Food for Life: How the New Four Food Groups Can Save Your Life (12 page)

“The majority of patients who made more conventional changes in their diet and life-style actually got worse overall,” Ornish said. “Their arteries became more blocked rather than less blocked.” The plaques in their coronary arteries were continuing to grow, cutting off blood flow to the heart a bit more with every passing day. These patients were still inching toward death.

But the special intervention group was getting better. “What we found after a year was quite dramatic,” Ornish said. “Overall, 82 percent of the patients who followed this program showed some measurable reversal of their coronary artery blockages.” Their coronary arteries were actually opening up. The plaques that had been growing in their hearts for decades were actually
starting to dissolve
within one year, with no medications and no surgery.

The work of Dr. Ornish and others has made previous recommendations obsolete, although not everyone has gotten the message. Many doctors still recommend “lean-meat” diets, even though such diets do not reverse heart disease for most patients and, in fact, are too weak even to stop the progression of the disease. “Our study and now four other studies have shown that, on average, people with heart disease who only make moderate changes—less red meat, more fish and chicken, taking the skin off the chicken, fewer eggs, and so on—overall they tend to get worse over time,” Ornish said. “The arteries become more blocked.” But for those who are willing to go further, the news is good indeed: “They begin to feel better, they have more energy, the chest pain tends to go away almost dramatically, and even the arteries become less blocked over time.”

This does not mean that eating vegetarian meals a few times a week will reverse your heart disease. Dr. Ornish’s program was meant to be followed seven days a week, and people who stuck to the program got the best results. And it was not just a diet. It was a life-style change. There is little point in a vegetarian diet if you continue to smoke, for example. A potent program frees your body from fat and cholesterol, from tobacco, from physical lethargy, and from stress to the extent possible. “We found, in fact, there was a direct correlation between the amount of change they made and the amount of improvement,” Dr. Ornish said. “The more they did, the better they got.”

Dr. Ornish’s remarkable program is described in his book
Dr. Dean
Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease
,
⁴⁶
which includes excellent advice on handling stress, stopping smoking, increasing exercise, and modifying the diet. Of course, people who have heart disease should be under the care of a cardiologist. While life-style changes are very powerful for most people, they do not take the place of individualized medical care.

Dr. Ornish had weighed the question of whether it is realistic to ask patients to adopt such a diet. There was no doubt that a vegetarian diet is powerful. But would people who were raised on chicken and roast beef be willing to make the change?

The answer was yes. I had an opportunity to talk with Dr. Ornish’s patients. I interviewed each patient in both the experimental group and the control group. I asked them how they liked the foods they ate, whether they found the new foods interesting, how their families felt about the diet, and how long it took to get used to the new menu. Dr. Ornish’s patients did say that they had grumbled a bit. At the beginning, they didn’t know what a lentil was. It took a little while to get used to a new way of eating—a month or two before they were totally adapted. But soon they found the new foods enjoyable and interesting, and began to lose their taste for foods that had damaged their hearts. And they loved what the program had done. For most, their cholesterol levels were dramatically lower, their chest pains had gone away, and they felt better than they had in years. They also lost weight. The average patient lost more than twenty pounds, without restricting calories!

The patients on the standard heart diet grumbled, too. They complained that their diet seemed to consist of nothing but chicken and fish, day after day after day. And they were not getting the benefits that would have made the change worthwhile. In talking to these patients, I found that people seem to grumble about any change in their dietary routine, and there does not seem to be any relationship between how much change is requested and how much they grumble. A more potent dietary regimen seems to get no more complaints than a weak one. And eventually tastes change. Within several weeks, people come to prefer their new routine. Moreover, the stronger program is so much more successful and rewarding that people want to stick with it.

“In some ways, it’s easier to make big changes in diet than small ones,” Ornish said. “You begin to notice the benefits so much more quickly when you make big changes that it becomes easier to stay on a diet like this. And
the guidelines are very clear. We made recipes that were delicious and beautifully presented, as well as healthful.”

Dr. Ornish’s patients embraced their powerful new menu. One patient had an interesting reaction. He was angry—angry that no doctor had offered him this program before. Doctors were ready to crack open his chest, rearrange the plumbing in his heart, jump-start his heartbeat, sew him up, hope that he survived, and charge him tens of thousands of dollars. But not one doctor had even suggested that different foods and life-style changes might accomplish the same thing. I believe that before long there will be a substantial change in what doctors tell their patients. One day it may constitute malpractice for doctors not to inform patients of all their options, including the powerful new life-style steps that help reopen the heart.

Other scientists agree that heart disease can be reversed. “It will go away,” says Dr. William Castelli, of the Framingham Heart Study. “Get your total cholesterol down to 150 and keep it there for five years. I don’t care how you do it. Diet would be the best way, but if you have to use drugs you can still do it. You will reverse your lesions.”

Dr. Ornish’s research showed that doctors’ recommendations have usually been too weak. If we want to die slowly, previous diets are fine. But if we want to reclaim health, we must adopt a truly healthful diet, along with other life-style changes. This is not to say that a vegetarian diet and a healthier life-style will make you live forever. They won’t. But for most people they add years to life and help maintain a healthy body that can enjoy life, rather than surrender to an ever-increasing list of physical problems.

As we saw in the research of Dr. Ornish, people who are concerned about their hearts get little benefit from switching from regular meats to lean meats, or to chicken and fish. Some may have a reduced risk of heart attack compared to those who eat fattier cuts. But for most, atherosclerosis will still progress and they have little chance of reversing any existing heart disease.

