Why I Have a Problem with Vegetarianism (Part I: The China Study, Animal Protein, & Cancer)

I could list ad nauseum a number of proliferate dietary myths, misconceptions, and falsities.  Few, however, compare to the meta-fallacy of vegetarianism.

I'll be blunt.  I think veganism/vegetarianism is a poor lifestyle choice, period.

For that matter, I consider any dietary path that requires strict attention to supplementation (by necessity) to be inherently inferior.

I'm not implying, here, that all vegetarian diets are bad per se (the people who have success with vegetarianism know how to supplement their diets properly in order to maintain their health).  I'm merely stating that, if you aren't careful, going vegan/vegetarian can lead to a host of maladies; many of which can be easily avoided by keeping animal products in your diet.

So, in this series of posts I'm going to cover a number of issues with vegetarianism.  Additionally, I'll cover several mistaken conceptions people commonly have regarding animal products.

Let's dig in!

Problems with The China Study - Animal Protein Causes Cancer?

For those unaware, The China Study is a book written by one T. Colin Campbell.  In it, Campbell lays out a "scientific" argument against high protein-animal product based diets.  He, in turn, espouses a low protein-vegetarian diet, basing his claims on research that indicates a causal relationship between animal protein, dietary cholesterol, and high levels of dietary fat with cancer and other sorts of deadly diseases.

Where to Begin?

Let me start off my critique of Campbell's work with a quote from Anthony Colpo (independent researcher, physical conditioning specialist, and author of The Fat Loss Bible and The Great Cholesterol Con) - 

I have read a lot of truly awful health and diet books in my time, but without question, one of the very worst was The China Study by T. Colin Campbell. Never have I read a book so audaciously misleading, one whose author pontificates so vigorously about the importance of the scientific method but then unabashedly proceeds to write page after page of scientifically untenable garbage (1).

Colpo makes some indicting claims here, but are they justified?  What does Colpo mean when he refers to Campbell's work as "scientifically untenable garbage"?  Chris Masterjohn may have an answer -

Campbell [in his book] tells the story like this.  In 1965, he took a faculty position at Virginia Tech, then still an advocate of animal protein as good, nourishing American fare.  In 1967, he accepted an invitation from a department head at that university to travel to the Phillipines with the task of alleviating childhood malnutrition and making sure peanuts could provide good protein without the potential harms of aflatoxin, a carcinogenic mold toxin with which peanuts are often contaminated. 

A shocking revelation then came in two-fold form: first an epidemiological study suggested that liver cancer was rampant among Filipino children and that the “best-fed” rather than the malnourished children were the ones most ravaged by the disease; then, in 1968, ”a research paper from India surfaced in an obscure medical journal” showing that aflatoxin only produced liver cancer in rats when they were fed high levels of casein, a milk protein.  Campbell was surprised and skeptical, but he attempted to replicate these findings, and thus was born his two-decade research program showing that animal protein, but not plant protein, was the single most important trigger that turns cancer “on” like a light switch.

Campbell never tells us, however, that these Indian researchers actually published this paper as part of a two-paper set, one showing that low-casein diets make aflatoxin much more acutely toxic to rats (1), and the other showing that these same diets make aflatoxin much less carcinogenic (2).

In the very paper (2) that Campbell cites as “a revelation to die for,” showing that a high-protein diet turns the cancer switch to the “on” position, the low-protein diet proved lethal to the animals.  The investigators gave rats a small dose of aflatoxin every day for six months and fed them either a 5 percent casein or 20 percent casein diet.  The experiment carried on for two years, in fact, but they stopped administering aflatoxin at six months for the simple reason that half the animals on the low-protein diet had died.  They had typical symptoms of aflatoxin toxicity including liver necrosis (cell death), proliferation of bile duct tissue, and fatty liver. 

All the animals receiving 20 percent casein, on the other hand, were still alive at that point.  For the remainder of the two years [rats are lucky if they live to be 2 years old], the rats receiving 20 percent casein continued to live longer, but many of them developed liver cancer or pre-cancerous changes, while none of the rats fed 5 percent casein developed liver cancer (2).

So....according to the research Campbell elucidates, the only reason a higher protein diet may lead to cancer is because it will allow you to live long enough to get cancer.  Thus, if you want to avoid getting cancer, you should eat a low protein diet so you won't live to see the day that you do get cancer!

What I find most interesting about Campbell's methodology is the lack of nuance.  First off, this study should have been used to assuage people from eating foods containing aflatoxin (i.e. peanuts), not to convince them that they should avoid high protein diets per se.  Moreover, Campbell, epistemologically speaking, could only (at least potentially) have used this research to indict casein as a source of protein.  Admittedly, casein has been associated with a number of autoimmune/cancerous diseases.  However, not all animal sources of protein are casein.  Whey, for example, is an animal protein (one found in milk in addition to casein) that has been shown to have anti-carcinogenic properties.  Rather than pay heed to such a discrepancy with his thesis, however, Campbell asserts in his book that all sources of animal protein are carcinogenic and causative of disease (this is quite the leap in logic given what little data he brings forth).

I think Denise Minger says it best -

As ample literature indicates, other forms of animal protein—particularly whey, another component of milk—may have strong anti-cancer properties. Some studies have examined the effect of whey and casein, side-by-side, on tumor growth and cancer, showing in nearly all cases that these two proteins have dramatically different effects on tumorigenesis (with whey being protective). A study Campbell helped conduct with one of his grad students in the 1980s showed that the cancer-promoting abilities of fish protein depended on what type of fat is consumed alongside it. The relationship between animal protein and cancer is obviously complex, situationally dependent, and bound with other substances found in animal foods—making it impossible extrapolate anything universal from a link between isolated casein and cancer (3).

 Minger further indicates in a separate critique of The China Study -

I propose that Campbell’s hypothesis is not altogether wrong but, more accurately, incomplete. While he has skillfully identified the importance of whole, unprocessed foods in achieving and maintaining health, his focus on wedding animal products with disease has come at the expense of exploring—or even acknowledging—the presence of other diet-disease patterns that may be stronger, more relevant, and ultimately more imperative for public health and nutritional research [such as grain products (Read This), hydrogenated seed and vegetable oils (This), an imbalanced ratio of omega 6-omega 3 fatty acids (This), the over-consumption and over abundance of hyper-rewarding/nutrient deficient foods (and This), etc.] (4).

Looking at the Big Picture

There's certainly more to come in this series (so much to come in fact!), but for now, let's focus on the take home point for today:  We should avoid a reductionist perspective, one which leads us to make unwarranted categorical statements (yes, even my somewhat ignorant rant at the beginning of this post) that ignore the emergent qualities inherent in any given complex system.  Thus, the statement that animal protein is, in and of itself, causative of cancer is epistemologically unfounded, and, moreover, it is blatantly wrong if we consider the fact that whey protein (an animal source of protein) has anti-cancer properties.

Health is not something that we can reduce to any one or small number of factors; rather, it is an emergent system, that being something which is greater than the sum of its parts.

Nevertheless, I still believe there is ample evidence to suggest that a diet lacking in animal sources of nutrition is a more or less unhealthy (or at least sub par) way to go about eating.

So stay tuned for my next post, wherein I will offer a critique of yet another unfounded claim from The China Study.

After that, I'll go on to cover such issues as nutrient deficiencies, and misconceptions about the nutritive value of plants vs. animals (spoiler alert:  diets that consist of just plants or just dead animals are inferior to a diet which contains ample amounts of both plants and dead animals).