“Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease: The Only System Scientifically Proven to Reverse Heart Disease Without Drugs or Surgery” by Dean Ornish, M.D., 1992
CONTENTS:
Author’s Note xxi
Introduction—Heart and Soul 1
PART ONE: OPENING YOUR HEART
- “Why Don’t You Do Something More Conventional?” 11
- “I Mean, What Could Be Wimpier Than That?” 33
- “Yes, That’s True, But What Is the Cause?” 49
- Lifestyle Changes of the Rich and Famous 85
- “This Is a Weed-Out Course!” 105
- “A Very Short Fuse” 119
PART TWO: THE OPENING YOUR HEART PROGRAM
Introduction to the Opening Your Heart Program 133 - Opening Your Heart to Your Feelings and to Inner Peace 139
- Opening Your Heart to Others 199
- Opening Your Heart to a Higher Self 229
- The Reversal and Prevention Diets 253
- How to Quit Smoking 305
- How to Exercise 323
PART THREE: OPENING YOUR HEART RECIPES
Introduction to the Recipes by Shirley
Elizabeth Brown, M.D., and Martha Rose Shulman 353
Twenty-One Days of Menus 389
The Recipes 397
Epilogue 545
Appendix. Nutrient Analysis of Common
Foods 554
Selected References 583
Index 605
EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK
Introduction: Heart and Soul
This is a book about healing your heart: physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The Opening Your Heart program described in this book can help transform your life.
This program is based on cardiovascular research that I have directed during the past fourteen years, including a recent study my colleagues and I conducted that has proven—for the first time—that many people can begin to reverse their heart disease simply by changing their lifestyle. This is the only program scientifically verified to begin healing heart disease without using cholesterol-lowering drugs or surgical interventions. (At the time this is written, no other controlled studies in this country are even in progress to see if heart disease can be reversed without using drugs or surgery.)
Using medical technology never before available, we found that the coronary arteries of many people with severe heart disease actually began to open when they followed our program. In other words, their arteries became less blocked and blood flow to the heart increased. And unlike with most surgical or medical therapies, the only known side effects from these lifestyle changes are desirable ones.
The participants in our program felt happier and more energetic; their chest pain decreased or went away completely; many were able to cut back on their medications or discontinue them altogether. Also, we measured greater reductions in their blood levels of cholesterol than have ever been reported without using drugs.
Although the incidence of heart attacks has been declining during the past decade, more people die from heart and blood vessel diseases each year than from all other causes of death combined, including cancer, AIDS, other infectious diseases, accidents, and homicides. (This is equally true for men and women.) Yet if heart disease can be reversed, then it may be preventable. We don’t have to wait for a new drug, surgical procedure, or technological breakthrough.
Knowing what we now understand, heart disease may be preventable for the majority of people who are willing to follow the program described in this book. What our medical system can provide is much less important in determining our health than the lifestyle choices we make as individuals on a daily basis. This book can help you tailor a program that is right for you.
This program does not require deprivation, although the diet I describe may represent an entirely different way of eating for those raised on lots of red meat, cream sauces, and rich desserts. However, our program need not be all or nothing. If your doctor determines you have severe heart disease, you may be more interested in following each step of the program very strictly. However, we all have a spectrum of choices, and this book can help you to make intelligent ones. Somehow, many of us believe we must choose between leading an interesting, exciting, productive life that’s filled with stress, great food, and dying young, or sitting under a tree, eating boring food, and watching our longer life go by—or maybe it just seems longer. Fortunately, that isn’t really the choice. This program can help you to increase your productivity and happiness—lasting happiness—while decreasing your anxiety, stress, and the risk of illness. I’ll explain how to make meaningful choices and how to tailor the program to best fit your needs.
While reversing coronary artery blockages is of great importance, I am even more interested in the power of this program to transform our lives in deeper ways. The goal of the program is not just to help you live longer—although you likely will do so. After all, none of us is going to live forever. And who wants to live longer if you’re not enjoying life? My goal is not only to help you live longer but also to feel better. You can begin enjoying life more now, with less stress, more joy, and greater health.
On a deeper level, this book explores the psychological and spiritual dimensions of heart disease. Physical heart disease may be the final manifestation of years of abuse that first begins in the psyche and spirit. Susan Sontag notwithstanding, I am becoming increasingly convinced that heart disease is a metaphor as well as an anatomical illness. In poetry, art, and literature, the heart is often portrayed as the organ most affected by our emotions, and I think there is some truth in that.
Ultimately, the Opening Your Heart program is about learning how to feel freer and happier—a different type of “open-heart” procedure, one based on love, knowledge, and compassion rather than just drugs and surgery. We can learn how to open our hearts on emotional and spiritual levels as well as anatomical ones. While these changes are more difficult to measure scientifically than the improvements in coronary anatomy, I find them to be even more interesting and important for leading a happier, healthier life.
Physically, this program can help you begin to open your heart’s arteries and to feel stronger and more energetic, freer of pain. Emotionally, it can help you open your heart to others and to experience greater happiness, intimacy, and love in your relationships. Spiritually, it can help you open your heart to a higher force (however you experience it) and to rediscover your inner sources of peace and joy.
