"What is the Optimal Diet?"
England has been keeping mortality
statistics since 1665,
when yes, one person fell down
some stairs and died,
but in that week,
nearly 4,000 people died
of the plague.
Today, the modern plague
is heart disease,
the #1 killer of men and women,
but it wasn’t always this way.
If you dig back into those old statistics,
by the middle of last century,
heart disease was already killing off
5 to 10% of the population,
but it was practically unknown
at the beginning of the 20th century.
Check out the natural history of coronary heart disease
just in the 1920s and 30s,
skyrocketing 10-fold in men
and the same in women.
What was going on?
A clue could be found if
you split people up by
socioeconomic class.
(You can tell this was a paper
written about 1950
because it’s split into Males and…
Wives.)
It was the richest folks
who had up to triple the heart disease
as the poorest.
Maybe, it had something to do
with their rich diets...
You don’t know, until you...
put it to the test,
and in doing so discovered
the natural cure
of coronary heart disease,
discovered decades ago by Pritikin,
a plant-based diet and lifestyle program,
followed by Dr. Dean Ornish,
and then Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic,
but how many know of the name
Hans Diehl?
Dr. Diehl was the first Director of Research
at the Pritikin Center back in 1976.
He was inspired by the amazing results
they were getting at the Pritikin Center,
amazing results like that of a
certain Grandmother Greger,
but he recognized the limitations
of live-in residential programs,
including their cost and
the “artificial” living environment
that made sustaining the behaviors more difficult
when patients returned back home.
So, Diehl developed the “CHIP program”
as an affordable 30-day lifestyle intervention
to be delivered in a community setting.
Ten years in, Esselstyn encouraged Hans
to publish their results in
the American Journal of Cardiology.
And, here it is:
Coronary Risk Reduction Through a Community-Based
Lifestyle Intervention,
famously starting out with a quote
from the pioneer of coronary bypass surgery,
describing it as only a palliative treatment.
The only way we’re going to stop this epidemic
is through prevention.
We know vigorous cholesterol lowering
can slow, arrest, or even reverse atherosclerosis,
but it only works if you do it.
Live-in programs work because
you can control people’s diets,
but they’re expensive,
and people may go back home
to toxic food environments.
So, how about instead of
them coming to you,
you go to them in the community?
The original program was 16 evening sessions over 4 weeks,
the major focus being to encourage participants
to adopt the “Optimal Diet.”
They also encouraged people to walk
a half hour a day.
But, most importantly, center their diet
around whole plant foods.
Now, that was the optimal, whole food plant-based,
but the program isn’t dogmatic,
just encouraging people to move along
the spectrum towards incorporating
more whole healthy plant foods
into their diets.
They didn’t provide meals,
just advice and encouragement, and…
four weeks later got an average weight loss
of about 6 pounds,
blood pressures went down
about 6 points,
and their LDL, bad cholesterol,
down between 16 and 32 points,
and fasting blood sugars
dropped as well.
Often, participants were able to decrease
or discontinue antidiabetic,
cholesterol-lowering, and blood pressure-lowering medication,
making their findings even more extraordinary.
Better numbers on fewer drugs.
Live-in programs, like Pritikin and McDougall,
are great in that you can optimize the clinical benefits,
but they can cost thousands of dollars—
in addition to missing work,
whereas CHIP is cheap,
and they’re living at home;
so, it’s not like they’ve been spoon-fed
some perfect diet for a few weeks
in some spa and then go back
to their cupboards of cookies.
CHIP is a free-living program,
teaching people how to eat
and stay healthy within
their home environments.
Well, at least, that’s the theory.
These remarkable results were
after just 4 weeks in the program.
The true test will be to what extent
people adhere to their new lifestyle
and sustain their health benefits
weeks, months, or even more than a year later,
which we’ll explore, next.