LEGENDARY! Dr Dean Ornish

privilege and honor to introduce somebody that does not need an introduction dr. Dean Ornish truly a pioneer for all of us in lifestyle medicine and you know that the same is often I often say that you know we stand on the shoulders of people that provided an amazing foundation for us and Dean Ornish is truly one of those people I believe in creating honor and and honoring those that have gone before us and so you know I want you all to honor Dean Ornish as you welcome him today and the other thing I want to do before you clap as a way of showing honor dr. Dean Ornish recently published a book called undo it this week we're trying to help Dean's book get pushed up on the New York Times bestseller list so my request to you is that if you would take some time at lunchtime to buy a copy and then on your social media platforms send out that that request to your friends and all of your contacts to purchase the books we can help Dean push his book up and gain the notoriety and publicity that it really deserves so if we would do that I want to welcome to the stage right now dr. Dean Ornish thank you it's such a pleasure to be here and I want to again salute Scott for his incredible not only pioneering vision but his ability to create events like this I want to talk to you today about the power of lifestyle medicine and as you probably know lifestyle medicine is using lifestyle changes not only to help prevent disease but to treat and often even reverse it and I think it's the most exciting trend in medicine today and after so many years I think our time has finally come the program has four main components a Whole Foods plant-based diet that's low in fat and sugar various stress management techniques including meditation and yoga modern exercise and what we call psychosocial support which is really love and intimacy or to reduce it even further to eat well move more stress less and love more boom that's it and the more diseases we study and the more underlying mechanisms we look at the more scientific evidence we have to show how powerful these changes can be and how quickly people can get better and in this new book that that Scott mentioned I put forth a what I call a unifying theory and that is that I was trained like most doctors to view heart disease and diabetes and prostate cancer and Alzheimer's disease as being fundamentally different but we found that these same lifestyle changes it wasn't there was one set of lifestyle changes for reversing heart disease and other one for versing diabetes or high blood pressure or high cholesterol or even early stage prostate cancer was the same for all of them the reason why I think that the same lifestyle changes can affect so many different diseases is that they're really the same disease masquerading and manifesting in different forms and you know I was trained like all doctors to say these are all very different diseases different diagnosis different treatments and yet with all this talk about personalized medicine which by the way is great if you're talking about developing a targeted immunotherapy for say melanoma but for the vast majority of chronic diseases that we've been talking about it was the same diet and lifestyle program that we found in 40 years of research that could reverse all of them and the reason is is that I think that there's really the same disease that they all share the same underlying biological mechanisms things like chronic inflammation oxidative stress changes in telomeres gene expression in the microbiome and angiogenesis and so on and every 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 so that makes it radically simple so my new book that I co-wrote with my wife and partner of over 20 years in puts forth this unifying theory in a way that makes it radically simple eat well move more stress lies love morph that's it and it begins with a quote from Albert Einstein which is one of my favorite quotes that says if you can't make it simple you don't understand it well enough so we tried to reduce it down to his essence and I think that you know that makes it easier to teach it for people as well just say look just cuts through all the conflicting clutter and noise and smoke and so on to say it's really radically simple and the guiding principle for all of my work for the last four decades has been this very simple question and it's a radical question as well because radical means to get to the root of something the cause and I've been showing this cartoon I had to draw on 40 years ago I've you know we spend so much time in medicine mopping up the floor without also turning off the faucet so when people get put on drugs to lower their cholesterol their blood pressure their blood sugar and they say doctor how long do I have to take these drugs what does the doctor usually say forever exactly that's like how long do I have to mop up the floor like forever well why don't we just turn off the faucet and when I'm continually impressed by is that these biological mechanisms are so dynamic that our bodies often have a remarkable capacity to begin healing and much more quickly than we had once realized when we can just turn off a faucet or treat the cause our diets been rated number one for heart health by a panel of experts at u.s. US News and World Report just about every year since they started rating diets in 2011 which was a nice justification but after so many years of doing this I think our fun time has finally come it's the right idea at the right time and all the things that we are going to talk about this morning we're thought impossible and that's to be part of the value of doing science is that it can redefine what's possible and by doing so can give at this point literally millions of people new hope and new choices so I started doing this work back you know 1977 seventy-eight when I was a second year medical soon and I was learning how to do bypass surgery with Michael DeBakey one of the pioneering heart surgeons who basically invented the procedure and it was fun at first you know we cut people open we bypass their clogged arteries he tell them they were cured but more often than not they would go home and do all the things that had caused a problem in the first place you know eat junk food not manage stress not exercise not having much social support and often the bypasses would clog up then come back we'd cut him open again sometimes multiple times and so for me bypass surgery became a metaphor of an incomplete approach we were literally bypassing the problem we weren't treating the cause and so I wondered what would happen if we turned off the faucet and I went to these things most of you don't know about consider not old enough called libraries and they have these things called books and journals you know and the copy machines for 10 cents that people often have the pages ripped out of anyway I learned that I kind of got obsessed with this that in dogs and cats and pigs and rabbits and monkeys you could cause him to get heart disease if he putted them on on a high fat high animal protein diet if you stress them if you disrupted their social networks if you didn't let them exercise but you could reverse it if you change those I said why should people be any different and people said oh no it can't be done so one of the nice things about being a medical student is you'll try things you wouldn't do if you knew better so I put ten men and women in a hotel for a month and we use what was then a new test called thallium they measure blood flow to the heart and we found the blood flow improved and eight of the ten patients and most of them became pain-free this is a representative patient here the the thing there is the heart and the brighter it is the more blood it's getting so around ten o'clock on the left side is the before picture and you can see that dark area around ten o'clock which just thirty days later was essentially normal and again most of