Here is the full transcript of T. Colin Campbel’s talk titled “Resolving the Health Care Crisis” at TEDxEast 2012 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction to Health Crisis
I’m here to talk about health. Your health, my health, the health of your families and friends. Especially our children; and I’m actually here to talk about the health in fact of our country. But talking about health, thinking about how we can get health, we are in a system today that is not exactly to our liking.
I think many of you would probably agree that we have a health care crisis. Eighteen percent of our gross domestic product is accounted for by the money we spend for taking care of our health. In this country the United States has the highest per capita health care costs in the world. We’re twice as high as the next highest country.
But in spite of all this money that is being spent, the quality of our healthcare, we’ve got to really face it, the quality of health care in this country, according to the statistics and health indicators, place us near last or last among similarly economically developed countries. On top of that we got another problem too, we’ve got more than 50 million people who don’t have health insurance and that’s up 40% just the last decade.
This is a fantastic business model, I think you would agree, it really has been, a lot of people are making a lot of money. But as far as health it’s not a good health model. In terms of looking to the future of what’s likely to come, because of this problem we presently have, if the tripling of childhood obesity during the last decade or the last 30 years is any indication, we’re not going in the right direction.
Health Concerns for Children and Adults
Especially when we think about too, the invasion of our children by type 2 diabetes; it used to be called adult-onset diabetes. We might have to put the children thing in it too. Or the eighty-three percent increase in a harsh drug like Ritalin in our children during the last four years. Something is not quite right.
Talking about prescription drugs by the way, at the present time nine out of ten people 60 years of age and older are consuming at least one or more prescription drugs on a regular basis. I’m not one of them by the way and not more than 60, neither is my wife taking drugs. Prescription drugs cost on the other hand have doubled in the last decade and it’s after we take into consideration adjustment for inflation.
And on this particular point as much as we are using prescription drugs these days, it’s sort of the centerpiece of our health care system, it turns out it’s a number three cause of death. Some would say number four, depending on how you divide up the first three, but in any case you don’t see this listed in the causes of death in mostly the popular reports. Something’s missing, something is missing from our system and that’s really what I want to talk to you about.
The Importance of Nutrition
I’d like to suggest it’s nutrition, we don’t understand it, it’s confusing, and on this question concerning nutrition let me just do a little defining here if I may. Nutrition if we think logically is actually using food to maintain health and prevent disease and the typical diet that we now, in my view, believe is the healthiest possible diet is a so called 80-10-10 diet. Namely it’s the nutrient composition having to do with 80 parts carbohydrate, 10 parts protein, 10 parts fat on the basis of an energy basis.
And that translates into a practical message what I’m talking about now it’s a whole food plant-based diet with little or no of the three devils. Oil and fat being one, sugar and salt. That’s the diet that really does create optimal health.
And on that question concerning nutrient composition, by the way, nutrient composition is the index, is the characteristic of food the best defines its effect on us in terms of health. And in terms of this nutrient composition question, antioxidants, complex carbohydrates and vitamins, those are the key elements that really give rise to health.
They’re all found in plants, that’s what plants really are. Plants make these things, animal foods don’t make these things. We might see a little antioxidants in animal based foods from time to time, but that has to do with the animals having eaten that kind of thing before they were slaughtered.
Plant-Based vs. Animal-Based Foods
Fat and protein are essential elements, absolutely essential elements, but it turns out that plants have about nine to eleven percent or so, on average, animal-based foods have quite a bit more. So there’s this distinctive difference between animal and plant-based foods. There’s another class of food that has crept into our society, too, in more recent decades that has to do with processed foods.
Processed foods – their nutrient composition is all over the map, it depends on what, how one combines pieces of the other groups of foods. Processed foods also are not good because they tend to be very high in salt, sugar and fat, the three devils. So I come back to my main point, this whole plant-based foods that really was doing the job for us.
Now when people think about whole plant-based foods, we’ve known for a good long time, our grandmothers told us, the mothers told us that, it prevents future disease, but it’s not only about using this diet to prevent future disease and here is the kicker, here’s the thing that really matters that the public tend not to know. It’s also about using this same kind of diet to actually treat existing disease and I think that’s a really important concept, because it goes right to the core of what our healthcare and medical care system is all about.
Diseases Affected by Plant-Based Diet
Here’s a list of diseases, for example, that one can find in a legitimate scientific literature, in a peer-reviewed literature, here are diseases that have been documented to be affected by a whole food plant-based diet.
That is to say this kind of diet prevents, suspends, that means stops the further progression, or cures all of these diseases. We can now cure heart disease, in fairly late stages.
