Know How Not To Diet

Surely, if there were a safe, simple, side effect–free solution

to obesity, we would know about it by now, right?

I’m not so sure.

It takes an estimated average of seventeen years before

evidence from scientific research is incorporated into day-

to-day clinical practice.1 One example that was particularly

poignant for my family: heart disease. Decades ago, Dr.

Dean Ornish and colleagues published evidence in one of

the most prestigious medical journals in the world that our

leading cause of death could be reversed with diet and

lifestyle changes alone2—yet this monumental discovery

was effectively ignored at the time.3 Even now, hundreds of

thousands of Americans continue to perish every year from

what we learned nearly thirty years ago is an arrestable,

reversible condition. In fact, I had seen such a reversal with

my own eyes.