Dr Caldwell Esselstyn Quotes

physicians, Drs. Bill Castelli, Bill Roberts and Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., that in their long careers they had never seen a heart disease fatality among their patients who had blood cholesterol levels below 150 mg/dL. Dr. Castelli was the long-time director of the famous Framingham Heart Study of NIH; Dr. Esselstyn was a renowned surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who did a remarkable study reversing heart disease (chapter five); Dr. Roberts has long been editor of the prestigious medical journal Cardiology. BLOOD CHOLESTEROL AND DIET

Are vegetarian diets an effective alternative, or complement, to drugs and surgery? Although studies designed to answer this question are limited in number and small in size, their results are encouraging. In 1990, Dr. Dean Ornish demonstrated that a very low-fat vegetarian diet (less than 10 per cent calories from fat) and lifestyle changes (stress management, aerobic exercise, and group therapy) could not only slow the progression of atherosclerosis, but significantly reverse it. After one year, 82 per cent of the experimental group participants experienced regression of their disease, while in the control group the disease continued to progress. The control group followed a “heart healthy” diet commonly prescribed by physicians that provided less than 30 per cent calories from fat and less than 200 milligrams of cholesterol a day. Over the next four years, people in the experimental group continued to reverse their arterial damage, while those in the control group became steadily worse and had twice as many cardiac events. In 1999, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn reported on a twelve-year study of eleven patients following a very low-fat vegan diet, coupled with cholesterol-lowering medication. Approximately 70 per cent experienced reversal of their disease. In the eight years prior to the study, these patients experienced a total of forty-eight cardiac events, while in over a decade of the trial, only one non-compliant patient experienced an event.

Some people think the plant-based, whole-foods diet is extreme. Half a million people a year will have their chests opened up and a vein taken from their leg and sewn onto their coronary artery. Some people would call that extreme.” —DR. CALDWELL ESSELSTYN N

Equally influential is Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. A former surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, as well as a Yale-trained rower who garnered Olympic gold at the 1956 Melbourne Summer Games, Dr. Esselstyn concludes from a twenty-year nutritional study that a plant-based, whole-food diet can not only prevent and stop the progression of heart disease, but also reverse its effects.

I didn’t invent my regimen from whole cloth. It’s built on a foundation of scientific data generated by leading medical professionals and other experts in the field: people like Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University and author of The China Study, a groundbreaking book published in 2005 that examines the close relationship between the consumption of animal proteins and the onset of chronic and degenerative illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, and obesity. In one of the largest epidemiological studies ever conducted, Professor Campbell and his peers determined that a plant-based, whole-food diet can minimize and actually reverse the development of these chronic diseases. Equally influential is Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. A former surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, as well as a Yale-trained rower who garnered Olympic gold at the 1956 Melbourne Summer Games, Dr. Esselstyn concludes from a twenty-year nutritional study that a plant-based, whole-food diet can not only prevent and stop the progression of heart disease, but also reverse its effects.