Whole (45 page)

Disease advocacy and professional organizations have also created the illusion of impartiality. All they care about, they tell us, is improving human health, either by wiping out their disease of interest or training their professional members in the best ways to deliver care. Because of this ostensible lack of commercial agenda, we trust their guidelines and research evaluations. When AstraZeneca tells us that tamoxifen is a safe and effective treatment for breast cancer, we know that, whether accurate
or not, it is self-interested advertising. But when the ACS makes the same claim, we accept it as truth.

Perhaps the most serious effect of these nonprofits’ collusion with industry is the “halo effect” that extends from these supposed saints to the corporations whose interests they promote. 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.

The upshot of this insidious industry influence over institutions that are supposedly helping us become healthier is a complete abdication on the part of most Americans of responsibility for their own health outcomes. It’s not their fault; the nonprofits have indoctrinated us to believe that we don’t have much influence over our own health—that all we can do is donate, march, run, and wear pink or yellow ribbons to help rid the world of these scourges. The fact that the vast majority of us can virtually eliminate our risk of premature death from cancer, heart disease, stroke, Type 1 diabetes, and dozens of other diseases is actively denied by the very societies who purportedly want to end these diseases. I’m sickened by the billions upon billions of dollars and the millions upon millions of volunteer hours that are redirected away from nutrition and toward reductionist, patentable, profit-generating distractions. And the most heinous misfortune of all is that the well-meaning people supporting these three societies honestly believe that they are doing socially conscious and constructive work to honor friends and family members who lost their lives to these diseases.

Here’s an example that crossed my desk just as we were finalizing the manuscript: an October 3, 2012 blog post on the ACS website by Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for the ACS national office, with the title, “During Breast Cancer Awareness Month We Must Not Only Celebrate Our Success but Also Understand Our Limitations.”
²⁰
The post, well-written and heartfelt, expresses sensitivity toward women whom the medical establishment could not help even while celebrating the contributions made by the latest screening techniques. Lichtenfeld writes:

I understand the anger of women with advanced breast cancer who say, “What about me?” Among these women are those who did everything “right” when it came to early detection and treatment [....] These are women who pray for a breakthrough, who pray for a cure and wonder whether those who have not been diagnosed with breast cancer or who don’t have advanced disease really understand.

These are moving, consoling, compassionate words. And yet they are utterly disempowering. Women with breast cancer, he advises, pray for a breakthrough. Pray for a cure. For your salvation lies in the hands of those who compound new drugs, who invent new radiation machines, who pioneer new surgical techniques, and who find new ways to manipulate genes. Even as he expresses humility and remorse on behalf of the medical establishment for having “oversold [their] magic,” for having “overpromised and sometimes underdelivered,” he’s still selling reductionist treatment as these women’s only hope. Not a word about prevention. About empowerment. About the fact that simple changes in diet may turn off cancer progression.

It’s the same message everywhere in our health-care system, and this disempowerment—whether well-intentioned, as I suspect is the case for Dr. Lichtenfeld, or cynically in pursuit of profit—is the most obscene part of the whole story.

While the world is rife with unethical behavior, it would be a mistake to blame the problems I have discussed up to this point solely on individual morality. If we limit our sight to individual players, we’ll never see the big picture. The issue is a systemic one, maintained by interconnected actors, all acting in their self-interest to further their goals. The trouble is not, or not always, the actors themselves, or their intrinsic motivations. Instead, it’s the overarching goal of the entire system that’s at fault: corporate profit above public health.

I’ve picked on the ACS, MS Society, AND, and ASN not because they’re any worse than the hundreds of other disease advocacy societies and professional associations, but because they’re the ones I’m most
familiar with. They aren’t “bad apples” in an otherwise good barrel; rather, the barrel itself, the system in which money talks and reductionism is the official language, is the source of the ethical rot. It rewards societies and associations that lend their moral might and PR prowess to expensive and ineffective reductionist approaches while ignoring or impugning the true preventive power of nutrition.

If a little bird were to take a grain of sand in its beak from the seashore and somehow manage to fly it to the furthest quasar in the universe, and if it returned and repeated the process until all the sand of the oceans both from the beaches and the bottoms were gone, eternity would be just beginning.

—
ANONYMOUS, WRITTEN ON THE WALL OF THE MATE FACTOR CAFE, ITHACA COMMONS, NY

I
f this book does nothing else, I hope that it convinces you that we need to change the way we think about health. We must recognize nutrition as a cornerstone of our health-care system, not a footnote. We must also recognize the limitations of our reductionist paradigm and learn to accept the validity of evidence beyond what that paradigm allows us to perceive. If we are truly to understand the meaning of nutrition, its effect on the body, and its potential to transform our collective health, we must stop seeing reductionism as the only method by which to achieve progress and
start seeing it as a tool, the results of which can only be properly evaluated within a wholistic framework. And we must be willing to embrace wholism beyond the realm of nutrition. The body is a complex system; bodies gathered together in societies are even more complex; and human life, interwoven with all of nature on this planet, is complex beyond our imagining. We cannot afford to ignore this complexity any longer.

