FOREWORD
by BEYONCÉ
I WAS BORN AND RAISED in Houston, and if there’s one thing we love in Texas, it’s good food. Food has always been at the heart of my family, and it played a big role in my upbringing. We celebrated, bonded, commiserated, and loved one another through food—and not necessarily the healthy kind. Our hometown favorites were fried chicken, fajita tacos, BBQ burgers, BBQ ribs, fried shrimp, and po’boy sandwiches. Growing up, I was always on the move and didn’t always make the right choices when it came to food and may have even developed some habits around it that were silently sabotaging my health as I grew older.After having my daughter, I made a conscious effort to regain control of my health and my body. But I didn’t want to do a crash diet. I was a mom now. I needed to change my ways and set an example for my child. So I turned to no one other than my good friend and fitness and nutrition confidant, Marco Borges. I’ve worked with him for years to keep me on-track, motivated, and ahead of the health game. Yet, as much as I follow and trust his advice, when I would hear him talk about the amazing benefits of a plant-based lifestyle, I would think, that sounds amazing. I would love to experience those benefits, and while I can incorporate those good foods into my life, I knew I could never eat that way. I love food too much. Something needed to happen for me to come around. I needed to be ready.
A year later (around November 2013), my husband and I decided we wanted to try a completely plant-based diet with Marco. I had lost my pregnancy weight with his help, through an exercise-and-nutrition program, and was ready for another challenge. I decided I wanted to take a more proactive role in my health, and knowing all the amazing benefits, I knew this was the one. I was ready.
And so the journey began that helped me get into the best shape of my life. Little did I know the long-lasting effects it would have. I thought, like with most diets, I would feel deprived and hate food, that I would miss out on restaurants and celebrations, that I would get headaches and be irritable, etc. I was wrong about all of that. It took a few days to adjust, but what I discovered was increased energy, better sleep, weight loss, improved digestion, clarity, and an incredibly positive feeling for my actions and the effects it would have on those around me and the environment. I couldn’t believe how much of our health we can control with food. And that I could still love food but this time it would love me back (like the walnut tacos you’ll find in here, oh my!!). We even celebrated my husband’s birthday with an all-vegan party. I can still see the reaction on our friend’s faces. Some were extremely excited while others had some reservations, but in the end, we all enjoyed it immensely. My greatest discovery was that I would benefit from the best gift I could give myself and my family—my health.
I’m sharing my experience because I want the best for everyone, and I would like for anyone who thinks that this isn’t for them, even though they may know of the incredible benefits, that they can do it. You deserve to give yourself the best life you can. Empowerment starts within you and your decisions. You can control the quality of your life with the food you eat. The truth is that if a Houston-born foodie like me can do it, you can too—you just need to try it for 22 days.
—Beyoncé
INTRODUCTION
I WELCOME THIS OPPORTUNITY TO write the introduction to this important book, as awareness is the first step in healing.
For almost four decades, my colleagues and I at the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and the University of California, San Francisco have conducted clinical research proving the many benefits of comprehensive lifestyle changes. These include:
In short—eat well, move more, stress less, and love more.
Many people tend to think of advances in medicine as high-tech and expensive, such as a new drug, laser, or surgical procedure. We often have a hard time believing that something as simple as comprehensive lifestyle changes can make such a powerful difference in our lives—but they often do.
In our research, we’ve used high-tech, expensive, state-of-the-art scientific measures to prove the power of these simple, low-tech, and low-cost interventions. These randomized controlled trials and other studies have been published in the leading peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals.
In addition to preventing many chronic diseases, these comprehensive lifestyle changes can often reverse the progression of these illnesses.
We proved, for the first time, that lifestyle changes alone can reverse the progression of even severe coronary heart disease. There was even more reversal after five years than after one year and 2.5 times fewer cardiac events. We also found that these lifestyle changes can reverse type 2 diabetes and may slow, stop, or even reverse the progression of early-stage prostate cancer.
Changing lifestyle actually changes your genes—turning on genes that keep you healthy, and turning off genes that promote heart disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and diabetes—more than five hundred genes in only three months. People often say, “Oh, it’s all in my genes. There’s not much I can do about it.” But there is. Knowing that changing lifestyle changes our genes is often very motivating—not to blame, but to empower. Our genes are a predisposition, but our genes are not our fate.
Our latest research found that these diet and lifestyle changes may even lengthen telomeres, the ends of your chromosomes that control aging. As your telomeres get longer, your life gets longer. This was the first controlled study showing that any intervention may begin to reverse aging on a cellular level by lengthening telomeres. And the more people adhered to these lifestyle recommendations, the longer their telomeres became.
This is a different approach to personalized medicine. It’s not like there was one set of dietary recommendations for reversing heart disease, a different one for reversing diabetes, and yet another for changing your genes or lengthening your telomeres. In all of our studies, people were asked to consume a whole-foods, plant-based diet like the one described in this book. It’s as though your body knows how to personalize the medicine it needs if you give it the right raw materials in your diet and lifestyle.
It’s not all or nothing. In all of our studies, we found that the more people changed their diets and lifestyles, the more they improved and the better they felt—at any age. If you indulge yourself one day, eat healthier the next.
