A Dialogue Between Dr. T. Colin Campbell & Dr. Walter Veith

[Music] you you presently are are you president of one of the universities or are you working on your own or no i'm retired i'm an old god now we're all getting on in years i'm 71 so i'm retired i was at the university of the western cape i was the head of the zoology department and i was in the medical bioscience department okay you're a young guy yeah i'm 86 you're 86 well you're as old as my friend francois duplici and he's still going strong so i assume that you have a a good diet yeah i've i've done it thanks to my wife uh and also the the evidence itself i got persuaded by the evidence have you got have you read the china study yes i've read the china study and i've watched the the dvds on the chinese study yes okay what did you want to boil it what's the background details if you have done that but yeah i came from a farm as you probably know i was on the other side of the fence uh at that time compared to where i am now absolutely we all went so was i is yes i was i was also i was a evolutionist atheist uh i was a big meat eater i mean that's a south african diet chicken is a vegetable in south africa right yeah where you were that's how you used to know were you one we raised on a farm or from the agricultural community no i was well i was trained as a as a comparative physiologist but grew up in cape town not on a farm but when i became interested in health issues i did dabble in organic farming as well and i still like to dabble in it as a hobby yeah it's a very hot topic now in the states as it is elsewhere i'm sure yeah yes it's a good way to go there you go so how did you get associated with the adventists because of the diet because of the lifestyle uh primarily my professor for when i did my master's actually he wasn't an advocate but he advocated everybody should read [Music] oh what was her name ellen g white ellen do you want this he had his he was going around giving some luscious uh about her when i was in school and i didn't notice that at the time and in any case he became quite a name within the adventist community years after that and i was i wasn't so his name was clyde mckay and uh okay a little bit about him so the advertisers got kind of interested in what i was doing obviously and uh so maybe in the first uh five to ten years what came out i spoke to a lot of advertisers communities uh as well as the university a couple times and that sort of thing so i became very friendly with my other friends a lot of great people yeah well i became an adventist i i switched from an atheist evolutionist to an adventist which was quite a painful experience boy that's quite a switch that's what it was that's quite a jump yeah and that's why i visited the sites like national park mount hornaday the petrified forests the canyons of the world the paleontological fields and it took a lot of scientific convincing to get me to change my my view on origins what what specifically or nothing specific i guess maybe but what mainly got you to start rethinking along those lines what well you know when you when you grow up like i did i mean i was in stellenbosch university in the zoology department which is uh evolutionist to the power of ten and of course everything is interpreted by uniformitarianism and then when i went actually on all the field trips i saw that it wasn't uniformitarianism in fact it couldn't be it was catastrophism and you find you find vast fossil beds where the fossils are all washed into position and are basically unidirectional so it cannot be slow fossilization over eons of time it's catastrophism yeah and the petrified forests are particularly interesting because they contain many upright trees and it is conjectured that because they were upright that they were in position of growth but when you analyze them they're actually not in position of growth they are transported into position in an upright position and when monsoon helens erupted it gave a mini example of how thousands of trees can be buried in an upright position and that was catastrophic and so when you go back to the fossil fields you find the same thing and when you dig them out you find that they have no rootstock in other words the roots are all ripped off so they are electrones they've been washed into position so it's not position of growth it's not long period of petrification it is virtually instantaneous and that was very convincing to me and of course the the layering that you see when you you have you you've obviously been to the grand canyon right yes i have yeah i've been to uh mount salas as well yes when you look at when you look at the grand canyon you see all these these flat layers right one on top of each other and the contact between the layers is flat like a sheet one sheet on top of another now the standard paradigm is that each one of those layers represents a time in history when that was the surface of the earth and the others were not yet there well if that is the case then they cannot be flat because they have to show erosional features if they were on top at some stage or other but they don't and so it's evidence of thermodynamic activity in other words a rapid deposition one layer like a mud flow on top of the other and that gives those flat layers so it takes a lot of re-looking and rethinking and a paradigm shift that is mind-boggling amazing amazing yeah yeah this is and i wouldn't believe it i wouldn't believe it until i saw fossilized fields of of whales and dinosaurs lying unidirectionally being washed into position then it gets kind of fascinating so you know animals don't die unidirectionally they die in sito where they stand they fall and it could be to the left it could be to the right it could be to the north to the east to the west but not unidirectionally i mean if you're dying you don't everybody doesn't fall over in the right same direction do they right well this i i never heard the interpretation before this has been fantastic yeah no so that was that was a major for me and uh well that's a little bit of my background and the health also yeah that was after that i i find that idea absolutely fascinating of course i'm going to have to now learn some stuff but uh how did that then position you into this whole area of health and diet and stuff like that well i got i i understand your question i got i got uh associated with some adventists and they were talking about creation and i said you know you're you're just playing bonkers you've got you've gone insane and then i started studying uh some of the prophecies and they they were absolutely mind-blowing when i looked at daniel for example and you know daniel foretells history in advance so i figured you know this was written after the fact but then when you trace it to 600 bc then it becomes kind of odd that he portrays kingdoms that are not even there