Dean Ornish Is Resoundingly Wrong

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

Dean Ornish, MD, is…

Actually, let’s allow him to describe himself. “From being a revolutionary thought leader, a powerful professor, a beloved author, and respected adviser to some of the world’s most powerful leaders, Dr. Dean Ornish is resoundingly recognized as a leader in health, health care, and medicine,” proclaims deanornish.​com.

I’m not sure one can be resoundingly recognized, but why quibble over semantics? The point is that everyone, including Dr. Ornish himself, seems to adore the fellow.

And why not?

For 37 years, this founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, and clinical professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco has relentlessly pushed a theme that gladdens every mainstream nutritionist’s (theoretically) healthy heart.

That is, that a low-fat, high-carbohydrate, largely vegetarian diet can prevent and even reverse heart disease, as well as resolve most of the modern ills that plague Americans.

And now, he’s doubling down.

In The New York Times on March 23, he expressed alarm that “many people” these days are promoting eating more meat — an apparent reference to the growing popularity of what some term the paleo diet.

That’s a travesty, argues Ornish. In the Times, he contends that “heavy” consumption of animal foods has been shown to underlie virtually every disease that’s on the rise these days: cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, even diabetes.

With due respect, allow me to disagree. While I’ll concede nutrition science can be murky, it is not opaque.

First, let’s visit what might be termed the macro level.

Over more than 250,000 years of Homo sapiens’ evolution, virtually every known human culture has gathered and prized animal foods. Some ate them almost exclusively. Some still do, notably the traditional Maasai of southern Kenya and some of the elder Nunavik Inuit of northern Quebec. These groups enjoy far lower rates of the diseases Ornish lists than do modern Americans.

(It’s worth noting that cultures that subsist largely on meat are careful to eat a good deal of the animal’s fat, as well as its vitamin-rich organs. A diet heavy in lean muscle meat — as some paleo diet adherents recommend — puts excessive stress on the liver and kidneys.)

For Ornish to argue that eating meat, even in “heavy” amounts, was some kind of ultra-long-term, collective, fatal mistake, one that 10,000 generations survived by… well, luck, I suppose… is just silly.

Human beings didn’t survive animal foods. We became human because of them. Our large, meaty, fatty brains (by dry weight, the human brain is 60% fat) are expressions of something we managed that other primates did not: securing plenty of protein- and fat-rich animal foods. We continue to need these staples to maintain our meat-derived organs, especially the one in our skull, in good working order.

“Killing animals and eating meat have been significant components of human evolution that had a synergistic relationship with other key attributes that have made us human, with larger brains, smaller guts, bipedalism, and language,” says evolutionary biologist Vaclav Smil in his 2013 book Should We Eat Meat?

Now, on the micro level — in making his point, Ornish says we are eating far more added fats these days and asserts that these are largely responsible for the modern obesity and diabetes epidemics.

As he puts it, “Although people have been told for decades to eat less meat and fat, Americans actually consumed 67% more added fat… in 2000 than they had in 1950.”

Note the juxtaposition — “meat and fat” — implying that the fat comes with the meat.

But a look at actual USDA statistics shows that animal fat is one of the few food categories in which consumption is down from 1970-2005, a trend corresponding quite nicely with the rise in obesity.

Specifically, vegetable oil consumption rose 63%. And grain consumption was 45% higher in 2000 than in the 1970s.

So is eating animals and their fat really the problem?

Finally, Ornish flogs his Lifestyle Heart Trial, a small, 25-year-old study that showed improvement in heart disease markers, ostensibly due to his plant-based diet.

But the doctor’s study design had a huge flaw – it changed many variables at once. The 28 patients who followed his diet (as opposed to the 20 controls who received typical care) also exercised, stopped smoking, and got training in stress reduction.

Further, his diet required them to switch to unprocessed, rather than processed carbs.

So which change was responsible for their improvement? Stopping smoking? Eating better-quality carbs? Long, daily walks?

There is no way to know.

It certainly seems possible, however, that Ornish’s exhortations that a “plant-based diet” was central to his patients’ recoveries is just plain wrong.

The fact is, the rise of modern diseases which Ornish cites is the result of massive increases in grain and vegetable oil consumption. Eating more quality organic meat, fish, eggs, and butter along with abundant vegetables is the key to lowering our risk.

After more than three decades of trumpeting his viewpoint virtually unchallenged, it’s satisfying to see a new generation of nutrition scientists take Ornish to task.

“As seems to be typical, Dr. Ornish’s stance is argued using half-truths, obfuscations, and all the other slippery tricks in his playbook of deceit,” points out Dr. Michael Eades, associate editor for Nutrition & Metabolism, a peer-reviewed journal based in London. (I highly recommend Eades’ carefully argued book Protein Power.)

And Scientific American said it all in a recent headline: “Why Almost Everything Dean Ornish Says About Nutrition Is Wrong.”

I resoundingly agree.

Sincerely,

Brad Lemley
Natural Health Solutions

Citations
Ornish, Dean, “The Myth of High-Protein Diets,” NYT.com, March 23, 2015, accessed April 24, 2015

Michael Eades, “Dr. Dean Ornish blasts high-protein diets” ProteinPower.com, March 23, 2015, accessed April 26, 2015.

Melinda Wenner Moyer, “Why Almost Everything Dean Ornish Says about Nutrition is Wrong,” ScientificAmerican.com, April 22, 2015, accessed April 26, 2015.

Cover photo by Joi Ito (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons