Dean Ornish

Dean Ornish (born July 16, 1953, Dallas, Texas, U.S.) American physician and author whose approach to treating heart disease through radical diet modification and exercise generated significant debate in the medical community and attracted a popular following.

Ornish was raised in Dallas by his father, a dentist, and his mother, a children’s book author and filmmaker. He attended Rice University in Houston but dropped out after experiencing severe depression and mononucleosis. Ornish eventually received a bachelor’s degree in humanities (1975) from the University of Texas at Austin, graduating first in his class. He received an M.D. (1980) in internal medicine from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Ornish then moved to the Boston area for a clinical fellowship at Harvard Medical School and an internship and residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, which he completed in 1984.

Ornish moved to San Francisco in July 1984 after accepting a teaching position at the University of California School of Medicine. That year Ornish also founded the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute (PMRI) in nearby Sausalito. He began the Lifestyle Heart Trial, a controlled study of the effects of a low-fat diet and stress-management regime on a small group of heart disease patients, implementing a unique approach to treating heart disease that he developed in the late 1970s while he was still a student. The diet limited fats to 10 percent of total caloric intake and cholesterol to only 5 mg a day, mainly through eliminating animal products and processed foods. (In contrast, the recommendations of the American Heart Association allowed up to 30 percent of total calories from fat and 300 mg of cholesterol daily.) In addition to giving up smoking and fatty foods, the test subjects did yoga, meditated, and participated in a support group. Ornish believed that the stress-management aspect of his program, designed to combat social isolation as well as daily pressures, was as essential to his patients’ recovery as diet and physical activity.

The results of the trial, published in 1990, revealed that at least some effects of coronary atherosclerosis had been reversed in many patients. That conclusion contrasted with standard medical treatment of heart disease, which typically relied upon cholesterol-lowering medications and the use of invasive and potentially risky procedures, such as coronary artery bypass surgery and angioplasty. In August 1993 the insurance company Mutual of Omaha announced that it would reimburse policyholders for the cost of participation in Ornish’s program, marking the first time a major insurer had agreed to cover an alternative treatment for heart disease. Medicare followed suit in 2006.

Ornish studied the effects of a similar regimen on prostate cancer patients and in 2008 concluded that adherence to the lifestyle changes recommended by the program slowed progression of the cancer. Some colleagues claimed that the admonitions of his program were entirely unrealistic and that patients not under supervision would in all likelihood return to their previous, unhealthy habits. Others expressed skepticism because his experimental methods did not attempt to account for the ways in which each component of his program affected the results.

Ornish was a physician consultant to U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2000 and served on the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy in 2001–02. In March 1998 he partnered with ConAgra Foods to release a line of vegetarian foods. Companies such as McDonald’s consulted him on the formulation of healthier foods, and he held lucrative positions on the advisory boards of PepsiCo and Safeway. Ornish wrote several popular books, including Stress, Diet, and Your Heart (1982), Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease: The Only System Scientifically Proven to Reverse Heart Disease Without Drugs or Surgery (1990), The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health (2007), and Undo It!: How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases (2019; written with his wife, Anne Ornish).