Ornish, Dean

▪ 1994

      In an age when medical science was combating heart disease with costly high-tech interventions, American physician Dean Ornish was something of a throwback. His simple, inexpensive program of lifestyle changes—which featured a low-fat, primarily vegetarian diet, moderate aerobic exercise, and daily stress management—contrasted sharply with such invasive and potentially risky treatments as bypass surgery, angioplasty, and cholesterol-lowering medication. The holistic regimen that Ornish recommended appeared not only to halt the progress of atherosclerosis (the buildup of fatty substances within the arteries) but actually to reverse it.

      Despite his reluctance to being labeled a guru, Ornish continued to gain enthusiastic converts following the publication of his best-selling second book, Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease: The Only System Scientifically Proven to Reverse Heart Disease Without Drugs or Surgery (1990). Highlights of 1993 for Ornish included the publication in June of a third book, Eat More, Weigh Less: Dr. Dean Ornish's Life Choice Program for Losing Weight Safely While Eating Abundantly; an invitation to the White House in July; and the announcement in August that Mutual of Omaha would reimburse policyholders for the cost of participation in the program—the first time a major insurer had agreed to cover an "alternative" treatment for heart disease.

      Ornish was born in Dallas, Texas, on July 16, 1953. He graduated first in his class at the University of Texas at Austin. He next went to Houston, Texas, to study at Baylor College of Medicine before moving to the Boston area for a clinical fellowship at Harvard Medical School and an internship and residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Ornish first began developing his unique approach to heart disease in the late 1970s while he was still a student. In July 1984 he moved to San Francisco and began the Lifestyle Heart Trial, a controlled study of the effects of a low-fat diet and a stress-management regime on a small group of heart-disease patients. His so-called Dean Cuisine diet limited fats to 10% of total caloric intake and cholesterol to only five milligrams a day. (In contrast, the recommendations of the American Heart Association allowed up to 30% of total calories from fat and 300 mg of cholesterol daily.) In addition to giving up smoking and fatty foods, the test subjects did yoga, meditated, and participated in a support group. The results, published at the end of the decade, revealed that the effects of coronary atherosclerosis had been reversed in many patients.

      Ornish attracted considerable attention for his therapeutic tactics, which also encouraged patients to "open their hearts" in the emotional sense. He believed that the stress-management aspect of his program, designed to combat social isolation as well as daily pressures, yielded untold benefits. His motivational approach complemented his skills as a fund-raiser and an adept promoter of alternative ideas. Ornish was a faculty member of the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco and the president and director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in nearby Sausalito. His first book, Stress, Diet, and Your Heart, was published in 1982.

      (TOM MICHAEL)

* * *