China Study Critics & How Plant-Based Nutrition Can Prevent & Reverse Disease

This week we hit a huge milestone – 2 MILLION DOWNLOADS! Wow. I was blown away when we hit 1 million after about a year since we started this experiment. Then just five months later, we hit the second million. I am beyond words. I love doing the podcast, love it. I do this for you. So it means more than you can imagine that it has found a passionate and loyal audience. With utmost sincerity, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and promise to honor your commitment to the show by striving to always do better and be better. In honor of the milestone, I thought it appropriate to bring you one of my most compelling and important interviews to date. A conversation with a man I owe my life. A man whose studies, books and tireless advocacy have transformed countless lives across the globe. A man absolutely instrumental in paving a path for my own personal transformation – a journey that begins and ends with my adoption of a plant-based diet. T. Colin Campbell Dr. Campbell may not have invented the whole food plant-based diet, but he is most certainly the regal lion of the movement, pioneering it from fringe acceptance to modern age, widespread mainstream adoption. He is best-known as the author of The China Study*, one of the most important, ground-breaking, massively best-selling books ever written on health & nutrition. More recently, Dr. Campbell published an important follow up, Whole: Rethinking The Science of Nutrition*. But even if you have not read either of these books, there is a solid chance you saw him and his work profiled in the incredibly powerful documentary Forks Over Knives*. The simple truth is that how we are beginning to understand the ways in which food and nutrition impact the underlying causes of so many Western diseases that unnecessarily plague developed cultures — and the means to prevent and reverse them — is due in large part to the tireless scientific research to which Dr. Campbell has devoted his life. He is, quite simply put, an absolute paradigm-busting legend of the modern movement for long-term wellness, disease prevention & reversal, sustainable ecosystems, animal welfare, and agricultural reform. For the uninitiated, T. Colin Campbell is a Cornell and MIT trained Ph. D. in nutrition, biochemistry and microbiology and current professor emeritus at Cornell specializing in both nutrition & toxicology – specifically the effects of nutrition on long-term health and even more particularly the role nutrition plays in the causation of certain types of cancer. In addition to the two books mentioned above, he is the author of over 300 peer reviewed research papers on a variety of subjects related to the above. Maybe you're new to all this — I don't get all the fuss. What exactly is The China Study? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down like, what am I actually going to make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build through this program, a balanced nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem solve along the way.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 79 with T. Colin Campbell.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. Well, today's guest is a biggie. I won't lie, can't lie. I am very excited to bring this conversation to you today. And I have a feeling, an inkling, that it's going to bring a new crowd of people to the show, which is very exciting. So I just wanted to say a few quick words for the new listeners out there about who I am and what we do here to set the stage a bit. And for the long time listeners out there, I hope you can forgive me a brief indulgence. But anyway, my name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. By way of background, I am a former corporate lawyer turned plant-based, ultra-distance, multi-sport athlete. I'm a wellness evangelist. I'm a public speaker, and I'm

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Author. I wrote a book called Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself. And that book essentially chronicles my journey of self-discovery, my awakening, if you will, from a disconnected, depressed, overweight, unfit, recovering alcoholic to maximum fitness and to accomplishing endurance feats I never previously thought possible in a million years. But the important idea is this: it's a journey to greater self-understanding and greater self-actualization that begins and ends with one simple thing, one simple idea: my adoption of a plant-based diet.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  And it's also a journey that begins and ends with the message put forth and popularized by the very important work of today's guest. As for the show, each week I bring to you the best, most forward-thinking, paradigm-busting minds in health, fitness, wellness, diet, nutrition, spirituality, creativity, entrepreneurship, and life transformation. And the goal, the goal is very simple: to motivate and inspire you to take your life to the next level, to help you discover, unlock, and unleash your best, your healthiest, your most authentic self. So, T. Colin Campbell, where to even begin? The lion of the whole food, plant-based

• 3:36Speaker 00

  movement. If you're already on board, then no doubt you've read his groundbreaking book, The China Study, and/or his more recent follow-up book, Whole. You've seen him and his work profiled in the incredible documentary Forks Over Knives. And if these works are unfamiliar to you, or you're brand-new to this idea of plant-based nutrition, then I urge you to stop what you're doing immediately and check out the books and the documentary Forks Over Knives straight away. And to find those things, you can check the show notes at richroll.com on the episode page for this podcast, and I'll have links up there to take you where you want to go, as well as additional information about today's guest.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  I can't say that Dr. Campbell invented the plant-based movement, but what I can say is that it would not be what it is today without his groundbreaking, tireless work, his life devoted to this subject. And he is, quite simply put, a pioneer and a legend of the modern movement for sustainable wellness and ecological systems and disease prevention and disease reversal. For the uninitiated, T. Cohen Campbell is a Cornell and MIT-trained biochemist and current professor emeritus at Cornell University, who specializes in nutrition and toxicology, specifically the effects of nutrition on long-term health,

• 5:02Speaker 00

  and in particular, the causation of cancer. And he's best known for his advocacy of a low-fat, whole foods, plant-based diet, a vegan diet, so to speak. And he's the author of over 300 research papers on the subject, the two books I already mentioned, Whole, which was co-authored by Howard Jacobson, who's going to be next week's guest for kind of a two-parter, and The China Study, which he co-authored with his son, as I mentioned a minute ago, obviously. And that has become one of America's bestselling books about nutrition. And Dr. Campbell made his mark on the world with The China Study. Maybe

• 5:44Speaker 00

  you've heard of it, maybe you haven't, maybe you have just a passing familiarity with it. So what is it? Well, The China Study was a vast, gigantic, 20-year epidemiological study, which was described by The New York Times as the grand prix of epidemiology. And it was conducted by the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, Cornell University, and Oxford University. And what it did was, it looked at mortality rates from cancer and other chronic diseases from 1973 to 1975 in 65 different counties in China.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  And data was correlated with dietary surveys from blood work from 100 people in each of these counties. And so why China? Why these counties? Well, the research was conducted in these specific counties because they had genetically similar populations that tended, over generations, to live and eat in the same way and in the same place. And the study concluded that counties with a high consumption of animal-based foods were more likely to have had higher death rates from western diseases. Well, the opposite was true for counties that ate more plant foods. So, basically, the China study examined the relationship between the consumption of animal

• 6:58Speaker 00

  products, including dairy, and chronic illnesses such as coronary heart disease and diabetes and cancers of the breast, prostate, and bowel. And the conclusion was that people who ate a whole-food, plant-based diet, people that avoided all animal products, and I'm talking about beef, pork, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese, and milk, and people who were reducing their intake of processed foods and refined carbohydrates, these people will escape, reduce, or reverse the development of numerous diseases. It's pretty huge, right? You might have seen President Bill Clinton. He became a vocal supporter of the China study in 2010.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  After living for years with heart disease, he undertook the diet. And within a short period, he said that he dropped 24 pounds and returned him to his college weight and was feeling great. He was profiled in my buddy Sanjay Gupta's, Sanjay Gupta, who's the chief medical correspondent at CNN, did a documentary called The Last Heart Attack, and it was a couple of years ago, I think it was 2011, in which he said that the China study had changed the way that people all over the world are eating, including the good Dr. Gupta himself. So, this is powerful stuff. This is awesome stuff. It's pretty huge. But I would be remiss if I did not point out that the China study is not without its controversy either.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  In the wake of the massive success of the book, the China study, and Forks Over Knives, and sort of ancillary works that have been published as a result of these works.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Critics have come out to challenge the findings and they've tried to poke holes in the research and suddenly, you know, I've noticed that it has become kind of this rather vogue thing to offhandedly say like, "Well, didn't you hear the China study was debunked? Didn't you hear about that?" And this is one of the things that I had the good fortune to sit down with Dr. Campbell and talk through and get his perspective on what's going on with that. You know, I mean, has it really been debunked and what is this really all about? I mean, who is threatened by and who stands to gain from attempting to undermine the integrity of Dr. Campbell's game-changing research? So, yeah, we get into all of that and more and Dr. Campbell's background and his journey to where he is now and it's