the patients show that it was also my first experience that when you're doing something that's really disruptive it's not really met with universal acceptance it was like well that can't be done the machine must be wrong or you know you it gets held to a different standard or you didn't have a randomized control group how do you know they wouldn't have gotten better anyway say well that's technically true but how often have you seen patients get better anyway well that's beside the point you know so I went back to school finished medical school then did a second study this time we did have a randomized control group for comparison and we found the experimental group got better shown in yellow the control group got worse the differences were highly significant we sat in the Journal of the American Medical Association and most of the patients became pain free during that time which is a very powerful motivator we'll talk more about that went to Boston did in my medical residency moved to San Francisco begin the most definitive study called the lifestyle heart trial and this used quantitative arteriography to measure the blockages in the arteries and cardiac PET scans to measure blood flow to the heart and we also looked at cardiac events as well and these were all blindly assessed by independent observers who are if anything a little hostile to the whole idea which is the best kind of people to work with because then if you find something they believe it and remember one of the guys who was doing the PET scans call who's from Alabama called me up he said Dean I used to think you were full of I'm not so sure anymore what do you began to see in his own lab these patients getting better and you can see here the all these patients had at least one artery that was 75% stenosis at the beginning but they were comparable at the beginning and they got shown in the red line was the randomized control group who we were doing what most doctors recommended you know eat less red meat more efficient chicken and take the skin off the chicken four eggs a week and all that they got worse after one year and their arteries got even more clogged after five years but the people who made these intensive lifestyle changes showed some reversal after one year in the green line and even more reversal after five years and these difference we published the one year findings in The Lancet and the five year findings in them it's really the American Medical Association and you couldn't even do this study today because none of the patients in the experimental group was taking cholesterol-lowering drugs during the five years of the study so we could look at the effects of lifestyle changes alone without being confounded with the usual you know drugs and so on that people are taking now half of the control group patients were taking cholesterol-lowering drugs those drugs did slow the rate of progression but they didn't go far enough to stop a reverse in and yet even without the drugs we were able to show reversal in the group that made these changes and statins are not without side effects one of the side effects of statins is diabetes in the most common complication of diabetes is heart disease we found a 40% average reduction in LDL cholesterol this is comparable to what you can get with drugs for without the cost and without the side effects except the only side effects here are good ones we also found a four-fold a 400% improvement in blood flow to the heart as measured by cardiac PET scans compared to the randomized control group and this is again a representative patient at the upper left at the beginning you can see the narrowing in one of the arteries that feeds the heart where the arrow is a year later it's less clogged and because of the blood flow to the heart or perfusion is a fourth power function of the diameter even modest changes and blockages because exponentially improved improvements in blood flow and you can see here on the left hand lower left at beginning blue and black with the PET scan is no blood flow and the lower right a year later it's mostly white and orange which is maximal blood flow and this is a best case this is truly representative and I can say that because 99% of the patients were able to stop or reverse the progression of their disease who made these lifestyle changes were only 5% of the control group patients got better and one of the interesting findings that surprised me I had thought incorrectly as it turned out that the younger patients who had milder disease would show more improvement but I was wrong it wasn't how old they were it wasn't how sick they were the more they changed the more they improved at any age which i think is a very empowering and hopeful message to give their patients and we've had two and a half times as many cardiac events heart attack strokes bypasses angioplasty stents and so on in the control group as in the experimental group since then we've been training hospitals and clinics around the country we Medicare is covering our program most insurance companies are that's another story which I'll get to later but to show you know that I think the biggest obstacle that we have as physicians or health educators is this idea that lifestyle changes you know how powerful could that be you know it's it's got to be a new drug and your laser a new procedure and you devise something really high-tech and expensive to be powerful and I think our unique contribution has been to use these very high-tech expensive state-of-the-art scientific measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low tech and low-cost interventions can be and to show how powerful they can be we have probably over a dozen patients now whose heart disease was so bad they were told that the only thing that could save their life would be to have a heart transplant it's pretty radical and one of them went through our program at UCLA who's a doctor himself to get in better shape for the surgery nine weeks later while they were looking for a heart donor and he improves his heart function improved so much in the nine weeks of going through our program he didn't need a heart transplant anymore so what's the more radical intervention here a heart transplant or eat well move more stress less love more this is a PET scan of another patient who avoided a heart transplant where we actually not only did a pet to look at blood flow to the heart but also used a radio labeled sugar molecule called FDG and the cells of the heart take up sugars their fuel so you can see how many of them are working and you see how much more red there was nine weeks later on the right and on the left what that means is a lot of the heart muscle that they thought was in was dead or scarred or or infarct and was in fact stunned or hibernating woke up and began to function again and that's why his heart began beating so much better he didn't your heart transplant anymore we then found that these same lifestyle changes could reverse early-stage prostate cancer maybe we did this study in collaboration with the chair of urology at UCSF dr. Peter Carroll in the chair of urology at the time here in New York at Memorial sloan-kettering Cancer Center dr. bill fair and we took men who had biopsy proven prostate cancer who had chosen not to do surgery or radiation for reasons unrelated to the study so we could then look at the effects of lifestyle changes alone by having a true non intervention control group and what we found is that the PSA levels which as you know is a marker for prostate cancer went up or got worse in the control group went down or got better in the experimental group who made these lifestyle changes these differences were highly significant and once again they occurred in direct proportion to the degree of lifestyle change the more people change the better they got but other things can affect PSA so we sent some of their serum to UCLA to a lab where they added it to a standard line of