yet so that got me interested in in the bible as a as a source which i always considered folklore and of course when it came to what the original diet was of animals and man that was just way off line with standard thinking because if you if you go to the bible it says that the original diet of man was totally plant-based but it goes a step further and says that animals were also plant-based and then it goes even further in the book of isaiah where it says that in the future when everything is restored animals will be plant-based again now if you're a zoologist that's insane how can a lion have had a plant-based diet right and so i became very interested in in basically what you were interested in a plant-based diet versus a animal based diet and it became a major part of my research when i was in the in the medical school of the university where i worked western cape university and most of my graduate students were working on the comparison between plant-based and animal based particularly with with regard to protein which is your field and that's why i was very interested in what you had to say and about your protein research and yours was particularly in the field of cancer correct yes and you came you came up with the conclusion that animal protein was detrimental and was actually an initiator or or a promoter of cancer so i didn't actually work in the cancer field i worked in the osteoporosis field and particularly it started off with but we're running ahead are we actually doing this already oh you mean as far as the program is concerned oh it's just not yeah we're enjoying this okay yeah so i was i was fascinated in your china study and i was fascinated in your protein research and you said in your lectures that you had a paradigm shift because protein you know was was the way to go and animal protein you know it's it's a complete protein it must be perfect and it's interesting when i asked for funding to do this kind of research our science body in south africa refused to fund me they point blank refused and the reason was i was going to compare animal protein to plant protein and the effect on on various parameters in animals and they said but that's insane because it shouldn't have any effect after all when a protein is digested it's broken down to amino acids so well that's the difference whether they come from plants or whether they come from animals and i said no it will make a huge difference because the ratio of the amino acids is different so they refused to fund it so we i funded it out of my own research crime i i worked together with the agricultural sector and it was astounding and so eventually when the penny dropped they actually started funding funding our research so that that created quite a paradigm shift yeah so i'm like you i had to i had to rethink everything and you know being a south african as i said chicken was a vegetable and beef steak was a meal so that's how it worked and i had to do a paradigm shift and one of my my big areas as in your case so there are a lot of parallels it was case team i i looked yeah i looked at the effect of casein uh on on the on the physiological parameters of the animals and we compared casein isolated casein added to a completely normal diet we worked on vervet monkeys well we worked on lots of and it was worked on rabbits and rats and hamsters and and reptiles and pigs and sheep and all kinds of animals but our big project was on vervet monkeys and we compared casein added to the diet a normal diet where they get fruits and vegetables and everything but they get a little bowl of grains and the one had its main protein component was casein and the other one was soy protein and the difference was just standing on whatever we studied it was so amazing so i was totally on your wavelength when it came to calcium so calcium is absolutely a no-no for human consumption except as an infant where you have these special enzymes and help from specific bacteria to digest it and then it has to be human and not cow cassian because the the difference is amazing so yes your research fascinated me wow you're that's an understatement for me to say to you i mean you're what you're doing is just absolutely mind-boggling i think it's really really interesting how you made that i i i would suggest incidentally that probably you and i share something else in common uh and that's the reaction we got from some of our colleagues um oh yeah you said that's the first thing yeah you you said you were with the community of agricultural scientists i think it was a point and and they just i was working with them on a project we were working on sheep okay i did that early on i i i actually uh created a fistula in this sheet you know studying the yeah the effect of the context of the microflora and the rumen you know as an excellent metabolism but in any case yeah coming back to the the reaction that you must have gotten from your friends uh i'm right in the middle of that i was of course coming up to the dairy farm i ended up at cornell in the animal science department excuse me in the animal science department and uh specifically in the building it's called the dairy science building that's where i was i mean that was was quite at home there but uh you know then when i and i did my doctoral dissertation in support of the idea the more protein we consume supposedly the health we are etc etc and it wasn't until a little later absolutely we ran across alternative ideas and uh yeah back to cornell in 1975 that was 14 years later that time some of the people in animal science department really were quite upset uh and then it got very bad for me after that i was on some national panels and that sort of thing and they tried to throw me out of my society they tried to get me dismissed from the university uh they withdrew it i had one on nige grant i was pretty well supported by nih during most of my career mostly because my applications were focused on trying to understand cancer and i was only using the protein as a means of sort of perturbing the progress you know of the cancer cell and so it really wasn't necessarily focused on questioning casein or or animal protein necessarily but so one thing let you know the diverse but um in washington i spent about 20 years in national policy development so i saw if you will sort of things behind the curtain and when i was always the lead institution in formulating national policy their food and housing so some of these individuals so things got testy so my my new book actually i would record i'm trying to offer some of that information without complaining i'm not complaining it was actually it turned out to be an opportunity i i think i think you were majorly instrumental in changing mindsets in the world so i think you did a wonderful thing you had a great contribution mine started when a man came and gave a lecture at our