How Cancer Cells Can Be Turned On and Off with Dr. T. Colin Campbell

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1:18 by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or positions of Next Level Soul, its host, or any of the companies they represent. Now let's dive into today's episode.

1:30 I'd like to welcome to the show, Dr. T. Colin Campbell. How are you doing, Dr.

1:35 Campbell?

1:36 Hello. Thank you for the invitation.

1:40 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

1:42 I've been following your work for many years now, as many people on the show know that I turned to plant-based diet almost a decade ago at this point. And a lot of that had to do with you and the work that you're doing and some of the documentaries that you were in as well early on in this kind of plant-based movement. And I wanted to have you on the show to kind of demystify a little bit about what plant-based diets are and what the myths are, what they aren't are, you know, I mean, obviously you and I should both be dead because we don't eat protein from animals. So, you know, how do we get protein and all these kinds of questions? So first question I have to ask you is how did you get started studying this kind of work and and going down

2:24 this plant-based world, because you started off as a traditional doctor, correct?

2:31 No, actually, I got started accidentally, if I can put it that way. I was raised, this has been the last thing that maybe was on my plate. I was raised on a farm milking cows. I hunted, I fished, I did all the usual things that us guys in the country do. So Then I went eventually away to graduate school at Cornell University, thanks to an unsolicited invitation from more of the professors. But in any case, I went there and I did my doctor dissertation of all things on advancing the consumption of more protein from animals.

3:09 I mean, that's consistent with being on a farm, right? It's also consistent with what was generally believed, that's high quality protein. So that's the way it was. And then when I got my first academic position about two years thereafter, I was put in charge of a project, a state department project that funded the examination of, let's say, a new model for feeding malnourished children in the Philippines. There, the idea that was circulating in our community was that these malnourished children were primarily deficient in proteins. They need more protein, especially animal protein. So early on, I learned from almost incidentally that the few children consuming the most protein in the Philippines had a higher risk for liver

4:03 cancer of all things. So here I'm presented with a dilemma. On the other hand, we're supposed to be given more protein, but yet the ones getting the most protein animal-based, they had a higher risk. So I thought. My medical colleagues, in the Philippines also pointed this out too. So I had to come home and start some research. You know, what's going on here? There was a study out of India at the time too, on experimental animals, showing that the higher the protein intake, the greater the risk of that cancer. Those researchers didn't even believe their own research.

4:38 And they set about doing a different way to try to prove otherwise. So I was sort of in the same position way. Anyhow, I got the research money. It lasted for many years. So it was well-funded during my entire career by mostly the National Institutes of Health, that's NIH. So I was publishing a lot. I was getting, you know, good scores, all that sort of stuff. My question was, is this true? It was high animal protein increased cancer.

5:07 So we did the study. Sure enough, you know, modest increases in animal protein turned on that cancer really sharply. And it did it quickly. Then we did a study where in the same bunch of, let's say, sperm animals, if we dropped the protein or switched it to plant protein, the cancer got turned off. It was so dramatic. We turn on cancer with feeding more animal protein. We turn it off by decreasing it or replacing with plant protein.

5:39 Protein is an important nutrient. It's absolutely essential. But it turns out after all these many years, we certainly have no need for animal proteins. to meet our protein requirements. Plants provide all that's needed. In any case, that was the result I got. Then the next task, and I had a number of graduate students working with me over the years. I wanted to find out what was the mechanism.

6:03 What was the biochemical mechanism to explain this strange phenomenon? So we started looking for mechanisms. And after about, I don't know, 12, 13, 14 years, something like that, a number of students doing their doctorate dissertations on this, that, and other things, Every time we look for a mechanism, we found one. What I mean by that is, for example, when you increase protein intake, it increases the rate at which the chemical carcinogen gets into the cell. Another one, it increases the synthesis of an enzyme that activates that carcinogen to produce a product that binds the DNA, which is stuff of genes. That's where the mutations start. It increased also the binding of the carcinogen to the DNA.

6:51 Then it did some more things as the cancer started growing. At the end of the day, after that number of years, I all of a sudden discovered there is no such thing as a single mechanism. That's the basis, I should tell you, for the entire pharmaceutical industry. The entire pharmaceutical industry is just the way we've been thinking. So there was no such thing as a single mechanism. What it turned out to be was a whole bunch of mechanism. Anyone, we want to examine if they were changed by the animal protein intake, some of them, most of them were up, some of them down, but however, whichever direction they went in, they all ended up in the same place. They increased cancer.

7:32 So that, that led to, in my view, the most important thing I ever got involved in. It changed the whole definition for me of nutrition. Nutrition is not about one nutrient doing one thing to create one disease or prevent whatever the case is. It's about a whole lot of mechanisms working together. And there are probably 10, I mean, hundreds, thousands, all working together in a sort of a mesh and a network to create a response. And it operates so fast.

8:04 And we know this in humans now, too. As soon as people, let's say with heart disease, they start consuming this kind of diet, just like that. you start seeing a drop in cholesterol within hours. In diabetes, if people with diabetes, they change their diet to the same formula, the same protocol, the blood sugar drops like a rock.

8:28 And so it went. Those studies, the first one, the heart disease was done by my good friend, Dr. Esselstyn, Ornish and others, about 20 years after I started my work. And they weren't nutrition, but they were simply just trying this out And they saw these remarkable results, both really fine people and got some good results. But in any case, so this operates not only in experimental animals where you can study the biochemical nature of cancer, for example, it also operates in humans. And the way I'm really confident to say that is because now we have a ton of research over many, many years showing very clearly, if you compare countries, As we begin to increase animal protein intake, there's a straight line relationship. At the very moment that

9:20 animal protein starts to be added to the diet. So even small levels of animal protein intake will cause a significant increase in the risk of a whole bunch of different diseases. From heart disease to different kinds of cancers, you know, to diabetes, to chronic kidney disease, on and on.

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9:50 So the story for me after these many years is that really, I have to say, it's an amazing story. And it's sharply different from traditional thinking in science to say nothing of sharply at odds with what we hear in the public. Because in the public, everybody believes that animal protein is high quality and we have to have some of that, obviously, and so forth and so on.

10:18 That's not true. That's a false dichotomy. And so, and as I say, I'd like to emphasize this because I didn't come to this story with any preconceived notions that I wanted to prove something. If I had any bias at all, it was to prove that animal protein is good.

10:41 You were raised with it, so of course.

10:43 Of course, that's what I ate and everything else. I know my reserves too. I mean, that's the way it was. It took me about, as I say, 12, 13 years, actually more than that even, to really come to terms with this. Because it was on the basis of this science, totally 100% on the basis of science. So I didn't get into this, for example, being a vegetarian. That was not my cup of tea. It was strictly the science, but obviously the results are very much in favor of that idea, which is a good idea. It's pretty much not a good proposition. Vegan is the same thing.

11:22 Dr.

11:22 Campbell, I want to ask you, and this is a question I get asked a lot as someone.

11:27 Who's vegan or plant-based.

11:31 Is it true that humanity is a general statement at a certain time in history, the hunter-gatherer times, that they needed to eat, that meat brought us out of a place where we were able to get the nutrition that we needed to be able to grow our minds, grew all that kind of stuff in. And now we're at a place in history that that is no longer needed, that we have the ability and the technology and the understanding and the knowledge to just eat plants. But that's also why those other people that we're talking about thousands of years ago had very short lives as well. So I just wanted to get your take on that.

12:09 Yeah, sure. And I thought a lot about that over the years. Now that's the popular narrative, basically what you were saying, If when you go back in time, as you suggest, for example, a few thousand years, a million, not a million years, but 10,000 years, something like that, humans were mostly residing in the tropical areas of the world, Africa and so forth. And then they were probably mostly plant-based, 100% possibly. They weren't dying because of that, but there's no evidence of that necessarily. But then they started migrating to the north. They went into the more temperate zones, the cold zones. At that point in time, you can, I mean, this is just a common sense kind of answer, I guess. It surmised that at that point in time,

12:57 during the wintertime, they didn't have access to plant foods. So they set about killing animals to get the food that way. That's one version, a fairly popular one. I have a friend, though, however, who's a professional philosopher in England. I only recently met him online. I've never talked to him otherwise. But he lectures on philosophy and so forth.

13:23 He's got it coming out with a new book now that's really fascinating. Namely, he's asking the same question. He himself is a vegan. That's where his motivation was. And so he gives lectures around Europe and so forth. He worked with some Spanish archaeologists and others that came up with a fantastic, really interesting idea. Namely, Prior to the last Ice Age, they found carvings on the cave walls.

13:54 Those carvings indicated that the humans who were making the carvings were sort of likened themselves to animals. They were very much akin to animals. You know, there were no spears, that kind of stuff, no evidence that they were in the business of killing animals. It wasn't until that Ice Age of some 5,000 years or so ended And suddenly the human emerged and then the new carvings that are now in existence and they've seen them. That's when you start seeing the evidence of violence. Violence of humans against animals.

14:30 This is now in Europe, perhaps elsewhere. And so that in turn has been likened to, let's say, what happened in the Egyptian civilization. some scientists there back in that time, and that was even before the Greek civilization, they said the biggest problem with humanity going forward is our ego, our sense of superiority, our sense of superiority over animals.

15:01 That stuck with us. And so, you know, we just got accustomed, I guess, as a human race, that it's perfectly okay to eat animals. I ate animals. You know, that's the way it happened. And so now, in the more modern times, when we're getting able to get into the sciences, I have been doing, looking at the details, all of a sudden it discovers that eminently, abundantly clear, inarguable, I would argue, inarguable. We have no nutritional needs. We have no need for animal food to satisfy our nutrition.

15:42 In fact, what we see now, It's exactly the opposite. If we switch from a diet as mostly plant-based, I mean, mostly animal-based food and some processed food and stuff like that, if we switch, and this has been done now as we talk, but done in recent years, the effect of that new plant-based diet, if you will, on these people with heart disease, diabetes, whatever, they see recovery in remarkable periods of, short periods of time. It's unbelievable. So then it raises the question, why don't we know this? I mean, for me, I define this as a process of nutrition.