prostate tumor cells growing in tissue culture and found that that prostate tumor was inhibited 70% in the experimental group versus only 9% of the control group also in direct proportion to the degree of lifestyle change and more people change their lifestyle the more it kept the tumor from growing there's something that in the blood that actually inhibited the growth of this even in tissue culture and when we measured the activity of the tumor and a subset of these patient's shown in red here you can see the tumor activity was shrinking or going getting better as well as the PSA coming down and none of the experimental group patients needed surgery or radiation or or chemotherapy but six of the control group patients during that first year so we wondered what some of it and by the way in the physicians health study this is done at Harvard Walter Willett screw that the men who ate a mostly Western diet had a 250 percent higher risk of the prostate cancer causing death whereas the people who actually and a 67 percent risk of increased that from any cause whereas those eating a plant-based diet actually were protective so not only are you not increasing it is actually decreasing the risk and prostate cancer is only a problem when it spreads and there's something about a meat-based diet that increases the likelihood of the tumor spreading so we wonder what some of the mechanisms might be to help explain these findings so we looked at their gene expression and we found that over 500 genes were changed in just three months you know when I was in medical school which wasn't that long ago we were told that you know your genes are you're stuck with your genes the only way you can change your genes is to change your parents which obviously you can't do but it turns out that our genes are controlled by switches that are controlled by proteins histone non-histone proteins methylation and so on and they basically and turn on a gene or turn it off so if you can turn off a gene that does bad things like cause cancer or causes chronic inflammation or oxidative stress or all these different mechanisms we've been talking about you're effectively changing your genes and we particularly found that the aankhen genes that promote prostate breast and colon cancer were switched off you know just within again a few months this is what's called a heat map along the right side or different genes that cause cancer on the left at the beginning it's mostly red which means those genes were turned on and then it's just three months later on the right the green means are mostly turned off I think that's pretty amazing that was that had never been shown in that way before and we also found that we turned off the genes that cause these other biological mechanisms we've been talking about chronic inflammation oxidative stress changes in microbiome and and so on so our genes our predisposition but our genes are not our fate and I think that's really important because so often people say oh I've just got bad genes what can I do well it turns out you can do a lot again not to blame people but to empower them there's a lot we can do to do that meditation itself can change gene expression and I think that's important because so often people say you know I when I'm exercising I'm really out there I'm doing something and you know you have to eat it's just a question of what but you know meditation you know just sitting there with your eyes closed I've got a thousand things I want to do this why would I want to do that well I mean look like you're not doing anything but one study for example from Jeff ducek at Harvard found that when you meditate and they looked at non-meditators people who had just been taught to meditate for eight weeks and more advanced meditators and they found that same dose-response effect you can see it goes from red to kind of green to green at the top and the bottom is the opposite so meditation alone changed gene expression in several hundred genes so when you look like you're not doing anything that it's very powerful we also did the first study with dr. Elizabeth Blackburn showing that these same lifestyle changes can actually reverse aging at a cellular level when we published this in The Lancet Oncology The Lancet editors sent out a press release worldwide and they called it reversing aging at a cellular level now our telomeres are the ends of our chromosomes that are there sometimes likened to the plastic tips on the ends of your shoelace to keep your shoelace from unraveling they actually keep our DNA from unraveling and over time as our DNA replicates the telomeres get shorter and as our telomeres get shorter our lives get shorter and the risk of premature death from all of these chronic diseases goes our proportionate to that we found for the first time that in just three months that these same lifestyle changes could actually increase telomerase the enzyme that repairs and lengthens telomeres which we published in The Lancet Oncology and over a five-year period we found for the first time that any intervention could actually lengthen telomeres and again reverse aging we found they've got about 10% longer in the group that made these changes whereas they got shorter which is what usually happens in the control group and we found that the more people change the longer their telomeres got again at any age there was that same correlation the more you change the more you improve in every way we can measure we also found these changes can reverse type 2 diabetes and as you know half of Americans today are diabetic or pre-diabetic half that's crazy now it turns out that we spent over 300 billion dollars last year on the u.s. just on treating diabetes alone so there's a huge problem now it turns out that lifestyle changes are actually better than drugs at preventing type 2 diabetes this is from the landmark diabetes prevention program where they found that lifestyle changes actually were better than drug and better than placebo and preventing diabetes and lifestyle changes are better than also better than drugs and treating type 2 diabetes no a lot of doctors thought well if we can just get tighter control of the diabetes you know give them enough medication they can get their blood sugar way down that'll help prevent the conflict of the complications of diabetes but it turned out that a review of a number of studies found that when you get your blood sugar down that low it creates its own problems people fall asleep when they're driving or they pass out in their house or they drown or whatever so you really you know or you have a double-edged sword there but actually and it turns out that neo Barnard study found that when in type 2 diabetes your body is making even more insulin but the receptors have downregulated they become insulin resistant it's like the not more insulin like the body just kind of shuts down in that way but what neo found was that you can become more insulin sensitive those receptors in fact to wake up and that's what we found over 40 years is that people have been put on diabetes medications under their doctor's care can often reduce or even get off these medications altogether and the complications of diabetes you know any one of which would be awful and aggregate are truly awful you know heart attacks strokes amputations impotence blindness kidney failure and so on but if you get your blood sugar down with diet and lifestyle you can prevent virtually all those complications but not necessarily if you get it down with drugs so lifestyle changes are actually better than drugs if you can get it down below a hemoglobin a1c which is an average blood sugar below 7 and that's whom we found in a demonstration project we did with Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield with about 700 patients almost 800 men and women it was above 7 when they started it was split went below 7 after 12 weeks and remained that low after a year now the epic study