Last weekend I was invited to a screening of the film Forks Over Knives. It is a film that I have been meaning to see for some time and I am very glad I saw it.  It advocates for a plant-based diet, citing multiple studies, one of which is the "Grand Prix of Epidemiology" - The China Study.

The China Study is a twenty-year effort conducted by Cornell University's Dr. Colin Campbell to study the eating habits and health of the Chinese people. 

So how does my viewing of this film apply to you and your heart?  

Dr. Campbell sets out to prove that people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease and the people who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. While I do advocate for increased plant consumption, I have uncovered an interesting twist in his data that has nothing to do with animal foods.

The China Study has had followers renouncing animal foods and taking up the vegan lifestyle since it was published in 2006. It has given birth to the general assumption that animal foods = ill health and plant foods = good health.

If you have been following my newsletters over the past years, you know that I spent many years going on and off a vegetarian diet - going vegan and even raw foods on several occasions. I taught vegan cooking classes and believed with all my might that eating animals was keeping me from glowing good health.

Until I wound up in a doctor's office and realized that my eating patterns had caused multiple deficiencies, thyroid disorder, massive inflammation and utter exhaustion. I had to seriously rethink my approach.  [An approach which has evolved and now has me eating some animal protein but no dairy and no wheat.]

What about all that data that Dr. Campbell had collected? It couldn't be wrong, could it?

No, of course not.  His data isn't "wrong", it just doesn't acknowledge head-on the presence of another diet-disease pattern that might have more relevance for us.

In my research on wheat in the American diet, I came upon the blog of a woman named Denise Minger, a data-crunching, former vegan who writes a blog at rawfoodsos.com. After months of extensive number crunching and analysis of the China Study data (which is available for anyone to analyze in the 894-page book, Diet, Lifestyle, and Mortality in China, 1990), Denise found something very interesting.

She found a strong correlation between wheat consumption and inflammation, heart attacks & coronary heart disease - an even stronger correlation than exists between animal products & cardiovascular disease.

Here is a snippet of her work, pulled from www.rawfoodsos.com:

"In the China Study data, most "Western" diseases (such as breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, and diabetes) are concentrated in areas that share some key characteristics: more industrial employment, less agricultural work, greater population density, and often higher levels of schooling. Folks here eat more processed starch and sugar, use more polyunsaturated vegetable oils, chug down more beer, smoke more manufactured cigarettes, and typically get less physical activity than their neighbors in pastoral communities.

"Most likely, these Western ailments aren't spawned from a single food or activity, but from a tragic mix of diet choices, lifestyle habits, and environmental factors. For problems like breast cancer and colon cancer and lung cancer, it's pretty easy to see what the matrix of risk-raisers are from looking at the data: It's the same combination of things spurring disease in Western nations.

"But oddly enough, this isn't the case for heart conditions. The factors shared by other Western illnesses are not, in most cases, associated with heart disease in this data set. 

"Unlike the other Western problems, heart disease isn't associated with eating more sugar, working in industry, drinking more alcohol, using polyunsaturated vegetable oils, or any of the other variables uniting the Western diseases and mirroring the traits common to industrialized countries.

"What's the only thing heart-disease-prone regions have in common with Westernized nations? That's right: consumption of high amounts of wheat flour."

Yup. Wheat flour. 

The data from The China Study shows that the greater the wheat flour consumption, the more likely the chance of death from heart disease. Even more concerning is the fact that there is an especially sharp increase in mortality at an intake of more than 400 grams (just under 1 lb.) per day. Also, The China Study shows the more wheat consumed, the higher the body weight and the higher the BMI.

Dr. Campbell had set out to prove that the consumption of animal foods causes chronic disease but his data also happened to show a connection between inflammation, cardiovascular disease and wheat consumption.

I bring you this information during National Heart Month as a message that not everything is always what it seems. Essentials can be overlooked. Even total rockstar PhD's like Dr. Colin Campbell advise that we should take his exceedingly solid body of information and experiment with our own bodies and our own lives.

Please take this information and use it however you think is best. Experiment with wheat, dairy and animal foods. 

What makes you feel best? 

What keeps you out of the doctor's office? 

That is what you should be eating.
 

Happy heart month,