We can cure type 2 diabetes in a very short period of time. I have spent more than 50 years in this field as an experimental researcher, if you will, in the area of nutrition and want to share with you a little bit about where I came from, and why I think the way I do. Now it’s controversial for some, but nonetheless I really believe in the data that we have obtained.
The Holistic Approach to Nutrition
Initially I was involved in investigating nutrients on a one-by-one basis and still today that’s the way research tends to work, looking at one thing at a time, just one thing at a time. But over the years I finally came for the view and this is really where the punch line is, this is where the power of nutrition really exists: nutrition should be recognized as a holistic effect of countless nutrients, involving countless diseases, working through countless mechanisms.
Now I want to share with you, just some, as I look back and sort of ask myself how did I sort of get to this place, because I didn’t start here in my career some 50 years ago and want to share with you just a few observations that are taken from my own research. Quite a number of years ago now 30, 35 years ago, that kind of set the stage in a way for developing some principles that apply to what nutrition and health really is all about.
Laboratory Animal Model
This model I’m going to be telling you about in the next three or four slides here involves a laboratory animal model, laboratory rats in this particular case, that had been genetically programmed to get cancer and so let’s see what do we see. I’m interested in this particular case here to see what effect nutrition might have on that model, where the genes are there to create the disease.
When we feed, in this particular case, an animal that has the ideal levels of protein, that being about twenty percent of total protein, when we feed a diet that is 20 percent dietary protein, these cancers are growing well in the first six weeks in those animals. In contrast when you feed a diet of 5 percent dietary protein, they don’t, even though that they’ve been genetically programmed to get the disease.
There’s this next little bit of this observation really struck me as being quite significant, namely when we watch these sort of cancers growing in the first stage and switch the diet back and forth between 20 percent protein and 5 percent protein, you can see it there. We could got to a point we could turn on and turn off cancer development, it was a very exciting concept, because it basically says, in this case it’s protein, but basically in a more general sense, it shows that nutrition controls cancer development.
The Role of Animal Protein in Cancer Development
Very exciting concept instead of thinking about genes causing cancer or carcinogens causing cancer or viruses causing cancer. What I’m talking about here in this particular case, nutrients, nutrition basically controlling cancer development. Now it turns out that the protein that we were using, up until a certain point in time, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it, because it was a protein that was available for us, was casein.
Casein is the main protein in cow’s milk! Why is that important? Well soy and wheat protein for example does not increase cancer development like does casein. Here’s a couple of plant proteins not doing it, one animal protein doing it, a major difference between the two.
So it’s suggested at that particular point in time, the hypothesis, that maybe animal protein would promote cancer and plant protein would prevent cancer and that came down as a fairly general statement that it was to carry through much of my research, it turned out that’s the bifurcation that really led to these distinctive differences between the two different kinds of foods. Now, as I say, this was a little troubling for me personally at the time, because actually I was raised on a dairy farm.
Personal Experience with Dairy
There’s me up front maybe I think it was about nine and a half years ago or so. And another just sort of sidebar story here before I go on, I talked about casein, dairy and so forth, so we have a lot of evidence now that dairy is a troublesome food, a very troublesome food, not just because of what we found with respect to its ability to increase cancer. But you know we, my family, we don’t use dairy anymore, haven’t in some time, and I suggest if we want to do it right, you know, get with the program.
Protein Concentration and Cancer Development
So let’s get back then to the model that I was using, just to tell you about some of the principles that in fact affected me and my thinking, in a larger context as we went forward. Namely in this particular case we were looking at just not that 5 percent, 20 percent kind of thing, but we were looking at a range of protein concentrations in the food to see what happens. And you can see here that in the lower levels of protein, dietary protein, from 4 to 10 percent in this particular case, it’s not the exact amounts I’m really concerned about here, it’s the inflection that I want to talk about.
But with up to about 10 percent dietary protein, what you can see is that protein is doing its good thing, it’s not creating cancer, it’s not promoting cancer. Protein is an essential nutrient that we need it, everything’s working fine. So what I’m talking about here is when we consume it in excess to the amount we need and in fact, most of us humans actually live in that red zone, where we’re consuming an excess of what we need.
So that 10 percent is enough, really is enough and that actually have provided by a diet made up of whole plant-based foods. If we’re consuming a diet of whole plant-based foods, we’re actually getting the ideal levels of protein, we don’t need more. But unfortunately 95 percent of us, according to the national statistics, are consuming an excess of what we need and we do that by actually consuming animal based foods.
