Dr. Dean Ornish, a Harvard clinical Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, regularly reverses severe coronary heart disease without bypass surgery. In his book Everyday Cooking he recommends, "All oils are excluded because they are liquid fat. Even olive oil is 14 percent saturated fat and 100 perfect total fat. The more olive oil you eat, the higher your cholesterol level will rise and the more weight you will gain. If you did nothing more than exclude all oils from your diet...your cholesterol and weight decrease."
General comments from me:
All diseases have the same root: congestion, clogging, stagnation, and toxicity. It settles in the heart or the liver or the pancreas, or in the joints in the form of arthritis—wherever the individual body is weakest. Thus, the cure is the same for the basis of all diseases: change the diet, and exercise.
Get rid of the saturated fat. Sorry, any advocates of the Paleo Diet who are reading this: meat and dairy products are full of saturated fat and acid and they offer no fiber. Those are three strikes against it. None of these problems are associated with people who make plant-based dietary choices.
Also (if you want to live longer) get rid of the simple carbohydrates: junk food, pastries, all white sugar and fruit juices, and chips. Replace them with more rice and beans to achieve that full satiated feeling. The other is knocking you around with too much sugar.
Keep in mind that all food has an emotional component, a strong one that was built by force of habit, so our minds must take hold of self-management. Just start by veering north deliberately with some grit. How you feel will be its own reward, if you do.
Here's a quick poem that reminds us of four positively good types of food to consume in generous quantities--and the reason why:
Berries and beans,
Walnuts and greens
Lengthen life's brevity
With healthful longevity.
Side note: if you want to see the effects of fat on a large scale, read this and look at these National Geographic photos of a thousand tons of food waste fat that had clogged London sewers. Here's just the caption to the photo:
"Shoveling fat under London's glittering Leicester Square last week, a worker helps remove the estimated 1,000 tons of oily solid waste that had completely blocked the sewer, creating a risk of flooding and sewage spills.
To eradicate ten years' worth of such food waste—enough to fill nine London double-decker buses—from under the city's busy West End, the private Thames Water company has drafted teams of "flushers."
"`We're used to getting our hands dirty, but nothing on this scale,' sewer flusher Danny Brackley (not pictured) said. `We couldn't even access the sewer, as it was blocked by a 4-foot-thick [120-centimeter-thick] wall of solid fat.'"