16:26 And the way I define nutrition has to do with the fact that it's what happens to food after we consume the food. In other words, our bodies, once we consume the food, our bodies start processing that food. It digests it, you know, portions that are all under the little nutrients and so forth and so on. And then Mother Nature, I'm going to use that word, Mother Nature decides which nutrient of the thousands, hundreds of thousands of nutrient-like substances, which ones to put together to do what job.

17:01 And it might be a little bit different for the liver compared to the pancreas compared to this, that or something else. But overall, what we see, and now I'm coming back to what I told you before, that nutrients, countless in number in food, each one of them operates by countless mechanisms to produce a consistent broad array of good outcomes. Now, having said that, I can't emphasize enough how, I'll use the word provocative. That is because, quite frankly, I'm really contesting. That idea of contests, Number one, our livestock industry, of which I was a part. Number two, it contests the whole idea that we get healthy by relying on drugs. That's not true. So there's two really huge, biggest industries there are almost, the food industry and the

18:06 pharmaceutical industry. So you can see this is so clear in our policies now in the United States, for example. And I spent some years very much involved in international policy, both nationally and internationally. So I know what goes on behind the doors, behind the curtain, I should say. And those folks are, personally, they could be fine people, but they don't know what they don't know. And they don't particularly care to ask because that's not, That's not who helps pay on their jobs and pay on their employment for one thing. But also at the same time, regardless of whether they get money or don't get money for it, that's the way we all think. Oh, animals are important. Yeah, it's very important. We got to have that animals, milk, meat,

18:54 and eggs to get the protein. Nonsense. Total nonsense. So now, in my view, and I've written some books on this, as you know, that China Study, and then subsequently to that. That book, incidentally, I didn't think this idea was going to sell in the beginning. I was told if it sold 3,000 to 5,000 copies, I'd be lucky.

19:21 Can you tell everybody what the China Study is?

19:24 The China Study, what happened was that from the 1960s, when I got involved, it's a long time ago now, in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and so forth, As I was getting involved with starting to tell this story, I was running into some real serious pushback from my colleagues, really serious. You know, throw me out of my society if they could, you know, this and that, because I held some very senior positions. you know, in Washington at the time.

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20:04 And so, I got a lot of pushback. And finally, in 1990... In 1990, actually, when a study that we had done in China, we did a big study there. The New York Times called it the Grand Prix of all epidemiology. But in any case, when they came out with that report in 1990, at the end of the year, with that kind of August title, if you will, I got a lot of attention. And people wanted to know, what are they talking about? Well, we're talking about plant-based stuff.

20:36 Then the people who were opposed to my way of thinking were really turned up the volume. And they were getting pretty nasty. And so my wife finally told me, stop complaining. Why don't you write a book for the public? That was the genesis of the China study. Ten years later, in 2005, I published a study telling this story, mostly from a scientific point of view, not too much of what I just told you, but mostly from the scientific point of view. I didn't think at the time that book, all the publishers that we visited, and I wrote a cohort with my son, Tom, who's now a physician himself at the University of Rochester Medical Center. But in any case, we went around and looking for a publisher and we

21:23 were told, you know, get all that. We were told, don't put all those references in your book. The public doesn't want to see that. I disagreed. We went with 11 publishers. And basically, they didn't like the idea of putting all those publishers in there. And they also said I was sort of telling the story a little bit too high level. You know, for they said I should bring it down to a 10-year-old. I couldn't believe what I heard, but that's what they said. And mine was judged by Amazon to be 14 and a half years old.

21:56 So it was up there a little bit compared to a lot of diet books. But they wanted me to do that. And I said, They said, we're never selling books. Maybe just enough to 2,000 or 3,000 or something. Some libraries might pick it up. Well, it turned out they were wrong. I went to a small publisher at that time, just starting out in Dallas, Texas. A man who had some funding, had resources. He had a Wall Street broker.

22:24 But in any case, he started a publishing company. He said, I'll take it. I'll run with it. And he thought, well, if I could get, if I could sell 8,000 copies, he said at one point, another time he said about 13,000, he'd cover his costs. So that's what I was aiming for. Well, the darn book has now sold close to 4 million copies.

22:43 It's been translated into 50 foreign languages. I understand that's a record. Wow. I'm not sure. It's a record for a medical book. And then I wrote a second book called Whole. That was a New York Times bestseller also. And then I wrote a couple more books. And so the whole, all these different books, I wrote all of them after I retired in 2001. And so the China study has really, I guess, had an impact. I'm the one that came up with the idea of plant-based. And the reason I did that was in the late 1970s.

23:21 You coined the phrase.

23:23 Yes, I coined a phrase like, I also coined a phrase, put the hole in front of a hole plant-based. That's the name of my second book, Hole. But in any case, I did that because I was at that time on a government so-called expert committee that judges established priorities for funding in Arab cancer research. So that committee was getting a lot of applications from researchers and so forth and so on. At that time, there was just some, occasional researcher was coming in and wanting to study a little bit something about nutrition. And so my colleagues, they're all cancer researchers. They said, why don't you take it? I was the only one on there in nutrition background. So they wanted me to take some time and tell them

24:05 a little bit about nutrition. And I did not want to use the word vegetarian. I didn't even know the word vegan at that time. I didn't want to use vegetarian. It's fine and dandy. I'm not saying anything against vegetarians. I'm only saying that was not my motivations. because that doesn't sell very good to the scientific community. So I tried to think of something more friendly with, let's say, the idea of science, and that's why I came up with the word plant-based. And then later poll, two or three years later, because I was on a, I was given testimony on behalf of the National Academy of Sciences and the Federal Trade Commission of Washington, and learning that nutrients consumed alone as supplements, that's not nutrition. We might

24:52 see some short-term benefits occasionally, what look like benefits, but that's not the way to get our nutrition. And we have to sort of consume the whole food. So these days, I just have two simple recommendations. You know, all the complexity, you can leave that to those who want to, you know, bury themselves in that kind of complexity. It's fun. There's a lot of interesting stuff there, but there is a general message here that's really important. Consume plants. That's one.

