Eat better, stress less: Dean Ornish highlights Lifestyle Medicine conference

Dr. Dean Ornish is often referred to as a guru of medicine. Interestingly, he credits an actual guru, Swami Satchidananda, with turning his life around when, as a college student, he was clinically depressed and contemplating suicide.

Ornish, a medical doctor and author of books including “Eat More, Weigh Less,” “Stress, Diet and Your Heart,” and “Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy,” spoke to a crowd that filled the ballroom at the Naples Grande Hotel last week, the highlight of the national conference of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. Sharing the stage with Ornish was Dr. Hans Diehl, another pioneer in the field, as the duo conducted a talk show-style interview.

The couple hundred listeners in the ballroom, most of them physicians involved in the burgeoning field of lifestyle medicine — which stresses preventative measures to control chronic disease — were familiar with Ornish’s groundbreaking medical research. He is credited with the concept that improved diet and exercise can not only lower the chance of contracting ailments such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, but actually reverse the symptoms and cure the disease in patients already suffering from the conditions.

For anyone not aware of the eminence of their presenter, Diehl played a video clip to introduce Ornish, showing some of the acclaim he has received. Messages from Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose diet he consulted, President Barack Obama, Dr. Mehmet Oz and Oprah Winfrey were interspersed with prominent mentions in Time, Newsweeek, USA Today, the Washington Post, The New York Times and the Journal of the American Medical Association. There also were photos or testimonials from luminaries such as Shimon Peres, Prince Charles, Barbra Streisand, Steve Jobs, Blue Zones founder Dan Buettner and the Dalai Lama.

Diehl focused on Ornish’s early life, as the son of a Dallas dentist and a “visionary” mother, who took up magic and photography, publishing photos in Rolling Stone as a teenager, and his somewhat unconventional education.

“When I decided not to kill myself, I decided I would lead kind of a messy life,” said Ornish, and not be afraid to challenge orthodoxy or take unconventional paths. “Some things that seem so crazy ultimately are what make you successful. People regret what they didn’t do.”

As a medical student, he contacted the head of the Harvard Medical School and invited him to view his research, which led to an association with the institution. Ornish worked with heart transplant trailblazer Dr. Michael DeBakey, but became fixated on preventing the deterioration that made the transplants necessary.

“We cut people open, bypass clogged arteries, tell them they’re cured — and they go and do all the same things.” As critical as healthy diet and exercise are, Ornish said a positive outlook on life is perhaps even more important.

“Loneliness, hopelessness and depression kill more people than smoking,” he said. “I talk about my period of depression, because I want to shine a light on it.” Often, he finds, patients’ self-destructive behaviors are a response to negative influences in their lives.

“I’ll say, ‘I’m interested in your diet, but what’s going on with your family, your school, your work, your relationships?’ The need for making connections in our life is a fundamental human need.”

In a lighthearted bit, Ornish was surprised – so they said – with a guitar onstage, and performed for the crowd a humorous Steve Goodman song called “Chicken Cordon Blues,” about the wrenching experience of being converted to a vegan diet. He was surprised again when his wife, presumably back at home in the couple’s San Francisco bay area home, unexpectedly appeared and joined him to tumultuous applause.

Ornish’s work has not been without controversy. A 2015 article in Scientific American, in response to a piece by Ornish published in The New York Times, was titled “Why Almost Everything Dean Ornish Says About Nutrition is Wrong.” But the assemblage of forward-looking physicians at the Naples Grande clearly revered the much-honored doctor and author.

Additional presentations for the approximately 600 attendees covered topics such as “Getting Unstuck: Coaching the Multiplicity of Mind,” “How Not to Die: Preventing and Treating Disease with Diet,” “The Gut, the Brain, and Chemicals,” and “Lifestyle Medicine for the Medically Underserved.”

A companion event, the Healthcare Transformation Summit, honored hospitals which are taking the lead in innovative, prevention-based healthcare, and two of the three hospitals are here in Southwest Florida. NCH and Lee Memorial were honored along with a Texas hospital group for embracing the principles exemplified by the Blue Zones Project.