HEALTH WATCH: Love of life vs fear of death

By Michael Greger MD

WHY DON’T more doctors practice preventive cardiology? Time availability is a reason frequently cited by physicians, but if you probe a little deeper, the number one reason given was their perception that patients fear being deprived of all the junk they’re eating.

Can you imagine a doctor saying, “I’d like to tell my patients to stop smoking, but I know how much they love it”?

Changes in diet to reduce cholesterol levels are often assumed to result in reductions in quality of life. Do we get to live longer or is it just going to feel longer? Contrary to popular belief, studies have  found  no apparent reduction, but rather an improvement in some measures of quality of life and patient satisfaction using  nutrition therapy as opposed to drugs for high cholesterol.

Whereas people taking cholesterol-lowering drugs don’t feel any different, studies have found that those using dietary changes reported significantly better health and satisfaction, and better life in general. More positive feelings and fewer negative.

In the Family Heart Study, for example, those placed on a cholesterol lowering diet showed significantly greater improvements in depression as well as a reduction in aggressive hostility.

Another barrier to preventive cardiology is that doctors don’t realize how powerful dietary changes can be. The importance of diet for patients’ health remains underestimated by doctors. Even the new drug-centered cholesterol guidelines emphasize that lifestyle modification should be the foundation for the reduction for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk. Despite this, more than half of physicians may skip over lifestyle change completely and jump straight to their prescription pad doubting that cholesterol goals can be reached with lifestyle changes alone.

According to the Director of the famous Framingham Heart Study  the best way to manage coronary artery disease is to lower patients’ LDL cholesterol and other atherosclerosis-causing particles. “You can achieve this with diet plus drugs, but if you can do it with a vegetarian diet, it works even better.” In the Framingham Heart Study, those running in the Boston Marathon achieved the goal of getting their total to good cholesterol ratio under four, but the vegetarians did even better.

And if you go all out, putting people on a very high fiber, whole-food vegetable, fruit, and nut diet, you can get a 25 percent drop in the bad to good cholesterol ratio within one week and a 33 percent drop in LDL. That’s the cholesterol-reduction equivalent to a therapeutic dose of a cholesterol-lowering statin drug.

Dr. Ornish talks about how diet can be more sustainable than drugs, since compliance is more based on love-of-life rather than fear-of-death

Many physicians just weren’t taught the power of diet: