Low-Fat Diet Guru Swims Against Swelling Tide

Wed April 30, 2003 10:26 AM ET

By Adam Tanner

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SAUSALITO, California (Reuters) - Dean Ornish, America's best-known advocate of a low-fat diet, takes a few bites of his granola cereal with soy milk and pushes it across the table in rejection.

"This is not the granola that they used to serve here so I can't eat this; it's too fatty," he says at a cafe opposite his office in Sausalito, an area of natural beauty and hundreds of boats bobbing along the panoramic waterfront.

He then orders an egg-white omelet with spinach and peppers, asking the chef to use as little oil as possible in the cooking. A slice of melon smiles from the plate's side.

Ornish, with wiry orange-brown hair and a slender frame, lives the message he preaches: Eat a low-fat diet and feel better and healthier. He laughs when pushing away his granola, but bristles at any notion he is a priggish diet freak.

"I am not trying to be the school marm, saying what you are doing is bad. I am not the food police," says the director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute.

"I don't care what people do as long as they know what the effects of those choices are. And if most people knew if they were willing to make these changes how much better they could feel, then many people might want to try that."

FAT NATION

In recent years, many have heard about his recommended diet of lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains and beans, no fatty dairy products or meats. Ornish's books such as "Eat More, Weigh Less" are best-sellers, and he even advised then U.S. President Bill Clinton and the White House chefs.

The problem is many Americans are ignoring the message.

"There is clearly an obesity epidemic," he says later at his office, booting up a laptop computer at his four-story wood-framed institute overlooking the waterfront. "Americans are eating more fat and more simple carbohydrates than ever."

He shows a series of computer maps of the United States that illustrate obesity state by state since 1985 to show a stunning increase in fatness from sea to shining sea.

Today, more than 60 percent of Americans are overweight, half of whom are obese, meaning they lug around so many extra pounds that their health is at risk. Yet the fat trend is ever expanding.

"There has been a bit of a backlash against, not only just low-fat eating, but healthy living in general," says Ornish, who is also a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "You used to find a lot more people interested in jogging and exercise and lifting weights and going to the gym and there is less of that now."

THE HIGH-FAT BACKLASH

One reason is a recent wave of publicity around diet doctor Robert Atkins, advocate of a popular but controversial high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet. The Atkins approach embraces steak, cheese, butter and other items verboten in the low-fat lifestyle.

The medical establishment has criticized the program, but several recent studies have shown that the diet can help people lose weight without damaging their health.

Texas-born Ornish grows animated as he complains that many articles on the Atkins diet compare it to an American Heart Association low-fat diet he considers not very low in fat and high in simple carbohydrates.

"People think it's like Woody Allen in 'Sleeper'... where science finally proves that steak is good for you," he says.

In the 1973 comedy Allen's character wakes up 200 years in the future to find a very different world in which steak, cream pies and fudge are engines of good health.

A sealed package of pork rinds does sit behind Ornish's desk, a joke from another doctor about the very foods barred under his diet approach.

"It doesn't frustrate me that some people may choose to do a diet other than what I recommend," he says. "What frustrates me is when they do it based on misinformation."

"What also frustrates me is how uncritically the media have embraced the high-protein diets because it tells people what they want to hear."

Atkins died in April at age 72, yet Ornish expects that the public debate about their differing approaches will grow even more heated in the months to come. "What we are going to see is a steady stream of articles saying Atkins diet better than a quote low-fat diet," he predicts warily.

GOOD SCIENCE NOT ENOUGH

Ornish reels off details about studies on the benefits of a low-fat diet at machine-gun speed, including one showing how it can even help curb prostate cancer.

He also recalls his earlier work was the first to show that diet and lifestyle changes would reverse heart disease.

Another study highlighting the importance of diet released last week shows that fatter people face a dramatically higher risk of developing cancer.

Yet in a country where an unending barrage of advertisements invites the hungry public to consume massive portions of delectables, Ornish knows his facts and figures are not enough to change eating habits.

"I used to think that if I just did good science that would change medical practice and human behavior, and that was very naive," he says. "It is not enough to say you are going to prevent something bad from happening years down the road."

So he writes books, appears on television programs such as the popular Oprah Winfrey show, gives speeches and consults.

"We don't talk about things like living longer, risk-factor reduction and prevention, which are just boring for most people," he says. "We say there is no point in giving up something that you enjoy unless you get back something that is better, and not 30 years later for the heart attack that doesn't come."

He says his low-fat diet will make people feel better, infuse them more energy, sweeten their breath and even improve sexual function.

Yet in the real world, it is not always easy to meet those standards, as Ornish himself concedes.

At a San Francisco black-tie tribute to actor Dustin Hoffman last week, diners paid $350-$1,000 to enjoy either a thick steak or vegetarian option of "polenta and spinach tower" and listen to barbs by luminaries such as Robin Williams.

Yet even the vegetarian option, with its roasted eggplant, zucchini slivers and asparagus, fell short of Ornish's low-fat standards because of the rich cheese-flavored polenta. The doctor came prepared however. He ate before he arrived.

He later confesses he might have eaten some of the polenta if he did not have to leave the dinner early. He then confesses his own food weaknesses: "I eat ice cream occasionally, and I eat a little bit of chocolate every day."