In short, this is a program about how to enjoy living, not how to avoid dying. How to relax, not how to be lethargic (a difference well known to world-class athletes). How to manage stress, not how to avoid it. How to live in the world more fully, not how to withdraw from it. How to take care of yourself so that you can also give more fully to others.
The implications of this research go beyond treating and helping to prevent heart disease. Heart disease presents a rich model for examining the relationship between lifestyle and health. Lifestyle factors are important in most of the major killers, including the most common forms of cancer (breast, colon, lung, and prostate), arthritis, diabetes, and other degenerative diseases. However, the mechanisms by which lifestyle affects our health are better understood for heart disease than for other illnesses. Also, the diagnostic technology for examining the heart is highly advanced, so it is possible to actually measure if the disease improves, to what degree, and for whom. Finally, the heart is the place where the body, the psyche, and the spirit all converge.
This book is divided into three sections:
Part One begins with an overview of the relevant research and what this program can do for you. In it, I describe new concepts of heart disease and how lifestyle factors such as diet, emotional stress, and exercise affect your heart—for better and for worse. I also explain how substances such as nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, and alcohol can influence your heart’s health. I hope that understanding how the lifestyle choices you make each day affect your heart will make it easier to understand the rationale for this program.
I’ll also clarify some of the more common nutritional half-truths; for example, why olive oil and fish oil can actually raise cholesterol levels and may help cause problems, and why taking aspirin to prevent heart attacks may be ill-advised. I’ll explain why cholesterol isn’t the whole story behind heart disease, and why taking cholesterol-lowering drugs or niacin or eating oat bran isn’t the best choice for most people. Most important, I’ll examine the most common ways the medical community has chosen to treat heart disease, and why these interventions, while expensive and often dangerous, don’t begin to address the root of the problem of why we feel stressed and get sick in the first place.
In later chapters I’ll describe the psychological and spiritual aspects of illness and healing, using coronary heart disease as both example and metaphor. Unfortunately, this is an aspect of health that has until recently been largely ignored by the medical community. Yet through my research and through the studies of others, I am coming to believe that our emotional and spiritual health are exceptionally important to the health of our hearts. I’ll share the latest scientific research in this exciting new field and explain how my own background helped to convince me of its value.
Part Two is a “how-to” section that describes the program in detail. (For an overview of the program, please turn to page 133.) For those interested in preventing heart disease, I’ll present a spectrum of dietary choices, not a long list of “shoulds” and “thou shalt nots.” For people who already have coronary heart disease, our all-you-can-eat Reversal Diet is much lower in fat and cholesterol, but it is not austere, with an emphasis on foods that are tasty, attractive, and familiar. Although you can eat virtually all you want on our program, you’ll never have to count calories, and you’ll probably find yourself losing excess pounds effortlessly. You’ll also receive detailed instruction in how to exercise, how to quit smoking, and how to practice stress management techniques, including stretching, breathing, meditation, visualization, progressive relaxation, and skills to improve communication with your loved ones.
Part Three is a cookbook-within-a-book, with over 150 gourmet recipes by some of the country’s most gifted chefs, including Wolfgang Puck, Deborah Madison, Alice Waters, Mollie Katzen, Mark Hall, and others, as well as some of the research participants who have been preparing and eating this food for years. They show how you can have food that is beautifully presented, delicious—and healthful. Each recipe has been nutritionally analyzed for fat, cholesterol, and protein content by Shirley Brown, M.D., to make it easier for you to customize a diet that works to meet your own individual needs. She and Martha Rose Shulman, author of Mediterranean Light and other best-selling cookbooks, have organized these recipes into twenty-one days of menus, as well as provided some helpful advice on making these meals.
References to all quoted studies are included for health professionals and the especially curious.
I write this book with passion and yet a certain amount of caution. As a physician, I want to share with you the joy that comes from seeing the amazing and powerful differences this program can make in people’s lives. As a scientist, though, I want to take a more cautious position, making sure all of the uncertainties and “yes, but . . statements are included. In this book, I have tried to take a balanced position somewhere in between these points of view.
Also, I will be careful to distinguish what is scientifically proven from my speculations, personal experiences, and clinical observations. Please understand that my goal in writing this book is not to tell you that you have to change but rather to provide you with facts so that you can make informed choices. Whether or not you decide to change your lifestyle is up to you, but at least you will have accurate information upon which to base this decision.
Heart disease is not easy to reverse. Blockages in coronary arteries take decades to build up, and they do not simply melt away overnight. But they can improve, and more quickly than we had previously thought possible.
In short, this book provides a comprehensive personal system—the Opening Your Heart program—to help heal not only the heart, but also the soul. As Conrad Knudsen, one of our research participants, said, “Even if the tests showed my arteries hadn’t opened up, I would still follow this program—because I’ve opened up.”
But don’t just take my word for it. Try it and see. In only seven days, see how much better you feel, whether or not you have a heart problem. In four weeks your cholesterol level will be significantly lower. After a few months, I hope you’ll recognize even more profound and rewarding changes in how you look and feel. Experience the difference for yourself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dean Ornish, M.D., is assistant clinical professor of medicine and an attending physician at the School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, and an attending physician at the Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center in San Francisco. He is president and director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito. A graduate of Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Ornish was a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School and an intern and medical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the author of Stress, Diet & Your Heart.
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