Dr. Dean Ornish on Reversing Chronic Disease

my plan was to get strong enough to kill myself as crazy as that sounds you know i think the real epidemic the pandemic if you will isn't just covert or heart disease or diabetes it's loneliness and depression and isolation if you go on the cdc website and you see the risk the incidence of obesity over the last 20 years it looks like a cancer spreading across the country you've probably seen those maps before but to me the more question goes back to what the swami said like what is the cause and what is the cause of that and what is the cause of that there's this causal chain of events that usually leads to anything and the farther back in that chain of events we can go the more powerful the healing can be [Music] hi everyone this is jenna mateke from plant-based news i really hope you enjoy this video which is an interview between myself and the world-renowned lifestyle medicine researcher dr dean ornish dr ornish in your opinion why are more and more doctors recommending plant-based diets because more and more scientific evidence is showing that a plant-based diet is the healthiest way for most people to eat it gives you really a double benefit you're not eating the things that promote disease and you're getting hundreds of thousands of other substances that help prevent it that have anti-cancer any heart disease and even anti-aging qualities we spent 86 percent of the 3.7 trillion dollars in the united states on health care which is mostly sick care for treating chronic diseases like coronary heart disease type 2 diabetes hypertension hypercholesterolemia early stage prostate cancer that are largely preventable and now we were able to show for the first time even reversible by making simple lifestyle changes a whole foods plant-based diet that's naturally low in fat and sugar mostly fruits vegetables whole grains like yum soy products and their natural forms moderate exercise like walking a half an hour a day with some resistance training various meditation and other stress management techniques derived from yoga and psychosocial support to reduce it to its essence to eat well move more stress less and love more and i think our unique contribution has been to use these very high-tech scientific state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost interventions can be i wrote a book with my wife ann called undo it that puts forth what is really a radical unifying theory that i thought we get a lot of pushback on but it's been really almost universally embraced which is that i was trained like most doctors to view all these different diseases heart disease diabetes prostate cancer and so on as being fundamentally different diseases different diagnoses and different treatments but i've come to believe that there really have a lot more in common than they have different that they're really in many ways the same disease manifesting and masquerading in different forms because they all share the same underlying biological mechanisms things like chronic inflammation oxidative stress changes in the microbiome telomeres human expression angiogenesis apoptosis and so on and each one of these mechanisms in turn is directly influenced by what we eat how we respond to stress how much exercise we get and how much love and support we have and the more diseases we study the more scientific evidence we've been able to gather over the last 43 years to show how powerful these simple changes can be and that's really been i think the biggest obstacle that i found in my career which is that we've been trained indoctrinated uh inductor native uh to view drugs and surgery and devices as being really powerful and lifestyle changes kind of that's kind of boring you know how powerful could that be and because we've been able to show that you can actually reverse the progression of the most common chronic diseases that you can change over 500 genes in three months turning on the genes that keep us healthy turning off the genes that cause us to get sick as a study we published with craig venter who was the first to decode the human genome we published a study with elizabeth blackburn who got the nobel prize for her pioneering work with telomeres the ends of our chromosomes that regulate aging and we found for the first time she had done studies showing that that harmful lifestyle changes people who smoke cigarettes or who are chronically stressed out or eat a lot of junk food etc their telomeres get shorter faster and as your telomeres get shorter your life gets shorter and the risk of premature death from a wide variety of causes goes up proportionate to that so i had lunch in there and i said you know if bad things make your telomeres shorter maybe good things make them longer and so we found for the first time that you could actually lengthen telomeres by making these same lifestyle changes and when we publish this in the landsat the editors called it reversing aging at a cellular level now there's a lot of interest in people who call personalized medicine and yet we found that it wasn't like there was one set of diet and lifestyle changes for reversing heart disease a different one for diabetes and so on it was the same for all of them again because they all share these underlying biological mechanisms and that radically simplifies what we recommend people to do so i think a whole foods plant-based diet a vegan diet if you will is the healthiest way for most people to eat but it's not all or nothing if you're not if you don't have a life-threatening illness i published a book uh 10 years ago called the spectrum which was based on the finding in all of our studies that the more you change the more you improve at any age and so if you know if you indulge yourself one day it doesn't mean you cheated or you're bad or you fail just get healthier the next you don't have time to exercise one day do a little more the next you don't have time to meditate for an hour do it for a minute whatever you do there's a corresponding benefit now if you're trying to reverse a life-threatening condition that's hard you know that's the pound of cure as opposed to the ounce of prevention and the reason we were the first to prove in randomized trials that you could reverse so many chronic diseases that most people didn't go far enough it takes a lot to reverse a chronic disease but if you're willing to do it then in most cases people can get better to the degree they make these changes who first inspired you to become plant-based and what did they say that really made you consider it when i was 19 i got suicidally depressed i felt like i was stupid that i didn't know anything that i was worthless that i didn't i i didn't deserve to live um and uh you know