of these books, there is a solid chance you saw him and his work profiled in the incredibly powerful documentary Forks Over Knives*. The simple truth is that how we are beginning to understand the ways in which food and nutrition impact the underlying causes of so many Western diseases that unnecessarily plague developed cultures — and the means to prevent and reverse them — is due in large part to the tireless scientific research to which Dr. Campbell has devoted his life. He is, quite simply put, an absolute paradigm-busting legend of the modern movement for long-term wellness, disease prevention & reversal, sustainable ecosystems, animal welfare, and agricultural reform. For the uninitiated, T. Colin Campbell is a Cornell and MIT trained Ph.D. in nutrition, biochemistry and microbiology and current professor emeritus at Cornell specializing in both nutrition & toxicology – specifically the effects of nutrition on long-term health and even more particularly the role nutrition plays in the causation of certain types of cancer. In addition to the two books mentioned above, he is the author of over 300 peer reviewed research papers on a variety of subjects related to the above. Maybe you're new to all this — I don't get all the fuss. What exactly is The China Study?

Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, Episode 79, with T. Colin Campbell. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. Well, today's guest is a biggie. I won't lie, can't lie. I am very excited to bring this conversation to you today. And I have a feeling, an inkling, that it's going to bring a new crowd of people to the show, which is very exciting. So I just wanted to say a few quick words for the new listeners out there about who I am and what we do here to set the stage a bit. And for the long-time listeners out there, I hope you can forgive me a brief indulgence. But anyway, my name is Rich Roll. I'm your host.

By way of background, I am a former corporate lawyer turned plant-based ultra-distance multi-sport athlete. I'm a wellness evangelist. I'm a public speaker, and I'm an author. I wrote a book called Finding Ultra, Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself. And that book essentially chronicles my journey of self-discovery, my awakening, if you will, from a disconnected, depressed, overweight, unfit, recovering alcoholic to maximum fitness and to accomplishing endurance feats I never previously thought possible in a million years. But the important idea is this. It's a journey to greater self-understanding and greater self-actualization that begins

and ends with one simple thing, one simple idea, my adoption of a plant-based diet. And it's also a journey that begins and ends with the message put forth and popularized by the very important work of today's guest. As for the show, each week I bring to you the best, most forward-thinking, paradigm-busting minds in health, fitness, wellness, diet, nutrition, spirituality, creativity, entrepreneurship, for the show. Each week I bring to you the best, most forward thinking paradigm, busting minds and health, fitness, wellness, diet, nutrition, spirituality, creativity, entrepreneurship, and life transformation. And the goal, the goal is very simple to motivate and inspire you to take

your life to the next level, to help you discover, unlock, and unleash your best, your healthiest, your most authentic self. So T. Colin Campbell, where to even begin? The lion of the whole food plant-based movement. If you're already on board, then no doubt you've read his groundbreaking book, The China Study, and or his more recent follow-up book, Whole. You've seen him and his work profiled in the incredible documentary Forks Over Knives. And if these works are unfamiliar to you or you're brand new to this idea of plant-based nutrition, then I urge you to stop what you're doing immediately and check out the books and the documentary Forks Over Knives straight away. And to find those things, you can check the show notes at richroll.com on the episode page for this podcast, and I'll have links up there to take you where you want

to go, as well as additional information about today's guest. So I can't say that Dr. Campbell invented the plant-based movement, but what I can say is that it would not be what it is today without his groundbreaking, tireless work, his life devoted to this subject. And he has quite simply put a pioneer and a legend of the modern movement for sustainable wellness and ecological systems and disease prevention and disease reversal. For the uninitiated, T. Colin Campbell is a Cornell and MIT-trained biochemist and current professor emeritus at Cornell University who specializes in nutrition and toxicology, specifically the effects of nutrition on long-term health

and, in particular, the causation of cancer. He's best known for his advocacy of a low-fat whole foods plant-based diet, a vegan diet, so to speak. And he's the author of over 300 research papers on the subject, the two books I already mentioned, Whole, which was co-authored by Howard Jacobson, who's going to be next week's guest for kind of a two-parter, and The China Study, which he co-authored with his son, as I mentioned a minute ago, obviously. And that has become one of America's best-selling books about nutrition. And Dr. Campbell made his mark on the world with The China Study.

Maybe you've heard of it. Maybe you haven't. Maybe you have just a passing familiarity with it. So what is it? Well, the China study was a vast, gigantic 20-year epidemiological study, which was described by the New York Times as the Grand Prix of epidemiology. Cornell University and Oxford University. And what it did was it looked at mortality rates from cancer and other chronic diseases from 1973 to 1975 in 65 different counties in China. And data was correlated with dietary surveys from blood work from 100 people in each of these counties. And so why China? Why these counties? Well, the research was conducted in these specific counties because they had genetically similar

populations that tended over generations to live and eat in the same way and in the same place. And the study concluded that counties with a high consumption of animal-based foods were more likely to have had higher death rates from Western diseases, while the opposite was true for counties that ate more plant foods. So basically, the China study examined the relationship between the consumption of animal products, including dairy, and chronic illnesses, such as coronary heart disease and diabetes and cancers of the breast, prostate, and bowel. And the conclusion

was that people who ate a whole food plant-based diet, people that avoided all animal products, and I'm talking about beef, pork, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese, and milk, and people who were reducing their intake of processed foods and refined carbohydrates, these people will escape, reduce, or reverse the development of numerous diseases. It's pretty huge, right? You might have seen President Bill Clinton. He became a vocal supporter of the China study in 2010. After living for years with heart disease, he undertook the diet. And within a short period, he said that he dropped 24 pounds and returned him to his college weight and was feeling great. He was profiled in my buddy, Sanjay Gupta, who's the chief medical

correspondent at CNN, did a documentary called The Last Heart Attack. And it was a couple years ago, I think it was 2011, in which he said that the China study had changed the way that people all over the world are eating, including the good Dr. Gupta himself. So this is powerful stuff. This is awesome stuff. It's pretty huge. But I would be remiss if I did not point out that the China study is not without its controversy either. In the wake of the massive success of the book, The China Study and Forks Over Knives and sort of ancillary works that have been published as a result of these works, critics have come out to challenge the findings.

And they've tried to poke holes in the research. And suddenly, you know, I've noticed that it has become kind of this rather vogue thing to offhandedly say like, well, didn't you hear the China study was debunked? Didn't you hear about that? And this is one of the things that I had the good fortune to sit down with Dr. Campbell and talk through and get his perspective on what's going on with that. I mean, has it really been debunked? And what is this really all about?

I mean, who is threatened by and who stands to gain from attempting to undermine the integrity of Dr. Campbell's game-changing research? So yeah, we get into all of that and more and Dr. Campbell's background and his journey to where he is now. And it's fascinating. And over the last few years, I've had the good fortune to meet him on several occasions, but it wasn't until we spent a week together on the holistic holiday at Sea Cruise last month that I had the opportunity to really sit down with him and really get to know him. And Dr. Campbell isn't one to often

sit for such long-winded interviews. So it really was a great honor and a privilege to grab this moment with him. And I have to say that I'm very proud of this interview. And my hope is that it will inspire and motivate you to think about your health and your diet and your lifestyle in new and different ways, profound ways that could have a gigantic impact on your future well-being. So a final note before we get into it, this is intended to be part one of a two-part series. Next week, I'm going to be bringing you Dr. Campbell's co-writer on his book, Whole, a guy called Howard Jacobson. And he's a great guy. He has a very amazing personal story and journey of his own.

