Dr. Dean Ornish
It’s not just because of what she’s done, which is extraordinary. It’s who she is.
Faced with an overwhelming cancer diagnosis, Kris grabbed the reins and became a voracious student of all things health and wellness. She transformed her life and became a shining example of an “empowered participant” in her body, mind, and spiritual health. She was able to integrate the best of modern medicine and ancient healing traditions to transform a diagnosis of death into vibrant living.
Many patients have told me, “Being diagnosed with cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me.” A skeptic might reply, “What are you, crazy?” To which they might hear, “That’s what it took to get my attention to begin changing my life in ways that have made it so much more joyful and meaningful.”
Not that we look for illness or suffering, but sometimes, for reasons that may be a mystery, there it is. What we do with it makes all the difference in the world. Even when we can’t be cured, we can be healed, becoming more whole. When we become active participants in our healing, it may bring meaning to our suffering, which makes it more bearable. Often, our physical illnesses improve as well.
Change is hard. But if we’re in enough pain, the idea of change becomes more appealing—“Well, it may be hard to change my diet and lifestyle, but I’m in so much pain I’m willing to try something different.”
In 2009, the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn for discovering telomerase, an enzyme that repairs and lengthens damaged telomeres, which are the ends of our chromosomes that control aging. Dr. Blackburn and her colleague, Dr. Elissa Epel, studied women who were under chronic emotional stress because they were taking care of children with autism or chronic diseases.
They found that the more stressed the women felt, and the longer they felt stressed, the lower was their telomerase and the shorter their telomeres. This was the first study providing genetic evidence indicating that chronic emotional stress might shorten a woman’s lifespan.
What was particularly interesting to me was that it wasn’t an objective measure of stress that determined the effects on their telomeres; it was the women’s perception of stress that mattered. In other words, two women might be in comparable situations, but one had learned to manage her stress better by empowering herself and taking charge of her life. As a result, her telomeres were longer.
We tend to think of advances in medicine as a new drug, laser, surgical procedure—something high-tech and expensive. We often have a hard time believing that the simple choices that we make in our lives each day—what we eat, how we respond to stress, how much exercise we get, and (perhaps most important), how much love and intimacy we have—can make such a powerful difference in our health and well-being, but they do.
For more than thirty-three years, my colleagues and I at the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and the School of Medicine, University of California—San Francisco have conducted a series of studies showing that what was once thought impossible was often achievable.
We found that a whole foods, plant-based diet (such as the one described in this book), moderate exercise, stress management techniques such as yoga and meditation, and learning to give and receive love more fully (what we euphemistically call “social support”) could often reverse the progression of coronary heart disease, early-stage prostate cancer, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, hypercholesterolemia, obesity, depression, and other chronic diseases.
We found that changing your lifestyle changes your genes. So often, I hear people say, “Oh, it’s all in my genes, there’s not much I can do about it,” what I call “genetic nihilism.” In men with prostate cancer, we found that making these comprehensive lifestyle changes for only three months caused changes in over five hundred genes—“turning on” diseasepreventing genes and “turning off” genes that promote many chronic diseases, including a series of oncogenes that promote breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer.
Your genes are a predisposition, but your genes are not your fate.
Along with Dr. Blackburn, we also measured telomerase levels in these patients. We found that telomerase increased by almost 30 percent in only three months. And while comprehensive lifestyle changes may increase telomerase, even drugs have not yet been shown to do this.
These studies are empowering many people with new hope and new choices.
So is Kris Carr.
Joy, pleasure, and freedom are sustainable. Because the mechanisms that affect our health are so much more dynamic than had once been realized, most people find that when they make the lifestyle changes described in this book, they feel so much better, so quickly, it reframes the reason for change from fear of dying (which is not sustainable) to joy of living (which is).
These are the practices Kris lays out so intelligently and simply in Crazy Sexy Diet. And not only this—she also explains in clear, layman’s language the science and logic behind these choices. Why should we eat plant-based foods? Why are whole grains superior to processed ones, and which ones are superior to others? How much protein, fat, and sugar do we really need, and how do we go about getting them without the excessive consumption of animal products?
Consider this not a diet book, but a guide to living fully; not a meal plan, but a road map to self-empowerment, adorned with Kris’s unrivaled enthusiasm, humor, and compassion.
And by the time you finish this book, there’s a good chance you may love Kris, too.
Dean Ornish, MD is the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute (www.pmri.org) and Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California–San Francisco.