>"The above analysis is trivially simple. Just data preprocessing simple correlations and filtering, using the most high-level overview the data allows for regarding food intake and health. The possible effect of different foods on longevity. No massaging of the data, no exposure to birthday paradox spuriousness, no statistical tricks, questionable adjustments for, etc"<p>There is also no controlling for anything! It seems a no-brainer that higher "Saturated Fat" and "Animal Protein" intakes correlate with higher income/access to modern health care infrastructure. Which means the author is really measuring an underlying latent "prosperity" variable. The author almost groks it with:<p>>"The correlations speak for themselves, the top X correlations for longevity are relatively strongly correlated amongst themselves. It is likely that multiple of these columns are indeed major contributors to longevity, yet given the inter-food correlations, it is quite impossible to isolate these from the variables that are just along for the ride."<p>Once the author controls for the prosperity that is the causal for all the correlated "dependent" variables, it might turn out that a Vegan diet is better than a non-Vegan diet. Or it might not. But this piece adds no value to the conversation, IMHO.<p>*As lspears points out, even worse is the wrong endpoint. Prob of making it to 80 != lower chance of death from Western diseases (heart attack/cancer).
Could someone quote from the book the claim on longevity or "All Cause Mortality" that this post is refuting?<p>The book is primarily about correlating the Western diet and animal protein with some western diseases.<p>There is no data here about the central claims of the book.<p>I read the book and don't remember the specific claims about longevity. I wouldn't be surprised if he found a correlation with longevity, though.<p>The US NIH found that Seventh-Day Adventists tend to live 4-10 years longer than the general population on a primarily vegetarian diet.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_Church#Health_and_diet" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_Church#H...</a><p>The large scale "Nurses Study" and the "Health Professionals Follow-up Study" also correlated plant-based diets with decreased risk of death.<p><a href="https://www.mygenefood.com/plant-based-diet-longevity/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mygenefood.com/plant-based-diet-longevity/</a><p>Also important, plant-rich diets are one of the top solutions for climate change ( <a href="https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank" rel="nofollow">https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank</a> ). That's another great reason to scale back animal protein consumption.
Denise Minger thoroughly critiques T. Colin Campbell's (seemingly incompetent) interpretation of the data in this study.<p><a href="https://deniseminger.com/the-china-study/" rel="nofollow">https://deniseminger.com/the-china-study/</a><p>EDIT: TCC's reply:
<a href="http://www.vegsource.com/news/2010/07/china-study-author-colin-campbell-slaps-down-critic-denise-minger.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.vegsource.com/news/2010/07/china-study-author-col...</a>
The author is missing an important point: dietary sources of cholesterol are from animal byproducts only.<p>> Cholesterol comes from two sources. Your liver makes all the cholesterol you need. The remainder of the cholesterol in your body comes from foods derived from animals. For example, meat, poultry and full-fat dairy products all contain cholesterol, called dietary cholesterol.<p>> Those same foods are high in saturated and trans fats.<p>from the American Heart Association:
<a href="https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/cholesterol/about-cholesterol" rel="nofollow">https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/cholesterol/about-cho...</a>
I think this analysis is incomplete. It's important to separate out longevity from cause of death. "The China Study"'s central premiss is that a vegan diet reduces the likelihood of dying of the "Western" diseases such as heart disease and cancer. A simple correlation between a vegan diet and longevity doesn't address this and also wouldn't take into account the high correlation between not being able to afford animal products and a lack of access to medical care. If you actually read the book the author goes into all this detail.
It seems the author is already kind of biased when he set out to analyse the data.. use of the term 'overzealous vegans' in the first paragraph sets of a few alarms for me.<p>I think it would be interesting to look at other long term studies (like the 7th adventist study someone else mentioned here) as well as studies that look at plant based eating as a cure/preventative method for more specific/acute diseases (like Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's WFPBN solution for cardiovascular disease, or Dr. Greger's 'How Not to Die' which compiles and summarizes research in the WFPB space <a href="https://nutritionfacts.org/book/" rel="nofollow">https://nutritionfacts.org/book/</a>)
Here is a debate between the author of <i>The China Study</i> and another scientist in the field who disagrees with his findings:<p><a href="http://www.catalystathletics.com/articles/downloads/proteinDebate.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.catalystathletics.com/articles/downloads/proteinD...</a>
(I have no idea why Campbell chose not to cite any sources.)<p>and here is a simplified take by the excellent skeptic Harriet Hall:<p><a href="https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/385/" rel="nofollow">https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/385/</a><p>As Hall notes:<p>>He criticizes conventional recommendations for a diet with 45-65% of calories from carbohydrates, 20-35% from fat and 10-35% from protein, showing how the following menu satisfies those requirements:<p>>[example of an obviously unhealthy diet]<p>>But that’s a bit of a straw man argument. In reality, most current nutritional advice makes very much the same recommendations Campbell does except for his strict prohibition of animal protein. For instance, for cancer prevention the American Cancer Society recommends (<a href="http://www.cancer.org/docroot/MED/content/MED_2_1X_American_Cancer_Society_guidelines_on_diet_and_cancer_prevention.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.cancer.org/docroot/MED/content/MED_2_1X_American_...</a>) a diet high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes and low in red meat and alcohol, along with regular exercise and weight control.<p>In these (and other) debates, Campbell repeatedly shows, IMO, an unwillingness to take his critics seriously, instead always resorting to the broadside of "reductionist!". At first he seems to have a point, but when you read more of his responses to more people, you just find yourself hearing "reductionist! reductionist! reductionist!". This is particularly concerning since all atomistic theories (i.e. physicalist theories, i.e. the modern scientific view of reality) are ultimately reductionist in some way. Furthermore, his attack on the standard recommendations is <i>extremely</i> reductionist, as seen above (and a similar diet can easily be constructed with less protein and no animal foods!). I'm particularly glad to link the critique from Science-Based Medicine as they're equally critical (if not more) of the paleo milieu.
Projects like Jupyter have so much potential to empower individuals to understand data and verify claims. But not in their current form. Immediately after the introduction, the author starts diving in to Python and different interpreters and dependencies and then a wall of code. Anyone who's never seen code, much less heard of Python, would be immediately turned-off. Just a tiny bit of extra work on top of projects like this could exponentially increase their target audience and turn thousands into amateur fact-checkers.
I read that book a few years ago, but I remember several researches that proved the correlation between casein (milk proteins) and the cancer development. Which doesn't mean that casein causes cancer, but that casein speeds up cancer development. SO if you have a little cancer, with animal protein it will develop faster. The article skips this relevant topic.