the kind of 19 year old existential angst of you know who cares why bother nothing matters so what big deal all those kinds of things we're really to the instagram i really came about as close as as you can to doing yourself in without but then i got so run down i was up i stayed up for a week straight i couldn't even read a headline in a newspaper and tell you a minute later what it said i was just a total wreck and um and i got so run down that i got this really severe case of infectious mononucleosis and didn't even have the energy to get out of bed and meanwhile my parents heard what a wreck i was came and saw what a wreck i was and took me home to dallas to recuperate where i grew up and uh my plan was to get strong enough to kill myself as crazy as that sounds uh meanwhile my older sister this was in 1972 um had been studying with an ecumenical spiritual teacher named swami sachadananda who was brought over to the us in 1966 by the artist peter max and if you ever saw the film woodstock he opened woodstock you know just to put it in context and he came in and he gave a lecture in our living room and he started off by saying nothing can bring you lasting happiness which i'd already figured out which is part of the reason why i got so depressed because i i thought well what if i do all the things that our culture tells us will brain lasting happens what if i get rich and famous and marry beautiful woman and and have great you know whatever and i knew that it'd be great for a little while but it wouldn't be um lasting so it's like i really felt like i was never gonna amount to anything but even if i did it wouldn't matter anyway so what's the point right so one and dead people look like they're peaceful and i i couldn't even sit still so why not just do myself in you know so but it was very validating to hear him say nothing can bring lasting happiness because everyone else that i've been talking to at the times oh no no just you know you know become a doctor or get married or whatever you know then you'll be happy and i knew that wasn't true so it felt very validating but then i immediately thought well gosh you know i'm about to do myself in and he's glowing what am i missing here you know and he went on to say what probably sounds to many people like a new age cliche but it really turned my life around which is that nothing can bring us lasting happiness but we don't need anything to bring this lasting happiness we already have that and you know not being mindful of that that our nature is to be peaceful and happy and healthy until we disturb it and not being aware of that we often run after all these things if only i had more money more power more sex more beauty more accomplishment whatever then i'd be happy then people would love me then i would feel so lonely and then everything would be fine once we set up that view of the world he taught me however it turns out you generally feel about it because until you get whatever that is you feel really stressed and the stresses go up because the stress is really not from what you do but it's how you react to what you do and if you perceive that you need all these things to be lovable and happy and healthy then the stresses go way up so until you get it you're stressed if someone else gets it then it's really stressful and it re reinforces this myth this misperception that there's not enough you know that there's a zero-sum game and the more you get the lesser is for me and so i better get it while i can and you know it's very hostile doggy dog competitive world but even if we get it it's seductive in the moment because it's like ah i got it now i'm happy but then invariably it doesn't last it's soon followed either by well now what it's not like one patient later and told me um i can't i can't even enjoy the view from the mountain i've climbed i'm already looking over the next one it's never enough or i used to think if i made twenty thousand dollars a year that'd be great and then it's like well maybe fifty thousand or maybe you know it just always keeps going up or if it's not now what it's so what it doesn't really provide that lasting sense of meaning that we talked about earlier and so what we generally do is go well maybe that didn't do but this will or the letdown that comes from accomplishing a goal is so great i always make sure i've got a dozen projects going at the same time people would say but what the swami taught me he said is that we have entirely backwards that it is our nature to be happy and healthy and peaceful uh until we disturb it and not being mindful of that and perhaps the ultimate irony we run after all these things that we think are going to bring us what we could have already if we just stop disturbing what's already there and so then the question shifts from how can i get all these things that i think i need to be happy to what am i doing to disturb my inner sense of peace and well-being that's already there not to blame myself but to empower myself because then i can do something about that otherwise every if i think it's out there then everybody who has what i think i need has power over me but if it's me then i can do something about that so he would say for example at the end of a meditation or a yoga class or if people are religious at prayer or secular or meditation when you're feeling more peaceful to remind yourself to literally remind yourself that the meditation didn't bring you that sense of peace that it was already there but rather at least temporarily we weren't disturbing it now that may sound like just parsing of words and semantics but the implications are profound because again i can do something about that and then the other implication is is that um i don't all the anxiety that i was having about you know i couldn't do well in tests or whatever because i was afraid i wouldn't do well and then i wouldn't get into medical school and i would be a doctor then i'd be a failure and then people would love me and all that stuff was more like oh i'm already happy i'm already peaceful i already love myself so let me go out on the world and do all these things but my the behaviors may be the same but the intention behind them is very different i'm not doing these to get a sense of happiness and help but rather um that's just what i do you know that's my dorm and that's what i do that's that it's fun for me to to make a difference to empower other people to uh help prevent or alleviate suffering i mean that's what gets me out of bed every day but then there's not the anxiety and fear along with that it allows me i mean everything i've done professionally people thought was impossible when i started it you know reversing heart disease for example you know that you can't do