What they say about each other.

A. The scientists

Willett: Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy

only way to tell is to interlineate ED&BH bibliography with Campbell bibliography, not worth the effort

chief publication of China study seems to be Chen et al., Willett does not cite

Campbell & Campbell: The China Study

Willett 271-275: "One scientist especially took note . . ." spurious; carnivorous nurses, good

Willett 284: more fruits & veggies better for cardio than cancer

Willett 286: Hu + Willett: "Although we agree that overall dietary patterns are also important in determining disease risk [ref], we believe that identification of associations with individual nutrients should be the first step because it is the specific compounds or groups of compounds that are fundamentally related to the [disease process]. Specific components of diet can be modified, and individuals and the food industry are actively doing so. Understanding the health effects of specific dietary changes, which Campbell refers to as 'reductionism,' is therefore an important undertaking."

B. The journalists

Pollan: In Defense of Food

Willett 60: "Epidemiologist WCW if the HSPH (a coauthor of the Hu paper) cites the increase in consumption of polyunsaturated fats 'as a major factor, if not the most important factor, in the decline of heart disease' observed in the seventies and eighties and calls the campaign to reduce saturated fats in the diet one of the great public health success stories of our time. And so it would appear to be: We reduced our saturated fat intake, our cholesterol levels fell, and many fewer people dropped dead of heart attacks. Whether the low-fat campaigners should take the credit for this achievement is doubtful, however."

Willett 72, Campbell 72: "'Virtually this entire cohort of nurses is consuming a high-risk diet,' according to Campbell. That might explain why the Nurses' Study has failed to detect significant benefits for many of the dietary interventions it's looked at. In a subject population that is eating a fairly standard Western diet, as this one is, you're never going to capture the effects, good or bad, of more radically different ways of eating. (In his book, Campbell reports WW's personal response to this criticism: 'You may be right, Colin, but people don't want to go there.'"

Willett 77: "It's not as though the epidemiologists who develop and deploy FFQs [=food-frequency questionnaires] are unaware of their limitations. Some of them, like WW, strive heroically to repair the faulty data, developing 'energy adjustment' factors to correct for the fact that the calories reported on surveys are invariably wrong and complicated 'measurement error' algorithms to fix the errors in the twenty-four-hour recall surveys used to fix the errors in the FFQ>"

Willett 88n: "According to WCW, only 3.1 percent of the Nurses' Health Study population could be described as following a 'low risk' diet and lifestyle, which he defines as follows: nonsmoker, body-mass index 9BMI) below 25 (the threshold for overweight), thirty minutes of exercise a day, and a diet characterized by low intake of trans fat; high ratio of polyunsaturated to saturated fats; high whole-grain intake; two servings of fish a week; recommended daily allowance of folic acid and at lease five grams of alcohol a day. Based on fourteen years of follow-up, Willett and his colleagues calculated that, had the entire cohort adopted these behaviors, 80 percent of coronary heart disease; 90 percent of type 2 diabetes, and more than 70 percent of color cancer cases could have been avoided. This analysis suggests that the worst effects of the Western diet can be avoided or reversed without leaving civilization. Or, as Willett writes, 'the potential for disease prevention by modest dietary and lifestyle changes that are readily compatible with life in the 21^st century is enormous.' From WCW, 'The Pursuit of Optimal Diets" etc.

Willett 141-142: "You could argue that the medical community's willingness to treat the broad contours of the Western diet as a given is a reflection of its realism rather than its greed. 'People don't want to go there,' as WW responded to the critic who asked him why the Nurses' Health Study didn't study the benefits of more alternative diets."

Campbell 25-26: "According to TCC, a Cornell nutritional biochemist who served on the panel, all of the human population studies linking dietary fat to cancer actually showed that the groups with higher cancer rates consumed not just more fats, but also more animal foods and fewer plant foods as well. 'This meant that these cancers could just as easily be caused by animal protein, dietary cholesterol, something else exclusively found in animal-based foods, or a lack of plant-based foods,' Campbell wrote years later. The argument fell on deaf ears."

Campbell 68: "Unfortunately, the focus on nutrients didn't tell us much about foods. Perhaps the culprit nutrient in meat and dairy is the animal protein itself, as some researchers hypothesize. (The Cornell nutritionist TCC argues as much in his recent book, The China Study.)

Campbell 71-72: Critics (notably CC) point out that the sample is relatively uniform and is even more carnivorous than the U.S. population as a whole."

Taubes 46: "So don't count on a scientific Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to show up and expose the whole fat paradigm as a historical disaster. The closest thing to such a figure we have had is not a scientist but a science journalist named Gary Taubes, who for the last decade has been blowing the whistle on the science behind the low-far campaign. In a devastating series of articles and an important new book called Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes has all but demolished the whole lipid hypothesis, demonstrating just how little scientific backing it had from the very beginning.

Taubes 48: "But as Taubes has documented. the attitude on the committee [the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs] was that even if all the data weren't hard as rock quite yet, what would be the harm in getting Americans to cut down on dietary fats?"

Taubes 59n: GT described the developing carbohydrate hypothesis at great length in Good Calories, Bad Calories. According to the hypothesis, most of the damage to our health that has been wrongly attributed to fats for the past half century – heart disease, obesity, cancer, diabetes, and so on – can rightly be blamed on refined carbohydrates. But the healthy skepticism Taubes brought to the lipid hypothesis is nowhere in evidence when he writes about the (also unproven) carbohydrate hypothesis. Even if refined carbohydrates do represent a more serious threat to health than dietary fat, to dwell on any one nutrient to the exclusion of all others is to commit the same reductionist error that the lipophobes did. Indeed, Taubes is so single-minded in his demonization of the carbohydrate that he overlooks several other possible explanations for the deleterious effects of the Western diet, including deficiencies of omega-3s and micronutrients from plants. He also downplays the risks (to health as well as eating pleasure) of the high-protein Atkins diet that the carbohydrate hypothesis implies is a sound way to eat. As its title suggests, GC,BC, valuable as it is, does not escape the confines of nutritionism."

Taubes 69: "As GT points out, it's difficult to design a dietary trial of something like saturated fat because as soon as you remove it from the trial diet, either you have dramatically reduced the calories in that diet or you have replaced the saturated fat with something else: other fats (but which ones?), or carbohydrates (but what kind?), or protein. Whatever you do, you've introduced a second variable into the experiment, so you will not be able to attribute any observed effect strictly to the absence of saturated fat."