This session is on natural wonders, and the bigger conference
is on the pursuit of happiness. I want to try to combine them all, because to me, healing is really
the ultimate natural wonder. Your body has a remarkable
capacity to begin healing itself, and much more quickly
than people had once realized, if you simply stop doing
what's causing the problem. And so, really, so much of what we do
in medicine and life in general is focused on mopping up the floor
without also turning off the faucet. I love doing this work, because it really gives many people
new hope and new choices that they didn't have before, and it allows us to talk
about things that -- not just diet, but that happiness is not -- we're talking about
the pursuit of happiness, but when you really look
at all the spiritual traditions, what Aldous Huxley called
the "perennial wisdom," when you get past the names and forms
and rituals that divide people, it's really about --
our nature is to be happy; our nature is to be peaceful,
our nature is to be healthy. And so happiness is not something you get, health is generally not
something that you get, but rather, all of these
different practices -- you know, the ancient swamis and rabbis
and priests and monks and nuns didn't develop these techniques
to just manage stress or lower your blood pressure
or unclog your arteries, even though it can do all those things. They're powerful tools for transformation, for quieting down our mind and bodies to allow us to experience
what it feels like to be happy, to be peaceful, to be joyful and to realize that it's not
something that you pursue and get, but rather, it's something that you
have already, until you disturb it. I studied yoga for many years
with a teacher named Swami Satchidananda. People would say, "What are you, a Hindu?" He'd say, "No, I'm an undo." (Laughter) It's about identifying what's causing us to disturb
our innate health and happiness and then to allow
that natural healing to occur. To me, that's the real natural wonder. So, within that larger context, we can talk about diet,
stress management -- which are really
these spiritual practices -- moderate exercise, smoking cessation, support groups and community,
which I'll talk more about, and some vitamins and supplements. And it's not a diet. When people think
about the diet I recommend, they think it's really strict. For reversing disease,
that's what it takes. But if you're just trying to be healthy,
you have a spectrum of choices. To the degree that you can move
in a healthy direction, you're going to live longer,
feel better, lose weight, and so on. And in our studies,
what we've been able to do is to use very expensive, high-tech,
state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple
and low-tech and low-cost -- and in many ways, ancient --
interventions can be. We first began by looking
at heart disease. When I began doing this work
26 or 27 years ago, it was thought that once you have
heart disease, it can only get worse. What we found was,
instead of getting worse and worse, in many cases,
it could get better and better, and much more quickly
than people had once realized. This is a representative patient
who, at the time, was 73, told he needed to have a bypass,
decided to do this instead. We used quantitative arteriography,
showing the narrowing. This is one of the main arteries
that feeds the heart, and you can see the narrowing here. A year later, it's not as clogged;
normally, it goes the other direction. These minor changes in blockages caused a 300 percent
improvement in blood flow, and using cardiac positron-emission
tomography, or PET, scans -- blue and black is no blood flow, orange and white is maximal -- huge differences can occur
without drugs, without surgery. Clinically, he couldn't walk
across the street without getting severe chest pain. Within a month, like most people,
he was pain-free, and within a year, climbing more
than 100 floors a day on a StairMaster. This is not unusual, and it's part of what enables people
to maintain these kinds of changes, because it makes a big difference
in their quality of life. If you looked at all the arteries
in all the patients, they got worse and worse from one year
to five years in the comparison group. This is the natural history
of heart disease. But it's really not natural; we found
it could get better and better, and much more quickly than people thought. We also found the more people changed,
the better they got. It wasn't a function
of how old or sick they were, but of how much they changed. The oldest patients improved
as much as the young ones. I got this Christmas card a few years ago
from patients in one of our programs. The younger brother is 86;
the older one is 95. They wanted to show me
how much more flexible they were. The following year they sent this,
which I thought was funny. (Laughter) You just never know. And what we found
was that 99 percent of the patients stopped or reversed the progression
of their heart disease. Now, I thought if we just
did good science, that would change medical practice. But that was naive. It's important, but not enough, because we doctors do
what we get paid to do and trained to do what we get paid to do, so if we change insurance, then we change
medical practice and medical education. Insurance will cover the bypass
and angioplasty but won't, until recently,
cover diet and lifestyle. So we began, through our nonprofit
institute, training hospitals around the country, and we found that most people
could avoid surgery. And not only was it medically
effective, it was also cost-effective. The insurance companies found
that they began to save almost 30,000 dollars a patient, and Medicare is now in the middle
of doing a demonstration project, paying for 1,800 people
to go through the program in the sites we train. The fortuneteller says,
"I give smokers a discount, because there's not as much to tell." (Laughter) I like this slide, because it's a chance to talk about
what really motivates people to change and what doesn't. What doesn't work is fear of dying,
and that's what's normally used. Everybody who smokes
knows it's not good for you. Still, 30 percent of Americans smoke,
80 percent in some parts of the world. Why do people do it? Well, because it helps them
get through the day. I'll talk more about this, but the real epidemic isn't just
heart disease or obesity or smoking, it's loneliness and depression. One woman said, "I've got 20 friends
in this pack of cigarettes. They're always there for me,
and nobody else is. You're going to take away my 20 friends?