And he sits down with me to share that and also to kind of fill in the gaps on the important work of Dr. Campbell. So if you enjoy today's show, definitely tune in next week for Howard Jacobson. I think you'll enjoy that as well. So in any event, dig in, put the earbuds in, and let's spin the wheel and see where this leads us. hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment Thank you. an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level

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To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. I would like to open it up, if you could, for the listeners who might be uninitiated or unfamiliar with your work, if you could simply synopsize the idea behind the China study and what the book is all about. Well, the China study, of course, is a book. It's 18 chapters, but there's only one chapter that's actually devoted specifically to the China project itself. I have to point that out because the whole book is not just about the work in China. Right. And that's something I want to explore with you, for sure. It's the rest of the book, the work that I was doing at least, if I can say, 25, 30 years before I got involved in China study that really played a major role in my thinking. The China study, in a sense, was getting to a place in time

that I wanted to really have an opportunity to examine a population to see if, in fact, the information we were getting there was consistent with what I already had been doing. And so to take it a step back, I have this sort of running joke that in order to be a qualified specialist in the plant-based nutrition world, you must have been raised on a farm. Because you, Dr. Esselstyn, Dr. Clapper, I mean, I'm feeling very unqualified because I was not raised on a farm, nor do I have a PhD or an MD. But you were raised on a dairy farm, and this was very instrumental in kind of informing your early views about nutrition and health. Yeah, it really was.

I mean, I was outdoors all the time for the most part, even sleeping outdoors at times. And, I mean, I really was in the dirt, you know, plowing fields, harrowing fields, raking hay, milking cows. I milked my first cow when I was five years old. That was the thing to do. I milked my first cow when I was five years old. That was the thing to do. And so I was everything about the outdoors. It was my life.

And I liked the outdoors. And I felt totally at home in the outdoors. I used to say when I was young that when I got big, I would not take a job inside. The opposite has happened. So I've really been living, if you will, in nature. Always had a great deal of respect for nature. And so where did it begin for you in terms of being interested in health and biochemistry and nutrition? That was kind of an accident in a sense. Not totally. of an accident in a sense. Not totally. I went to Penn State for my undergraduate work. In that first year, as was customary in universities, freshmen were given tests for aptitude, future

aptitudes. I took this test and my dad wanted me to be a lawyer. My dad only had two years of education So I come from a family that, for the most part, you know, education was a big thing. And in any case, he wanted me to be a lawyer. So I took the test and there were about six or seven or eight different paths I could have followed. Law was in the middle. So I wasn't too happy with that. I wanted to, but there were two things. Your dad wasn't happy either. No. So there were two things that i i suppose that i'm right at the top and one was to be a farmer i said whoop-dee-doo i know how to farm the other was to be in medicine and that surprised me i never thought about it but it kind of stuck

in my mind i started thinking about it and i didn't particularly want to go into medicine because we lived with a doctor who, you know, was on call 24-7. He had an old Model T Ford. He came to the homes. You know, there wasn't such things as being in an office, that kind of thing. It was in the countryside. And I didn't particularly want to do that for that reason.

I didn't want to be on call all the time. Very naively, I have to tell you. Most of my life was very naive from the very beginning. But nonetheless, I took the idea to my work at Penn State to say I'll be a veterinarian. I said that combined medicine with my agriculture background. So I ended up in veterinary school a little bit early, just after three years of undergraduate school.

But then just out of the clear blue, I got a telegram one day from a fairly famous professor at Cornell who had been talking to my advisor at Penn State about possible students. And so he offered me a full scholarship to drop out of veterinary school, come to Cornell. And I thought, boy, that's a pretty good deal. Yeah, you must have been quite the student. How did you make such an impression?

Well, whatever, I don't know what it was. He obviously, my advisor at Penn State, passed on a good word about me. And the thing about it, too, was why I say it's kind of an accident happening in time because they were going to pay me to go to school. I couldn't imagine that. Or, you know, my dad, he didn't have any more money to hardly see me through. So I thought that was a pretty good deal too. So I went to Cornell thinking that somehow I was going to get involved

maybe in medical research because it was in the area of nutritional biochemistry and pathology. And I went there and I didn't even know, to be honest about it, until I was there about six, eight months, that I was actually working for a PhD. I never heard of a PhD. That's how naive I was. So it was just kind of something pulling me in this way and that way as I went forward.

And so I finished up that work in a year doing actually a master's because I was being pressured to get it. You got your master's in one year. I did it in one year because I was being pressured by my draft board. I was classified 1A, and I had gotten a deferment four times, and they said, this is the last time. You've got to go. So I had to quit that

fortunately i finished up my degree and when i was i went home went to the draft board and and i didn't particularly want to go in the army just being a foot soldier so i heard about the opportunity i lived outside of washington heard about the opportunity of uh inquiring about being an officer so i went and took the test and there were some rare occasions when you could do that kind of thing. I passed that. I was assigned to be a second lieutenant, scheduled to report to a hospital in Colorado. This was prior to the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War at that time was just starting.

And so I was ready to go, but then another professor at Cornell wrote me into Meanwhile and offered me again a full scholarship to come and do my PhD. I didn't know this professor, and he said, come on back. He said, you should come back.

So I took it to the guy who gave me my commission that I was supposed to report to, and he said, well, okay, go back. There's no great pressures right now. We'll keep in touch. Let us know when you finish your PhD. You've got to serve your time. If you don't, we'll contact you. So I figured, well, I'll go do my PhD, come back and serve. But by that time, the Vietnam War was getting a little bit hotter. And so I didn't hear from them. to come back and serve. But by that time, the Vietnam War was getting a little bit hotter. Right.

And so I didn't hear from them. But as long as you're a student and you're getting your Ph.D., you're in the clear, right? Well, not until I was 38. That was the rule of the day. I had to take up that officer appointment until I was 38, which would have been about 1970 or so. And so I was kind of waiting to hear from them. I never heard from them.

And I learned later that there was a big fire in St. Louis. They burned up 30,000 records, fast-paced records. Mine was one of those records that got burned up. Wow. So I became a non-person as far as the Army was concerned. Wow. You have these little amazing occurrences that are happening, a phone call here, a telegram here, a fire over here

that are all kind of directing you without your conscious awareness. But I was enjoying science in the meanwhile. And you're getting your Ph.D. in biochemistry. I got a Ph.D. at that time in nutrition with biochemistry, right, nutritional biochemistry. And was there any specificity to that, or what was your focus? Well, it was in animal nutrition. So it was focused largely on trying to improve the lot of animals as far as the nutrition was concerned. And I got offered a couple of positions as a professor even before I finished my Ph.D.

