The China Study, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health

Medecine is focussed reductionism:  finding impacts of isolated chemicals and magic pills to counteract them. It fails miserably at looking at the big pictures. I would love to go to the doctor and have them say "you should focus on changing this in your diet and do these exercises". However, it is most often "take this pill and lets run a test".

China Study advocates a "focus on the big picture" approach. We should look at our entire diet. Studies that focus on individual chemicals miss the big picture of how our body interacts with all the different components of food products. A plant-based diet seems to be the best way to get the nutrition needed. The typical American diet includes heavily processed foods with a great deal of animal products. Attempts to "improve" it are often based on more processing and reducing some bad component (like fat) or adding some good component (like vitamins). This often misses the big picture.

I really wanted to agree with the book, but I had trouble with some of the process and conclusions. The very title of "China Study" felt odd. The Chinese diet that I have known is very heavy on meat. It does tend to be a "whole animal" meat, but I have rarely seen a Chinese diet where meat does not play a significant role. How did they come up with the benefits of a plant-based diet from this?

The book also spends time berating the competition. The "nurses study" looked at people following a typical American diet. It would be unable to find the benefit of a plant based diet. Other doctors and  societies were also going out of their way to discredit the "nutrition" approaches to health care. Are we just hearing one side of the story? It seems the authors have jumped on the "all animal products are bad" bandwagon and may be unwilling to credit a study that shows some benefits. This is somewhat similar to the other studies showing "inconclusiveness" about plant-diet benefits.

Things did get better when the authors analyzed the problem with science and medicine today. There are many people that depend on the current approach for their livelihoods. If we suddenly upended the reductionist "pill" model to health-care, thousands of well-paying jobs will go away. Our pharmaceutical and medical approach is built on the assumption that there a number of small little knobs that can be turned to get the desired result. A single knob is thought of as a possible fix to health. However, only gradually is science realizing that we may need to turn hundreds or thousands of different knobs together to get what we need. Nature has already done some of this for us. Alas, as we have sought to "optimize" we have focussed on a few at the expense of others. Will we be able to fix our understanding before it is too late?