I realize that what I’m proposing here is a tectonic shift in the way we think about nutrition, medicine, and health. The process may not be easy. But it is possible. I know, because this shift is one I experienced myself over the course of my career.

My doctoral dissertation, written over fifty years ago, was on the greater biological value of animal-based protein. I believed then, as firmly as any meat-loving cattle baron, that there was no better, more beneficial food than the protein we received from meat and milk. But as you have seen here and in
The China Study,
my position today is very different. I am now convinced that there is no healthier way to eat than a whole food, plant-based diet, without added fat, salt, or refined carbohydrates.

For me, the source of that shift was evidence—the empirical, peer-reviewed evidence produced over many years by my own research group. It was bolstered in later years by the evidence produced by my colleagues in clinical medicine, who have been independently and convincingly documenting the WFPB diet’s ability to reverse serious diseases in ways unmatched by pills and procedures.

But this shift in thinking required more than just evidence. It also required a shift in my understanding of the body, and therefore in the way I understood evidence related to the body’s functions. And this shift is one that I hope this book will help you achieve, as well.

Early on in my career, even before I began the work on AF and MFO we’ve talked about at some length here, I had a conversation with a nutrition professor of mine at Cornell about a set of research studies that looked at the role played by four nutrients in two diseases, encephalomalacia (softening of brain tissue) in chicks and muscular dystrophy (progressive muscle weakness) in calves. It turned out that the activity of any one of these four nutrients could substantially change the activities of the other three, leading to changes in the body’s response to the diseases.

When I asked my professor how common interactions like these were for other nutrients, he replied that although they were quite common,
they did not get much attention in experimental research; they were too difficult to study and almost impossible to interpret adequately. Although nutrients act in complex ways in nature, we still had to think about their activities in a simple, linear way to produce acceptable scientific evidence. In other words, even though we could see the applicability of the wholistic framework, we still had to pursue our research as if reductionism were the whole truth.

That we ignored this complexity was something that troubled me greatly, and in a way it drove the direction I chose in my research into AF and MFO. I might not have begun this research had I not been willing to question what appeared to be an unquestionable, reductionist fact: AF causes liver cancer. If I had not been so interested in the idea of complexity, I might not have looked for factors other than AF that could affect the development of liver cancer. I might not have discovered that, in fact, AF was not even the most important factor affecting liver cancer development. And I would not have gained the much deeper understanding and appreciation of our biological complexity that I now possess and seek to share with you.

This understanding of biological complexity was crucial to changing the way I viewed the findings of reductionist studies. It made me realize how important it was to view such findings not as truths that are complete in and of themselves, but as pieces of a larger, more meaningful puzzle.

Any individual finding—say, that MFO’s catalysis of AF leads to liver cancer, or that beta-carotene protects against lung cancer—does not tell the whole story. Therefore, choosing a course of action based on that individual finding, without looking at the larger wholistic framework— avoiding AF to avoid liver cancer, or taking beta-carotene supplements to prevent lung cancer—has the potential to be either significantly less effective than other ways of addressing the same problem, or even outright dangerous.

The findings in our reductionist experiments with MFO and animal protein are important, but not for their specific results (e.g., animal protein is a critical causal factor in liver cancer) so much as for the biological principles they suggest. These principles have helped me understand how cancer works and how nutrition, taken as a whole system, affects the development of cancer and possibly other diseases as well. The fundamental biological properties these MFO experiments revealed suggested
a need to investigate the impact of animal protein in real people, in the real world, in all its complexity.

It was with this mindset that we designed the project in rural China that came to be known as the China Study. We wanted to investigate not single chemical mechanisms, as I had been doing for so many years in the research lab, but patterns of causes and effects that might help explain complex diet-disease relationships. We were looking for the larger context that might confirm or challenge findings like mine with MFO. We found it, and the shift in my view of nutrition and health was complete.

Looking back, it’s easy to wonder why this shift was so difficult and took me so long. But I had to struggle against the same beliefs and assumptions that now plague my efforts to convince my colleagues, as well as the public, of what I have learned.

The first is our reverence for animal protein. Our society believes so passionately in the health value of milk and meat that it is hard for us to conceive that we might be wrong—that these foods might, in fact, be very
un
healthy. It is too far outside of what we have been taught for decades for us to believe it easily, no matter how true it may be.