If you eat the standard Western diet that most people eat in the modern world, you will surely develop heart disease, and may die from it. But there are other options. When it comes to treating heart disease, most doctors promote drugs, expensive, invasive testing, high-tech medical procedures and heart surgery as the standard options. A significant number of research studies have documented that heart disease is easily and almost completely preventable through a diet rich in plant produce and lower in processed foods and animal products. Removing the foods that cause blood vessel damage and providing the body with copious phytonutrients can facilitate the body’s natural healing processes to reverse existing heart disease and restore quality of life.
Successful heart disease reversal with lifestyle changes have been reported in the scientific literature and the mass media. In the 1990s the low-fat, vegetarian diet devised by Dr. Dean Ornish provided the first hard evidence that heart disease could be reversed – that atherosclerotic plaques could regress – with diet and lifestyle changes alone.1 Similar results were found by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. 2 More recently, Bill Clinton began following the recommendations of Drs. Ornish and Essesltyn, which attracted the attention of the media, sending the message that heart disease is truly a disease caused by poor diet and inactivity – a disease with a diet and lifestyle cure.