to go to an animal science department, one back at Penn State to be a professor of dairy science and so forth. And so I thought some of it, but I didn't accept it. I didn't want to do that. By that time, I'd gotten interested in some other things and the more fundamental things. So I finally finished up and then did some work in a laboratory where I met my wife, a testing laboratory near Washington, D.C., near where I lived. And then you want to hear all this story? I don't know. Well, I mean, I'm interested in understanding kind of how your perspective on nutrition, dairy, meat, et cetera, evolved

over time from your perspective when you were a student at Cornell to what you began to discover when you undertook what you describe in the China study? Yeah, it was time went forward i mean when i was at um in this position in this laboratory doing work right after my phd i was there for a short while uh nice experience but then i got offered an opportunity to come to mit who by a guy who had been at the fda to organize a new department there in toxicology. So without going into all those details, I got sort of some training in toxicology too, toxicological biochemistry, essentially. And after that, it was an offer to go take a faculty position at Virginia Tech and a

few other places. So I went to Virginia Tech there, I started my research career applying for funding to do research. And one, I had two tracks, which is a little bit unusual for the day. I wanted to do some basic science stuff. And the other one was to work in the international setting, which is very, very applied. The second one, this international experience, was an opportunity to go to the Philippines and help organize a nationwide

program of female nurse children. I always had that kind of, I had an interest in kind of serving society, if you will, particularly on an international level. I don't know where that came from, but that's what my interest was. In the laboratory, I was working in sort of very basic biochemical kinds of things. Well, the two just happened to join without my planning because the Philippines had an interest in liver cancer. I mean, laboratories of liver cancer go to the Philippines. I see this observation in the Philippines where children getting liver cancer had a much higher risk of getting the cancer, in fact,

if they were from families who, the few families who were consuming the best diets, high in protein. And then there was another report. So the rest is history. Right. So this fact sort of lodged in your brain and kind of compelled you to decide to look into this further or to design a study to understand what exactly was going on. Right. Well, yeah, as my career passed, I really got quite active in my science and

at fairly senior levels, actually early on at the national level, being on expert panels and things like that, policymaking. And I kept seeing things all the time that I found very troubling. And I would ask myself, why is this bothering me and not bothering others? And when I tried to do some, if you will, introspection, you know, why do I think the way I think? I often came back to the farm. You know, I would come back, this doesn't sound natural to me, if you will. me, if you will. And so one of the first questions I know, I took a course at Cornell when I first went there about in nutritional biochemistry. And one of the major illustrations was, you know, this nutrient does that, another nutrient does something else. And there was a big project at

Cornell at the time involving four nutrients as it impacted disease in chickens and calves of all things. And I remember each one of those four things did something specific. But when you kind of mix those nutrients together, then something different happens. Right. So I asked my professor, I remember at the time, it was just a classroom. I was just asking a simple question. professor, I remember at the time, it was just a classroom. I was just asking a simple question. But as I look back, it's stuck in my brain because I said to him, well, why don't we study that this way? He said, we can't. It's not possible. Right. In other words, the idea of taking a more

macro approach and a more global perspective as opposed to this very reductionist. Exactly. So that was sort of lesson number one, in a sense, as far as the science was concerned, that things were far more complicated than just thinking about going from A to B, to go to C, and so forth. So our biochemical research went and got involved in that. And I was lucky to get quite substantial amounts of funding from the very beginning, and it continued from NIH. From NIH, right. Yeah. And so we had a big research program, actually. I had a lot of graduate students, and I had the freedom to be able to ask questions, design experiments, see what it might look like.

And any time you learn something new, you always have more questions. Right. So that was the way it went. It just kind of drifted in a certain direction. But the more I just found myself just asking questions that were a little bit offbeat, I guess, because I was just curious. I liked the science. And pretty soon, I just, things started to fall together. And I realized there was a much bigger story here than just working on one single thing at a time.

But to bring it back to the specifics of the China study, could you just describe the essence of what that was? Yeah. By the time the China study opportunity came along, and this was in the early 1980s, I got an opportunity to, well, it was a letter sent to Cornell by the first senior scientist from China to come to the United States and this particular gentleman

Dr. Zheng Shanshu he had come from a famous family in China actually in any case he was one of the first to come to this country he was looking for a place to land spend some time his government had given him this opportunity and he was sent to Cornell a little bit and some others turned it down He was looking for a place to land, spend some time. His government had given him this opportunity. And he was sent to Cornell a little bit.

And some others turned it down. I don't know why, but I grabbed onto him right away. And so he came and worked with me. And it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made because it turned out he really was from a well-connected family in China, for starters. And high up in the government, as far as science is concerned. And so at that time, the Chinese government had done this nationwide survey of how much cancer existed across a total of something like 2,400 counties. It was a massive undertaking. And what they were able to show was that cancer was very

common in some counties and not in others. So it was common sense just to ask, well, what's causing this unusual concentration of cancer in certain places for about a dozen different cancers? So we got together and I said, why don't we try to get an application to do some funding there? We got together and I said, why don't we try to get an application to do some funding there? His government was offering a lot of support in kind. We need capital. So I went back to NIH again to see if I could get that funding, and we did. We had the first project between the United States and China, the first research project at that time. So we went there and surveyed a large population.

and surveyed a large population. That was an opportunity for me to see if, in fact, the kind of information we might learn from that population was consistent with these rather aberrant questions that I was getting in the laboratory. And that had to do with it. And those questions were? Those questions were basically that animal protein, in particular, was promoting cancer,

because that's what we were learning in the laboratory. was promoting cancer because that's what we learned in the laboratory. And so we did that and measured just a huge amount of information. It was a massive undertaking. I mean, how many people did it take to sort of collect the data from this gigantic population of individuals? Well, it wasn't so big in terms of numbers of people. It was 6,500 adults plus a family, so we estimate around 10,000 to 11,000 people, which in those days, it was big, but it

wasn't that big, really. What made it big was the number of variables that we were looking at, and I wanted to be able to analyze for just anything and everything, because I really was getting interested in this idea that there's more to this story, as we generally do in science, than just one thing at a time. So the ideas that you're discussing in your more recent book, Hole, these are already formulated and taking place in the China study. Because I think it would have been very easy for you to simply say, we're going to look at animal

protein and liver cancer, and that's all we're looking at. And we don't need to look at anything else. And nobody would have batted an eye. That is reductionist science 101. That's the way we do it. And you could have gone on your way with that and dismissed with this idea of entertaining the possibility that an innumerable number of other variables could be contributing or having causative or correlative effects with the results

that you were seeing. Yeah, actually, we proposed for that grant application, by the way, exactly something like that. We wanted to look at the relationship between the mineral selenium and its relationship to heart disease in children. That's why, in part, I got the grant because I was focused. At the same time, we were kind of fortunate in a way because there were parties interested in the United States in getting involved in China and vice versa. So for some political support, I was able to get it that way, but it was focused on one thing. And so describe what you began to learn when you assayed this population across all these variables. Well, we ended up with collecting 367 items of information, as I would say. Things measured in the blood, the urine, the food, questions being asked.

And so we had a big collection of a lot of variables, if you will. We worked on each one to make sure they're reliable. We had ways of doing that. And then they were all correlated with each other. So we ended up with about 100,000 correlations, about 9,000 of which were statistically significant. To be expected. That's just a random chance of that happening. But in any case, we wanted to take those significant correlations and some others that might approach significance to see if there were patterns.

I should say, incidentally, it was directed by me at Cornell University, but I was able to access some fantastic colleagues at the University of Oxford. Richard Peto, Sir Richard Peto now, Sir Richard Doll, some very eminent epidemiologists, and others in China, some of the senior scientists there, plus another 24 laboratories around the world. And so what were some of the most significant, statistically significant correlations that you began to uncover? Well, it really, coming back to the question concerning animal protein, I mean, that had been a lifelong or career-long question because we were able to, in the prior studies, we were able to show that we could turn on and turn off cancer just simply by feeding, of all things, the protein of cow's milk, which brought me back to the dairy farm in a sense. And that was very provocative, to say the least.

And I think it's, you know, there might be a perspective out there that you were out to, you know, sort of prove, to establish an objective that you already believed in. to establish an objective that you already believed in. But you're coming from this dairy farm background, and it had been your whole, you know, the conviction of your entire upbringing that, you know, milk does a body good, that this is the perfect food, right? So where did you start to begin to see kind of cracks in the firmament of that concept? Well, it was the initial observation I think we did. There were some Indian researchers who had done some laboratory animal studies that showed that at the time that I was in the Philippines.

