Have you heard of the 2021 Food Revolution Summit with John & Ocean Robbins? Every spring for the last ten years I have signed up for their summit without hesitation, and once again, they have knocked it out of the park. 🙂
Dr. Dean Ornish has been a regular guest speaker over the years, and here is an excerpt from his latest interview with John Robbins on why the treatment protocol for reversing heart disease is the same for reversing diabetes, obesity, some types of cancers, and many auto-immune diseases as well. And oh yeah, the elephant in the room that nobody in the media wants to talk about: Eating well (a plant based diet), exercising, stressing less, and loving more are the best ways to lower your risk for hospitalization and death due to COVID-19!
Dr. Dean Ornish: “I was trained like all doctors to view these diseases you mentioned – heart disease, type II diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, obesity, early stage prostate cancer, perhaps dementia, autoimmune diseases – as being fundamentally different diseases, different diagnoses and different treatments. And it kind of hit me, in what in retrospect may seem like a blinding flash of the obvious, that the reason why these same lifestyle changes were so powerful is that these diseases are not really so different from each other. They have more in common than they have different.
Because they all share the same underlying biological mechanisms. Things like chronic inflammation, changes in the microbiome and telomeres, gene expression, overstimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, changes in angiogenesis, apoptosis, immune function, and so on. And each one of these mechanisms, in turn, is directly influenced by what we eat, how we respond to stress, how much exercise, and how much love and support we have.
It also helps to explain why you often find that, what are called comorbidities, the same person will have heart disease and type II diabetes, and high blood pressure, and high cholesterol and be overweight and so on. Because they’re really just different expressions of the same underlying mechanisms. And again, why these same lifestyle changes can be so powerful in addressing such a wide variety of chronic diseases both in reversing and preventing them…
The people who are most likely to die from being exposed to the coronavirus, or getting sick from the coronavirus are those who have chronic diseases. The ones we’ve been mentioning. And so most of the focus so far has been on preventing exposure to the virus, which of course is very important. You know, staying at home, social distancing, washing your hands, gloves, disinfectants, and so on.
But relatively little has been written about the other half of the equation, which is, first of all, how to reduce your risk of getting these chronic diseases, or to reverse them if you have them. And also how to enhance your immune system so that if you are exposed, you can reduce your chances of getting sick, or at least to mitigate the intensity of the disease.
Some people have very mild cases and some people die from it. And the chronic diseases really are a big factor in that. And the four aspects of our lifestyle medicine program – eat well (a plant based diet), move more, stress less, love more – not only have been proven to reverse a wide variety of chronic diseases that often predispose someone to having bad outcomes if they get COVID, but also they enhance immune function.”