it it's impossible you can't get people to change your lifestyle or whatever but having been through that horrible experience right and at the time i said okay well let me i'll move killing myself down to plan b let me try this weird stuff and i began to get glimpses of what that was and then i went back to school and graduated first in my class and gave the commencement address at the university of texas in austin and i say that not to brag but to say that i experienced both ends of that spectrum that when i really thought i had to do well that my whole sense of existence was dependent on that i was so anxious i couldn't even function i was ready to do myself in the more inwardly defined i became the more outward accomplishment i had but because the intention behind it was very different there's a little zen proverb uh before enlightenment chop would carry water after enlightenment chocolate cherry water you know in other words you do the same things but the reason behind it is very different and so when i went to medical school and i began working with people i realized that so many people are really suffering because of these same misunderstandings and that when someone is suffering there's an opportunity for transformation because change is hard you know but if you're hurting enough i remember i saw the swami when i first met him i said oh i'm so in so much pain i'm doing this and i'm doing that and you go good i said it's not good it's terrible i'm hurting them you go no that's really good i said why is that good because imagine i'm giving you a hot uh pot to hold um and it's burning are you gonna how how long you're gonna hold it and let go of it right so you can let go of all the suffering if you're really motivated and so he helped me connect the dots between when i was suffering and why so now when i'm working with people who have heart disease or other chronic conditions i can say look yeah we can talk about diet and exercise and so on but really what the essence of this is is to use the suffering as a doorway or as a catalyst for really transforming your life to rediscover inner sources of peace and joy and well-being to find a sense of meaning and purpose to open your heart to yourself and to have that sense of love and compassion for yourself and for others because you know we're all going to die that the the mortality rate is still you know 100 percent it's one per person um so to me the question shifts from how long are we going to live to how well are we going to live and um and then in each moment we have all degrees of freedom that can really help us enjoy life to its fullest by serving other people you know one of the things i find interesting is that all spiritual traditions and religions pretty much have dietary guidelines of one sort or another but they're sometimes different from each other and but i think that whatever the intrinsic benefit of eating or not eating certain foods just the act of choosing not to eat certain foods imbues those choices with meaning and if it's meaningful then it's sustainable so it's actually liberating to say i'm only going to eat certain foods because it's going to help me it's going to help the planet it's going to help reduce suffering and so then that's ultimately what makes it sustainable and the paradox is that you know most doctors say oh i can get my patients to take their their cholesterol on drugs their statins but there's no way they're going to change their lifestyle and yet most people are not taking those drugs two-thirds of the people who are prescribed them are not taking them after just four to six months even though they're proven value in people with heart disease and the reason is that they don't make you feel better but the lifestyle changes do they and most people feel so much better so quickly when they make these changes to the degree they make them then it refrains the reason for making them from fear of dying which is not sustainable to joy of living which is back then you were a student was it hard for you to stick with eating this way many people find that trying out plant-based in the beginning can be especially tough given that they're surrounded by so many not so great choices well it wasn't hard because i was in so much pain remember i was ready to kill myself that um he said like try this weird stuff and i figured okay well what have i got to lose you know and i tried it and i and i grew up in texas you know eating meat three times a day cheeseburgers chilies chalupas whatever so this is a big change for me not only just the meat but the sugar and all the other stuff junk food um but i felt so much better and i began to get glimpses and i wasn't just again what he also taught me is that it's easier to change a lot of things at the same time than just to change one thing like diet even though that's counterintuitive a lot of people think well it's hard enough to change diet you want me to change diet and meditate and exercise and love more are you kidding me you know there's no way i can do that my patients can never do that you know and yet the paradox is that sometimes it's actually easier to make big changes in a lot of things than just small changes and one thing and the reason is is that again you feel so much better to the degree you make these changes and to the degree you make these changes and the number of changes that you make and so i began to get glimpses i mean i couldn't even sit still i mean i was literally i had such an agitated depression that i literally couldn't sit still that's how i do walking meditations you know and then finally i just got these glimpses of what it means to feel more peaceful and relaxed and then i was able to function better and so it became a virtuous cycle instead of a vicious cycle and so that's really ultimately what made it sustainable but the other thing that happens is when you quiet your mind down and you feel more peaceful is that you realize that you can tune into that peaceful state even in the midst of the busiest activity so when i'm out there doing whatever i can most of the time stay in that peaceful place not always but you know more often than not stay in that peaceful place to remind myself or if i forget i can get back to it but the other thing that happens is that you get more in touch with your inner wisdom your inner teacher your inner swami your inner guru you're in or whatever you're under god um that little voice that speaks very clearly but very quietly it's the one that would wake me up at three in the morning and say hey dean listen up pay attention you're not doing something that's in your best interest or you're missing something that's really important here and so i would um uh realize that i could actually