So What Are You Trying to Say There, Colin?

It [empirical research] is a type of science advocated 2,400 years ago by the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, who said, “There are, in effect, two things:  to know and to believe one knows.  To know is science.  To believe one knows is ignorance.”  I plan to show you what I have come to know.          T. Colin Campbell, The China Study, p. 21

I don’t know about animal protein, but a small dose of irony is good for the blood, eh?

Yes, friends, my number finally came up at the library, and The China Study will be my reading during my morning and evening commutes for a while.  I decided to give the book a chance, but I must admit, I’m fighting down my skepticism at every word.  I have seen recordings of presentations that Campbell has given (here’s one), and thus far I am unimpressed.  What his research seems to show is 1) if you add fractionated casein to laboratory rat chow, the rats get cancer, and 2) Chinese people are healthier than Americans.

I promise not eat any rat chow fortified with fractionated casein.  Or feed it to any rats, either.  I’m not going to move to China just yet, however.

I’m trying not to be dismissive, though.  When Campbell appeals blatantly to our emotions by telling us about how his dairy farmer father died of heart disease, I remind myself I’ve made the same sort of appeal talking about my mother’s diabetes.  When Campbell argues that his point of view must be valid because he started his career believing the exact opposite (I call this the it must be convincing if it convinced me fallacy), I tell myself that I use the same technique when I talk about all my years believing the low-fat dogma.  Strictly speaking, these are logical fallacies (appeals to emotion or to the zeal of the convert do not in fact prove the point in question), but writers, even very good writers, use such rhetorical flourishes all the time.  Maybe Campbell and I are not so different.  After all, he thinks that most of the major chronic health problems of the West could be defeated by diet.  Most people who espouse a diet low in grains and high in animal products think the same thing.  We differ from Campbell in the details, of course.

But I’m already guessing that I differ from Campbell on the idea that there is only One Right Way.  (He sure comes across as confident in that video, doesn’t he?)  I am sure I come across as very confident on this blog, too, but I have a confession.  I think that a vegetarian, or even a vegan, could be a whole lot healthier than someone following the Standard American Diet.  But simply giving up anything that comes from an animal will not be enough.  So, to all those people I see in Whole Foods every week with carts full of frozen vegetarian entrées and boxes of white flour pasta and packages of Quorn and Morningstar Farms breakfast “sausages” and Tofu Pups and bags of vegan sugar - you are harming your health.  That’s right, you heard me, your diet is not merely neutral, it’s just plain bad.  If it is a perfect rectangular prism that stacks neatly in your cupboard or fridge, it will not promote well-being.  Eat something that looks like the plant it came from, I beg you.  Asparagus will be in season soon, and it’s tasty with olive oil.  Put the vegan sugar back on the shelf - thus far it has not harmed any animals, but you, my primate friend, are going to be the first.

But a vegetarian, or even a vegan, who eats a diet composed mostly of fresh, minimally processed foods, with lots of fruits and vegetables and very little added sugar will undoubtedly be healthier than someone who skips breakfast, chows down on Taco Bell for lunch and Dinty Moore Beef Stew for dinner.  Or, yikes, SlimFast.

Will a vegetarian eating whole foods be any healthier than someone who eats meat but avoids grains and sugar?  Honestly, I don’t know.  I tend to view questions of health through the lens of that constellation of health problems known as metabolic syndrome - high blood pressure, obesity, Type II diabetes, and heart disease.  There is little question in my mind that restricting sugars and starches is the best treatment for these conditions.  But cancer?  Who knows?  I haven’t given it nearly as much thought as how to keep myself from ending up like my mother, a double amputee who lived her last few years in fear of dying during a reactive hypo.

Oh, wait, there I go appealing to emotion again.