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2010-01-06 T Colin Campbell PhD Chronic Disease Prevention, The China Study and Plant-Based Diet

An Interview with T. Colin Campbell, PhD

KIRK HAMILTON: Hi, my name is Kirk Hamilton, your host of Staying Healthy Today, and our mission is simple: To provide you credible, usable health information from interviews and our educational resources to help you Stay and Be Well in the busy modern world. Please take a few moments before or after listening to this interview to browse through the Prescription2000.com website, the home of Staying Healthy Today Radio, for our free educational services.

Today's show topic is "How The World Can Prevent And Reverse The Chronic Disease Epidemic And Emerging Healthcare Crisis With A Plant-Based Diet And Create Real Healthcare Reform. Lessons From The China Study And A Lifetime Of Nutrition Research."

Our guest today is Dr. T. Colin Campbell, co-author with his son Dr. Thomas M. Campbell of the best-selling book, "The China Study. Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health." This book provides the evidence and the argument for a whole-food, plant-based diet being the real solution for long-term healthcare reform. Dr. Campbell is a Jacob Gould Sherman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University. Dr. Campbell also received his master's and PhD at Cornell. At MIT he was a research associate in nutrition, biochemistry and toxicology. He spent 10 years on the faculty at Virginia Tech's Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition before returning to the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell in 1975. For more than 40 years, Dr. Campbell has been at the forefront of nutrition research. His legacy is the China Project, the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Dr. Campbell has more than 70 grant years of peer-reviewed research funding and has authored more than 300 research papers.

Welcome, Dr. Campbell, and thank you for taking the time to be on the show today.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Pleasure being here.

KIRK HAMILTON: You know, I've read the China Study and we've heard a lot about you, and the question is, "How does a country boy from a dairy farm become a world-renowned advocate of whole-food plant-based diets in which the consumption of dairy products is highlighted as sometimes being a health concern and not recommended?"

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Well, when I grew up on the farm my father, who only had two years of education, and I was the first to go to college even on either side of my family. I left home with the suggestion of his that says always be honest. So when I got into this research, I loved research, biologic research, medical research and eventually ended up at Cornell University thinking I was going down the road to prove that the good old American diet was the best there is. And so doing all kinds of research with lots of students, lots of colleagues over the years, many different kinds of research, in different places in the world, it became clearer, that what I had revered as a kid on a dairy farm, milk, was not was it was touted to be.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let's start with milk products. I know you did some research in it. When did you begin to discover that milk was a problem?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: This was in the 1960s. I was actually at the time coordinating a nationwide program of feeding malnourished children in the Philippines and a special interest in an usual liver cancer that was occurring in young people and it turned out that the families who were most likely to have children with that problem were the ones who were best fed, you know, consuming diets like we do in the West. The most protein if you will. So I came back home and organized a fairly substantial research program funded by the National Institutes of Health, NIH, that was to continue then for the next 27 years. And just asking this question, why were we getting this impression that a higher intake or consumption of animal protein, why was that associated with the emergence of liver cancer? And so it was an interesting experimental model and we did lots of work, published the results of course, in over the years we learned a lot. And it was more than just about the effect of cow's milk protein on liver cancer in experimental animals. It really demonstrated a lot of principles about cancer. How it develops and progresses and in the early days I was using milk protein only as a model to understand cancer. But then it became quite clear after a few years that the real story here, really was concerned with the effect of milk protein itself and very likely other animal proteins as well. But not plant proteins.

