Eat well. Move more. Stress less. Love more. I grew up hearing about Dean Ornish, and heard more about him when I came to Satchidananda Ashram because he was a successful healthcare leader who’d been a student of Swami Satchidananda. He’s said that “all of [his] work is based on what [he] learned from [Swami Satchidananda]” – work that seeks to show it’s possible to reverse illnesses like heart disease with simple tools like healthy diet, exercise, meditation, and healthy personal relationships. With US healthcare projected to reach about 20% of GDP by 2028 – $1 out of every $5 of goods and services produced – in a complex system that places a heavy emphasis on drugs and surgery, I find it exciting that Dean Ornish offers treatments that aim to put patients in charge of their own healthcare through natural means and with comparatively less cost.
Biography:
Dean Ornish, M.D., directed clinical research proving, for the first time, the heart disease and early-stage prostate cancer may be stopped or even reversed by comprehensive lifestyle changes, without drugs or surgery. He is founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. His newest research was the first to show that changing your lifestyle changes your genes – “turning on” disease-preventing genes, and “turning off” genes that promote breast cancer, heart disease, and other illness, and increasing telomeres – the ends of your chromosomes that control how long you live. Our genes are not our fate.
He is Medical Editor of The Huffington Post, chairs the Google Health Advisory Council, and authored six best-selling books including his most recent, “Undo It!” He was recognized as one of the “Time 100” in integrative medicine, and chosen by LIFE magazine as “one of the fifty most influential members of his generation”.