department and he was talking about skew leg syndrome in sheep now they don't develop skew leg syndrome when they are free range but if they are in a stall and they don't get exercise then they develop skew legs syndrome their legs start to get to buckle owing to calcium loss and so aft they didn't know what the reason was and they were just talking about it and doing all kinds of stuff to find out what the cause was and i i went to him after the lecture and i said to him why do you feed these sheep and he says well a regular diet of alfalfa lucerne and mixed with fish meal for extra protein and i said to him the problem that you have is the animal protein that you are adding to the diet is causing this this uh skew leg syndrome and they were laughing me out of town and then i i convinced him to do an experiment and we tried to get funding and they wouldn't fund it so i i funded it out of my own research grant and we set up an experiment with sheep and we fed one group in a stall just 12 protein from plant-based from lucerne from alfalfa and then we added 5 and 8 and 20 percent uh protein from fish meal to the diets and then we had another comparison where we added 20 percent protein by adding plant-based protein in the form of gluten so we had two groups that were at twenty percent whereas eight percent of that twenty percent came from animal protein in the one group and eight percent additional protein came from plant-based in the other group and it was absolutely amazing all those on animal protein develop skew-leg syndrome is that right to a horrendous yeah and so of course that opened their eyes and they they wanted to know why with this happening and we we did the amino acid analysis and i said the animal protein contains far more sulfur-containing amino acids than the plant-based protein and if you're feeding a high-protein diet to get the the growth increase then you're sitting with the problem that the animal also metabolizes that protein for energy and then it has to obviously metabolize the methionine and the cysteine to get the sulfur out and you have to get the nitrogen out the nitrogen's fine you you excrete it by your rear but the sulfur is converted to sulfate which is uric acid and when you ask when your system gets acidic then your acid-base balance has to neutralize that and so the hormone cascade kicks in and then of course you release calcium out of the bone to keep your acid base balance and because of the high acidity you then you then lose the calcium so they have massive calcium excretion and as a consequence the the legs because the animals are not active and running around they're still fed they just start buckling and then they have these these terribly skewed legs and then we repeated those experiments in rabbits and in vervet monkeys but we started using casein as our our animal protein and the results were exactly the same monkeys for example that got casein they all develop massive osteoporotic problems and also cardiovascular problems and the only difference in the in in the diet between the two groups was the one received the soy protein and the other one received calcium amazing amazing it really fits wow uh i will have to quit everything i'm doing at the moment i'm gonna have to come back and start reading some more of your material i i knew of some of this that you you know you were from you were known for but i i didn't have to get back in the details of some of your studies but i i just find out your story is just absolutely amazing especially where you came from that it's came from the journey that you took well i switched in my lifestyle of course which was another major adaptation so yes today i propagate a whole food plant-based diet with zero animal products by the way i have to run this by you because you are obviously familiar with this field uh the uh the word vegan and vegetarian uh you were talking about you were an atheist and then you had to reconsider some of that but in any case uh i i i've read it it's a very straight this sounds kind of a silly story maybe but when uh i was uh just coming around to realizing that eating class was a good idea and i was on again of cancer researchers carcinogenesis a study section of nih yes they were all pathologists oncologists molecular biologists and so forth and i was the only one on nutrition so when we we are charged as you may know those police stations was to review uh new applications for research and then prior to that and this was 1978 79 i was just kind of getting into it at that time and they were um when it was so there was some application story to come in with a hint of people wanted to study nutrition as it relates to cancer so i got those applications so then my colleagues on the committee they didn't know anything about nutrition so they asked me at that time if our at our next meeting i could take an hour or two and and talk about nutrition it's really particularly reference to the protein question and i knew when i went there i had to this is kind of crazy i i knew that uh this smacked of vegetarianism and i i didn't i did veganism at that time and i said i don't want to use the word vegetarianism because i don't that'll spook them out so uh and so i i that's when i came up with the word plant-based and it was kind of a silly term uh i tried to orient it it's actually not a bad term it's actually a very good uh plant-based is actually a very good term because vegan i used to use the word vegan for total plant-based diet but there are many in in various fields out there particularly you know the animal rights league and all of these vegan becomes so broad that in the end for example some people won't wear shoes that are made of leather because they are vegan so vegan gets a different connotation to all plant-based so these days if you say vegan then it cuts out a whole plethora of things that people will put you into an extremist group so plant-based is a much better name so thank you for that well that's exactly why i did it because i say it wasn't reference to veganism at that time because the word i didn't know the word but was certainly related to vegetarianism so when i had that those words you know kind of picked off quickly i wanted to emphasize the science that was my background and i didn't want to be confused you know as they're coming from the dead and then the word whole was added to it in a couple more years because the whole this holistic idea of nutrition was was i found attractive uh but so i haven't used the word vigor vegetarian very much uh and i want to i just want to tell you to get your opinion on this uh you know i i respect very much their views that's not the issue uh it's just that was not that's not the issue yeah i want to talk about the science and you let's rest the case on the basis of the facts and so as and not on the emotion not on the emotion exactly well they have emotions about they had emotions about my first book and one fellow pretty well known at the time publicizing the whole idea of veganism online uh i'll say who it is because he i've said the public is he's he was semi-science but many cases so i've since met him with stuff before what he liked what i was doing but and when when the book came out he wrote two reviews of my book uh one of his it was very uh congratulating you know very positive about the way it has had some information but the then forget what title he had for it but the other review he really says who gives a damn and so he the fact that i had learned what i learned using experimental animal studies and that really upset him that really upset him so it went from that to then some more and there's been two or three pretty leading figures in this field who won't talk about any of this stuff that i that was my bread and butter is what i learned they don't want to talk about it because experiment animals are used and that's that's enough as you know they they they come from this uh philosophical perspective which fair enough i mean i i grant them their rationale their their their ideas but uh when they then they want to chop off you know this other area of research that matters so i had very similar experiences very similar people were saying because i show slides of these sheep i can actually show you some i have some here on my computer of what these sheep look like when they have skew leg syndrome or what the vervet monkeys look like or what their systems look like when when you feed them these diets and they're saying that this this uh this kind of research is cruel to the animals now i myself was also on the ethics committee of the university which was a very tricky job later on they actually made me a one-man committee which was even worse but one other thing yeah one of the things uh how i dealt with it is i said look industry does this anyway industry feeds these animals on stall on a daily basis and you're not going to stop industry so when we went in and did our experimentation we didn't introduce an experiment to torture animals our worst case scenario was exactly what industry does on a 24 7 basis so by introducing the other diets which were totally plant-based or only partially animal based in various percentages we were actually lowering the stress of the animals and not increasing them so and by doing this research we could actually prove a point which would make life for future sheep so much better and you could argue for that that same thing for humans as well so when we did the experiments with vervet monkeys these monkeys are in the vervet monkey institute where you there's a special license to do this research and the animals are in that program in any case so you are not you are not adding to anything you're not taking away from anything you actually by introducing the better lifestyles for comparison improving their situation and the long-term benefit is that you get information which is useful for all animals and for humanity yes so for example if if you say to if you can prove to the veterinary world that giving milk to adult cats is not a good idea because it causes severe renal failure and evil renal bleeding and they say nonsense and you do an experiment where you compare cats that drink milk to cats that don't get milk and you see a vast difference between the two then you're not only changing a mindset you're actually benefiting cats and so the veterinary world today will say don't feed your cat's because it causes severe renal damage if you hadn't done that little experiment they would never have believed you oh boy that's a beautiful story that's a beautiful story you know there's i have something similar uh and you may know the uh what they call the bioassay program for testing you know you know candidate chemical carcinogens uh that's that's the usa yes yeah it's been around for 50 years or something like that and they spell millions of dollars every year well in any case uh the idea there which was formulated in the early 60s was that these chemicals since they can initiate the carcinogenic lesion through their ability to mutate the dna as you know um it was that that were now being exposed to you know a lot of new synthetic chemicals that might be carcinogenic and uh some felt that that was the major explanation for the rise in cancer some cancers the human in humans so then they got busy there being going around starting testing all these candidates with these candidate chemicals for their carcinogenicity and that they have that became a rather sophisticated program for that's existed for many years to still exist spend lots of money on that sort of thing and in the process in the process um that has become almost in in some quarters the major uh assumption of why human cancer has been on the rise in recent decades it's because of exposure to these chemical carcinomas absolutely environmental chemicals if you will uh and sure enough i mean i i i'm an expert again with the idea we don't need to get exposed to all those that nasty stuff we can figure out better things to do but what it did it deflected that argument therefore and the subsequent time at least in my community it deflected uh considerations of the role of nutrition particularly the role of protein-based diets these diets they deflected that uh that kind of argument so um again it became sort of a narrow-minded view that still holds sway they still holds weight that and that by the way and so the vegan people the vegetarian type people they want to make that argument not on the kind of things that i was doing in fact um so i've had quite a wrestle with that group and uh but but the odd thing is is in that group the reason we know which chemicals are carcinogenic and which one's not at least according to official documents if you will was because that was all done with experimental animals animal experimentation yeah absolutely this is so fascinating it's interesting actually hearing both of your stories we're actually answering some of the questions that we are going to ask just naturally i i find that this conversation absolutely fascinating i talked to this gentleman for hours and hours and hours it was a sort of similar story i think that you were telling namely that we we get on our silos in thinking and sometimes that we we we're so rigidified we were stuck in that line that lane and then we have lots of those guys with those uh kind of silos in science and i i get kind of upset about it and that's why i really enjoyed listening to you because uh you're a free thinker like i spared i'm going to say is obviously you just want to explore i want to explore and i want to see i my big question is why why i want to know why that's that's there's a there's an idea that i i've read this is recently it's called the five why or four one