But they didn't believe what they got. It was published in an obscure journal, but I kind of believed it because it was consistent with what I was seeing with the children. And so as we went into that research, we looked at it in great depth. And I had become convinced by that time. We did it so many different ways that animal protein actually increases cancer risk, period. And so I was really interested to know in the China study whether there was any evidence for that. And my bias was to find the opposite.

Right. Really was, I mean, if I had a prejudice in the beginning. And that's a very important point. You know, I think that you weren't out to, you know, sort of be on this crusade to, you know, with this foregone conclusion that you already had in your mind. You went out and you surveyed a gigantic population of people across innumerable variables and remained open-minded and, to take what you just said, hopeful that maybe it might prove the opposite.

That's right. Absolutely. I was always kind of swimming upstream against my own sort of prior prejudices. But finally, the evidence was overwhelming with respect to, for starters, with the effect of animal protein on encouraging the development of cancers, if you will. But then there were other questions that arose, too, at the same time. And always having this doubt about the significance of this, I would want to ask broader questions. What if we eat animal protein-containing foods?

What about all the other nutrients that come along with it? What's happening there? Do they cancer each other? So we started investigating other nutrients, other cancers, other diseases. And the more that I looked, the more consistent became the data. and the more that I looked the more consistent became the data everything seemed to all the nutrients in animal based

foods as opposed to all the nutrients in plant based foods they seemed to be doing opposite things and their activities were sort of mutually supportive at the biochemical physiological level so the story became for me even ever more impressive

but it was always coming from a position in my case So the story became, for me, even ever more impressive. But it was always coming from a position, in my case, in a sense, almost trying to disprove what I had observed. And this is a landmark discovery, right? This had never been sort of established or presumed or even conjured by anyone prior to you. It's an interesting question, and I'll comment on it in just a minute. But yes, when we were doing all the research in the laboratory, and because of my skepticism about a lot of things, what we ended up discovering were a lot of fundamental ideas that were against the rules, against what I was teaching and against what was in the books. Such as?

Well, for example, turning cancer on and off by nutritional means. I mean, that was in the books. Such as? Well, for example, turning cancer on and off by nutritional means. I mean, that was a big deal. And it turned out we didn't do it just with protein and liver cancer. We also did it with dietary fat and pancreatic cancer and things like this. So that phenomenon of thinking about the causation of cancer and later other diseases as a result of simply modifying nutrient intake and the idea of actually reversing disease. Right.

It's the turning off part. We were reversing disease. Yeah. And cancer, I thought, this is incredible. And so we are learning other things too, like the relationship between nutrition and genes. A lot of people think and a lot of people still think that somehow genes predetermine whether or not we're going to get a certain kind of disease. And what we are showing, no, it's not the case. We can have the genes to cause it, start the initiation of events.

But we can control it by nutritional means. Big thing. Another one, sort of principle, like if you will, an A, like protein, it causes cancer, let's say for starters. One of the things that I was really being pushed to do to prove my point was to find what the mechanism was, which enzyme, which this, which that. And so we started looking for the mechanisms. And I had a series of PhD students spending four or five years each of them looking at a mechanism. And it turned out there is no such thing.

So that was another myth that I was all of a sudden running across too. And so a lot of the things that we learned really were, I think, the result of my skepticism. And it's quite astounding.

I mean, I think people can inherently wrap their brain around the idea of prevention, like doing certain things, whether through diet or exercise or what have you, to prevent certain things from happening. But when you start talking about reversal once onset has begun, that starts to get into

radical territory. Really radical territory. Because the whole medical profession, in a sense, is sort of supported by the idea that somehow you're going to be able to, if you have a disease or about to start or it's already there, you're going to cure it. That's sort of the premise. And that's the territory of the practice of medicine. Right. medicine. What we were seeing, what I thought we were seeing, I'm very excited about this idea that this formula, this nutritional formula for preventing the production of future disease also works to treat existing disease. That's the future of this field. Just the whole idea

you could take this with people with disease or a very high risk of disease and treat them. Right. So you're drawing these conclusions, these statistically significant correlations, and there's a decision at some point that this should not just reside in a medical journal, but that this should be shared more broadly through a book, right? So where does the idea of a book come in and how does that all come about? Well, from about the late 1970s until, let's say, 1990, I was getting into more and more trouble, if you will, by raising these provocative questions, getting results to show things that were rather different. I was a subject of pretty intense scrutiny, to say the least, from my colleagues.

But I was still succeeding in getting all the money I wanted. I had senior positions in my society and the government. So, yeah, the NIH is smiling down on you throughout this whole thing. Yeah, I was thinking of going great. But finally, you know, it became apparent that I was supporting an idea that I never expected I would arrive at in the early 1990s. When we got the results from the China study, it supported what we had been doing in the laboratory. New York Times got a hold of it. Jane Brody, one of the leading people writing at that time for the Times, a graduate of Cornell too, she came up to interview me. She wrote the article.

It came out in the New York Times as the lead article in the science section. And the headline in it said something like, this is the Grand Prix of all studies. It establishes this, that, or something else. Very provocative. And it made me nervous. Because by this time, I know, I'm in the science establishment, right? You don't go out and

say these crazy things. And so here are the times I put it in headlines. I had to say to myself. You're losing control of this story. Yeah, now it's getting out there. And you know, I didn't mind it really getting out there, sharing it with the public to some extent. But this was really provocative. New York Times.

And I saw that and I picked up the phone I called Jane I said Jane why did you put that title up there like that I said this is pretty outrageous and she said I didn't do it she said the editors did it oh okay so it was out there by that time so I came home and asked my wife I remember this very well she does too I said are you willing to live in a double wide because? Because I figured, you know, even I said I had the senior position at Cornell, the topmost position actually, an endowed chair and all that sort of thing.

And I knew that I was about to take a big hit one way or another. And she said, of course. And it was, I don't know why I asked that, I just wanted to confirm it with know why you could start stockpiling uh guns and yeah bunker hunker down i i was driven as she was i mean as i go back in my background it's very simple we were raised on a farm my wife similarly was that way no education her you know upper level education for her family or for mine. And I only could rely on one thing, and that was the truth.

And so I get that from my father, who had a great reputation as a farmer in the area, great integrity. He said, when you go out, always tell the truth. It was that simple. It was a hard-nosed thing. So, you know, there's no other way. So I obviously put my toe in the water and kept on going. And I can't turn back because then it only becomes bigger and bigger. The China Study itself is a book.

I was complaining to my wife a little bit about this. The arrows coming my way were becoming more and more intense. And so finally she said, well, why don't you write a book? So I said, okay, well, we will. But I kept putting it off, and then she was getting a little more annoyed with time. And I got a couple of offers from book publishers in the early 90s that if I would write a book, and that came from the New York Times article, if I'd write a book in one case, the guy offered me a million dollars to write a book, and he wanted to call it the China Diet.

And I didn't want to do that because I thought that was corrupting the message. And so he went back to New York and actually wrote the first chapter and wrote the outline and everything came back. He says, you know, I guarantee you a million dollars if you write this book. I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it for money. That was not the purpose. And so that just sort of sat there for a while and from

19, I think 92 or 3 or so until 2002 when I finally sat down and said to my wife, you better write that book, she said. You know, it's for the women and the children of the world for no other reason than to tell my story. So I started writing a book with my youngest son,

who's now a physician, without understanding exactly where this thing was going to go. And all I wanted to do was just see if I couldn't summarize for myself the story that made sense. That was all it was. And we did say in the latter part of the book that you don't have to believe all this science. I said to the reader, just try it. And that's kind of an amazing thing to pass up, I mean, a million dollars so that you could write a book the way that you wanted to write it and tell the story appropriately

without inflammation or trying to sort of frame the narrative in the context of a diet that people could purchase. Right. Yeah, it was. And then, actually after we did the China study, we had the manuscript

ready to go. We were shopping around. I had engaged three other agents prior to that. Finally landed on one that was a good agent. I thought that's the way to go. I didn't know anything about the publishing business. But in any case, this guy had been senior vice president at Random House. So he wanted to represent us.