• 9:21Speaker 00

  fascinating. And over the last few years, I've had the good fortune to meet him on several occasions, but it wasn't until we spent a week together on the Holistic Holiday at Sea cruise last month that I had the opportunity to really sit down with him and really get to know him. And Dr. Campbell isn't one to often sit for such long-winded interviews, so it really was a great honor and a privilege to grab this moment with him. And I have to say that I'm very proud of this interview and my hope is that it will inspire and motivate you to think about your health and your diet and your lifestyle in new and different ways,

• 10:03Speaker 00

  profound ways that could have a gigantic impact on your future well-being. So, a final note before we get into it. This is intended to be part one of a two-part series. Next week, I'm going to be bringing you Dr. Campbell's co-writer on his book, Whole, a guy called Howard Jacobson. And he's a great guy. He has a very amazing personal story and journey of his own and he sits down with me to share that and also to kind of fill in the gaps on the important work of Dr. Campbell. So, if you enjoy today's show, definitely tune in next week for Howard Jacobson. I think you'll enjoy that as well. So, in

• 10:42Speaker 00

  any event, dig in, put the earbuds in, and let's spin the wheel and see where this leads us.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  I would like to open it up, if you could, for the listeners who might be uninitiated or unfamiliar with your work, if you could simply synopsize the idea behind the China Study and what the book is all about.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Well, the China Study, of course, is a book, eighteen chapters, but there's only one chapter that's actually devoted specifically to the China Project itself. I have to point that out because the whole book is not just about the work in China.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  Right, and that's something I want to explore with you, for sure.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yes, it's the rest of the book, the work that I was doing at least, if I can see, twenty-five, thirty years before I got involved in China Study that really played a major role in my thinking. The China Study, in a sense, was getting to a place in time that I wanted to really have an opportunity to examine the population, to see if, in fact, the information we were getting there was consistent with what I already had been doing.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  And so, to take it a step back, I have this sort of running joke that in order to be a qualified specialist in the plant-based nutrition world, you must have been raised on a farm. Because it's you, Dr. Esselstyn, Dr. Clapper, I mean, I'm feeling very unqualified because I was not raised on a farm, nor do I have a PhD or an MD, but you, you know, you were raised on a dairy farm, and this was very instrumental in kind of informing your early views about nutrition and health.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really was. I mean, I was outdoors all the time, for the most part, except even sleeping outdoors at times, and, I mean, I really was in the dirt, you know, plowing fields, harrying fields, raking hay, milking cows. I milked my first cow when I was five years old. That was a thing to do, and so I was everything about the outdoors, as was my life, and I liked the outdoors, and I felt totally at home in the outdoors. I used to say when I was young that when I got big, I would not take a job inside. The opposite has happened, so I've really been living, if you will, in nature. Always had a great deal of respect for nature.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  And so where did it begin for you in terms of being interested in in health and biochemistry and nutrition?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  That was kind of an accident in a sense, not totally. I went to Penn State for my undergraduate work. And in that first year, as was customary in universities, we were given, freshmen were given tests for aptitude, you know, future aptitudes. And I took this test and my dad wanted me to be a lawyer. My dad only had two years of education. So I come from a family that, for the most part, you know, education was a big thing. And in any case, he wanted me to be a lawyer, so I took the test and there were about six or seven or eight different paths I could have followed. Law was in the middle, so I wasn't too happy with that. But there were two things-

• 14:11Speaker 00

  Your dad wasn't happy either, probably.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  No, so there were two things that I suppose I ranked at the top end. One was to be a farmer. I said, whoop-de-doo, I know how to farm.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  The other was to be in medicine. And that surprised me. I never thought about it. But it kind of stuck in my mind and I started thinking about it. I didn't particularly want to go into medicine because we lived with a doctor who, you know, was on call 24/7. He had an old Model T Ford. He came to the homes. You know, there wasn't such things as being in an office, that kind of thing. It was in the countryside. And I didn't particularly want to do that for that reason. I didn't want to be on call all the time. Very naively, I have to tell you. Most of my life was very naive from the very beginning. So, but nonetheless, I took the idea to my work in at Penn State to say, I'll be, I'll be a veterinarian. I said, that combined medicine with my agriculture background.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  So I entered a veterinary school, a little bit early, just after three years of undergraduate school.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  But then just out of the clear blue, I got a telegram one day from a fairly famous professor at Cornell, who had been talking to my advisor at Penn State about possible students. And so he offered me a full scholarship to drop out of veterinary school, come to Cornell. And I thought, boy, that's a pretty good deal.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, you must have been quite the student. How did you make such an impression?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Well, whatever, I don't know what it was. He, obviously, my advisor at Penn State passed on a good word about me. And the thing about it too was, why I say it's kind of an accident happening in time, because they were going to pay me to go to school. I couldn't imagine that. Or, you know, my dad, he didn't have any more money to hardly see me through. So I thought that was a pretty good deal too.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  So I went to Cornell, thinking that somehow I was going to get involved in, maybe in medical research, because it was in the area of nutritional biochemistry and pathology. And I went there and I didn't even know, to be honest about it, until I was there about six, eight months, that I was actually working for a PhD. I never heard of a PhD. That's how naive I was. So it was just kind of something pulling me in this way and that way as I went forward. And so I finished up that work in a year, doing actually a master's, because I was being pressured to get to...

• 16:38Speaker 00

  You got your master's in one year?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  I did it in one year because I was being pressured by my draft board. I was classified 1A, and, you know, I had gotten a deferment four times. And they said, this is the last time, you've got to go. So I had to quit that. Fortunately, I finished up my degree. And when I was, I went home, went to the draft board, and I didn't particularly want to go in the army, just being a foot soldier. So I heard about the opportunity, I lived outside of Washington, heard about the opportunity of inquiring about being an officer. So I went and took the test, and there were some rare occasions when you could do that kind of thing. I passed that. I was assigned to be a second lieutenant.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Scheduled to report to a hospital in Colorado was this is prior to Vietnam War. The Vietnam War at that time was just starting. And so I was ready to go, but then another professor Cornell wrote me in the meanwhile and offered me again a full scholarship to come and do my PhD. I didn't know this professor and he said, come on back. He says, you should come back. So I took it to the guy who gave me my commission that I was supposed to report to and he said, uh, well, okay, go back. You know, there's no great pressures right now. We'll keep in touch. If you don't hear, if we, if you, let us know when you finish your, finish your PhD. You gotta serve your time. Uh, if you don't, we'll contact you. So I figured, well, I'll go do my PhD,

• 18:08Speaker 01

  come back and, and sort of, but that, by that time, the Vietnam War is getting a little bit hotter.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  And so I didn't hear from them and I was sort of.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  But as long as you're a student and you're getting your PhD, you're in the clear, right?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Well, not until I was thirty eight. That was the rule of the day, you know, I, I was, I had to take up that officer appointment until I was thirty eight, which would have been about nineteen seventy or so.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Uh, and, uh, so I was kind of waiting to hear from them. Never heard from them. And I learned later that there was a big fire in St. Louis. They burned up thirty thousand records.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Oh, my goodness.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Records. Mine was one of those records that got burned up.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  So I became a non person as far as the army was concerned.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Wow. So you have these little amazing occurrences that are happening, a phone call here, a telegram here, a fire over here that are all kind of directing you, you know, without your conscious awareness.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  But I was enjoying science in the meanwhile.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. And you're getting your PhD in biochemistry.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Got a PhD at that time and nutrition was biochemistry, right? Nutrition biochemistry.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  And was there any specificity to that or what was your focus?

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Well, it was an animal nutrition. So it's focused largely on trying to improve the lot of, of animals as far as nutrition was concerned. And, uh, I got offered a couple of positions as a professor even before I finished my PhD. To go to an animal science department, one back at Penn State to be a professor of dairy science and so forth and so. I thought some, but I didn't accept it, I didn't want to do that. By that time I'd gotten interested in some other things and the more fundamental things. So I finally finished up and then did some work in a laboratory where I met my wife. Testing Laboratory near Washington DC where, near where I lived.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  And then, you want to hear all this story? I don't know.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I'm interested in understanding kind of

• 20:11Speaker 01

  How did I get one?

