The China Project on Nutrition, Health & Environment is a massive study involving researchers from China, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the University of Oxford, into the relationships between diet, lifestyles and disease-related mortality in 6500 Chinese subjects from 65 mostly rural or semi-rural counties.
The rural Chinese diet is largely vegetarian or vegan, and involves less total protein, less animal protein, less total fat and animal fat, and more carbohydrate and fibre than the average Western diet. Blood cholesterol levels are significantly lower. Heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and osteoporosis are all uncommon. Areas in which they are becoming more frequent are areas where the population has moved towards a more Western diet with increasing consumption of animal products.
The China Health Project has clearly demonstrated the health benefits of a diet based on plant foods. One of the Project's co-ordinators, Dr Colin Campbell of Cornell University, has stated that "We're basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant foods and minimising our intake of animal foods."