"dean ornish" news and stories

I don't know about you, but even though I love every sunny, poolside moment of summer, I secretly rejoice when the days start to get shorter and the air a little chillier. The end of summer means the beginning of fall, and that means I get to drop kick my bathing suit and body-baring shorts and tanktops. I don't have to be so conscious of what I'm eating. And not eating.

But "dieting" isn't a seasonal activity. People watch what they eat year-round. According to Forbes, "Americans spent an estimated $46 billion on diet products and self-help books in 2004." If that's the case, why is obesity such a problem in the US? Because, as a government review has found, two-thirds of dieters on "diet regimes" will regain all the weight that they lost within a year. Give them five years, and almost everyone will gain it back.

People gain the weight back for a number of reasons, but one of them is that the popular diet programs are very expensive, especially since many health and nutrition experts believe that they are ineffective to begin with. Forbes examined the weekly menus of the ten most popular diets to find out just how expensive they really are. The results are listed below. The first dollar amount is how much the program costs per week for any associated book, membership fees, and food costs, and the second percentage is how much more that is than the average $55.44 a normal person spends on food.

• Jenny Craig - $137.65, 152.8%
• NutriSytem - $113.52, 108.5%
• Atkins - $100.52, 84.6%
• Weight Watchers - $96.64, 77.5%
• Zone Diet - $92.84, 70.5%
• Ornish - $78.75, 44.6%
• South Beach - $78.76, 44.4%
• SlimFast - $77.73, 42.8%
• Sugar Busters - $69.62, 27.9%
• Subway - $68.80, 26%

Whatever happened to good old fashioned "eat less, exercise more?" I think that's free.

Source

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the three-day Global Economics Conference, hosted by economic research powerhouse, the Milken Institute. Because one of the main themes of the conference was on health, healthcare, and the aging population, several of the seminars featured physicians (and authors who write about "diets!"). One of the panel discussions was called Nutrition and Health, Separating Fact from Fiction, with cardiologist Caldwell Esselstyn from the Cleveland Clinic, Francine Kaufman from USC's Department of Pediatrics and Children's Hospital of LA, Samuel Klein from the Washington University School of Medicine, Dean Ornish, from the University of California, San Francisco Medical School, and Harold Schmitz, Chief Science Officer, Mars Inc..

The biggest take away from that discussion was that the American diet is toxic, and that going toward an 80% plant-based diet will save your cardiovascular system in the long run. Of course, Harold Schmitz from Mars, Inc. was very heartily promoting the cardiovascular benefits of chocolate.

Check out the notes from the panel discussion at Blogging Milken.