• 20:12Speaker 00

  How your perspective on nutrition, dairy, meat, et cetera, evolved over time from your perspective when you were a student at Cornell to what you began to discover when you undertook what you described in the China study.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, time went forward. I mean, when I was at, in this position, in this laboratory doing work, right after my PhD, I was there for a short while. Nice experience, but then I got offered an opportunity to come to MIT. By a guy who had been at the FDA to organize a new department there in toxicology. So without going into all those details, I got sort of some training in toxicology too. Toxicological biochemistry essentially. And after that, it was an offer to go take a faculty position at Virginia Tech and a few other places. So I went to Virginia Tech there, gotten, I started my research career, applying for funding to do research.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  And one, I had two, I had two tracks, which is a little bit unusual for the day. I wanted to get, do some basic science stuff, and the other one was to work in the international setting, which is very, very applied. The second one, this international experience was an opportunity to go to the Philippines and help organize a nationwide program of female nurse children. Always had that kind of, I had an interest in kind of serving society, if you will, particularly on an international level. I don't know where that came from, but that's what my interest was. In the laboratories, working in sort of very basic biochemical kinds of things. Well, the two happened, just happened to join, without my planning. Because the Philippines had an interest in liver cancer and, um, you know, like, I mean,

• 21:59Speaker 01

  laboratories and liver cancer. Go to the Philippines, I see this observation in the Philippines where children getting liver cancer had a much higher, um, risk of getting the cancer, in fact, if they were from families who, a few families who were consuming them the best diets, high in protein.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  And then there was another report, it's, so the rest is history.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Right, so this, this fact, um, sort of lodged in your brain and, and kind of compelled you to decide to look into this further, to design a study to understand what exactly was going on.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Right. Well, yeah, and, and as, as my career passed, I, I really got quite active in my science and at fairly senior levels, actually, early on at the national level, being on expert panels and things like that, policymaking. And I kept seeing things all the time that I found very troubling. And I would ask myself, why is this bothering me and not bothering others? Uh, and when I tried to do some, if you will, introspection, you know, what, why do I think the way I think? I often came back to the farm. You know, I, I, I would come back, this doesn't sound natural to me, if you will.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Um, and so, one of the first questions, I know I took a course at Cornell when I first went there about, uh, in nutritional biochemistry. And one of the major illustrations was, you know, this nutrient does that, another nutrient does something else. And there was a big project at Cornell at the time involving four nutrients as it impacted, you know, a disease in chickens and calves of all things.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  And, uh, I remember each one of those four things did something specific. And when, but when you kind of mix those nutrients together. You know, then something different happened.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  So I asked my professor, I remember at the time, it was just a classroom, I was just asking a simple question. But as I look back, it's stuck in my brain because I said to him, well, why don't we study that this way? He said, we can't, it's not possible.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Right, in other words, the idea of taking a more macro approach and a more global perspective as opposed to this very reductionist.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Exactly, so that was sort of lesson number one in a sense, as far as the science is concerned, that things are far more complicated than just thinking about going from A to B, to go to C and so forth. So our biochemical research, when I got involved in that, and I was lucky to get quite substantial amounts of funding from the very beginning, and it continued from NIH.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  From NIH, right.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so we had a big research program, actually, had a lot of graduate students, and I had the freedom to be able to ask questions, design experiments, see what it might look like. And anytime you learn something new, you always have more questions.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  So that's, that was the way it went, and it just kind of drifted in a certain direction. But the more, I just found myself just asking questions that were a little bit offbeat, I guess, because I was just curious, I liked the science. And pretty soon, I just, things started to fall together and I realized there was a much bigger story here than just working on one single thing at a time.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm, but to bring it back to the specifics of the China study, could you just describe the essence of what that was?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, by the time the China study opportunity came along, and this was in the early 1980s, I got a, an opportunity to, well, it was a letter sent to Cornell by the first senior scientist from China to come to the United States, and this particular gentleman, Dr. Chen Shou Shu,

• 25:42Speaker 01

  he had come from a famous family in China, actually. In any case, he was one of the first to come to this country. He was looking for a place to land, spend some time, his government had given this opportunity. And he was sent to Cornell a little bit, and some others turned it down, I don't know why, but I grabbed on to him by the way, and so he came and worked with me. And it was probably one of the best decisions ever made because it turned out he really was from a well-connected family in China for starters and high up in the government in a sense, as far as science is concerned. And so, at that time, the Chinese government had done this nationwide survey of how much

• 26:21Speaker 01

  cancer existed across a total of something like two thousand four hundred counties. It was a massive undertaking and what they were able to show was that cancer was very common in some counties and not in others. So we just, it was common sense just to ask, well, what about, you know, what's, what's causing this unusual concentration of cancer in certain places for about a dozen different cancers? So I just, we got together and I said, why don't we try to get an application to do some funding there? His government was offering, offering a lot of support in kind. We need capital, so I went back to NIH again to, to see if I could get that funding and we did. We had the first project between the United States and China, the first research project

• 27:06Speaker 01

  at that time. So we went there and surveyed a large population. That was an opportunity for me to see if in fact the kind of information we might learn from that population, from that population was consistent with these rather aberrant questions that I was getting in the laboratory.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  And those questions were?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Those questions were basically that animal protein in particular was promoting cancer. Because that's what we learned in the laboratory. And so, we did that and measured just a huge amount of information.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  It was a massive undertaking. I mean, how many people did it take to sort of collect the data from this gigantic population of individuals?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Well, it wasn't so big in terms of numbers of people. It was six thousand five hundred adults, plus their families, so we estimated around ten, eleven thousand people, which in those days, it was big, but it wasn't that big really. What made it big was the number of variables that we were looking at. And I wanted to be able to analyze for just anything and everything. Because I really was getting interested in this idea that there's more to this story as we generally do in science than just one thing at a time.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  So the ideas that you're discussing in your more recent book, Whole, these are already formulated and taking place in the China study. Because I think it would have been very easy for you to simply say, "We're going to look at animal protein and liver cancer, and that's all we're looking at, and we don't need to look at anything else." And nobody would have batted an eye. That is reductionist science 101. That's the way we do it. And you could have gone on your way with that and dismissed with this idea of entertaining the possibility that an innumerable number of other variables could be contributing or having causative or correlative effects with the results that you were seeing.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, we proposed for that grant petition, by the way. It's actually something like that. We wanted to look at the relationship between the mineral selenium and its relationship to heart disease in children. That's why, in part, I got the grant. Because it was focused. At the same time, we were kind of fortunate in a way because there were parties interested in the United States in getting involved in China and vice versa. So for some political support, you know, I was able to get it that way. But it was focused on one thing.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  And so describe what you began to learn when you assayed this population with, across all these variables.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Well, we ended up with collecting 367 items of information, as I would say. Things measured in the blood, the urine, the food, questions being asked. And so we had a big collection of a lot of variables, if you will. We worked on each one to make sure they're reliable. We had ways of doing that. And then they were all correlated with each other. So we ended with about 100,000 correlations. About 9,000 of which were statistically significant. To be expected, that's just a random chance of that happening. But in any case, we wanted to take those significant correlations and some others that might approach significance to see if there were patterns.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  I should say, incidentally... It was directed by me at Cornell University, but I was able to access some fantastic colleagues at the University of Oxford. Richard Pedo, Sir Richard Pedo now, Sir Richard Dalison, very eminent epidemiologists, and others in China, some of the senior scientists there, plus another 24 laboratories around the world.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  And so what were some of the most significant, statistically significant correlations that you began to uncover?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Well, it really, coming back to the question concerning animal protein, I mean, that had been a lifelong or career-long question, because we were able to, in the prior studies, were able to show that we could turn on and turn off cancer, just simply by feeding, of all things, the protein of cow's milk, which brought me back to the dairy farm in a sense. And that was very provocative, to say the least.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  And I think it's, you know, there might be a perspective out there that you were out to, you know, sort of prove, to establish an objective that you already believed in. But you're coming from this dairy farm background, and it had been your whole, you know, the conviction of your entire upbringing that, you know, milk does a body good, that this is the perfect food, right? So where did you start to begin to see kind of cracks in the firmament of that concept?

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Well, it was the initial observation, I think we did, with the, there were some Indian researchers who had done some laboratory animal studies that showed that at the time that I was in the Philippines, but they didn't believe what they got. And it was published in an obscure journal, but I kind of believed it because it was consistent with what I was seeing with the children. And so as we went into that research, we looked at it in great depth, and I had become convinced, you know, by that time, we did it so many different ways, that animal protein actually increases cancer risk, period. And so I was really interested to know, in the China study, whether there was any evidence for that. And my bias was to find the opposite.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Really was, I mean, if I had a prejudice at the beginning...

