All plants, no oil

Two men, a biochemist and a surgeon, pushed the plant-based idea as far as it goes.

T. Colin Campbell was a nutrition researcher at Cornell who, from the 1980s, led a large study of diet and disease across rural China, where regional diets varied widely and so did cancer and heart disease rates. The counties eating the most animal food had the most disease. He wrote it up in 2005 as The China Study, and it became the founding text of the whole-food, plant-based movement. Caldwell Esselstyn was a surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who put patients with advanced heart disease on a diet of vegetables, fruit, whole grains and beans, no oil, no animal products, and in 2007 published results showing their disease stopped and in many cases reversed. He kept following them for years.

The diet is the strictest on this part of the shelf. No meat, no dairy, no eggs, no fish, and, distinctively, no added oil, not even olive oil, which separates it from the Mediterranean pattern. Everything whole, everything plant. Campbell's epidemiology has been criticized, fairly, for drawing strong conclusions from correlations, and Esselstyn's studies were small. But the clinical results in heart patients are real, and the broader finding, that diets built mostly on whole plants reduce heart disease, diabetes and some cancers, is now mainstream.

Vault Human points to the approach without prescribing it. For some people, especially with serious heart disease, it's been the key that turned. For most, it's a direction: more plants, more whole, less packaged.