These lifestyle changes are part of the most influential trend in medicine today—what is known as “Lifestyle Medicine,” which is lifestyle as treatment as well as prevention.
And what’s good for you is good for our planet. To the degree we transition toward a whole-foods, plant-based diet, it not only makes a difference in our own lives; it also makes a difference in the lives of many others across the globe.
The crises in global warming, health-care costs, and energy resources can feel overwhelming: “What can I do as one person to make a difference?” This may lead to inaction, depression, and even nihilism.
However, when we realize that something as primal as what we choose to put in our mouths each day makes a difference in all three of these crises, it empowers us and imbues these choices with meaning. If it’s meaningful, then it’s sustainable—and a meaningful life is a longer life.
HEALTH CRISIS
More than 75 percent of the $2.8 trillion in annual U.S. health-care costs (mostly sick-care costs) are from chronic diseases that can often be prevented and even reversed by eating a plant-based diet at a fraction of the costs.
For example, in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study, patients who adhered to healthy dietary principles (low meat consumption and high intake of fruits, vegetables, and whole-grain bread), never smoked, were not overweight, and had at least thirty minutes a day of physical activity had a 78 percent lower overall risk of developing a chronic disease. This included a 93 percent reduced risk of diabetes, an 81 percent lower risk of heart attacks, a 50 percent reduction in risk of stroke, and a 36 percent overall reduction in risk of cancer, compared with participants without these healthy factors.
Another recent study of more than twenty thousand men found that those who didn’t have much belly fat and who had a healthy diet, didn’t smoke, and exercised moderately reduced their risk of a heart attack by 80 percent.
It’s not just low-fat versus low-carb. A new study found that animal protein dramatically increases the risk of premature death independent of fat and carbs. In a study of more than six thousand people, those aged fifty to sixty-five who reported eating diets high in animal protein had a 75 percent increase in overall mortality, a 400 percent increase in cancer deaths, and a 500 percent increase in type 2 diabetes during the following eighteen years.
At the same time that the power of comprehensive lifestyle changes is becoming more well documented, the limitations of high-tech medicine are becoming clearer.
For example, randomized controlled trials have shown that angioplasties, stents, and coronary bypass surgery do not prolong life or prevent heart attacks in most stable patients. Only one out of forty-nine people with early-stage prostate cancer and PSA levels below ten may benefit from surgery or radiation. Also, type 2 diabetes and prediabetes are pandemic, affecting almost one half of Americans, yet drug treatments to lower blood sugar do not prevent the complications of diabetes nearly as well as lowering blood sugar with diet and lifestyle. United Health Care estimated that if current trends continue, the costs of type 2 diabetes will be $3.3 trillion by 2020, which is clearly not sustainable.
Lifestyle medicine is cost effective as well as medically effective. Our research has shown that when comprehensive lifestyle changes are offered as treatment (not just as prevention), significant cost savings occur in the first year because the biological mechanisms that control our health and well-being are so dynamic.
For example, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield found that overall health-care costs were reduced by 50 percent in the first year when people with heart disease or risk factors went through our lifestyle program in twenty-four hospitals and clinics in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska. In patients who spent more than $25,000 on health care in the prior year, costs were reduced 400 percent in the following year. In another study, Mutual of Omaha found that they saved $30,000 per patient in the first year in those who went through our lifestyle program.
Because of these findings, we are grateful that Medicare began covering our program of lifestyle medicine in 2010. If it’s reimbursable, it’s sustainable. (For more information, please go to www.ornish.com.)
GLOBAL-WARMING CRISIS
Many people are surprised to learn that animal agribusiness generates more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation combined. The livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire global transportation chain as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent (18 percent versus 13.5 percent). More recent estimates are that these numbers are even higher—that livestock and their by-products may actually account for more than 50 percent of annual worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions (at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year).
It is also responsible for 37 percent of all the human-induced methane, which is twenty-three times more toxic to the ozone layer than carbon dioxide, as well as generating 65 percent of the human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide and methane mostly come from manure, and fifty-six billion “food animals” produce a lot of manure each day.
Also, livestock now use 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly for permanent pasture but also including 33 percent of global arable land to produce feed for them. As forests are cleared to create new pastures for livestock, it is a major driver of deforestation: some 70 percent of forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.
ENERGY CRISIS
More than half of U.S. grain and nearly 40 percent of world grain is being fed to livestock rather than being consumed directly by humans. In the United States, more than eight billion livestock are maintained; these livestock eat about seven times as much grain as is consumed directly by the entire U.S. population.
Producing one kg of fresh beef requires about thirteen kg of grain and thirty kg of forage. This much grain and forage requires a total of 43,000 liters of water.
So, to the degree we choose to eat a plant-based diet, we free up tremendous amounts of resources that can benefit many others as well as ourselves. I find this very meaningful. And when we can act more compassionately, it helps our hearts as well.
We’re always making choices in our lives. If what we gain is more than what we give up, then it’s sustainable. Because these underlying biological mechanisms are so dynamic, if you eat and live this way for just 22 days, you’re likely to feel so much better, so quickly, you’ll find that these are choices worth making—not from fear of dying but from joy of living.
