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Once I stepped outside the prevailing nutritional paradigm, I discovered something exhilarating: you can learn a lot about the inside of a paradigm from the outside. Think of a fish swimming in the ocean, blissfully unaware of other environments. Once she is caught in a net, hoisted in the air, and then dropped on the deck of a ship, she has no choice but to confront the inadequacy of her old belief that the entire world was water. Suppose she wriggles free of the net and flops back into the water. How can she describe what she has seen to her fellows? What would be their likely reaction, if they were anything like us? “Poor Dori has gone mad. She’s babbling and making up lies.” What’s happened, of course, is that Dori now sees the ocean for what it is: one environment among many. She realizes that it has boundaries, and understands some of the properties of this element called “water.” Because she has experienced dry air, she now perceives water as wet and cold. She now knows that water has a certain feel, and responds to tail and fin movements in a particular way that isn’t universal. There are other truths out there, and Dori can now place the ocean within that larger context.

My journey “out of the water” has led me to be branded a heretic by many of my colleagues. Unlike Dori, I wasn’t thrown out of the paradigm; I just kept swimming in a direction that led me closer and closer to shore until eventually I reached dry land. My heretical path through the research world has been a result of my curiosity about and dogged pursuit of “outlier observations.” An outlier is a piece of data that doesn’t fit with the rest of the observed results. It’s a weird blip, an anomaly, something out of place—an unusual outcome that, if we’re honest with ourselves about it, can call into question the integrity of our current understanding.

Often, outlier observations are simply mistakes. The scale was broken. Two test tubes were accidentally switched. That sort of thing. Sometimes outlier observations are the result of deliberate fraud, perpetrated by researchers seeking to make a name (or a fortune) for themselves. So science is rightly skeptical of data that seems to contradict prevailing wisdom. After all, we don’t want our understanding of the universe to lurch and sway with every random measurement.

The scientific method, at its best, looks at outliers and says, “Prove it! Show us that wasn’t a fluke, a mistake, or a lie.” In other words, reproduce that result under laboratory conditions. Describe the experiment in enough detail that others can repeat it and see if they get the same outlier result. If an outlier can withstand that kind of scrutiny, it’s supposed to get folded into our knowledge base and change our paradigm.

Unfortunately, scientists are human and don’t always represent the very best of the scientific method. When a finding threatens the validity of their life’s work, they can become irrationally defensive. And when new evidence threatens their funding, they can get downright nasty. You can tell when this happens because they stop arguing about the evidence and start slinging epithets.

My first step onto the path of heresy occurred when I discovered an outlier observation that called into question one of the most deeply held beliefs in nutrition: the notion that animal protein is good for us.

Coming from a dairy farm, I thought my contribution to humanity’s well-being would be to figure out how to get more protein from farm animals. After all, millions of people around the world suffer from malnutrition, and one of the principal nutritional problems was protein deficiency. If we could make milk and meat cheaper and more plentiful, we could alleviate untold suffering. As a popular folk song written in 1947 put it, “If each little kid could have fresh milk each day, if each working man had enough time to play, if each homeless soul had a good place to stay, it could be a wonderful world.” Fresh milk was right up there with a humane work week and ending homelessness! What could be more noble?

The topic was perfect for me. My entire childhood had been about milking cows and sharing the goodness with our customers. My background in veterinary medicine, biochemistry, and nutrition gave me knowledge and insights I could use to manipulate animal feeds to improve the human food supply. And the beef and dairy industries were—and still are—very generous with grant money to further such research. It would have been hard to find anyone less likely than me to throw all that away
when confronted with evidence that animal protein was actually harmful to humans.

What did me in, as I look back, was my insatiable curiosity when it came to outlier observations. I believed that my job was to discover the truth, wherever it led. And my research into protein led me, step by step, to a realization that the entire modern scientific paradigm was badly flawed.

My slippery slope to heresy began with that puzzling, even alarming observation I made in the late 1970s, which you’ll recall from the introduction: the children in the Philippines who ate the most protein were the ones most likely to get liver cancer. That finding was so strange, and so counter to everything I believed and thought I knew, that I immediately searched the scientific literature to see if anyone else had ever seen such a connection between protein and cancer.

Someone had. A group of Indian researchers had conducted a “gold standard” clinical trial, the kind that isolates one variable and performs a controlled experiment on it.
¹
The researchers had fed aflatoxin, a powerful carcinogen, to two groups of rats. One group was fed a 20 percent animal protein (casein) diet. The other group was protein deprived, ingesting only 5 percent of their calories from casein. The results? Every single 20 percent protein rat developed liver cancer or cancer precursor lesions. Not a single 5 percent protein rat did. (You may recall this study from
chapter two’s
discussion of depth of effect.)

Looking back, the wise career move would have been to imbibe several stiff drinks, go to bed, and never think about it again. Tackling such a controversial topic so early in my career was a lot more dangerous than I knew. And despite my growing awareness that the actual practice of science was not all about the selfless discovery of truth, I was still naive enough to think that the world might appreciate (and reward) information that could eradicate the scourge of cancer.

I will say that I proceeded cautiously, and so managed to fly under the radar of potential critics for many years. I set up research labs, first at Virginia Tech, then for many more years at Cornell, to investigate the role of nutrition in preventing or causing cancer. We conducted very
conservative experiments that looked at the biochemistry of proteins, enzymes, and cancerous cells, the sort of beaker-and-test-tube, high-powered microscope science that grant reviewers and journal editors like. Except our group of mad scientists was slowly proving, beyond any doubt, that not just excess dietary protein, but a particular
type
of excess dietary protein, promoted cancer formation and growth. And these results, seen in our experiments with rats, were consistent with human population and case-control studies that showed impressive associations between animal-based protein consumption and cancer rates.

