Whole (Book)

[Dr Robyn]

Whole by Dr T Colin Campbell

As is the case with Dr Campbell’s other books, this one is academically dense. But, the information in it is spot on, well researched and well referenced. If you want to have a good understanding of why the whole-food plant-based lifestyle has been found to be the optimal diet for human health and nutrition, this book will provide that. These notes/quotes are the things I took away as interesting and worth noting. They are by no means a full summary of the ideas in the book.

Who is profiting from our collective ignorance?

“We don’t have a health care system. We have a disease care system.”

None of the medical advances are decreasing the death rate

Prescription drugs kill more people than traffic accidents. Number three behind heart disease and cancer.

106,000 deaths a year from prescription drugs prescribed and taken correctly (this is shocking to me)

The more we spend on disease, the sicker we get

What you eat every day is a far greater factor in your health and well-being than any medical breath through will be

Eating whole-food plant-based only has positive side effects (side note – pharmaceutical companies call them “confounding variables”)

Greater protein = greater free radicals

Why don’t humans make their own antioxidants? Because we evolved getting them from plants.

Your taste buds won’t change if you aren’t 100% whole-food plant-based (WFPB) (side note – I don’t know that I agree with this completely. Because we were still having the occasional burger or nachos and found that they just didn’t taste good any longer. We ended up 100% WFPB because the “cheat” foods we were eating were no enjoyable to eat.)

Just because someone is funny and articulate doesn’t make them right

In our bodies everything is connected. There are always unintended effects when you “monkey” around with things

Dr Robyn question: If triglycerides shoot up after eating a fatty meal, how is measuring them at any one moment useful? Also – if your body releases fat from fat cells into the blood as fuel when you are fasting, is it surprising that they would be high when you do a fasting blood test? (after doing additional research I have learned that fasting does raise triglycerides)

It’s not “fair” to compare drugs to WFPB because prescription drugs are meant to treat the symptoms while WFPB cures the disease. It’s not a fair fight

Prescription drugs are great for emergencies

Doctors are typically suspicious of anything that treats more than one thing. That WFPB is just good overall raises eyebrows

American Ginseng

What if all disease has one main cause – poor nutrition?

It’s more profitable to treat diseases like they are all different. But they really aren’t. They are all a malfunction of the system.

They are all the body not working at its optimal level

Good nutrition deals with the root cause of disease

Meds – lesson one symptom while increasing side effects with no hope of curing or helping the person live longer (antibiotics that kill infection are a difference conversation)

Then you need more meds to deal with the side effects

We shouldn’t be just managing a disease state when there is a way to cure the disease

“Healthy eating” doesn’t mean anything (side note – I will often ask people “what does that mean?” when they tell me they eat healthy)

Research shows that WFPB cures/treats better than any medication

Diet: unsustainable healthy-ish spurts of eating that only lead to yo-yoing

Fuel your body and it will cure itself

Why is having our head in the sand about nutrition the norm?

Big industry – go where the money is. It is NOT in your health and longevity

Science – Greed. Small mindedness. Bury the truth for money

How does the “science” you believe get funded? The answer may be killing you

You can learn a lot about a paradigm from the outside. Like a fish has no idea what water is. The human diet has the same issue. We are all so buried in it we can’t see the truth.

“I don’t care if you have evidence. I like the falsehood I believe.”

Outlier observations are seen as mistakes/flukes and are deleted (science fraud)

You know there is a problem when people stop discussing the evidence and start slinging personal insults (I, Dr Robyn, have been called dumb, stupid and ugly for sharing this information)

There is a DEEPLY held belief that animal protein is good for us.

But it turns out animal protein is bad for humans

Science should be about discovering the truth. But it’s not. It’s business. Which makes it money driven

1839 – protein discovered

Funded by NIH

People have strong feelings about their food. They will discredit and ignore even the best studies that show it’s killing them

Being healthy is not luck. It’s having knowledge about nutrition

Downside of eating healthy – none

Cancer growth is controlled more by nutrition than genes or environment

Why are the boundaries around nutrition so stark? Money and jobs

Rural China has an average cholesterol in the 88-165 range

We need a paradigm shift (change our long-standing beliefs)

Reductionism – researches don’t talk to each other. They all think they have the whole answer even though they are only looking at a very small piece of the problem.

