The Man Who Named 'Plant-Based'

Thomas Colin Campbell was born on a dairy farm and grew up to become a Cornell nutritional biochemist who spent decades chasing an unglamorous question: does a diet heavy in animal protein drive cancer and heart disease. In 1980, presenting his research at the National Institutes of Health, he needed a term for the diet his data pointed toward, one that wouldn't sound like advocacy to a room of scientists. He settled on 'plant-based,' a deliberately clinical alternative to 'vegetarian' and 'vegan.' Twenty-five years later, he and his son turned findings from the China-Cornell-Oxford Project into The China Study, which carried that word out of the lab and into supermarkets, cookbooks, and restaurant menus.