When I say “protein,” what foods do you think of? Probably not spinach and kale, although those plants have about twice as much protein, per calorie, as a lean cut of beef. No, to most of us in the United States, protein means meat, milk, and eggs. Our love affair with protein has been around for a long time. The word
protein
gives us a clue as to how deeply we revere our protein: its Greek root,
proteios
, means “of prime importance.” And the “really good kind” of protein has long been the kind found in animal-based foods. Shortly after protein was discovered by Gerardus Mulder in 1839,
²
a famous chemist, Justus von Liebig, then went on to exclaim that animal-based (“high quality”) protein “was the stuff of life itself!” The high-quality label even made sense from a biochemical perspective—our bodies, themselves made up of animal protein, can metabolize animal protein much more efficiently than they can plant protein.

So imagine our shock when animal protein, but not vegetable protein, was the culprit in turning on cancer in our studies. The most significant carcinogen, the substance that almost invariably led to cancer at 20 percent of the rats’ diet, was casein, or milk protein. Plant proteins, such as those from wheat and soy, had no effect on cancer development, even at high levels.
³

In fact, in 1983, my Cornell University research group showed that we could switch early cancer growth on and off in rats simply by changing the amount of protein they consumed. Equally amazing, when cancer was switched off for a relatively long time by feeding a low-protein diet, it could be turned on again by switching to a high-protein diet.
⁴
The effect was striking. When turned on, cancer growth was vigorous and robust. When turned off, it was totally shut down. Major changes in cancer development, both positive and negative, were triggered by only modest changes in protein intake.

Boy, did we have outlier research on our hands! Part of the significance of our findings was the relatively low animal protein levels needed to trigger cancer. Most carcinogen studies (for example, the ones on food dyes and nitrates in hot dogs and environmental toxins like dioxin) dose the lab animals with hundreds or thousands of times the amount they would ever encounter in nature. The extremely powerful carcinogenic effect we saw was occurring at levels of animal protein that humans routinely consumed, and were encouraged to consume.

At this point I knew we had a provocative finding on our hands. We needed airtight experimental design, rigorous documentation, and as much transparency as we could provide to back up the protein-cancer connection. We approached our continuing research from different perspectives and published our results in the most critical peer-reviewed scientific research journals. We had to do our studies very carefully according to the accepted criteria for research in order to survive and secure the necessary but very competitive funding.

Because we followed those research criteria so rigorously, we were able to get funding despite the incendiary nature of the topic. We received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for twenty-seven years in a row, money that allowed us to learn an incredible amount about the nature of animal protein and its biochemical effects within the body. We learned how protein, once consumed, works within the cell to turn on the cancer process. As with the similar Indian research on rats, our results were lopsidedly convincing. Something quite dramatic and provocative was going on.

During these early days of our research, I was invited to give a lecture at the Fels Institute of the Temple University School of Medicine by Peter Magee, the editor in chief of the leading journal in the field of oncology research,
Cancer Research.
At dinner after my lecture, I told him of a new experiment that we were planning, one that might prove to be quite provocative. I wanted to compare this remarkable protein effect on cancer growth with the well-accepted effect produced by a really potent chemical carcinogen. I told him that I suspected that the animal protein effect would be of far more concern. He was highly skeptical, as the editor of a prestigious journal should be. When a scientific paradigm comes under attack, the burden of proof falls squarely and rightfully at the feet of the attacker.

Part of our current paradigm is that bad stuff in the environment causes cancer, and the more enlightened elements involved in the war on cancer seek to reduce our exposure to that bad stuff.
Not
part of our current paradigm is that the food we eat is a much more powerful determinant of cancer than just about any environmental toxin. And I suggested that a relatively modest change in nutrient consumption might be even more relevant for cancer development than consuming a potent carcinogen. I asked the journal’s editor whether he would consider highlighting our findings on the cover of his prestigious journal if we actually got such results. To his credit, he agreed to consider it despite his well-entrenched skepticism. He “knew,” as did almost all cancer specialists back then, that cancer occurs because of chemical carcinogens and viruses and genes, not because of modest changes in nutrient consumption. But he agreed that if I could prove my heretical statement to his satisfaction, he would accept the findings and publish our research.

When we actually did these new experiments, it supported our previous findings even more clearly than I had expected.
⁵
Animal protein intake determined cancer development far more than the dose of the chemical carcinogen. But my hope for having these exciting results featured on the cover of our association’s journal was dashed. My editor in chief colleague was now retired, and his replacement and the Editorial Review Board were changing policy. They were inclined to dismiss nutritional effects on cancer. Instead, they referred manuscripts on the connection between cancer and nutrition to a new, untested journal,
Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention,
a good way of relegating such nutrition-related research to second-class status. They wanted papers that were more “intellectually stimulating”—ones with aims like figuring out how cancer works in molecular terms, especially if the answer concerned chemicals and genes and viruses. They considered investigating nutritional effects on cancer growth, as we were doing, to be almost akin to nonscience.

At about this same time, when we had even more convincing evidence of this remarkable protein effect, I gave a keynote presentation at the World Congress of Nutrition in Seoul, South Korea. A good-sized audience of researchers was in attendance, and during a question-and-answer period, a former colleague of mine in the audience—and a well-known advocate for consuming more, not less, protein—arose and lamented, “Colin, you’re talking about good food! Don’t take it away from us!” He did not question
the validity of our research results; he was concerned that I was trying to undermine his personal love for animal protein.