that was mentioned in the last lecture showed that 93% of diabetes was prevented by making just simple lifestyle changes that think about that half of the population today is diabetic or diabetic or diabetic or pre-diabetic and yet 93 percent of that today is preventable I think it's closer to 99% maybe even a hundred percent if people make big enough changes so let me talk a little bit about what we've learned that enables people to make sustainable changes because people think that you know small changes are easy and big changes are hard and when people hear on gosh there's no way my patients could make these changes you know I can't even get them to eat less red meat expecting to be or vegan and meditate an exercise and love more there's no white people can do that but what I learned is that I thought and most of doctors are trained to try to scare people into changing if you can just scare people enough and they won't smoke and you know if you go through you know duty-free shop in London at Heathrow Airport they have these big pictures of people half their faces removed on cigarette cartons or tracheotomies like if we just scare people enough make it awful enough then they won't do that and what I learned is that fear is not really a sustainable motivator in this short run it is people will do anything when they after they've had a heart attack for maybe a month or two but then they stop doing it because we all know we're gonna die the mortality rate is still a hundred percent it's one per person we're but it's not something we think about most of the time so fear is not really a sustainable motivator what is sustainable is if it's fun if you feel like you're freely choosing to do it and we've learned that even more than being healthy people want to feel free and in control if it makes you feel good and if you have a lot of love and support those are the really key things but the whole idea of even risk factor reduction is really fear base you know put that cigarette down you're gonna get lung cancer put that burger down getting a heart attack and as I've said fear is not really a sustainable motivator not for more than a month or two and again even more than being healthy people may feel in control and this goes back to the first dietary intervention when God said only the Apple and that wasn't that didn't go so well and that was God talking so we're not gonna do better than that and I have an 18 year old son and if you tell a teenager that something's bad for them that just makes it cool that's why motorcycles are cool because they're dangerous so that doesn't work very well either and the cartoon says I give smokers a discount because there's not as much to tell that's the fear-based approach it doesn't work so well these are from the drug companies own data because a lot of doctors say oh yeah I can get my patients to take their lipitor their statins but there's no way they're gonna change their lifestyle and yet half to two-thirds of people prescribe statins are not taking them after just 4 to 6 months and 25% of statin prescriptions never even get filled and yet we're finding that we're getting 85 to 90 percent adherence to our program after a year even though the program's only 9 to 12 weeks long how can that be well again the statins don't make you feel better but the lifestyle changes do so you know the doctor says here take this pill it's not gonna make you feel better hopefully it won't make you feel worse to prevent something really awful from happening like a heart attack or stroke that you don't want to think about so people stop thinking about it but when you make these lifestyle changes and when people feel loved and cared for they feel so much better so quickly they're much more likely to make lifestyle choices that are life enhancing than ones that are self-destructive and you know that we're always making choices it's a beautiful day today in New York you could be doing a thousand things but you're here hopefully it's worth it because what if you if what you gain is more than what you give up that makes it sustainable and because these underlying biological mechanisms are so dynamic when you make big changes you feel so much better so quickly it reframes the reason for making these changes from fear of dying or fear of something bad happening which is not sustainable to feeling good which is and you start to connect the dots like oh when I do this I feel good when I do that I don't feel so good so let me do more this and less of that and then it comes from your own experience so then you don't have to say which expert should I believe you can actually experience the benefits and the show how dynamic these are this is from a patient who's in the California Highway Patrol who went through one of our lifestyle programs and you can see on the left where the arrow is there's a 50% blockage and just nine weeks later it was essentially undetectable and I spoke to the interventional cardiologist he said it wasn't a blood clot that reak analyzed or a spasm it was an actual soft plaque that that regressed and just again shows you even though those plaques may take years or even decades to build up you can show improvement in usually weeks when you eat healthier when you manage stress when you exercise when you love more your brain gets more blood you think more clearly you have more energy you need less sleep you can actually grow some into brain neurons in just a few weeks your brain can actually get bigger I mean imagine that particularly the part of your brain you want to get bigger like the hippocampus it can troll your memory just walking for a half hour a day for three months cause so much new brain growth in the hippocampus and people's brains got better and some of my favorite foods and things like coffee and tea and chocolate and blueberries actually increase in orogenesis whereas what's bad for your heart is bad for your brain things like saturated fat and sugar and nicotine are actually bad for your brain as well as your heart whereas believe it or not cannabinoids I wear they're legal now in California increase neurogenesis so you heard it first here your skin gets more blood so it slows the aging process your sexual organs get more blood flow this is one of the best most effective anti-smoking billboards that was in San Francisco and there's a wonderful new movie that's coming out the James Cameron who did you know the legendary director did avatar and Terminator and Titanic all those great things he became a vegan with his life Susie about ten years ago mainly for environmental reasons which I'll talk more about in a moment because more global warming is caused by livestock consumption than all forms of transportation combined and so he has so much energy he's actually making avatars two three and four now at the same time I went to the set and you know he's sleeping there he's just like he's in his mid 60's he's got more energy than ever so he made this film with Louie Psihoyos who got an Academy Award for his brilliant film his first documentary called the cove on the dolphin slaughter in Japan a few years ago and so they made a film called game changers and Scott Stoll and I are are both in that film to try to you know get past the big myths that you know you're kind of a wimp and you don't get enough protein if you had a plant-based diet so he's got all these world-class athletes who lifted their game and became an Olympic medalists and mixed martial artists national champions and heavyweight boxing champions and nfl superstars and so on by eating a plant-based diet but then there's one great scene in there that I talked about in the first chapter of my book where they where they get these three elite guys these three guys who are elite athletes in their mid 20s and they feed them a single meat based meal and it's organic beef and grass-fed on the grass-fed beef and organic chicken or pork just a single meal and then at night