• 32:40Speaker 00

  And that's a very important point, you know, I think that, that you weren't out to, you know, sort of be on this crusade to, you know...

• 32:51Speaker 00

  With this foregone conclusion that you already had in your mind, you went out and you surveyed a gigantic population of people across innumerable variables and remained open-minded and to take what you just said, hopeful that maybe it might prove the opposite.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  That's right, absolutely. I was always kind of swimming upstream against my own sort of prior prejudices, but finally the evidence was overwhelming with respect to, for starters, with the effect of animal protein on encourage the development of cancers, if you will. But then there were other questions that arose too at the same time and always having this doubt, you know, about the significance of this, we would ask, I would want to ask broader questions. What if we eat animal protein containing foods? What if it all the other nutrients that come along with it? What's happening there? Do they cancel each other? So we started investigating all the nutrients, all the cancers, all the diseases,

• 33:49Speaker 01

  and the more that I looked, the more consistent became the data. Everything seemed to, all the nutrients in animal-based foods as opposed to all the nutrients in plant-based foods, they seemed to be doing opposite things. And their activities were sort of mutually supportive, you know, at the biochemical physiological level. So the story became, for me, even ever more impressive. But it was always coming from a position, in my case, in a sense, of almost trying to disprove, you know, what I had observed.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  And this is, this is a landmark discovery, right? This had never been sort of established or presumed or even conjured by anyone prior to you.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  It's an interesting question. I'll comment in just a minute, but yes, when we were doing all the research in the laboratory and because of my skepticism about a lot of things, what we ended up discovering were a lot of fundamental ideas that were against the rules, against what I was teaching and against what was in the books.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  Such as?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Well, for example, turning cancer on and off by nutritional means. I mean, that was a big deal. And it turned out, we didn't do it just with protein and liver cancer. We also did it with dietary fat and pancreatic cancer and things like this. So that phenomenon of thinking about the causation of cancer and later other diseases as a result of simply modifying nutrient intake and the idea of actually reversing disease.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Right, it's the turning off part.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  We were reversing disease.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  And cancer, I thought, this is incredible. And so we were learning other things too, like that the relationship between nutrition and genes. A lot of people think, and a lot of people still think, that somehow genes predetermined whether or not we're going to get a certain kind of disease. And what we are showing, no, it's not the case. We can have the genes to cause it, to start the initiation of events, but that is, we can control it by nutritional means. Big thing. Another one, sort of principle, like if you will, and A, like protein, it causes cancer, let's say for starters. One of the things that I was really being pushed to do to prove my point was to find

• 36:01Speaker 01

  what the mechanism was, which enzyme, which is that. And so we started looking for the mechanisms. And I had a series of PhD students spending four or five years, each of them looking at a mechanism. And it turned out, there is no such thing. So that was another myth that I was all of a sudden running across too. And so a lot of the things that we learned really were, I think, the result of my skepticism.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  And it's quite astounding. I mean, I think people can inherently wrap their brain around the idea of prevention, like doing certain things, whether through diet or, you know, exercise or what have you, to prevent certain things from happening. But when you start talking about reversal, once onset has begun, that starts to get into radical territory.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Really radical territory. Because the whole medical profession is, in a sense, is sort of supported by the idea that somehow you're going to be able to, if you have a disease or about to start or it's already there, you know, you're going to cure it. That's sort of the premise. And that's the, that's the territory of the practice of medicine.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  What we were seeing, what I thought we were seeing, I'm very excited about this idea, that this formula, this nutritional formula for preventing

• 37:18Speaker 01

  The production of future disease also works to treat existing disease. That's the future of this field. Just the whole idea, you could take this with people with disease or a very high risk of disease and treat them.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  So you're drawing these conclusions, these statistically significant correlations, and there's a decision at some point that this should not just reside in a medical journal, but that this should be shared more broadly through a book, right? So where does the idea of a book come in and how does that all come about?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Well, for the, from about the late 1970s until, let's say, 1990, I was getting into more and more trouble, if you will, by raising these provocative questions, getting the results to show things that were rather different. I was a subject of pretty intense scrutiny, I should say, at least from my colleagues. But I was still succeeding, getting all the money I wanted. I had senior positions in my society and the government.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  So, yeah, the NIH is smiling down on you throughout this whole thing.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was thinking of going great. And finally, you know, it became apparent that I was supporting an idea that I never expected I would arrive at in the early 1990s. When we got the results from the China study, it supported what we had been doing in the laboratory. New York Times got a hold of it. Jane Brody, one of the leading people writing at that time for the Times, a graduate of Cornell too, she came up to interview me. She wrote the article. It came out in the New York Times as the lead article in the Science section. And the headline in it said something like, "This is the grand prix of all studies. It establishes this, that, or something else." Very provocative. And it made me nervous. Because by this time, you know, I'm in the science establishment, right?

• 39:15Speaker 01

  You don't go out and say these crazy things. And so here's the Times, they put it in headline. I had to say to myself.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  You're losing control of this story.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's now it's getting out there. And, you know, I didn't mind it really getting out there, sharing it with the public to some extent, but this was really provocative, New York Times. And I saw that and I picked up the phone and I called Jane. I said, "Jane, why did you put that title up there like that? I said, "This is pretty outrageous." And she said, I didn't do it. She said, the editors did it. I said, oh, okay. So it was out there by that time. So I came home and asked my wife. I remember this very well, she does too. I said, are you willing to live in a double wide? Because I figured, you know, even I, I said, I had the senior position at Cornell. The topmost, topmost position, actually, I had a down chair, I was, and all that sort of thing.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  And I knew that I was about to take a big hit, one way or another. And she said, of course. And it was, it was, I don't know why I asked, I just wanted to confirm it with her.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  You could start stockpiling guns and hunker down.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  I was driven, as she was. I mean, as I go back, and my background is very simple. We were raised on a farm. My wife similarly was that way. No education, her, you know, upper level education for her family or for mine. And I only could rely on one thing, and that was the truth. And so I get that from my father, who was, had a great reputation as a farmer in the area, great integrity. He said, when you go out, don't always, he says, always tell the truth. It was, it was that simple. It was a hard-nosed thing, and I just, so, you know, there's no other way. So I obviously put my toe in the water and kept on going. And I can't turn back, because then it only becomes bigger and bigger.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  The China Study itself is a book. I was complaining to my wife a little bit about this. I said, the arrows coming my way were becoming more and more intense. And so finally, she said, well, why don't you write a book? So I said, okay, well, we will. But I kept putting it off, and then she was getting a little more annoyed with time. I got a couple of offers from book publishers in the early nineties, that if I would write a book, and that came from the New York Times article. If I'd write a book, in one case, the guy offered me a million dollars to write a book. And he wanted to call it The China Diet. And I didn't want to do that because I thought that was corrupting the message.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  And so he went back and back to New York and actually wrote the first chapter and wrote the outline and everything came back. He says, you know, I guarantee you a million dollars if you write this book. I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it for money. That was not the purpose. And so that just sort of sat there for a while and from nineteen, I think ninety-two or three or so until two thousand and two, when I finally sat down and just assisted with my wife, "You better write that book," she said, "you know, it's for the women and the children of the world for no other reason," and tell my story. So I started writing a book with my youngest son, who's now a physician, without understanding exactly where this thing was going to go. And all I wanted to do was just see if I

• 42:29Speaker 01

  couldn't summarize for myself the story that made sense.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  That was all it was. And we did say in the latter part of the book that you don't have to believe all this science, I said to the reader, "Just try it."

• 42:41Speaker 00

  And that's kind of an amazing thing to pass up, I mean, a million dollars so that you could write a book the way that you wanted to write it and tell the story appropriately without inflammation or trying to sort of frame the narrative in the context of a diet that people could purchase.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, it was. And then actually after we did the China study, we had the manuscript ready to go. We were shopping around. I had engaged three other agents prior to that. Finally landed on one that was a good agent. I thought that's the way to go. I didn't know anything about the publishing business. But in any case, this guy had been Senior Vice President Random House. So he wanted to represent us and he took us. He shopped around to eleven different publishers or manuscript. And a couple of them offered advances and I didn't want the advances because the story that they all wanted, they were all consistent on a couple of points. They looked at it and they said, "You know, we don't need all these references and the public doesn't want to have all these references, number one."