For all these reasons and more, this is the right book at the right time. It can help transform your life for the better.
Marco Borges embodies the core values that he writes about in this book. What he describes here can make a powerful difference in your health and well-being.
The Harvard Health Professionals Study and the Harvard Nurses Health Study followed more than thirty-seven thousand men and eighty-three thousand women for almost three million person-years. They found that that consumption of both processed and unprocessed red meat is associated with an increased risk of premature mortality from all causes as well as from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes.
And it’s not just the arteries in your heart that get clogged on a diet high in red meat. Erectile dysfunction—impotence—is significantly higher in meat eaters. In men forty to seventy, more than half report problems with erectile dysfunction.
Good news: according to the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, eating a diet rich in fruit, vegetables, whole grains and fish—with less red and processed meats and fewer refined grains—significantly decreased the likelihood of impotence.
It’s not all or nothing. Start with a meatless Monday (or Tuesday or Wednesday). To the degree you move in this direction, there is a corresponding benefit.
You’ll look better and feel better and have hotter sex and a cooler planet.
Now that’s sustainable.
DEAN ORNISH, M.D.
Founder and President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute
Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
Author, The Spectrum and Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease
www.ornish.com
THE 22-DAY MANIFESTO
PART ONE
Why the 22-Day Revolution Is So Effective
1
IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE your health and make those changes permanent starting right this moment, you can. How? Begin by eating plants.1 And by this I mean a whole-foods, plant-based diet with meals like walnut tacos, veggie ceviche, lentil soup, quiona-stuffed red peppers, oatmeal with banana and blueberries, chia puddia. So whenever you see “eat plants,” I want you to think of delicious, live foods that make you look and feel amazing while inspiring the best in you.
Eating plants is the most powerful, most effective, and simplest way to get healthier. If you want to lose weight, if you want to be fitter and stronger than ever before, you must eat more plants. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes—all of these illnesses come from eating too much of the wrong kinds of food. If you regularly eat processed foods, from sugar-added cereals to meats that are pickled in preservatives, you are probably getting too many calories and not enough vitamins and minerals, and creating a situation where your body cannot help but gain weight and eventually become sick.
A plant-based diet will help you lose weight and keep it off; provide an enormous amount of energy daily; and prevent long-term health problems like heart disease and high blood pressure. A plant-based diet is the answer to some of the major problems plaguing our country, from these increasingly commonplace diseases to the slow and steady breakdown of the environment. “Eat plants” is a mantra that I live by, and one that I voice everywhere I go—to my family, friends, and clients—because I believe it to be the most important thing we can do to take care of ourselves and the planet that we live on.
I have learned firsthand during my twenty years of helping clients lose weight and regain health that diet is the most important tool that we have, and that a plant-based diet is the very best way to achieve vitality and longevity—and to get the best body of your life.
WHY IS PLANT-BASED EATING BETTER FOR YOU?
As your palate adjusts to the natural and whole foods you’re eating, cravings for processed and sugary foods subside.
By eating an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables, your body will be flooded with vitamins and minerals. And without expending energy breaking down overprocessed foods, your body can focus on repair and cell renewal.
As you’ll find out in the coming chapters, a plant-based diet can help reverse heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and other diseases that are caused by eating unhealthy, unwholesome, processed foods.
• • •
It may sound drastic, but a plant-based diet is actually one of the most common ways of eating. In fact, worldwide, an estimated four billion people live primarily on a plant-based diet, while only about two billion people live primarily on a meat-based diet.2 Places where plant-based and vegetarian diets are most popular have far lower levels of health problems, like high blood pressure and heart disease, than in Western countries. For example, India, a country that has the world’s second-biggest population—more than 1.2 billion people!—has five hundred million vegetarians. What is radical is our Western style of eating meat, dairy, eggs, and processed foods. America’s waistlines, health, and even the environment are paying the price.
Every time clients come to me with the desire—the need—to lose weight and regain control over their lives, I teach them how to incorporate more plants into their diets and cut out the over-processed foods that are slowly poisoning their bodies. With a true plant-based diet, I can help my clients drop anywhere from ten to one hundred pounds and radically transform their overall health. Within days and weeks, each one of them experiences firsthand the incredible benefits, like watching the pounds melt away while they catapult themselves into a world of energy and vitality, simultaneously reversing disease and improving their health profile.
The biggest obstacle I must first help them overcome is the idea that giving up meat and animal products is impossible. No bacon?! No cheese?! Yes. By giving up what you consider to be essential (and fun) components of your diet, you will gain so much more. Choosing plants regularly and discovering how delicious plant-based food is will create brain pathways that will support your newer, better habits. As you become more used to eating plants, and start to really feel the benefits, your new habits will become second nature, and it may soon become hard to imagine that you ever ate a different way.