And he shopped around to 11 different publishers or manuscripts. And a couple of them offered advances. And I didn't want the advances because the story that they all wanted, they were all consistent on a couple of points. They looked at it and they said, you know, we don't need all these references. And the public doesn't want to have all these references, number one. They wanted to dumb it down to a 10-year-old. Get rid of the science, Colin.

Yeah, get rid of this stuff. And then they also wanted me to put 60 to 70% of the book with recipes. I said, I don't even know where the pots and pans are in the kitchen with the recipes. So that's not what I want to do. And it's not about the money.

So I remember a couple of occasions, I won't go into details here, where they were really insisting I was doing the wrong thing. And finally, we had the last meeting with the senior vice president at the company where this agent had come from. And he had to straighten my tie up and everything else and tell me how to talk. And he thought, this is a winner that we're going to go in and have this opportunity to meet a senior person at Random House. that we're going to go in and have this opportunity to meet a senior person at Random House. We got in there, and she started saying things.

I started talking about the grander scheme of things and how things work together. No, no, no, that's not possible. They had published the Okinawa Diet, I think it was. She said, are you saying that you got the same message for all these different diseases? I said, yes. That's not possible. She got really quite angry. And so I was arguing with him. My agent intern got annoyed.

He thought he was going to have a big one. He got up and left us. Right. Because I had blown the lid. No big advance from Random House. They both said, you know, okay, do the book. You're not going to sell more than 3,000 to 5,000 copies at the most. They might just put it in libraries.

It's standard stuff. So we walked away from 11 publishers just because of what they wanted to do. They weren't saying no. They just wanted to reflect. Direct what I was going to do. Exactly. So I didn't want to do it. So I finally went to a small publisher who allowed us to do what we wanted to do.

Even he said, you're not going to sell more than 5,000 or 10,000. I didn't want to do it. So I finally went to a small publisher who allowed us to do what we wanted to do. Even he said, you're not going to sell more than 5,000 or 10,000. Finally, he said, if you can sell 15,000, I think it was 15,000 to 18,000, he said, I'll be happy. I'll cover my costs. He said, but he was just hoping that we could sell that. Well, now it's well over a million, so made his company. That's amazing. It's exceeded a million?

Yeah. Wow, that's incredible. About 25 languages, foreign languages. Wow. So it's getting around. But it didn't start out that way. Just in sitting down with Howard, he told this amazing story. Well, Howard wasn't involved in the China study.

No, I know, but he was sort of recounting the early days of, you know, when the China study initially came out and how he was the third person to review the book. And it was seven weeks after it had come out. And I just presumed that when it came out, it came out big and strong and fast. And that was not the case. It took a while before anybody was paying attention. It took a while before anybody was paying attention. And your little publisher actually was sort of right in the first few weeks or these early days after publication.

Yeah, I saw on Amazon where these reviews are written. Obviously, I'm looking at that. It's all new to me. And this brilliant review came out supporting the study. And I saw this guy's name, Howard Jacobs Jacobson and I said I think I know him you know because prior to that Howard had met another someone else and I and so I thought it was true and of course it turned out well you have a bear trap memory because Howard's claims that he stood in line amongst seven other people to meet you at the veg source event and couldn't

imagine how he you could possibly remember meeting him. But that's... Well, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I met him through another person by the name of John Allen Mulliner. Oh, maybe that's the case. Yeah. Yeah.

In any case, we had a short meeting, obviously. But clearly, it became the person that I thought it was. And so that review stayed on the Amazon site throughout just about the entire history of the 10 years. Right. If you're one of the early reviewers, good or bad, those reviews tend to stay at the top. That's right.

Once it really starts to cascade. Unfortunately, that was a good review. Yeah, it's good. You're lucky. Very well written. Yeah. Very positive. But where was the moment where it kind of tipped the scales in terms of getting out into the public? I mean, was there one thing that occurred that kind of changed

things in terms of getting the book out there? There are certain individuals. Gary Player, the pro golfer, called me up right after it came out, and he said, I'm Gary Player. I couldn't believe that I was talking to Gary Player, but he said that he was going to be on the Golf Channel with a big audience and wanted to know if he could talk about it. I said, help yourself. It's great. It's fantastic. He told me what it's going to do. He said, I'm going to get down on my knees and just talk about this book. I mean, he was really impressed with it, I guess. So, in fact, we watched to see when this happened. I was actually, by this time, with Howie, Dr. Jacobson.

And so we watched Howie. And we watched Gary Player get down with the praying position and says, America, everyone in this country should read this book or something like that. That was a good hit. Yeah, that's pretty good. That was pretty good. And then Bill Clinton. No publicist is going to get you that. No.

And then Bill Clinton came along too. How does Bill Clinton come into the equation? Because this is fascinating. Well, this is about two, I'd see three years after the book was out. And I was on the board with a close friend of Bill Clinton's, a former governor of North Carolina, Jim Hunt. The board of what? Oh, of a company that my son and I had founded. And so Jim Hunt was on there. Actually, we had some pretty key figures on there. But Jim Hunt, the former governor of North Carolina, was there. He, in turn, was a close friend of Clinton.

So Jim came and asked me if I'd sign a couple copies for Clinton. So I did. I got a handwritten note back from President Clinton thanking me for the book. But he didn't follow up for a couple years. And it wasn't until the time of his daughter's wedding that he had another problem with his heart. And she in turn, the story goes that she in turn wanted him to do the book. And so he got pretty enthused about it, and I got a call from one of his close associates who was at the wedding and said that Clinton had come to the wedding and was carrying a book with him. That's what I was told.

And I heard this before the CNN thing came along. And said that Clinton had come to the wedding and was carrying a book with him. That's what I was told. And I heard this before the CNN thing came along. But he had the book with him. He was showing it to everybody, including Barbara Streisand, who wanted to know, you know, what is that book you keep on talking about? And this is second information before the CNN thing. And so he told her, and her husband allegedly said, second information again, said to her, you know, I got that book for you two years ago, and you never read it. So these kind of stories, I always get into these stories. And finally then he's on CNN.

And this is the Wolf Blitzer interview, right? There was the last heart attack show with Sanjay Gupta, but I remember that Wolf Blitzer interview where he talked about wanting to be healthy for his daughter's wedding. Yeah, it was. And he got really good results and became a real enthusiast for this idea. Yeah, it's true. That's amazing. And then where in the timeline

does Forks Over Knives come into the equation? At about that same time, let's say I think about 2009 possibly. This is four years after the book had been published. A young fellow in California had attended one of my lectures. This fellow having some resources decided that he really loved it and so forth and so on. And I recommended that he also talk to my friend Esselstyn. Because in the book, I knew Esselstyn. He hadn't at that time really had too much attention.

So we went and interviewed him partly for the book, as you know, and others. And so I recommended goes to hear him too he did and the next thing uh he wants to get together and put a film out and he said he wanted to get the best possible director and producer and he introduced me to them and wanted to get me to confirm the possibility of making a film you you know, based on starting out at least with the China study. That's where it started. And I, so I wasn't involved in any of that planning, certainly not in the resources or

the return or anything like that. I didn't, I mean, I haven't gotten any financial return out of it. I have no equity position in any of that stuff. But he followed us, the crew followed us to to china to washington to all over the place back to my farm the farm we had when i was a kid and uh so they went ahead and did the film and of course that film has turned out to be pretty fabulous quite amazing yeah and talking about it with howard um i don't think anybody could have predicted what a phenomenon it has become. I think it was the – maybe it still is.