• 43:48Speaker 01

  They wanted to dumb it down to a ten-year-old.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Right. Get rid of the science column.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Get rid of this stuff. And then they also wanted me to put, you know, sixty to seventy percent of the book with recipes. I said, "I don't even know where the pots and pans are in the kitchen," level of recipes. So, you know, that's not, that's not what I want to do. And it's not about the money. You know, so I remember a couple of occasions, I won't go into details here, where they were really insisting I was doing the wrong thing.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  And finally, we had the last meeting with the senior vice president at the company where this agent had come from. And he had to straighten my tie up and everything else and tell me how to talk. And, you know, he thought this is, this is a winner.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  Uh-huh.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  You know, that we're going to go in and see, have this opportunity to meet a senior person at Random House. We got in there, and she started saying things. I started talking about, you know, the grander scheme of things and how things work together. "No, no, no, that's not possible." They had published the Okinawa Diet, I think it was.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  She said, "Are you saying that you, you got, it's the same message for all these different diseases?" I said, "Yes." "That's not possible." She got really quite angry. And so I was arguing with it. My agent in turn got annoyed. He thought he was going to have a big one. He got up and left us.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Because he, I had blown the, I had blown the lid.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  No big advance from Random House.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  No big advance. And they both said, you know, you're, okay, do the book. You're not going to sell more than three to five thousand copies at the most. You know, they might just put it in libraries, standard stuff. So we walked away from eleven publishers.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Just because of what they wanted to do and the advances.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they weren't, they weren't saying no. They just wanted to, they wanted to...

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Direct what I was going to do.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  So I didn't want to do it. So finally went to a small publisher who allowed us to do what we wanted to do.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Even he said, "You're not going to sell more than five or ten thousand." He said, finally, he said, "If you can sell fifteen thousand," I think it was fifteen to eighteen thousand, he said, "I'll be happy. I'll cover my costs."

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  He said, "But that's," he was just hoping that we could sell that. Well, now it's well over a million, so made his company.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  That's amazing. It is, it's exceeded a million?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Wow, that's incredible.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  About twenty-five languages, foreign languages.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  So it's getting around.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  But it didn't start out that way. Just in, in sitting down with Howard, he told this amazing story.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Well, Howard, Howard wasn't involved in the China study.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  No, I know, but, but he was sort of recounting the early days of, you know, when the China study initially came out and how he was the third person to review the book.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  And it was seven weeks after it had come out. And, and... Yeah, I just presumed that, you know, when it, when it came out, it came out big and strong and fast, and that was not the case. Like, it took a while before anybody was paying attention. And your little publisher actually was sort of right in the, in the first few, in the first few weeks or these early days after publication.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I saw on Amazon where these reviews are written. You know, obviously, I'm looking at that, it's all new to me, you know?

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  And this brilliant review came out, you know, supporting the study. And I saw this guy's name, you know, Howard Jacobson, and I said, I think I know him. You know, because prior to that, Howard had met another someone else, and I, and so I thought it was true, and of course, it turned out to be true.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Well, you have a fair trap memory, because Howard's claims that he stood in line amongst seven other people to meet you at the veg source event, and couldn't imagine how you could possibly remember meeting him, but that's...

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I met him through another person other than John Allen Mullinar.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Oh, maybe that's the case, yeah.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. In any case, we had a short meeting, obviously, but I, clearly, it became the person that I thought it was. And so, that review stayed on the Amazon site throughout just about the entire history of the, of the 10 years.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Right. If you, if you're one of the early reviewers, good or bad, those reviews tend to stay at the top.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  You know, once the, once it really starts to cascade.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, that was a good review.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's good. You're, you're lucky.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Very well written.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Very positive.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  But what, where was the moment where it kind of tipped the scales in terms of getting out into the public? I mean, was there one thing that occurred that kind of changed, changed things in terms of getting the book out there?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  There were certain individuals. Gary Player, the pro golfer, called me up right after it was, it came out, and he said, I'm Gary Player. I couldn't believe that I was talking to Gary Player. But he said that he was going to be on the Golf Channel with a big audience, and wanted to know if he could talk about it. I said, you know, help yourself. It's great. Fantastic. He told me what it's going to do. He said, I'm going to get down on my knees. And and and just talk about this book. I mean, he was really impressed with it, I guess.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  So in fact, we watched to see when this happened. I was actually by this time with Howie, Dr. Jacobson. And so we watched Howie. And we watched Gary Player get down and, you know, with a praying position and says, America, everyone in this country should read this book, or something like that.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Uh, that was a, that was a good hit.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's pretty good.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  That was pretty good. And then, um, Bill Clinton.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  No publicist is gonna get you that.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  No, and then Bill, Bill Clinton came along too.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, how does Bill, how does Bill Clinton come into the equation? Because this is fascinating.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Well, this is about two, let's see, three years after the book was out.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  And, uh, I was on the board with a close friend of Bill Clinton's, a former governor of, uh, North Carolina, uh, Jim Hunt.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  The board of what?

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Oh, of, of, of a company that my son and I had founded.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  And so Jim Hunt was on there, the chief, actually, we had some pretty key figures on there, but, uh, Jim Hunt, a former governor of North Carolina was there. He in turn was a close friend of Clinton. So Jim came and asked me if I signed a couple of copies for Clinton. So I did. I got a, a handwritten note back from President Clinton, thanking me for the book. And he, but he didn't, he didn't follow up for a couple of years. And it wasn't until the time of his daughter's wedding.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  That he had another problem with his heart. And she in turn, the story goes, she in turn wanted him to do the book. And so he got pretty enthusiastic about it. And I got a call from, um, uh, one of his, uh, close associates who was at the wedding and said that Clinton had come to the wedding and was carrying a book with him. That's what I was told. And I heard this before the CNN thing came along.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  But he had the book with him. He was showing it to everybody, including Barbra Streisand, who wanted to know, you know, what is that book you keep on talking about?

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  This is, and this is second information before the CNN thing.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  And so he told her, and her husband allegedly said, second information again, said to her, you know, you, I got that book for you two years ago and you never read it. So these kind of stories, I always get in these stories. And finally then he's on CNN.

• 50:44Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. And this is the Wolf Blitzer interview, right?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Wolf Blitzer.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Prior, there was the, the last heart attack show with Sanjay Gupta, but it was, I remember that Wolf Blitzer interview where he talked about, um, wanting to be healthy for his daughter's wedding.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was. And he got big res- really good results and became a real enthusiast for this idea. Um, yeah, it's true.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  That's amazing. And then, um, where in the timeline does Forks Over Knives come into the equation?

• 51:15Speaker 01

  At about that same time, and let's say, I think about in, uh, two thousand nine, possibly, this is, uh, four years after the book had been published, a young fellow in, uh, California had attended one of my lectures. Uh, this fellow having some resources, decided that he really loved it and so forth and so on, and I recommended that he also talk to my friend, Esselton. Because in the book, we, I knew Esselton. He hadn't at that time really had too much attention. I, so we went and interviewed him for, partly for the book, as you know, and, and others. And so, um, I recommended that he goes hear him too. He did. And the

• 51:57Speaker 01

  next thing, uh, he wants to get together and put a film out. And he said he wanted to get the best possible director and, and producer. And he introduced me to them and wanted to get me to confirm the possibility of making a film, you know, based on, starting out, at least with the China study. That's where it started. And I, I so wasn't involved in any of that planning, certainly not in the resources or the return or anything like that. I didn't, I mean, I haven't gotten any financial return out of it.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  I have no equity position in any of that stuff. But he, he followed us, the crew followed us to China, to Washington, to all over the place, back to my farm, the farm we had when I was a kid. And, uh, so they went ahead and did the film. And of course, that film has turned out to be pretty fabulous.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Quite amazing, yeah. And, and talking about it with Howard, um, I don't think anybody could have predicted what a phenomenon it has become. I think it was the- Maybe it still is, I'm not sure, but for a very long time, it was the number one, you know, watched documentary on Netflix, or the number one selling documentary on Amazon, or I don't know exactly what the statistics are, but phenomenal impact that that movie has had.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  It has.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  And what's interesting about it is, it's not just about plant-based nutrition, the findings of the China study, Dr. Esselstyn's remarkable work with reversing heart disease through plant-based nutrition. I mean, when you see these angiograms, the before and after, it's just, it's so compelling. But it's also about this amazing friendship that you have had for many years with Dr. Esselstyn. And it sort of begs the question of, you know, sitting where you're sitting now, you know, having devoted both yourself and Dr. Esselstyn, having devoted the better part of your lives to this, this quest and, and this message that you're putting out, for so many years, having it fall on deaf ears,