access that voice uh intentionally so at the end of a meditation i've gotten in the habit of asking for that voice to say hello just so i can recognize it and then i'll say what am i not paying attention to that i need to pay attention to and then just listen and it will tell me i mean we're in the middle of now doing the first randomized trial to see if these same lifestyle changes can reverse the progression of early stage alzheimer's disease my mom died of alzheimer's and all of her family her siblings did and i've got one of the genes for them so and um i think we're at a place with alzheimer's very reminiscent of where we were with heart disease um 43 years ago in other words the same biological mechanisms affect alzheimer's that affect all these other diseases this unifying theory we talked about less intensive lifestyle interventions back then could slow the rate at which heart disease got worse we found a more intensive one could actually reverse it consider getting worse and worse people get better and better and the same for alzheimer's that less intensive interventions the finger study the mind study uh what's now going to be replicated as the pointer study that less intensive diagnostic interventions can slow the rate at which people got worse our hypothesis is that a more intensive intervention can maybe stop and reverse it and that's i think even more important with alzheimer's than any other diseases we've studied because at least with heart disease and diabetes there are medications or surgical procedures that have some benefit but nothing works with alzheimer's at best you can slow the rate at which you get worse and that's about it uh there have been no new drugs approved in 17 years they've spent uh 15 billion dollars on over 400 drug trials and they've all failed and yet i think that there's a good chance we might be able to show that these same lifestyle changes may stop or reverse the progression of early stage alzheimer's we're in the middle of the study now so i can't really talk about it more than that but i'm cautiously optimistic but that idea came from listening to that inner voice um and said try this this will work and so then i kind of go in the literature and read about it reverse engineer it and see okay what can we design to see if this is true or not so that little voice is very wise and we all have that and i've learned to trust that and the other thing that happens is when you quiet down your mind and body enough you get what the swami would call a double vision that on one level were separate you know you're you and i me and we can enjoy having this dialogue but on another level we're not we're really all interconnected in in ways that are somewhat ineffable hard to describe that limitless really even the talk even to describe it is the limit what's really a limitless experience he would use the analogy of going into a theater which unfortunately we're not doing these things because of code but with an old style movie project we have the light that goes through the film and then it projects all these dramas and names and forms on the screen which you can only really enjoy if you don't forget that you're watching a movie and that the light behind it is really the same for all these different characters and so it can actually give you that direct experience and i've come to believe that anything that is into that brings us together is really healing and having that direct experience of interconnectedness is also a powerful healing thing so you know we get these are just kind of in a basket of stress management techniques but there's so much more than that they're really actually powerful tools for transformation but just to circle back to the point i was making earlier that for me what i really love is to be able to help people use the experience of suffering as a doorway for transforming their lives yes they get better physically in many cases but again what's the point of getting better if you're just going to be i mean telling somebody who's lonely and depressed if they're going to live longer is not motivating you know they're saying look you don't get it i'm just trying to get through the day you know and so you need to work at a deeper level and then when we do that we find that people are much more likely to make lifestyle choices that are life enhancing than ones that are self-destructed hey everyone i really hope you're enjoying this interview if you are you're definitely going to get something out of a free premiere summit linked below the summit features dr ornish as well as 24 different experts in the fields of lifestyle medicine and conscious living before we get back to the interview there's going to be a quick trailer about this premiere amazing event and again if you hit the link in the video description you will get free access enjoy the global pandemic has changed our world forever millions of lives have been lost and tragically it's not over yet and here's something that's really kind of important some of the biggest covet 19 risk factors are what's called co-morbidities these include obesity cardiovascular disease type 2 diabetes and other chronic illnesses and the good news here is that whether or not you ever get coveted 19 the food you eat and the choices you make today have the power to shape your destiny and your health for the rest of your life right now it's more important than ever to clean up your diet to eat the foods that support your immune system scientific studies show us that eating the right foods can help you prevent and even reverse cancer type 2 diabetes autoimmune conditions obesity can help prevent alzheimer's and these foods really are your number one way to strengthen your heart your brain your microbiome and your immune system they can help you to have lasting energy more satisfying sleep and to set you up for a long happy life i'm ocean robbins host of the food revolution summit and i want you to know the truth about your food that's why my dad and colleague two million copy best-selling author john robbins and i have teamed up with 24 of the world's most brilliant revolutionary experts to bring you this year's biggest breakthroughs in food and health and because this information is so important right now more than ever before we're offering it to you completely for free in this the 10th anniversary food revolution summit you will find out what's really going on behind the scenes in our food system you'll find out which foods you need to avoid and what the leading edge of medical science is discovering about how you can optimize your immune health your brain health and your heart health most importantly you're going to find hope for your future and real actionable scientifically grounded