1964 vs. 2014. It is time to declare that animal food is bad for health

Today, (1/11), it marks 50 year anniversary of a very important 'Surgeon-General Report' that saves millions of life across the globe.

On January 11, 1964, Luther L. Terry, M.D., Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service, released the first report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health.  The report was controversial at the time because in 1964, half of the American smoked.  People smoked at the work, during the meeting, at the restaurant, even in the airplane.  Yet, today we acknowledge the contribution that Dr. Terry has made to the public health.  Millions of life (not just American) was saved because of the warning.

Americans have been fighting cancers for many decades.  Although we have made progresses in diagnosis, but we are not winning the war in cancer prevention .  The incidence of breast cancer in women and colon cancer in men is still rising.

Maybe it is the right time for the Surgeon-General to issue another warning about the health hazard associated with animal product consumption.

Many reports have implicated that  all cancers can be related to animal product consumption.  The most convincing report was the report published in 2004 by the lead author, Dr. Cambell,  the so-called 'China-Study', which was originally the 'China-Cornell-Oxford' project.

The China–Cornell–Oxford Project was a large observational study conducted throughout the 1980s in rural China, jointly funded by Cornell University, the University of Oxford, and the government of China. In 1991 The New York Times called it "the Grand Prix of epidemiology."

The first two major studies were led by T. Colin Campbell, professor of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell, who summarized the results in his book, The China Study (2004). Other lead researchers were Chen Junshi, Deputy Director of Institute of Nutrition and Food Hygiene at the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, Richard Peto of the University of Oxford, and Li Junyao of the China Cancer Institute.

The study examined the diets, lifestyle and disease characteristics of 6,500 people in 65 rural Chinese counties, comparing the prevalence of disease characteristics, excluding
causes of death such as accident.

China was selected for the study because in the 80's, due to the rapid economic development, some Chinese became affluent and ate like Westerners consuming more animal products.  However, there were still large populace that were poor, and consumed more plant-based food.  Thus, in the 80's, there was a large spectrum of the extent of  meat consumption in the subject studied by the Project.  The objective of the study is to relate the incidence of breast cancer to the extent of meat consumption.

The results of the study was stunning:  Researchers found that as the amount of animal foods increased in the diet, even in small relative increments, so did the emergence of the cancer that are common in the West.  Cancers occurred in direct proportion to the quantity of animal foods consumed.

So, what are we waiting for?  This could be a land-mark report to save millions of life:  not to consume animal products for the save of our lives.