I'm not sure. But for a very long time, it was the number one watched documentary on Netflix or the number one selling documentary on Amazon. I don't know exactly what the statistics are, but phenomenal impact that that movie has had. It has. And what's interesting about it is it's not just about plant-based nutrition, the findings of the China study, Dr. Esselstyn's remarkable work with reversing heart disease through plant-based nutrition. I mean, when you see these angiograms, the before and after, it's just, it's so compelling. But it's also about this amazing friendship that you have had for many years with Dr. Esselstyn.

And it sort of begs the question of sitting where you're sitting now, having devoted both yourself and Dr. Esselstyn, having devoted the better part of your lives to this quest and this message that you're putting out, for so many years, having it fall on deaf ears or being criticized or being maligned to now having, you know, sort of the sort of audience or reception that maybe you thought initially you might get right out of the gate. How does that feel? I mean, does that give you a sense of vindication? That's a little bit of a negative word, but it's been a long road. I mean, you and Essie have been at this for a very long time, and it's taken an extremely long time for the momentum to pick up to the point where people are now receptive and hearing it,

and it's become this thing. It's become this movement. Yeah. I mean, obviously, I'm very gratified that this is happening. And as time passes, because deeper and deeper in meaning for me, and it relates more to more than just working with the biochemistry inside of cancer cells, if you will. Obviously, it's led to, you know, the possibility of writing another book, as you know. And at that time, when I first started to write the second book that eventually got called Whole, I had in mind the first title was using the word control.

I had in mind the first title was using the word control. Because for me, I'd had a lot of experiences, a lot of kickback from institutions and other people about this crazy path I was on. And it was very discouraging at times, but I couldn't turn around. And so I spent three weeks at a resort, not a resort but a beach house down one before we started white hole it's called control and i started out just documenting all of these these ridiculous experiences that had the lies you know that existed in policy and all this sort of stuff and i wrote about 60 pages you know in that period of time and I was going to document it that way. And all of a sudden it struck me. This is really stupid. Why am I talking about all

this horrendous kickback? It made no sense. And so I said, well, forget that. So I decided to go back and write a book that was more positive. Trying to understand rather than talk about all the negative stuff

coming my way. Right. I mean, it would kind of come off as sour grapes. That's right. Exactly. And I just didn't have any taste for that whatsoever. I wanted to write something just asking myself, is there something about this idea that's missing from our work in science?

And what I thought about it, and I started out with three, to define three words, nutrition, medicine, health. I didn't know how I was going to define it, but I knew it wasn't what I was teaching and had been teaching over the years and stuff like this, and our research didn't show that.

And the reductionist idea had been mentioned in the China study, so that was there. But then I didn't know how to describe the rest of it, so I found out it's holism and something like that. And I wanted to spell it out. I went to three dictionaries

to learn. You know, I was going to spell it W-H-O-L-I-S-M. It always had been spelled H-O-L-I-S-M. And I thought I'd find an alternative spelling. I couldn't find it. Right. And so then I decided, you know, I'm going to create my own word here.

Put the W and put parentheses around it and call it holism. And then I got into reading some, if I was a total amateur, you know, in the history of

a little bit of religion, if you will, the ancient Greek times and stuff like that and got some ideas and the more I thought about the concept, I was, oh, man, this is some ideas. And the more I thought about the concept, I was, oh, man, this is pretty good.

Because it really is. All of a sudden, it's like a step into a new world, a new paradigm. Almost taking a step beyond holistic into the WH holism. And the idea of taking this global view of understanding and embracing the idea of taking this global view of understanding and embracing the idea of the incredible complexity of nutrition, diet, biochemistry, human physiology, and an appreciation, I think, for how difficult it is to draw conclusions from a reductionist approach. Is that fair to say?

It's very fair to say. In fact, now I'm really kind of immersed in the idea of really challenging the whole concept of what we regard as science. I mean, science is in the biological world, in the medical world, so-called science. It's largely reductionist. Of course, we all know that. It's caused a lot of harm and a lot of difficulties. But I understand the need to do reductionist research because that's what I was involved in too in the beginning. But it's sort of the threads of the tapestry.

Everybody can work on their own thread and make a big deal out of it, what the tapestry might look like, but they have no clue except for what's in their imagination. How these threads impact each other. Yeah, so it's only by putting all these threads together do we begin to see something new and something exciting. And so I kind of like that metaphor

as much as any other. So how do we move in a new direction with this? I mean, what is the solution? I mean, I would presume that you still maintain that a reductionist approach is appropriate in certain circumstances for certain purposes. Sure. But how do we take this newfound idea that you're proposing and implement that into a better way of approaching science? Well, you know, reductionist research, I don't want to come back off, you know, as actually being opposed to reductionist research. I'm certain I'm not.

Because we have to have the threads to make the tapestry. That's fair enough. And I'm glad there are reductionist scientists building my airplanes that I ride on or building my computers. You know, I want them to be precise. I want them to be just doing the best they possibly can as they put that together. But in biology and medicine, all one needs to do is go look at the cell. You know, between whatever it is, 10 to 100 trillion cells we have in our body. Just look inside of one of those cells and see this extraordinary complexity, which in itself, every cell is just virtually almost like our universe.

It's the microcosmos, it's the macrocosmos, if you will, and see this enormous integrity that occurs in symphony, it occurs within the cell. And that's, for me, in a nutshell, what this is all really all about. And as to where we go with this in the future, I think experiential is a really big thing. People have to simply try it, like we said in the China study. You don't have to believe me, just try it. And that... And so what is it that they're trying?

Well, just eating a whole food, plant-based diet. Right. Okay. Yep. Without adding back the oil, the fat, and the sugar that they've become accustomed to. Just eating the whole food, plant-based diet. It's an awkward term. It's not exactly veganism or vegetarianism because they come up short on this.

But nonetheless, they were going in the right direction. And we now know, and thanks to my friend Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Ornish and some others who were. Dr. Furman, Dr. Greger, Dr. Clapper. Yeah, especially, but it's Esselstyn, really. It's Esselstyn and Ornish. And Dr. Clapper, yeah. There's – we – and what I got really enthused about their work as much as anything else,

it confirmed what we had been doing in animals reversing cancer, which is just about the furthest thing one could have in their mind, reverse it by nutritional means. I mean, that really kind of sealed the deal for me in many ways, that biologically speaking, we were turning cancer on and off by nutritional means, and we were doing it by multiple sort of holistic sort of approach in that sense, and controlling genes in the process. That's all those so-called principles that I had worked on years ago, all of a sudden it would come to the light when I, when

Dr. Essendon called me after the New York Times article. And then I found out what he was doing. He's covering the heart disease aspect. Yeah, I said, geez, you're doing exactly. And he did his thing from his perspective and it was really nice.

We came to the same place right yeah it's beautifully orchestrated i think i would be remiss if i didn't uh the issue of the critiques of the China study, the sort of dismissals that are out there. And there's a lot of people that listen to this podcast that are coming from different kinds of nutritional protocols. And you go online, it's very easy to be confused and there's conflicting opinions and it can kind of create a paralysis in terms of what to do and and and like many things in life something comes out that's new and revolutionary and it takes a while for it to come into the mainstream and then it's celebrated and human nature is to then after five minutes later let's see if we can pull this down and attack it. And there are certain contingents out there that have proposed that the China study has been debunked.