they had a urologist give them a device that measured how frequently and there they got erections at night which is a normal human process guys getting erections while they sleep and how hard those directions were and then they did the same thing the next day and they gave them a single plant-based meal a vegan meal and they measure them that night as well and they found that all three guys had 300 to 500 percent more frequent erections and 10 to 15% harder erections after eating the single plant-based meal than the single meat based meal you know I think the parently the film crew became vegan after a shooting that same but it really changes the whole debate lights like I'm gonna eat you know plant-based burger because it'll prevent something awful you know I'll live to be 86 instead of 85 that didn't really do it but if you if you say wow you know my sexual function improves my sexual organs get my blood flowing my brain gets more blood flow my brain gets bigger and my skin gets more blood flow I look younger I'm 96 I don't think I mentioned I think I look pretty good then it really changes their from doing something that may help you down the road to something that can really feel better quickly like within a day and then you say again what you gain is more than what you give up and that makes it sustainable we started about six months ago the first randomized trial to see if these same lifestyle changes can reverse early stage Alzheimer's disease and I have a personal interest in this because my mom who is brilliant died of Alzheimer's and there are no good drugs for treating it and or for preventing it and yet these same mechanisms that cause heart disease and diabetes again are the same ones that cause Alzheimer's chronic inflammation oxidative stress changes in your microbiome and your telomeres in angiogenesis and so on so I think we're at a place with and the studies were showing that less intensive interventions that change lifestyle can slow the rate of progression I think it's very much like it was 40 years ago 42 years ago when we started doing work on heart disease we think the more intensive intervention may actually reverse it you know if a less intensive intervention can slow the progression maybe a more intensive intervention can actually reverse it and just to show you some of the related studies one study showed that eating five or more fruits and vegetables a day was associated with a 47% decreased risk of cognitive impairment now if a new drug came out could do that it'd be a multi-billion dollar drug you know you couldn't watch a TV show without ask your doctor for this new miracle drug that can reduce the risk of dementia by 47% but it's just fruits and vegetables the same thing is another studies showed that in people over 65 those who ate more fruits and vegetables had a 38 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer's people have the omega-3 fatty acids again a 60% lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease again imagine if a new drug came out there are no good drugs there are no effective drugs for treating or for preventing Alzheimer's and yet something as simple as the omega-3 fatty acids you can get out algae-based ones can reduce your risk by 60% and again what's bad for your heart is bad for your brains more saturated fat and trans fats more than double the risk of getting Alzheimer's disease this was a study that came out about six weeks ago at the Cleveland Clinic I didn't even know they were doing it where they compared that what it's called TMAO levels TMAO is a substance produced by your microbiome that has a it's more strongly linked with heart disease even than cholesterol is this is developed by san hazen and his group at the Cleveland Clinic and they looked at TMAO levels they found the highest levels of TMAO on the Atkins diet medium on the Mediterranean diet and normal on the diet that I recommend just one more piece of a puzzle showing that the more markers we look at the more diseases we study the more scientific evidence we have to show the power of eating a plant-based diet so what is an optimal way of eating well I think it's really simple you know having debated dr. Atkins and others over the years which I stopped doing well he was the the low-carb guys so I became the low-fat guy but it's really not low-fat I mean his loaf Abbot is low fat let's low sugar and it's essentially plant base we need to get past this whole fat verses carbs thing and talk about in a larger picture so what do you eat well mostly plants fruits vegetables whole grains legumes in their natural form what we include in our diet is as important as what we exclude because there are literally hundreds of thousands of substances and fruits and vegetables that are protective things like phytochemicals bioflavonoids carotenoids retinols isoflavones Genesee lockaby and on and on and on that have anti-cancer any heart disease in anti-aging properties try to eat food as close as it comes in nature was reducing the process down where it is total fat and especially the so-called bad fats the hydrogenated and saturated and trans fats have some of the good fats the omega-3 fatty acids we've been talking about organic not only tastes better but it has fewer the insecticide residues which we now know are are really talks in particularly endocrine disruptors and we eat less sugar it's not less fat or less sugar you want to try to reduce both now when you eat a lot of sugar it causes your blood sugar to zoom up your pancreas makes insulin to try to bring it back down but over time those repeated insulin surges down regulate the insulin receptor and cause insulin resistance which can lead to metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes but as we've talked about good carbs fruits and vegetables and whole grains and legumes are rich in fiber the fiber slows the rate of a zorp since you don't get those rapid rises in blood sugar that caused the insulin resistance you get a more constant level that gives you a nice constant level of energy throughout the day and doesn't cause that well there's still some controversies around that let me just go through a couple of them one that's been repeated so often that it's almost become a meme is that you know Americans have been told eat less fat reading less fat were fatter than ever low fat is dead it's all sugar I'm sure you've heard some variation on that theme but it turns out when I actually said okay well we've been told eat less fat but what are we doing as a country and when I looked at the US Department of Agriculture database which actually looks at the entire US food supply every decade since 1950 not what people say they're eating what they're actually eating and we found that every decade since 1950 we're eating more fat more sugar more calories and more meat so not surprising that we're fat or not cuz we're eating too little fat but according to much of fat and everything else for that matter and we found in our study there was a dose-response correlation between fat intake and changes in arteries and that was also found in the class study which was the first set of using drugs to see if they could get reversal and they found the same thing that the more fat that people were eating the more new blockages they had and the worse those blockages became and it wasn't just the so-called bad fats it was all kinds of fats that that seemed to be linked with that this is study from Walter Willis group that found again that for every 5 percent reduction in saturated fat and in their Harvard study there was a 26% reduction in deaths from heart disease but again I think when you get past this whole fat verses carbs debate the animal protein itself may be even more important and this is a study that came out from Levine where they looked at animal protein intake and they found that the people like the most animal protein had a 75% higher risk of premature death from all