What are you going to give me?" Or they eat when they get depressed
or use alcohol to numb the pain or work too hard or watch too much TV. There are lots of ways we have of avoiding
and numbing and bypassing pain, but the point of all of this
is to deal with the cause of the problem. The pain is not the problem,
it's the symptom. And telling people they're going to die
is too scary to think about, or that they'll get emphysema
or a heart attack is too scary, and they don't want to think
about it, so they don't. The most effective
anti-smoking ad was this one. You'll notice the limp cigarette
hanging out of his mouth. And the headline is "Impotent,"
it's not "Emphysema." What was the biggest-selling
drug of all time, when it was introduced a few years ago? Viagra, right? Why?
Because a lot of guys need it. It's not like you say, "Joe, I'm having
erectile dysfunction. How about you?" And yet, look at the number
of prescriptions that are being sold. It's not so much
psychological, it's vascular, and nicotine makes
your arteries constrict. So does cocaine, so does a high-fat diet,
so does emotional stress. So the very behaviors that we think of
as being so sexy in our culture are the very ones that leave
so many people feeling tired, lethargic, depressed and impotent. And that's not much fun. But when you change those behaviors,
your brain gets more blood, you think more clearly, have more energy, your heart gets more blood,
as I've shown you. Your sexual function improves. These things occur within hours. This is a study: a high-fat meal, within one or two hours,
blood flow is measurably less. And you've all experienced
this at Thanksgiving. When you eat a big fatty meal,
how do you feel? You feel kind of sleepy afterwards. On a low-fat meal, the blood flow
doesn't go down -- it even goes up. Many of you have kids, and you know
that's a big change in your lifestyle. People are not afraid
to make big changes in lifestyle if they're worth it. And the paradox is that when you make
big changes, you get big benefits, and you feel so much better so quickly. For many people,
those are choices worth making -- not to live longer, but to live better. I want to talk a little bit
about the obesity epidemic, because it really is a problem. Two-thirds of adults
are overweight or obese, and diabetes in kids and 30-year-olds has increased 70 percent
in the last 10 years. It's no joke, it's real. And just to show you this,
this is from the CDC. These are not election returns; these are the percentage of people
who are overweight. And if you see from '85 to '86
to '87, '88, '89, '90, '91 -- you get a new category, 15 to 20 percent; '92, '93, '94, '95, '96, '97 --
you get a new category; '98, '99, 2000 and 2001. Mississippi, more than 25 percent
of people are overweight. Why is this? Well, this is one way
to lose weight that works very well -- (Laughter) but it doesn't last, which is the problem. (Laughter) Now, there's no mystery
in how you lose weight; you either burn more calories by exercise or you eat fewer calories. Now, one way to eat fewer calories
is to eat less food, which is why you can lose weight
on any diet if you eat less food, or if you restrict
entire categories of foods. But the problem is, you get hungry,
so it's hard to keep it off. The other way is to change
the type of food. And fat has nine calories per gram, whereas protein and carbs only have four. So when you eat less fat, you eat fewer
calories without having to eat less food. So you can eat the same amount of food, but you're getting fewer calories because the food
is less dense in calories. And it's the volume of food that affects
satiety, rather than the type. I don't like talking about the Atkins
diet, but I get asked about it, so thought I'd spend a few minutes on it. The myth that you hear is,
Americans have been told to eat less fat, the percent of calories from fat is down, Americans are fatter than ever,
therefore fat doesn't make you fat. It's a half-truth. Actually, Americans are eating
more fat than ever, and even more carbs. So the percentage is lower,
but the actual amount is higher, so the goal is to reduce both. Dr. Atkins and I debated each other
many times before he died, and we agreed that Americans eat
too many simple carbs, the "bad carbs." And these are things like -- (Laughter) sugar, white flour, white rice, alcohol. And you get a double whammy: you get all these calories
