How to Be Well
A new Zoom lecture from the Vegan Society of Hawaii is called “A Unifying Theory for Lifestyle Medicine.” At first glance, one might be skeptical. This sounds rather ambitious, if not a touch grandiose. But when the proposer is Dr. Dean Ornish, you’ve got to pay attention.
After all, the much-honored physician, researcher, professor and best-selling author is responsible for the breakthrough research that found that intensive lifestyle changes, including a low-fat, vegetarian diet, can reverse coronary heart disease.
Indeed, the talk proved to be one of VSH’s most profound health-related presentations in recent years.
According to Ornish, who helped create the discipline more than four decades ago, lifestyle medicine uses “lifestyle changes to not only help prevent disease, which we all know, but to treat and often even reverse it. To me, it’s the most exciting field in medicine today, and it’s a wave that hasn’t even yet begun to crest.”
Its four major components are a whole food, plant-based diet low in fat and sugar; various stress management techniques; moderate exercise; and psychosocial support from friends, family and community. It may be summed up as “eat well, move more, stress less and love more.”
Dr. Ornish says that these lifestyle changes can reverse a number of chronic diseases, including severe coronary heart disease, early-stage prostate cancer, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity and more.
Why do the same changes positively impact a variety of different diseases? Here’s where the unifying theory comes in.
“The reason that these same lifestyle changes can help prevent and reverse so many different chronic diseases is that they are different manifestations of the same underlying biological mechanisms,” Ornish explains. These mechanisms include chronic inflammation, chronic sympathetic nervous system stimulation, oxidative stress and others.
This theory helps explain why so many individuals have “co-morbidities” -- the same person many have diabetes and high blood pressure and obesity and type 2 diabetes, for example.
Despite the fact that physicians receive very little training in nutrition, Dr. Ornish is upbeat about the future of medicine. He identifies a “convergence of forces” -- limits of high-tech approaches, unsustainable health care costs, and increased documentation of the positive impact of intensive lifestyle changes -- that are coming together to force a transformation in the medical approach to disease prevention and management. Lifestyle medicine, he concludes, is “the right idea at the right time.”
For more information, read Undo It!: How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases.