A review by davidr
Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition by T. Colin Campbell

5.0

"There are these two young fish swimming along and the happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says,'Morning boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'"

This joke spells out one of the main themes of this fantastic book. Medical science is caught up in a reductionist paradigm, and people don't realize how stuck they are in it. They cannot imagine that there is any other valid approach to medical research and to health care.

Reductionism is the idea that you can understand everything in the world if you understand all its component parts. In other words, the whole is simply the sum of its parts. This is opposed to "wholism", which is the belief that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Medical science has become very focused on performing research that is narrowly focused on studying the effects of individual molecules, enzymes, nutrients, chemical reactions, and genes. The problem is that no component works in isolation. It is foolhardy to focus on the effect of a single nutrient, because each nutrient interacts with thousands of other nutrients, enzymes, and molecules in extremely complex ways. Campbell spells out the paradox of bioavailability:

There is almost no direct relationship between the amount of a nutrient consumed at a meal and the amount that actually reaches its main site of action in the body.

The reason is that the body absorbs as much of a nutrient that it needs at that moment, rather than as much of the nutrient that is consumed.

This reductionist approach is now firmly established by the research community; a scientist cannot get funding unless he narrowly focuses on a single nutrient, or a single molecule or chemical. Campbell shows how a few researchers (including himself) have tried to break out of this paradigm, and the ruinous effect on their careers.

Campbell's career has not suffered significantly; he is the professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University. He was the lead scientist of the largest epidemiological study ever. He is not a quack. He has served on expert panels for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and as a senior science adviser to the American Institute for Cancer Research.

Campbell's voice comes through in his writing as an embittered scientist, one who feels that nutrition's important wholistic effects on health have been ignored. They are ignored by researchers, by dieticians, by doctors, by the government, and by the various disease societies (e.g., American Cancer Society, American Society for Nutrition). He writes very convincingly, that the establishment is not interested in improving health and preventing disease--only in fighting diseases after they occur.

This is a very important book. I read Campbell's previous book
[b:The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted And the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, And Long-term Health|178788|The China Study The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted And the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, And Long-term Health|T. Colin Campbell|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1376474019s/178788.jpg|544922] about seven years ago, and it was most impressive. This book brings a somewhat different message, about the entire medical establishment, and the need for more emphasis on prevention of disease, through a wholistic approach.