KIRK HAMILTON: Did you not lower the level of protein in your animal studies and
find that they didn't get cancer induced by a toxin, and then you split that up to compare cow's milk with soy protein and found out that the vegetable protein had less of a cancerogenic effect? Is that the case?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yes. Let me try to answer that question. It's a little bit tortuous, but it turns out, at least in retrospect, that the amount of protein that is recommended and has been so for many, many years in the professional community is around 10% of total calories. And that can be supplied by a plant-based diet by the way. You know, a whole food plant-based diet, and when we start going above that 10% and virtually everyone in our country does, when you start going above that 10% by including animal based foods in our diet, and our average intake is more in the neighborhood of 17%, not 10%, so it's really quite high. When that starts going up, when we start putting protein and animal protein in the diet that way, that's when the cancer gets turned on. That's when it gets turned on and it turns out that in the experimental model that we were using when we compared milk protein with soy protein and wheat protein as you just said. Even at a level of 20% those plant proteins did not turn on cancer. Only casein did. That's the animal protein. That was pretty remarkable and it was a substantial effect.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well then, let's stay on soy for a second because it's a hot topic of debate. I'm digressing a little bit. But soy on one end of the spectrum will have websites that are denouncing it as the world's greatest evil and then you might study a traditional Asian culture like the Okinawans, and it's part of a healthy diet. Do you have any feelings on this debate? About soy?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yes I do. I mean I became aware of the so-called debate way back in the 1960s when in the Philippines there was an attempt there to develop a soy program to export to this country and at that time there emerged a sort of conflict between the dairy industry and the soy industry. The dairy industry in this county did not particularly like the idea of having soy protein being introduced into our society. And so there was a lot of argument going back and forth, press relations and things, and it got worse over the years and finally the soy industry came into its own in this country in the 1980s. I think you can say and became quite prominent themselves. So now we have two industries. One very powerful industry, the other an emerging power - the soy industry. And they started, just you know, slamming each other. Every time there's a research result that came forth to support soy obviously the soy industry touted it. If a research report came along that was tending to question soy then the dairy industry touted that. And so a lot of the stuff that got into the press - I followed it very closely. I wasn't very impressed. I mean there was a lot hype. And so the bottom line for me looking at the research results themselves is that soy itself, you know as a food is a good food. There's no question about that. It's just like other legumes, peas and beans and so forth. However, when we take out the protein, extract the protein and make special protein products as the soy industry has done, and as we tend to consume those products at fairly substantial levels then we might expect to see some problems especially at the really higher levels of consumption. So my sense of this field is that whereas soy products is a good food and the protein is better than milk protein for example, if we look at it that way in reality we can consume too much of the soy protein.

KIRK HAMILTON: But I even heard that soy is in hamburgers and we consume more soy containing products than any other culture in the world, more than Asian cultures.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: That's right. Coming back to your Okinawan suggestion. Yeah, compared to the studies we did in China for example. We do. We consume a lot more soy protein in this country than they do there.

KIRK HAMILTON: Do you care if the soy is genetically modified or not?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yes I do. Yes, I am concerned about that and it's not because of any specific finding that I am familiar with but the whole question concerning replacing a gene or two you know out of the thousands that are available, you know whether it's in food or whatever. Replacing these genes like that or changing them in some fashion you know can very likely lead to unintended consequences in the future. That concept has been demonstrated a few times.

KIRK HAMILTON: Is it not also, before we leave the soy subject - I have been reading that soy is one of the major foods for agribusiness and farm animals and that's where most of the soy is consumed. It's feed to animals. Is that correct?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yes it is. That's absolutely true and so also it's true for other cereal grains as well. I mean the corn that we grow in this country is primarily for livestock production. It's true.

KIRK HAMILTON: And I'm not advocating this because I happen to be a vegan, but if people are going to eat meat, would it not be a better type of meat if it was a free-range grass-fed animal?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yes. I mean there's some evidence that it might be a bit better, but I have to tell you and I've followed that suggestion closely too. The advantage of consuming grass-fed animals over feed-lot animals is not that much in the health sense. Maybe just a little bit. It's really minor. I mean the real question here, if one wants to get really the big benefits of choosing food then they wouldn't choose any kind of animal based food, whether it's grass-fed or otherwise. But let me just return, and sort of for example let's imagine that maybe the grass-fed animal is a lot better in some ways. It really isn't. But even if it were true then the other question that we have to concern ourselves with is that really the way for a population to go? We don't have enough land in the world you know to sustain grass-fed animals as a source of food. There's just no way. So I think the whole argument for grass-fed animals even if there's a shred of truth in it as far as health is concerned - I think it's a ridiculous argument. That is not going to solve our problems that we now have you know by consuming so much livestock products.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well I feel somewhat vindicated because that's the answer that I give even if it was better. How are we going to have 7.2 billion people in 2015 consume free-range animals all over the world?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Absolutely. It's sad that this argument is out there in the public now and people talk about it a lot. They're not really thinking this thing through.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let's jump into the China Study. And one thing I have a hard time understanding is when I thought of the China Study, I thought I would open up one of the prestigious medical journals and see one study that kind of encapsulated it. And it's hard to pin it down. So where is the results of the China Study per se published?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Well the China Study was a unique study designed in a sense. It's what we call a cross-sectional ecological study where we're comparing a bunch of sort of small populations in a country. We, for example, you know looked at 130 villages across the country, compared them one against the other and that kind of design sort of demonstrates for us you know what are the differences for sure. But we cannot draw in the usual sense - we cannot draw specific conclusions from the study like that involving specific causes or specific outcomes with that kind of study design so it doesn't get a lot of attention for that reason. However, I think that assumption that is generally made in science is wrong because in cross-sectional studies - I know I'm a little technical here, but in cross-sectional studies we can make inferences about specific causes you know creating specific effects on one the one hand. On the other hand, if we look at a whole lot of correlations and begin to put them together and look at them in the sense of you know restructuring a hypothesis and restructuring the way we interpret the information then it becomes much more powerful.

KIRK HAMILTON: So tell me how the China Study started then.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Being at Cornell University in the early 1980s and this is shortly after our two countries started to talk to the other in a sense the first senior scientist from China, Dr. Junshi Chen, a fairly prominent guy himself in China. He came to the United States and wanted to spend some time here. And he came to my laboratory. Really a marvelous guy, very competent, and he spent about a year in my lab. And while he was in the United States we learned about his country releasing a really impressive atlas of how much cancer existed in a total of about 2500 counties across China. And so we said well why don't we go there and organize a study to see why it is that cancer is so common in some counties and much less common in other counties. I mean it was a perfect setting. And so we got funding from the National Institutes of Health and this was the first project, research project, that was funded between the United States and China. It was a joint project, and then we drew in the University of Oxford as one of our main partners and we took it from there and the Chinese did a marvelous job in 1983 of surveying a total of 130 counties taking blood samples and urine samples and food samples and questionnaires and so forth and so on. And so we ended up with a huge body of data. A very comprehensive set of data that we could then begin to examine and interpret.

KIRK HAMILTON: So the first genesis or the first reason was it that - was it that the leader of China said that he wanted to do a cancer survey of his country and then you came back and did the China Study with the blood samples and things of the different areas?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yes, that is correct. The late premier Zhou Enlai in the 1970s got cancer and wanted to know more about it and learned that his medical people didn't know about a lot this disease and so he organized or had organized a survey of how much cancer existed in a population then of about 800 million people. How much cancer existed in all these 2500 counties and then that information was collected. A huge effort involving six hundred and some thousand professional people. That information was collected and then published in 1980 and 81 and that's why it came to our attention that wow, this is a really impressive data base. So then we went there as a follow-up you know to measure as best we could dietary and lifestyle information and then compared it with the data that the Chinese government had already obtained.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let's talk about then the four or five highlight findings of the China Study.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Well as I said. Take a little side here - incidentally - and there is such a thing as the China Project or China Study we just talked about. Eventually when we got around to writing the book and I did with my son in 2005. The title of the book was "The China Study." Unfortunately that was the publisher's choice, but in the China Study, so there is some confusion. I - the conclusions I draw now these days - at least that's published in the book "The China Study" - those conclusions were not based just on the China Project itself. In fact, it's based on a whole lot more information that we had collected prior to that study in China, and a whole lot more information that others had collected or we had collected too, you know after the China Project. So my conclusions for, you know, are based on a very broad sweep of information - much of it is ours in the laboratory. But in any case, the main findings, if I can sort of answer your question that way.

