A lifestyle change can reverse heart disease: US doctor

If it werent for India and Sri Swami Sachidananda,I wouldn’t have got involved in this. It goes back to the 1970s,when I was an undergraduate,and became suicidally depressed. And he really helped me out of that. My lifestyle programme actually follows from what I learned from him.

In medical school,we would cut people open,do a bypass,and tell them they were cured. More often than not,they would go home and do the things that caused the problem in the first place. And often their bypasses would clot up. So we would cut them open again,sometimes,to bypass the bypass. I thought,there has got to be a better way. So I started reading the scientific literature voraciously and found that in animals you could cause heart disease if you put them on an unhealthy diet,with no exercise. But you could reverse it. So I took a year off between the second and third years of medical school to do the first of a series of studies on how a comprehensive change in diet and lifestyle can prevent disease.

What does the Dr Dean Ornish programme consist of and how does it help prevent disease?

The programme addresses what we eat,how we respond to stress,how much exercise we get,and perhaps most importantly,how much love and support we have in our lives.

For preventing disease,there is a spectrum of choices. One of the interesting findings in all our studies was that the more people changed their lifestyle,the more they improved in every metric we looked at,including the number of blockages in their arteries. We found for the first time that heart disease could be reversed by making these changes. And in subsequent studies,we found that the progression of early stage prostate cancer could be slowed,stopped or even reversed by the same lifestyle programme.

How is the programme relevant for India?

I think it is particularly relevant for India now because unfortunately,what we are seeing worldwide,and especially in India,is what I term the globalisation of chronic disease: that other countries are starting to eat,live and die like us Americans. Heart disease and type 2 diabetes were fairly rare in India 50 years ago. Now type 2 diabetes is affecting over 50 per cent of the Indian population. Ironically,our lifestyle and diet programme is essentially what Indians were eating and living before they started copying the American way of life.

How do doctors in India feel about your programme?

I first came to India in 1978 with Sri Swami Sachidananda. We toured the country visiting hospitals,naturopathic,homoeopathic and Ayurvedic clinics. It wasnt acceptable among doctors back then to talk about yoga - we had to call it stress management. I gave a talk at AIIMS and I was talking to a very sceptical and a sometimes hostile group of Indian cardiologists about the power of yoga and meditation and a plant-based diet. Now,it has changed completely. Several groups in India have corroborated our study.

Do you have any words of advice for Indians?

Go back to your roots. Value your traditional wisdom.

How do you get young people to adopt a healthy lifestyle?

If you tell them something is unhealthy,dont do it,it is just counter-productive. It is like saying: riding a motorcycle is dangerous,it only makes it cool. Teenagers think they are immortal. But if you say,smoking constricts the arteries in your face and makes you age faster and look ugly,they may give it a thought. Those who smoke,even people in their 20s and 30s,experience sexual dysfunction. So if a change is fun-based,love-based,pleasure-based,good looking-based and better sex-based,people will get it.

Dr Dean Ornish is the founder and president of US-based Preventive Medicine Research Institute,a non-profit organisation. He is also a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California,San Francisco