"CHIP, the Complete Health Improvement Program"
The best kept secret in medicine is that
given the right conditions the body can sometimes heal itself.
And when it comes to cardiovascular disease,
there is no substitute for nutritional excellence.
So Ornish, Pritikin, Barnard, Esselstyn,
all the great names in evidence-based nutrition,
but how many have heard about the CHIP program,
the Coronary Health Improvement Project,
a volunteer-run community-based education program
educating physicians and patients alike about the power of nutrition as medicine
as perhaps the best investment we can make in the fight against heart disease—
more effective, cheaper, safer, and what are the side effects?
Improved overall health, and not just physical health.
Lifestyle change programs such as CHIP
aimed at improving physical health behaviors
can likewise have a profound effect on mental health.
Based on studies of thousands of individuals
who went through the CHIP program,
there were significant improvements in a number of sleep or stress disorders
like sleeping restlessly or not sleeping at all, stress, upset, fear, depression.
Here are the numbers: most of these cut in half, all highly significant findings.
The question is why?
Well, the psychological well-being of the CHIP participants
might have been positively affected by increasing feelings of empowerment
and making strides towards reducing their body weight,
improving other health indicators.
As they start eating better and making strides, feelings of despair and failure
may be replaced by a growing sense of accomplishment,
increased social support, a new sense of hope.
Or they may just be physically feeling better.
I mean if your diabetes goes away, that's reason enough to perk you up.
While these before and after results look great, what was missing?
Right, a control group.
Now, you say, "Wait, they each acted as their own control, before and after."
Ah, but you're forgetting about the Hawthorne effect. Remember?
Just being in a study under observation can affect people's behavior.
So if they put you on a scale, weigh you, and say they're going to weigh you again
in 6 months, people may consciously or unconsciously,
just eat better on their own,
even if they're not told to do anything special.
So how much of these improvements would have happened without the CHIP program?
Yeah, it's great that you can take a thousand people
and markedly reduce their risk factor profiles for our leading killer
in just four weeks—I mean, regardless—
but to know exactly what role healthy eating and living advice can play
you need to put it to the test by performing randomized controlled trials.
And as expected, there were small improvements even in the control group,
but for almost all variables the CHIP intervention group showed
significantly greater improvements,
so much so as to have the potential to dramatically reduce the risks
associated with common chronic diseases in the long term.
Ironically, CHIP was so successful in this city of Rockford, Illinois that
dozens of restaurants started offering special plant-based menu options.
So the control group might have been sneaking in some healthier meals too.
OK, but what about the mental health improvements?
A randomized controlled trial,
and those in the CHIP group showed significantly greater improvements
in physical functioning, pain, general health perceptions,
vitality, social functioning, emotional and mental health.
For example, significant improvements in particularly
mild to moderate depression compared to the control group.
And not just right after the program ended, but 6 months later.
So the CHIP acronym started out as the Coronary Health Improvement Project,
but as study after study showed the efficacy of the intervention
in addressing other chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and even depression,
it has since been renamed the Complete Health Improvement Program.
As Hans Diehl, the founder of CHIP, explains it,
we as a society are largely at the mercy of powerful
and manipulative marketing forces that basically tell us what to eat.
Everywhere we look, we're being seduced to the "good life" as marketers define it,
but this so-called "good life" has produced in this country
an avalanche of morbidity and mortality—disease and death.
What he'd like to see in America is not this so-called "good life,"
but the "best life," a simpler lifestyle characterized
by eating more whole plant foods, in other words, foods-as-grown.