KIRK HAMILTON: Yes please.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: The main findings are that as soon as we start putting in animal foods - let me say this. The principle recommendation is that - for health - is that a whole foods plant based diet is the best that we have. I mean that creates optimum health. Now as soon as we start straying from that model either in one of two ways. We start substituting some of the plant foods for animal - we substitute animal foods for the plant foods. And we all do it - most people do it. Or we take the whole plant based foods and we fragment them, and what I mean by we take out the sugar or the white flour or the bran or something else like that, and we create a lot of processed foods. So processed foods and animal foods both have strayed from the ideal model. The ideal model being whole plant based foods. And so as soon as we start doing that then we start getting into trouble. And we get all kinds of diseases and I would suggest that you know 80 to 90% at least of the diseases that we now have in our society is really attributed to diet and it's attributed to the fact that we have strayed from what really is the most natural and healthiest way to eat. Namely consuming a whole plant-based food.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let me be the devil's advocate then. I mean, what I don't get is who defined what the perfect diet was? Some would say the Paleolithic diet, some would say you know there's no vegan culture that I know of that's totally vegan that's the longest living people in the world. The - let's say the Okinawans centenarians have been studied. They have a small amount of animal food and lots of plant food. So how did you get that this is the perfect diet, I guess is what I'm trying to get at?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Well it's an important question but it's a very complex question. First off, the Okinawan diet - that's not a reasonable comparison in my view, because it is said yes their life expectancy is a shade higher than the next highest, but life expectancy in most countries is really related to infant mortality and so they've succeeded in cutting down infant mortality substantially. That's really what determines life expectancy for the most part and so they're really not the longest living people on the face of the planet. That's been a misrepresentation in my view. So it's not a good comparison. The way to sort of ascertain or determine you know what is an optimum diet is to look at the question concerning the effect of nutrition you know on a whole lot of different systems. A lot of different disease outcomes and a lot of ways in which you know it works biochemically if you will and physiologically. And it turns out that when we look at all of the nutrients and nutrient-like substances in plant foods when they're working together they create these really impressive effects. For example, and this is my colleague at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn did this and Dr. Dean Ornish out your way did it as well. Dr. Esselstyn conducted it a lot longer but in any case what they were able to do was to take people with advanced heart disease and cure heart disease. I mean that's pretty dramatic. And they do it by using a whole foods plant-based diet. As soon as they start putting in a little bit of the wrong thing in there then people begin to get compromised. Diabetes, type 2 diabetes is another case. Dr. John McDougall again in California is up near Santa Rosa. He and now many other physicians are now taking type 2 diabetics, putting them on this whole food plant based diet, and they have to take their medications away from them really early or within a day or two because the dietary effect is so powerful that were they to stay on these meds they would likely go into hypoglycemic shock. I mean that's how powerful the diet is. And multiple sclerosis. And so now coming back to the outcome of the diet, the optimum - you know what is the optimum diet so to speak is concerned - if you take the worst health conditions like advanced diseases for example and find this kind of diet can reverse these diseases and actually cure these diseases and then you compare that kind of - that very dramatic information with let's say looking at the relationship between dietary practices and different customs in the world versus how much heart disease, how much cancer and so forth and so on. I mean it all adds up and then you especially compare it to the biological biochemical stuff that's going on and that was sort of my territory. Looking at the metabolism and the metabolic reactions that are occurring and comparing you know plant based nutrients versus animal nutrient and what it can do. When you put the whole thing together it's clear. It's really - I mean I had no idea that when quite frankly when we published the book in 2005. I felt we were on the right track in summarizing all this information but since then I didn't know that it was - it's so dramatic in terms of you know whether it - people who otherwise think they are reasonably healthy but they're not quite. They've got high cholesterol, they've got this, they've got something else. If they go on a whole plant-based diet virtually every single person sees benefits.

KIRK HAMILTON: Right. I have no qualm and no debate - you're preaching to the choir about reversing chronic diseases. The question is that I brought up about longevity is that they do have - when I said the Okinawan centenarians - the study was of the percentage of centenarians per capita. They had more than other people and they do eat some animal food - not a lot. They eat a whole food diet. And so I guess my question was, is there a model for - of purely vegan, because you're talking about a vegan plant-based diet, of which I'm an advocate, but if we took a poll of centenarians even in our country, around the world, what are they eating? It seems to me that lifestyle is the one that we would want to look at, to find out how correct this is as the optimum diet. I understand it (whole food, plant-based diet) reverses disease. I got that down. I use that argument all the time. But that was my one question about longevity and functional longevity you know. What are 100-year-olds doing because we have this huge aging population. It's one thing to reverse chronic disease, but the other thing is we're going to have this really skyrocketing (aging) population and are they going to be functional?

So let me backtrack a little bit because I wanted to go into - when you went into like rural China, were there areas like - what was the typical cholesterol there you know in these provinces that didn't have heart disease let's say?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Well the average cholesterol here in the West as you probably know is around 210 mg/dl. The range is let's say 160 to 170 or so to 270. In China, in rural China the average cholesterol there was 127. That's a whole lot lower than 210. And the range across the different communities in China went from around 90 or so up to about 170 mg/dl, and there were individuals actually less than 90. I mean it was this striking difference.

