Top 70 T. Colin Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The people who eat the most animal protein have the most heart disease, cancer and diabetes.”

— T. Colin Campbell

2. “A good diet is the most powerful weapon we have against disease and sickness.”

— T. Colin Campbell

3. “In the next ten years, one of the things you’re bound to hear is that animal protein is one of the most toxic nutrients of all that can be considered. Quite simply, the more you substitute plant foods for animal foods, the healthier you are likely to be.”

— T. Colin Campbell

4. “A plant-based diet is more likely to produce good health and to reduce sharply the risk of heart problems, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, gallstones, and kidney disease.”

— T. Colin Campbell

5. “It’s never too late to start eating well. A good diet can reverse many of those conditions as well. In short: change the way you eat and you can transform your health for the better.”

— T. Colin Campbell

6. “The answer to the American health crisis is the food that each of us chooses to put in our mouths each day. It’s as simple as that.”

— T. Colin Campbell

7. “Nutrition is not a mathematical equation in which two plus two is four. The food we put in our mouths doesn’t control our nutrition-not entirely. What our bodies do with that food does.”

— T. Colin Campbell

8. “First, nutrition is the master key to human health. Second, what most of us think of as proper nutrition – isn’t.”

— T. Colin Campbell

9. “We now had impressive evidence that low protein intake could markedly decrease enzyme activity and prevent dangerous carcinogen binding to DNA.”

— T. Colin Campbell

10. “The process of eating is perhaps the most intimate encounter we have with our world; it is a process in which what we eat becomes part of our body.”

— T. Colin Campbell

11. “Good health is about being able to fully enjoy the time we do have. It is about being as functional as possible throughout our entire lives and avoiding crippling, painful and lengthy battles with disease. There are many better ways to die, and to live.”

— T. Colin Campbell

12. “No chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein.”

— T. Colin Campbell

13. “There’s only one thing that we have to do in life, and that is to die.”

— T. Colin Campbell

14. “So removing vitamin E from its context within plant foods is like sending a general into battle without any troops.”

— T. Colin Campbell

15. “Everything in food works together to create health or disease. The more we think that a single chemical characterizes a whole food, the more we stray into idiocy.”

— T. Colin Campbell

16. “Nutrition trumps genes.”

— T. Colin Campbell

17. “As you will come to see, much is governed by the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.”

— T. Colin Campbell

18. “You can’t be protein deficient without being calorie deficient because even if you take the foods that have the least amount of protein in them, let’s say potatoes, for example, or rice at 8 or 9%. That’s the figure we more or less need.”

— T. Colin Campbell

19. “The solution to losing weight is a whole foods, plant-based diet, coupled with a reasonable amount of exercise. It is a long-term lifestyle change, rather than a quick-fix fad, and it can provide sustained weight loss while minimizing risk of chronic disease.”

— T. Colin Campbell

20. “It is a wonderful harmony. The plants make the antioxidant shields, and at the same time make them look incredibly appealing with beautiful, appetizing colors. Then we animals, in turn, are attracted to the plants and eat them and borrow their antioxidant shields for our own health. Whether you believe in God, evolution or just coincidence, you must admit that this is a beautiful, almost spiritual, example of nature’s wisdom.”

— T. Colin Campbell

21. “Truly winning the war on cancer requires individual responsibility for our food choices; as long as we wait for the next pharmaceutical breakthrough or genetic engineering miracle to save us, we won’t use the considerable power we already possess to end this scourge. In.”

— T. Colin Campbell

22. “Americans love to hear good things about their bad habits.”

— T. Colin Campbell

23. “Western culture is hell-bent on ignoring, disbelieving, and, in some cases, actively twisting the truth about what we should be eating – so much so that it can be hard for us to believe that we’ve been lied to all these years.”

— T. Colin Campbell

24. “Instead, the secret of health has been in front of us all along, in the guise of a simple and perhaps boring word: nutrition. When.”

— T. Colin Campbell

25. “The foods you consume can heal you faster and more profoundly than the most expensive prescription drugs, and more dramatically than the most extreme surgical interventions, with only positive side effects.”

— T. Colin Campbell

26. “You should not assume that your doctor has any more knowledge about food and its relation to health than your neighbors and coworkers.”

— T. Colin Campbell

27. “Wait until you’re really sick,” could be the motto of doctors and hospitals in the current system. “We can do nothing for you until your symptoms surpass the subclinical and reveal themselves in pain, loss of function, or a particularly worrisome test result. Until then, keep calm and keep eating the Standard American Diet.”