It's like become this popular thing. Well, didn't you hear the China study has been debunked? And I'm interested in how you weather those kind of comments and what your response to that is. Well, first off, I should point out those people who are writing this kind of information have no training in science, in the church of science. Number one, they have no experience to do any kind of experimentation. They don't publish.

They're not being held accountable for their words. They can say anything they want to say. In science, we develop some evidence, and if it's going to be worthy of consideration, we publish it. And it's being reviewed by peers. And we don't publish it if it doesn't pass that muster. And my work was reviewed extensively. First off, in actually competing for funding. Only one of every six applications gets funding.

And we just continued to get funding for 27 years for that one project. I had a lot of success in getting funding. And so I had a pretty good name, actually, in the scientific world for doing good science. Then when you publish, and I have over 300 and some publications that were peer-reviewed, so I'm held accountable for my words, let me tell you, even by my critics.

These people writing this stuff have nothing, none of that. That's a very important point to make. Good writers, great writers, but they don't have this background. They can say anything they want to say, and they say just totally untruthful things. But if we come down, there's a couple of observations that the people who have all these Atkins-like diets, if you will, and paleo diet and all, all those books, different names, different authors, different times, they're all basically the same thing.

They're all talking about a low-carb diet. That's become the mantra of the day. Well, since plants are the only kind of foods essentially that have carbohydrates, really serious amounts of carbohydrates in them, this really has been an attack on the recommendation that we should be consuming vegetables, fruits, and grains as a means of health from the very beginning. I mean, Atkins came out in 73 with their first book.

That was following the McGovern thing that said to eat less animal food. So the low-carb diet, the better name for that, they should be called a high-protein, high-fat diet. And there is no evidence, I find no evidence in scientific literature or any place else that you can actually take that kind of diet and treat and reverse disease. It's simply not done. That's the one thing that always brings me back to a whole food plant-based diet

is that it is the only protocol that I'm aware of that actually has had significant success reversing illness. And I don't think any other protocol can make that claim. No. And suddenly, you know, in recent years it's become very vogue to talk about grass-fed meats and putting butter in your coffee and the supposed cholesterol myth and fat is not your enemy and all of these sorts of things. And I'm mystified. I'm mystified as to how this could suddenly be the case. I mean, every cardiologist I've spoken to,

every medical practitioner that I respect does not adhere to these ideas that are out there. And I don't know whether there is some science to support something that I'm not understanding or whether people just want to hear good news about their bad habits. But what is your perspective on that? Well, it's always possible, since they're not being held accountable for their own sort of interpretations, if you will, they're able to choose rather reductionist kinds of ideas and thread it together to make it sound like a halfway decent story at times. Some of them can.

And Good Calories, Bad Calories is one such book where the writer is a good science writer, good journalist, but he pulls from the literature observations of various kinds, pulls it together and makes it sound like a reasonable story. So it's used in reductionist science in that sort of fashion. But the point is that, as I say, they cannot treat people with disease. Some of these diets, of course, lead to some loss of body weight in the media. That's pretty consistent.

That's one thing. And to some extent, the blood cholesterol has come down a bit too. But in reality, with the passage of some time most of them drop off the wagon don't continue it from some short term adverse effects but in the long term

no one can tell me that they can find societies or large groups of people who consume a high protein high fat diet for all their lives and seeing lower rates of cancer and heart cancer. But Dr. Campbell, don't you know about the Inuits? The Inuits, of course, they come up.

Well, the Inuits, of course, are the people who tend to die early for starters. And the major cause of death is trauma. So they don't quite live into the period when they otherwise might get problems. But there has been research showing, in fact, that their problems are not quite so severe, given how much protein and fat they presumably consume. It's not all what it's claimed to be. Well, I suppose that they may be a genetic outlier also because they've adapted in a certain environment in isolation for many years. I mean, there could be. But it's such a statistically insignificant. I mean, it's such a small group of people.

But there seems to be like an inordinate amount of focus on that particular community as opposed to the planet at large. Well, there's another group. That's a better illustration, I think. And this is the Maasai in Africa who blood, meat, and milk. That's their lives. It's often said they don't have any problems. Their cholesterol levels are low and they don't have any heart disease and so forth and so on. It turns out the principal person who was first reporting this so-called low cholesterol levels,

The principal person who was first reporting the so-called low cholesterol levels, actually in 1973, when he went back and had a chance to examine 50 messiahs who had died otherwise, he just wrote in his conclusion, all these men had atherosclerosis equal to that of old American men. So they actually do not, in fact, have really low cholesterol levels, you know, don't have the effects of atherosclerosis. This is the man who first told

this often gets quoted, George Mann was his name, you know, as telling about the Messiah having these remarkable health advantages. But in 73, he published something quite the opposite. So to explain this in a sense, they actually are able to,

apparently, they exercise, just inordinate amounts of exercise, obviously, something like yourself. And so the exercise plays a big role. And they actually are able to form this collateral vascular network around some of these lesions possibly. And so they're able to survive

and extend and do quite well in this for some period of time. They don't live again to that age where we can really get good data on that point. But it's this story about the Maasai and those kinds of people, oftentimes you go back and really check to see what evidence is being used. This was sort of a citation of some early literature that somebody made some observations that weren't reliably examined. Certainly it's true with the Maasai. And I had the first Maasai student to come to the West to do a doctorate.

She came to work with me at Cornell. I gave her some money to go back, and her father had been a doctor, I guess a traditional doctor in the Maasai group. And so I asked her to go and collect some more information, you know, to see because I wanted to know more of what they were really eating. And, of course, she came back, and they were eating a lot more tubers and roots like that than had previously been reported.

And then I happened to also be friendly, got to know one of the Leakeys, the wife of one of the Leakey's sons, who lived in the midst of that group for 20 years. And when I was talking to her about that, and that's where she says they spent 20 years of her life in the Maasai tribal region, she said that their claim that they only eat meat, milk, and eggs is not true. They do eat a lot.

I mean, that's very clear. Right. But more gathering and agrarian than maybe earlier presumed. Interesting. But that's the limit of my knowledge. I can't tell you too much. Presumed. Interesting. That's the limit of my knowledge. I can't tell you too much more about that. Right.

All right, well, we've got to wrap this up. But I want you to tell us a little bit before we go about this new movie project that's underway. Yeah, the Force of Knives has had great success. My oldest son has actually engaged the services of the director of 479s, Lee Fulkerson. Lee Fulkerson. And also one of the co-producers of 479s, John Corey. Quite an experienced fellow himself. Right, I know John. Do you know John?

Mm-hmm. I'm very impressed with John and with Lee, and they both are excited about what's happening here. I can't tell too much at this point in time where actually there's one event in particular that's going to set it apart. It's happening right now while we're sitting here talking today.

You're such a tease. You're teasing us. No, I'm not teasing you. I'm not teasing you. I just got an email this morning. I can't wait until tonight. You're in a gag order. Oh, okay.

Because I can't say. All I can say is I'm enthusiastic for what this is turning out to be because Force of an Eyes was sort of telling the public, here's some information that's kind of useful and which you might use in your lives and so forth and so on. It was. It became very popular. But it didn't really answer the question of why. Why hasn't this not been told before? This goes to that question.

And it goes right to the heart of it. I can't imagine any... Not been told in the sense of why, you know, why has it been so difficult to penetrate the American consciousness with these ideas? Yes, right. I've become really very interested in the history of this whole field of nutrition and cancer research in particular. And often ask myself, why is it taking so long? Because we had this information.