The 22-Day Revolution program is a 22-day intensive program built to reset your body and mind. It will jump-start your body, so you can get healthy and shed the excess weight. It will be challenging, but as your body adjusts to the correct portions, you’ll learn what 80 percent fullness should feel like. If you’ve been overeating for years, or are more than fifty pounds overweight, the portions outlined in the 22-day program will feel small. That’s why the plan allows for healthy snacks as needed. If you’re embarking on this program for its myriad health benefits instead of weight loss, then chances are the portions are much more in line with what you’re currently consuming. This program is about change, creating new habits and breaking the ones that aren’t working for you anymore. It’s empowering to learn that you can completely transform the way you live and feel in such a short and manageable amount of time.
By combining the benefits of plant-based eating with breakthroughs in science about habit formation and development, I developed a program that, over 22 days, introduces people to eating plants, and simultaneously resets their habits in a way that makes plant-based eating more sustainable for the long term.
Many people begin healthy eating programs; not many manage to make those changes permanent. The goal of the 22-Day Revolution is to get you past the point where most diets fail so that you can create long-lasting change. When I was studying psychology, I discovered that some psychologists believe that it takes 21 days to make or break a habit. The human brain is an incredible machine that can rewire itself over time. The more often you engage in a specific behavior, the more pathways your brain builds to support that behavior. Scientists call that neuroplasticity: the ability of your brain to “change [its] connections and behavior in response to new information, sensory stimulation, development, damage, or dysfunction.”3
Challenge yourself to introduce newer, healthier habits for 21 days, and on day 22, you will emerge as an improved version of yourself. If you can make it through three weeks, you can make it forever!
Gone will be the days of yo-yo dieting, the constant state of misery where you consistently rebound between eating too much, feeling too full, and gaining weight, to going on a strict diet and feeling miserable. Instead, you’ll feel energized immediately, and over time the benefits will absolutely amaze you.
The 22-Day Revolution will give you the tools to take control of your life and your body, to learn to eat in a way that empowers you instead of slowing you down. Three weeks from now, you could be at the beginning of a brand-new way of living in the world—one that makes you feel happy and content.
And you are holding the map in your hand.
This program is a guide to losing weight and gaining health by learning to eat plants.
If you’re looking for a way to lose weight, reclaim your health, and feel good about yourself through and through, it’s possible. If you want to give yourself what you need to have an inner glow and an outer glow that inspires all of the people who know you to say, “What are you doing? Something about you is different!” you can. Food matters! And eating a plant-based diet will help you lose weight, feel better, and positively glow with good health. Plain and simple: It gets results.
Across the country, people are taking up the challenge: Spend 22 days on a plant-based diet and see what it will do for you. Are you ready to join us? If you’re reading this book, I suspect that the answer is already yes.
Set your goals and create a road map for success. What are your personal goals? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to change your health profile so that you’ll be able to attend your child’s graduation in fifteen years? Do you want to reverse heart disease, have more energy, encourage your family to be more healthful? Be mindful and clear about your goals, and consider writing them down so that you will have inspiration during hard days, and a reminder of what you set out to do so you can appreciate your progress as you move through the program.
In just 22 days you can change the way you feel about yourself, the way you feel about the world, the way you feel every single day.
A SIMPLE CHANGE, INCREDIBLE RESULTS
Every time a client takes the challenge, I get an e-mail about how I have changed his life, or how excited she is to introduce her friends and family to the challenge, and I always take a moment to appreciate how lucky I am to be able to help others learn how to feel their best. But sometimes there are those testimonials that stop me in my tracks; the kind of letters that reinforce every reason for my plan and why I do what I do for a living. I will never forget the day that my dear friend Raymond called me and told me that he was ready to change his life and start his 22-Day Revolution.
Raymond and I had been friends for years, and I had been watching his habits hurt him for all of those years. He has two beautiful children, an amazing wife, and a rewarding career. But his eating habits were catching up with him, and his weight, which had always fluctuated, was going up and up. Raymond was in a downward spiral. When we talked about it, he would admit that he kept mistreating himself over and over, but he somehow couldn’t get himself to stop—especially long-term. He would diet and lose some weight, but cash in on the small victories and ultimately end up gaining more weight than he started with. He was at a loss and felt powerless against his own self-proclaimed “irresponsible and destructive habits.”
I would encourage him to get more conscious about his eating habits. He would try, but always ended up reverting to his habitual, unhealthy patterns. Raymond is the kind of guy who does everything to the max—he thinks big, works hard, and enjoys life to the fullest. However, what he considered to be “enjoying life” most often meant eating long, decadent meals—usually at restaurants or home parties—and most often accompanied by “fine wine.” To him, dieting was a deprivation that meant no longer enjoying himself. What he didn’t truly understand was that while he was doing so well in every other aspect of his life, he was using his successes in those areas to justify his poor health habits, and these habits were slowly killing him. From the outside looking in, it made no sense to me that he didn’t take control of his health, and it would pain me to watch him neglect himself.
I would say, “Raymond, this is your life we’re talking about. Why not capture your success in health as well?”
And Raymond would say, “I know. . . . I’m actually eating better. I was worse before. I’m doing it.” But as soon as he would lose a little weight, he would get comfortable, and then gain it back . . . and then some.
Time went by and nothing changed, because there was no habit change and no map for success. Success needs a plan! If you truly want to change, you need to consciously take a good look in the mirror and say, “I can be a better version of myself, and here’s how.”
