Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition - Hardcover

Campbell, T. Colin; Jacobson, Howard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1937856240 ISBN 13: 9781937856243

Verlag: BenBella Books, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

What happens when you eat an apple? The answer is vastly more complex than you imagine.

Every apple contains thousands of antioxidants whose names, beyond a few like vitamin C, are unfamiliar to us, and each of these powerful chemicals has the potential to play an important role in supporting our health. They impact thousands upon thousands of metabolic reactions inside the human body. But calculating the specific influence of each of these chemicals isn't nearly sufficient to explain the effect of the apple as a whole. Because almost every chemical can affect every other chemical, there is an almost infinite number of possible biological consequences.

And that's just from an apple.

Nutritional science, long stuck in a reductionist mindset, is at the cusp of a revolution. The traditional “gold standard" of nutrition research has been to study one chemical at a time in an attempt to determine its particular impact on the human body. These sorts of studies are helpful to food companies trying to prove there is a chemical in milk or pre-packaged dinners that is “good" for us, but they provide little insight into the complexity of what actually happens in our bodies or how those chemicals contribute to our health.

In The China Study, T. Colin Campbell (alongside his son, Thomas M. Campbell) revolutionized the way we think about our food with the evidence that a whole food, plant-based diet is the healthiest way to eat. Now, in Whole, he explains the science behind that evidence, the ways our current scientific paradigm ignores the fascinating complexity of the human body, and why, if we have such overwhelming evidence that everything we think we know about nutrition is wrong, our eating habits haven't changed.

Whole is an eye-opening, paradigm-changing journey through cutting-edge thinking on nutrition, a scientific tour de force with powerful implications for our health and for our world.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

For more than 40 years, T. Colin Campbell, PhD, has been at the forefront of nutrition research. His legacy, the China Study, is the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Dr. Campbell is the author of the bestselling book, The China Study, and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University. He has received more than 70 grant-years of peer-reviewed research funding and authored more than 300 research papers. The China Study was the culmination of a 20-year partnership of Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine.

Howard Jacobson, PhD, is an online marketing consultant, health educator, and ecological gardener from Durham, N.C. He earned a Masters of Public Health and Doctor of Health Studies degrees from Temple University, and a BA in History from Princeton. Howard cofounded VitruvianWay.com, an online marketing agency, and is a coauthor of Google AdWords For Dummies. When Howard is not chasing groundhogs away from blueberry bushes or wrestling with Google, he relaxes by playing Ultimate Frisbee and campfire songs from the 1960s. His current life goal is to turn the world into a giant food forest.

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WHOLE

Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

By T. COLIN CAMPBELL, HOWARD JACOBSON

BenBella Books, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 T. Colin Campbell
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-937856-24-3

Contents

Introduction...............................................................
xi
PART I ENSLAVED BY THE SYSTEM..............................................
Chapter 1 The Modern Health-Care Myth......................................
3
Chapter 2 The Whole Truth..................................................
14
Chapter 3 My Heretical Path................................................
26
PART II PARADIGM AS PRISON.................................................
Chapter 4 The Triumph of Reductionism......................................
45
Chapter 5 Reductionism Invades Nutrition...................................
58
Chapter 6 Reductionist Research............................................
75
Chapter 7 Reductionist Biology.............................................
88
Chapter 8 Genetics versus Nutrition, Part One..............................
107
Chapter 9 Genetics versus Nutrition, Part Two..............................
125
Chapter 10 Reductionist Medicine...........................................
140
Chapter 11 Reductionist Supplementation....................................
150
Chapter 12 Reductionist Social Policy......................................
164
PART III SUBTLE POWER AND ITS WIELDERS.....................................
Chapter 13 Understanding the System........................................
181
Chapter 14 Industry Exploitation and Control...............................
196
Chapter 15 Research and Profit.............................................
214
Chapter 16 Media Matters...................................................
231
Chapter 17 Government Misinformation.......................................
247
Chapter 18 Blinded by the Light Bringers...................................
262
PART IV FINAL THOUGHTS.....................................................
Chapter 19 Making Ourselves Whole..........................................
285
Acknowledgments............................................................
291
About the Authors..........................................................
293
Notes......................................................................
295
Index......................................................................
313

