Health & Nutrition by Michael R. Eades, M.D.

As I was going through all the comments that had stacked up while I was away, I came across one about the Ornish program that I thought might be of interest to the group. Here is the gist of it:

after my 3rd heart attack dec 04 I quit the veggie/ornish just plant food eating and now with type 2 this yr am still doing great with no carbs. also off BP drugs and since May have stopped all lipitor and crestor (7 days of crestor was enough) still getting stronger and no more brain fog feeling, wish I knew then what I know now

This comment reminded me of one I read in the long list of comments after Ornish’s response to John Tierney’s blog post about Taubes’ comments on the Israeli low-carb study. Said a commenter who states that he works in a clinic that uses the Ornish regimen:

I too, happen to work in a clinic that espouses the Ornish program. In practice, however, as long as patients do the stress relief, engage in exercise, and quit smoking, they seem to do fine. The diet doesn’t seem to do very much one way or the other, especially since most people give it up quickly. They seem to dislike it.
The diet does wreak havoc with our diabetic patients, however. They are put on the diet because diabetics are prone to heart disease, but the huge quantities of starch required by the Ornish program (whole grain or not) makes make blood sugar control almost impossible. There’s a lot of internal argument about this now.

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Looks like Dean Ornish has taken time out from pimping for McDonald’s (and KFC and Pepsi Co.) to write a new book out titled The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight and Gain Health.

I haven’t read the book, but I assume it’s a recycling of all the Dean Ornish stuff we’ve seen before. Although, he does have a photo of a piece of salmon on the cover, so maybe he’s graduated from vegan to beady-eyed vegitarianism.

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A reader sent me a link to the CSPI (Center for Science in the Public Interest) Scam site, which is great. It will become a part of my daily read.

In the particular link she sent, there was a video of Michael Jacobson, the director of CSPI, making an appearance on Steven Colbert’s show. Colbert, of course, made Jacobson look like a fool, which he pretty much does with everyone who ventures onto his show. But his making a fool of his guests only works if the guests don’t go along with the joke and try to remain on their message and stay the pompous windbags that most of them are.

Jacobson didn’t disappoint. In fact, he played right into Colberts hands. I’m sure Jacobson had a media consultant tell him to try to be light and upbeat and go with the flow, which, in Jacobson’s mind translated into hunching over the table while maintaining a Cheshire cat rictus throughout the interview. Pompous windbag that he is, Jacobson couldn’t resist trying to stay on message, which made him look all that much more ridiculous. I’ll have to admit to experiencing more than a little schadenfreude as I watched.

What I found most interesting about the interview comes at the end. Under Colbert’s prompting Jacobson spirals off into a discourse about the dangers of trans fats and how they’re slowly but surely being removed from the food supply, saving thousands of lives in the process. What Jacobson doesn’t elaborate on - and what I wish Colbert had known and injected into the dialog - is that CSPI, Jacobson’s own group, is largely responsible for putting trans fats in the food supply in the first place. I guess it’s a great gig if you can get it. First, you militate to replace a harmless substance with a harmful one (replacing saturated fat with trans fat in this case), then you get traction and publicity by militating to remove the harmful substance that you were greatly responsible for putting in place. And look like the hero in both cases.

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I’ve had a hectic past few days what with switching the website, blog and bulletin board to a new server and a new tech person along with all the other trials and tribulations of simply maintaining life on a somewhat even keel. I didn’t even get to play golf once.

In catching up on my reading I came across an article in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal that set my teeth on edge. The piece was entitled: Meditating for Heart Health. It was a balanced take on the idea that Transcendental Meditation (TM) improves heart health. Followers of TM have claimed that its practice can help reduce blood pressure, reduce arterial plaque, reduce the incidence of heart attack, and even reduce mortality. And they have the studies to prove it. One of the studies mentioned in the article is found in an issue of last year’s American Journal of Cardiology and presents data showing that subjects with high blood pressure who took up TM and other behavioral stress reducing interventions had reduced rates of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality after a follow up of 7.6 years. The references at the end of this paper list a number of other studies purporting to show the same thing. I pulled down a few of these and thumbed through them and they all pretty much indicated the same thing. I didn’t go over the statistics with a fine-toothed comb like I usually do simply because I didn’t have the time, and the studies all told me what I wanted to know, which is that there is evidence that TM and other sorts of meditation and stress reduction decrease mortality, or at the very least, don’t appear to increase it.

Why does all this stick in my craw? Because it reminds me of the paper that put Dean Ornish on the map, the one that he has been running around crowing about since.

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