‘Reading it may save your life’
(Note: This is the second of a two-part story on the China Study and how its findings relate to health and the AIM products. The first part in the series was published in the March-April Partners Living Well magazine.)

When the China Study was first introduced in 2005, the New York Times profiled it, proclaiming the book as “the Grand Prix of epidemiology.” Whole Foods CEO John Mackey called it “the most important book on health, diet, and nutrition ever written.” Dr. Dean Ornish, an author and personal physician to such famous stars as Oprah Winfrey, said that “reading it may save your life.”

But in the four years since its debut, it has been met with significantly less fanfare and even less of an impact.

The dietary world of today remains largely the same as the one that the China Study warned against. Eating habits have gone unchanged, whole food nutrition still remains a niche movement, and cancer is just as troublesome as it was four years ago.

What is the reason for the relative anonymity in which the China Study has lived? Its nutritional breakthroughs should have been enough to get any person to sit up and notice. The China Study was the first of its kind to provide substantive evidence of the benefits of eating a plant-based diet – benefits that included a lower risk of disease, including cancer.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell, the book’s author, has some theories about why his research has stayed under the radar. One of his assumptions is that there are a handful of influential people who fear the ramifications of the China Study being put into practice. Many businesses stand to lose a lot of money if a conversion to plant-based diets were to actually come to fruition. Fast food chains, food suppliers, and much of the health field would be drastically trimmed if the dependence on current dietary status quo waned.

Another criticism deals with errors in the study’s methods. At face value, the research done in the China Project – a 20-year study covering 880 million people in 2,400 Chinese counties – is not entirely bulletproof. The mortality rates that Campbell and his associates used for comparison were taken from nearly a decade earlier and extrapolated to fit the study’s timetable. The measurement of nutrients that the China Project used was dietary data from a broad table measure rather than the individual foods themselves. This would have neglected the specific nutrient benefits of particular foods that were otherwise grouped into the generic categories of “bad” animal proteins and the “good” plant proteins.

Generalizations, too, are another issue that some have with Campbell’s China Study. Statements like “eating foods that contain any cholesterol above zero milligrams is unhealthy” tend to be looked at with a critical eye when there are so many variables left unaccounted for.

What these criticisms fail to mention, though, is the unique, original voice that the China Study provides that contradicts the current standard of diet and health in Western cultures. Campbell’s research may lack specifics on certain results, but it does not lack for a compelling case to reconsider the way that animal-based proteins are used in contemporary diets.

The sheer volume of disease-related research that the China Project compiled is enough to warrant a serious look. The following is a list of diseases that the China Project claims could be avoided and lessened by using the proper diet.
• Diabetes
• Brain disease
• Breast cancer
• Colon cancer
• Eye disease
• Heart disease
• Kidney stones
• Obesity
• Osteoporosis

A movement toward whole food health is the China Study’s desire, and it is a foundational principle of The AIM Companies™. AIM Members have seen the benefits of whole food nutrition, and these benefits are exactly the types of results that Campbell and the China Study would expect.

AIM Member Jacqueline McDermott, a Director from Fonthill, Ontario, Canada, is one who discovered the health benefits of plant-based nutrients through AIM BarleyLife® and a host of other great AIM products.

“In July of 2004, four years after a lumpectomy due to breast cancer, I was diagnosed with bone cancer. The cancer had metastasized very rapidly into my bones causing my femur to break. The cancer not only attacked my left leg, but my pelvis, ribs, vertebrae, and skull as well.

“Six heavy doses of chemo were prescribed and completed in December 2004.

“All the while, I continued under the direction of a homeopath who included natural products to help keep my immune system as strong as possible during the treatments. I have always kept a healthy eating lifestyle and often entertained new health products. It wasn’t until four months after my last chemo treatment that a friend introduced me to BarleyLife by giving me some samples.

“I was so touched by his visit that it led me to sign up immediately. This product testified to cleansing and healing, so why wait, when something sounded so good. At that time no matter what I ate and took, I still lacked energy and my body remained very acidic, which is a prime state for cancer to thrive in.

“I also know from past experience that when you begin a new product, whether for cleansing purposes or building your immune system, you have to give the product a fair chance; therefore, I knew that when my samples ran out, my first shipment would have arrived and I could continue taking the BarleyLife without interruption.

“The big question for me was, ‘How much should I take?’ The cancer had already done massive damage, eating away at my leg and my spine.

“This is where AIM Member Muriel McPherson (a Chairman’s Club Director) came into my life, giving me her ‘recipe’ for cancer treatment, which I faithfully began to take. It involved taking the AIM Garden Trio® eight times per day. The Garden Trio is BarleyLife, AIM Just Carrots®, and AIM RediBeets®. It sounded like a lot, and it was. But my body had been intruded by an ugly disease and had left me weakened and in pain. Two weeks into the Garden Trio recipe, not only did I notice a tremendous increase in energy but for the first time ever, my body was no longer acidic. BarleyLife was the only product that worked for me and brought me into the healthy neutral acidity zone. I was thrilled.

“I have been told that I am a walking miracle. My oncologist says that I’m still full of cancer, but it is not active and not eating at the bones. The cancer remains quiet, and that is glorious news for a bone cancer patient.

“I faithfully take a good portion of the Garden Trio each day as well as a number of the other products such as AIM Proancynol® 2000, AIM Cellsparc 360®, AIMega®, and AIM Herbal Fiberblend®, which I have found to be ‘my happy balance’ for maintenance purposes.”

Jacqueline and others like her are prime examples that there is enough evidence in the China Study to at least constitute a reconsideration of current habits. The China Study’s research was unique: rather than blame disease on genetics, it turned the attention to nutrition and nutrition’s role in activating good and bad genes.

It would be a shame if revolutionary ideas like this were forgotten so quickly.