Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

According to Campbell (emer., Cornell Univ.; The China Study, Jun'05, 42-5895), plant-based whole food is the nutritional elixir for maintaining health. The noted nutrition researcher criticizes the current scientific reductionist mind-set, along with the medical system that focuses on disease rather than health, and provides evidence that proper nutrition is basic to fitness. A diet that excludes fats and sugars and is low in meat-based proteins is the holistic recipe to avoid cancer, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. Plant-based foods contain the antioxidants essential for health that are absent in meat products. Vegetable food sources serve as the enzymes for the myriad combinations and permutations of chemical reactions that are part of metabolism. Evolution has fine-tuned the body to select its raw materials from the ingested diet. Unfortunately, profits drive industries to fashion food tastes; medicine treats symptoms but not underlying causes; and science pursues molecular solutions while ignoring the whole picture of the functioning body. Campbell emphatically and emotionally argues for a shift from the reductionist paradigm of science to a broader, holistic view of how food affects the body. The reader may well be converted to a vegetarian diet after digesting the book's contents. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. R. A. Hoots emeritus, Sacramento City College