Letter From Dean Ornish, M.D. to the NY Times re: recent diet studies

[Guest guest]

He says it well...

February 17, 2006

A Healthier Diet

To the Editor:

Re " Thinning the Milk Does Not Mean Thinning the Child " (Week in

Review, Feb. 12) and " Low-Fat Diets Flub a Test " (editorial, Feb. 9):

Reports about the Women's Health Initiative study may leave people

thinking that very low-fat diets are impossible to follow and not

worth doing. That is inaccurate.

The more intensive diet and lifestyle changes in our randomized trials

caused a 91 percent reduction in chest pain in just one month,

significant reversal of coronary atherosclerosis after one year, and

even greater reversal after five years. Most patients stopped or

reversed the progression of heart disease.

The greater the changes in diet and lifestyle, the more improvement we

measured in heart disease as well as prostate cancer.

The studies were published in leading peer-reviewed journals and

replicated in 2,500 patients in three demonstration projects,

including one by Medicare. Similar studies were published by Caldwell

Esselstyn Jr. at the Cleveland Clinic, Barnard at the University

of California at Los Angeles and others.

By analogy, cutting back from 60 cigarettes a day to 50 won't do much

to prevent disease, yet doctors still encourage people to quit

smoking, no matter how hard it is.

Dean Ornish, M.D.

Sausalito, Calif., Feb. 15, 2006

The writer is president of Preventive Medicine Research Institute and

a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San

Francisco.