Another look at the China Study.

Author's Note: T. Colin Campbell's highly acclaimed book, The China Study, was published in 2006. Campbell is widely acknowledged as a giant in the field of nutritional research. The China Study is an elegant, refreshingly readable synthesis of decades of research on the relationship between diet and the evolution of Western degenerative diseases. The title of the book refers to a specific mammoth study cited in the book that has been called "the Grand Prix of epidemiology." This research project looked at the relationship between the diets of people in 65 rural counties across China and at the incidence of various Western degenerative diseases in those populations. The results of many other highly regarded studies are also discussed in the book. The article below explores the underlying, hidden reasons why these studies all keep delivering the same clear dietary message.

In the spring of 1996, a friend recommended a book to me that addressed the subject of intentional thinking. It suggested that the reader sit down for a few minutes every morning and intend what he or she wished to experience that day. This was a completely novel idea to me, and I felt curious about experimenting with it. The next morning I decided to give it a try.

It was a Friday morning. I sat down and put out one intention: "I intend to have a communication from nature today." I didn't have the least idea what this might be like, having never received a communication from anything in the natural world before. But I'd always loved the idea of communicating with plants, animals, and birds, so this was the first thing that came to mind that morning.

Then I headed out the door for a full day at my office, seeing patients in my naturopathic practice. Absorbed in the world of herbal tinctures and homeopathic remedies, the brief intention I'd set forth that morning was soon forgotten. That evening, I went to a dance at The Palindrome, a community hall often used for dances and weddings, located in a pastoral area of our small town. Across the road from The Palindrome was an enormous tract of lovely, undeveloped land. A huge grassy field was home to several old and stately madrona trees, and a wide expanse of dense woods encircled the field at the far end. I had always loved this spot, and several times in the past had walked out to the biggest madrona tree there, a great-grandmother of a tree, and had danced little spontaneous jigs around it, singing to it and to the beauty of the land it inhabited--all the while hoping no one driving by would notice my peculiar behavior!

So, the Friday night dance was fun after a long day at work, the weekend was ahead of me, and I had completely forgotten the experimental intention I had done early that morning. The dance ended around eleven that night. Afterwards, I chatted with friends for a while and then began the slow drive out of the grassy parking area towards the road, following the long line of cars ahead of me. As I neared the road, I suddenly became overwhelmed by a very strong urge to walk into the big field and out to the grandmother tree. I remember thinking: "Now, it doesn't make sense to go wandering out into the field at this time of night. It's past 11:30, everyone's driving home, and you don't have a flashlight." But somehow reason failed to prevail that night, and I pulled my car over to the side of the road and began walking to the tree, feeling a little self-conscious.

As I walked on, the overwhelming pull to the tree began intermingling with a feeling of intense grief that began to engulf me. My rational self was very confused by this and wanted nothing to do with it. "There's nothing I'm sad about right now in my life. This doesn't make sense. Let's turn around." The feelings pouring through me were huge and felt like something much bigger than myself, though I couldn't understand where they would be coming from, if not from myself. My mind was trying to sort it all out and was having a predictably tough time achieving this. I made an uncharacteristic decision at this point and said to myself: "Let's just not try to figure this out right now. Just let it happen and see where it takes you." Tears of grief began streaming uncontrollably down my face. I was entirely consumed by this overpowering emotion and was nearing the grandmother tree, still feeling pulled to her. I sat down next to the tree and leaned my back against her strong, smooth orange-red trunk, giving way completely to the emotions flowing through me.

And then information started to flow into my mind. It didn't flow in a linear way. It came, rather, as a clear flood of "knowings" that I later was able to translate fairly accurately into linear language:

  The Earth is starving. Just as people are nourished by food given to
  them by the Earth, the Earth in turn is literally nourished by
  humanity's joyful celebration of nature. The heartfelt celebration and
  thanksgiving people give trees, flowers, bees, fertile soil, birds,
  rivers, and mountains--these offerings are a type of food. Fewer and
  fewer people on Earth are celebrating and honoring in this way. Very
  few people are feeding the Earth any more, and She is starving.

