Health lessons to learn from a coach's experience with a heart attack - opinion

I wrote in Part 1 about my heart attack experience and the role exercise played in keeping my cardiac event relatively small. Now it’s time to address what is the single biggest cause of cardiovascular disease and, at the same time, what can cut your risk of heart disease by 90%. What you eat can actually reverse heart disease in some cases. It’s been put to the test and it’s been proven!

Food – we can’t live without it, but can we live with it?

Most of you grew up like I did, eating the standard American diet (SAD). Animal proteins like meat and chicken were daily fare. The 1970s saw the explosion of processed food on the market and the convenience that came with it. Yes, I ate that, too. As I got older and went away to college, it got worse, as I loved eating out, and fast food – whether burgers and fries, pizza, or a good pastrami sandwich – was all too frequently my choice. The beverage of choice was Coca-Cola. I did try to include fruits and vegetables in the diet, but that wasn’t going to offset what I was eating most of the time.

Eating well can reverse heart disease

After getting married, I certainly was eating a little more at home, but by this time I was a full-time musician in New York. So, weddings, bar mitzvahs, dinners, and any event had big smorgasbords, and as a musician, I quickly learned how to eat a lot of food on a five-minute break. During the day, I sometimes came home for lunch, but many times it was grabbing a slice or two of pizza or a steak sandwich. Yes, I often ordered a tossed salad with whatever I ate, but that wasn’t going to undo the damage. And I continued guzzling the sodas. Shabbat really exacerbated the situation with the meaty cholent, chopped liver, and unhealthy desserts always on the menu. You get the picture.

Now, let’s talk about the main cause of heart disease – the food we eat.

What if we were to eat like people in the blue zones, where people live very long and productive lives? There, the mainstay of the diet is fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lots of legumes, and some nuts and seeds. 

Occasionally, they include meat or fish, but it’s in incredibly small amounts – almost like a condiment. Processed foods aren’t there – not a candy bar, Dorito, or a potato chip to be found. In those areas of the world, heart disease and diabetes are hard to find, and we need to learn from that. Two cardiologists did just that.

Independent studies by Dr. Dean Ornish and by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn found that eating in this manner will absolutely prevent and even reverse heart disease. Ask any of the new breed of preventive cardiologists, Drs. Ornish, Esselstyn, Batiste, Williams, Agarwal, Montgomery, Ostfeld, and the many more now practicing lifestyle medicine, what causes this disease. It is a food-borne illness! It is 90% preventable, and although food isn’t the only factor, it’s the biggest one. Dr. Agarwal has said that nine out of 10 people that come to her, having been told they need a stent, end up not getting one after switching to a whole foods, plant-based (WFPB) diet for reversing heart disease.

SO, HERE I am. For the last six years, I have been a 90%-95% WFPB eater who has tried hard, in spite of the HCM (enlarged heart muscle) we spoke about in Part 1, to exercise. I am trying to get my steps in and get aerobic exercise with moderate to brisk walking, and then this happened.

We need to put this in context. The first 33 years of my life I was a pretty terrible eater. Then, as I started to exercise and deal with high blood pressure, my diet improved. It was better, but not what it needed to be. I still ate pizza, occasional meat, way too much chicken, and loved cheesy things in general. I just figured I could cheat more and exercise it away. That doesn’t work!

So about six years ago, I took a big step up to WFPB eating. The milk products went out the door. I still had a small piece of chicken Friday night on Shabbat and a small piece of fish Shabbat day. Gradually, the amount of oils in my diets became less and less. I still ate some healthy, fatty foods like nuts and avocado. My weight dropped, and my blood pressure dropped as well, and I really felt better. But because of the amount of plaque buildup I had already accumulated, I would have had to be 100% perfect to really reverse the disease.

There is no question that this was a huge factor in slowing down the progress of my heart disease. The invasive cardiologist who successfully stented my right coronary artery feels the left one has been blocked for more than five years and possibly as much as 10. So, my efforts at changing my diet were simply too little, too late. It is very important to remember that heart disease doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a progressive disease that takes decades to manifest itself. Most who grow up in the West already have fatty streaks in their coronary arteries in their teens.

Just like the exercising, everything I did enact with my change to WFPB eating contributed greatly to having an end result much better than it could have been. I am now following Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s and Dr. Ornish’s way of eating to reverse heart disease. The coronary artery that was opened up? I’m not going to let it get blocked again. With God’s help, my lifestyle changes are going to help prevent any deterioration in other arteries and hopefully even do some reversal.

In the last article, I urged everyone to start and gradually increase their exercise. Even more critical is to change your eating. If you need help with that transition, that is exactly what my clinic specializes in. If not, you can buy Dr. Esselstyn’s book or Dr. Ornish’s book on how to reverse heart disease. But do it. People don’t usually like it when I say this; however, everyone needs to hear this: If you eat a Western diet, you are more likely to get some Western disease at some time. So, now is the time to change your eating habits.

In Part 3 we will talk about my experience with hospitals and doctors. They are an important part of my recovery and healing. Our medical system and lifestyle can work very well together to add hours to our days, days to our years, and years to our lives.

The writer is a health and wellness coach and personal trainer with more than 25 years of professional experience. He is director of The Wellness Clinic and can be reached at alan@alanfitness.com.