Is There Any Evidence That A Plant-Based Diet Can Reverse Heart Disease? by Brenda Davis

reversal of heart disease is is uh so interesting because there was a time where we believed once plaque was laid down you couldn’t nothing could could change that that it would just continue to get worse and worse and worse until the lifestyle heart trial in 1990 and Dean ornish did a study where he used a lowfat plant-based diet about 10% fat uh Stress Management group therapy uh exercise and 82% of his group his experimental group uh actually had reversal and and what was really interesting is these people were basically people who were told by their doctors you’re done there’s nothing more we can do for you we’ve done the triple bypasses get your Affairs in order you’re you’re going to be gone within a year and you know 12 14 18 20 years later they’re still doing well and and so this was really Earth shattering and then not not so long after Dr Caldwell esselon who will be here speaking as well uh did his his research and and and actually with Dean ornish’s he um his experimental group 5 years later had two and a half half times fewer cardiac events than the control group that was doing you know the sort of standard of care American Heart Association diet but with Dr esselon nobody that stuck to his program had recurrence nobody and and so and he came up with another study in 2014 uh where I think 6% of the people sticking to his diet had recurrence and 62 or 63% of the people in the in the uh uh you know in the control uh or wasn’t really wasn’t a control it was the people that didn’t follow the diet that that 62% actually had an event so this is really quite uh astounding I don’t know of any diets that have ever shown uh cardiac disease or heart disease reversal and so this is this is uh important and and we can’t underestimate um the value of this

and you know I’ve had I talking to Physicians I I have the privilege of talking to Physicians uh quite often and I’ve had Physicians say to me um and and on a regular basis I I believe you but I don’t think my patients would ever do that and and so one of the things that I like to remind them of is what their responsibility as a physician really is and their responsibility is to lay the options out on the table of course your patients won’t do it if they don’t even know about it uh don’t the it’s so important not to be paternalistic and to assume you know what your patient will or will not do you don’t I can remember working in a in a Cardiology clinic years ago it was probably 25 years ago and and I there was this big truck driver that came in he must have been 300 lb and I remember thinking to myself this guy was going to be dead in five years he was in his 30s and I thought um his his cholesterol and triglycerides were so high and and so I thought you know he eat he was eating um uh hot beef sandwich with gravy and french fries and pop for lunch and dinner pretty much every day that’s the truck stops that’s what they served that’s what he ate and I can remember thinking to myself like why should I waste my breath there’s no way this guy’s going to do anything but I thought to myself don’t you know you just don’t you you need to lay his options out so I told him that you can do a lowfat plant-based diet and see a reduction of you know Dean ornish on average it was 37% % reduction in cholesterol uh and reversal of disease or you could do a Heart Association kind of diet that’s you know 20 to 30% of calories from fat and low saturated fat and so on and so forth and you’ll get a 5% reduction in in in cholesterol and you’ll be on medication for the rest of your life or you can continue doing as you’re doing and die um you know it’s your it’s really your choice and he looked at me uh and he said why would I do anything other than what would give me the very best chance chance of survival I don’t want to die I’m 35 years old and it was a real it it hit me um that we don’t we cannot decide for our patients what they are or are not willing to do all we can do is lay out those options and we need to let them know what is possible because when people make these choices it is absolutely lifechanging you can rebuild your body your body wants to heal itself it will do everything in its power if you put the right Tools in your mouth uh the building blocks to rebuild your body properly and Magic will happen and so people need to know about that they’ve got to know and so we just we just have to have the courage to tell them and then let them decide uh we can’t decide for them uh but they’re the captains of their own ship I I’m a dietitian of Physicians we can’t eat we can’t exercise for anybody they’re the only ones that can do that all we can do is tell them what’s possible so I think that’s really really important and yes heart disease is absolutely reversible