Very quickly, the intensity of the emotions began to recede. I sat there under the quiet night sky, totally stunned and shaken to my core. I had never experienced anything like this before in my life. I could not deny the authenticity of it or shove it into some back corner of myself and pretend it was just some bizarre and best-forgotten lapse of sanity. I don't know exactly what I'd been expecting in terms of a communication. I think I'd had some vague notion that if anything occurred at all it might be some small thing, like my cat John Bailey telling me he didn't really care for the way I brushed him. In any case, I most certainly wasn't expecting such an emotionally wrenching experience, nor was I expecting to be given a message of such profound global import.

After I regained enough composure to drive safely, I walked back to my car and slowly made my way back home, wondering all the way why in the world this had occurred and thinking about the enormous implications of what had been "downloaded." As I got ready for bed, still filled with awe by what had happened, I suddenly remembered my intention from that morning. For a second time that night, I was stunned. Clearly, my intention had not only been "heard," but it had been responded to as well, just before the day was over.

Ten years later, in November 2006, I was in the office of an acquaintance. Jim had a big stack of paperback books on one of his desks--all brand-new books and all copies of the same book: T. Colin Campbell's The China Study. As we were saying good-bye, he motioned to the stack of books and asked if I'd read the book. I hadn't. He asked me if I ate meat. "Oh, just occasionally." He strode over to the desk, picked up one of the books, and said, "Here, I give these away. You won't want to eat any meat again after you read this. It's a phenomenal book."

Well, having been in the naturopathic profession for over 25 years, I'd had countless people tell me about countless numbers of "phenomenal" supplements, diets, books, healers, etc. So, I thanked Jim, and the book sat on a shelf at home until May of the following year when I felt a sudden desire to take a look at it. And I soon realized that The China Study is indeed one of those truly phenomenal books: extremely well-written, well-organized, well-documented, and well-presented in a refreshingly straightforward, user-friendly manner. As many Townsend Letter readers undoubtedly know, The China Study, backed by mountains of solid research, makes an irrefutable case for adopting a plant-based, whole foods diet--if, that is, one wants to steer clear of what has become a plethora of alarmingly common Western degenerative diseases. I have no doubt at all that this is very sound dietary advice.

What I would like to address in this article is why eating animal products has been so adversely affecting our health--the "big why" that I believe is the underpinning of all the other "whys" that research has addressed: acid/base imbalance, hypercholesterolemia, lack of antioxidants in the diet, and so forth. This is a hypothesis, based not on scientific research, but rather primarily on communications from nature that I think provide a crucial missing link in the information presented in The China Study.

I began reading The China Study in early May of 2007, and I liked it straightaway. However, two days into reading, I began to feel that something significant was missing amongst all of the very convincing, well-executed research. I couldn't put my finger on what that missing thing was, but noted that this feeling persisted as I made my way through each of the following chapters. On day three into the book, I took a break from reading and headed out to some nearby woods with my two adventuresome dogs for our daily off-leash romp, along with a good friend and her dog. Fifteen minutes into the trails, my dogs had run off into the woods ahead of us, on what we assumed would be one of their countless chases after things-that-never-get-caught. But this time we were wrong. Suddenly, excited barking and yapping erupted ahead of us, and intermixed was also the sound of another creature snarling viciously and yowling, clearly cornered and outnumbered by the dogs. It was a horrid ruckus, sickening to hear, and my friend and I began running and yelling, trying to locate the melee in the midst of all the underbrush in the woods. Having grown up in the tidy, manicured world of California suburbs, I was not accustomed to the ugly sounds of an animal being torn apart by other animals, and I was distraught, as was my friend. By the time we found the dogs, they had already killed the big raccoon and were enthusiastically tugging at its body, thrilled with their adventure. My friend and I were upset and furious, yelling at them and yanking them none too gently off of the raccoon's mangled body.

