“The China Study” and Longevity | Hacker News Reader

“The China Study” and Longevity

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>"The above analysis is trivially simple. Just data preprocessing simple correlations and filtering, using the most high-level overview the data allows for regarding food intake and health. The possible effect of different foods on longevity. No massaging of the data, no exposure to birthday paradox spuriousness, no statistical tricks, questionable adjustments for, etc"

There is also no controlling for anything! It seems a no-brainer that higher "Saturated Fat" and "Animal Protein" intakes correlate with higher income/access to modern health care infrastructure. Which means the author is really measuring an underlying latent "prosperity" variable. The author almost groks it with:

>"The correlations speak for themselves, the top X correlations for longevity are relatively strongly correlated amongst themselves. It is likely that multiple of these columns are indeed major contributors to longevity, yet given the inter-food correlations, it is quite impossible to isolate these from the variables that are just along for the ride."

Once the author controls for the prosperity that is the causal for all the correlated "dependent" variables, it might turn out that a Vegan diet is better than a non-Vegan diet. Or it might not. But this piece adds no value to the conversation, IMHO.

*As lspears points out, even worse is the wrong endpoint. Prob of making it to 80 != lower chance of death from Western diseases (heart attack/cancer).

Certainly true, but I don't think anyone will draw the opposite conclusion that poverty contributes to longevity...

There were a few studies showing that rats fed less than their normal assumed calorie intake urged to live longer. I can't speak for the effect pathway, but similar things could also be true in humans.

Check this Comment on Campbell and the china study by a vegan on the vegan subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/zz7wb/debunking\_res...

>As a short list, here are a few peer-reviewed articles specifically attacking claims made in the China Study (which, by the way, is itself not peer-reviewed):

Claim 1: "\[Protein from dairy products\] almost certainly contribute to a significant loss of bone calcium while vegetable-based diets clearly protect against bone loss". \—[Campbell in 1994 article in Cornell Chronicle](http://www.news.cornell.edu/chronicle/96/11.14.96/osteoporos...)

Debunking of 1: "The results strongly indicated that dietary calcium, especially from dairy sources, increased bone mass …. \[C\]alcium from dairy sources was correlated with bone variables to a higher degree than was calcium from the nondairy sources". —[Campbell in Dietary calcium and bone density](http://www.ajcn.org/content/58/2/219.full.pdf+html)

Claim 2: "\[Due to animal consumption raising cholesterol,\] the findings from the China Study indicate that the lower the percentage of animal-based foods that are consumed, the greater the health benefits. " —[Campbell on p242 of The China Study](http://books.google.com/books?id=KgRR12F0RPAC&pg=PA242)

Claim 3: "Plasma cholesterol is positively associated with animal protein intake and inversely associated with plant protein intake." —[Campbell in 2001 article in Cornell Chronicle](http://www.news.cornell.edu/chronicle/01/6.28.01/china_study...)

Debunking of 2 & 3: "Within China neither plasma total cholesterol nor LDL cholesterol was associated with CVD. … The results indicate that geographical differences in CVD mortality within China are caused primarily by factors other than dietary or plasma cholesterol. … There were no significant correlations between the various cholesterol fractions and the three mortality rates." —[Campbell in Erythrocyte fatty acids, plasma lipids, and cardiovascular disease in rural China](http://www.ajcn.org/content/52/6/1027.full.pdf)

Claim 4: "Liver cancer is strongly associated with increasing blood cholesterol." —[Campbell on p104 of The China Study](http://books.google.com/books?id=KgRR12F0RPAC&pg=PA104)

Debunking of 4: "This produces…an inverse relation between cholesterol concentration and the risk of death from liver cancer or from other chronic liver disease." —[Campbell in Prolonged infection with hepatitis B virus and association between low blood cholesterol concentration and liver cancer](http://ukpmc.ac.uk/backend/ptpmcrender.cgi?accid=PMC1677354&...)

Claim 5: "\[A\]s blood cholesterol levels in rural China rose in certain counties the incidence of 'Western' diseases also increased". —[Campbell on p78 of The China Study](http://books.google.com/books?id=KgRR12F0RPAC&pg=PA78)

Debunking of 5: "\[I\]t is the largely vegetarian, inland communities who have the greatest all risk mortalities and morbidities and who have the lowest LDL cholesterols". —[Campbell in Fish consumption, blood docosahexaenoic acid and chronic diseases in Chinese rural populations](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1095643303...)

