On this day in vegan history · July 21, 1990
The Lifestyle Heart Trial
A cardiologist put a strict low-fat vegetarian diet up against standard heart care in a randomized trial, then checked the arteries with angiograms to see who was right.
The facts
- Published
- The Lancet, July 21, 1990 (vol. 336, no. 8708, pp. 129-133)
- Trial design
- 28 patients on a low-fat vegetarian diet, stress management, and moderate exercise vs. 20 patients on usual care, no lipid-lowering drugs
- Measurement
- 195 coronary artery lesions analyzed by quantitative angiography at baseline and 1 year
- Result
- Average stenosis regressed from 40.0% to 37.8% in the lifestyle group and progressed from 42.7% to 46.1% in the control group
On July 21, 1990, The Lancet published Dean Ornish and colleagues' Lifestyle Heart Trial, a randomized study asking whether diet and lifestyle alone could affect coronary artery disease, without drugs. Twenty-eight patients followed a low-fat vegetarian diet, quit smoking, took up stress management training, and exercised moderately; twenty patients got usual medical care instead. Researchers measured 195 coronary lesions by quantitative angiography before the trial and again a year later. The lifestyle group's arteries narrowed less than before; the control group's kept narrowing further. It was the first randomized controlled trial to show measurable regression of coronary atherosclerosis from lifestyle change alone.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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Comprehensive lifestyle changes may be able to bring about regression of even severe coronary atherosclerosis after only 1 year, without use of lipid-lowering drugs.
Dean Ornish and coauthors, abstract of "Can lifestyle changes reverse coronary heart disease? The Lifestyle Heart Trial," The Lancet, July 21, 1990
Source: PubMed
Why it still matters
It gave the idea that food could treat heart disease a hard number instead of a hunch, and opened the door to lifestyle medicine being taken seriously as treatment rather than dismissed as mere advice.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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