wabmester
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
- Joined
- Dec 6, 2003
- Messages
- 4,459
Yes, protein will kill you ... according to T. Colin Campbell in The China Study.
I finally got around to reading this after some anonymous poster here mentioned the book in passing. It's an interesting thesis by an interesting guy.
So, who is this T. Colin Campbell dood? Turns out he's a bonafide scientist from Cornell who grew up as a bacon and egg-eating farm boy and ended up becoming a vegan.
He's somewhat famous for studying aflatoxin, the stuff from peanut mold that's been identified as a potent carcinogen. (As an aside, you're more likely to find aflatoxin in peanut butter rather than peanuts. Nut packers save their good looking nuts for cans, and the moldy ones get made into peanut butter.)
He's also one of the guys who wrote the original government report in 1982 that started the low-fat craze, and for that he is sorry.
I had high expectations for a book from a Real Scientist (TM). I was hoping for an unbiased view with good insight into mechanisms of action. I wasn't totally satisfied, but it is a worthwhile read. It does come off somewhat like a vegan trying to justify his views with hard data, but he ignores or glosses over enough stuff to leave me skeptical. And, of course, there's a bit of conspiracy theory in the book as well.
Here is his recommendation in a nutshell: eat whole plant foods.
And here is his reasoning:
Cancer has three stages: I) initiation, II) promotion, and III) progression. Don't sweat initiation. Carcinogens are everywhere. And you can't do a damn thing about genetic predisposition. But, it looks like animal protein is a promoter, and you can do something about that.
He found a dose-response curve for casein (milk protein) promotion of liver cancer initiated by aflatoxin. And no effect from soy protein. So, his message is "don't drink milk."
This raised a couple of questions for me:
1) Protein is mostly broken down to constituent amino acids before it enters the blood stream, so how can one kind of protein be bad and another be good?
2) Protein is essential for growth, so are you just saying no growth = no cancer? That doesn't seem very useful.
He doesn't really answer these questions directly for me, but he has a couple of interesting tidbits I latched onto:
+ Protein isn't completely broken down in the gut, so you end up with some big fragments in the blood. In another section of the book, he links fragments of milk protein to autoimmune diseases by suggesting that the milk protein fragments look so much like markers for our own cells, that the immune system starts attacking itself.
+ Animal protein does contain some components that plant protein doesn't, including homocysteine, which has been implicated in some diseases.
+ Plants also contain antioxidants as part of their photochemistry machinery, so maybe that helps reduce the amount of DNA damage that's part of the cancer initiation process.
There wasn't very much "meat" in the stuff about the China Study itself (a large epidemiological study he ran), except a lot of generalizations that the less animal food consumed, the lower the incidence of disease observed.
He derides low-carb diets, but does appear to buy into the part about high-GI foods being bad for you. Which is why he stresses *whole* plant foods rather than processed plant foods with freely available carbs.
On the bright side, he doesn't seem too religious about veganism. His suggestion is to try to be a vegan, but don't go nuts if you happen to get a little bit of animal food in your diet (like chicken broth in your veggie soup).
I would have liked more data and more mechanisms, but I found the book compelling enough that I plan to give veganism a trial (with before and after bloodwork).
I finally got around to reading this after some anonymous poster here mentioned the book in passing. It's an interesting thesis by an interesting guy.
So, who is this T. Colin Campbell dood? Turns out he's a bonafide scientist from Cornell who grew up as a bacon and egg-eating farm boy and ended up becoming a vegan.
He's somewhat famous for studying aflatoxin, the stuff from peanut mold that's been identified as a potent carcinogen. (As an aside, you're more likely to find aflatoxin in peanut butter rather than peanuts. Nut packers save their good looking nuts for cans, and the moldy ones get made into peanut butter.)
He's also one of the guys who wrote the original government report in 1982 that started the low-fat craze, and for that he is sorry.
I had high expectations for a book from a Real Scientist (TM). I was hoping for an unbiased view with good insight into mechanisms of action. I wasn't totally satisfied, but it is a worthwhile read. It does come off somewhat like a vegan trying to justify his views with hard data, but he ignores or glosses over enough stuff to leave me skeptical. And, of course, there's a bit of conspiracy theory in the book as well.
Here is his recommendation in a nutshell: eat whole plant foods.
And here is his reasoning:
Cancer has three stages: I) initiation, II) promotion, and III) progression. Don't sweat initiation. Carcinogens are everywhere. And you can't do a damn thing about genetic predisposition. But, it looks like animal protein is a promoter, and you can do something about that.
He found a dose-response curve for casein (milk protein) promotion of liver cancer initiated by aflatoxin. And no effect from soy protein. So, his message is "don't drink milk."
This raised a couple of questions for me:
1) Protein is mostly broken down to constituent amino acids before it enters the blood stream, so how can one kind of protein be bad and another be good?
2) Protein is essential for growth, so are you just saying no growth = no cancer? That doesn't seem very useful.
He doesn't really answer these questions directly for me, but he has a couple of interesting tidbits I latched onto:
+ Protein isn't completely broken down in the gut, so you end up with some big fragments in the blood. In another section of the book, he links fragments of milk protein to autoimmune diseases by suggesting that the milk protein fragments look so much like markers for our own cells, that the immune system starts attacking itself.
+ Animal protein does contain some components that plant protein doesn't, including homocysteine, which has been implicated in some diseases.
+ Plants also contain antioxidants as part of their photochemistry machinery, so maybe that helps reduce the amount of DNA damage that's part of the cancer initiation process.
There wasn't very much "meat" in the stuff about the China Study itself (a large epidemiological study he ran), except a lot of generalizations that the less animal food consumed, the lower the incidence of disease observed.
He derides low-carb diets, but does appear to buy into the part about high-GI foods being bad for you. Which is why he stresses *whole* plant foods rather than processed plant foods with freely available carbs.
On the bright side, he doesn't seem too religious about veganism. His suggestion is to try to be a vegan, but don't go nuts if you happen to get a little bit of animal food in your diet (like chicken broth in your veggie soup).
I would have liked more data and more mechanisms, but I found the book compelling enough that I plan to give veganism a trial (with before and after bloodwork).
- Nothing like a good Filet Mignon! Plenty of Chocolate too! Red Wine! 
