How well does a truly low-carbohydrate diet stack up against the Ornish approach?

Hard to say since no well-controlled trials have been conducted with the necessary three groups: the controls, the Ornish group and the low-carb group…..with the latter two making changes to their dietary habits only (no stress reduction, no exercise, no other changes, period) over an extended period of time (say, at least six months) with accurate patient education for each dietary approach (ie. low-carb isn’t indoctrinated about saturated fat is bad, bad, bad and made to believe they need to use liquid vegetable oils instead of butter or eating meat) and with both groups expected to consume similar intake of non-starchy vegetables (perhaps, say, 3-cups per person per day), along with each provided the same fish oil supplements and multivitamin a day. If one or the other group winds up eating more or less vegetables, fine, but both must be educated to target similar intake of non-starchy vegetables to have a fair comparison.

Dr. Ornish states he prefers including people in his research team whom are sometimes even “hostile” to his ideas - hey, do this study, and I’ll handle patient education for the low-carb subjects and I can guarantee they’ll not only have a higher rate of compliance, they’ll also do better with intake of essential micronutrients too….something he doesn’t talk much about, huh?

Where I do totally agree with Dr. Ornish - stress plays a very big role in our lives and how our health is effected over time with too much stress. I do think that is a HUGE contributing factor to the benefits found in his data - that subjects are taught how to reduce stress, how to pay more attention to their stress levels, and how important the mind-body-spirit connection is in our health. It’s also a huge confounding variable in his data that is not acknowledged as such. But I digress!

Off to the next installment….

Part of the problem with Dr O. is that he uses the wrong diagnostic tools to judge the effectiveness of his approach vis a vis cardio-vascular disease. He doesn’t employ, or indeed refer to, calcium scores. Instead he employs nuclear stress tests and other tests and imaging techniques. As you would know from Dr Davis and his Track Your Plaque program, the Ornish approach does not improve CVD — it makes it worse. Dr Davis has had fantastic success, as you would know from your interview with him.

I know that your Ornish interviews are now done and dusted, but did this vital aspect come up in part 4?

Michael Richards

I see he didn’t really want to open up pandora’s box by answering your question on the Inuit. He does admit we in essence don’t know what we don’t know when it comes to diet and there is more to learn.

I believe he misses the whole point of Taubes book proving he hasn’t read it (which you said today in the GCBC forum that he hasn’t). Taubes asks for real science on the carbohydrate hypothesis. That was all he was asking for as the previous stuff was all bad science.