Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease

“I often ask patients to compare their coronary artery disease to a house fire. Your house is on fire because eating the wrong foods has given you heart disease. You are spraying gasoline on the fire by continuing to eat the very same foods that caused the disease in the first place.”

“Here are the rules of my program in their simplest form:

• You may not eat anything with a mother or a face (no meat, poultry, or fish).
• You cannot eat dairy products.
• You must not consume oil of any kind—not a drop. (Yes, devotees of the Mediterranean Diet, that includes olive oil.)
• Generally, you cannot eat nuts or avocados.

You can eat a variety of delicious, nutrient-dense foods:

• All vegetables except avocado. Leafy green vegetables, root vegetables, veggies that are red, green, purple, orange, and yellow and everything in between.
• All legumes—beans, peas, and lentils of all varieties.
• All whole grains and products, such as bread and pasta that are made from them—as long as they do not contain added fats.
• All fruits.”

“The dietary changes that have helped my patients over the past twenty years can help you, too. They can actually make you immune to heart attacks. And there is considerable evidence that they have benefits far beyond coronary heart disease. If you eat to save your heart, you eat to save yourself from other diseases of nutritional extravagance: from strokes, hypertension, obesity, osteoporosis, adult-onset diabetes, and possibly senile mental impairment, as well. You gain protection from a host of other ailments that have been linked to dietary factors, including impotence and cancers of the breast, prostate, colon, rectum, uterus, and ovaries. And if you are eating for good health this way, here’s a side benefit you might not have expected: for the rest of your life, you will never again have to count calories or worry about your weight.”

“It may be years before we understand each step and every nuance of the process by which dietary fat and cholesterol destroy coronary arteries. But we are well aware of the general outlines. Simply stated, just as you need stone to build a stone wall, you need a specific level of fat and cholesterol in your bloodstream to narrow and clog your arteries with atherosclerosis.”

He also tells us: “We can do better. We can go right to the source of the disease. We can cut off the supply of fatty substances that accumulate in the arteries to such catastrophic effect. We can go directly to the bottom line. This is it: if you follow a plant-based nutrition program to reduce your total cholesterol level below 150 mg/dL and the LDL level to less than 80 mg/dL, you cannot deposit fat and cholesterol into your coronary arteries.
Period.”

“But let’s take another look at that study. There is no question that the group consuming the Mediterranean-style diet did not fare nearly as badly as those in the control group. But there is another way to look at the results of the Lyon Diet Heart Study. By the end of the study, nearly four years after its start, fully 25 percent of the subjects on the Mediterranean diet—one out of four—had either died or experienced some new cardiovascular event.

I feel these are wretched results for a nonmalignant disease. We can do much better. During a panel discussion at the 2nd National Summit on Cholesterol and Coronary Heart Disease, in 1997, Colin Campbell, author of the best-selling China Study, was asked his thoughts on the results of the Lyon Diet Heart Study, and to compare those results with those he found in studying health and nutrition in rural China, where coronary disease is practically nonexistent. Colin didn’t hesitate for a moment. The Mediterranean and rural Chinese diets are practically the same, he replied. “I would say the absence of oil in the rural Chinese diet is the reason for their superior success.””

“These scientists were challenged to develop what they felt constituted the optimal diet for health, one least likely to develop coronary heart disease. I asked them to answer the question: What do you tell the patient who says, “I’ll do anything, but I never want to have heart disease,” or, “I have had a heart attack, and I never want another”?

One panelist replied, “Have him eat beans, beans, and more beans.” Another, Professor T. Colin Campbell of Cornell, one of the world’s most respected nutritionists and coauthor of The China Study, said most clearly and forcibly what other faculty members were feeling:

“If we are reasonably sure of what our data from these studies are telling us, then why must we be reticent about recommending a diet which we know is safe and healthy? Scientists can no longer take the attitude that the public cannot benefit from information they are not ready for. We must have the integrity to tell them the truth and let them decide what to do with it. We cannot force them to follow the guidelines we recommend, but we can give them these guidelines and then let them decide. I personally have great faith in the public. We must tell them that a diet of roots, stems, seeds, flowers, fruit, and leaves is the healthiest diet and the only diet we can promote, endorse, and recommend.””

Fact is, we scientifically know what to do to prevent heart disease—which begs the question: Why aren’t things different?!

Here’s what Dr. E tells us: “To begin with, it is true that people have a craving for oil, dairy, and animal fat, and that includes the medical scientists who study the problem. We are immersed in an environment of toxic food that is attractive, tasteful, reasonably priced, and heavily advertised. And there are powerful commercial interests that want no change in the American diet. Over the years, there have been a number of attempts to bring nutritional recommendations more into line with what the science actually shows. In every case, intensive lobbying by industry—the producers and purveyors of dairy products, meat, and poultry—has caused those who set the standards to pull their punches.”

“My colleague Dean Ornish succinctly sums up the dilemma faced by those of us who believe in this healthy way of eating: “I don’t understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open.””

Think about it.

It’s OK to cut someone open but weird to change our diets?

Dr. E puts it this way: “At this point, if you are like most of the patients I see in person, you are probably thinking something like this: “How on Earth will I be able to give up cheeseburgers, French fries, steak, mayonnaise, cheese, olive oil, and the other things I love?” One friend of mine, a lawyer, was so put off by the idea of giving up all those foods that he asked me whether he couldn’t keep eating his high-fat diet until he developed symptoms of coronary artery disease—and then stop eating fat. I dissuaded him from this approach by explaining that in fully one of four patients with heart disease, the first symptom is sudden death.”

“I still cherish the naive dream I had when I started this research. We have shown that the number one killer in Western civilization can be abolished, through consumption of a plant-based diet. But we can do much more. If the public adopted this approach to preventing disease, if, by the millions, Americans abandoned their toxic diets and learned a truly healthy approach to eating, we could largely limit all those diseases of nutritional extravagance—strokes, hypertension, obesity, osteoporosis, and adult-onset diabetes. Meanwhile, we would see a marked reduction in cancers of the breast, prostate, colon, rectum, uterus, and ovaries. Medicine could relinquish its primary focus on pills and procedures. Prevention, not desperate intervention, would become the order of the day.

Even I am not optimistic enough to believe that this could happen overnight—that the entire population of the United States would switch to a plant-based diet the moment its benefits are widely known. But we can get there. The first step is to educate the public, teaching the truth about what we know about nutrition and the ravages of the traditional Western diet.”