• 53:56Speaker 00

  or being criticized, or being maligned, to now having, you know, sort of, the, the sort of, um, audience or reception, um, that maybe you thought initially you might get right out of the gate. How does that feel? I mean, is that, does that give you a sense of vindication? Or, maybe, that's a little bit of a negative word, but it's been a long road. I mean, you've been, you and Essie have been at this for a very long time, and it's taken an extreme, an extremely long time for the momentum to pick up, to the point where people are now receptive and hearing it, and it's become this thing, it's become this movement.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, if I, I mean, obviously, I'm very gratified, you know, that this is happening. And as time passes, it becomes deeper and deeper in meaning it for me. And it relates more to, more than just, you know, working with biochemistry, you know, inside of cancer cells, if you will. And obviously, it's led to, you know, the possibility of writing another book, as you know. And at that time, when I start, first started to write this second book that eventually got called Whole, I had in mind, the first title was using the word "control." Because for me, I'd had a lot of experiences, a lot of kickback, you know, from institutions

• 55:18Speaker 01

  and other people about this crazy path I was on.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  And it was very discouraging at times, but I couldn't, I couldn't turn around. And so I spent three weeks at a resort, not a resort, but a beach house down in one, before we started White Hole, it's called Control. And I started out just documenting all of these, these ridiculous experiences that I'd had, the lies, you know, the existence in policy and all this sort of stuff. And I wrote about sixty pages, you know, in that period of time, and I was going to document it that way. And all of a sudden it struck me, this is really stupid. You know, why am I talking about all this horrendous kickback? It made no sense. And so I said, well, forget that.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  So I decided to go back and write a book that was more positive, trying to understand, you know, rather than talk about all the negative stuff coming my way.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  Right, I mean, it would kind of come off as sour grapes.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  That's right, exactly. And I just didn't have any, any taste for that whatsoever. I wanted to write something, just asking myself, is there something about this idea that's missing from the, from our work in science? And what I thought about it, and I started out with three, to define three words, nutrition, medicine, and health. I didn't know how I was going to define it, but I knew it wasn't what I was teaching and had been teaching over the years and stuff like this, and our research didn't show that. And the reductionist idea had been mentioned in China study, so that was there. But then I didn't know how to describe the rest of it, so it was holism, it's something, something like that. And I thought, and I wanted to spell it out.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  I went to three dictionaries to learn, you know, I was going to spell it W H O L I S M. It always has been spelled H O L I S M. And I thought I'd find an alternative spelling. I couldn't find it.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  And so then I decided, you know, I'm gonna create my own word here, put it, put the W in front for parentheses around it, and call it a holism. And then I got into reading some, as a total amateur, you know, in the history of, um, a little bit of religion, if you will, the ancient Greek times and stuff like that, and got some ideas. And the more I thought about the concept of holism, man, this is, this is pretty good.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  You know, because it really, just all of a sudden, it's like a step into a new world, new paradigm.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  Almost taking a step beyond holistic into

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  the W H holism. And the idea of taking this global view of understanding and embracing the idea of the incredible complexity of nutrition, diet, biochemistry, human physiology, and an appreciation, I think, for how difficult it is to draw conclusions from a reductionist approach.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Is that fair to say?

• 58:14Speaker 01

  It's very fair to say. In fact, now I'm really kind of immersed in the idea of really challenging the whole concept of what we regard as science. I mean, science is in biolog- in the biological world, in the medical world, so-called science, it's largely reductionist. Of course, we all know that. It's caused a lot of harm, a lot of difficulties. And, but I understand the need to do reductionist research, because that's what I was involved in too in the beginning.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  But it's sort of the threads of the tapestry. Everybody can work on their own thread, you know, and make a big deal out of it, what the tapestry might look like, but they have no clue.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  How these threads interrelate, how these threads impact each other.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's only, you know, by putting all these threads together. Do we begin to see something new and something exciting?

• 59:07Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  And so I, I kinda like that metaphor as much as any other.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  So how do we, you know, how do we move in a new direction with this? I mean, what is the solution? I mean, I, I would presume that you still maintain that a reductionist approach is appropriate in certain circumstances for certain purposes.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  But how do we, how do we take this newfound idea that you're proposing and implement that into a better way of approaching science?

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Well, you know, reductionist research, I, I don't wanna come back off, you know, as actually be opposed to reductionist research, and I certainly am not. Because those, we have to have this register to make the tapestry. That's fair enough. And I'm glad there are reductionist scientists building my airplanes that I ride on, or building my computers.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  You know, they, I want them to be precise. I want them to be just doing the best they possibly can as they put that together. But in biology and medicine, all one needs to do is go look at the cell. You know, the ten, the between, whatever, it's ten to a hundred trillion cells we have in our body. Just look inside of one of those cells and see the extraordinary complexity, which in itself, every cell is just virtually almost like our universe. It's the microcosmos, it's the macrocosmos, if you will. And, and see this enormous integrity that occurs and sympathy that occurs within the cell. And that's, for me, in a nutshell, what this is all really all about.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  And where, as to where we go with this in the future, I think the spirituality is a really big thing. People have to simply try it, like we said in the China study. You don't have to believe me, just try it.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  And that, that.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  And so what is it that they're trying?

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Well, just eating a whole food plant-based diet.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  Right, okay.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Yep. Without adding back. The oil, the fat and the sugar that they've become accustomed to. Just eating the whole food, plant-based diet, it's an awkward term.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  It's not exactly veganism or vegetarianism because they come up short, you know, in this. But nonetheless, they were going in the right direction. Uh, and I, we said, we now know, and thanks to my friend, Dr. Esselton and Dr. Ornish and some others who were-

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Dr. Furman, Dr. Gregor, Dr. Clapper.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially, but it's Esselton really.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  Esselton, right.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Esselton and Ornish. Um, and Dr. Clapper, yeah. Uh, there's, um, we, but, you know, what I got really enthused about their work, uh, as much as anything else, it confirmed what we had been doing in animals, reversing cancer, which is just about the furthest thing one could have in their mind, reversed it by nutritional means. I mean, that really kind of sealed the deal for me in many ways, that biologically speaking, we were turning cancer on and off by nutritional means, and we were doing it by multiple mechan- sort of holistic sort of approach.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  In that sense, and controlling genes in the process. That's all those so-called principles that I had worked on years ago, all of a sudden it come to light and when I, when Dr. Esselton called me after the New York Times article, and then I found out what he was doing.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. He's covering the heart, the heart disease aspect.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I said, geez, you're doing exactly, and he did his thing, or from his perspective, and it was really nice.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  We came to the same place.

