..man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d…

From Measure for Measure by Wm Shakespeare

The web has been alive with commentary the past few weeks since Denise Minger lobbed her first cannonball of a critique across the bow of The China Study, the vessel T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. rode to fame and bestsellerdom.  Seems like everyone is now jumping into the fray and gunning for poor Dr. Campbell, who early on in the fracas made a few halfhearted attempts to fight back but has now fled the scene.  I’ve been laying low watching it all play out, and so now figured it’s about time I add my two cents worth to the debate. But first a little history.

I met Dr. Campbell about ten years ago (five or so years before the publication of the popular book The China Study) when we both spoke at the same conference.  He was a nice enough man who spoke about the work he and his team had done in China gathering the data published in the massive 894 page monograph Diet, Life-style and Mortality in China (pictured above left).  As Dr. Campbell presented his data ‘demonstrating’ the superiority of a plant-based diet and demonizing protein of animal origin, I didn’t think much about it because the data was all in the form of observational studies, which, as all readers of this blog should know by now, despite often showing correlation don’t prove causation.  My lecture, which followed Dr. Campbell’s, was, as you might imagine, a lecture of a different sort.  Then we both sat on a panel after our talks and fielded questions.  And were both cordial to one another.

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You think carbohydrates aren’t addictive?  You think it’s easy to give them up?  You don’t think it possible that people might prefer carbs to life?

Think again.

A story appeared in the online version of Time Magazine last year that I read when it came out, put aside to blog about later, then got sidetracked.  A reader sent me a link to it a few days ago, which brought it back to the front of my mind.

The article discusses a study being done in Germany using a carb-restricted diet to fight cancer.  In pre-WWII days, a German scientist, Otto Warburg, received a Nobel Prize for his work in sussing out the fact that cancer cells don’t generate energy the same way that normal cells do.  Cancer cells get their energy, not like normal cells, from the mitochondrial oxidation of fat, but from glycolysis, the breakdown of glucose withing the cytoplasm (the liquid part of the cell).  This different metabolism of cancer cells that sets them apart from normal cells is called the Warburg effect.  Warburg thought until his dying day that this difference is what causes cancer, and although it is true that people with elevated levels of insulin and glucose do develop more cancers, most scientists in the field don’t believe that the Warburg effect is the driving force behind the development of cancer.

But it stands to reason that it can be used to treat cancer that is already growing.  Since cancers can’t really get nourishment from anything but glucose, it stands to reason that cutting off this supply would, at the very least, slow down tumor growth, especially in aggressive, fast-growing cancers requiring a lot of glucose to fuel their rapid growth.

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Here we go again. No doubt you’ve seen on T V or read in the news that meat causes colon cancer. At least that’s the take home message you got if you saw any of these ‘news’ reports or read any of the articles about a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) this past week. Let’s take a look at what is really going on.

The study was pretty simple. Researchers looked at the diets of over 1000 subjects who had stage III colon cancer and who were enrolled in a chemotherapy trial. These subjects filled out food frequency questionnaires (FFQ) during their chemotherapy then again six months after. Researchers then stratified the data from the FFQs into what they called a Western dietary pattern and a prudent dietary pattern. After a little over 5 years of follow up about a quarter of these subjects had died from their colon cancer. Significantly more of the patients following the Western dietary pattern died than did those who followed the prudent dietary pattern. Therefore, say these researchers, those who have advanced colon cancer should avoid a Western dietary pattern in favor of a prudent dietary pattern in order to reduce their chances of dying from their disease. And the implication is that all of us should follow the prudent diet rather than a Western diet to maybe avoid getting colon cancer at all. And, as you shall see, what these researchers really want us to avoid is red meat.

Nice and tidy. Problem is that it’s all BS. And it’s the kind of BS that infuriates me because of the dishonesty involved. Let me show you what I mean.

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Ten or twelve years ago we wrote in Protein Power about the data contained in the vast amount of ancient Egyptian mummies. We pointed out that several thousand years ago when the future mummies roamed the earth their diet was a nutritionist’s nirvana. At least a nirvana for all the so-called nutritional experts of today who are recommending a diet filled with whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, and little meat, especially red meat. Follow such a diet, we’re told, and we will enjoy abundant health.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way for the Egyptians. They followed such a diet simply because that’s all there was. There was no sugar – it wouldn’t be produced for another thousand or more years. The only sweet was honey, which was consumed in limited amounts. The primary staple was a coarse bread made of stone-ground, whole wheat. Animals were used as beasts of burden and were valued much more for the work they could do than for the meat they could provide. The banks of the Nile provided fertile soil for growing all kinds of fruits and vegetables, all of which were a part the low-fat, high-carbohydrate Egyptian diet. And there were no artificial sweeteners, artificial coloring, artificial flavors, preservatives, or any of the other substances that are part of all the manufactured foods we eat today.

Were the nutritionists of today right about their ideas of the ideal diet, the ancient Egyptians should have had abundant health. But they didn’t. In fact, they suffered pretty miserable health. Many had heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity – all the same disorders that we experience today in the ‘civilized’ Western world. Diseases that Paleolithic man, our really ancient ancestors, appeared to escape.

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Newspapers are always on the lookout for man-bites-dog kind of stories to sell papers. The more off beat the story, the more it flies in the face of what seems normal, the more newsworthy it is, at least in the eyes of the inky wretches who publish the dailies. It shows just how deeply ingrained in the minds of so many is the notion that dietary fat is bad for us when a series of studies showing that cutting fat from the diet doesn’t do squat makes the front page headline of the New York Times, the country’s most influential paper. And I don’t mean just the front page, but the actual top-of-the-page, main headline. The idea that fat might not be harmful is apparently a man-bites-dog story of the highest order.

Here’s the headline, right up top.

Low Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Report Says

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