causes a 400% increase in cancer risk and a 500 percent increased risk of type 2 diabetes in part me eating through what's called igf-1 which is another substance that your body makes the causes chronic inflammation and again in the Walter wellit's group they found that in large numbers of men and women animal protein intake was associated with a higher premature mortality from all causes whereas the plant proce protein was actually protective again not only did it not make you worse it actually makes you better you get a double benefit by doing that and they found that process red meat was the worst and then red meat and then kind of going all the way down in terms of its relative risk in another study they found that red meat was associated with a significantly risk cause of all cause cardiovascular and cancer mortality and it's worth mentioning that the only diet that's actually been proven in randomized trials to reverse heart disease is the diet that we've been talking about a Whole Foods plant-based diet low in fat low in sugar and so on whereas a low-carb diet that's high in animal protein has been found to be associated with a 30% increase higher all cause premature death and a 51% higher risk of cardiovascular death now this was in the New England Journal of Medicine which surprised me and they showed what happens in arteries on different diets and on the top is a Whole Foods plant-based diet the arteries are clean the middle is a standard American diet and you can see they're partially clogged and the bottom is an Atkins paleo ketogenic whatever the latest version of that is and it shows that your arteries are severely clogged even if the cholesterol and weight and so on weren't that different it's mediated through other mechanisms that are besides just the traditional risk factors and so you can lose weight on lots of ways you know that aren't necessarily good for you you can lose weight on a on an Atkins diet because most people eat too many refined carbs and we agreed on that it's where you it's why do you substitute for those refined carbs and pork rinds and bacon and sauces are not health foods but if you substitute the refined carbs if you sub set up those with good carbs fruits and vegetables and whole grains and legumes then it's actually you can lose even more weight or at least as much weight without mortgaging your health in the process the cartoon says that my only consolation is that by eating us they're killing themselves a little bit of dark humor here maybe early for that red meat consumption was associated with a 70% increased risk of lethal prostate cancer most guys if you live long enough we're gonna get prostate cancer 50% of guys in their 50s 80% of guys in their 80s have prostate cancer but it's not going to be of clinical significance because it doesn't spread there's something about the animal food that actually makes your cancer more likely to spread and kill you and again a high-fat diet increases metastases prostate cancer whereas a low-fat plant-based side inhibits a plant-based diet down regulates the mTOR gene which makes you live longer it's high in red meat is high in a sugar molecule that causes chronic inflammation again you don't have to remember all this stuff but the more diseases we look at the more mechanisms and biology we look at the more evidence we have to show why a plant-based diet is protective and a meat-based diet is harmful now the other thing that's been repeated so often it's really become a meme is that all calories are not alike carb calories calorie calorie and make you fatter than fat calories well Kevin Hall at the National states of Health put people in a metabolic ward where he could actually control exactly what they were eating and he found in fact that all calories are not alike but the opposite of what that meme is they found that calorie for calorie reducing fat calories causes 67% greater weight loss than reducing carb count now it's not to say that the point is that they're both important the people who want to reduce and say oh it's all sugar you know fat doesn't matter is really not the case and fat is much denser in calories as well it has nine calories per gram whereas protein and carbs have only four so when you eat less fat you're eating fewer calories even if you've the same quantity of food because the food is less dense in calories and so you can eat whenever you're hungry you can eat too you're full and you still can lose weight and keep it off and this just goes to show you know what what what it feels like 400 calories of oil barely coats the lining of your study 400 calories of beef maybe it's a quarter full 400 calories of vegetables it's completely full so it fills you up before you get too many calories and again you can get all the protein you need from eating plant-based diets I don't need to spend too much time with this group on that what about the Mediterranean diet isn't that the best diet for your heart well no it's not this study came out in the New England Journal of Medicine made headlines around the world they had to retract the study they put it back in a few years later but they said that Mediterranean diet better than low-fat diet well the low-fat diet went from 39 to 37 percent fat hardly any reduction and they replaced fat with sugar which is never a good idea and even with all that they actually found no difference in cardiac events what they found was it had a massive decrease in strokes because when you were eating more omega-3s then it helps reduce blood clotting and blood clots account for 90% of strokes but when they they when they pool the cardiac data and the stroke data they found a reduction when they looked at the cardiac data alone there was no real difference and there's their health implications that go beyond our personal health to global health it turns out that you know what I call this globalization of chronic disease as other countries are starting to eat like us and live like us and now die like us and ironically the diet they were eating before they started copy ours is the one that we found that can prevent and reverse all these different diseases and more people are dying today from what they call non communicable diseases like heart disease and diabetes than AIDS TB and malaria combined in virtually every country in the world and it's diverting a lot of resources away from things that really do require drugs so things have been largely prevented a reverse by changing lifestyle and what's good for you is good for the planet what's personally sustainable is globally sustainable from a hunger crisis from the global warming crisis and from the health crisis they all intersect around food as many of you know it takes 14 times more resources to make a pound of plant-based of meat based protein than plant-based protein there's enough food today no one need go hungry if enough people were to move towards eating a plant-based diet more livestock consumption is more global warming is caused by livestock consumption than all forms of transportation combined as we talked about earlier and 86% of the three point six trillion dollars we spent last year on health care which is mostly sick here are for treating chronic diseases that can be largely prevented or reverse by changing lifestyle but turns out that only 5% of people account for 50 to 80 percent of all of these three point six trillion dollars in healthcare costs these are the people generally have chronic diseases like heart disease and so when we can reverse disease as opposed to simply preventing it we can show dramatic cost savings in the first year the first study we did with meats of Omaha we found most people could could choose our program as a direct alternative to having a center of bypass and they found they saved almost $30,000 per patient in the first year Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield had a match control group you can see on the far left the costs