This 2010 Oz Show segment with Dr. Ornish is outstanding.
Oz (the doctor) check out Oz (the patient)
Why do I say occasionally? Because being in the “entertainment” business requires that he devote many of his daily shows to fad diets and other oddities that simply add to the vast amount of confusion about food & health in our country. But I want my readers to understand that there are some Oz segments that promote powerful truths about your health—but you may have to search for them.
This 4-minute video with Dr. Dean Ornish is one of those times. I had not seen it until this week when one of my readers referred it to me.
—DEAN ORNISH, MD, Founder, Preventive Medicine Research Institute; Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco; and author of The Spectrum and Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease
I like the relaxed manner in which Dr. Ornish describes how people can easily prevent or reverse heart disease. Dr. Oz states that the main problem most people have with Ornish’s dietary guidelines—is that they are too extreme and that most Americans simply cannot do them. Dr. Ornish responds:
- “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” He’s implying that if you don’t have heart disease already that you can probably prevent it by moving toward an optimal diet—even if you don’t choose to go all the way.
- But if you’ve already had a few cardiac events and want to reverse the deadly disease, then you might be motivated to get real serious about embracing his guidelines forever.
- Most importantly, he says that it’s sometimes easier to make BIG changes rather than little ones.
Dr. Dean Ornish, one of the most famous “real doctors” in the world, says just “Get rid of your type 2 diabetes.”
I find that all of the five M.D.s featured in Chapter 1 of our book agree with that. When making radical dietary changes, baby-steps are not recommended for many reasons. From our book, Dr. Ornish is quoted:
In our research, we learned that it is often easier for people to make comprehensive changes in diet and lifestyle than to make only moderate ones. At first, this may seem like a paradox, but it makes sense when you understand why.
If you make only moderate changes in lifestyle—for example, reducing fat intake from the typical American diet of about 40 percent of calories as fat to the conventional dietary guidelines of 30 percent fat—then you have the worst of both worlds.
You feel deprived and hungry because you are not eating everything you want and are used to, but you’re not making changes big enough to feel that much better or to significantly affect your weight or how you feel (or, for that matter, your cholesterol, blood pressure, or heart disease)
Dr. Dean Ornish wrote the cover endorsement—-and we filled the entire book with a heavy dose of “big picture” CLARITY.
Two famous doctors. I can’t end this blog without noting my assessment of these two doctors:
- Dr. Mehmet Oz is the most famous doctor in America; but he now spends most of his time in the entertainment business—meaning that we can’t always depend on his show to provide the best advice when it comes to our health.
- Dr. Dean Ornish is the most famous real doctor in America. He became famous in 1999 after working in the Clinton White House for six years and he has consistently delivered the same sound advice about promoting health through diet and lifestyle changes.
Finally, I would like to share the Ornish endorsement that graces the top of the front cover of our book.
“What’s good for you is also good for our planet. Although heart disease and diabetes kill more people each year worldwide than all other diseases combined, these are completely preventable and even reversible for at least 95% of people today by changing our diet and lifestyle. This book shows you how.”
Consecutive daily blogs
More Dr. Oz blogs for your convenience; some helpful, but most are just plain confusing—doing much more harm than good.
- Friday’s blog. Dr. Oz—still promoting the diet gimmick of the month
- My favorite Oz segment ever. Oz hits a HOME RUN with Julieanna Hever…
- Another great Oz segment. Dr. Oz Show — focusing on plant-based, whole foods
- Another blog about a not-so-great Oz segment. Oz takes “confusion over clarity” to a new level
- Ditto. More “confusion over clarity” from Dr. Oz in TIME
- Ditto. Oz shares colon story; “cancer screening $$ business” gets bigger …
- Ditto. Dr. Oz – back to the same old fad diets…
Happy Holidays! Everyday is a shopping day on Amazon. Want to give the gift of health this year? This may be the answer to your shopping dilemma:
Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com
- The movie that’s changing the lives of millions: Forks Over Knives DVD
- Healthy Eating, Healthy World, The “big picture” about food (our book)
- An essential scientific resource: The China Study by Dr. T. Colin Campbell
- Dr. McDougall’s new book, The Starch Solution, with lots of great recipes.
Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com
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J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.
For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.
Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.
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Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.
—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation
J. Morris Hicks, engineer. writer. big picture guy. 
GOOD MORNING JIM,
The prodigious work reflected in HEALTHY EATING, HEALTHY WORLD continues to deserve the widest possible distribution to all who seek truth. . The Dean Ornish feature of today with video has the merit of being succinct, clearly focused and very easy to watch. The more that this is forwarded to truth seekers, the better. Ditto with “Low Carb vs. Plant-Based.” Note the refreshing RATIONAL strain of consistency evident in Dr. Ornish’s scholarship. The basics – aside from “fine tuning” – justified by new scientific findings – remain as consistent as others on my “short list” of doctors and gurus. E.g Dr. Esselstyn.
So much for RATIONAL fact-based consistency. Contrast Dr. Ornish with Barry Sears’ assertions in the 2000 USDA Great Nutrition Debate that Americans had changed from a high-fat diet to a low-fat diet. DREAM ON. Granted that fat (as % of calories) MAY have declined (albeit minuscule) over the decades, it’s a fact that fat intake (quite often) is a ONLY a common MARKER for animal protein.
Upon request, I’m happy to attach a PDF transcript of Debate to an E-mail for requesters’ review. This file, only 277 KB in size, works well with G-Mail protocol. Although the DVD video and MP3 audio files are too large for E-Mail attachments, beyond postage fees, I can send them FREE to requesters. Burning DVD and CD media is not that time consuming – so far at least. We’ll see how this works out.
MEANWHILE, see above cited You Tube VIDEO. Google “USDA Great Nutrition Debate.” My web site will be brought up to speed in 2012 – with greater resources on health issues.
The goal is to get 2013 Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to do what Dan Glickman did in 2000. Beyond more “feel good” preaching to the choir, Politicians I’m in contact with may help effort.
One state at a time? Hope to learn what works politically in other states. Who knows whom?
CHEERS.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson