ROBBINS: It seems that you are saying that the central thing to do is to derive as much of our nutrients, our proteins, our vitamins, our phytochemicals, our fats, and our carbohydrates from plant sources as possible.
DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Absolutely. I think a lot of the time in the field of medicine and nutrition research in particular, we get caught up in the details rather than thinking about the big story. I think the really big story is just getting some wonderful vegetables and fruits and grains in their natural and whole state, and learning how to use them and adapt to the taste of them.
JOHN ROBBINS: You have been a researcher, a scholar, and a scientist for more than forty years. You went to China and conducted the most comprehensive study of human nutrition in world history. Now you and your son have written about what you learned in The China Study, which is a runaway bestseller. You have come to be on the front lines, challenging the prevailing nutritional dogma. How is that for you?
DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: It has been gratifying and honestly somewhat surprising to see the story of The China Study go as far as it has. I was always quite confident of what we had written and what I had done. But I did not know how the public would respond. Some people are persuaded by the time they get to chapter three, where I am talking about protein and cancer. Other people are persuaded by the last third of the book, where I talk about my twenty years' worth of experience on National Policy Boards on food and health and some of the insights I gleaned along the way.
JOHN ROBBINS: You are running up against government, medicine, corporations, and the media, all of which have at times concentrated on profits at the expense of health. Together they have created a level of confusion about nutrition and have at times stifled and even attempted to destroy viewpoints that challenge the status quo. You, yourself, were almost expelled from a committee of scientists because you dared to suggest that there might be a link between diet and cancer. Where do you find the strength to continue working so hard despite all the obstacles, discouragement, and resistance that you encounter?
DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Well it took many years for me to get enough confidence. Honestly, your work, as well as the work of Dr. John McDougall and others, helped to give me courage and inspiration. All of a sudden it occurred to me that I wasn't standing alone. I was just contributing my part. I get a lot of strength from being part of this community.
We have to go in this direction, because now we have enough evidence from the laboratory, from the field, and even from certain philosophical and environmental resource perspectives. We have enough evidence now to demonstrate it. I have taken my hits and I am sure you have too, some of them pretty serious. But I keep trying to look past them, because this is a story worth telling.
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Joel Fuhrman, M.D.
Specific Steps to Excellent Health
Joel Fuhrman, M.D., is a family physician and researcher who specializes in reversing disease through nutrition. Millions of people were inspired by his work through the PBS special, 3 Steps to Incredible Health, which was the network's highest grossing pledge drive program of 2011. Dr. Fuhrman is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Eat to Live, and research director for the Nutritional Research Foundation. He coined the term “nutritarian,” which means someone who strives for nutritional adequacy for improved health and whose food choices are high in nutrients per calorie.
What is a diet that won't just be a little better than the norm, but that will maximize your potential for optimal health? Which vitamins are healthy for you, and which are so hazardous that they should come with warning labels? What about food allergies, and whole grains? The doc is in, and he's here to give you the latest breakthroughs in nutrition for optimal health.
JOHN ROBBINS: I find you somewhat unique among medical doctors. Very few even study nutrition, much less help their patients apply it. It has occurred to me that a doctor who doesn't know about nutrition is something like a fireman who doesn't know about water.
DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: The medical profession developed with a primary focus on developing and prescribing medications to reduce people's symptoms, rather than on dealing with the causes of disease. Thousands of years ago, a doctor was someone who taught people how to live a healthy life. But I think it has evolved to now being a person who is an expert in giving medications. The trouble is that taking toxic remedies to resolve bad lifestyle choices is largely ineffective and allows for peoples' underlying disease process to continue advancing. I think there are a lot of doctors re-evaluating their careers right now. Fortunately I had the opportunity to learn about nutrition at a young age and to pursue a career where nutrition became the centerpiece of my medical practice. It's afforded so much personal reward to help many thousands of people reverse their conditions and get well, without medications.
JOHN ROBBINS: What are the rewards that our readers could look forward to if they were to heed your suggestions?
DR. JOEL FUHRMAN: Proper nutrition is the foundation for protecting yourself from cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, and strokes. Most people who learn about my Nutritarian approach are in poor health, after living thirty to fifty years on a diet that breeds disease. Now they can lose weight and they can get in better health, lower their blood pressure, or get rid of their diabetes. But the question is: Is that enough? After forty to fifty years of eating a cancer-causing diet, will a change now be sufficient to prevent you from having your life cut short with a tragic cancer at a later stage from what you ate in the first half of your life?
My answer is that eating decently or making moderate beneficial changes is not adequate enough to repair the broken DNA cross-link—the methylation of DNA. In other words, whatever damage occurred to your cells over those years even before you were born, even when your eggs were in your mother's body before you were conceived, has an impact still. Your health can be affected long-term by your exposure to toxins, and by a lack of nutrients.
So we maximize the body's ability to repair dysfunctional DNA, to remove toxins from the cells, and to restore itself and its immune system. We have to undo the damage that, if left unchecked, would lead to cancer. My niche in the nutritional world is to help people who don't just want a little better health, but who want to know what would be optimal. To maximally repair cellular damage, we are going to push the envelope of human longevity and really see if we can win the war on cancer.
My approach is not just about losing weight and not having heart attacks. It's also about maximizing healthy life expectancy. A hundred years ago people lived about as long as they are living now. Life expectancy was lower because we had much higher infant and child mortality rates, and many women died during childbirth. But in the real comparison of health issues, we found that people who lived fifty or a hundred years ago actually didn't have as much disability, discomfort, and pain in the last ten years of their lives as people do today. They mostly had a bad time in the last three to six months of their lives. Now people are over-medicated and sickly, and have a very poor healthy life expectancy. This is because the American diet has degenerated with so much fast food, processed food, and refined food.
We are literally seeing an epidemic of disease that's weighing down our health-care system, weighing down our economy, and creating huge amounts of personal human tragedy. Excellent nutrition is tremendously powerful in giving us personal choice and control of our health destiny. It can also be tasty, fun, and exciting to actually be in great health and continue to have a healthy life as we age.
JOHN ROBBINS: You coined the term
