The doctors watching Dr. Ornish’s presentation were thrilled to see his
tangible, compelling data supporting the role of diet in health. In their heart of
hearts, they knew that eating well was both healing and preventive—and now
they had numbers to prove it and profess it.
I often saw anecdotal evidence in my practice. I remember a patient who was
about fifty and in very good shape. He was actually more muscle-bound than
paunchy (how you’d perhaps picture a typical heart patient). He wasn’t
overweight, he exercised every day, he didn’t smoke, and he didn’t have any
typical markers that would indicate a problem (no high blood pressure, no
diabetes). But he had advanced heart disease—likely caused by genetics since all
the men in his family had heart problems by their forties. He was experiencing
chest pain and, in fact, his coronary arteries were nearly blocked off.
Rather than schedule an immediate surgery, I put him on an aggressive diet
plan in which he ate lots of vegetables and limited his saturated fats. What
happened next was very interesting. The diet didn’t cause the artery-clogging
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