As I drove home, I tried to reason with myself: "Linda, this is the way animals behave in the wild. This is instinct. Sure, it sounded awful and that was upsetting, but get a grip on yourself and accept things as they are." But I still felt shaken and off-center. I gloomily nursed thoughts that our pleasant little excursions into the woods would never again be the same. On the way home, I stopped at a small grocery store in search of comfort food. I knew just what I wanted. The warnings of The China Study went completely unheeded as I made a beeline to the freezer that is home to a variety of iced cream bars. And, yes, Hagen Daas was in stock! As I turned around, clutching my Swiss Almond Vanilla bar, I ran into Jonathan Collin, publisher of the Townsend Letter, someone I rarely see in town. We stopped and chatted a bit, and soon I was blurting out somewhat incoherently my recent Trauma-in-the-Woods story, and he, in turn, smilingly told me how his little West Highland White Terrier, Bella, loved to tree raccoons. It was a teeny bit comforting to hear that adorable little Bella also had killer instincts, but I couldn't really imagine all fifteen pounds of her ripping a raccoon apart as my 60-pound dogs had just done.

Back in the truck again, I began hearing a little voice within me saying: "You need to read that chapter on 'Predator and Prey.'" This referred to an animal communication book I'd begun reading two months prior and then put down in favor of some other book that had made bigger demands on my attention. I'd read the first few chapters in Animal Voices and read through the list of chapter titles in the table of contents. One of the very last chapters was "Predator and Prey," a chapter I hadn't explored because the book now lay somewhere in the midst of a pile of other such partially read books, all beckoning to me at once, a very familiar scenario in my life as a die-hard bibliophile.

The little voice did not leave me alone. "Read that chapter now," it commanded, with no little authority. So after I got home and cleaned off the dogs' battle wounds, I sat down with the book and turned to "Predator and Prey." This chapter, like the others in Animal Voices, weaves commentary by various animal communicators together with what animals said to them via telepathic communication. As I read through the chapter, I realized with great surprise that here, in a completely unexpected place, was the "significant missing thing" in The China Study.

Below you will find a summary of the chapter on predator and prey. Communications from various animals are all italicized. Regular type represents animal communicators' commentary. I have added bold type in a few places for emphasis.

  There are agreements that take place in predator/prey relationships.
  The predator literally asks the prey, usually when the prey is first
  sighted: "Noble being, will you offer yourself to me, for I am hungry
  and seeking sustenance?" The prey will reply, "I do offer myself to
  you, with blessings." This is rarely seen by humans at this point in
  time, and most humans have fallen away from and dishonored this
  contract that is implicit in spiritually healthy predator/prey
  relationships. If you truly understand these things, then you will not
  have judgment of how killing another for food is "bad."
    The problem is not that we eat the body of the animal or the plant
  for food. If humans would ask the animals to make the sacrifice of
  their bodies, the animals surely would. But to take without asking is
  stealing, and therefore the energy of the food is less nourishing and
  may even be harmful to the one eating it. Until we are honored for our
  gifts once more, and are given respectable living arrangements,
  certain diseases will be a danger to humans. Crate living with no
  exposure to nature and freedom destroys our immune system, and we pass
  this on to humans, along with feelings of fear, entrapment, despair
  and the like. When animals are fed antibiotics and hormones, and are
  kept in places where they can't even move, they are literally
  sometimes going crazy in their cages. By eating them, we ingest that
  energy. Free-range provides far more than just chemical-free
  nutrition: you also ingest freedom, joy, health, connection with the
  Earth, and healing properties of nature. This is a lesson to humans to
  wake up and pay attention. What you do to us all, you do to
  yourselves.

As I finished reading "Predator and Prey," I understood why I had been feeling that something of significance was missing from The China Study. Perhaps animal products have, in recent history, become deleterious to our health and well-being because they no longer contain the energies of love, joy, and connectedness to the earth. When we habitually ingest "dead meat," then we are habitually ingesting the energies of fear, loneliness, boredom, depression, and insanity, and eventually, we begin to resonate with them. These frequencies are not measurable by our scientists' instruments. As one book puts it: "The energy behind what you call matter is not detectable by your scientists' instruments, because they, too, are made of matter, and no instrument can detect frequencies higher than those from which it is made" (Stubbs, p.19). Must we wait until instruments are designed that can detect the frequencies of love, fear, depression, lack of spirit, joy, etc. before we let ourselves understand how profoundly affected we are by the "invisible" energy in the food we eat?

