The CHIP program (now tabbed Pivio) has attempted to take the pioneering lifestyle medicine work of Pritikin and Ornish and spread it out into the community.
England has been keeping mortality statistics since 1665 when one person was “killed by a fall lanugo stairs at St. Thomas Apostle.” That same week, though, nearly 4,000 people died of the plague.
Today, the modern plague is heart disease, the number one killer of men and women, but it wasn’t unchangingly this way. If you dig into those old statistics, heart disease was once killing off 5 to 10 percent of the population by the middle of the last century, but it “was practically unknown at the whence of the [20th] century.” Consider the natural history of coronary heart disease in the 1920s and 1930s. As you can see at 0:45 in my video What Is the Optimal Diet?, it skyrocketed tenfold in both men and in women. What was going on? We get a track in a study that divided people by socioeconomic class. (You can tell the paper was written well-nigh 1950 considering the subjects are identified as “Males” and “Wives.”) The richest folks had up to triple the heart disease of the poorest. Did it have something to do with their rich diets? You don’t know, until you put it to the test. In doing so, we discover “the natural cure of coronary heart disease,” found decades ago by Nathan Pritikin, who ripened the eponymous plant-based nutrition and lifestyle program, followed by Dean Ornish and then Caldwell Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic, but how many know of the name Hans Diehl?
Dr. Diehl was the first director of research at the Pritikin Center when in 1976. He was inspired by the wondrous results they were getting—amazing results like those gotten by a unrepealable Grandma Frances Greger. Diehl “recognized the limitations of [live-in] residential programs, including their cost…and the ‘artificial’ living environment that made sustaining the learned behaviors increasingly difficult for participants when they returned to their home setting. In response, Diehl ripened CHIP”—now known as the Complete Health Improvement Program—“as an affordable 30-day lifestyle intervention to be delivered to individuals in their community.
Ten years in, Dr. Esselstyn encouraged Dr. Diehl to publish their results in the American Journal of Cardiology. “Coronary Risk Reduction Through Intensive Community-Based Lifestyle Intervention: The Coronary Health Improvement Project (CHIP) Experience” famously started with a quote from the pioneer of coronary shirk surgery who described it as “only a palliative treatment. The incidence of coronary disease will only be decreased by proper preventive measures.”
We know that “vigorous cholesterol lowering” can slow, arrest, or plane reverse atherosclerosis, but it only works if you do it. Live-in programs work considering you can tenancy people’s diets, but they’re expensive and people may go when home to toxic supplies environments. So, instead of them coming to you, what if you go to them in the community?
The original program was 16 evening sessions over four weeks. “The major focus of the program was to encourage participants to prefer the Optimal Diet,” and they were moreover “encouraged to exercise 30 minutes a day.” Most importantly, however, they were to “embrace” centering their nutrition virtually whole plant foods. Now, that was the optimal—a whole supplies plant-based diet—but “the program did not prescribe a dietary dogma but instead encouraged participants to move withal the spectrum toward the ad libitum consumption of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes”—incorporating increasingly whole, healthy plant foods into their diets. They didn’t provide meals, just translating and encouragement. And, without only four weeks, there was an stereotype weight loss of well-nigh six pounds, thoroughbred pressures went lanugo well-nigh six points, bad LDL cholesterol went lanugo 16 to 32 points, and fasting thoroughbred sugars dropped as well, as you can see unelevated and at 3:36 in my video.
“Often, participants were worldly-wise to subtract or discontinue antidiabetic, hypolipidemic [cholesterol-lowering], and antihypertensive [blood pressure–lowering] medication,” making their findings plane increasingly extraordinary. Indeed, they achieved largest numbers on fewer drugs.
Live-in programs, such as the Pritikin Longevity Center and the McDougall Program, are unconfined in that you can optimize the clinical benefits, but they can forfeit thousands of dollars and rationalization many participants to miss work. On the other hand, CHIP is cheap, and people can live at home, so they aren’t spoon-fed a perfect nutrition for a few weeks at some spa only to go when to their cupboards of cookies. CHIP is a free-living program, teaching people how to eat and stay healthy within their home environments. At least, that’s the theory. These remarkable results were without just four weeks in the program. “The true test, however, will be to what extent people pinion to their new lifestyle and sustain their health benefits,” looking forward to weeks, months, or plane increasingly than a year later, which we’ll explore in my video Flashback Friday: The Weight-Loss Program That Got Largest with Time.