25:25 Just leave it there. Consume plants, a whole variety of them and so forth like that, because the variety is important. Our body wants to have access to all the different kinds of nutrients in plants, but consume plants. First thing. The second thing, as much as possible, consume the whole plant. What I mean by that is you can chop up, you can cook the food, you can chop it up, dice it up and stuff like that. That part of it is not terribly important. The idea is that our body wants to look at, if you will, all the nutrients that are available in plants, make a choice. Which nutrient to send here, which to send there, and so forth and so on. I finally decided, rather strangely, that's mother nature. It's a fascinating concept because if we were

26:17 just to eat plants, And try to make them as whole food as much as possible. As I say, you can mix and match them different ways. Try to avoid those, let's say those foods are loaded up with sugar, salt and fat. That's the other part of the equation. Those nutrients are out of context. Salt and sugar and fat are very good when they're part of whole food. That's not the problem. When we take them out and we put the, oil of plants into a bottle and pour it as a salad dressing or something like that, or we throw out the recipe, that's not so good. That's added oil. On the other hand, we don't need to dump a lot of salt on our food either. A little bit, you know, to give some extra flavor to it, that's true. But then refined carbohydrates, you know, pure sugar.

27:10 You know, go easy on that, I guess I could say. So, Those two ideas, don't eat animals. Don't eat animals, number one. Number two, stay with the plants and try to eat them as much as possible, like in salads. And you can cook, you know, that's what we eat. So anyhow, my wife was kind of into this too. And we had five children. We were raised at the time. And so she started changing our diet in the late 1970s.

27:45 And we gradually changed. It took us about 10 years. Because mind you, we're eating the same thing as everyone else is eating. And liking it. I like cheese. I like meat. Stuff like that. But we just, you know, as I was learning this stuff, we just dropped one group at a time. The first thing we gave up was red meat. But then we got lots of chicken and fish. Went on that journey for a little while.

28:11 And then we kind of finally dropped that. And then my wife was then later diagnosed with melanoma, which is a serious cancer. It was advanced melanoma, no less. It had gone to her lymph glands. That's part of the story, too. And we were pretty much where we were at that time. And I was surprised to see that. And so they wanted to take out her lymph tissue at that time with an operation. Very serious cancer. And then they also wanted to put her on chemo. And she said no to both. Because I had seen the evidence myself in a microscope. And it looked like the kind of evidence they were relying on could be interpreted in a slightly different way. She had had the cancer years before and was actually going backwards. It was already reversing. Still some there,

29:02 but no way. So she did that. And the doctor, he threw up his hands and said, you know, if you don't do what I'm telling you, essentially what he was advising, you know, in chemo and that stuff, I won't be able to do anything for you in six months. Well, that was now 17 years ago. And so, you know, she's, she's now 81 and really good health. I'm 88. And so both of us have lived quite a bit beyond our parents.

29:33 So let me ask you a question when she was diagnosed, so in other words, when she was diagnosed with the cancer, the cancer had already been decreasing because of the diet change. So they just happened to catch it on the downwards, but they got concerned because they didn't know it was on the downward.

29:49 They thought it was the other way.

29:51 So, but how long before, from the diagnosis to the point where she was cancer-free?

29:57 How long, how many years?

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30:11 I can't say that because the way to examine that, you kind of have to go into Buddy and hunt for those kinds of sales. And that kind of analysis wasn't done, that kind of testing. Got it. Basically, she just wished and felt good about it ever since.

30:28 Well, she's alive, so there's that.

30:29 Yeah. Yeah, it worked.

30:31 It worked, obviously.

30:32 So let me ask you a question because a lot of people, I've heard many stories of people who have cancer, found that they have different kinds of cancers and they changed their diet. Like there was one case, a very public case, I forgot her name, but she was very young, but had cancer. I forgot what kind of cancer, but she decided to go completely plant-based, drinking fresh juices every day, eating fresh vegetables every day. completely changed to a pure diet and within, and she, she didn't have a good diagnosis. She, they said she had six months after she started doing that.

31:09 It just started to go. It's the cancer started to decrease to the point where it went completely gone. What advice do you have for anybody listening out there who might have this, this have cancer? What can diet do and what kind of diet can help them?

31:25 That's a very good question. And I have to be careful.

31:27 Yes, I know.

31:29 The way I answered this question, I really want to just say it as I know it, as truthfully as I can. I don't want to make promises. That's not my territory. And so what I can say is that we know, for example, heart disease. Let me tell that story first. In people with heart disease, it's really far along.