CHAPTER 1

The ModernHealth-Care Myth

He who cures a disease may be the skillfullest, buthe that prevents it is the safest physician.—THOMAS FULLER

What a great time to be alive! Modern medicine promises salvationfrom scourges that have plagued humanity since time began.Disease, infirmity, aging—all soon to be eradicated thanks toadvances in technology, genetics, pharmacology, and food science. Thecure for cancer is just around the corner. DNA splicing will replace our self-sabotagingor damaged genes with perfectly healthy ones. New wonderdrugs are discovered practically every week. And genetic modification offood, combined with advanced processing techniques, will soon be ableto turn a simple tomato, carrot, or cookie into a complete meal. Heck,maybe someday soon we won't have to eat at all—we can just swallow apill that contains every nutrient we need.

There's only one problem with that rosy picture—it's totally false.None of those lofty promises is anywhere close to being realized. We "racefor the cure" by pouring billions of dollars into dangerous and ineffectivetreatments. We seek new genes, as if the ones we've evolved over millionsof years are insufficient for our needs. We medicate ourselves with toxicconcoctions, a small number of which treat the disease, while the resttreat the harmful side effects of the primary drugs.

We talk about the health-care system in America, but that's a misnomer;what we really have is a disease-care system.

Fortunately, we have a far better, safer, and cheaper way of achievinggood health, one with only positive side effects. Furthermore, this approachprevents most of the diseases and conditions that afflict us before theyshow up, so we don't need to avail ourselves of the disease-care systemin the first place.

THE DISEASE-CARE SYSTEM

The United States spends more money per capita on "health" care thanany country on earth, yet when the quality of our health care is comparedwith other industrialized nations, we rank near the bottom.

As a country, we're quite sick. Despite our high rate of health expenditures,we're not any healthier. In fact, rates of many chronic diseases haveonly increased over time, and based on health biomarkers like obesity,diabetes, and hypertension, they may be headed for further increases.The prevalence of obese individuals increased from 13 percent of the U.S.population in 1962 to a staggering 34 percent in 2008. The U.S. Centersfor Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that the age-adjustedType 2 diabetes rate in the United States has more than doubled from 1980to 2010, from 2.5 percent to 6.9 percent of the population. Hypertension(high blood pressure) among American adults increased 30 percentbetween 1997 and 2009.

Drugs and surgical advances are keeping the death rates more or lessconstant despite the increased risk factors (except for diabetes, whosemortality rate has increased an astounding 29 percent in North Americafrom 2007 to 2010). But the data make it clear that none of our advancesin medicine deal with primary prevention, and none are making us fundamentallyhealthier. They aren't decreasing the death rate. And the pricewe're paying for these advances is steep.

For many years, the cost of medically prescribed drugs has beenincreasing at a rate faster than inflation. Think we're getting our money'sworth? Think again.

Side effects of those very same prescription drugs are the third leadingcause of death, behind heart disease and cancer. That's right! Prescriptiondrugs kill more people than traffic accidents. According to Dr. BarbaraStarfield, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in2000, "adverse effects of medications" (from drugs that were correctlyprescribed and taken) kill 106,000 people per year. And that doesn'tinclude accidental overdoses.

Add to that the 7,000 annual deaths from medication errors in hospitals,20,000 deaths from errors in hospitals not related to medications (likebotched surgeries and incorrectly programmed and monitored machines),80,000 deaths from hospital-caused infections, and 2,000 deaths per yearfrom unnecessary surgery, and the tire-screeching ambulance ride startsto look like the safest part of the whole hospital experience.

Yet when you ask the U.S. government about this, you're met withdeafening denial. Look at the CDC web page on the leading causes ofdeath shown in Figure 1-1.

Notice anything strange? Not a peep...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BenBella Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1937856240
• ISBN 13: 9781937856243
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland