the good news: chronic disease is preventable and reversibleIs Heart Disease Reversible? Yes!
Heart disease reversal by aggressive diet and lifestyle change
was shown over thirty years ago by the late Nathan Pritikin and fifty
years ago by California cardiologist Dr. Lester Morrison.^41 Within
the last twenty years, the excellent work of Dean Ornish, MD, in
his landmark 1990 paper in the Lancet^42 and in his excellent 1991
book, Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program For Reversing Heart Disease,^43 has
also shown that a very low-fat, unrefined, mainly plant-based diet,
with exercise and stress management, can reverse heart disease.
Dr. Ornish’s work really put the whole concept of a diet and life-
style approach to reversing heart disease on the road to legitimacy
with his published work in the Lancet.
In recent years, popular books such as Stop Inflammation Now
by cardiologist Richard Fleming, MD^44 and Prevent and Reverse
Heart Disease^45 by internationally recognized surgeon Caldwell
B. Esselstyn Jr., MD, (and his son, Rip Esselstyn’s, new book, The
Engine 2 Diet),^46 continue sharing meticulously documented cases
of heart disease reversal by very aggressive diet and lifestyle pro-
grams with a common modality of whole-food, unrefined, low-fat,
plant-based diets that virtually eliminate all animal foods, espe-
cially in the early “reversal” phase.
The China Project, one of the most comprehensive databases on
the multiple causes of disease ever compiled, was initiated in 1983,
and the book The China Study (2006), with key investigator and
co-author T. Colin Campbell, PhD from Cornell University, showed
virtually no heart disease in parts of rural China where cholesterol
levels ranged from 90 to 170 mg/dl (average 125 to 130), and the
diets of these individuals were predominantly plant-based.^47
William Castelli, MD, former director of the famed Framing-
ham Heart Study in a recent interview I had with him stated the
number of people who have had heart attacks with a cholesterol
level below 150 since Framingham’s beginning in 1948 was about
a half a dozen people. Dr. Castelli said the following when asked
if he couldn’t use drugs, but he could get the average American to
go on the diet of his choice to reverse heart disease, “I would do
it (diet) and it would work better than the drugs.” He continues,