Can Diet and Health be related?

Peter  Tong  (F3)

As we all know, the leading cause of death in the US is heart and cancer. I had seen data like this before from CDC (Center for Disease Control). This particular table might be a little out of date because I seem to remember that cancer had recently surpassed heart diseases as the leading cause of death. Either way, the important thing is that heart diseases and cancer are our primary concern. Unless we can reduce the incidence of these two causes of death, whatever plans our leading politicians propose will only make health care most expensive without actually improving overall health of the general population.

As I said, I was aware of the statistics in this table before I read the book and I had always assumed that heart diseases and cancer are the leading causes of death in all the developed countries and not so developed ones. What surprises me is that this Book shows that this is not at all the case. As I shall show you that according to the data cited in this book, the US have more heart diseases and cancer than almost all the countries in this world and in comparison, some countries have far fewer heart diseases and cancer than the US. I am not talking about 10% fewer or 20% fewer. I am talking about a factor of ten fewer, like 70,000 versus 700,000.

As we all know, the US has spent a great deal of our resource on health related issues over the last 40 years. Our current spending per person is second to none according to The China Study and is almost twice that of Germany, the next country on the list. Now take a look at the next figure.

All that money we had spent on health has not reduced the incidents of cancer in the last twenty years. In fact, if look carefully, the rate of incidence might be just a little higher now. Isn’t this depressing? Ah, it is possible that cancer patients do live longer these days due to our medical advances. Even so, wouldn’t we rather be cancer free?

Now, I am going to show you three figures about hearts diseases and two types of common cancers in different countries versus the diet pattern in those countries.

Didn’t I tell you a moment earlier that some country has far fewer heart diseases than the US? Look at the bar chart below. The US heart disease death rate is 700 per 100,000 persons and the Yugoslavia rate is only 50. Would anyone reading this figure come to the conclusion that the Yugoslavs are doing something right and we are doing something entirely wrong? Although it is not obvious from this particular chart, the Book maintains that the secret is in the diet. In effect, we eat too well, much, much too well. Too much meat, too much cow milk, too many eggs and too much animal in our diet.

Now, look at the next chart which shows the breast cancer rate in different countries. We do not have the worst rate in this chart. That belongs to Netherlands, UK, Denmark, and Canada. The US is way up there though. Once again the difference between the highest rate of incident and the lowest is a factor of ten or even twenty.

The next chart concerns colon cancer in female. (The Book talked about colon cancer in male as well but I did not see a chart similar to the one here.) In this case, the highest incidence rate versus the lowest is a whopping factor of thirty, 30.

Just by looking at these three charts here, it should be fairly obvious to the reader that there is a profound relationship between diseases and diet. In particular, the authors asserted that animal diet is bad and plant diet is good. I am not going to bore you with any more details but if you are at all interested, get the book and read it. It talked about diet and many other common diseases, including diabetes, kidney stones and brain diseases. Less you think you are Chinese and are not affected by these statistics. The authors point out that Chinese that immigrated to the US from China suffer the same diseases at the same rate within one to two generations, i.e. as soon as they live and eat the Westerners.

What has the title of the book got to do with what I just told you? According to the authors, Colin Campbell was studying liver cancer in Philippine when Chou En-Lai was diagnosed with colon cancer. He had a study done on the cancer rate among the Chinese in all regions of China. The result was a map of different types of cancer in China which showed great variations among the Chinese population. These variations suggested to Colin Campbell that if he could determine the source(s) of these variations, he would know what controls cancer. Subsequently, he and his Chinese colleagues did another, more controlled and more general, study of 6500 rural Chinese. It is the result of these two studies, experiments on live animals and studying the available data in the literature that led to his conclusions that a plant diet is much healthier than the traditional animal diet.

If this is so obvious, why hasn’t we been told? Only two days ago, I heard on TV news that a researcher in England had just showed that meat is cancer prone, red meat being the worse. The TV program showed the interview with the research but immediately following that they showed a butcher saying that it is all rubbish. Meat is good for you. Hey, who could you believe?

As the authors said in the China Study, they presented the studies, the facts, the data, and the statistics. Do you own analysis and reach your own conclusion? From what I can see, unless the book is all fabrication, the conclusions in the book must be correct. Whether I am willing to eat only plants in my meals is a personal matter.

One last incident may be of some interest. About five years ago, I decided to do an annual physical with an internist that was recommended in the Washingtonian magazine. The result came back showing my cholesterol level at 200. At that time, the CDC had just lowered their recommendation from 220 to 200. The doctor said I was a marginal case and must take step to lower that level. He said I have two risk factors, 1. I am male and 2. I am Chinese. I certainly could not argue with risk factor number 1 but I had never heard that being Chinese was a risk factor. In fact, I learned from The China Study, Chinese has relatively few heart diseases traditional. They have very few heart diseases if they live and work in China. Here in the States, they are about average. That doctor also said I should take cholesterol medicine because dieting wouldn’t work.

I did not agree with the doctor and never went back to see him again. He was wrong on Chinese being a risk factor and he was also wrong to say that dieting wouldn’t work. Meanwhile, I went to the web and did a search on just what is so bad about a cholesterol level of 200? Most doctors would tell you that level is bad for you heart. How? And to what extent? I found a website that was sponsored by some university. It asked me to enter my gender, my age, my blood pressure, my cholesterol level and my HDL. Based on what I entered, it said I had 1 chance in 10 to die of some heart disease in the next ten years. 1 in 10 is not that comforting but not so bad either. Being a scientist, I am curious what my chances would be if I make an effort to lower my cholesterol level. So, I enter a level of 80. The website refused to accept that. I entered a level of 130. It came back with a prediction that my chance was now 1 in 12. That was better than 1 in 10 but hardly justify the effort to change my diet or take medicine every day.

Just for kicks, I reentered my cholesterol level on that site and changed my gender to female. Lo and behold, I chance of dying from heart disease in the next ten years dropped out of sight. For all practical purpose, I was more likely to get hit by lightning. Oh, well. My only real option is to change sex.

One final observation, the China Study says nothing about living longer if one adopts a plant only diet. It only promises fewer diseases.