that don't fill you up because you've removed the fiber, and they get absorbed quickly
so your blood sugar zooms up. Your pancreas makes insulin
to bring it back down, which is good, but insulin accelerates
the conversion of calories into fat. So the goal is not to go to pork rinds,
bacon and sausages -- these are not health foods -- but to go from "bad carbs"
to "good carbs." These are things like whole foods
or unrefined carbs. Fruits, vegetables,
whole wheat flour, brown rice, in their natural forms, are rich in fiber. The fiber fills you up
before you get too many calories and it slows the absorption, so you don't get
that rapid rise in blood sugar. And you get all
the disease-protective substances. It's not just what you exclude
from your diet, but also what you include
that's protective. Just as all carbs are not bad for you,
all fats are not bad; there are good fats. These are predominantly
what are called omega-3 fatty acids. You find them, for example, in fish oil. Bad fats are things like
trans-fatty acids in processed food and saturated fats, which we find in meat. If you remember nothing else
from this talk: three grams a day of fish oil can reduce
the risk of heart attack and sudden death by 50 to 80 percent. Three grams a day. They come in one-gram capsules; more than that just gives you
extra fat you don't need. It also helps reduce the risk
of the most common cancers, like breast, prostate and colon. The problem with the Atkins diet is, everyone knows people
who've lost weight on it, but you can lose weight
on amphetamines and fen-phen; there are lots of ways of losing weight
that aren't good for you. You want to do it
in a way that enhances your health, not one that harms it. The problem is,
it's based on this half-truth: Americans eat too many simple carbs, so if you eat fewer, you'll lose weight, and even more weight
if you eat whole foods and less fat, and you'll enhance your health
rather than harming it. He says, "I've got good news. While your cholesterol level
has remained the same, the research findings have changed." (Laughter) Now what happens to your heart
when you go on an Atkins diet? The red is good; at the beginning
and a year later. This is from a study in a peer-reviewed
journal called "Angiology." There's more red after a year
on a diet like I would recommend, there's less red, less blood flow
after a year on an Atkins-type diet. So, yes, you can lose weight,
but your heart isn't happy. Now one of the studies
funded by the Atkins Center found that 70 percent
of the people were constipated, 65 percent had bad breath, 54 percent had headaches -- this is not a healthy way to eat. So you might start to lose weight
and start to attract people towards you, but when they get too close,
it's going to be a problem. (Laughter) And more seriously, there are case
reports now of 16-year-old girls who died after a few weeks
on the Atkins diet, of bone disease,
kidney disease, and so on. And that's how your body excretes waste -- through your breath,
bowels and perspiration. So when you go on these kinds
of diet, they begin to smell bad. An optimal diet is low in fat,
low in the bad carbs, high in the good carbs
and enough of the good fats. And then, again, it's a spectrum: when you move in this direction,
you're going to lose weight, you'll feel better,
and you'll gain health. There are ecological reasons
for eating lower on the food chain too, whether it's the deforestation
in the Amazon or making more protein available to the four billion people
who live on a dollar a day, not to mention whatever
ethical concerns people have. So there are lots of reasons
for eating this way that go beyond just your health. Now, we're about to publish
the first study looking at the effects of this program
on prostate cancer, in collaboration
with Sloan Kettering and UCSF. We took 90 men who had
biopsy-proven prostate cancer, who had elected, for reasons unrelated
to the study, not to have surgery. We could randomly divide them
into two groups, and then we could have one group that is a nonintervention
control group to compare to, which you can't do with,
say, breast cancer, because everyone gets treated. We found that after a year, none of the experimental group patients
who made these lifestyle changes needed treatment, while six of the control group patients
needed surgery or radiation. When we looked at their PSA levels,
