Dr Dean Ornish is nothing short of legendary in the field of plant-based nutrition research. His research career began in 1983, and since then he has published numerous carefully-conducted studies in peer-reviewed medical journals demonstrating that his comprehensive lifestyle program comprising a low-fat plant-based diet, regular moderate exercise, training in stress management techniques and structured social support can:
- Reverse heart disease, even in people who have been told they need bypass surgery or stenting;
- Reduce or eliminate the need for medication in type 2 diabetics;
- Allow many hypertensives to get off their blood pressure drugs;
- Dramatically reduce total and LDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels;
- Help even people who’ve struggled with their weight for decades to attain and maintain a healthy weight – without dieting;
- Relieve depression;
- Lengthen telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that erode as we age; and
- Slow, stop, and even reverse the progression of early-stage prostate cancer, allowing men to avoid or delay treatments that dramatically decrease their quality of life.
It was on the latter finding that Ornish focused his presentation at the 3rd International Plant-Based Nutrition Healthcare Conference – and with good reason. Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in American men (and in Australian men too). Although 1 in 7 US men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime, only 1 in 38 will die of it, and as Ornish pointed out, this leads to massive overtreatment of men who cannot possibly benefit from that treatment.
In fact, when it comes to early-stage prostate cancer – on which Ornish’s research has focused, primarily because urologists often offer patients in this category the option of ‘watchful waiting’, which allows researchers to ethically randomise study participants to the treatment or control arm – only 1 out of 49 men who opts for medical or surgical treatment actually lives longer.
The other 48 men not only don’t enjoy any survival benefit (and at the end of the day, why else would you undertake treatment for cancer?), they suffer demoralising side effects including urinary incontinence and impotence. In fact, as Ornish explained, by 15 years after treatment for prostate cancer, virtually all men suffer from erectile dysfunction. Having your sex life wrecked is a high price to pay for a treatment that you didn’t get any real benefit from anyway.
Ornish took us deep into the studies his team, and other researchers, have conducted that are trying to determine exactly how his lifestyle intervention program stops cancer in its tracks. Here are some of the mechanisms they’ve discovered:
- Blood serum from overweight men was collected before and after they went on a low fat, high fibre diet and exercise for just 11 days; at the end of the intervention their serum reduced the growth or prostate cancer cells in a petrie dish by 30% more than at the beginning. Even more impressively, the serum of men who had been on a low-fat diet long term (on average, 14.2 years) was every more effective at inhibiting prostate cancer cell growth in vitro.
- The expression of over 500 genes involved in the growth, invasion and spread of cancer is beneficially affected after just 90 days on the Ornish program.
- After 90 days on the Ornish program, the telomeres of 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer were significantly lengthened. Telomeres protect against the DNA mutations that can give rise to cancer, and shortened telomeres predict a higher risk of developing, and dying from, breast, prostate, colorectal, bladder, head
and neck, lung, and renal cell cancer. The researchers found that the closer the men stuck to the program, the more their telomeres lengthened.
The last finding underlined a point that Ornish emphasised several times during his presentation:
“The more you change the better you get.”
No matter how old you are, and no matter how sick you are, the more improvements you make to your diet and lifestyle, the more vitality and well-being you will enjoy. In many cases, this leads to the reversal of clinical illness and a reduced need for medical care. (In fact, almost 80% of cardiovascular disease patients who had been told they needed a heart bypass no longer required the surgery once they had gone through the Ornish program.)
Furthermore, unlike researchers who struggle to get study participants to stick to diets that represent only a slight variation to what they normally eat, the Ornish program – which asks participants to make significant dietary changes – has achieved remarkable adherence rates: 85-90% in nearly 3000 men and women at 24 sites after 1 year. Why such good results? Because, says Ornish, when people make big changes to the way they eat and live, they feel better so quickly that they want to stick to the program long-term!
This is something I’ve been telling my clients for years: Small, incremental changes may seem easier to make than 180-degree shifts, but they often lead to disappointing results, which reduces the motivation to continue.
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