>For fun, notice that every single debunking article I mentioned above is from T. Colin Campbell himself. Yes, seriously. He actually rebuts his own points when submitting peer reviewed articles.* I guess he's more careful with what he says when he's not writing a book aimed at the general public to help convince people to go vegan.

Could someone quote from the book the claim on longevity or "All Cause Mortality" that this post is refuting?

The book is primarily about correlating the Western diet and animal protein with some western diseases.

There is no data here about the central claims of the book.

I read the book and don't remember the specific claims about longevity. I wouldn't be surprised if he found a correlation with longevity, though.

The US NIH found that Seventh-Day Adventists tend to live 4-10 years longer than the general population on a primarily vegetarian diet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_Church#H...

The large scale "Nurses Study" and the "Health Professionals Follow-up Study" also correlated plant-based diets with decreased risk of death.

https://www.mygenefood.com/plant-based-diet-longevity/

Also important, plant-rich diets are one of the top solutions for climate change ( https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank ). That's another great reason to scale back animal protein consumption.

Denise Minger thoroughly critiques T. Colin Campbell's (seemingly incompetent) interpretation of the data in this study.

https://deniseminger.com/the-china-study/

EDIT: TCC's reply: http://www.vegsource.com/news/2010/07/china-study-author-col...

Why should I trust Denise Minger over Colin Campbell?

I read Capbell's China Study and I'm definitely interested in counter points to his findings, but it seems like Minger is a food blogger (and recent book author) while the other is a biochemist with a long history in their field.

You shouldn't. Denise Minger does not know what she's analysing. And it's visible from the response.

TCC said multiple times that his study should have been a starting point for new research. Not as a definitive statement on what the optimal diet is.

You don't have to trust anything, she lays out relevant information from the original study with analysis. It's not conjecture when the info is there plainly to see. Reading studies isn't that hard.

The headline given by "vegsource" to the article on T. Colin Campbell's reply ("China Study Author Colin Campbell Slaps Down Critic") is unfortunate, since his reply is surprisingly detailed and collegial.

I think this would be excellent material for a medical statistics course. Fortunately, the raw data is available.

Do the data support the TCC's conclusions?

Are Denise Minger's critiques valid?

Harriet Hall from Science Based Medecine finds Denise Mingers critiques good and well researched: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-china-study-revisited/

But they are not. She didn't control any variables. She also didn't mention that TCC published several studies that go against the thesis of China Study, after he wrote the book.

There's definitely valid criticism of the epidemiological study model but Monger's sloppy data munging is not.

I let my biostatistician friend have a look at her critique ha wasnt impressed and commented om her blog. His comment was promptly removed.

Many comments criticising her statistical errors have been removed, which makes me draw the conclusion that she mostly just wants to sell books and write a popular blog than be att part of serious academic discussion.

The author is missing an important point: dietary sources of cholesterol are from animal byproducts only.

> Cholesterol comes from two sources. Your liver makes all the cholesterol you need. The remainder of the cholesterol in your body comes from foods derived from animals. For example, meat, poultry and full-fat dairy products all contain cholesterol, called dietary cholesterol.

> Those same foods are high in saturated and trans fats.

from the American Heart Association: https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/cholesterol/about-cho...

> trans fats.

I’m no expert but this is the first time I hear about this. I thought trans fats are mainly found in industrially processed (mostly vegetable) fats!

Ah, according to Wikipedia:

> Animal-based fats were once the only trans fats consumed, but by far the largest amount of trans fat consumed today is created by the processed food industry as a side effect of partially hydrogenating unsaturated plant fats (generally vegetable oils). These partially hydrogenated fats have displaced natural solid fats and liquid oils in many areas, the most notable ones being in the fast food, snack food, fried food, and baked goods industries.

So eating no fast food, no margarine and also no animals might even further reduce consumption of trans fats.

I think this analysis is incomplete. It's important to separate out longevity from cause of death. "The China Study"'s central premiss is that a vegan diet reduces the likelihood of dying of the "Western" diseases such as heart disease and cancer. A simple correlation between a vegan diet and longevity doesn't address this and also wouldn't take into account the high correlation between not being able to afford animal products and a lack of access to medical care. If you actually read the book the author goes into all this detail.

"Western" disease is caused by high intake of processed foods, soda, etc. It isn't the vegan diet that helps. It's removing processed food, soda, etc. You can be an omnivore or a carnivore and remove processed junk food and reduce "Western" disease. And you can be a vegan and eat a ton of processed vegan junk food and succumb to "Western" disease.