which is a marker for prostate cancer, they got worse in the control group
but got better in the experimental group. And the differences
were highly significant. I wondered -- was there any relationship between how much people changed
their diet and lifestyle, whichever group they were in, and the changes in PSA? And sure enough, we found
a dose-response relationship, just like we did in the arterial
blockages in our cardiac studies. And in order for the PSA to go down,
they had to make big changes. I then wondered
if they're just changing their PSA, but it's not really affecting
the tumor growth. So we took some of their blood
serum and sent it to UCLA. They added it to a standard line
of prostate tumor cells growing in tissue culture, and it inhibited the growth
seven times more in the experimental group than in the control group --
70 versus 9 percent. Finally, I wondered
if there's any relationship between how much people changed and how much it inhibited
their tumor growth, whichever group they were in. And this really got me
excited because again, we found the same pattern:
the more people change, the more it affected
the growth of their tumors. Finally, we did MRI and MR spectroscopy
scans on some of these patients. The tumor activity
is shown in red in this patient, and you can see clearly it's better a year
later, along with the PSA going down. If it's true for prostate cancer, it'll almost certainly be true
for breast cancer. And whether or not you have
conventional treatment, in addition, if you make these changes,
it may help reduce the risk of recurrence. The last thing I want to talk about, apropos of the issue
of the pursuit of happiness, is that study after study has shown that people who are lonely
and depressed -- and depression is the other
real epidemic in our culture -- are many times more likely
to get sick and die prematurely, in part because, as we talked about,
they're more likely to smoke, overeat, drink too much,
work too hard, and so on. But also, through mechanisms
that we don't fully understand, people who are lonely
and depressed are many times -- three to five to ten times
in some studies -- more likely to get sick
and die prematurely. And depression is treatable.
We need to do something about that. Now on the other hand, anything
that promotes intimacy is healing. It can be sexual intimacy -- I happen to think healing energy
and erotic energy are just different forms
of the same thing. Friendship, altruism,
compassion, service -- all the perennial truths
that we talked about that are part of all religion
and all cultures, once you stop trying
to see the differences -- these are the things
that are in our own self-interest, because they free us
from our suffering and our disease. And it's, in a sense,
the most selfish thing that we can do. Just to look at one study,
done by David Spiegel at Stanford. He took women with metastatic
breast cancer, randomly divided them into two groups. One group met for an hour and a half
once a week in a support group. It was a nurturing, loving environment, where they were encouraged
to let down their emotional defenses and talk about how awful it is
to have breast cancer with people who understood
because they were going through it too. They met once a week for a year. Five years later, those women
lived twice as long. And that was the only difference
between the groups. It was a randomized control study
published in "The Lancet." Other studies have shown this as well. So these simple things
that create intimacy are really healing. Even the word "healing"
comes from the root "to make whole." The word "yoga" comes
from the Sanskrit, meaning "union," "to yoke, to bring together." The last slide I want to show you
is from -- again, this swami that I studied
with for so many years. I did a combined oncology
and cardiology grand rounds at the University of Virginia
medical school a couple years ago. And at the end of it, somebody said, "Hey, Swami, what's the difference
between wellness and illness?" So he went up on the board
and wrote the word "illness" and circled the first letter, then wrote the word "wellness," and circled the first two letters. To me, it's just shorthand
for what we're talking about: that anything that creates a sense
of connection and community and love is really healing. And then we can enjoy our lives more fully
without getting sick in the process. Thank you. (Applause)