As Chief Seattle said over 100 years ago:

  For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to man. All things are
  connected. This we know ... Man did not weave the web of life, he is
  merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to
  himself.

In The China Study, Campbell cites research showing that people who suffer from schizophrenia often markedly improve on a vegetarian diet. John Robbins, in his landmark book Diet for a New America, notes that in today's large-scale farming practices "chickens are crammed into cages so tightly they can barely move and are driven insane" and that "pigs are crammed together so tightly that they go crazy and often bite each other's tails and rears, even killing each other." What happens to those of us who consume the meat of these animals driven insane by inhumane living conditions? What effect does this food have on our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being? As a retired farm veterinarian wrote: "More and more I find myself developing an aversion to the snow-balling trend toward total confinement of livestock ... If we regard this unnatural environment as acceptable, what does it portend for mankind itself?.... Will all of us become tail-biters without recognizing what we have become?" (Robbins, p. 91).

Diet for a New America was published 20 years ago. For anyone who may think that the "total confinement trend" and other unconscionable corporate farming practices are things of the past, please see www.factoryfarming.com for up-to-date, comprehensive coverage of this subject.

Anthropological studies have documented the hunting rituals common to many aboriginal tribes around the world. These people thrived on diets where animal meat was a staple without suffering from any of the degenerative diseases that plague Western civilization today. They offered prayers of thanksgiving to the animals they killed and celebrated the gift of their meat with dance and song and reverence. In this way, the animals were greatly honored. The animals also lived in the wild and therefore had high-quality lives of freedom. This meat, in turn, imparted health-giving, freedom-loving qualities to those who ate it. (See The Weston Price Foundation at www.westonaprice.org for information about Weston Price's invaluable research on indigenous people's diet and health before and after adoption of typical Western dietary habits. See also Price's classic work on this subject: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.)

It is important to know where our food comes from. As most of us by now know, we cannot blindly trust that just because something is labeled "organic" or "natural" that is was raised in conditions we would find acceptable. The 2006 Horizon Organics (see Organic Consumers Association citation below) and 2007 Aurora Organic Dairy scandals bear this out. These companies market organic milk to many large-scale groceries nation-wide. Recently, it was discovered that much of the milk they market is taken from cows raised in inhumane, factory-farm conditions where they are kept in intensive confinement. "After personally inspecting some of Aurora's dairies in Texas and Colorado, we found 98% of their cattle in feedlots instead of grazing on pasture as the law requires," stated Mark Kastel, Cornucopia's senior farm policy analyst. "The good news for consumers is that in our survey of organic dairy brands, a full 90% of namebrand products received very high ratings in our scorecard that critiqued the environmental and animal husbandry practices used in sourcing the organic milk for the dairy products." (See Cornucopia citation below.)

The argument I am making extends beyond the lives of our animal companions. What of wheat, corn, soy, and other plant crops that have been monocropped, treated without love and appreciation, genetically modified, and made Roundup[TM]-ready? Love is the glue that holds all creation in form and harmony. What happens to us when the very food we eat is devoid of the energy of love? In general, most plants grown for food still enjoy a much higher quality of life than factory-farmed animals do, even if they are unappreciated. I think this is why study after study shows that vegetarians have a much lower rate of chronic degenerative disease than carnivores.

We live in a miraculous web of interconnectedness. As the madrona tree told me over a decade ago: the Earth starves if we fail to give Her our genuine gratitude, appreciation, and joy, for this is the way we feed Her. And we starve if the food we eat is devoid of love. This is not a starvation for calories. Rather, it is a starvation of the spirit, and the long list of Western degenerative diseases chronicled in The China Study are symptoms of starvation of the spirit. Conversely, when we make time to celebrate Earth and all our relations, when we honor the animals and plants we eat and raise them humanely, then all of us in the web are well-nourished, and all of us thrive.

References

Brunke D. Animal Voices: Telepathic Communication in the Web of Life. Rochester, VT: Bear & Company; 2002.