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, it's beautifully orchestrated. I think I would be remiss if I didn't, uh, raise the issue of, um, the critiques of the China study, the, the sort of, um-

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  Dismissals that are out there and there's a lot of people that listen to this podcast that are coming from different kinds of nutritional protocols and you go online, it's very easy to be confused and there's conflicting opinions and it can kind of create a paralysis in terms of what to do and and like many things in life, something comes out that's new and revolutionary and it takes a while for it to come into the mainstream and then it's celebrated and human nature is to then, after five minutes later, let's see if we can pull this down and attack it and and there are certain contingents out there that that have proposed that the China study has been debunked. It's like become

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  this popular thing. Well, didn't you hear the China study has been debunked and and I'm interested in in in how you weather those kind of comments and what your response to that is.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Well, first off, I should point out those people who are writing this kind of information have no training in science, in the church of science. Number one, they know experience to do any kind of experimentation. They don't publish. They don't they're not being held accountable for what their words. They can say anything they want to say. In science, we developed some evidence and and if it's going to be worthy of consideration, we publish it and it's being reviewed by peers and we don't publish it if it doesn't pass that muster. And my work was was reviewed extensively. First off, in actually competing for funding,

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  only one of every six applications gets funding and we just continued to get funding for 27 years for that one project. I had a lot of success in getting funding and so I had a pretty good name, actually, you know, in the scientific world for doing good science. Then when you publish, and I have over three hundred and some publications that were peer reviewed, so I'm held accountable for my words, let me tell you, even by my critics. These people writing this stuff have nothing, none of that. That's a very important point to make. Good writers, great writers, but they don't have this background, they can say anything they want to say, and they say just totally untruthful things. But if we

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  come down, there's a couple of observations that the people who have all these Atkins like diets, if you will, and paleo diet and all, all those books, different names, different authors, different times, they're all basically the same thing. They're all talking about a low carb diet. That's become the mantra of the day. Well, since plants are the only kind of foods essentially that have carbohydrates, really serious amounts of carbohydrates in them, this is really has been an attack on the recommendation that we should be consuming vegetables, fruits, and grains as a means of health, from the very beginning. I mean, Atkins came out in seventy-three with their first book, that was following the McGovern

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  thing, that, you know, said eat less animal food. So the low carb diet, the better name for that, they should be called a high protein, high fat diet. And there is no evidence, I find no evidence in scientific literature anyplace else, that you can actually take that, that kind of diet, and treat and reverse disease. It's simply not a thing.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  That's the one thing that always brings me back to a whole food, plant-based diet, is that is the only protocol that I'm aware of that actually has had significant success reversing illness. And I don't think any other protocol can make that claim. And suddenly, you know, in recent years, it's become very vogue to talk about grass-fed meats, and putting butter in your coffee, and the supposed cholesterol myth, and fat is not your enemy, and all of these sorts of things. And I'm mystified, I'm mystified as to how this could suddenly be the case. I mean, every cardiologist I've spoken to, you know, every medical practitioner that I

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  respect does not adhere to these, to these ideas that are out there. And I don't know whether it's, there is some science to support something that I'm not understanding, or whether people just want to hear good news about their bad habits. But what is your perspective on that?

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Well, it's always possible, since they're not being held accountable for their own sort of interpretations, if you will. They're able to choose rather reductionist kinds of ideas and thread it together to make it sound like a halfway decent story at times, some of them can. And Good Calories, Bad Calories is one such book, where the writer's a good science writer, good journalist, but he pulls from the literature, you know, observations of various kinds, pulls it together, makes it sound like a reasonable story.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  So it's used in reductionist science in that sort of fashion. But the point is that, as I say, they cannot treat people with disease and get their, they can, some of these diets, of course, lead to some loss of body weight, and the big guy's pretty consistent, that's, that's one thing. And to some extent, the blood cholesterol's come down a bit, too.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  But in reality, with their passage of some time, most of them drop off the wagon, don't continue it, from some short-term, you know, adverse effects.

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  But in the long term, no one can tell me that they can find societies of large groups of people who consume a high protein, high fat diet for all their lives and seeing lower rates of cancer.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  But Dr. Campbell, don't you know about the Inuits?

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  The Inuits, of course.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  Inuits always seem to come up.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Well, the Inuits, of course, are the people who tend to die early, for starters. And the major cause of death is trauma. So they don't quite live into the period when they might otherwise might get problems, but there has been research showing in fact that their problems are not quite so severe as much given how much protein in fact they presumably consumed. It's not all what it's claimed to be.

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  Well, I suppose that they're they may be a genetic outlier also because they've adapted in a certain environment in isolation for many years. I mean, there could be, but it but it's such a statistically insignificant, I mean, it's such a small group of people to, but there seems to be like an inordinate amount of focus on that particular community as opposed to the planet at large.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Right, well, there's another group that's a better illustration, I think, and this is the Maasai in Africa who blood, meat and milk, right? That's their lives. It's often said they don't have any problems, their cholesterol levels are low and they don't have any heart disease and so forth and so on. Turns out the principal person who was first reporting this so-called low cholesterol levels, actually in 1973, when he was back and had a chance to examine 50 Maasai's who had died otherwise, he just wrote in his conclusion, all these men had atherosclerosis equal to that of old American men.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  So they actually do not in fact have the really low cholesterol levels, you know, don't have the effects of atherosclerosis. This is the man who first told, is often gets quoted, George Mann was his name, you know, as telling about the Maasai having these remarkable health advantages. But in 73, he published something quite the opposite. So to explain this in a sense, they actually are able to, apparently, they exercise just inordinate amounts of exercise, obviously, something like yourself. And so the exercise is a big place, a big role, and they actually are able to form

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  this collateral vascular network around some of these lesions possibly. And so they're able to. Survive and extend, you know, and do quite well in this for some period of time. They don't live, right, they don't live, again, to that age where we can really get good data on that point, but it's the story about the Maasai and those kinds of people, oftentimes you go back and really check to see what evidence is being used. This was sort of a citation of some early literature that, you know, somebody made some observations that weren't reliably examined. I certainly it's true with Maasai. And I had the first, the first Maasai student to come to the West to do a doctor, she came

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  to work with me at Cornell. I gave her some money to go back and her father had been a doctor, I guess a traditional doctor in the Maasai group. And so I asked her to go and collect some more information, you know, to see, because I wanted to know more of what they were really eating. And of course she came back and they were eating a lot more tubers and roots like that than had previously been reported. Then I happened to also be, finally got to know one of the Leekies, the wife of one of the Leekie's sons, who lived in the midst of that group for 20 years. And when I was talking to her about that, and that's where she says, they spent 20 years of her life in the Maasai tribal region.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  She said that their claim that they only eat meat, milk, and eggs is not true. Interesting. They do eat a lot, I mean, that's very clear. Right, but more gathering and agrarian. They do certainly do some gathering. Presumed, interesting. But that's the limit of my knowledge, I can't tell you too much more about that. Right. All right, well, we got to wrap this up, but I want you to tell us a little bit before we go about this new movie project that's underway. Yeah, the Four Seven Eyes has had great success. My oldest son has actually engaged the services of the director of Four Seven Eyes, Lee Folkeson.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  And also one of the co-producers of Four Seven Eyes, John Corey. Quite an experienced fellow himself. Right, I know John. Do you know John? Yeah, I'm very impressed with John and with Lee, and they both are excited about what's happening here. I can't tell too much at this point in time where... Actually, there's a, one event in particular that's gonna set it apart. It's happening right now while we're sitting here talking today.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  You're such a tease. You're teasing us.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  No, I'm not teasing you. I'm not teasing you. I just got an email this morning. I can't wait until tonight.

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  You're in a gag order.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  Cause I, I can't say. All I, all I can say is I'm enthusiastic for what this is turning out to be.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  Because force of an eye is sort of telling the public, here, here's some information that's kinda useful and which you might use in your lives and so forth and so on. It, it was, it became very popular. But it didn't really answer the question of why. Why hasn't this been, not been told before? This goes to that question.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  And it, it goes right to the heart of it. I can't imagine.

• 1:14:08Speaker 00

  Not been told in the sense of why, why, you know, why has it been so difficult to penetrate the American consciousness with these ideas?

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Yes, right, right. I mean, I've become really very interested in the history of this whole field of nutrition and cancer research in particular. And often ask myself, why is it taking so long?

• 1:14:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  You know, because we had this information. That's another whole story. We had a lot of this information back in the 1800s. It was brilliant. It was fantastic. For giving us the resources they had. I've got 11 books, in fact, written by a gentleman in the middle of 1800s who was a doctor until he was 41. He was a surgeon, a doctor. And when he was 41, got to be age 41, um, he became a vegetarian. And then he wrote a total of 11 books. Eventually was elected to the Irish Academy of Science. And he, these books are incredible. He's taught, he's warning against going down the road of using pharmaceuticals

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  in those days. He's suggesting that, uh, cancer, for example, is not a disease they thought it was. That is a local disease you could treat very specifically. It was a constitutional disease. So he's talking about a whole, but he was talking about holism.

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  And he was writing these extraordinarily interesting texts.

• 1:15:31Speaker 00

  But he wasn't able to connect with the public.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  He got forgotten.

