Slow childhood growth rates in poor countries aren't necessarily due to a "poor man's diet" devoid of meats and other foods of animal origin, as many scientists and policy makers have long assumed, reported a Cornell University nutritionist who is the director of a huge diet and disease study by Cornell in China.

In fact, despite a diet very low in animal-based foods (only 3 to 6 percent of calories) and fat (10 to 20 percent of calories), childhood growth rates and adult stature in China steadily increased from 1950 to 1980, observed T. Colin Campbell, professor of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell and principal investigator of a comprehensive survey of diet, lifestyle and disease characteristics in 130 villages in rural China, undertaken in collaboration with Junshi Chen, M.D. of the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine and Richard Peto, professor at Oxford University in England.

In comparing food and health associations obtained in the China-Cornell-Oxford study after 1980 with earlier food and health trends collected in China from 1950 to 1980 and published by the World Bank, increases in growth rates in China were comparable to those in Japan following World War II, Campbell said. He presented his findings at the conference "The Social Consequences of China Economic Reform" at Harvard University in May to a group of economists, social scientists and policy-makers from the U.S., China and the World Bank. Economic reform in China was introduced around the year 1980.

"These substantial increases in body stature occurred in spite of a lack of animal-based foods in the Chinese diet," said Campbell. "Reaching one's genetic potential for body size in China appeared to be much more related to the control of childhood parasitic diseases and adequate quantity of food than to a lack of animal-based foods. In the three decades before 1980, China made remarkable progress in bringing under control serious public health problems without introducing animal-based agriculture."

Essentially the same conclusions were reached with the data collected during the 1980s when economic reform was being established. For example, a comparison of villages across China where there is much variation in diet, disease and lifestyle patterns showed that greater body size was highly significantly associated with increasing consumption of plant protein, a surprise to many observers even though by 1983, average diets still contained only 10 percent of its protein from animal sources. By comparison, average American diets contain 65 to 70 percent of its protein from animal sources.

Diets in China are rapidly becoming much more like those of Western countries. Dietary fat intake now is approaching 35 percent of calories in urban areas, blood cholesterol is rising, and cardiovascular diseases and cancers are becoming the most common diseases.

If Chinese continue to eat more like Americans, the cost to China in lost productivity and treating these degenerative diseases is estimated to be $300 to $600 billion per year, said Campbell. "Why, given the overwhelming data on the health problems associated with the consumption of animal-based foods, would a country plan to enlarge or to stress the use of its precious land and water resources, thus producing both the most expensive foods and the most expensive diseases?" Campbell asked the scholars and policy-makers attending the Harvard conference.

Campbell, Chen and Banoo Parpia, reseaerch associate from the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell, and their colleagues have been consolidating and analyzing comprehensive data collected since 1983 in 170 villages in mainland China and Taiwan. The report of these most recent findings will be published as a conference monograph by Harvard's Fairbank Center on East Asian Studies.