31:52 These are my friends, Dr. Essington, Ornish, McDougall, they were kind of doing that. With heart disease, almost any stage, you see a remarkable recovery. Diabetes is a chip shot. Cancer, it's been difficult to do that kind of research in humans because the industry that sells chemotherapy and works on that idea, they're so powerful. So even to attempt to do that kind of study means using one group and not giving them the chemo. That's almost like illegal. That is very strongly felt position So the kind of research that I would like to see done hasn't really been done.

32:34 The closest to it is actually my son, who's working on a stage four breast cancer, and he's switching, but he has to kind of do it along with their continuing on their chemo. So it kind of compromises the results, but I can't say more than that. I'll keep my fingers crossed everything's coming out okay. It looks good so far, but So on cancer, the evidence that we'd like to see is not yet quite ready for that sort of thing.

33:05 But I hear a lot of anecdotal things, number one. And number two, I know that basically science fairly well. And on the basis of what we see, I think the effect of this diet on cancer patients, how should I say it? It can be nothing but good. You know, how good?

33:23 It can't hurt.

33:24 That's right. How good it might be, I don't know. I can tell my wife's story. I can tell some others that I've heard of, but that's really not enough either. People want to have a little more certainty about a disease like that. Right.

33:39 It's really interesting, Dr.

33:41 Campbell, because when I started my plant-based journey, I did a juice cleanse. That was how I got started with this whole thing. I did a juice cleanse for two weeks, and I was pre-diabetic prior to the juice cleanse. And after the two weeks, I did a blood test just to see where my blood sugar was. And after two weeks of drinking fruit juices, vegetable juices, but there was, I mean, I was a meat eater and I was addicted to sugar and all that stuff. So I needed a good amount of apple juice just for me to drink the kale. So I had a good amount of natural juices coming in, orange juices, apple juices, inside of the kale and the celery and the carrots and all that stuff. I dropped from a 110 blood sugar to

34:30 a 76.

34:30 Okay.

34:33 And I was so confused because I was like, how can my blood sugar drop down when I'm actually consuming more quote unquote sugar? But I guess it's the kind of sugar.

34:44 That I was.

34:46 So can you explain to me what happened there and explain to the audience what happened there?

34:51 And you described it really well. And your experience is also telling. Carbohydrate is one of the so-called macronutrients in food. It ought to be the main source of our energy. Carbohydrates are only made in plants. I mean, it's a little bit an animal, you know, but you don't count that. It's carbohydrates in plants. And carbohydrates as a class of chemicals, it's enormously complex. One group of carbohydrates comes under the category of dietary fiber. Okay, so carbohydrates are found in grains. Obviously, it's found in fruit. The kind that's in grains and plants, quite frankly, is a little more fibrous than it is in fruits. So in that case, you've got a different kind of mix of carbohydrates. What happens, unfortunately, is instead

35:45 of when we're eating the plants to get that carbohydrate, it's lovely. That's where we should be getting energy from. On the other hand, but way back when, I'm not sure when this all started, they were able to start extracting out of certain plants, the cane sugar cane. They started extracting out the sugar that was really sweet. And they could put it in a package and they could crystallize it and they could do this and that. So the sugar industry was born. Now, That kind of sugar taken away from the plant and the plants is great.

36:21 If you take it out, and this is true for most nutrients, take out that one nutrient and put it, crystallize it of all things, it adds a sweetness. And guess what? And you know this, of course, everyone does. Sweetness is adversely addictive. Yes, sir. You know, we like sweet things. We want, and more and more is better.

36:41 And also added oil is kind of addictive too, fat. Mm-hmm. And so salt, those three. So the three things that are most addictive are the things that we like to add back to the food to make it taste a little bit better, if you will. So that's what our minds work. As we end up consuming too much sugar, that's refined carbohydrates. We use also too much refined flour.

37:10 Whole wheat flour is better than just the refined wheat flour, right? And so somehow, well, not somehow, I know what their story is. In the early 1970s, at that time, I was already bothered a little bit, and some of this story just began to emerge at that time. I wasn't formally involved at that point in the early 70s, but I subsequently became very much involved in the late 70s, early 80s. At that time, there was a man came out, a doctor, supposedly, He never showed his medical credentials. He wouldn't.

37:47 But his name was Dr. Atkins. Robert Atkins.

37:51 Yes, Mr.

37:52 Atkins. And so he and many others were not liking this sort of very preliminary evidence at that time that eating plants might be a good idea. Because that's kind of an assault on eating animal foods. And so he wanted to come up with a different point of view. And he said, hey, the whole problem we have in health is too much carbohydrates. He just used that word carbohydrate.

38:17 He didn't say refined carbohydrate. He just said carbohydrate. And that was an affront. That was a direct criticism of eating plants. Because that's really what it was. If he had stayed with the idea of refined carbohydrates, he'd have had something. Because we can't, you know, that free sugar. It's just not, everything is toxic in certain levels, but it's not the kind of thing you're going to kill you right tomorrow. It's not like that.

38:49 You drink a glass of sugar, of pure sugar, you're not going to feel good, but you're not going to die.

