Did you know that the so-called “Western affluent diseases,” such as heart disease and stroke, diabetes, most cancers, and most autoimmune diseases, can be prevented or delayed, and sometimes reversed or even cured, by diet and lifestyle changes? On Fridays, Harvard’s Community Cable Access Committee (CCAC) is showing, on TV channel 12, a series of talks and lectures by eminent experts on what has come to be called lifestyle medicine, especially diet and nutrition. Almost forgotten or ignored in the 20th century, lifestyle medicine is becoming increasingly important in this century because of growing evidence that it works.
Beginning in July 2007, the effort to show health-and-nutrition videos on Harvard’s cable channels began to take shape. CCAC found that DVDs with talks and lectures on these topics by well-known experts such as Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Neal Barnard, Dr. Michael Greger, and Dr. Joel Fuhrman, could be obtained free, provided that they were shown on noncommercial, community-access cable TV and were not shown for a fee or donation. At last count, CCAC has 43 DVDs, featuring at least 23 speakers. Some of the DVDs have several talks and some have several different speakers. CCAC is working to obtain more such DVDs. (The Harvard Public Library has books on topics by various speakers who appear on channel 12 programs.)
After trying some other schemes, CCAC settled on showing at least two such talks on channel 12 every Friday. The times, titles or topics, and names of the speakers for each Friday are printed in local newspapers and in announcements on channel 13.
The message in these DVDs and in books written by these speakers can be summarized as recommending a low-oil, low-salt, vegan diet. Vegan means no animal products—no meat, no dairy, no eggs, and no products derived therefrom. These experts also advise avoiding, or at least being skeptical of, foods processed in ways that our distant ancestors could not or did not process them because our bodies have adapted as well as possible to what our ancestors ate and did over the past one or two millennia. This message has been corroborated in the book The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II, which examines the connections between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, as well as nutritional confusion produced by powerful lobbies.
In 2006 I acquired a copy of The China Study. In the index, I found “prostate cancer,” and in just two pages of reading, I learned how and why I got prostate cancer in 2005 and what I should have done to avoid it. For me, this was the intellectual equivalent of a serious slap across the face. It still stings. And I learned that other investigators had been saying similar things since at least 1991.
In the DVDs shown by CCAC and in books on these topics, there are many success stories and a number of careful scientific experiments that investigate ameliorating or curing heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers. Most people, however, are very reluctant to change their diets and lifestyles until after they get seriously ill with one of these chronic diseases. But there is hope in following the pattern of addicted cigarette smokers, some of whom were able to quit before getting lung cancer.
Oak Hill Road resident John Ball is a member of Harvard’s Community Cable Access Committee.