That's another whole story. We had a lot of this information back in the 1800s. It was brilliant. It was fantastic. For giving us the resources they had, I've got 11 books, in fact, written by a gentleman in the middle of the 1800s who was a doctor until he was 41.

He was a surgeon, a doctor. When he got to be age 41, he became a doctor. When he got to be age 41, he became a vegetarian. And then he wrote a total of 11 books. Eventually, he was elected to the Irish Academy of Science. And these books are incredible. He's warning against going down the road of using pharmaceuticals in those days. He's suggesting that cancer, for example,

is not the disease they thought it was. That is a local disease you could treat very specifically. It was a constitutional disease. So he's talking about a whole body. He was talking about holism. And he was writing these extraordinarily interesting texts. But he wasn't able to connect with the public. He got forgotten. And so the idea is, I mean, I would presume that this gets into politics and money and all sorts of private interests and things like that that sort of work together to kind of prevent certain kinds of awareness from penetrating. It was during the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

It really was. And so a lot of things were being invented, like the microscope and being refined and other kinds of instrumentation to special photometric sort of instrumentation to be able to see things and concentrations and so forth and so on. sort of instrumentation to be able to see things, the concentrations and so forth and so on. Radioisotopes came into play in the late 1800s and were being used to track the course of nutrients and other things through the body.

I mean, some very powerful instrumental methods were coming to the fore, and people in science wanted to play with these things, and it was fascinating stuff. So they ended up looking at individual things, individual nutrients and all the rest. So the birth of reductionism. The birth of reductionism. I've written a long paper, actually, almost a book on this whole history.

And I found some really amazing statements made during the 1800s and early 1900s. The founder of the Cancer Society, the American Cancer Society, founded in 1913. He had already had a name for himself in the area of tuberculosis. He founded that society and advocated that one of the things this new society should do as far as cancer is concerned, pay some attention to nutrition, which is totally off the charts. That's radical. Yeah, and three years later, he was thrown off the board of the organization that he founded. Wow. And in 1922, nine years later, they held their first national conference, international conference actually.

national conference, international conference actually, two of the presenters there were tasked with the idea of basically really criticizing this founder. Interesting. This stuff has been going on for a long time. Right, right, right. And are these ideas that are going to be addressed in this documentary? Or it's a sort of current context? Not so much. A current version of that.

Yeah, the current content is more a derivative of that kind of thought. Yeah, I wish I could tell you more, but we'll have to wait and see. It's supposed to be out in September. I don't want to say... Oh, really?

That's not that far off. No, it isn't. Most of it's filmed. It's most of his films. But still, you know, it's an uncertain end. Right. And I don't want to overstep my bounds for that reason either, because the events of... I don't see how what's about to transpire today,

I don't think it's going's going to hurt hurt the film at all but one never knows the world is an unpredictable place that it is and uh that is a perfect cliffhanger to uh conclude conclude the conversation so we will look forward with uh bated breath to september do we don't we don't know what the title is yet, though. It has a title. I'm not particularly fond of it myself, but others seem to like it for some reason. It's called Plant Pure Revolution. Plant Pure Revolution.

I think it's a mouthful. I'm not sure. It sounds a little bit academic. To some people, it sounds a little bit too provocative, I guess. I don't know. It's not prepared to say. All right. I wish I could have a cat.

If I had Howard Jacobson with me to come up with a title, I'm sure with all his metaphors and things like that, I'm sure he'd come up with something better. He'd come up with something better. Well, let's call it the working title. Maybe that will change by September.

Whatever. All right. Well, Dr. Campbell, it was an honor and a privilege to sit down with you. Thank you very much. You are an inspiration. You're a gift to humanity, and I appreciate your work tremendously, and it's been fantastic to be have to say. Number one. But number two, I just would like to add this little footnote. Do you know there was a famous study that was done in the early 1900s by a physiology professor at Yale University? On the question concerning the role of a plant-based diet. He didn't call it that.

On athletic performance. No, I didn't know that. Amazing results. Published in two books. One in, I think, 1905 and the other 1907, I believe. His name was Russell Chittenden. C-H-I-T-T-E-N-D-E-N.

And he did it on himself first. He started using this kind of diet. It felt better than all the usual. Then he got some other fellow professors to join him to do this, and they felt better too. And then he worked on some young students who were coming into the ROTC program at Yale.

Getting trained for the next six months physically and otherwise. So he put them on a plant based diet essentially. Not the diet they had come from home on. You know high in animal protein. He put them through 15 strength and endurance tests at the beginning in October of that year. He came back in April, same test again.

You could see the numbers swoop up, all of them. It was impressive when they went on this diet. He got criticized by his fellow colleagues. That would work. That's crazy they they improved because they were being trained they had nothing to do with it he said fine so he went out and got some a couple all-american athletes and really into as he said already trained already trained peak of their peak of their condition as he called it their numbers

were near the top you know they were already at that level. He put them on a plant-based diet and it just jumped way up. Wow. That was published at that time. Can you still, I would love to read that. Yeah, I can get that information for you. Yeah, I would love to be able to. So you're living proof of what, you know, he tried. Right, so what I'm saying is nothing new.

Well, I don't want to say that. It's over 100 years ago. You've taken it to a whole new level. Nothing new. It's been over 100 years ago. You've taken it to a whole new level. I think that what you have done and some other, obviously, world-class athletes that I've come to know, too, have just— There are some amazing athletes out there doing incredible things, and in no small part due to your tireless work. It's just beginning. It's just beginning so it's just beginning it's just beginning yeah so uh it's exciting times i'm optimistic and uh i think that there's a lot of work ahead for myself and for you but it's very encouraging uh to see what's happening and to be, for example, on this boat and to have the experience of connecting with so many, uh, people that are having incredibly dramatic, uh, changes

in their life by adopting this new perspective. And it's touching and, um, you know, it's a life work that is fun and meaningful. So thank you. Thank you. All right, everybody, that's our show. I hope you enjoyed it. Again, if you want to check out the offerings of Dr. Campbell, go to richroll.com on the episode page for this episode. There'll be some hyperlinks in the show notes that will take you to all of his amazing work if you want to dig deeper and learn more.

I appreciate you guys tuning in. I know you have lots of choices vying for your attention, lots of content out there, and it warms my heart that you would take time out of your busy day to listen to this podcast. It means a lot. And for those of you who want to support the mission, support the podcast, support the Plant Power Revolution, the best way to do that is to tell a friend about the show. That's it. The show's free.

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and that helps us keep the lights on. It helps me pay my son Tyler to produce this show. By the way, he produces, writes, arranges not just the show but all the music in the show and everything about it. So give him a shout-out in the comments. He's been doing a great job. So, yeah, the Amazon banner ad has really helped keep us afloat. And I appreciate all you guys out there who have been using it. It's fantastic. You can also donate to the show.

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You can take Dr. Campbell's course on plant-based nutrition at eCornell. Again, I'll link on the show notes. Or you can take my course, which is the ultimate guide to plant-based nutrition. It's on mindbodygreen.com, three and a half hours of streaming online content video and online community forum, lots of downloadable tools and awesome stuff. We're proud of it. We like it. So check that out. And of course, go to richroll.com for all your plant power provisions. We've got cool plant power t-shirts. We just, uh, started offering

beanies and a trucker hats. Let's say plant power revolution on them. So you can wear your affiliation proudly. And we've got some nutritional products up there too. So go check out all that stuff and you can read my musings at richroll.com on my blog follow me on twitter at richroll at richroll on instagram as well facebook all that stuff

you guys know what to do so that's it I'm out of here thanks everybody I will see you next week with Dr. Campbell's comrade in arms Howard Jacobson and until then

live wide live deep. Peace. Blants.