Diet Expert Gets to the Heart of the Matter

No meat, no chicken, no fish, no oil, no whole dairy products.

That sums up the weight-loss advice of Dean Ornish, a deadpan cardiologist who never met a legume he didn’t like.

Armed with years of research and a heaping portion of common sense, Ornish is methodically mincing the nutritional status quo into so much vegetarian ratatouille.

How hot is Ornish? Nearly 1,000 people showed up to hear him speak in Santa Monica recently. Saint John’s Hospital, which sponsored the free lecture, said space ran out two days after the talk was publicized.

Ornish’s two books, “Reversing Heart Disease” and “Eat More, Weigh Less,” have rocketed onto best-seller lists.

Drawn by the wise and gentle guidance of this unassuming low-fat guru, I witnessed his Santa Monica oration more as a glassy-eyed disciple than an impartial journalist.

What can I say? I love the guy. In the course of a month, Ornish has taken my desire to shed a few pounds--60 of them, to be precise--and introduced me to a low-fat, high-volume vegetarian promised land. Under his counsel, I have abandoned such staples as Corn Dog Wellington and 12-Cheese Pizza with Dove Bar sauce for more flavorful, satisfying fare, namely . . . grain.

No, the transition has not been effortless, but it has been far easier than many of you blood-thirsty meat-eaters might expect. In fact, a central Ornish theme is that most people find it easier to radically change their diets than to cut back on the bad stuff, one bratwurst at a time.

Merely reduce the amount of fatty foods you eat, says the Dean of Lean, and you’ll crave them more than ever. But eliminate such fare altogether, and quicker than you can say “steamed broccoli,” healthy eating becomes a habit.

Comfortably sated by mass quantities of plant matter, you will find yourself strolling untempted past whole bins of grease-embalmed pork grenades and other artery cloggers. Not only will you no longer covet such foods, but you’ll come to regard them with an indifference bordering on disdain. You might even start lecturing friends and co-workers on the evils of demon meat. You might expound endlessly on the myriad uses of nonfat yogurt. You might puree eggplant.

In short, you might become a crashing bore.

You might also lose some weight.

By following the Ornish regimen, which includes regular, moderate exercise, I have shed 10 pounds in a little more than a month. I’m now a Tinkerbell-esque 270.

“That’s great,” Ornish said with a Buddha-like smile as we chatted before his talk.

At the risk of angering the great master, I confessed that I was a bit disappointed that I had not lost more. But Ornish, who is director of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, urged me to keep the faith. This may not be the fastest way to lose weight, he assured me, but it’s the most lasting.

To underscore his point, he told me about an obese patient who was placed on the program and instructed not to weigh himself for a full year. Twelve months later, he had lost an average of seven pounds per month, which added up to a whopping 84 pounds.

Ornish, a proponent of meditation and other holistic techniques, proved even more inspiring during his formal presentation. He lambasted federal guidelines that call for Americans to limit their daily fat intake to 30% of total calories. (For example, if you consume 2,000 calories, no more than 600 should come from fat). But to make a serious dent in heart disease and obesity, Ornish contends, fat intake should be reduced to 5% to 10% of total calories.

“If we just put into practice what we already know, heart disease could be wiped out 95% of the time, like malaria,” he said.

Like others, Ornish suggests a link between low-fat eating and the low rates of cancer and heart disease in China and other cheeseburger-deprived countries.

But the notion that a healthy diet can actually reverse heart disease is something new.

As the audience gasped in amazement, Ornish showed before-and-after slides of clogged arteries becoming dramatically clearer after patients embarked on a 10%-or-less fat regimen. Despite his training as a cardiologist, he was almost scornful of angioplasty, heart bypasses and other high-tech treatments that fail to address the underlying cause of heart disease.

“It’s somehow conservative to cut someone’s chest open and blow a balloon up in their arteries, and it’s radical to stop smoking, walk, eat vegetables and meditate,” he said to a hearty round of applause.

So persuasive was Ornish that no one in the audience seemed to care that he weighs nearly 400 pounds. (Just kidding.) Actually, Ornish is a trim ex-Texan who believed meat made him sluggish so he gave it up at age 19.

His interest in diet eventually led to groundbreaking clinical studies on heart disease. An unintended consequence of his work with heart patients was that they lost weight on a low-fat program. So he tailored the approach for the general public in his book, “Eat More, Weigh Less,” which includes a sizable collection of gourmet low-fat recipes.

Unfortunately, no one in our busy modern household has time to prepare them, least of all my razor-thin, not-so-subtle girlfriend who bought me Ornish’s book in the first place.

She, of course, eats ANYTHING she wants, including whole-milk ice cream and beef tallow STRAIGHT FROM THE CAN and yet she never gains a SINGLE OUNCE AND I HATE HER AND I HATE DEAN ORNISH AND . . . Time to meditate.

The point is that even if you don’t use the recipes in the book, it’s easy to improvise. For example, black bean burritos with tofu and nonfat sour cream make for a quick and tasty meal.

My plan is to eat this way for a year and see what happens. I’ll either be very thin or very angry.

So pass the damn celery.