solutions that can improve your life and your world starting today i can't wait to share it all with you remember it's completely free so go ahead and sign up right on this page all you need to do is enter your name and email to reserve your spot right now and i'll see you in the summit you've spent the large part of your career producing incredible scientifically backed research studies it's one of the many reasons why insurance carriers cover your program i'm curious also by medicare you know medicare created a new benefit category after 16 years of review and the reason i spent so much time doing research is that it can redefine properly done and you know we publish in all the leading peer review journals we work with the top investigators in the planet is that it can redefine what's possible for people and by doing so it can give people new hope and new choices that they can empower them in ways that uh to me are incredibly fulfilling so then why are so many of your medical colleagues ignoring and or avoiding your research well i'm on the nutrition subcommittee of the american college of cardiology and we published a paper in the leading cardiology journal called the journal of the american college of cardiology about a year year and a half ago and we surveyed how much nutrition training does the average doctor get in four years of medical school and turns out it's about four hours a year you know which is nothing and even that is really about you know vitamin c and scurvy and things like that then we ask how much nutrition training does the average cardiologist get in four years of fellowship and it turns out it's zero you know so we're trained to use drugs in surgery we'll reimburse use drugs in surgery so we use drugs in surgery you know abraham maslow's famous quote you know if you only until you have as a hammer you see everything as a nail and so that's why i spent 16 years to work with cms to get medicare coverage and now many of the admin and other major insurance companies blue cross blue shield and others are covering our program for reversing heart disease because if you change reimbursement you change medical practice and even medical education and that is changing and now you know things are really making really coming around and there's a convergence of forces that i think finally many people are realizing make this the right idea at the right time because on the one hand the limitations of drugs and surgery are becoming increasingly well documented in case of heart disease there are now multiple or at least eight randomized trials showing that in patients with stable heart disease that stents and angioplasties don't prolong life don't prevent heart attacks don't reduce engine it don't really work and we spend you know tens of billions of dollars on these procedures that are dangerous invasive expensive and largely ineffective and yet we've shown that simple lifestyle changes can actually reverse the progression of disease at a fraction of the cost and the only side effects for good ones the same with type 2 diabetes getting your blood sugar down with drugs doesn't prevent the horrible complications of type 2 diabetes nearly as well as getting it down with lifestyle you know amputations and heart attacks and strokes and blindness and impotence and so on in the case of early stage prostate cancer maybe one out of 50 men who had surgery or radiation for prostate cancer lives longer because of it but the other 49 often get maimed in the most personal ways because they're often either impotent or incontinent or both for no real benefit at huge economic and huge personal costs we did the first randomized trial with the chairs of urology at ucsf and at the morrison kettering cancer center showing that these same lifestyle changes can slow stop and often even reverse the progression of early stage prostate cancer and with alzheimer's as i mentioned there are no treatments that really work so if we are to show if we can show and it's still a big if but if we show that we can stop reverse the progression of alzheimer's that'll you know that'll give millions of people new hope and new choices in the area that people are more afraid of than any other because when you lose your memories you lose everything let's talk a little bit about the decision-making psychology behind your healthy eating spectrum the less desirable choices in the spectrum are animal products you've shown in your research again and again that ideally we shouldn't be eating any of these why even include them at all what is the master plan decision making psychology behind that well the spectrum includes all foods that's why we we the spectrum was the idea that having seen it all i mean when i started doing these studies i thought that the younger people who had less severe disease heart disease for example would do better and i was wrong one of the things we learned was that it wasn't how old they were or how sick they were the more you change your lifestyle the more you improve at any age that's a very empowering realization and so um it's you know again if you're trying to reverse a life-threatening disease it really is all or nothing but for most people it's you know the more you change the more you improve and i shared google health with marissa meyerton like 12 years ago and we're trying to come up with you know all these you know elaborate ways of of personalizing lifestyle recommendations and i thought you know we're making this so complicated i mean mrsa designed the google logo you know with you know these you know beautiful clean white background and so on i said let's make this radically simple for people and i've learned also that even more than being healthy people want to feel free and in control and as soon as i tell somebody you know eat this don't eat that do this don't do that they immediately want to do the opposite you know it's just it goes back to the first dietary intervention you know when god said don't eat the apple and that didn't go so well and that was god talking you know and apples are good for you so um you know and and even the language of behavioral change often has this very moralistic sometimes fascist uh you know quality like you know um like i cheated on my diet you know once you call foods good or bad it's a small step i'm a bad person because i bad food and well might as well finish the the rest of the ice cream the pine of ice cream or the cheeseburger at that point so what i did with the spectrum was to say for most people um you decide what you want to do what what are your goals like sometimes like let's say you came to see me and you'd say i'd say jenna what do you want to do i want to get my cholesterol down 50 points i want to lose 5 pounds