— T. Colin Campbell

28. “You can’t patent a recommendation to eat lots of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. So there’s no incentive for industry to invest in such research and no incentive for researchers to study and validate such claims.”

— T. Colin Campbell

29. “With industry’s sales and marketing machines cloaked in mantles of charitable virtue, no wonder most Americans don’t realize that the junk that passes for food is in fact the biggest contributor to our health crisis, and the junk that passes for medicine keeps us just well enough to continue to spend on both the food and the medicine.”

— T. Colin Campbell

30. “When we live in a system, we absorb a system and think in a system. – JAMES W. DOUGLASS.”

— T. Colin Campbell

31. “When absurdities get repeated often enough, they start sounding like truth.”

— T. Colin Campbell

32. “Everything in food works together to create health or disease.”

— T. Colin Campbell

33. “Genes do not determine disease on their own. Genes function only by being activated, or “expressed,” and nutrition plays a critical role in determining which genes, good and bad, are expressed.”

— T. Colin Campbell

34. “The problem is that we are asking the wrong questions – questions based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the wholistic nature of nutrition. We’re asking, “How much vitamin C are we getting?” when we should be asking, “What foods should we be eating to support our bodies’ ability to maintain health?”

— T. Colin Campbell

35. “In every respect, vegans appear to enjoy equal or better health in comparison to both vegetarians and non-vegetarians.”

— T. Colin Campbell

36. “In short, it is about the multiple health benefits of consuming plant-based foods, and the largely unappreciated health dangers of consuming animal-based foods, including all types of meat, dairy and eggs.”

— T. Colin Campbell

37. “These days, the supplement industry has the process down to a “science.” New scientific research on single nutrients generalizes in a very superficial way about their ability to promote human health. Companies put these newly discovered “nutrients” into pills, organize public relations campaigns, and write marketing plans to encourage a confused public to buy.”

— T. Colin Campbell

38. “I was raised on a dairy farm and ate plenty of meat and eggs until about twenty years ago. I started doing nutritional research, and a decade pr so after that my family made some major dietary changes. I’m just paying attention to what the data are telling me: The scientific evidence came first.”

— T. Colin Campbell

39. “One way to identify the optimal human diet, pretty obvious to all but fundamentalist reductionists, is to survey and compare populations as they already exist, and see what they eat and how healthy they are.”

— T. Colin Campbell

40. “Furthermore, a pattern was beginning to emerge: nutrients from animal-based foods increased tumor development while nutrients from plant-based foods decreased tumor development.”

— T. Colin Campbell

41. “Let’s start with the most prominent ecological crisis of our time: global warming. When you look seriously at the numbers, you find that switching from a meat-based to a plant-based diet would do more to curb and reverse global warming than any other initiative.”

— T. Colin Campbell

42. “There are, in effect, two things: to know and to believe one knows. To know is science. To believe one knows is ignorance.”

— T. Colin Campbell

43. “The distinction between government, industry, science and medicine have become blurred.”

— T. Colin Campbell

44. “Once people start introducing animal products into their diet, that’s when the mischief starts.”

— T. Colin Campbell

45. “Quite simply, the more you substitute plant foods for animal foods, the healthier you are likely to be.”

— T. Colin Campbell

46. “Population studies begun forty to fifty years ago show that when people migrate from one country to another, they acquire the cancer rate of the country to which they move, despite the fact their genes remain the same.”

— T. Colin Campbell

47. “We don’t need to know the effects of single agents on health, because this is not the way that nature works. Nutrition has a wholistic effect on health; one that we consistently miss and misinterpret when we focus on isolated nutrients.”

— T. Colin Campbell

48. “The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn but to unlearn. – GLORIA STEINEM.”

— T. Colin Campbell

49. “Perhaps the most telling report on the low-carb diet and health is the recent summary of 17 studies published in January 2013 involving 272,216 subjects,59 in which a low-carb diet showed a statistically significant 31 percent increase in total deaths. This finding is even more telling than the statistics suggest because this 31 percent increase is in comparison to the already high mortality typically observed for the SAD, when compared to a whole food, plant-based diet.”

— T. Colin Campbell

50. “And as a nutritional researcher, I was surprised at first by the popularity and commercial success of the low-carb diet, especially given its serious flaws. The research on high-protein, high-fat diets has consistently demonstrated that they have disastrous health effects and fail to secure compliance and long-term weight loss.”

— T. Colin Campbell