38:55 That's about what it is. So what started out was Atkins' diet. Low carb, he said. Well, then that really caught on with the animal industry. They liked that idea. You know, if you start using a low carb diet, by the way, One of my books is called Low Carb Fraud. I'm speaking from what I published in 2013, I guess. If you use that kind of diet, let's say you're overweight, especially. People are overweight. If they go on a natural diet, low carb diet, what happens? They lose weight straight off. That impresses people. Hey, I got, I got my answer, you know, kind of thing. And also their blood cholesterol tends to drop somewhat too. That looks good. So all of a sudden this idea of the low carb diet, wow, this is it for me.

39:50 But people don't stay on that quite frankly. After a few months, it's about gone. And fortunately for them, it's about gone. Because if they were to stay on that kind of diet, which is low carb, yes, very high in animal protein, very high in fat.

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40:17 We got the record. We got the lifetime records on that. They're in deep trouble. So the low-carb diet is kind of a joke. And really, it's a misnomer. It's basically bad nutrition.

40:32 Well, let me ask you, do you remember how Mr. Atkins died?

40:36 Yes, part of that.

40:39 I found that very ironic when I heard that. I was like, wow. And yet that's not as publicized. I mean, there's still Dr.

40:46 Atkins stuff out there and people are still talking about the Atkins diet. And it's not as popular as it was when I was a kid in the 90s, but it blew up in the 90s. I mean, everybody was doing the Atkins diet. It was a save all, but a lot of damage was done with that concept, with that idea.

41:05 Yeah, they changed the name from time to time. I just recently had an opportunity to review some of this information At a point in time, it was called the keto diet. Now it's being called the ketogenic diet. It makes it sound a little fancier. Sometimes it'll be called the paleo diet. The paleo diet partly is okay because I know him. I debated him, actually. But he's opposed to consuming dairy, which is a step in the right direction.

41:36 So the paleo diet, but nonetheless, is an example of the continuation of the Atkins myth. So it goes up through these years. They come up with different names from time to time. Oh, we got a new diet here, a new diet here. It's the same old story, just wrapped in different cloths.

41:53 Now, let me ask you, why is it that doctors are not trained in nutrition?

41:59 If they're there to.

42:00 Help you heal the body, they don't understand the basics of what it takes to fuel the body and heal the body with nutrition, which isn't the father of all medicine, who said in thy food is thy medicine or something along those lines.

42:18 And yet they've gone so far from it.

42:20 When I ask friends of mine who are doctors, basic nutritional ideas, I ask how many hours did you get trained? And they go, we had the three hour session, or maybe we had an eight hour session over a course of a semester talking about basic nutrition.

42:36 Why is that?

42:37 There's a very good reason from the scientific point of view, by the way, If we're eating whole food, okay, that's everything working together, right? The alternative to that point of view, incidentally, is using one nutrient at a time, as I said before. One nutrient at a time, maybe making some supplements. Or if you get sick, use one nutrient, one chemical at a time. That's called a drug. Okay, so the idea is that using one thing at a time to treat one condition like that, that is the name of medicine.

43:11 That is medicine. So here's what happens. The so-called system authorities, if you will, won't tell you the kind of food we ought to be eating because they leave people to believe we should eat a lot of animal-based food, especially industry like that. They don't want to tamper too much with the other kinds of food we eat too, the highly processed, because there's corporate interest there too. And at the same time with all that's going on, We have drugs, by the way. We can solve our problems. So the story goes. That is the practice of medicine. I've spoken to probably, I think, close to at least 150, somewhere between 150, 200 medical schools myself. And I've invited a number of cases just to talk about the question you

43:59 just raised. How can we teach nutrition? Well, it's not easy, to be honest about it. And it's absolutely needed. But nutrition is not part of the medical paradigm. Why? Why? Because nutrition, the way it works is everything works together. It costs them whole food. That's pretty cheap. And we get healthy. And we don't need drugs, right? The medical system is bounded, quite frankly, historically on the principle that if we get sick, we are feeling bad, we all get a name for our disease. And then we have a drug to treat that disease, presumably operating on one mechanism at a time, if you will. So the whole, the discipline, the whole industry of, let's say, medical care, a lot of very good people, I mean, they got

44:49 in there to take care of people. Obviously, I'm not, I don't want to talk about the individual, not whatsoever, but I'm simply talking about the paradigm within which we live. Medicine, the practice of medicine is focused on the use of single chemicals to treat illness. Most of those chemicals are, in fact, foreign chemicals. They're called drugs. And in fact, they're very strange. They're not even natural, most of them, because a lot of the so-called drugs are discovered initially as some substance in a plant, usually as a forest, you know, the tropical forest, for example. But we can't patent those kind of chemicals. They're natural. So you can't get intellectual property protection for using those chemicals for anything.

45:34 So here's the way it goes. You discover this chemical in the plant, a tree, wow, it has this effect here, whatever you think is pretty good. What happens, you can't sell it that way. You can't package it up and make it a drug. What you have to do is get intellectual property protection. I'm talking about patents, maybe trademark patents and stuff like that. Once you have that kind of protection, let's say for a couple of decades, now you got some time to invest in it. Then you can't even patent a natural substance. That's what I mean to say. So what happens is you take the natural substance and you change it a bit chemically. And so finally you end up with a chemical, they're going to give it a new fancy name. You know, it was

46:18 really derived from the plant substance itself. But you give it a new name because it really is a little bit different. That's not natural. Now you can patent it. Once you can patent it, you're good for life.

