Jeffrey Bland defends Dean Ornish's plant-based approach to heart disease against sensational media headlines. Bland argues the real issue is food quality and nutrient density, not just macronutrient ratios, and says polemical articles undo decades of research.
Are you as fed up about these nutrition controversies as I am and the polemical nature in which people discuss them as if they have all the answers? I just can't believe it. You know, having been in this field now for in excess of four decades, I'm amazed when we see articles from very respected sources like Scientific American Magazine, in which the title of the, of the discussion is why almost everything Dr. Dean Ornish says about nutrition is wrong. I mean, if that's not a polemical title, I don't know what is. And how audacious for someone to write that it's totally incorrect in itself. Dr. Ornish has done a tremendous amount to help us all understand the important value of nutrition and lifestyle in both the prevention of and treatment of cardiovascular disease. He has done a lot of the heavy lifting. He has published in top tier journals such as the Journal of the American Medical association, the results of his work. And yes, it is a diet that he has propounded that is high in complex unrefined carbohydrate, low in total, saturated in fats, and modest in protein, principally vegetable protein. Yet to say that everything is wrong about his approach, it makes no sense. The data speaks for itself. Now, where does the problem really reside? The problem resides, I think, in two areas. First of all, people trying to get a sound bite of other individual's time so they'll be taken seriously. And for whatever reason, either their ego or their zealot nature, they want to grab people's attention. And the second is for people not really understanding what they're talking about. Dr. Ornish has done a tremendous amount to help us all, the whole country, the whole world, to understand the value of intervention using exercise, stress reduction and diet. A very different diet than a fast food convenience, processed food diet for the modulation of vascular endothelial dysfunction and atherosclerotic disease, the number one killer in the Western world. And then for someone to then say, you throw this all out by some kind of a proclamation, why almost everything Dr. Dean Ornish has to say about nutrition is wrong is a tremendous disservice to people. Now, what we can say is that this discussion about what is the appropriate ratio of protein to carbohydrate to fat is still a highly interesting, controversial topic that never goes away. But I think it's missing the point. The point is not the ratio of protein to carbohydrate to fat, it's what are the protein, carbohydrate and fat components. If you eat a bunch of white starch and sugars and refined materials that are high in carbohydrate. That's very different than what Dr. Ornish was talking about, which is this unrefined plant based diet that has a lot of natural vitamins and minerals and fibers and all sorts of phytochemicals that actually modulate function very differently than if you eat white, white sugar, white starch, white fat. And so the construct that we're really trying to find, the optimal ratio of protein to carbohydrate to fat, is not where the action point is. And what we can take away from Dr. Ornish and many of the other more serious and I think well informed individuals in this field is that it's the nature of the individual foods and the ratio of nutrients they have versus the number of calories, their nutrient density. And, and what we're really talking about here from Dr. Ornish's work is the extraordinary disservice that refined foods do to human health and the importance for good health that using foods that are minimally processed, that come out of the earth, that have a lot of this rich array of nutrients and are minimally industrially modified, have on improving function. So do I have a degree of disgust when I read something like this? Yes, I do, because it takes us back 25 years. It eliminates all this extraordinary research that's been done, including that of Dr. Ornish over the last 25 years, and it starts once again dredging up questions which we long ago resolved if we would just exercise good judgment. So I would put this in the trash heap of exaggerated title, Reputation Growing, 15 minutes of Andy Warhol fame type of article, and I would say let's look at the substance of what Dr. Ornish really has contributed before we start saying that everything he has talked about is wrong.
