New York Times Bestseller
What happens when you eat an apple? The answer is vastly more complex
than you imagine.
Every apple contains thousands of antioxidants whose names, beyond a few
like vitamin C, are unfamiliar to us, and each of these powerful
chemicals has the potential to play an important role in supporting our
health. They impact thousands upon thousands of metabolic reactions
inside the human body. But calculating the specific influence of each of
these chemicals isn't nearly sufficient to explain the effect of the
apple as a whole. Because almost every chemical can affect every other
chemical, there is an almost infinite number of possible biological
consequences.
And that's just from an apple.
Nutritional science, long stuck in a reductionist mindset, is at the
cusp of a revolution. The traditional "gold standard" of nutrition
research has been to study one chemical at a time in an attempt to
determine its particular impact on the human body. These sorts of
studies are helpful to food companies trying to prove there is a
chemical in milk or pre-packaged dinners that is "good" for us, but they
provide little insight into the complexity of what actually happens in
our bodies or how those chemicals contribute to our health.
In The China Study, T. Colin Campbell (alongside his son, Thomas M.
Campbell) revolutionized the way we think about our food with the
evidence that a whole food, plant-based diet is the healthiest way to
eat. Now, in Whole, he explains the science behind that evidence, the
ways our current scientific paradigm ignores the fascinating complexity
of the human body, and why, if we have such overwhelming evidence that
everything we think we know about nutrition is wrong, our eating habits
haven't changed.
Whole is an eye-opening, paradigm-changing journey through
cutting-edge thinking on nutrition, a scientific tour de force with
powerful implications for our health and for our world.
