Lifestyle and diet key to slashing health care costs

“Dr. Dean Ornish has a solution for lowering the nation’s skyrocketing health care costs: Lifestyle medicine. Ornish’s 37 years of clinical research show that chronic diseases such as severe coronary heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and early-stage prostate cancer can be reversed or prevented by changing one’s diet and daily lifestyle habits. The best-selling author of six books including “Eat More, Weigh Less” and “The Spectrum,” and founder of the nonprofit Preventative Medicine Research Institute, tells The Daily Ticker that “limitations to high-tech approaches are becoming clear.” Randomized studies have determined that traditional treatments do not prolong life or prevent heart attacks, he notes, and lowering blood sugar with drugs “doesn’t work nearly enough as it does by getting it down with lifestyle…

Three-quarters of the $2.8 trillion that we spent on health care costs last year were predominately ‘sick care’ costs,” says Ornish. “If we can treat the underlying causes, which to a large degree are the lifestyle choices we make each day, we can make better care available to more people at lower costs, and the only side effects are good ones.” Here is a direct video link.