No complex system can be known in its entirety by reductionism

So many boundaries we believe exist are just made up. Yes, the liver is a whole thing. It has boundaries. BUT it is PART of the body.

We need less dogma and more open-mindedness

Why is food and nutrition relegated to the “style” section of newspapers and websites lite it’s not important?

What does “nutrition” actually mean? (went to dictionary.com and this is what is said:
the act or process of nourishing or of being nourished.
the science or study of, or a course of study in, nutrition, especially of humans.
the process by which organisms take in and utilize food material.)

We can’t talk about each nutrient on its own without the context for health for the whole body and the whole package (food) that nutrient came in

Nutrients are not food!

Too much granular info about nutrients keeps us majoring in minor things

We think if we carefully track our intake we will “control” the output

Intake does not equal bio-availability

The body uses what it needs, absorbing sometimes and not others

Amount of a nutrient used is not linear. Taking a super dose is not helpful

You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps

Reductionist research creates reductionist causality while complexly ignoring the messy complexity of reality

You don’t need to isolate single agents to see and understand the result. In fact to try is futile.

We need wholism. Spelled with the ‘w’ to make it clear we are talking about whole foods and the whole body not to be confused with holistic which has a “bad” name for being woo-woo

MFO – can kill or grow cancer

Health isn’t something you have to search out and pin down. Your body will do it on its own if you feed it right

Genetic Medicine is the ultimate reductionist fantasy. It focuses on DNA (set state) with no room for the fuzziness or randomness this is the truth of the human condition

It is impossible to banish unpredictability. We need to let the body do its thing. Not try to reduce it to one nutrient.

The limiting factor to improving human health is NOT a lack of data!

Human DNA is not computer software. It can tell you what MAY happen but not if, how or when. And maybe not at all

DNA is too complex Genes are not fixed

The most complex machine, computer or math equation pales in comparison to molecular genetics
25000 genes

One gene does not equal one protein. They can work together or not. It is too complex for us to understand.

All your cells have the same DNA but not every cell does the same thing. Liver cells vs brain cells. Same DNA. Different job. Different needs.

Scientists like to study one thing doing one thing. But that is not at all how it happens in the body.

Add in environment, mood, behavior, etc, etc and it becomes too complex to even think about

Nutrients don’t act alone. They work together with the whole plant and the body that ingests them

Commitment and responsibility

Indoctrination and subsidization

The media is punished for reporting the truth about animal products by industry removing advertising.

Scientists are not selfless and Big Pharma certainly isn’t – they have shareholders.

It is much easier to be critical than right

Much of what we are fed as “science” is actually technology

Science is the pursuit of the truth and the willingness to be proved wrong

Technology is the pursuit of a specific answer and money

The only things that are studied are those that can provide a return on investment – leading to fraud

Dropping data based on “gut feelings” (ie prejudice for or against a finding).

Pretending bad research that agrees with what they want is good research

Genetics controls the conversation but that is only because they get more of the funding

Gen therapy is more interesting than nutrition

Industry – turn questionable findings into money as soon as possible

Narrowly focused short-term generalized to broad long-term results

Unthinking respect for authority to the detriment of health

Consumers of info should make informed decisions. However, that is hard to do when you don’t actually get the info needed to decide.

If it hasn’t gone through peer review it shouldn’t be used as “proof” for anything

Lay people don’t realize they are lay people – elected officials included

Big Pharma funds medical journals with ads and reprinting articles. Of course, only those articles that agree with what they want it to say. Journals don’t bite the hand that feeds them (publication bias)

Everything is going to kill you so you might as well not worry about it – that is what we get from the media

So much noise lets bad ideas sneak through and omits inconvenient data.

Unbiased = reporting both sides good and bad

Journalists just repeat what the industry tells them. They act like they know what they are talking about and we believe them.

Mislead by omission – talk about drugs but say nothing about nutrition give the impression that nutrition is not important.

We have the best government money can buy (Great for industry. Not very good for the people)

OpenSecrets.org

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