the four why sen you know have you heard of that science is what happened it's it's why why why i i've become fascinated with the concept because inside that's what i was doing too i was exploring things that i didn't know existed uh why why why it was always every time as you know there's some more questions to ask exactly now when i became a a believer from a non-believer that doesn't mean that my faith was going to be blind because if i was going to serve a logical god or a logical religious system then i must have an answer to the why question you can't just tell me become a vegetarian if i don't know why i want to know why you were talking about being exposed to carcinogens you know we are in this world but we can actually rise above it you're going to be exposed to environmental factors in this world whether you like it or not now you can go and isolate yourself in a bubble and cut yourself off from humanity or you could do the best you can and leave the consequences to to the higher forces of this universe and the same with carcinogenicity my mother died of cancer when i was 12 years old so cancer has always been a special interest to me why and a plant-based diet especially as you advocate a whole food plant-based diet gives you this vast plethora of protection in terms of the phytochemicals and the antioxidants and the interactions with all of these things you cut that out of a diet and you go into a modern diet you have absolutely no protection you have nothing that can stop the process of initiation and even if it has started you've got nothing that can stop the promotion if you don't have all of these chemicals in your diet and it's no good taking a tablet because there are so many interactions between the phytochemicals and the vitamins and the minerals and that's why i went into organic farming because organic farming doesn't feed the plant organic farming feeds the soil so that the soil can get every single mineral out of the system that it requires to be a healthy plant with all the the phytochemicals in there to give you maximum protection so yes it's like you know in the bible you talk about a spiritual war you have to put on the armor of god and in the natural world he has supplied an armor in the form of all of these antioxidants and anticarcinogens that you get in in a whole food diet and that's your protection not not the tablet the food is your protection the food becomes your medicine as you yourself also stay you know that's the best explanation i've heard anyone ever say of the concept that i have come to believe and and i like a lot that's beautiful dr campbell we're so excited about this conversation uh between you yourself dr t colin campbell and dr walter vike it's so exciting to hear both of your backgrounds and how much you have in common and and just to be able to learn from from your experiences some of our viewers some of our audience had questions about protein which you both beautifully answered and um you know why whole food platf plant-based diet and that's been answered as well and so we're just so thrilled with this conversation well i want to thank you heidi for uh actually arranging this because i think this is one of the best conversations i've had in years oh wonderful well ivan and i really thought that this would be a great match you both have done so much research over the years and and you know have the support of science from your research to support these concepts which you know we're christians as well these are biblical concepts for the health of all of us so we're just so excited by the way i i loved your idea on genetic pre-proposed to cancer yeah now you are quite right there absolutely even if you are genetically inclined to to get cancer because cancer runs in the family there's still the promotion stage and you can block that with the right with the right phytochemicals so you know all is not lost if you have this propensity to cancer because by taking a whole food diet you give yourself some pretty good uh protection i i find that experiment that the americans did on on animals unfortunately for uh protection against uv exposure in the iraq war for example how to prevent skin cancer and they fed these these rodents diets high in phytochemicals and low in phytochemicals typical american diet and those that had the phytochemicals even though they were exposed to the radiation didn't get cancer but the others did so you're absolutely right there but just for the viewers the difference in plant proteins and animal protein is not only the amino acid composition and the amino acid composition and the amino acid sequence of course changes the structure of the protein as you know so plant proteins tend to be globular proteins whereas animal proteins tend to be very tightly wound more fibrous proteins especially if you look at muscle protein which is the main diet that people will be taking in and it's a total different ball game to digest an animal protein which has to be basically unwound for the enzyme pepsin to get in to cut it into polypeptides and later trypsin as well whereas if it's globular it's much easier so if you if you're feeding an animal animal protein then you have to optimize the enzymes activity and the way that the that the animals and humans do that is by lowering the ph in the stomach so if you if you're digesting a plant protein your ph in your stomach doesn't have to really drop below 4.5 because pepsin is only activated in an acid medium so pepsin will only start working once the ph gets to run about 6.5 and then it'll it'll increase its activity as you lower the ph so plant proteins you don't have to go lower than maybe four whereas if you add an animal protein you have to go down to three if you add phosphate which is egg protein you have to go down to 1.5 that's a huge acid load so all of this adds to creating an acid system and as you know cancer is something that flourishes in an acid system and in order to counteract that then you have to have more release of calcium from the bone to neutralize the acid and so you actually you're actually starting a cascade of degenerative diseases so you're not sticking only with with cancer you're starting to go into the field of osteoporosis you're starting into the field of acid load and gout and calcium deposition arthritis the whole cascade starts with animal protein it's amazing that is so perfect too again um there i i have one one thought here though uh that may sound somewhat counter to what you said but i want to that's fine that's good let's yeah that's right that's that's the fun part of this kind of discussion um there is a the way one one of the questions from the days since i was doing my doctoral dish dissertation basically was this idea that animal protein is higher quality as a word was used in the public is used in science and so forth higher quality higher