How Not To Die and The China Study

4 min readMar 21, 2017

If I were to tell you about a study read about recently you really wouldn’t lend any weight to it. You’d likely think to yourself “hey, that’s mildly interesting.” Single studies are great for conversation or fodder for the likes of CNN, but it’s not something we would change our lives around. If I told you about a few dozen peer reviewed, double-blind, repeatable studies you would likely take it a little more seriously. What if I said thousands of thorough studies on hundreds of thousands of individuals that have been conducted over decades and the topic of many New York Times bestsellers and dozens of documentaries? Would I have your attention? I think I would, but what if it challenged what you knew? Or at least what you thought you knew.

The word ‘healthy’ is too nebulous plus we’re all our own unique bag of genes and biochemistry. What’s a strong source of vitamin E and good fats like almonds are healthy for some and fatal to others. Allergies aside, I wanted to get as much information as I could so I can make the best nutrition decisions for myself and my soon-to-arrive daughter. Moreover, in my ethical move to Veganism I wanted to learn as much I could to ensure a healthy transition. The more I learned the more I was surprised at how harmful our North American diet is.

Research

Google is great and useless at the same time. You can find pretty much any study that “proves” anything. The two main sources I’m using are The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, Thomas M. Campbell and How Not To Die by Dr. Micheal Greger. The China Study is one of America’s best-selling books about nutrition and the largest, most comprehensive series of studies on nutrition in history. There are several books and documentaries around this work. Dr. Greger is a physician and New York Times bestselling author who scours the world’s nutrition research to bring you free daily videos and articles. All proceeds from his books, DVDs, and speaking go to charity. Dr. Greger founded NutritionFacts.org and has a series of talks viewed millions of times. He’s also pretty entertaining. Here’s his talk on the leading causes of death and how diet can make an impact.

In reading these studies and books I found that I needed to distill the claims made in the the above material. The following are the claims based on the evidence compiled from thousands of studies on hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world. The books mentioned contain all the references to the actual studies if you’re interested.

A whole food, plant-based diet can arrest and even reverse heart disease.

Animal based diets severely raises our LDL (bad) cholesterol causing heart disease.

Animal based diets provide an optimum environment that promotes cancel cell growth and is closely linked to colon, breast cancer.

There are direct links to animal based diets, cow’s milk in particular, to lethal Type 1 diabetes and autoimmune diseases.

Dairy increases the risk of osteoporosis and weakens bones. You read that right.

Animal protein consumption is closely correlated with kidney stones.

Plant based diet can offer protection from Alzheimer’s and blindness.

High animal protein intake is associated with increased mortality. The substitution of plant protein for animal protein is associate with lower mortality.

These are pretty big claims and we were not brought up to believe any of them. Why were we brought up to not believe any of these claims? That’s for another time, but it rhymes with meat and dairy industries. So many of us are so brainwashed even vegetarians seem to have redefined the term to include dairy and fish.

If even one of these claims is true, and my stance is that they all are, why would we continue eating meat and milk products? Convenience?

The Problem With Unknowns

There will be unknowns in studies. It’s why science exists. The challenge is that some may toss the baby with the bathwater if they find there is some obscure unknown in a study. It will certainly happen if the mission is to discredit the findings for whatever reason. The important thing to remember is to stick to what is know.