The Ornish Diet By Dr. Dean Ornish

Following the Ornish diet may even reverse heart disease, and help us achieve heart health.

Remember that the purpose of a diet is to give us the proper boost; giving you the tools you need to begin living a healthy active lifestyle.

Each person is different, we all know our own needs, wants, and cravings and deep down we all know our own strengths and weaknesses.

We should choose the diet or technique that helps us in our unique way to achieve the goal we want to obtain.

This is to live a happy active lifestyle and avoiding heart disease and other life threatening diseases.

Dr. Dean Ornish in his book Reversing heart disease recommends the Heart reversal diet.

This Ornish diet is basically a vegetarian diet, making sure not to eat any cholesterol, and is very low in fat.

These are the general guidelines

• Fat less than 10% of calories
• Carbohydrates 70% to 75% of calories
• Protein 15% to 20% of calories
• no more than 5 mg cholesterol per day

These are the permitted foods

Animal products:

• Egg whites
• Non-fat milk or Yogurt

Foods to be eaten are:

• fresh fruits
• vegetables
• whole grains
• pasta
• rice
• breads
• cereals
• soups
• salads
• dried beans and legumes
• No coffee and minimum amounts of alcohol

The ornish diet Program

There are many that consider Dr. Ornish's diet to be the best diet for heart disease and for losing weight. In his book Reversing Heart disease, he has many vegetarian low-fat recipes that can be prepared and used while on this diet.

The diet is part of a healthy living program to reverse heart disease; the other parts are

• Yoga
• Meditation
• Visualizations
• Exercise
• Support groups

The book is an extremely interesting read for anyone who has or is concerned that he is genetically prone to getting heart disease.

The critics of the ornish diet

The critics say that that the diet is too low in essential fats that the diet is too restrictive, and it is extremely difficult to adopt such a low-fat regiment as a lifestyle choice. There are other critics who say that not eating any cholesterol at all may increase type two LDL's which are the smaller LDL particles, which may even be more dangerous than the larger LDL particles.