46:34 Dr. Campbell, you know, you've been doing this for so long now, and I'd imagine that you've seen a shift in the world from the moment in the early 70s to where we are today, where the knowledge is a lot more out there. People understand, at least to a certain level, plant-based diets, whole diets, Mediterranean diet. These kind of ideas are in our zeitgeist much more than they were before. Because I remember in the 70s, the vegetarian was the thin, frail guy sitting in the corner who didn't know what he was doing. He was dying slowly because he wasn't eating meat. That's the image of the vegetarian or vegan. Where do you think we're going to be in 50, 100 years from now? Do you think that this new generation coming up, this younger generation gets

47:25 it a lot more and isn't fighting against the old ways like my generation and definitely your generation is?

47:33 At times, I become really discouraged, to be honest about it, because The resistance to this idea is very profound. It's so profound right now, just mention specifically, I know I'm being recorded in this case, but I've published in science what we do to be legitimate. We do research, we get money, we do it very carefully. We teach people and all that kind of stuff. When we produce our results, it's very carefully examined and questioned. And so we have to get money to do the research, right? So in any case, the, I forgot what I was gonna say here.

48:18 You're discouraged in the research and the money coming in.

48:23 Yeah, well, in any case, the whole system that we now live with that we call health or healthcare is based on the idea of using drugs. Yes. Okay. And so we eat the wrong food to start with. That comes from one of our departments in the government called Department of Agriculture. It's livestock based. And the other department is producing drugs. That's Health and Human Services. So we got a really serious problem here. And so what we need to do is actually to do what you're doing.

48:53 I'm really impressed with you personally. I think that you are really into it and you're really asking the right questions and you're the right age.

49:02 Thank you.

49:03 So I think that you and your comrades can go forward with this knowledge. Somehow we have to sell this story. And it's really difficult to sell the story. Well, I knew what I was going to do. I published all the, my life was publishing papers. Just recently, the last couple of years, all of a sudden, I submitted a couple of papers, one of them showing how this thing works on viral diseases. It's dramatic. It's research that we did in China. But anyhow, I wanted to publish that paper.

49:36 They wouldn't even review it.

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49:49 That's the first time in my life I ever heard that happen. I published about 350 papers. And so now all of a sudden some lead journals are in the business of turning down a paper they might not like to see published.

50:05 But it was peer-reviewed?

50:08 They wouldn't even do the peer review.

50:10 They wouldn't even do that. It was just a big debate.

50:11 No, it's really, really serious. It's really become very serious. I'm right now up to my balls in trying to address that question. And so just in the last couple of years, I've had a couple of papers turned down just because of the title of the paper. They wouldn't even... I never had that happen before in my entire career.

50:33 And I've been on editorial boards myself of these journals. I know how it works. Mm-hmm. And I had no problem about publishing papers. Now we got something in works that's controlling the whole community of scientists and controlling what gets published and what doesn't. That's where I wanted to go. And I find that really serious. The public needs to know this, that we are at the present time, we are structured in such a way or infrastructure, you know, propelled by, or at least provided to the public. The government doesn't want to provide this kind of information, but the government in turn is reflecting the interests of the corporate sector.

51:20 Of course.

51:22 And so, you know, elected politicians, we all know about the 2010 Supreme Court decision called Citizens United. That was a time when the decision was made, a five to four decision was close, but they made a decision that big money corporations could use their money as they almost chose for election officials. So what have we got since 2010?

51:44 Elections are bought. Politicians are bought and sold.

51:48 Well, that's not new information.

51:52 It happened before 2010, but 2010, it was kind of legitimized.

51:58 Correct.

51:59 That's what happened. And now we're in a tough spot.

52:03 Yeah, I think we are in a tough spot, but I do think that this new generation that's coming up, I do see a lot of hope in the eyes of the new generation coming up behind me because they're being born into a world where information is available to them. They can watch these documentaries, these books, this information is out there and extremely easily accessible for the most part.

52:29 And they're just looking at things differently. Like I was raised, I'm a Gen Xer, so I'm in between the old way of things and the new way of things before the internet and after the internet. So I have a sympathy for both sides, as opposed to my kids who were born in this world and know nothing else. They don't, when you tell them the stories of what we used to do in the seventies, eighties and nineties, like there were no seatbelts.

52:53 What?

52:54 We used to smoke on airplanes. What?

52:57 There were only three channels, the horror, things like that. But I do believe that there is some hope and I'm doing my small part trying to get information out there and trying to educate people by having experts like yourself on the show to talk about just different perspectives about things that help.

53:16 The whole body.

53:17 You talk about whole plants, I talk about the whole body, the mind, body, and soul of the individual. And that's why I don't try to focus on just the one part of the whole. I try to touch upon all of it because it's all important. because you could be extremely spiritual or you can be extremely body-based, but if you're not eating the right things, the others are suffering.

53:37 If you can combine the three together, I think that's how you succeed in life and hopefully help more people in the world. But that is my goal. But I wanted to ask you a couple of questions, Dr. Campbell, that I ask all my guests. I think I know the answer to the first one, but I'm going to ask it anyway. What is your mission in this life?

