330 THE CHINA STUDYfew of them became healthy. Their chronic diseases didn't go away, and
John qUickly realized that he had severe limitations as a doctor. He also
started to learn something else from his patients: the first and second
generation Americans from Asia, the ones who ate more traditional,
Asian staple diets of rice and vegetables, were trim, fit and not afflicted
with the chronic diseases that plagued John's other patients. The third
and fourth generation Asian Americans, however, had fully adopted
America's eating habits and suffered from obesity, diabetes and the
whole host of other chronic diseases. It was from these people thatJohn
began to notice how important diet was for health.
Because John wasn't healing people, and the pills and procedures
weren't working, he decided he needed more education and entered a
graduate medical program (residency) at the Queens Medical Center in
Honolulu. It was there that he began to understand the boundaries that
the medical establishment had set and the way that medical education
molds the way doctors are supposed to think.
John went into the program hoping to find out how to perfect the
pills and procedures so that he could become a better doctor. But
after observing experienced doctors treating their patients with pills
and procedures, he realized that these authoritative doctors didn't do
any better than he did. Their patients didn't just stay Sick-they got
worse. John realized something was wrong with the system, not him,
so he began to read the scientific literature. Like Dr. Esselstyn, once
he started reading the literature, John became convinced that a whole
foods, plant-based diet had the potential not only to prevent these dis-
eases that were plaguing patients, but also the potential to treat them.
This idea, he was to find out, was not received kindly by his teachers
and colleagues.
In this environment, diet was considered quackery. John would ask,
"Doesn't diet have something to do with heart disease?" and his col-
leagues would tell him that the science was controversial. John contin-
ued to read the scientific research and to talk to his colleagues and only
became even more baffled. "When I looked at the literature, I couldn't
find the controversy. It was absolutely clear what the literature said."
Through those years,John came to understand why so many physicians
claimed diet was controversial: "The scientist is sitting down at the
breakfast table and in the one hand he has a paper that says that cho-
lesterol will rot your arteries and kill you, and in the other hand he has
a fork shoveling bacon and eggs into his mouth, and he says, There's