FOREWORD
by BEYONCÉ
I WAS BORN AND RAISED in Houston, and if there’s one thing we love in Texas, it’s good food. Food has always been at the heart of my family, and it played a big role in my upbringing. We celebrated, bonded, commiserated, and loved one another through food—and not necessarily the healthy kind. Our hometown favorites were fried chicken, fajita tacos, BBQ burgers, BBQ ribs, fried shrimp, and po’boy sandwiches. Growing up, I was always on the move and didn’t always make the right choices when it came to food and may have even developed some habits around it that were silently sabotaging my health as I grew older.After having my daughter, I made a conscious effort to regain control of my health and my body. But I didn’t want to do a crash diet. I was a mom now. I needed to change my ways and set an example for my child. So I turned to no one other than my good friend and fitness and nutrition confidant, Marco Borges. I’ve worked with him for years to keep me on-track, motivated, and ahead of the health game. Yet, as much as I follow and trust his advice, when I would hear him talk about the amazing benefits of a plant-based lifestyle, I would think, that sounds amazing. I would love to experience those benefits, and while I can incorporate those good foods into my life, I knew I could never eat that way. I love food too much. Something needed to happen for me to come around. I needed to be ready.
A year later (around November 2013), my husband and I decided we wanted to try a completely plant-based diet with Marco. I had lost my pregnancy weight with his help, through an exercise-and-nutrition program, and was ready for another challenge. I decided I wanted to take a more proactive role in my health, and knowing all the amazing benefits, I knew this was the one. I was ready.
And so the journey began that helped me get into the best shape of my life. Little did I know the long-lasting effects it would have. I thought, like with most diets, I would feel deprived and hate food, that I would miss out on restaurants and celebrations, that I would get headaches and be irritable, etc. I was wrong about all of that. It took a few days to adjust, but what I discovered was increased energy, better sleep, weight loss, improved digestion, clarity, and an incredibly positive feeling for my actions and the effects it would have on those around me and the environment. I couldn’t believe how much of our health we can control with food. And that I could still love food but this time it would love me back (like the walnut tacos you’ll find in here, oh my!!). We even celebrated my husband’s birthday with an all-vegan party. I can still see the reaction on our friend’s faces. Some were extremely excited while others had some reservations, but in the end, we all enjoyed it immensely. My greatest discovery was that I would benefit from the best gift I could give myself and my family—my health.
I’m sharing my experience because I want the best for everyone, and I would like for anyone who thinks that this isn’t for them, even though they may know of the incredible benefits, that they can do it. You deserve to give yourself the best life you can. Empowerment starts within you and your decisions. You can control the quality of your life with the food you eat. The truth is that if a Houston-born foodie like me can do it, you can too—you just need to try it for 22 days.
—Beyoncé
INTRODUCTION
I WELCOME THIS OPPORTUNITY TO write the introduction to this important book, as awareness is the first step in healing.
For almost four decades, my colleagues and I at the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and the University of California, San Francisco have conducted clinical research proving the many benefits of comprehensive lifestyle changes. These include:
In short—eat well, move more, stress less, and love more.
Many people tend to think of advances in medicine as high-tech and expensive, such as a new drug, laser, or surgical procedure. We often have a hard time believing that something as simple as comprehensive lifestyle changes can make such a powerful difference in our lives—but they often do.
In our research, we’ve used high-tech, expensive, state-of-the-art scientific measures to prove the power of these simple, low-tech, and low-cost interventions. These randomized controlled trials and other studies have been published in the leading peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals.
In addition to preventing many chronic diseases, these comprehensive lifestyle changes can often reverse the progression of these illnesses.
We proved, for the first time, that lifestyle changes alone can reverse the progression of even severe coronary heart disease. There was even more reversal after five years than after one year and 2.5 times fewer cardiac events. We also found that these lifestyle changes can reverse type 2 diabetes and may slow, stop, or even reverse the progression of early-stage prostate cancer.
Changing lifestyle actually changes your genes—turning on genes that keep you healthy, and turning off genes that promote heart disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and diabetes—more than five hundred genes in only three months. People often say, “Oh, it’s all in my genes. There’s not much I can do about it.” But there is. Knowing that changing lifestyle changes our genes is often very motivating—not to blame, but to empower. Our genes are a predisposition, but our genes are not our fate.
Our latest research found that these diet and lifestyle changes may even lengthen telomeres, the ends of your chromosomes that control aging. As your telomeres get longer, your life gets longer. This was the first controlled study showing that any intervention may begin to reverse aging on a cellular level by lengthening telomeres. And the more people adhered to these lifestyle recommendations, the longer their telomeres became.
This is a different approach to personalized medicine. It’s not like there was one set of dietary recommendations for reversing heart disease, a different one for reversing diabetes, and yet another for changing your genes or lengthening your telomeres. In all of our studies, people were asked to consume a whole-foods, plant-based diet like the one described in this book. It’s as though your body knows how to personalize the medicine it needs if you give it the right raw materials in your diet and lifestyle.
It’s not all or nothing. In all of our studies, we found that the more people changed their diets and lifestyles, the more they improved and the better they felt—at any age. If you indulge yourself one day, eat healthier the next.
These lifestyle changes are part of the most influential trend in medicine today—what is known as “Lifestyle Medicine,” which is lifestyle as treatment as well as prevention.
And what’s good for you is good for our planet. To the degree we transition toward a whole-foods, plant-based diet, it not only makes a difference in our own lives; it also makes a difference in the lives of many others across the globe.
The crises in global warming, health-care costs, and energy resources can feel overwhelming: “What can I do as one person to make a difference?” This may lead to inaction, depression, and even nihilism.
However, when we realize that something as primal as what we choose to put in our mouths each day makes a difference in all three of these crises, it empowers us and imbues these choices with meaning. If it’s meaningful, then it’s sustainable—and a meaningful life is a longer life.
HEALTH CRISIS
More than 75 percent of the $2.8 trillion in annual U.S. health-care costs (mostly sick-care costs) are from chronic diseases that can often be prevented and even reversed by eating a plant-based diet at a fraction of the costs.
For example, in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study, patients who adhered to healthy dietary principles (low meat consumption and high intake of fruits, vegetables, and whole-grain bread), never smoked, were not overweight, and had at least thirty minutes a day of physical activity had a 78 percent lower overall risk of developing a chronic disease. This included a 93 percent reduced risk of diabetes, an 81 percent lower risk of heart attacks, a 50 percent reduction in risk of stroke, and a 36 percent overall reduction in risk of cancer, compared with participants without these healthy factors.
Another recent study of more than twenty thousand men found that those who didn’t have much belly fat and who had a healthy diet, didn’t smoke, and exercised moderately reduced their risk of a heart attack by 80 percent.
It’s not just low-fat versus low-carb. A new study found that animal protein dramatically increases the risk of premature death independent of fat and carbs. In a study of more than six thousand people, those aged fifty to sixty-five who reported eating diets high in animal protein had a 75 percent increase in overall mortality, a 400 percent increase in cancer deaths, and a 500 percent increase in type 2 diabetes during the following eighteen years.
At the same time that the power of comprehensive lifestyle changes is becoming more well documented, the limitations of high-tech medicine are becoming clearer.
For example, randomized controlled trials have shown that angioplasties, stents, and coronary bypass surgery do not prolong life or prevent heart attacks in most stable patients. Only one out of forty-nine people with early-stage prostate cancer and PSA levels below ten may benefit from surgery or radiation. Also, type 2 diabetes and prediabetes are pandemic, affecting almost one half of Americans, yet drug treatments to lower blood sugar do not prevent the complications of diabetes nearly as well as lowering blood sugar with diet and lifestyle. United Health Care estimated that if current trends continue, the costs of type 2 diabetes will be $3.3 trillion by 2020, which is clearly not sustainable.
Lifestyle medicine is cost effective as well as medically effective. Our research has shown that when comprehensive lifestyle changes are offered as treatment (not just as prevention), significant cost savings occur in the first year because the biological mechanisms that control our health and well-being are so dynamic.
For example, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield found that overall health-care costs were reduced by 50 percent in the first year when people with heart disease or risk factors went through our lifestyle program in twenty-four hospitals and clinics in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska. In patients who spent more than $25,000 on health care in the prior year, costs were reduced 400 percent in the following year. In another study, Mutual of Omaha found that they saved $30,000 per patient in the first year in those who went through our lifestyle program.
Because of these findings, we are grateful that Medicare began covering our program of lifestyle medicine in 2010. If it’s reimbursable, it’s sustainable. (For more information, please go to www.ornish.com.)
GLOBAL-WARMING CRISIS
Many people are surprised to learn that animal agribusiness generates more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation combined. The livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire global transportation chain as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent (18 percent versus 13.5 percent). More recent estimates are that these numbers are even higher—that livestock and their by-products may actually account for more than 50 percent of annual worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions (at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year).
It is also responsible for 37 percent of all the human-induced methane, which is twenty-three times more toxic to the ozone layer than carbon dioxide, as well as generating 65 percent of the human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide and methane mostly come from manure, and fifty-six billion “food animals” produce a lot of manure each day.
Also, livestock now use 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly for permanent pasture but also including 33 percent of global arable land to produce feed for them. As forests are cleared to create new pastures for livestock, it is a major driver of deforestation: some 70 percent of forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.
ENERGY CRISIS
More than half of U.S. grain and nearly 40 percent of world grain is being fed to livestock rather than being consumed directly by humans. In the United States, more than eight billion livestock are maintained; these livestock eat about seven times as much grain as is consumed directly by the entire U.S. population.
Producing one kg of fresh beef requires about thirteen kg of grain and thirty kg of forage. This much grain and forage requires a total of 43,000 liters of water.
So, to the degree we choose to eat a plant-based diet, we free up tremendous amounts of resources that can benefit many others as well as ourselves. I find this very meaningful. And when we can act more compassionately, it helps our hearts as well.
We’re always making choices in our lives. If what we gain is more than what we give up, then it’s sustainable. Because these underlying biological mechanisms are so dynamic, if you eat and live this way for just 22 days, you’re likely to feel so much better, so quickly, you’ll find that these are choices worth making—not from fear of dying but from joy of living.
