T. Colin Campbell > Quotes

“Americans love to hear good things about their bad habits.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health

“Everything in food works together to create health or disease. The more we think that a single chemical characterizes a whole food, the more we stray into idiocy.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health

“I have heard one doctor call high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets “make-yourself-sick” diets, and I think that’s an appropriate moniker. You can also lose weight by undergoing chemotherapy or starting a heroin addiction, but I wouldn’t recommend those, either.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health

“How did we forget these lessons from the past? How did we go from knowing that the best athletes in the ancient Greek Olympics must consume a plant-based diet to fearing that vegetarians don’t get enough protein? How did we get to a place where the healers of our society, our doctors, know little, if anything, about nutrition; where our medical institutions denigrate the subject; where using prescription drugs and going to hospitals is the third leading cause of death? How did we get to a place where advocating a plant-based diet can jeopardize a professional career, where scientists spend more time mastering nature than respecting it? How did we get to a place where the companies that profit from our sickness are the ones telling us how to be healthy; where the companies that profit from our food choices are the ones telling us what to eat; where the public’s hard-earned money is being spent by the government to boost the drug industry’s profits; and where there is more distrust than trust of our government’s policies on foods, drugs and health? How did we get to a place where Americans are so confused about what is healthy that they no longer care?”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

“Furthermore, a pattern was beginning to emerge: nutrients from animal-based foods increased tumor development while nutrients from plant-based foods decreased tumor development.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

“Good health is about being able to fully enjoy the time we do have. It is about being as functional as possible throughout our entire lives and avoiding crippling, painful and lengthy battles with disease. There are many better ways to die, and to live.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

“You should not assume that your doctor has any more knowledge about food and its relation to health than your neighbors and coworkers.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health

“It’s never too late to start eating well. A good diet can reverse many of those conditions as well. In short: change the way you eat and you can transform your health for the better.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Every kilogram of beef requires 100,000 liters of water to produce. By comparison, a kilogram of wheat requires just 900 liters, and a kilogram of potatoes just 500 liters.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“When absurdities get repeated often enough, they start sounding like truth.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The Low-Carb Fraud

“He who does not know food, how can he understand the diseases of man?” —Hippocrates, the father of medicine (460-357 B.C.)”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

“So, what is my prescription for good health? In short, it is about the multiple health benefits of consuming plant-based foods, and the largely unappreciated health dangers of consuming animal-based foods, including all types of meat, dairy and eggs.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

“So removing vitamin E from its context within plant foods is like sending a general into battle without any troops.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Western culture is hell-bent on ignoring, disbelieving, and, in some cases, actively twisting the truth about what we should be eating—so much so that it can be hard for us to believe that we’ve been lied to all these years.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“If you flip a coin three times and it lands on heads each time, it’s probably chance. If you flip it a hundred times and it lands on heads each time, you can be pretty sure the coin has heads on both sides. That’s the concept behind statistical significance—it’s the odds that the correlation (or other finding) is real, that it isn’t just random chance.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

“What you eat every day is a far more powerful determinant of your health than your DNA or most of the nasty chemicals lurking in your environment.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“dairy intake is “one of the most consistent dietary predictors for prostate cancer in the published literature,” and those who consume the most dairy have double to quadruple the risk.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

“The distinction between government, industry, science and medicine have become blurred.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health

“Much of my early career was spent working with two of the most toxic chemicals ever discovered, dioxin and aflatoxin. I initially worked at MIT, where I was assigned a chicken feed puzzle. Millions of chicks a year were dying from an unknown toxic chemical in their feed, and I had the responsibility of isolating and determining the structure of this chemical. After two and a half years, I helped discover dioxin, arguably the most toxic chemical ever found. This chemical has since received widespread attention, especially because it was part of the herbicide 2,4,5-T, or Agent Orange, then being used to defoliate forests in the Vietnam War.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health

“What made this project especially remarkable is that, among the many associations that are relevant to diet and disease, so many pointed to the same finding: people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. Even relatively small intakes of animal-based food were associated with adverse effects. People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored. From the initial experimental animal studies on animal protein effects to this massive human study on dietary patterns, the findings proved to be consistent. The health implications of consuming either animal or plant-based nutrients were remarkably different.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

“Plant- and animal-based foods are hugely different in terms of their nutrient contents, and watching what foods you consume is far more important than obsessing over calorie-counting without respect to where those calories come from.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The Low-Carb Fraud

“Nutrition is not a mathematical equation in which two plus two is four. The food we put in our mouths doesn’t control our nutrition—not entirely. What our bodies do with that food does.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Side effects of those very same prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer. That’s right! Prescription drugs kill more people than traffic accidents. According to Dr. Barbara Starfield, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2000, “adverse effects of medications” (from drugs that were correctly prescribed and taken) kill 106,000 people per year.5 And that doesn’t include accidental overdoses.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“The health care establishment is structured to profit from chemical and surgical intervention. Diet still takes the back seat to drugs and surgery. One criticism that is constantly leveled at the dietary argument is that patients will not make such fundamental changes. One doctor charges that Dr. Esselstyn’s patients change their eating habits simply because of Esselstyn’s “zealous belief.”47 This criticism is not only wrong and insulting to patients; it is also self-fulfilling. If doctors do not believe that patients will change their diets, they will neglect to talk about diet, or will do it in an off-handed, disparaging way.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn but to unlearn. —GLORIA STEINEM”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“At this point, any scientist, doctor, journalist, or policy maker who denies or minimizes the importance of a whole food, plant-based diet for individual and societal well-being simply isn’t looking clearly at the facts. There’s just too much good evidence to ignore anymore.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“With industry's sales and marketing machines cloaked in mantles of charitable virtue, no wonder most Americans don't realize that the junk that passes for food is in fact the biggest contributor to our health crisis, and the junk that passes for medicine keeps us just well enough to continue to spend on both the food and the medicine.”
― T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

“Protein during promotion trumps the carcinogen, regardless of initial exposure.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

“physicians, Drs. Bill Castelli, Bill Roberts and Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., that in their long careers they had never seen a heart disease fatality among their patients who had blood cholesterol levels below 150 mg/dL. Dr. Castelli was the long-time director of the famous Framingham Heart Study of NIH; Dr. Esselstyn was a renowned surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who did a remarkable study reversing heart disease (chapter five); Dr. Roberts has long been editor of the prestigious medical journal Cardiology. BLOOD CHOLESTEROL AND DIET”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health

“It is a wonderful harmony. The plants make the antioxidant shields, and at the same time make them look incredibly appealing with beautiful, appetizing colors. Then we animals, in turn, are attracted to the plants and eat them and borrow their antioxidant shields for our own health. Whether you believe in God, evolution or just coincidence, you must admit that this is a beautiful, almost spiritual, example of nature’s wisdom.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health