For almost four decades, Dr. Ornish and his colleagues at the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and the University of California, San Francisco have conducted clinical research proving the many benefits of his program of comprehensive lifestyle changes. These include:

a whole foods, plant-based diet (naturally low in fat and refined carbohydrates);
stress management techniques (including yoga and meditation);
moderate exercise (such as walking); and
social support and community (love and intimacy).
In short—eat well, move more, stress less, and love more.

They used the latest high-tech state-of-the-art scientific technology to prove the power of simple lifestyle changes: eat well, stress less, move more, love more.

It remains the only program scientifically proven to reverse heart disease in randomized controlled trials published in the leading peer-reviewed journals. Angina (chest pain) was reduced by over 90% and blood flow to the heart improved significantly in just three weeks. After one year, coronary arteries became significantly less clogged, and there was even more improvement after five years.

Also, Dr. Ornish’s program has been proven to reverse type 2 diabetes and may slow, stop, or even reverse the progression of early-stage prostate cancer. Most people who were told that they would need to take drugs for the rest of their lives to lower their cholesterol levels, blood pressure, or blood sugar have been able to reduce or even discontinue these under their doctor’s supervision.

Changing your lifestyle also changes your genes—turning on (upregulating) protective genes that help keep us healthy, and turning off (downregulating) genes that cause oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, and the genes that promote prostate cancer, breast cancer, and colon cancer—over 500 genes in only three months. Our genes are a predisposition, but are genes are not our fate.

In collaboration with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for her pioneering work with telomeres and telomerase, Dr. Ornish and his colleagues found that these lifestyle changes lengthened telomeres, the ends of our chromosomes that regulate longevity—in a real sense, beginning to reverse aging at a cellular level.

Here are the latest findings from the nearly 4,000 patients who went through Dr. Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease in a study via Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield in Pennsylvania, Nebraska, and West Virginia:

Overall adherence after 1 year was 88%.
The average patient lost 13.3 pounds in the first 12 weeks and 15.9 pounds after 1 year.
There were significant reductions in systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, total cholesterol, triglycerides, and LDL-cholesterol after 12 weeks and also after 1 year.
Exercise capacity increased from 8.7 to 10.6 METS after 12 weeks (18% increase) and to 10.8 METS after one year (24% increase).
Significant reductions in depression and hostility (the emotions most strongly linked with heart disease) after 12 weeks that were still significant after 1 year.
Hemoglobin A1C in diabetics decreased from 7.4% at baseline to 6.5% after 12 weeks and 6.8% after one year (complications of diabetes such as blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, and amputations can be prevented when hemoglobin A1C is less than 7.0%).
95% of patients reported improvement in severity of angina (chest pain) after 1 year.
These studies show how powerful comprehensive lifestyle changes can be, how dynamic these mechanisms are, and how quickly benefits may occur.