For all these reasons and more, this is the right book at the right time. It can help transform your life for the better.
Marco Borges embodies the core values that he writes about in this book. What he describes here can make a powerful difference in your health and well-being.
The Harvard Health Professionals Study and the Harvard Nurses Health Study followed more than thirty-seven thousand men and eighty-three thousand women for almost three million person-years. They found that that consumption of both processed and unprocessed red meat is associated with an increased risk of premature mortality from all causes as well as from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes.
And it’s not just the arteries in your heart that get clogged on a diet high in red meat. Erectile dysfunction—impotence—is significantly higher in meat eaters. In men forty to seventy, more than half report problems with erectile dysfunction.
Good news: according to the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, eating a diet rich in fruit, vegetables, whole grains and fish—with less red and processed meats and fewer refined grains—significantly decreased the likelihood of impotence.
It’s not all or nothing. Start with a meatless Monday (or Tuesday or Wednesday). To the degree you move in this direction, there is a corresponding benefit.
You’ll look better and feel better and have hotter sex and a cooler planet.
Now that’s sustainable.
DEAN ORNISH, M.D.
Founder and President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute
Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
Author, The Spectrum and Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease
www.ornish.com
THE 22-DAY MANIFESTO
PART ONE
Why the 22-Day Revolution Is So Effective
1
IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE your health and make those changes permanent starting right this moment, you can. How? Begin by eating plants.1 And by this I mean a whole-foods, plant-based diet with meals like walnut tacos, veggie ceviche, lentil soup, quiona-stuffed red peppers, oatmeal with banana and blueberries, chia puddia. So whenever you see “eat plants,” I want you to think of delicious, live foods that make you look and feel amazing while inspiring the best in you.
Eating plants is the most powerful, most effective, and simplest way to get healthier. If you want to lose weight, if you want to be fitter and stronger than ever before, you must eat more plants. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes—all of these illnesses come from eating too much of the wrong kinds of food. If you regularly eat processed foods, from sugar-added cereals to meats that are pickled in preservatives, you are probably getting too many calories and not enough vitamins and minerals, and creating a situation where your body cannot help but gain weight and eventually become sick.
A plant-based diet will help you lose weight and keep it off; provide an enormous amount of energy daily; and prevent long-term health problems like heart disease and high blood pressure. A plant-based diet is the answer to some of the major problems plaguing our country, from these increasingly commonplace diseases to the slow and steady breakdown of the environment. “Eat plants” is a mantra that I live by, and one that I voice everywhere I go—to my family, friends, and clients—because I believe it to be the most important thing we can do to take care of ourselves and the planet that we live on.
I have learned firsthand during my twenty years of helping clients lose weight and regain health that diet is the most important tool that we have, and that a plant-based diet is the very best way to achieve vitality and longevity—and to get the best body of your life.
WHY IS PLANT-BASED EATING BETTER FOR YOU?
As your palate adjusts to the natural and whole foods you’re eating, cravings for processed and sugary foods subside.
By eating an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables, your body will be flooded with vitamins and minerals. And without expending energy breaking down overprocessed foods, your body can focus on repair and cell renewal.
As you’ll find out in the coming chapters, a plant-based diet can help reverse heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and other diseases that are caused by eating unhealthy, unwholesome, processed foods.
• • •
It may sound drastic, but a plant-based diet is actually one of the most common ways of eating. In fact, worldwide, an estimated four billion people live primarily on a plant-based diet, while only about two billion people live primarily on a meat-based diet.2 Places where plant-based and vegetarian diets are most popular have far lower levels of health problems, like high blood pressure and heart disease, than in Western countries. For example, India, a country that has the world’s second-biggest population—more than 1.2 billion people!—has five hundred million vegetarians. What is radical is our Western style of eating meat, dairy, eggs, and processed foods. America’s waistlines, health, and even the environment are paying the price.
Every time clients come to me with the desire—the need—to lose weight and regain control over their lives, I teach them how to incorporate more plants into their diets and cut out the over-processed foods that are slowly poisoning their bodies. With a true plant-based diet, I can help my clients drop anywhere from ten to one hundred pounds and radically transform their overall health. Within days and weeks, each one of them experiences firsthand the incredible benefits, like watching the pounds melt away while they catapult themselves into a world of energy and vitality, simultaneously reversing disease and improving their health profile.
The biggest obstacle I must first help them overcome is the idea that giving up meat and animal products is impossible. No bacon?! No cheese?! Yes. By giving up what you consider to be essential (and fun) components of your diet, you will gain so much more. Choosing plants regularly and discovering how delicious plant-based food is will create brain pathways that will support your newer, better habits. As you become more used to eating plants, and start to really feel the benefits, your new habits will become second nature, and it may soon become hard to imagine that you ever ate a different way.
