I agree with your comment, and I want to clarify that Dr. T. Colin Campbell, author of "The China Study", is a Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, not MIT.
He is likely the foremost nutritional researcher, not only of our time, but of history. The work he and his team did in the decades-long China Study research has not been paralleled.
Some of the notable discoveries they made was that a particular protein found in dairy products, casein, enabled tumor growth. When removed from the diet, the tumors stopped.
A similar tumor on/off mechanism was found with regards to the percentage of calories from protein in the diet. When the protein went over a certain threshold, tumor growth was enabled, but not at the lower levels.
Excellent summary of his work, btw. I cannot imagine how difficult it must be for him professionally to have exhibited all the courage he did in going against the status quo only to remain in relative obscurity.
I guess great insights sometimes don't catch on right away.
Yes, it seems he really went against the establishment thinking in those early years of his work, and even his own assumptions, as he grew up on a dairy farm. He and his team initially set out to "save the third world" by providing high quality animal protein. He was working in the Phillipines during this time, and as his work progressed, he started noticing that his initial assumptions about animal protein did not seem to be true.
This was before the China Study research, and I do not know if it was covered in the book, but he talks about this in at least one talk that is available online.
In addition to being sincere and extremely knowledgable about his subject matter, a characteristic of T. Colin Campbell is that, despite the respect and acclaim (more so in recent years) he has garnered, he comes across as quite humble.
Thanks for the video link. I just watched it and am inspired to pick up the book now.
I must confess it is a pretty frustrating task to try and gain a well-informed, well-balanced general understanding of nutrition with an accompanying good idea of "what to eat". I've become pretty interested in the subject of late and in my research came across another source, Gary Taubes, whose theory I thought was pretty damn compelling. Unfortunately, the Campbell position seems pretty much directly opposed to the Taubes hypothesis.
I have no idea what to think. If anyone can point me to a fair, informed criticism of either or both, by someone who knows what they are talking about and is not obviously writing in defense of some preconceived partisan allegiance, I would be delighted to read it.
Right now I would say I find Taubes more convincing, simply because I tend to mistrust any statistics I didn't do myself. There could be any number of factors causing the strong correlations Campbell is graphing; without the full data they are close to useless.
He is likely the foremost nutritional researcher, not only of our time, but of history. The work he and his team did in the decades-long China Study research has not been paralleled.
Some of the notable discoveries they made was that a particular protein found in dairy products, casein, enabled tumor growth. When removed from the diet, the tumors stopped.
A similar tumor on/off mechanism was found with regards to the percentage of calories from protein in the diet. When the protein went over a certain threshold, tumor growth was enabled, but not at the lower levels.