KIRK HAMILTON: And were in these areas no heart disease?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Well there were areas. As you get down below 150, 140 certainly, you essentially see almost no heart disease and in fact in one of the counties I think there were around 115 or 110 or something like that. They had had something like 250-some thousand successive deaths and not one of those that was reported was due to heart disease. And so heart disease was extremely rare to say the least.

KIRK HAMILTON: When did Asia - when did they incorporate oil in their diet? I am a little confused at when oil - I mean you see a stir-fry and I'm not sure when oil was used.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: I don't know exactly but they have - I mean oil has generally been considered by most cultures as kind of precious if you will. And so when they get money they started using more oil, but in rural China the amount of oil that they were using, or total fat if you will was extremely low. It - the average as a percent of total calories being consumed - the average was only around 14.5%. Our average is 35 to 40. So I mean they were really low and they do use some oil in rural China even in the poor areas, just kind of you know spritz it on a wok if you will - something like that. But it's not a significant amount of oil at all so the amount of oil or fats that are consumed is for the most part coming from the food.

KIRK HAMILTON: Your colleague, Dr. Esselstyn, and your friend who wrote "Prevent, Reverse Heart Disease" from the Cleveland Clinic, he is a no ‘nut and seed' man. How about you?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: No, I don't quite go that far. I mean he - I agree with him and he has worked with patients and what he finds is that if they go - start using nuts and seeds and these are very you know sensitive - they're very sensitive to diet. He wants to keep them really clean and pure. And so that's I guess the basis primarily for his recommendation. From my perspective, you know I think some nuts and seeds is okay. I don't have any problem with that. You just don't - we just don't gobble them up you know by the handfuls. So I think it's a good food.

KIRK HAMILTON: On your vegan or plant based regimen, where do the essential fatty acids come from?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: On a vegan diet - well they can come from nuts, seeds, of course flax seed is quite famous and walnuts and things like that. But the omega-3s can also come from vegetables too. And quite frankly the omega-3 story again has unfortunately been distorted to some extent because the question concerning the omega-3s versus the omega-6s which I mean let's call omega-3s good, omega-6s bad - it's really a ratio of the two and so in our society right now we are loaded down with omega-6s. And so therefore by adding some omega-6s it potentially corrects the balance of it and we might see some benefits now and again. However, if we reduce the total fat intake - total fat -then the ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s is about right.

KIRK HAMILTON: Where do we get these omega-6s that are the problem that are in excess?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: It's mostly in corn. I mean I think it's about 60% of corn oil for example. It's linoleic acid which is an omega-6. And I mean it's just loaded up with the omega-6s and so a lot of the oil that we get, even the plant oils that we have used extensively since the last 20, 30, 40 years or so. I mean now the ratio of the omega-6 to omega-3 instead of being the ideal maybe 2:1 or something like that - you're getting plant based fat - it's more in the neighborhood of 10 to 15:1. So it's a problem. It's a serious problem and that's the kind of upsetting. You know we're doing so badly in regards to the omega-6 - omega-3 ratio, that by adding a little of omega-3s to that it helps a little bit. You know that's why we see some benefits.

KIRK HAMILTON: I'd like to jump into a couple of your principles of health if I can.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Sure.

KIRK HAMILTON: You had eight principles in your book. In one of them you comment on that nutrition that is truly beneficial for one chronic disease will support health across the board. Is that like if we applied your plant based diet to let's say reverse diabetes, it's also going to help heart disease and other conditions?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yes. In fact I've sort of really become quite impressed with, you know, the results that people are getting in the clinic, as well as the sciences being published. This kind of diet really addresses all kinds of ailments. I mean I like to say from time to time that we don't have a bunch of different diseases - we have one disease. We have one disease as one cause. It just has different names depending on you know when it appears in the body and where it appears and so forth. I mean the causes of heart disease and cancer and diabetes is virtually almost the same thing.

KIRK HAMILTON: So applying your whole food plant based diet would be obviously the real answer to healthcare reform which would be to dramatically reduce the chronic diseases or eliminate them and then we wouldn't have to worry about treating them with all the expenditures in the first place.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Well you said it right. I couldn't agree with you more. In fact, I saw that same thing myself. I mean unfortunately in these days with the tremendous debate that's occurring on healthcare reform that's been going on over the last year or two most of the progress and proposal that the politicians talk about - they're primarily talking about, you know, who's going to pay the bill. And you know they sort of make some comments from time to time about reducing healthcare costs but none of them really are talking about reducing costs by getting people well really. I mean substantially well I should say.