were the same but after a year there were 50% lower in the group that made these lifestyle changes and when they looked at the subgroup of people that they spend at least $25,000 on in the previous year they cut their costs by 400% in the first year and that's important because a lot of companies say gosh you know why should we spend our money for some future benefit that someone else is going to get because about 1/3 of people change companies every but if you can show cost savings in the first year when you offer this treatment and not simply this prevention then those cost savings are dramatic and they become much more sustainable and that's what we found in this demonstration project we did with Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield almost 4,000 patients and we found beginning 12 weeks the program was only 12 weeks long but we followed them for a year we see sustained weight loss sustained reductions in angina most patients became angina free in the first year the ability to exercise went up and stayed up the quality of life you know the old joke am I gonna live longer is it just gonna seem longer if I eat a plant-based diet you know the quality of life actually improved dramatically systolic blood pressure diastolic blood pressure showed great reductions blood sugar comes down and stays down even though we were able to reducing or getting people off their their medications as those reductions would have been even more dramatic if we kept them on the same medications depression scores were cut essentially in half and Medicare after 16 years of review created a new benefit category to cover a lifestyle program for reversing heart disease most of the major insurance companies are so we're trying to create a new paradigm of health care where we actually spend more time with people not just a 10-minute visit but 72 hours the cartoon says I can operator you can go on a strict diet it says you better operate my insurance doesn't cover us recognize that's been the problem it's our approach is to have the doctors quarterback where he or she works with a yoga and meditation teach for an exercise physiologist a dietician a psychologist and a nurse and the doctor doesn't spend a lot of his or her time there moreover seeing the other people people come twice a week for four hours at a time for 72 hours that's a very different thing that a 10 minute office visit you can do you have the time to do these things they get an hour of supervised exercise an hour of meditation and yoga who would have thought Medicare everything for that which is really cool and now our support group in an hour of a lecture with a group meal and again if it's reimbursable then it's sustainable we originally started training people in the 90s through our nonprofit Institute we trained 53 sites again bigger changes in lifestyle better clinical outcomes bigger cost savings better adherence anyone ever shown and a number of the sides closed down because we didn't have the reimbursement so that's why I spent 16 years to get Medicare coverage which we're very grateful for because when you change reimbursement you change medical practice and even medical education most of these settings are on website just it's all free most of them are downloadable in PDF form and the last thing I want to talk about in the remaining few minutes is that the real epidemic isn't just heart disease or diabetes or Alzheimer's it's what I call loneliness and depression and isolation and study after study have shown that people who are lonely and depressed are 3 to 10 times more likely to get sick and die prematurely and virtually all causes when compared to those who have a sense of love connection and community and to me that deepest roots of of healing in my limited experience are we can transform isolation into intimacy that you know anything that brings us together is healing even the word healing comes from the root to make whole yoga comes from the Sanskrit meaning to yoke to unite Union these are really old ideas that were rediscovering that anything that brings us together is healing now information is important but we're drowning in information in the year of Google it's not like you know you tell somebody hey I want you to quit smoking it's bad for you they go I didn't know that I'll quit today you know everybody knows that it's on every pack of cigarettes but as I mentioned fear is not a sustainable motivator one study showed that six months after a heart attack this was done at Stanford those that were depressed were four times more likely to be dead than those that weren't independent of their cholesterol their blood pressure anything else like that just from depression alone when you're depressed your immune function is depressed in every way we can measure and and we're on the other hand I don't know how they got this to the human studies committee they dripped rhinovirus coal virus into people's noses 100% of them got infected but none everybody got sick and the more visits from a friend and phone calls and love they had they had four times fewer infections than those that didn't have that men and women who are HIV positive her depressed or more than twice as likely to develop AIDS and die from it as those who aren't this is found in the military as well I gave them matriculation lecture at this place called the US Army War College the last few years where they trained the future generals and Joint Chiefs of Staff from all branches of the military and I when I learned that more soldiers have died by suicide than in combat I said you know Houston we've got a problem here so I decided to talk about the power of love at the Army War College it had a bit of a dr. Strangelove quality to it and I knew it I thought where there is kind of the West California doc I'd have no street cred so the first time I asked 4-star General Sam McChrystal if he would do a short video on the power of love and the second time I asked former four-star Admiral Erik Olson who's really a guy's guy to talk about who he was in charge of all Special Forces worldwide all the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers in Delta Force in green beret talks about the power of love in a way that I just find really compelling I love that Larry says the power of love dominates it crushes caution and fear that love is more powerful than fear Duke they found that those after five years after having an angiogram those that were unmarried and didn't have a confidant someone to talk with half of those people were dead compared to only you know 10 to 15% of those who they were married who had a confidant that's how powerful love and intimacy can be we trained the same instead of all homeless shelter in our program over 30,000 homeless people I went through this so it's not just for affluent people Nicholas Christakis at Harvard did a study we are so interconnected already that if your friends are obese you're 45% more likely to be obese yourself if it's your friends friends you're 25% more likely and if it's your friends friends friends are 10% more likely even if you've never met them that's how interconnected we are and it's not just obesity is suppression it's pretty much everything whereas David Spiegel at Stanford took women with metastatic breast cancer gave them a support group once a week for a year for 90 minutes and five years later those women live twice as long that's how powerful love and intimacy can be and anything that creates a sense of intimacy that brings us together not necessary romantic intimacy having a dog and spending time with your friends your family your loved ones leads to a sense of healing and meaning hostility turns out to be the most toxic emotion for our hearts and for our well-being in every way we can measure and they did a wonderful study of almost a hundred and fifty million Twitter feeds and they found that the more hostile language they had in there the more especially anger the