Campbell T. The China Study. Dallas: Benbella Books; 2006.

Campbell, Colin T. The China Study. Available at: www.thechinastudy.com. Accessed October 29, 2007.

Cornucopia Institute. USDA cracking down on "organic" factory-farming. Available at: www.cornucopia.org/index.php/category/news/page/3/. Accessed October 29, 2007.

Farm Sanctuary. Comprehensive coverage of factory farming issues. Available at: www.factoryfarming.com. Accessed October 29, 2007.

Price W. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects. New Canaan, CT: Keats Publishing, Inc; 1989. (First published in 1945 by the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.)

Organic Consumers Association. Consumer co-ops start to boycott Horizon Organic Products. Available at: www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_400.cfm. Accessed October 29, 2007.

Roberts E, Amidon E, eds. Earth Prayers: From Around the World, 365 Prayers, Poems and Invocations for Honoring the Earth. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco; 1991.

Robbins J. Diet for a New America. Walpole, NH: Stillpoint Publishing; 1987.

Stubbs T. An Ascension Handbook. Livermore, CA: Oughten House Publications; 1993.

Weston A. Price Foundation. Traditional diets. Available at: http://www.westonaprice.org/traditional_diets/index.html. Accessed October 25, 2007.

by Linda Showler, ND (retired)

Linda graduated from Bastyr University in 1985 as a naturopathic doctor. She had a holistic family medical practice for 18 years and specialized in herbal medicine, homeopathy, and women's health car Linda is currently devoting time to land preservation project in Port Townsend, Washington and is also writing a book on work she developed in her practice on the significant impact that chemical, drug, and radiation miasms have on peoples' health in modern times. Articles she has written on this topic have been published in the Townsend Letter and in Simillimum, the journal of the Homeopathic Academy of Naturopathic Physicians.

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RELATED ARTICLE: How to Bring More Balance into Your Eating Habits

1. Take the time to familiarize yourself with local farmers. If you like the way they treat their animals raised for food and/or the way they treat their crops (no pesticides, etc.), then buy your food from them. Food sold at local farmers' markets or local CSAs will be more likely to be raised humanely. You can also explore websites, such as www.countrynaturalbeef.com, and can find other similar sites by doing an Internet search for "grass-fed beef."

2. There's no better way to track how your food was raised than to grow it yourself with love and respect. It's amazing how much food can be grown even in a very small backyard plot of earth.

3. Experiment with learning how to sense the energy in foods by holding your hands near them or by touching them. How does your body let you know that a particular food transmits the energies of joy and freedom or the energies of fear and entrapment?

4. One very simple way to honor the plants and animals we eat is to cultivate the habit of giving thanks before we have a meal. It is a wonderful practice to pause and give heartfelt thanks for our food before we eat it. There are so many inspiring prayers of gratitude for the food we eat! One I like in particular goes something like this: "Thank you every being who went into the making of this food, from the tiniest bacteria in the soil, out to our sun and the light beyond the sun." If I am not pressed for time, sometimes I will thank all the beings I can think of. For example, if I'm eating an apple I might say: "Thank you waters of the earth, thank you honeybees and all you pollinators, thank you soil and you, little earthworms. Thank you wind and microbes and apple trees. Thank you Food Co-op, and thank you organic farmers. I thank you plant devas and nature spirits. I honor you, sun of this Earth, for your light that gives life to us all. Thank you, Mother Earth--thank you for giving us all health, well-being, and life." It feels good to do this, and I've noticed that it helps me on a daily basis remember and feel how connected I am to the vast, sacred web of life.

RELATED ARTICLE: We Give Away Our Thanks

by Dolores La Chapelle (from Earth Prayers)

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We give-away our thanks to the earth which gives us our home.

We give-away our thanks to the rivers and lakes which give-away their water.

We give-away our thanks to the trees which give-away fruit and nuts.

We give-away our thanks to the wind which brings rain to water the plants.

We give-away our thanks to the sun who gives-away warmth and light.

All beings on earth: the trees, the animals, the wind and the rivers give-away to one another so all is in balance.

We give-away our promise to begin to learn how to stay in balance with all the earth.