Ornish Diet Health Article

Definition

The Ornish diet was developed by Dean Ornish, M.D. Ornish was the first physician to demonstrate that heart disease can be reversed by natural methods, including specific dietary and lifestyle changes. Before Ornish published his clinical studies of patients whose cardiovascular problems were improved by diet and other means, doctors believed that heart disease was irreversible.

Origins

It took Ornish several published studies before conventional medicine would accept his position that simple and inexpensive treatments, including diet, exercise, and stress reduction, could reverse heart disease. Ornish believed that therapies for heart disease should confront the roots of the problem—high-fat diets, stress, and sedentary lifestyles—instead of more expensive and risky heart surgery. Beginning in 1980, Ornish studied 48 people with severe heart disease. Half of them were assigned to a control group and were treated by conventional methods, while the other half participated for three weeks in Ornish's program of an ultra-low fat diet, yoga, meditation, social support groups, and no cigarettes. The diet that Ornish designed was similar to the regimen developed in the 1970s by Nathan Pritikin to combat heart disease, which is still used in several clinics. Both diets emphasize foods that are very low in fat and yet filling, including high-fiber grains and legumes (beans and peas).

Over the course of the study, Ornish's group experienced improvement in symptoms and significant drops in cholesterol and blood pressure. Ornish published the results in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, and his study was met with controversy. To convince his critics, Ornish set up a long-term controlled study. After one year, patients treated with Ornish's methods showed convincing results: 82% of them had significantly less blockage in their heart arteries and there was a drop of 91% in reported chest pain. After that study was published in the British medical journal Lancet, Ornish became internationally famous, and the Ornish diet was adopted by many heart disease patients. Ornish now serves as president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, and as a professor at the University of California.

Benefits

The Ornish diet, when used in a holistic treatment program, has been shown to lower blood cholesterol levels and reverse atherosclerosis, or obstruction of the arteries, making it a dietary therapy for heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. The Ornish diet has also been shown to be an effective weight loss program, and is recommended as a preventive measure for heart disease, strokes, diabetes and other conditions related to high fat consumption. The Ornish diet is an easy and inexpensive form of treatment as well as a preventive measure.