quality and and that in turn is in reference to his latest as far as the science is concerned i suspect you know this well uh it's it's a reference to the mitchell method of measure of biological value yes but that is a professor university illinois back in the 20s by the name of mitchell he came up with this rather simple-minded equation to be honest about it and the value of protein according to this equation if you will was it was in reference to the amount of protein being absorbed and been retained in the tissues and so the biological value was a measure of the proportion of the total protein consumed that is retained in tissues so therefore it suggests that the animal that the animal protein is being digested faster because more being or at least more completely which as i say someone runs characters what you would just describe that's kind of what you just said very very interesting but i went back and looked at uh uh in fact i i should tell you this when i was in graduate school my first teaching opportunity it was kind of a practice kind of thing if we have to do as you know it was in fees and feeding of all sorts of livestock and the biological value thing was was that but was sort of the centerpiece that was a centerpiece i knew that from the farm i knew it from the classroom then it was all about the mitchell method well mitchell himself published that method in 1922. it turns out and uh he became a very avid proponent of consuming more animal protein because it had this high value that really put an emphasis on consuming protein from animals instead of plants we put plants try to put plans together you had to mix and match and complement charity and all that stuff that we've had to live with over the years uh but then you go back to the method itself yes it stimulated growth in livestock like page for example because and so on the farm uh you know you tend to want to use a tank as we called it animal products to encourage the growth of the animal and it was a higher they always said always higher value well mitchell himself i thought this was he published that in 1922. in 1913 he was responding to an exchange that was going on at the time about the importance of protein and human existence all almost always if i could put in those terms and the uh the author of that first 1913 paper was argued saying something like protein is so important humans have and so forth and so on mitchell called back of response and say you know this is why the inferior races of the world exist they don't have enough protein so he whoa he was quite a racist to be honest about it yeah this question here because he and and others were saying protein shortly after was discovered it was called the stuff of civilization itself well the whole the history of protein that's part of my new book that telling our story but protein became almost worshipped if you will as a nutrient absolutely because and then that triggered you know the kind of food we eat obviously um and that triggered the kind of food we don't eat because we got so caught up in eating animal food and the consumption of plant food goes down there's a see-saw effect here and it already comes back to the question concerning how when could we die from animal sources by the way when did we decide it was so so so important to human health and the word protein you probably know this as well the word protein means fest right prime importance this kind of stuff that was just unimportant and then justify leave living thereafter and avoid the genuine chairman professor they came after after they in that line of thinking uh and they kept emphasizing all the time this highly valuable protein from animal sources of course and you can see that their own interpretations their own research as they went forward if they found something that encouraged the consumption more protein it was always animal based of course absolutely natural method came along said that's it now we got an analytical method now it's established it is the best protein period you see the trouble with that the trouble with their thinking is they think that an animal protein because it is is a complete protein it has all the essential amino acids in fairly high concentrations whereas plants don't so if you have a diet that is purely grain based you're going to have shortages of essential amino acids for for example methionine is quite low in grains but it's very high in legumes so if you combine the grain with the legume which is something as simple as a simple peanut butter sandwich which is a grain and a legume then you have a complete protein the difference is that because you are combining grains with legumes you are getting a whole plethora of other chemicals that you don't get in animal proteins and it actually enhances the system now one of the amino acids that we did a lot of work on was arginine as you know arginine has more than one nitrogenous group attached to it the amino acid itself and arginine is the first entry into the urea cycle so it's like a chemical reaction where you have a lot of substrate in the form of arginine and it pushes the reaction to the right so that you get rapid urea production so animal protein is very low in arginine plant proteins particularly nuts and seeds and and all of these are very high in arginine so a diet that contains plant protein has a very high arginine level i mean really triple double and more than an animal protein so your system works absolutely optimally because you don't actually in animal protein you have to manufacture the arginine it's not an essential amino acid so you can make it but you have a manufacturing process so there's a slow increase so the reaction to the urea is very slow whereas if you supply the arginine in a dietary form the reaction is very fast so your protein metabolism which produces of course nitrogen which is released from from the digestive protein in the form of ammonia which is highly toxic to cells and highly carcinogenic is immediately degraded to urea if you are on a plant-based diet so it's much better to get a plant-based protein high arginine fast detox on every level you are better protected so that's another reason though is we compared arginine levels in in rabbits that we gave diets with casein and diets with soy protein and we looked at arginine and the relationship to arterial sclerosis and it's just amazing comparison in our vervet monkeys after just three months the blood vessels the main artery as to as to cholesterol deposition on a diet with casein as the protein or soy with the protein is just mind boggling you cannot believe it and one of the things that protects the cell is detoxification and that's what a plant protein enables in the body at a at a far more efficient rate yeah so there are many reasons why plant protein is the way to go but as you correctly say you have to have combinations now