The Search For Enlightenment

I have to admit to having shed a few tears this afternoon, whilst reading how the epidemic levels of heart disease caused by our western diet, can be easily and effectively reversed by simple changes in that diet.

Why tears? Well it was heart disease that took my father from us all too soon, and because maybe, just maybe, knowing then what I know now, might have saved him. The evidence has been around for decades, but it has been buried by the food companies, under a deluge of marketing ‘science’, simply to protect their obscene profits.

When you add cancer, diabetes, obesity and Alzheimer’s disease to the list of conditions being caused by what we eat and amazingly, amongst other things, the Casein protein in milk, it makes you wonder what the hell you have been taught all this time.

So what was this book I was reading, what scientific basis has it to make these outlandish claims? Written by the renowned Dr T. Colin Campbell and his son, The China Study has a simple title, coined from the research project that revealed some of the shocking truths.

For more than forty years, Dr T. Colin Campbell has been at the forefront of nutrition research. His legacy, The China Study, is the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Dr Campbell is Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University. His son, a 1999 graduate of Cornell University, Thomas Campbell is currently pursuing a career in medicine.

The China Study itself was the culmination of a twenty year partnership of Cornell University, Oxford University and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine. It details a monumental survey of diet and death rates from cancer in more than 2,400 Chinese counties and the equally monumental efforts to explore its significance and implications for nutrition and health.

Now we are all taught to take things like this with a pinch of salt, although following a great deal of research into my HCRV diet, I avoid salt whenever I can. I just feel that when I come across something so potentially life-changing, like Nichiren Buddhism, it is my duty to try to inform others, or at least bring it to their attention.

I know that some of you will not go on to explore the information in the book, preferring to fall back on the accepted ‘truths’ we have all been taught. But if a single person reads the book, and having done so, alters their diet, or that of their children and that change averts the onset of any preventable disease, I will be satisfied that I did my bit.