Processed foods and overeating is the true problem in the western diet.

And do you references to published study results to back up your assertion?

This is so true...I believe this wholeheartedly, had to find my long-last hn login to upvote this. I've read a lot of stories where people start a diet such as one meal a day, or all potatoes...heck I even heard of a guy who was "curing" patients with only rice and sugar back in the day. The common thread among these stories is that they've stopped eating a lot of what they used to (presumably mostly junk food), and so their body can recover. It's not what you put in so much as what you've stopped putting in.

Just to stress that the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. It may be true - or not. But it's important not to assume it's true just because a few stories say so.

It seems the author is already kind of biased when he set out to analyse the data.. use of the term 'overzealous vegans' in the first paragraph sets of a few alarms for me.

I think it would be interesting to look at other long term studies (like the 7th adventist study someone else mentioned here) as well as studies that look at plant based eating as a cure/preventative method for more specific/acute diseases (like Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's WFPBN solution for cardiovascular disease, or Dr. Greger's 'How Not to Die' which compiles and summarizes research in the WFPB space https://nutritionfacts.org/book/)

Here is a debate between the author of The China Study and another scientist in the field who disagrees with his findings:

http://www.catalystathletics.com/articles/downloads/proteinD... (I have no idea why Campbell chose not to cite any sources.)

and here is a simplified take by the excellent skeptic Harriet Hall:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/385/

As Hall notes:

>He criticizes conventional recommendations for a diet with 45-65% of calories from carbohydrates, 20-35% from fat and 10-35% from protein, showing how the following menu satisfies those requirements:

>[example of an obviously unhealthy diet]

>But that’s a bit of a straw man argument. In reality, most current nutritional advice makes very much the same recommendations Campbell does except for his strict prohibition of animal protein. For instance, for cancer prevention the American Cancer Society recommends (http://www.cancer.org/docroot/MED/content/MED_2_1X_American_...) a diet high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes and low in red meat and alcohol, along with regular exercise and weight control.

In these (and other) debates, Campbell repeatedly shows, IMO, an unwillingness to take his critics seriously, instead always resorting to the broadside of "reductionist!". At first he seems to have a point, but when you read more of his responses to more people, you just find yourself hearing "reductionist! reductionist! reductionist!". This is particularly concerning since all atomistic theories (i.e. physicalist theories, i.e. the modern scientific view of reality) are ultimately reductionist in some way. Furthermore, his attack on the standard recommendations is extremely reductionist, as seen above (and a similar diet can easily be constructed with less protein and no animal foods!). I'm particularly glad to link the critique from Science-Based Medicine as they're equally critical (if not more) of the paleo milieu.

Campbell does not advocate strict prohibition of animal protein. He observes, merely, that it’s probably easier to avoid it altogether than to reduce the intake to safe levels.

The argument is as follows, albeit simplified: When you eat an animal-based diet you are likely to eat a lot more protein than you should, say 20-40% of calories. Recommenced is 10% which is nowadays very close to what authorities generally recommend regardless of source. Campbell argues that it is very challenging to achieve that 10% on a traditional western animal based diet, therefore suggests avoiding animal based protein. He does not say that an occasional meal with meat is harmful.

A varied Whole Foods plant based diet just happens to average out at around 10% protein of calories.

Projects like Jupyter have so much potential to empower individuals to understand data and verify claims. But not in their current form. Immediately after the introduction, the author starts diving in to Python and different interpreters and dependencies and then a wall of code. Anyone who's never seen code, much less heard of Python, would be immediately turned-off. Just a tiny bit of extra work on top of projects like this could exponentially increase their target audience and turn thousands into amateur fact-checkers.

I read that book a few years ago, but I remember several researches that proved the correlation between casein (milk proteins) and the cancer development. Which doesn't mean that casein causes cancer, but that casein speeds up cancer development. SO if you have a little cancer, with animal protein it will develop faster. The article skips this relevant topic.

Casein != animal protein.

not sure what point you are trying to make here. Casein is a protein. Sources in our diet come exclusively from mammalian milk. A protein from animal sources = animal protein does it not?

I read that you always have ~200 "little cancers" in your system floating around, but your immune system usually catches them.

If they all are nurtured better your immune system has more to deal with. So in a sense wouldn't it be the same?

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