53:57 Well, I sort of asked myself that because I was forced to. My father was a farmer. He only had a couple years of formal education. I had to drive for five years, just over 100 miles a day to go to school.

54:13 Wow.

54:14 It was in Washington, D.C. I could have gone to the local school, but my dad, who didn't have that education, wanted me to have an education. So he went to a special effort for me to be able to go to a public school in Washington. It was free. So I did that for five years. I was lucky. uh and so i got a halfway decent education there they kept on uh i uh and so i ended up where i ended up with thanks to a lot of people older than me my my seniors you know doing this that and everything else um to give me this position i forget what your question was what is your mission in this life oh my mission so yeah he so my dad was uh was important obviously in my life and uh He used to say, the main thing

54:58 to remember, whatever you do, tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I mean, that's pretty special. And so when I was faced in science, for example, with this evidence that animal protein might turn on cancer, let me tell you, that did not set very well. My colleague said, no way, don't go down that road.

55:19 You're going to get in trouble. But so my option was, if I had an option, Okay, I'll drop that. I'll do something else. Or do I stay with it? So I had to stay with it because I got money from the National Institute to help to do that research. And I kept getting renewed and renewed. So I would say that for me, it was just staying with the idea.

55:46 Staying with the results. Publish the results. Take a critique. Obviously, that was an important part of it. Take the critique. And I got to a place where I really love science. And the most important thing of all is that I had tenure early in my life, academic tenure. Along with the tenure, most of the time you get to the higher levels of professorship, you get the freedom to speak for academic freedom. So I got academic freedom now as my early 30s. I've had more than 55 years. So I'm able to speak without being fired. That is one characteristic in our society that has declined radically. And so academia, where I've been, that's my home. I loved it because we were encouraged to be skeptical, to ask questions, to teach,

56:47 all this kind of stuff. That's what we're supposed to do. Now, unfortunately, my colleagues in academia, the younger people especially, they're not necessarily, in fact, very few of them, have this opportunity of having a lifetime appointment, you know, to speak freely. And so freedom of speech for me is golden. It's golden.

57:13 And unfortunately, it's missing now in academia to a great extent. Dr.

57:17 Campbell, where can people find out more about you and your work and your books and things like that?

57:22 Well, we have a website that is an online program in teaching nutrition. Our daughter actually is the president of that now. It's with Cornell. It's called nutritionstudies.org. Nutrition studies is all one word, of course. Nutritionstudies.org. So we've had that. It's done very well. And I think we've got gosh, over 20,000 graduates, people get a certificate with that. And so that's an attempt. And now we have a staff and we do various things, but in any case, the idea is to convey this information to the public. And just in the last couple of years, thanks to my daughter who worked on this, we're reaching out to other organizations in the world, giving them micro grants for people who have interesting ideas. and how to convey this information.

58:20 My oldest son also, he did a film. He's a film producer. You may have heard of Plant Pura Nation. Force Over Knives, that came out of the China study. I started lecturing on that just thereafter, and the question I was always getting asked, how come we haven't heard this before? That's when my son Nelson, his training is in economics and government services, if you will. So he went and had an opportunity to make a film of me lecturing to the Kentucky legislature, you know, on this subject, along with my colleague, Dr. Edison at that time. But so the film was, that was recorded, and then he went on to develop the story around that. So the second film that I was involved with, Plant Pure Nation,

59:07 eventually at that time, there were a number of films done. that I was in and, you know, kind of spreading the word. I think film is a big deal. And so it's one way I'm told by those in the trade that the best way of communicating information on a large scale is movies.

59:29 Documentaries dr campbell i've been in the movie industry for close to 30 years so i know exactly what you're talking about it's a very very powerful medium.

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59:48 You you have that you're in this and uh what you are you've been in movie industry.

59:53 Oh yeah i've been a director i've been in post-production i've been a producer and i have two top rated podcasts in the filmmaking space. Actually the number one podcast in the filmmaking and screenwriting space, two different shows that I talked to Oscar winners and Emmy winners and so on. So I very, very closely understand the power of storytelling and stuff.

1:00:17 We got to talk more. I don't talk about this publicly and I'm going to say it very carefully, but there has been a script written all my life by an Oscar winner.

1:00:27 Well, let's talk about that after the show. But I want to thank you. But Dr. Campbell, thank you so much, not only for being on the show, but for your tireless work that you've been doing over the decades to try to get this message out. And I hope in my small way, I've been able to help you with that mission. So I appreciate you, my friend. Thank you so much for all the work you've done.

1:00:48 Well, thank you for this invitation. It's been wonderful. Your questions are right on point.

1:00:55 Thank you for spending this sacred time with us today. If you feel called to explore this conversation further, you'll find the show notes for this episode at nextlevelsoul.com forward slash 093. And if your soul is craving an even deeper journey, step into Next Level Soul TV, our streaming sanctuary for spiritual films, documentaries, original shows, guided meditations, channeling sessions, audio books, and transformative teachings. It's a space created to support your awakening, your healing, and your return to the truth of who you really are. begin your journey at nextlevelsoul.tv.

1:01:31 Until next time, keep expanding, keep seeking, and keep walking your path towards the next level of your soul.