in animals often they are monoculture for example herbivores or grazers they get one kind of food so where do they get these additional things from that's where the the ruminant for example comes in with with all those bacteria so actually they are growing their own plants the the organisms in their rumen and those in turn as they pass through the the rest of the digestive system the orgasm and the albumism etc they get digested and supply all the other needs so in actual fact the ruminant that only eats grass has a very varied diet and then it's very interesting that when a lion actually catches a herbivore the the alpha lion gets the first bite and he eats the stomach content so that is why he's the strongest line because he has a vegetarian diet i've never heard that before that's really kind of interesting okay you know i i have to if we can change course here's just a little bit on a different question because the minister said you're getting your opinion on this namely this has to do with our study in china that we did you know about of course where we had access to a lot of disease mortality rates uh we've measured lots of things having to do with nutritional status uh and so forth and so we had access to all this information that we could combine stuff and see what we could see uh in any case my motivation for doing the china study i should tell you primarily came not only because it was a good opportunity to get involved with my chinese colleague at the time but i wanted to see also if in that kind of study in humans that we would get some data that would uh counter or agree with whatever seen in the laboratory especially in reference to the consumption of animal-based protein okay so we we that was one of my personal interests at the time uh but now with the covet analysis the covet crisis that we now have i want to ask your opinion on this we collected in that study in back in the 1980s information on liver cancer among other cancers liver cancer being primarily caused by the hepatitis b virus as you probably know uh and so it's it's a very prominent cancer in china and other asian african countries too as you know too um so we then had we collect all this nutritional information that was a viral disease and so uh now i'm just only recalling some of this now with this crisis but in in effect uh it turns out that of all the things that we've measured anything that having to do with plant consumption all the way from plant protein to dietary fiber to actual measurement of plant food consumption plant foods consumption was strongly correlated with the formation of antibodies the link between before the hepatitis b virus the the correlation between the two was really really impressive across the board we had a number of different ways immune correlations as we know are suggestive not necessarily proof of causation as as you know but nonetheless we have so many correlations all pointing in the same direction it does arrive at the point that we can talk about causation so people who consume more plant-based foods form antibodies to the virus and it was no relationship between plant food consumption and their mortality rate for liver cancer which is the product of that virus in contrast the conception of animal food and it wasn't much was only on average in rural china they were only consuming about one tenth of the level of animal food that we do in the west and so it was a very low consumption more protein in the chinese diet even that even so that was sufficient that is strongly correlated with liver cancer rate so plant protein consumption is not correlated liver cancer rates animal food consumption is correlated and and the correlation with liver cancer is at the significance level of 0.001 for statistical argument um and so in contrast the the animal food uh was associated with the activation of the virus to form the cancer and was in inversely correlated with the formation of antibodies the plant food consumption was just exactly the opposite it was quite correlated with the formation of antibodies and inverse what wouldn't even correlate at all with it with the liver cancer mortality rates i happen to believe that that is a really good suggestion for one way that we might be able to manage uh exposure to flues it's precluding this particular one here you just simply switch diets and as you may know too once people jump to this diet and do these jump starts to try these jump start programs the effects that we see are very fast i mean cholesterol drops like a rock within two or three days even insulin it is diabetics for example um i have a friend in houston who's got a clinic of his own and he takes uh people in his clinic and puts them on a plant-based diet and the effect of plant-based diet on the need for insulin and diet among diabetics is very profound that is to say the diet is so fast of reducing insulin that people can go into hyperglycemic shock so his studies with his patients he takes him off the insulin uh at medication when he first introduced him to the diet so here's my point is this whole food plant-based diet is so pronounced that it that it operates very broadly involving all kinds of disease endpoints at the same time it acts very fast so now with the data we have from china plants are equivalent to antibodies animal food consumption equivalent to antigen uh i think that's a crucial way out of this of this uh coronavirus situation and i think that people if they are inclined to let's say they were tested positive or close to it or in association with it if they were to switch or die right at that point in time this is my hypothesis you know coming from that of course is coming from the hepatitis virus not the culvert thing but i think that you know all viruses they all are subjected to the immune system interaction first before they express their their effects they're all different in terms of the effects of symptoms but they all you know have the immune system and and this is really where the action is it seems to me that the plant food consumption enhances the immune system the activity to handle affairs like this the animal food consumption it does the opposite so i think we have a really sharp demarcation distinction between animal food and plant food insofar as this effect on viral diseases is concerned i think you are absolutely spot on when we did our vervet monkey study we also compared the immune system's response and we looked at you know the normal blood parameters and the leukocytes on the lymphocyte levels and all of these issues and we found that those that were on animal protein were immunocompromised whereas those that were on plant print protein had a much more alert if i can put it that way defense system going if we compare the various cell types and i'm quite sure that the natural killer cells which i think you've also done are greatly enhanced