Learn well-nigh this community-based education program informing physicians and patients unwrinkled well-nigh the power of nutrition as medicine.
“The weightier kept secret in medicine is that, given the right milieu”—the right conditions—“the soul heals itself, and “[w]hen it comes to cardiovascular disease, there is no substitute for nutritional excellence.” We know well-nigh Ornish, Pritikin, Barnard, Esselstyn—all the unconfined names in evidence-based nutrition—but how many have heard well-nigh the CHIP program, the Coronary Health Improvement Project, a volunteer-run community-based education program? “More so than any clinical trial, educating physicians and patients unwrinkled well-nigh the power of nutrition as medicine is the weightier investment we can make in the fight versus heart disease.” Increasingly effective, cheaper, and safer. What are the side effects? Improved overall health—and not just physical health, as I discuss in my video CHIP: The Complete Health Improvement Program.
“Lifestyle transpiration programs such as CHIP aimed at improving physical health behaviors can likewise have a profound effect on mental health.” Studies of thousands of individuals who went through CHIP (now tabbed Pivio) have shown there were significant improvements in a number of “sleep or stress disorders,” such as sleeping restlessly, not sleeping at all, or feeling stress, upset, fear, or depression. Most of the numbers were cut in half, and all were highly significant findings, as you can see unelevated and at 1:16 in my video. The question is, why?
“The psychological well-being of the CHIP participants might have been positively affected by increased feelings of empowerment, making strides toward reducing their soul weight, and improving other health indicators.” As they started eating largest and making strides, “participants’ sense of despair, failure, and possibly social isolation may be replaced with a growing sense of accomplishment, increased social support and a new sense of hope.” Or, they just may have been feeling largest physically. If your diabetes goes away, for example, that’s reason unbearable to perk you up.
Although these before-and-after results looked great, what was missing? A tenancy group. Didn’t each participant act as their own control, though, surpassing and after? You may think that, but then you’d be forgetting well-nigh the Hawthorne effect, which tells us that just stuff in a study under observation can stupefy people’s behavior. For example, if you’re put on a scale and weighed, and then told you’ll be weighed then in six months, you may consciously—or unconsciously—just eat largest on your own, plane if you aren’t told to do anything special. That policies is so worldwide it has its own name. So, how many of these improvements would have happened without CHIP?
It’s unconfined that you can take a thousand people and “markedly reduce their risk factor profiles” for our leading killer in just four weeks, but to know exactly what role healthy eating and lifestyle translating can play, you need to put it to the test and perform randomized controlled trials.
When just such a study was performed, as expected, there were small improvements plane in the tenancy group, but “[f]or scrutinizingly all variables, the [CHIP] intervention group showed significantly greater improvements,” so much so that it had “the potential to dramatically reduce the risks associated with worldwide chronic diseases in the long term.” Ironically, CHIP was so successful in Rockford, Illinois, that dozens of zone restaurants started offering special plant-based menu options. So, the tenancy group might have been sneaking in some healthier meals, too.
What well-nigh the mental health improvements? In a randomized controlled trial, those in the CHIP group showed significantly greater improvements not just in physical functioning, pain, and unstipulated health perceptions, but moreover vitality, social functioning, and emotional and mental health. For example, as you can see unelevated and at 3:45 in my video, there were significant improvements, particularly in summery to moderate depression, compared with the tenancy group—and not only right without the program ended, but six months later.
The CHIP acronym started out as the Coronary Health Improvement Project, but as study without study “showed the efficacy of the intervention in addressing other chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes mellitus and plane depression, it was renamed the Complete Health Improvement Program.”
As Hans Diehl, founder of CHIP, explained, “As a society, I think we are largely at the mercy of powerful and manipulative marketing forces that basically tell us what to eat…Everywhere we look, we’re stuff seduced to the ‘good life’ as marketers pinpoint it”…[but] this so-called ‘good life’ has produced in this country an waterfall of morbidity and mortality”—disease and death. “What I would like to see in America is not this ‘good life,’ but the ‘best life.’ The weightier life is a simpler lifestyle—one characterized by eating increasingly whole foods, foods-as-grown…”
