Cardiologist Baxter Montgomery interviews nutritional biochemist T Colin Campbell.
Click here for video interview w/ slides:
Could Changing Our Diets Defeat COVID-19?
Center for Nutrition Studies
by T. Colin Campbell, PhD
June 25, 2020
In the early 1980s, I organized and helped lead a comprehensive study of diet, lifestyle, and disease mortality in rural China and eventually Taiwan, to investigate why cancer and other chronic degenerative diseases localized in geographic clusters.
The findings from this study, when combined with experimental studies of cancer in my laboratory and clinical human studies on heart disease, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and related illnesses by others, showed that a whole-food, plant-based diet could not only prevent but also reverse these diseases.
I draw my confidence in this suggestion both from the multifaceted evidence on hepatitis B virus cited here and from an abundance of evidence showing the comprehensive effect of whole-food, plant-based nutrition on total health. Although some narrowly focused research studies have shown a beneficial effect of plant nutrients on viruses, a protocol using such candidate chemicals or nutrients is not likely to be effective unless they are part of whole food.
This nutritional makeover could be hugely important, both for its health value and because I sense that we are becoming too accepting of our present limited knowledge as to how to manage future flu seasons and other epidemics. I doubt there are many people who will be content with repeated masking, social distancing, and contact tracing when changing our diet could do so much more, while simultaneously protecting social norms, job security, and our economy.
With each new epidemic, do we really want to wait a year or more to develop drug treatments and vaccines of uncertain efficacy?