900 PAGE STUDY CHALLENGE...TAKEN UP...AND....
The China Study: A Love Story
The China Study is a twenty-year effort conducted by Cornell University's Dr. Colin Campbell to study the eating habits and health of the Chinese people. Dr. Campbell argues that the data show that "People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease ... People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease." The China Study findings have been held up as evidence that all animal products exert adverse health effects and that the human diet should be plant-based. To Dr. Campbell's credit, the data were made available to anyone interested in reviewing them in his 894-page book, "Diet, Life-Style, and Mortality in China" (1990).
One person with a deep fascination with health and numbers took him up on his offer and, over months of data crunching, performed an extensive reanalysis. Denise Minger, a twenty-three-year-old raw food advocate and former vegan, dove into Campbell's data, hoping to understand the raw findings, and made her analyses public in a blog she started in January 2010. Then the fireworks began.
After months of reanalysis, Minger came to believe that Campbell's original conclusions were flawed and that many of the purported findings were due to selective interpretation of the data. But what was most astounding was what she uncovered about wheat. Let Ms. Minger tell the story in her own quite capable words.
"When I first started analyzing the original China Study data, I had no intention of writing up an actual critique of Campbell's much-lauded book. I'm a data junkie. I mainly wanted to see for myself how closely Campbell's claims aligned with the data he drew from-if only to satisfy my own curiosity.
I was a vegetarian/vegan for over a decade and have nothing but respect for those who choose a plant-based diet, even though I am no longer vegan. My goal, with the China Study analysis and elsewhere, is to figure out the truth about nutrition and health without the interference of biases and dogma. I have no agenda to promote.
I propose that Campbell's hypothesis is not altogether wrong but, more accurately, incomplete. While he has skilfully identified the importance of whole, unprocessed foods in achieving and maintaining health, his focus on wedding animal products with disease has come at the expense of exploring - or even acknowledging - the presence of other diet-disease patterns that may be stronger, more relevant, and ultimately more imperative for public health and nutritional research."
Sins of Omission
Ms. Minger below refers to values called correlation coefficients, symbol r. An r of 0 means two variables share no relationship whatsoever and any apparent association is purely random, while an r of 1.00 means that two variables coincide perfectly, like white on rice. A negative r means two variables behave in opposite directions, like you and your ex-spouse. She continues:
"Perhaps more troubling than the distorted facts in the China Study are the details Campbell leaves out. Why does Campbell indict animal foods in cardiovascular disease (correlation of 0.01 for animal protein and -0.11 for fish protein), yet fail to mention that wheat flour has a correlation of 0.67 with heart attacks and coronary heart disease, and plant protein correlates at 0.25 with these conditions?
Why doesn't Campbell also note the astronomical correlations wheat flour has with various diseases: 0.46 with cervical cancer, 0.54 with hypertensive heart disease, 0.47 with stroke, 0.41 with diseases of the blood and blood-forming organs, and the aforementioned 0.67 with myocardial infarction and coronary heart disease? Could the "Grand Prix of epidemiology" have accidentally uncovered a link between the Western world's leading cause of death and its favorite glutenous grain? Is the "staff of life" really the staff of death?
When we pluck out the wheat variable from the 1989 China Study II questionnaire (which has more recorded data) and consider potential nonlinearity, the outcome is even creepier.
Wheat is the strongest positive predictor of body weight (in kilograms; r = 0.65, p<0.001) out of any diet variable. And it's not just because wheat eaters are taller, either, because wheat consumption also strongly correlates with body mass index (r = 0.58, p<0.001): What's the only thing heart disease-prone regions have in common with Westernized nations? That's right: consumption of high amounts of wheat flour."
The full impressive text of Ms. Minger's ongoing ideas can be found in her blog, Raw Food SOS, at http://rawfoodsos.com.
..........
FROM THE BOOK "WHEAT BELLY" by William Davis M.D.
YES, IT DOES TAKE PLACE. PEOPLE WILL WRITE 900 PAGES ON SOMETHING AND WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE IT IS ONLY HALF-TRUTH: IT LOOKS IMPRESSIVE, UNTIL SOMEONE TAKES UP THE CHALLENGE AND FINDS IT'S ONLY HALF-TRUTH.
TIME FOR YOU TO CAST AWAY THE CLOUD AND WISE UP TO THE FACTS ON MODERN WHEAT CONSUMPTION AND GOMOing.
"WHEAT BELLY" HAS TO BE ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS WRITTEN IN THIS CENTURY SO FAR, FOR THE EFFECTS IT COULD HAVE ON YOUR HEALTH, AND THE HEALTH OF THE WORLD.
Keith Hunt
No comments:
Post a Comment