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

  And so the idea is, I mean, I, I would presume that this gets into politics and money and all sorts of uh, private interests and things like that, that, that sort of work together to kind of. Prevent certain kinds of awareness from penetrating.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  It was during the advent of the industrial revolution.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  It really was. And so, a lot of things were being invented, like the microscope and re-refined and other kinds of instrumentation to, spectral photometric sort of instrumentation to be able to see things in concentrations and so forth and so on. Radioisotopes came into play in the, you know, late 1800s and were being used to track, you know, the course of nutrients and other things through the body. And, I mean, there were some very powerful instrumental methods were coming to the fore and people in science wanted to play with these things and it was fascinating stuff.

• 1:16:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  So they ended up looking at individual things, individual nutrients and all the rest.

• 1:16:39Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. So, the birth of reductionism.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  The birth of reductionism. I've got a lot, I've written a long paper, actually, almost a book on this whole history. And I found some really amazing statements made during the 1800s and early 1900s. And the founder of the Cancer Society, American Cancer Society, founded in 1913. He had already had a name for himself in the era of tuberculosis. He founded that society and advocated that one of the things this new society should do as far as cancer is concerned, pay some attention to nutrition.

• 1:17:15Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Which is totally off the chart.

• 1:17:17Speaker 00

  That's radical.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he, three years later, he's thrown off the board of the organization that he founded.

• 1:17:23Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  And in 1922, nine years later, they held the first national conference, international conference, actually. Two of the presenters there were tasked with the idea of basically really criticizing this founder.

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  Hmm. Interesting.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  This, this stuff has been going on for a long time.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  Right, right, right. And, and are these ideas that are going to be addressed in this documentary? Or it's a sort of current context?

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Not, not so much.

• 1:17:53Speaker 00

  Current version of that?

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  It's, it's, yeah, the current content is more derivative of that kind of thought.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wish I could tell you more, but we'll have to wait and see. It's supposed to be out in September. I don't want to say-

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  Oh, Sept- oh, really? That's, that's, that's, that's not that, that far off.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  No, it isn't. It's, most of it's filmed and we, but still, you know, it's uncertain end.

• 1:18:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  And I don't want to overstep my bounds and, you know, for that reason either, because the events of, I don't, I don't see how what's about to transpire today is, I don't think is, is going to hurt-

• 1:18:33Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Hurt the film at all, but one never knows. The world is an unpredictable place.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  That it is, and that is a perfect cliffhanger to conclude, conclude the conversation. So, we will look forward with bated breath to September. Do we don't, we don't know what the title is yet, though.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  It has a title. Uh, I'm not particularly fond of it, but my, myself, but others seem to like it for some reason.

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  [laughing]

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  It's called Plant Pure Revolution.

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  Plant Pure Revolution.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  I think it's a mouthful. I'm not sure. It sounds a little bit academic. To some people, it sounds a little bit too provocative, I guess. I don't know.

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  I was not prepared to say.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  Right, alright.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  I wish I could have a, if I had Howard Jacobson with me to come up with a title, I'm sure with all his metaphors and things like that, I'm sure he'd come up with a nice-

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  He could come up with something better.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  He'd come up with something-

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  Well, let's call it The Working Title. Maybe that will change by September, right?

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, whatever.

• 1:19:29Speaker 00

  Alright, well, Dr. Campbell, it was an honor and a, and a privilege to sit down with you. Thank you very much. You are an inspiration. You're a gift to humanity, and I appreciate your work tremendously, and it's been fantastic to be able to spend a little time with you on this course.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  I really thank you for this opportunity. It's fantastic. Your story is also so inspirational, it's beyond belief, I have to say. Number one, but number two, I just would like to add this little footnote. Um, you know, there was a famous study that was done in early nineteen hundreds by a physiology professor at Yale University?

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  On the question concerning the role of a plant-based diet, he didn't call it that. On athletic performance.

• 1:20:11Speaker 00

  No, I didn't know that.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  Amazing results, published in two books, one in I think nineteen oh five and the other nineteen oh seven, I believe. His name was Russell Chittenden, C-H-I-T-T-E-N-D-E-N. And he did it on himself first. He started using this kind of diet, felt better and all the usual. Then he got some other fellow professors to join him to do this and they felt better too. And then he worked on some young students who were coming into the ROTC program at Yale. Getting trained for the next six months physically and otherwise. So he put them on a plant-based diet essentially, not the diet they had come from home on, you know, high in animal protein.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Put them in, he put them through fifteen strength and endurance tests at the beginning in October of that year. He came back in April, same test again. You could see the numbers swoop up, all of them. It was impressive when they went on this diet. He got criticized by his fellow colleagues. That would work, you know, that's crazy. They improved because they were being trained. They had nothing to do with it. He says, fine. So he went out and got some, a couple of all-American athletes and really into...

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  They were already trained.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  Already trained, peak of their condition, as he called it. Their numbers were near the top. You know, they were already at that level. He put them on a plant-based diet and it just jumped way up.

• 1:21:35Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  That was published in, at that time and then...

• 1:21:38Speaker 00

  Can you still, I would love to read that.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can get that information for you.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would love to be able to.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  So you're a living proof of what, you know, he...

• 1:21:47Speaker 00

  Right, so what I'm saying is nothing new. It's been...

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want to say that.

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  Over a hundred years ago.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  You've taken it to a whole new, whole new level. But, yeah, I think that what you have done and some other, you know, obviously world-class athletes have come to know too, have just...

• 1:22:05Speaker 00

  There's some amazing athletes out there doing incredible things and in no small part due to your tireless work, so. It's just beginning. It's just beginning.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  Just beginning, I think so, I agree.

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  It's exciting times. I'm optimistic and I think that there's a lot of work ahead for myself and for you, but it's very encouraging to...

• 1:22:32Speaker 00

  See what's happening and to be, for example, on this boat and to have the experience of connecting with so many people that are having incredibly dramatic changes in their life by adopting this new perspective. And it's touching and, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a life work that It's fun. Is fun and, um, and meaningful. So, thank you. Thank you.

• 1:23:07Speaker 00

  All right, everybody. That's our show. I hope you enjoyed it. Again, if you want to check out the offerings of Dr. Campbell, go to richroll.com on the episode page for this episode. There'll be some hyperlinks in the show notes that will take you to all of his amazing work if you want to dig deeper and learn more. I appreciate you guys tuning in. I know you have lots of choices vying for your attention, lots of content out there, and it warms my heart that you would take time out of your busy day to listen to this podcast. It means a lot. And for those of you who want to support the mission, support the podcast, support the Plant Power Revolution, the best way to do that is to tell a friend

• 1:23:49Speaker 00

  about the show. That's it. The show's free. It will always be free. If you want to take it the extra step, the best way to do that is to use the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for your next Amazon purchase. Amazon will not charge you even a penny extra on your purchase, but they kick us some loose commission change and that helps us keep the lights on. It helps me pay my son Tyler to produce this show. By the way, he produces, writes, arranges not just the show, but all the music in the show and everything about it. So, give him a shout out in the comments. He's been doing a great job. So, yeah, the Amazon banner ad has really helped keep us afloat and I appreciate all you guys out there who

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  have been using it. It's fantastic. You can also donate to the show. You can subscribe weekly, monthly, or pay one time. Amount of your choice, if that feels right to you. And for those of you who have been doing that, thank you so much. Finally, you can leave a review on the iTunes page for the show, and that helps us out with the iTunes rankings and helps the profile of the show get out there a little bit broader. So, thank you for that. So, that's it. Want to get more plant-based? You can take Dr. Campbell's course on plant-based nutrition at E. Cornell. Again, a link on the show notes. Or you can take my course, which is

• 1:25:14Speaker 00

  The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. It's on MindBodyGreen.com. Three and a half hours of streaming, online content, video, and online community forum. Lots of downloadable tools and awesome stuff. We're proud of it. We like it. So, check that out. And of course, go to RichRoll.com for all your Plant Power provisions. We've got cool Plant Power t-shirts. We just started offering beanies and trucker hats that say Plant Power Revolution on them, so you can wear your affiliation proudly. And we've got some nutritional products up there, too. So, go check out all that stuff. And you can read my musings at RichRoll.com

• 1:25:55Speaker 00

  on my blog. Follow me on Twitter, @RichRoll. @RichRoll on Instagram as well, Facebook, all that stuff. You guys know what to do. So, that's it. I'm out of here. Thanks, everybody. I will see you next week with Dr. Campbell's comrade in arms, Howard Jacobson. And until then, live wide, live deep. Peace. Plants.