Many doctors and even medical organizations still recommend diets that derive about 30 percent of their calories from fat, consisting of lean meats, fish, and poultry without the skin. Unfortunately, researchers have found
that patients get worse on such diets.
^45
,
47
,
48
It may be that plaques do not grow as rapidly on a lean-meat diet as they do on an unrestricted diet, but they still grow. In most patients, as they are busily pulling the skin off their chicken or trimming the fat off their meat, the blood supply to the heart is slowly and surely being choked off. The lean-meat, chicken, and fish diet just does not work very well for most people.

The power foods are foods from plants. Vegetarians have a much better menu for the heart. Lacto-ovo-vegetarians (those who shun meats, poultry, and fish but consume dairy products and eggs) do much better than those on lean-meat diets, while pure vegetarians who steer clear of all animal products do best of all.

If you were to switch from a standard American diet to a lean-meat diet in which you ate no more than two four-ounce servings of lean meat each day, and you kept your overall fat intake to 30 percent of calories, you would still only get about half the cholesterol-lowering effect that you would have gotten had you chosen a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet, assuming your experiences were similar to those in research experiments.
⁴⁹

If you were to adopt a pure vegetarian diet, on the other hand, your cholesterol control would be better still. A pure vegetarian diet is sometimes called
vegan (VEE-gun)
and, of course, contains zero cholesterol, very little saturated fat, and lots of fiber. How powerful is the vegan diet? A research study in New England compared typical meat-eaters, lacto-ovo-vegetarians, and vegans. All the subjects were fairly young, ranging in age from twenty to forty-seven. The average meat-eater’s cholesterol level was 173, which is lower than the average American’s, but not unusual in a young population. The lacto-ovo-vegetarians’ cholesterol levels were better, averaging 150. And the vegans’ averaged—believe it or not—135.
⁵⁰
A Harvard research study found about the same thing. Vegetarians who include eggs and dairy products in their diet ran cholesterol levels averaging 157. But vegans had an average cholesterol level of 124.
⁵¹
As you can see, both vegetarian groups had good cholesterol levels, on average. But remember, roughly half the subjects in the study will be above the average and half will be below it, assuming a normal statistical distribution. Since the lacto-ovo-vegetarians average cholesterol levels around 150, roughly half will be above this level. Many more of the vegans will be under that threshold.

As Dr. Castelli says, “Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rates of coronary disease of any group in the country.” And those who pick from a purely vegetarian (vegan) menu are the best of these.

Yes, but how does it taste? That’s the surprise. Although it does take a few weeks to adapt to any change in diet, people who switch to low-fat vegan diets come to prefer them. On your plate, this translates into linguine with tomato sauce, with broccoli and spinach on the side; or a bean burrito with Spanish rice and fresh vegetables; or miso soup and vegetarian sushi. In
Chapter 8
you will find menus and recipes for any palate.

Imagine what would happen if the country were to establish such a diet as a new standard. One result, of course, would be a savings of phenomenal amounts of money. The cost of heart attacks is reflected in the billions of dollars for Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, and out-of-pocket medical payments, not to mention the time lost from productive employment. And the dollars and cents mean nothing compared to the anguish of victims and their families as heart disease robs them of their ability to engage in daily activities or even walk without crushing pain, and ultimately leaves their spouses to grow old alone.

New research has given us more powerful tools than ever before. We now know that we can gain control over the health of our hearts.

When I was in medical school in the late 1970s, I was not taught that foods had the power to prevent cancer or improve cancer survival. Much of what we know today about the causes of cancer was, at that time, totally unknown. We did know that tobacco was carcinogenic. We had some inklings about fiber. But aside from that, we kept our scalpels sharp, our chemotherapy and radiation ready, and we waited.

No more. Eighty percent of cancers are due to factors that have been identified and can be controlled—if we choose to do so. Eighty percent is not my statistic. It is from the National Cancer Institute, and some estimates are even higher. And not only can we potentially prevent most cancers, we can also improve the survival of people who have cancer. Foods are extraordinary allies in our personal wars on cancer.

Cancer starts when one cell goes haywire. It could be one of the cells that make up your skin, or your lungs, or your digestive tract, or just about anywhere else in your body. In the center of the cell, in the nucleus, the DNA that directs its function becomes damaged. The saboteur may be a toxic chemical, radiation, or other cause. This kind of damage occurs commonly enough that our bodies have specialized white blood cells that patrol the bloodstream and body tissues, looking for damaged cells and removing them. But if one damaged cell is left to its own devices, it can begin to multiply. One cell splits into two. Two become four. Four become eight. And eventually this lump of cells is big enough to show up on a mammogram or a chest X-ray. This is cancer. It would not be so bad if this mass of cells would stay put. But it invades healthy tissues, and releases some of its cells to travel to other parts of the body, where new tumors form, eventually causing death.

What can we do about it? A lot. Thirty percent of cancers are caused by tobacco, according to the National Cancer Institute. Lung cancer is the most obvious example, but by no means the only one. Cancers of the mouth and throat are also caused by tobacco. And carcinogens in tobacco smoke are excreted in the urine, so along the way they cause cancer of the kidney and bladder. If you smoke, you would do well to stop. But it will take a while for your cancer risk to diminish, so you will want to pay close attention to the cancer-protection factors described later.