Joel Fuhrman - Eat To Live

Eat to Live 69

The China Project

Fortunately, evidence from a massive series of scientific investiga-

tions has shed some light on the confusion. The China-Cornell-Oxford

Project (also known as the China Project) is the most comprehensive

study on the connection between diet and disease in medical history.

The New York Times called this investigation the "Grand Prix of all epi-

demiological studies" and "the most comprehensive large study ever

undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of develop-

ing disease."^1

Spearheaded by T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., of Cornell University,

this study has made discoveries that have turned the nutritional

community upside down. To the surprise of many, the China Project

has revealed many so-called nutritional facts as demonstrably false.

For example, the answer to all the Nutrition Quiz questions above is

false.

China was an ideal testing ground for this comprehensive project

because the people in one area of China eat a certain diet and the

people just a few hundred miles away may eat a completely different

diet. Unlike in the West, where we all eat very similarly, rural China

is a "living laboratory" for studying the complex relationship be-

tween diet and disease.^2

The China Project was valid because it studied populations with

a full range of dietary possibilities: from a completely plant-food diet to

diets that included a significant amount of animal foods. Adding

small quantities of a variable is how scientists can best detect the risk

or value of a dietary practice. It's the same principle as comparing

nonsmokers with those who smoke half a pack a day, to best observe

the dangers of smoking. Comparing a fifty-cigarette per day habit

with a sixty-cigarette per day habit may not reveal much more addi-

tional damage from those last ten cigarettes.

In China, people live their entire lives in the towns they were

born in and rarely migrate, so the dietary effects that researchers

looked at were present for the subjects' entire life. Furthermore, as a

result of significant regional differences in the way people eat, there

were dramatic differences in the prevalence of disease from region to

region. Cardiovascular disease rates varied twentyfold from one place

to another, and certain cancer rates varied by several hundredfold. In

America, there is little difference in the way we eat; therefore, we do