i want to get my blood pressure down i want to whatever i said great what are you eating now well i'm eating mostly so group group 1 are the vegan plant-based low-fat foods group 5 or the you know donuts and red meat and things like that in groups two through four in the middle and so it's saying okay well what do you know i'm eating mostly group four and five unhealthy foods great how much are you willing to change or first what are your goals okay these are my goals how much are you willing to change oh wow no one's ever asked me that before they're always telling me what to do you're asking me how much i want to change okay well i don't know i'll eat less of the groups four and five and more groups one through three great how much exercise are you doing now well not that much how much are you willing to do oh i don't know i'll walk 20 minutes a day great how much meditation and yoga are you doing uh zero how much are you willing to do um i'll meditate 10 minutes a day great how much love and support do you have in your life not enough but i'll spend more time with my friends and family cool so we track it we measure it a month later let's say you want to get your cholesterol down 50 points it's come down 30. great look how well you're doing now if you need more of the groups one through three and even less of the groups four and five you can probably get the rest of the way there but if you indulge yourself one day it doesn't mean you cheated or you failed or you're bad just eat healthier the next you know then it frees everybody then we're out of this kind of manipulative dancer i'm trying to get you to do something which maybe i can do for a little while but i mean when someone has a heart attack they'll do pretty much anything their doctor or nurse tells them for like i don't know four or six weeks then the fear goes away and they stop doing it but this is based on a different motivation which is not fear and not controlling or manipulating someone or guilt tripping them but rather like you're in control how much do you want to change and why and and how can we support that degree of change so all of these foods are included because it includes all foods you know but it's just saying instead of calling these are good and these are bad saying to the degree you move in this direction you're going to look better feel better lose weight gain health all the things that really are important to you true or false and why many doctors although they may deeply care about their patients are not currently curing them with their existing treatments well it depends i mean if you have someone who's got pneumococcal pneumonia give them uh penicillin they get better they are curing it but for most chronic diseases the reason they're chronic diseases because they're not cured if they were cured they'd be acute diseases you know and so people have to live with them and so um the reason is and this is again what i learned from the swami he was always saying what is the cause you know whenever i lecture back in 1981 i had this cartoon drawn that other people have since copied of a doctor of busily mopping up the floor around a sink that's overflowing and nobody's turning off the faucet like how long do i have to mop up the floor like forever like well why don't you turn off the faucet how long do i have to take these drugs to lower my cholesterol my blood pressure my blood sugar forever why don't i just stop eating these you know why don't i just change my lifestyle and again we find under their doctor's supervision that most doctors can reduce or even get people off of these kinds of medications and others that they were told they'd have to take the rest of their lives so but there's an infinite having healing and curing that even when we can't cure something we can help people heal from it even when someone has a you know like end stage pancreatic cancer when you really can't do anything you can help them heal even the process of death can be a healing experience as we move into the next you know phase of our of our lives and so these are also things we're not really trained to deal with you know death and dying but because it was so close to me when i was 19 it's something that i you know have a lifelong interest in researchers are by design supposed to constantly be trying to prove themselves wrong that's science in your opinion what are some of the best critiques that you've received of your work over the years um well i am trying i mean that that's the whole nature of science is you have the null hypothesis of what you're trying to disprove the null hypothesis which is that there is something happening here but i will say that knock on wood that every study that we've done has worked and every study people thought it was impossible but you know we showed that we redefined that for people and that's again part of what i i feel excited about um so a lot of the critiques of our work say oh you know people won't change their lifestyle and so much of that can become self-fulfilling it's like if i said to you jenna i know you're not going to change your diet and why would you want to anyway just take this pill and that'll take care of it and then you don't change and then say i see i knew you couldn't do it i mean you know there's there's been a lot of crazy i mean there was an article that somebody wrote you know that was widely circulated called like why everything dean ortiz writes about nutrition is wrong you know you know and i had to like do a point-by-point rebuttal i mean there's a lot here that can be threatening to people in many ways you know that it can kind of threaten there's so many interests that you know would like people to just take these pills forever there's a reason why drug companies like chronic diseases because you know if it's a antibiotic for a pneumonia you take it for a week or two and then that's it you know if it's otherwise you take it for the rest of your life and then they price these drugs i mean when when lipitor first came out it was there was a hundred billion dollars a year that pfizer was making off that you know um it's crazy you know half the population today are taking cholesterol-lowering drugs is that a good or a bad thing well if it's that or nothing it's a good thing is it the best choice most of those people could reduce or get off those medications if they were willing to make bigger changes in their lifestyle again under their doctor's supervision you've done so many of these interviews that i'd like to try something i would like to say a few words and then ask you to share the first thing that comes to your mind as i say those words are you ready gosh can you be my therapist first nature versus nurture uh both you know we our