The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

Author: T. Colin Campbell, PhD and Thomas M. Campbell II

ISBN: 1932100660, 978-1932100662 Publisher: Benbella Books (2004)

What will it take for veggie stir-fry on rice to replace a beef burger on a bun as the all-American meal? A switch to a more plant-based diet has been standard dietary advice for years and the new Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report is no exception. In The China Study, however, the Campbells go much further, arguing that “a good diet is the most powerful weapon we have against disease and sickness” and that the healthiest diet is an entirely plant-based whole-food diet (no meat, dairy or eggs and little, if any, fish). A simple switch to such a diet, claim the Campbells, will dramatically decrease your risk of getting the diseases common in Western societies, including auto-immune diseases, cancer, heart disease and diabetes. As large-scale genetic screens to identify genes for these same diseases continue to fail, and as this failure looks to be permanent (see The Great DNA Data Deficit: Are Genes for Disease a Mirage?), this advice appears more and more prescient.

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USDA Top Officials Versus USDA Data

Daryll E. Ray, the Blasingame Chair of Excellence in Agricultural Policy, Institute of Agriculture, University of Tennessee. He is the Director of UT’s Agricultural Policy Analysis Center (APAC).

The recent Rome food summit was dominated by some rather intemperate exchanges over whether biofuels were a significant cause of higher food prices. Shortly before the summit, on May 19, USDA held a reporter briefing which argued, in contradiction to our regular column (www.agpolicy.org), that Chinese and Indian food imports were a significant factor in these price hikes. In the column we said, “China has increased its consumption of meats [beef, pork, broilers] at a rate well above the rate of population increase.” But we also noted, “China produces virtually all of the meat that is domestically consumed, and then some. In fact China was a net meat exporter for the last 7 years and 14 of the last 18 years.”

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