KIRK HAMILTON: Yeah, I mean if we got people well, there would be no bill.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: That's right.

KIRK HAMILTON: Then we could solve the problem.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: And this may sound rather hypothetical to some of your listeners, but the fact is I think it's easy to imagine being able to cut that bill down by 80 to 90% easily.

KIRK HAMILTON: I'm with you. It's so obvious to me that we could do that. I want to ask one other principle. It's kind of interesting comment. Number six. The same nutrition that prevents disease in it's early stages can also halt or reverse disease in its later stages so we don't have to reinvent the wheel so to speak to prevent heart disease and treat it.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Absolutely. I mean this dietary approach of whole foods plant-based diet really does work in advanced stages of these diseases and so suddenly now we can think of it - think of this diet not as means of preventing future events which it does but actually reversing you know current conditions that it's treating. I mean I think it's a very exciting concept to think that nutrition, in a sense, becomes a medical treatment and is far more effective than using drugs.

KIRK HAMILTON: Let me go on principle number three because it's also an interesting concept, and it also gets into the comment of, "Is a vegan no animal food diet, is it deficient in something?" And you see in principle number three there are virtually no nutrients in animal based foods that are not better provided by plants.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yes. I do say that and I do still believe that but at the same time especially from my colleagues in the clinic you know have taken note of the fact that vegans have lower B12 levels. Most people do in their blood and B12 is a significant important nutrient. And there's some concern that with these lower levels among vegans, that they should supplement and I go along with their recommendations. Sometimes I'm not terribly impressed with you know all of the information on that point, but B12 is a supplement that has been widely recommended for people consuming you know plant based foods. Vitamin D is of course a more recent addition to our little black box and especially for people living in the northern climates. I am not convinced again that using vitamin D for all the things that now are being mentioned is the way to go. I mean if we consume the right kind of diet and we get outside, get some exercise, get some sunlight even in a northern climates you know we can do a lot for ourselves.

KIRK HAMILTON: I would like to have a comment here since we're having obviously an ever-growing older population and we've talked about the classic chronic diseases. How do you feel your plant-based diet would work with things such as Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson disease, preventing these kinds of diseases and dementias?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Well you know the evidence - I wish we had a lot more evidence on some of those kind of things but you know for some of these sort of progressive kinds of diseases like multiple sclerosis, for example, and even some evidence of Parkinson's on this point. There's neurological kinds of conditions as well. I mean we have some evidence now that a plant-based diet can tend to prevent that including Alzheimer's by the way. And cognitive dysfunction. I mean this is obviously a neurological setting I guess you could say. So we don't have enough research in my view to, you know, be really assertive. I think that it can do all these wonderful things but the evidence so far that does exist certainly points to the direction that these diseases can be prevented, at least delayed and even maybe treated to some extent although that may be more difficult.

KIRK HAMILTON: In your book you had some chapters entitled "Science, The Dark Side", "Government - Is It For The People?" and "Big Medicine - Whose Health Are They Protecting?" and I remember somewhere in your book you talked about knowing that the basic things such as nutrition, vegetables and fruit and things like that - the benefits of them were known in the 70s and yet you were on these boards where it was difficult to get that information out. Is that correct?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yes it is. I mean there's a lot of good people doing bad things and I don't like to focus you know on the conspiracies and that kind of thing but it turns out that you know in development of policy, and I was a member of a number of these sort of expert panels who, you know, sort of advised or helped to develop the national policy, it became clear to me that we tended to as a committee for example - we would tend to want to go to the safest kind of statement often times - the least common denominator which usually meant going with the status quo. You know not going too far out on a limb. I mean that's just the nature of science. The nature of human beings, I guess if you get a bunch of people together they want to be reasonably safe and so those kinds of recommendations that had been made in the past and continue to be made in many ways is only supporting the status quo. Well I don't want the status quo. I really don't. I think we need to be more demonstrative. We've got problems and we need to sort of, you know, ask ourselves some serious questions. Are there some other ways? And one of the things that I did learn in spades I should say, is the effect of the commercial sector or the corporate world on the development of national policy in the area of food and health, it's serious. That's a problem. And the corporate world has inserted itself not only into the development of policy in this country in a fairly major way in a fairly short period of time. They've also pushed their way into the research laboratory as well. You know into academic research for example.