by a plant-based diet so your response to these viruses would be so much more efficient off the bat now if i can't sneak in a vertical perspective again there's the story of daniel who insisted to go on a plant-based diet and they also told him you're crazy you have to eat the food that comes from the king's table and he said give me give me an opportunity give me 10 days on a plant-based diet and if i'm worse off than my colleagues then fair enough then switch me back to the other diet and after 10 days the scripture says that his countenance was so much improved now we have health institutes in our country where we introduce or where they introduce the 10-day plant-based diet in order to help people with really serious debilitating diseases in just 10 days the turnaround is absolutely amazing it is like day and night people that can hardly walk five places can walk a kilometer after just 10 days and it's just a switch of diet now just imagine if people adopted this how they would be dealing with the covet situation situation and all of these that's your best protection you're absolutely spot on i believe well you know there's another part of that story too that we both know namely the the people who seem to be most susceptible to the effects of the virus or the older people who are compromised nutritionally speaking meaning they were you know used and so and and in fact just some of the data from italy i think in london and new york city uh where they've got some figures on they said something like uh 95 of the older people who really had or more of the people who experienced the worst of the virus or were died were all the ones who were the older people with compromised nutritional situations and so that's what i'm of course referring to is at the same time if people start consuming this diet early on or even at the time if it acts so fast that we i think we both agree is possible uh that that could actually uh intercept uh the infection the initial infection before it goes on to cause this mischief absolutely you know the diets in some of these old age homes are absolutely horrendous it consists of jams and and white bread and animal based protein and vegetables are virtually non-existent you know if people would do simple things like sprouting they could add to their phytochemical defense in a marvelous way and it's such a simple thing to do you can do it in a kitchen you don't need anything in particular other than a jar and some seeds people should start augmenting their their diets with healthy live food with active phytochemicals and antioxidants and they should concentrate on those things i mean as you know berries and are just amazing in terms of their antioxidant ability they should be adding these things to their diet on a regular basis especially in the times that we are living in now yes yes definitely unfortunately i've got a bit of a conflict coming up uh i don't know no problem it was wonderful chatting to you but we have so many things we could talk about i just find your ideas really just fantastic very enlightening and uh thank you it's been an honor to talk to you yeah well likewise i i we didn't quite finish that discussion concerning your talk about you know the ph the gastric ph as it declines and as it relates to the animal versus plant food kind of thing and and this question is concerning the uh absorbability of light protein and animal protein and there was one more point i would yeah right there was one more point that i want to add is if you are producing more uh aesthetic gastric juices that affects not only the digestion it affects also the microflora in your intestine so the entire micro flora in the first part of your digestive system is affected and eventually even the colonic microflora is affected you know that the microflora in on a plant-based diet is substantially different from the microflora on an animal-based diet because you have more methodogens if you are on a plant-based diet and more sulfur metabolizing bacteria if you are on an animal-based protein diet because because of all the sulfur-containing amino acids and that is also a contributing factor uh if you have this this sulfur production in the in the colon that is another contributor towards and and of course the phenolic ones the phenolic amino acids they are also metabolized by the bacteria and they break off these phenol components like in vanilla alanine and they are carcinogenic so in many ways the plant protein root is absolutely the way to go in terms of your flora in terms of all of those things really yeah it's the the breadth of the infection is just amazing i i like in this uh ideas scientific perspective in a sense that look at the data what happens inside the cell i i sort of have have sort of had visions what we're really looking at here is nature at work absolutely this is nature itself and i find a whole lot you know it's so beautiful it's so beautiful and so interconnected and so precise that i would just like to notch it up one and say it smacks of design yeah i was i was only almost going to say the same thing you know this was there you started off with your your arms as far as what you were thinking and how you transformed and so forth and so on i mean i see this this this whole operation that goes on inside the cells and the communication between cells the communication between organs all of it being so instantaneous almost something something is managing there's there's some management going on here who's in control of integrating and making this turn this whole system into a symphony and you know exactly we cannot argue so simplistically that we always try to bring it down to a single denominator uh take this tablet with this one component and that'll target the problem it doesn't work that way it's a symphony orchestra as you say they all have to play their music that's right that's right well this has been a delight fantastic maybe we'll figure out a way to do it again may god bless you thank you thank you well that would be great and we just want to thank both of you so much for your time this really really was very interesting and very exciting to hear all these ideas and we'd love for you know to connect again and to share additional ideas and we're just so grateful that you guys both took your time to participate in the plant-based summit the plant-based summit is designed to teach our audience and to share information about the plant-based diet from the perspective of science history and the bible and we really covered it all today so we're just so thrilled thank you so much yeah look for the pleasure for sure thank you well thank you so much have a great rest of your day

Channel: Clash Of Minds

Views: 67,961

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Id: Tcfw2_BMtfQ

Length: 74min 55sec (4495 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021