The China Study

I have very recently been loaned a copy of The China Study and am so impressed that I have ordered my own copy. In essence, this is a very detailed and scientific investigation into the effect of diet and nutrition on disease, not specifically cancer, though cancer features quite prominently in the investigation. It is very well written and easy to read

The reason that this book is called The China Study is that the bulk of the research on people and their diet and their diseases was conducted in China. The advantage of China is that the vast majority of the population is of the same ethnicity and that it is a vast country across which diet and lifestyles vary. That removes questions of whether different findings relate to ethnicity, as would be the case if comparing one country with another, and it still enables the study of different outcomes from different diets.

The book was first published in 2004, but I am reading the later version, updated in 2016 and as shown in the illustration above.

Content

The book covers more than the China Study – it is essentially a very interesting, and I find exciting, history of the development of research into the connection between diet and disease, primarily the authors’ own experience and experimentation, but also the work of others. The author, T. Colin Campbell was director of the China Study, which was a collaborative program with American, Chinese and British researchers.

As well as the observation of human diet and disease, there is also reference to animal studies which are more controlled, but not necessarily applicable to humans. The applicability to humans is confirmed by the population studies.

What is quite dramatic in the animal studies is the way cancer growth (my main concern!) is turned on and off by changes in diet. That of course cannot ethically be conducted on humans, but what the China study shows is that the diet differences between different Chinese communities correlate with disease or health in the same way as the animal studies.

The diseases other than Cancer that are studied are Heart Disease, Obesity, Diabetes, Autoimmune Diseases and a few others. My main concern is Kidney Cancer, because that is where mine originated. Unfortunately it does not get a mention because it is not as common as many others. Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that the same dietary advice applies.

The authors are American and there are a lot of comparisons of the prevalence of disease in the United States and China. America comes off quite badly, but it isn’t just America – there are other countries with prevalent diet-related diseases. Some reasons are geographic, some cultural and some relating to affluence.

Why Don’t We Know About This?

That really was my first question. Here we have a well-researched study into diet and disease – both the management and avoidance of disease – and we are not hearing about it unless we are motivated to do our own research or get lucky in hearing about these things through the grapevine. In my own case, I was aware of some of the dietary findings, but not about this book and the science behind it.

To be fair, I did check the websites of Cancer Research UK, The British Heart Foundation and Diabetes UK, and they do include some dietary advice. Certainly this advice is not too far removed from the findings of The China Study, but it does not go the whole way and does include things that the China study indicates are probably undesirable.

We do expect the medical profession to keep up to date with all the research that affects their specialism. As far as diet goes, I don’t know whether they are not aware of works like The China Study, whether they don’t accept it or whether they are reluctant to suggest anything outside the accepted treatments of whatever disease they are dealing with.

In my own case, when I first consulted an oncologist, I did tell him that I was considering the ketogenic diet, having read some research that indicated it might be beneficial. Instead of telling me that was a bad idea (which I subsequently discovered to be the case), I was only told that it was a hard diet to follow and that best was a balanced diet. A balanced diet wasn’t defined, but I presume they would accept what was on the Cancer Research UK website as meeting the necessary criteria.

Another factor of course is that the medical profession are probably not involved until we have a disease that needs medical attention. They are in the business of fixing problems rather that preventing them in the first place. The difficulty with something like cancer is that it is likely the result of years of environmental and dietary abuse of our bodies, and curing it is a lot harder than living a healthy lifestyle that prevents it. A doctor cannot say that this diet or that diet will make it go away, or even effectively supplement the accepted therapies for cancer. What they can do is prescribe surgery and/or radiation and/or chemo where there is an established track record of these therapies – with the knowledge that they are not effective in every case, that some cancers won’t go away and others will cone back.

Conclusion

I am not qualified to repeat the findings of The China Study with any sort of suggestion that it will make your condition any better. I can only suggest that you read it for yourself and make up your own mind whether this is for you. You should feel free too discuss it with your oncologist. For myself, I had already adopted a diet that is quite well-aligned with the recommendations of The China Study and my recent scan results were quite encouraging. At the same time as amending my diet, I have continued my prescribed therapy of Everolimus and Lenvatinib and will continue to do so.

Addendum

I have done a bit more investigation since writing this article. The results are in this later post on Kidney Cancer Diet. What I learned is that detailed statistical analysis indicates that the conclusions of The China Study are not as well supported as they claim. So although there is some evidence that the conclusions might be broadly correct, it is not proof that they are. My later post discusses some of the other cancer diets that organisations and doctors are recommending, including the recommendations of Kidney Cancer UK and Cancer Research UK. I think there are some good guidelines, but ultimately you have to find something that works for you. A mostly vegan diet seems to be working for me at the moment, but if scan results show it is not working, then I will modify it in line with any more research that I do.