more it predicted heart disease mortality now I know that doesn't have any relevance today about you know angry Twitter feeds but I just thought I'd put that out there anyway and you know if you say I feel deprived because I can't eat everything I want that's not really sustainable if you say I'm choosing not to eat certain foods because what I gain is so much more than what I give up that is sustainable and you know just the act of choosing not to eat certain foods or not to do certain things actually imbues those choices with meaning when I was in college I was suicidal I depressed I came very close to killing myself because I could take all the meaning out of something you know who cares why bother nothing matters so what big deal all that but I also learned that by one of the things by just choosing not to do certain things choosing to be in a monogamous relationship choosing not to eat certain foods actually imbues those choices with meaning and then if it's meaningful and sustainable and I even have gotten to the point of asking people you know people say like why do you want to change your lifestyle well I want to live longer well why do you want to live longer well gosh no one's ever asked me that doesn't everyone to live longer and I'll tell you if you talk to someone who is suicide to press or just depressed in general and you say do you want to live longer they say you don't get it I'm just trying to get through the day you know these are and you say why do you smoke and overeat and drink too much and work too hard they say because these things help us deal with my pain I've got 20 friends in this pack of cigarettes they'll say they're always there for me nobody else is or food fills that void fat coats my nerves and numbs the pain alcohol opioids numb the pain working all the time is a more socially acceptable way of distracting myself from my pain videogames numb the pain and so on so again information is important focusing the behavior is important but if we work in the deeper level of why do you want to live longer you know what really brings a sense of meaning people say well gosh I want to I don't know know watch my kids grow up I want to dance at their wedding I want to you know be able to make love with my partner II write a book you know whatever it is it brings a sense of meaning this goes back to Victor Franco studying World War 2 of concentration camp survivors the one who survived Werth the strongest were healthiest ever the ones who said I need to survive so that I can whatever be reunited with my loved ones Rob bear witness or whatever so if you can help people get in touch with that because again it's not just how long with if it's how well we live that really is motivating and meaning is really the antithesis of depression depression is all about helplessness and hopelessness you know you take all the meaning out and you really think you're seeing things clearly for the first time because of that reality distortion it creates you know things are bad they'll always be bad any time I thought they'd be dead there was I was just fooling myself and we can really help people break through that by when you choose not to do certain things it makes those choices meaningful and even sacred in the sense of the most fun the most meaningful the most joyful the most pleasure the most erotic the most intimate if it's pleasurable it's sustainable and allows us to quiet down a mind and body the ancient Swami's and rabbis and priests and monks and nuns didn't develop these techniques to simply unclog their arteries you know make their telomeres longer perform better in sports or in business or in the military whatever it can do all those things they're really powerful tools for transformation for transformation for quieting down our mind and body to experience more of an inner sense of peace and joy and love and well-being and to realize that's our natural state and they may sound like a lot of semantics but to the degree I thought when I was so depressed I had to you know get into medical school so that I could then love myself and people would respect me and so and I wouldn't feel so lonely but once you set up that view of the world if only I had more whatever then I'd be happy then I'd be healthy then however it turns out you generally don't feel either one because until you get it you're stressed if someone else gets it then you're really stressed and even if you get it it's great for a little bit then it's like well now what it's never enough or so what it doesn't really provide that lasting sense of meaning and so the idea is that the I I studied for 40 years with a teacher named Swami Satchidananda and people say what are you a Hindu and say no I'm an undo you know but Sid where the title of my book came from because he said these techniques don't bring you when you at the end of a meditation or a yoga class or prayer or whatever you do whether spiritual or secular these techniques don't bring you a sense of peace and health you have that already what they do is they help to quiet down remind enough so we can experience what's already there and then you can go out in the world and paradoxically often accomplish more without the stress and without the illness that go along with that and if you take the meditation deep enough it gives you the direct experience that on one level we're separate you know you're you and I'm me and we can enjoy having this conversation on another level we're already interconnected we're all the same in different forms like the light and the movie projector that gets filtered through the film on the screen you have all these dramas but it's all the light behind that in that double vision I think is profoundly healing because to me so much of illness and stress begins by seeing people is being different and only different you know those Muslim terrorists those Mexican rapist is the latest iteration of that once you see people as being different and only different then you can do bad things to the because there's not you but I think all the spiritual truths you know you know we'll go from the I in illness to the we and wellness that anything that brings us together is really healing and the ancient spiritual truths that algae's Huxley called these perennial philosophy what you find in all religions and spiritual paths once you get past the rituals that people fight and kill each other over altruism and forgiveness and compassion and love flow naturally from the realization that we're all interconnected you know that when I help you it helps myself when I forgive you it doesn't condone or or excuse what you did but it frees me from the suffering of that when I give to love to you it comes back to me you know the heart pumps blood to itself first so that it can then take care of the rest of the body these are really old ideas that we're rediscovering it's part of what I call the conspiracy of love that where we can help people use the experience of suffering as a doorway for transforming their lives allows us to reclaim our role is not just being an algorithm but is through healers and it helps us to use the experience of suffering as it was for me with depression it might be or someone else a heart attack or you know be on medication for whatever to use that as a doorway or as a catalyst for really transforming our lives in ways that can help us rediscover inner sources of peace and joy and love and well-being and health and happiness and then be able to share that with the rest of the world so I appreciate so much the chance to share that with you today and I hope it's been useful thank you [Music] thank you thank you [Music] thank you so much to you thank you very much to you so nice to have you

Channel: neofilm

Views: 38,702

Keywords: Dr Dean Ornish, Dr Ornish, Dean Ornish, Plant Based Medicine, Lifestyle Medicine

Id: JEVmagZRZSY

Length: 54min 0sec (3240 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020