In our last health column, we discussed some of the frontpage news in 1990: Dean Ornish MD, a young cardiologist, had demonstrated that advanced coronary artery disease could actually be reversed through a lifestyle medicine approach that highlighted a simple plant-based whole food diet. In his one-year Randomized Clinical Trial published in the Lancet Medical Journal he demonstrated that the participants in the intervention group — in the absence of cholesterol-lowering medication — were able to drop their dangerous LDL-Cholesterol levels by 37 percent, and yet even more importantly 82 percent of their narrowed plaque-filled arteries had actually widened allowing more blood and oxygen to nourish their heart muscle. The atherosclerotic process had begun its regression; it had begun to reverse itself. The control group, however, following the so-called “Prudent Diet” of the American Heart Association, showed actual progression in 53 parts of the arteries under investigation.
You mean the American Heart Association’s diet did not help at all?
Their Prudent Diet, designed for the prevention and treatment of heart disease, did not do its job. At the press conference Dr. Ornish concluded:
“The moderate diet recommendations of the American Heart Association do not go far enough to effectively influence the progression of coronary heart disease. People with clinically demonstrated disease need to go beyond the present dietary recommendation.”
The Esselstyn Study
In another study, commenced in 1985, Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr, MD, a well-known surgeon at the famous Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, took 18 patients with established, serious coronary artery disease. Described by some as the “walking dead” with limited life expectancy, these patients had received the best of available coronary care: they had their bypasses, their stents, their medications. Yet nothing could be done for them any further from a medical perspective. However, they were highly motivated. They wanted to live!
Dr. Esselstyn focused his instructions on following a very strict plant-based whole food diet — very low in fats, oil and grease, and very low in sugar and salt. Refined foods and animal products were not allowed. Within weeks, their blood cholesterol levels dropped dramatically below 160 mg/dL where they remained over the next 20 years.
What was the clinical outcome of this strict dietary study?
Prior to joining the dietary experiment, these 18 coronary patients had suffered 49 cardiovascular events (such as angina and heart attacks, strokes, bypass surgeries, angioplasties) over a period of 8 years with cholesterol levels around 230 mg/dL while under excellent cardiological care at the Cleveland Clinic. In his 12-year follow up report in the American Journal of Cardiology, Dr. Esselstyn showed zero cardiovascular events!
Dr. Esselstyn was able to document angiographically that atherosclerotic plaque had consistently not only been halted and arrested but reversed. His documented 20 to 30% regression in most of his patients facilitated an often dramatically improved blood flow to the heart muscle which, in general, alleviated angina pain and reduced the need for angina medication. His 20-year follow-up findings have been published in his 2007 book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease.
We have known for years that much of today’s coronary heart disease could be prevented. But it’s exciting to realize that, under the proper conditions, it is now also possible to reverse it. This revolutionary study suggests that, given the proper diet, we may be able to eat ourselves out of heart disease.