The Impact of Nutrition on Genetic Expression
Now I just want to take you to this notable idea here coming from these experiments that I found very interesting. Just a little schematic, so just treat as a schematic. I’ve just sort of given you two clusters of cells, one cluster of the red cells, those are the ones, let’s argue, let’s propose they’re the genetically programmed cells that give rise to cancer, the seed has been planted.
The immunogenic event has occurred. OK there so there’s those are the cells that have programmed to get cancer. The blue cells are normal cells. So on the left we’ve got a high dose, let’s say a high dose of genetically prone cancer cells.
On the right we’ve got far less of those, just a little bit. Now if all else is considered equal, nothing else has changed beyond that point, obviously the one with the highest dose of the genetically programmed cancers we’re going to get more cancer, fair enough. The ones on the right get less cancer.
So in that particular case it’s legitimate to say that genes cause cancer. All diseases really start with genes at some fundamental level. So in this case we can say genes cause cancer, sort of makes sense.
Nutrition Trumps Genes
However look what happens when we get to that stage and now, you know our genes are constant over a lifetime, more or less, but we go beyond the genes if we look in this particular model here, it turns out that if you take the cells in left where there is a very high degree of genetic concentration of the cells, feed them the low protein diets you get less cancer, not more. In other words you completely just switch it, so what really matters here is not the genes, what’s mattering in this particular case is the expression of those genes, that in turn is controlled by nutrition and that is really one of the most fundamental properties of nutrition across the board.
Not just in this particular model, but in this particular model was actually a key. It was a key, it was a lead in, in fact to a larger consideration. So nutrition controls cancer genes, it controls genes across the board, really quite interesting for all kinds of diseases and so we could say nutrition trumps genes.
That’s my view and we have lots of evidence now to really make that point. It’s something we can do about, rather than something we can’t do anything about. And it turns out there’s a list of these same positions again that all basically start with genes controlled by nutrition.
Questioning Genetic Research Funding
So I have a question in the current conversation we’re having now, if nutrition controls genes then why are we spending so much money for genetic research? In my estimation, a rough approximation, we’re spending at least a hundred times the amount of funding for genetic research that we do for nutrition research. When in fact it’s nutrition, it’s nutrition that actually gives us the health, it’s not the genes.
Genetic research of course makes money or at least there’s the perception of those who are making this money available that in fact it’s doing that. Nutrition research only makes health. So it comes down to this, how do we understand nutrition, as I said in the beginning, it’s about looking at one nutrient at a time.
The Old Paradigm of Nutrition
And we see that every day, the recommended dietary allowances, this nutrient, you need this much, food labelling. It’s actually led to a vitamin supplement industry as a matter of fact. At 30, more than 30 plus billion dollar industry, we now know that nutrient supplements really don’t do the job, that’s not what we need.
I like to say let’s call that an old paradigm. The practice of medicine is the same sort of argument, at the present time our health system, our medical practice system is reductionist in nature. We think about single causes, single bio markers, you go to the doctor he tells you how much cholesterol you have, how much blood sugar as if these are really things that count, all by themselves.
Or single diseases that’s how we give them this international classification of disease code, doctors get paid according to what they diagnosed. By our thinking of health in terms of one thing at a time in a very narrow little context like that, what it needs is OK now we’re going to find one thing to cure things, we make drugs with other side effects.
Transforming the Healthcare System
That becomes the primary means of health maintenance. So I’m going to suggest, we’re at the threshold now, we can be at the threshold now of actually transforming the entire healthcare system and think of it in a different way. Think about what we can do and that’s really about nutrition.
There’s countless, as I said that we have to think about nutrition this is a real challenge to the way we do research and the way we think about things. Nutrition is not a one-on-one kind of thing, it’s a collective thing, we call wholeism, a holistic kind of idea. It’s really quite frankly an anathema as far as the scientific community’s concerned, that’s at least my experience.
But that’s what nutrition is, many disease working as a symphony and interestingly, this is simple, it is very complex biology but it’s a simple solution. Just decide what we should put in your mouths, a whole food plant based diet, vegetables, fruits, grains and legumes. Don’t add back the oil, fat and sugar, it’s a lot cheaper, it really works.
The Future of Health
And as far as coming back to my initial take, my initial thesis is concerned, we now have information, empirical data to actually show that if you take a group of people, I’ve been involved in a couple of these tests now. If you take a group of people give them the right food, the things that happened to us whether we have a disease or not are remarkable. You can see these things within a week or two.
Cholesterol goes down, body weight drops off and I’m going to say that should be the future of medicine or let’s say, I don’t like the word medicine, let’s say it’s the future of food and the future of our health. Thank you.