no I don’t and and with all due respect to my um absolutely cherished colleagues Dr esselon Dr ornish and others that are promoting a very lowfat plant-based diet um I believe that the research shows definitively that these diets work for reversing heart disease um and there’s a little bit of research even with diabetes that they may be effective for that as well but I think what people need to understand is just because a diet is effective for a very sick person uh to reverse heart disease um that works to reverse heart disease does not make it the gold standard for everyone uh I think it’s risky to use a very lowfat diet for uh young children um even for athletes you you we you know fat is actually important it’s important for our brains our eyes our our cell membranes for all of those things fat um also Prov it it’s what provides us with our essential fatty acids some of the very low fat diets aren’t providing enough essential fats uh also it’s very important for the absorption of fat soluble nutrients so for example um you know vitamin A carotenoids uh vitamin E uh vitamin D uh you know these kinds of nutrients many phytochemicals are fat soluble and in order to absorb them we need to have some fat so like let’s say for example some people just uh pour a a sugar dressing on their salad they’ll buy a fat-free dressing and think it’s all healthy well you’ll absorb you know a fraction of the pH chemicals from your salid that you would if you put a tahini based dressing or a hemp seed based dressing on your salad so I think it’s I I actually believe and I think the evidence is pretty clear that nuts and seeds are protective avocados are protective uh that some of these higher fat plant foods are are very very beneficial and the other thing is sometimes when people sh shift to a very lowfat plant-based diet and not they’re not conscious of uh refined carb hydrates they end up eating a lot of refined carbohydrates their triglycerides go up their HDL goes down and they can actually increase risk uh by doing that so people need to be careful the other thing I’ve seen which is people choosing Foods on the basis of uh whether or not it contains fat so they would choose a loaf of white bread over a loaf of bread with flax seeds because flax seeds have fat and Fat’s bad so there’s a you know sort of an extreme example but I’ve actually seen that in in people they’ll if if something’s fat free it must be good so there’s the fat-free snack Wells cookies or whatever and and they must be good and so I think we we need to be uh cautious so to me um for you know the World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 15% of calories from fat and I think for the average healthy individual that’s a really good uh starting point because at 15% then you’ll be ensuring sufficient absorption of these protective nutrients and enough essential fatty acids so I would say 15 to 25 is probably a good range when the fat is coming from Whole fat uh whole uh plant Foods higher fat whole plant Foods

well cancer is tricky so um one of the things like let’s say you had a 100 people with colon cancer uh and you know you divided uh you put half on conventional treatment you give them chemo radiation whatever they need the other half you said well we’re going to put you on green juices and you’re going to do this diet it would never P pass any ethical board because basically you’ve got what is considered the evidencebased standard their standard of care and so you couldn’t just use an unproven therapy for these other people that might die if they don’t receive this treatment so that makes it really difficult however we have evidence that um people consuming plant-based diets have uh less DNA damage uh better DNA repair they have fewer toxic metabolites in their stools they have better gut micro Flora they have better um lower levels of inflammation lower levels of igf-1 so all of these factors that you know are kind of cancer promoters are reduced so that that’s some decent evidence

then the other evidence that I think is among the most compelling uh bits of evidence we have is from Dean ornish again so after he finished his cardiovascular disease research he went on to prostate cancer research in 2005 he did a study that show that um PSA levels on people doing plant-based were reduced about 4% and well first of all he had a group of men who chose not to get treatment for their very slow growing prostate cancer and so you know he put I think 49 of them on uh just control and 44 went on this uh this um uh lifestyle uh program and the ones that went on the lifestyle program their PSA decreased the ones that were doing nothing their PSA increased after a year six of the people that were in the control group actually had to start treatment because their disease had progressed uh sufficiently that they they they felt they needed to start therapy and and then the other thing that was very cool was the serum of the people on the plant-based diet killed SE killed 70% um uh let’s see 70% more cancer cells than the people in the in the um uh 70% yeah it was SE it was 70% versus some other percent of cancer cells that were killed uh and so it was eight times more is what it was than the people in the control group so very very interesting

and then he went on to prove that you could actually change the expression of your genes by doing plant-based for just three months he he reported um it was about 453 I think close to 500 um um uh disease cancer promoting genes that were downregulated and and and about 48 cancer preventing genes that were upregulated by going on a plant-based diet unbelievable this was Earth shattering we can change the expression of our genes then he went on to show in 2013 that you could actually change the length of your telome by eating a healthy diet so telr are the ends of the chromosomes that sort of tell you how long you’re going to live and normally as you get older they just shrink and shrink and drink well adopting a a healthy lifestyle and they actually start to get bigger and and so this was again it was pretty Earth shattering so he’s he’s done some some work that would give us indication that adopting a plant-based diet could be a very effective strategy for uh cancer treatment even if you’re doing it in conjunction with conventional treatment uh it that it it it can do nothing but good and the answer is a very very clear yes

um so we have uh several dozen studies uh even I I looked at studies between between 1994 and 2008 and there were 24 studies and it’s very consistent they both are very highly protective against cancer but raw vegetables are more protective and there are several reasons for that uh number one is that they’re higher in phytochemicals uh number two is is that when you cook vegetables you change the effect of the fiber in in the food and that can alter the effect they have on your gastrointestin system number three is raw vegetables contain enzymes that convert phytochemicals into their active forms and so one of those enzymes is called myrosinase in cruciferous vegetables and it actually turns on Phase 2 enzymes which help to change carcinogens into water soluble compounds so we can excrete them from the body so we’ll so for example uh in cruciferous vegetables you have these compounds called glucosinolates that get converted into isothiocyanates like suor orane and sulphoraphane is needed in this you get kicks in this this Phase 2 enzyme system so it’s it’s that’s another reason um that you know raw vegetables may may provide some advantage and of course when you cook you lose some nutrients that may be cancer fighting nutrients as well so there are several reasons why raw foods uh May provide an advantage over or do provide an advantage over overcooked both the the more vegetables you eat the better you do uh but raw are more powerful in terms of cancer uh prevention than cooked