genes are a predisposition but our genes are not our fate you know we publish a study showing that over 500 genes were changed in just three months turning on the good genes turning off the badgings bill clinton when he was first diagnosed with heart disease when his bypass is clogged up i should say uh his cardiac one of his cardiologists held a press conference on cnn and said oh it was all in his genes his dying lifestyle had nothing to do with it and because i've been working with him for many many years i knew it had everything to do with it so i sent the president clinton a note i said look it's not all in your genes if it were all in your genes then you'd be a victim you're not a victim you're the most powerful guys in the world you know and so i figured that either i'll never hear from again or maybe i will so we met together a few days later and he's been now doing this for now 12 or 13 years he's talked publicly about his heart disease is getting better um so yeah we if your father and mother and sister and brothers and aunts and uncles all died early from heart disease then you are at much higher risk of getting it but that doesn't mean it's a death sentence it just means that you need to make bigger changes than someone else to prevent or even reverse it that's all fats versus carbs being a veteran of the diet wars i i don't do those debates anymore i debated dr atkins more times than i can count um one of them was a meeting of the annual scientific sessions of the american college of cardiology and four thousand cardiologists in the audience he actually fell asleep during our debate i wish it tells you something and when he died his autopsy was published and it showed that um that he died of heart failure you know so he was the low carb guy so i got pegged as the low fat guy which still you know haunts me because our diet is so much more than low fat it's it's uh it's you know all the things we've been talking about it's fruit vegetables whole grains legumes soy products low in fat low in sugar low and refined carbs etc but there's more and more evidence coming out now that animal protein beyond this whole fat versus carbs debate is important and is very uh inflammatory and has other stimulates these other biological mechanisms we've been talking about and so one study showed that people a lot of animal protein were had a 75 increased risk of premature death from all causes and a four to five hundred percent increased risk of of uh premature death from the most common forms of cancer and from type 2 diabetes so there's more and more evidence that says we need to move beyond this fat versus carbs and more into what a really healthy way of eating is two-thirds of american adults are overweight or obese are we on the whole getting sicker and sicker it's just i found so much anguish in that statistic yet at the same time we're seeing so many positive changes i think we're seeing uh both ends of the spectrum you know the the dark and the light and this is in the political world in the medical world and all different things we're seeing both ends of the spectrum are energized uh i take solace in the fact that the light dries out the darkness the swami used to talk about this convention of unlit candles wondering if light exists and debating a very vigorous thing this little tiny lit candle walks into the room and fills the room up with light you know so the light i take solace in the fact that the light drives out the darkness if you go on the cdc website and you see the risk the uh incidence of obesity over the last 20 years it looks like a cancer spreading across the country you've probably seen those maps before but to me the more question goes back to what the swami said like what is the cause and what is the cause of that and what is the cause of that there's this causal chain of events that usually leads to anything and the farther back in that chain of events we can go the more powerful the healing can be and so to me the more question and in doing these studies i've had the chance to spend a lot of time with the same group of patients over a period of often many years so we get to know each other really well and and learn to trust and love each other and so when i started doing these studies i'd say teach me something like why do you smoke why do you overeat why do you drink too much why do you work too hard why do you abuse opioids why do you play so many video games these behaviors seem so maladaptive to me and they look at me they go you don't get it do you you don't have a clue do you dean these behaviors aren't maladapted they're very adaptive they help us deal with our loneliness our pain our depression you know i think the real epidemic the pandemic if you will isn't just covet or heart disease or diabetes it's loneliness and depression and isolation i wrote a book in 1998 called love and survival that reviewed what we've done thousands and now tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of studies showing that people who are lonely and depressed are three to ten times more likely to get sick and die prematurely of virtually all causes when compared to those who have a sense of love and connection with community and i don't know anything in medicine that has that powerful an impact so when i ask people out like why do you smoke they say why do i smoke because i've got 20 friends in this pack of cigarettes and they're always there for me and nobody else is going to take away my 20 friends what are you going to give me or food fills that void or fat coats my nerves and numbs the pain or alcohol numbs the pain or opioids them the pain or video games distract me from the pain or working all the time distracts me from my pain so it's not enough to give people information i mean if information were enough nobody would smoke it's not like i'd say hey jenna did you know smoking is bad for you i want you to quit you go oh i didn't know that i'll quit today it's like it's on every pack of cigarettes everybody knows that's true and it's not enough to focus on the behavior we need to deal even deeper and when we can show people how they can rediscover inner sources of peace and joy and well-being and love each other and love themselves more you know the 50 years ago people had an extended family they saw regularly they had a neighborhood with three or three generations of people who grew up together they had a job that felt secure they had a church or a synagogue or a mosque or a club or something they went to a regular basis and when you grew up in a in a neighborhood with three or three generations of people they know you they don't just know your facebook profile they know where you messed up they know your dark side they know when you're