Dr. Dean Ornish is a preventive cardiologist at UCSF who's shown for over 2 decades that some people can reverse the symptoms and signs of their coronary heart disease by just diet and meditation alone (see his 1989 JAMA paper titled "Intensive Lifestyle Changes for Reversal of Coronary Heart Disease"). He's been running the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, where he and his team continue research into how changing what you eat and how you handle your stress can influence your health and your body battles disease. 

So it caught my attention when I learned that Dr. Ornish wrote an essay carried by the New York Times ("Eating for Health, Not Weight," 9/22/2012). In it he writes that the purpose of diets should not be to lose weight. Rather, the purpose should be to improve your health. By virtue of eating for health, you'll control your weight. More importantly, you'll feel better and keep disease away. An interesting point he makes is that being obese doesn't always lead to disease. Studies like this one run in JAMA this year (and covered in another NYT piece) have implied that obese people live longer than thinner people. 

Read on...