Date: 5.1.2000
I am not the food police," swears Dr. Dean Ornish, the bestselling author and advocate of ultra-low-fat diets to combat heart disease. Ornish, 46, and his wife, Molly, 38, recently joined us for lunch. This is no vegetarian hangout; it's a Swiss restaurant featuring things like veal in cream sauce. Ornish scans the menu and sighs in exasperation. He asks the waiter if the chef can prepare steamed vegetables.
Then he recalls his salad days in the mid-1970s as a student at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. "We'd cut people open, we'd bypass the blocked arteries. The patients would get home, eat the same foods, smoke, not manage stress, not exercise and, more often than not, the bypass would just clog up." In 1990 Ornish published a study that concluded that heart disease was not only preventable but could be reversed with drastic lifestyle changes, including his low-fat diet.
"My program is not about sacrifice," says Ornish. "It's a matter of replacing something bad for you with something better." He tells how he was asked on the TV show Politically Incorrect why people would go on a regimen in which they can't smoke, can't get drunk, can't eat cheeseburgers and have to go out of their way to avoid stress. What can they do that's fun? Ornish's reply: "Well, have sex. Because eating a high-fat diet, undergoing too much stress and over-drinking leave many men tired, lethargic and impotent. How much fun is that?"
At lunch he continues: "Great sex is better than a cheeseburger. It's not a hard choice." (Molly stifles a yawn.)
Ornish dedicated his latest book, Love and Survival, to Molly, whom he married in 1998 and credits with changing his life. In it he states that love and intimacy are among the most powerful factors in health and illness, even though they are mostly ignored by the medical profession.
Easy for you to say, Dr. Ornish; you have Molly.
Ornish refers me to chapter three. At 19 he was depressed and suicidal. There ensued a long journey to that day when he could open his heart to love. He continues, "If you had read chapter three, you'd know it's not about finding the right person, it's about being the right person, who can then open up to love."
What about scientific research to prove the intimacy thesis? I question. "Have you read chapter two?" Ornish says in his schoolmarmish voice.
Well, I had scanned it. One study of 126 healthy men chosen from Harvard classes in the 1950s found that 91% of participants who didn't think their relationship with their mothers had been warm had a serious disease in midlife, such as coronary artery disease, high blood pressure or duodenal ulcer. Compare that with the 45% of those who perceived themselves as having warm feelings for Mom and were diagnosed with the same ailments. Warm feelings for Dad had similar results. What the book doesn't tell us is how many people did or did not have warm relationships with their parents.
No question, Ornish and his books have saved lives. Cheeseburgers are bad for you. But it must be said that his scientific claims sometimes reach beyond the evidence. He casually dismisses surgical procedures. "There's no proof that angioplasty and bypass surgery prolong [life] or prevent heart attacks for most people. Twenty billion was spent in the U.S. last year on those two operations."
Dr. Sidney Smith, the chief of cardiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a past president of the American Heart Association, takes exception to one point. "There are subgroups of coronary patients whose lives have been extended by bypass surgery."
Ornish, a gifted man with a sound bite who's battle-hardened by dozens of interviews over the years, is not easily shaken from his beliefs. He is talking robotically at blinding speed. (Molly looks off into the distance and then picks up a book--not his--while he goes on.)
A frequent complaint is that life on Ornish's diet is not a life worth living. And who lives it? Under cross-examination, the doctor confesses that he veers off his diet every day, with one particular vice: chocolate. He describes a dark chocolate that he particularly likes. "I have chocolate meditations."
Wait a minute. Millions of people follow your diet or die trying--and you don't stay on it yourself? He argues that only people with heart disease have to cut back to a 10% fat diet. Others trying to prevent the disease can keep to 30% fat. He continues smugly: "I don't have heart disease. I don't eat some kind of a monk's diet, nor do I need to." Besides which, we are about to explore what's more important than diet anyway.
He explains: "The reason that I wrote this book was not to [say to] people, 'Now you've got something else to be depressed about.' But awareness is the first step in healing. So, if you become more aware of how much things like intimacy matter, then you'll be maybe more motivated to do something about it. It doesn't have to be love, it could be a bridge club or the bowling league."
Is Ornish saying that in a pinch a bowling alley can substitute for Molly? "A little bit of intimacy goes a long way," he says. Don't try to make that one scientifically precise.
SIDEBAR
Food Fight
Drs. Dean Ornish and Robert Atkins could not be more opposed if they were throwing tomatoes at each other.
To Ornish, the spiritual leader of a low-fat, plant-based, high-carbohydrate diet, fat is the enemy. To Atkins, the proponent of a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet, fat is our much-maligned friend.
Guess who sells more books? Atkins has more than 10 million copies of his books in print. Ornish tells us he has sold many fewer but won't cough up the numbers, and he's asked his publisher not to release them because, he says, they could hurt his research fundraising.
"Atkins makes me want to pull out what's left of my hair," Ornish says. He says the Atkins diet is scientifically unproven, hazardous to your health, and--here comes the nasty part--absolute hell on your sex life. "Eating pork rinds and sausage is a good way to sell books, but it's irresponsible," scolds Ornish. Sour grapes, anyone?
In a recent debate, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Ornish concedes that people lose weight on the Atkins diet because they are cutting out sugar and processed foods. But by eating so much protein, he says, they are mortgaging their future health. He ticks off the many problems that he claims the Atkins diet can cause: kidney ailments and increased chance of breast and prostate cancers--to say nothing of hair loss, bad breath and constipation. And here's the clincher: Viagra is one of the most popular drugs of all time, he says, "because [sexual dysfunction] is a big problem in the U.S. A number of studies have shown that when you eat a high-fat, high-animal-protein diet, it's not just your heart that gets less blood flow."
Some of those allegations are untrue, responds Atkins. And he counters that he would have done more research, "but I'm not as good a fundraiser as [Ornish]."
Atkins suggests Ornish's high carbohydrate diet has its health problems. It will raise triglycerides and lower HDL, the good cholesterol, thus putting people at high risk for heart attacks. Dr. Barry Sears, who was at the debate, says that those who went on the Ornish diet had twice the number of fatal heart attacks.
Ornish says the increased level of triglycerides and lowered HDL are just temporary--eventually triglycerides go down and HDL goes up. Yes, there were two deaths. One was a man far exceeding the exercise recommended; the other went off the Ornish program and started eating Atkins-plan-type foods. Still there were two-and-a-half times fewer cardiac problems in the study. Or so says Ornish.
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