A diet rich in animal-based and highly processed foods featuring an abundance of salt, sugar and fat appears to be a significant contributor to heart disease, especially when combined with smoking, sedentary lifestyle and an inability to cope with stress.

“Clinical indicators of heart disease — high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol (especially the 'bad' cholesterol, LDL), high blood homocysteine and a couple of other indicators — also are important to consider but these occur mostly because of a bad diet. When total blood cholesterol is under 150 mg, almost no heart disease is observed. The usual range of total cholesterol in North America and other western countries is between 160 and 260 mg, so most of us are in trouble,” says renowned nutrition and health expert Dr. T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University and author of The China Study (available on Amazon.com), which explores the connection between disease and diet.

People who eat the most animal-based foods get the most chronic disease, according to Dr. Campbell. People who eat the most plant-based foods are healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease.

There is evidence that diet alone can prevent and even reverse heart disease, says Dr. Campbell, citing the clinical experience of a number of researchers.

By increasing your intake of fiber and plant-based foods, managing your weight and exercising you may notice a marked difference in your cholesterol levels within a matter of weeks — and that’s not all.

“The same diet, if done properly, affects all these diseases, and more, Alzheimer's, obesity, kidney stones, macular degeneration — the most common cause of blindness among the elderly, osteoporosis, and multiple sclerosis, among others. Different dietary factors and combinations of factors may be responsible for the individual diseases but the final result is basically the same,” says Dr. Campbell.

After years working in the policy arena, Dr. Campbell points to flawed thinking concerning the biology of nutrition as one of the reasons we are so drug-dependent.

“We tend to work on individual nutrients and nutrient analogs as if they are responsible, thus accounting for the multi-billion-dollar nutrient supplement industry. But this is terribly superficial and almost always has led to either no long-term effects or, in some cases, more not less disease. Nonetheless this is what makes money and this is the way that sounds simple to the consumer and the patient.”

Nutrition, he says, should be considered from a whole-foods perspective, allowing the natural interplay of food components to work its wonders in the body.



Here’s some healthy advice from Dr. Campbell:

• Consume a whole foods, plant-based diet (oats, whole wheat, dried beans, tofu, eggplant and almonds are all cholesterol-lowering foods)
• Eat lots of colored vegetables and fruits
• Restrict salt, sugar (refined carbs) and fat
• Add a regular exercise program
• Drink at least two quarts of good water per day
• Get some sunlight
• Sit back and enjoy

“Most importantly, if this represents a major lifestyle change, be patient and allow for new tastes to emerge — probably in a few months,” Dr. Campbell says. “It is at this point that you begin to enjoy tastes you never realized were there. Finally, you’ll wonder, ‘How did I get on the wrong path in the first place?’ “