Discover the Best Books Written by Dean Ornish

Dean Michael Ornish (born July 16, 1953) is an American physician and researcher. He is the president and founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, and a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The author of Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease, Eat More, Weigh Less, and The Spectrum, he is an advocate for using diet and lifestyle changes to treat and prevent heart disease.

Ornish, a native of Dallas, Texas, graduated from Dallas's Hillcrest High School. He is of Judaic heritage. He holds a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude in Humanities from the University of Texas at Austin, where he gave the baccalaureate address. He earned his MD from the Baylor College of Medicine, completed a medical internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital (1981–1984), and was a Clinical Fellow in Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Ornish is known for his lifestyle-driven approach to controlling coronary artery disease (CAD) and other chronic diseases. He promotes lifestyle changes, including quasi-whole foods, plant-based diet, smoking cessation, moderate exercise, stress management techniques, yoga and meditation, and psychosocial support. While Ornish promotes a Plant-based diet, he does not advocate for a strictly vegan diet, as his program allows for the occasional consumption of other animal products.

From the 1970s through the 1990s, Ornish and others researched the impact of diet and stress levels on people with heart disease. The research, published in peer-reviewed journals, became the basis of his "Program for Reversing Heart Disease." It combined diet, meditation, exercise, and support groups, and in 1993 became the first non-surgical, non-pharmaceutical therapy for heart disease to qualify for insurance reimbursement. Except for chiropractic care, it was the first alternative medical technique not taught in traditional medical-school curricula to gain approval from a major insurance carrier.

Ornish worked with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for 16 years to create a new coverage category called intensive cardiac rehabilitation (ICR), which focuses on comprehensive lifestyle changes. In 2010, Medicare began to reimburse costs for Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease, a 72-hour ICR for people who have had heart attacks, chest pain, heart valve repair, coronary artery bypass, heart or lung bypass, or coronary angioplasty or stenting. In addition to the Ornish program, Medicare and Medicaid pay for ICR programs created by the Pritikin Longevity Center and the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Ornish has been a physician consultant to former President Bill Clinton since 1993 when Hillary Clinton asked Ornish to consult with the chefs at The White House, Camp David, and Air Force One. In 2010, after the former President's cardiac bypass grafts became clogged, Clinton, encouraged by Ornish, followed a mostly plant-based diet. In 2011, Barack Obama appointed Ornish to the Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health.