The 22-Day Revolution program is a 22-day intensive program built to reset your body and mind. It will jump-start your body, so you can get healthy and shed the excess weight. It will be challenging, but as your body adjusts to the correct portions, you’ll learn what 80 percent fullness should feel like. If you’ve been overeating for years, or are more than fifty pounds overweight, the portions outlined in the 22-day program will feel small. That’s why the plan allows for healthy snacks as needed. If you’re embarking on this program for its myriad health benefits instead of weight loss, then chances are the portions are much more in line with what you’re currently consuming. This program is about change, creating new habits and breaking the ones that aren’t working for you anymore. It’s empowering to learn that you can completely transform the way you live and feel in such a short and manageable amount of time.
By combining the benefits of plant-based eating with breakthroughs in science about habit formation and development, I developed a program that, over 22 days, introduces people to eating plants, and simultaneously resets their habits in a way that makes plant-based eating more sustainable for the long term.
Many people begin healthy eating programs; not many manage to make those changes permanent. The goal of the 22-Day Revolution is to get you past the point where most diets fail so that you can create long-lasting change. When I was studying psychology, I discovered that some psychologists believe that it takes 21 days to make or break a habit. The human brain is an incredible machine that can rewire itself over time. The more often you engage in a specific behavior, the more pathways your brain builds to support that behavior. Scientists call that neuroplasticity: the ability of your brain to “change [its] connections and behavior in response to new information, sensory stimulation, development, damage, or dysfunction.”3
Challenge yourself to introduce newer, healthier habits for 21 days, and on day 22, you will emerge as an improved version of yourself. If you can make it through three weeks, you can make it forever!
Gone will be the days of yo-yo dieting, the constant state of misery where you consistently rebound between eating too much, feeling too full, and gaining weight, to going on a strict diet and feeling miserable. Instead, you’ll feel energized immediately, and over time the benefits will absolutely amaze you.
The 22-Day Revolution will give you the tools to take control of your life and your body, to learn to eat in a way that empowers you instead of slowing you down. Three weeks from now, you could be at the beginning of a brand-new way of living in the world—one that makes you feel happy and content.
And you are holding the map in your hand.
This program is a guide to losing weight and gaining health by learning to eat plants.
If you’re looking for a way to lose weight, reclaim your health, and feel good about yourself through and through, it’s possible. If you want to give yourself what you need to have an inner glow and an outer glow that inspires all of the people who know you to say, “What are you doing? Something about you is different!” you can. Food matters! And eating a plant-based diet will help you lose weight, feel better, and positively glow with good health. Plain and simple: It gets results.
Across the country, people are taking up the challenge: Spend 22 days on a plant-based diet and see what it will do for you. Are you ready to join us? If you’re reading this book, I suspect that the answer is already yes.
Set your goals and create a road map for success. What are your personal goals? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to change your health profile so that you’ll be able to attend your child’s graduation in fifteen years? Do you want to reverse heart disease, have more energy, encourage your family to be more healthful? Be mindful and clear about your goals, and consider writing them down so that you will have inspiration during hard days, and a reminder of what you set out to do so you can appreciate your progress as you move through the program.
In just 22 days you can change the way you feel about yourself, the way you feel about the world, the way you feel every single day.
A SIMPLE CHANGE, INCREDIBLE RESULTS
Every time a client takes the challenge, I get an e-mail about how I have changed his life, or how excited she is to introduce her friends and family to the challenge, and I always take a moment to appreciate how lucky I am to be able to help others learn how to feel their best. But sometimes there are those testimonials that stop me in my tracks; the kind of letters that reinforce every reason for my plan and why I do what I do for a living. I will never forget the day that my dear friend Raymond called me and told me that he was ready to change his life and start his 22-Day Revolution.
Raymond and I had been friends for years, and I had been watching his habits hurt him for all of those years. He has two beautiful children, an amazing wife, and a rewarding career. But his eating habits were catching up with him, and his weight, which had always fluctuated, was going up and up. Raymond was in a downward spiral. When we talked about it, he would admit that he kept mistreating himself over and over, but he somehow couldn’t get himself to stop—especially long-term. He would diet and lose some weight, but cash in on the small victories and ultimately end up gaining more weight than he started with. He was at a loss and felt powerless against his own self-proclaimed “irresponsible and destructive habits.”
I would encourage him to get more conscious about his eating habits. He would try, but always ended up reverting to his habitual, unhealthy patterns. Raymond is the kind of guy who does everything to the max—he thinks big, works hard, and enjoys life to the fullest. However, what he considered to be “enjoying life” most often meant eating long, decadent meals—usually at restaurants or home parties—and most often accompanied by “fine wine.” To him, dieting was a deprivation that meant no longer enjoying himself. What he didn’t truly understand was that while he was doing so well in every other aspect of his life, he was using his successes in those areas to justify his poor health habits, and these habits were slowly killing him. From the outside looking in, it made no sense to me that he didn’t take control of his health, and it would pain me to watch him neglect himself.
I would say, “Raymond, this is your life we’re talking about. Why not capture your success in health as well?”
And Raymond would say, “I know. . . . I’m actually eating better. I was worse before. I’m doing it.” But as soon as he would lose a little weight, he would get comfortable, and then gain it back . . . and then some.
Time went by and nothing changed, because there was no habit change and no map for success. Success needs a plan! If you truly want to change, you need to consciously take a good look in the mirror and say, “I can be a better version of myself, and here’s how.”
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