about to kill yourself like for me or whatever it happened to be and they're still there for you and there's just something really profoundly healing about being fully seen you know like in that movie avatar i see you you know i see you all of you not just in fact one study that i quote in the undoing book is that the more time you spend on facebook the more depressed you are because um it's not a real authentic intimacy it's like here i am in front of the eiffel tower and here i am with my kids who just graduated here i am you know being interviewed on this show or whatever it's like it doesn't say here i am when i'm despondent in my room you know i'm ready to with a gun you know in my mouth or here i am with you know whatever and yet when you grow up in that kind of extended family they see you all of you and you know and that they know and they know that you know that they know they're still there for you and there's just something really powerfully healing about being fully seen and accepted in that way and so our support groups are not just helping people stay on the diet in our studies they're creating a safe environment where people can let down their emotional defenses and really connect authentically and deeply so someone in our alzheimer's study could say you know when i was diagnosed with alzheimer's they told me i was only going to get worse they said they didn't even look at me and i looked at my wife he said put him in the corner put him in front of the tv if there's anything you want to do do it now because he's only going to get worse and so they just start to spiral downwards it's a profoundly isolating experience and so when we put people in the support group and they share each other's stories and they go wow and then sometimes they hear people getting better and they say well gosh maybe i can get better too then it really transforms things for people by the way we're still recruiting patients so if anyone's watching this go to ornish.com and there's a link to our study if you're interested in volunteering everything is offered for free to the patients and their and their spouse or caregivers last question you state in your book undo it that your health is determined by how well you live in your opinion why is this not more common sense i think it is common sense but common sense has become kind of radical these days you know explain well i mean most people would say yeah of course our lifestyle affects our health i mean duh but the question is why aren't we learning more about that um in our lives in our school and why are our doctors learning more about this as part of our training um and i think again we're at a uh an inflection point i think that uh you know when the chinese you know translation of crisis is opportunity and when someone has a heart attack they're open to change when the whole system is having a heart attack if you will it's just not sustainable you know we're we spent 3.7 trillion dollars last year on health care uh and yet our our overall health is like you know number 50 in the country in the world you know so we're not getting a lot of return on our investment and so i think that on the one hand as the limitations of drugs and surgery become clear and again i'm well trained in using drugs and surgery i'm a harvard trained internist you know i they we've all benefited from drugs and surgery they can be life-saving when they're used appropriately but we also need to address the more fundamental causes and when we can do that we often find that the need for drugs and surgery is often greatly reduced and that we can accomplish you know the same kinds of benefits at a fraction of the cost and again the only side effects for a good one so things are changing um would i like them to change faster i think medicine is inherently conservative which in some ways works to an advantage you don't want to go along with every fad that comes along and these studies are really hard you know i most of these randomized trials are really hard to do uh you have to raise the money for them it's hard to raise money for things that people think are impossible uh without if it's a catch-22 you can't prove it's possible without the funding they don't want to fund it if they think it's not possible so we generally just get started doing it and then hope the universe will provide the funding and then that's always come to pass you know things i would never have done had i not gotten so depressed when i was in college and being well it's like well what's the worst thing can happen well it'll fail we'll learn something you know but knockout what everything we've done has been successful would you like to maximize your odds of having a healthy heart even this year even in the midst of a pandemic heart disease is the number one killer on our planet but i've got some good news for you you see hundreds of studies show us that you can prevent maybe even reverse heart disease with simple changes to your diet and lifestyle with the heart healthy superfoods guidebook you'll find out what the studies actually tell us about the foods that are good for your heart and you'll get the latest breakthrough so you can take immediate action to protect yourself and the people you love most when you enter your name and email right on this page you'll get your free guidebook and you'll also gain free access to the 10th annual 2021 food revolution summit my dad and my colleague bestselling author john robbins and i are bringing you this summit because we are on a mission we want to help as many people as possible stay healthy during the pandemic and beyond during this free online global event my dad will personally interview 25 of the most brilliant revolutionary experts as they share this year's breaking updates about food and about health you'll leave the food revolution summit inspired and empowered with trustworthy information you can put to use right away just enter your name and email right on this page to join in the free summit and to get your completely free heart-healthy superfoods guidebook the truth is you're meant to thrive at every age and every stage of life no matter what happens in the world of pandemics and politics this is the time to take charge of your health all you have to do is join us for free by entering your name and email right now and i'll see you in the summit let's do this [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: PLANT BASED NEWS

Views: 88,121

Rating: 4.9150553 out of 5

Keywords: dr, doctor, dean ornish, lifestyle medicine, dr dean ornish, md, nutrition facts, low fat, reverse disease, healing, cure, heart disease, mic the vegan

Id: PAXBzBX8j9A

Length: 47min 2sec (2822 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021