KIRK HAMILTON: You have an excellent website that I want to kind of turn people to. You want to talk about the T. Colin Campbell Foundation and what people can find on your educational site and your goals for that?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yes. Our mission is to provide education in this field, universities don't usually do it. And we really have started with a course that I taught at Cornell University for seven years and we'd just sort of put my lectures online. We've been adding lectures from a number of my colleagues as well and we're doing that in conjunction with the company owned by Cornell University that is responsible for developing online courses. So our foundation together with this company is called eCornell, Incorporated. We've sort of jointly made available a course that people can take. In fact we have so-called three courses, and we are going to be building on that and we just started that at the beginning of January just a year ago. And it's going like gangbusters. It's been a lot of fun. We've had all kinds of people taking that course. It's a course that basically lasts for two weeks so it's fairly easily done so people get online. They're with a group of 30 to 35 other people and they're required to write responses to thought-provoking questions. They can get accredited - professionals can get accreditation for this and those thought-provoking - eCornell said they never saw anything like it. The people who got on there were almost - they did literally burn up the program that they had in the beginning.

KIRK HAMILTON: How do people get to this website, Dr. Campbell ?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Well it has - it goes by my name TColinCampbell.org. www.TColinCampbell.org so when they get there they just can hit the buttons for the course, the lectures.

KIRK HAMILTON: You know I have to close with a story that will make some sense to you and you're a believer. But I gave a talk here at the local radio station, maybe I don't know, four or five, six months ago and in there I challenged everybody to go off milk products for a month, and I do that in all my talks. And I just got stopped literally in the hallway before I'm doing this, before going into the recording studio. And the guy said "Are you the guy that told me to get off milk products?" and I said, "Well, what happened?" And he said, "Well, I got rid of my 8 ounces of milk in my latte, I stopped eating my cheese and I dropped 12 pounds, my gastrointestinal symptoms went away and I'm not snoring anymore." And so it just - I know you know this but it kind of fits the story with you being the dairy person.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yeah. Actually, of all the problems that I think we now face, almost the first one to tackle is the question concerning the effective of dairy on our health. I mean I often say that to people if they've got problems, allergic problems especially, or other kinds of problems you know just try going off dairy and see what happens. As you know that fellow was right, and I get those kind of comments all the time.

KIRK HAMILTON: How did the "Got Milk?" ads ever get - you know the people with the moustaches - how did that ever get out there?

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: I don't know the details of that actually. I don't know the history of it, but I know it did get out there and you know professional athletes started wearing their white moustaches as well as you know. And I did an interesting story that happened on that score. An all-pro football player with the Kansas City Chiefs - he's going to be in the Hall of Fame I'm sure - he holds the all-time records, by the name of Tony Gonzalez. He is a fantastic football player. Well, he wore a white moustache himself when he was in the Midwest and he saw-heard of our book. He was on a plane and wanted to let us know that he tried it and he gained endurance. He felt a lot better. He could - I mean he played the game better and it was near the end of his career and he's still at the top of his league and one thing led to another. He went from a milk moustache, got milk kind of a guy, to now going out there and he has his own book and Tony is now - I've gotten to know him and has been - I've gotten to know a number of world-class athletes who are now trying this and it's pretty amazing.

KIRK HAMILTON: I just did get his book actually. I picked it up and though he did - we have to admit he added a little fish to his diet.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Yeah. Well he was - I mean Tony really didn't really write that book much. It's, you know, who worked with him. I'm sure he is a little more skittish about going too far with making so many statements, you know making it - I mean people just have this reaction who are not in the research field you know and not quite willing to go all that way if you will. And I can understand it. I mean they want to pull back a little bit and otherwise you're considered to be a bit of a whacko or too extreme. And so - but Tony he's staying with it. He's doing really doing well. He's playing for the Atlanta Falcons right now.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well Dr. Campbell. We've gotta wrap this. I ran over a little bit because I could go on talking to you forever because you're such a wealth of knowledge. But thank you for taking the time to come out and talk about your book "The China Study" and all these basic principles on plant-based diets. I greatly appreciate it.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Well thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

KIRK HAMILTON: And in closing I want to thank you Dr. Campbell for your great work and dedication. And I want to thank you the audience for listening today on this edition of Staying Healthy Today Radio. And remember, until next time, Stay and Be Well.

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