staying healthy in the fast lane“Well you‘d have them on a pure vegetarian diet and not getting
fat on the vegetarian diet.” Dr. Castelli commented on two past
diet trials that showed reversal of heart disease, the St. Thomas
Hospital Study in London and the Dean Ornish Study. “In any event,
what we’ve learned is that in these reversibility trials, that the two
diet trials, for the same fall in cholesterol if you get there with diet
you did get twice the shrinkage of the deposits than trying to do
it with drugs alone.” He further comments on the effectiveness of
diet therapy for atherosclerosis, “...it’s much better if you can get
people to go on a diet. Now if I would have put everyone on a veg-
etarian diet and drive their numbers down by diet, we would get
rid of all the atherosclerosis in America.”^48
Dr. Castelli feels to prevent or reverse heart disease from all
his years of experience a low fat, unrefined vegetarian diet is best
and special attention should be given to keeping one’s triglycer-
ides below 60 by reducing all refined carbohydrates, and keeping
the total cholesterol:HDL ratio below 3.5. He feels these are the
two strongest lipid markers of cardio-protection and have been
somewhat over-looked with all the attention given to lowering
LDL cholesterol.^49
The highly honored Cleveland Clinic breast cancer and thy-
roid/parathyroid surgeon turned heart disease reversal advocate
Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. sums up for me the certainty that an
aggressive plant-based diet can prevent and reverse heart disease
in a recent interview I had with him:
“...I therefore decided it would be more appropriate to look
at the leading killer of women and men in Western civilization,
which is cardiovascular disease and heart attacks because in this
global research it was very apparent that there were many cul-
tures where heart disease and heart attacks were virtually non-
existent. I mean, even today if you’re a cardiac surgeon and you
go to rural China or the Papua Highlands in New Guinea, or if you
go to central Africa or the Tarahumara Indians in northern Mex-
ico, forget it. You’d better plan on selling pencils because you’re
not going to find cardiovascular disease there, and it’s largely be-
cause of that plant-based nutrition, and that’s what made me feel