Pritikin, Whitaker, and Ornish

Nathan Pritikin

Nathan Pritikin was born August 29, 1915 in Chicago, Illinois. His father was a sign salesman. While still in high school, he began studying health as a hobby. He attended the University of Chicago from 1933 to 1935 but was forced to drop out of school for financial reasons (this was the time of the Great Depression.) To support himself, he became a free-lance inventor and engineer. In the 1940s he invented the acid resist etching process for the manufacture of bombsight reticles. (This process would later become important in electronics manufacture.) By the late 1950's he held over two dozen U.S. patents in diverse fields. He was a millionaire by the age of 40.

His interest in health matters was renewed in 1957, when he was diagnosed with heart disease. Medical treatment at the time was limited to drugs and surgery, and was not very effective. In the face of mainstream medicine's inability to offer any relief, he began an intensive study of the scientific literature on the subject and came to the conclusion that diet was to blame. He then began experimenting with his diet, keeping meticulous records. By April 1958, he had become a vegetarian. He had also started running three to four miles daily. By May, his cholesterol had fallen to 162. By January 1960, his cholesterol was 120. An electrocardiogram done on June 15 showed that his coronary insufficiency was gone. His test results were normal.

For the next 10 years, he refined his program, testing it on friends and relatives. During that time, he learned how to cook without sugar, fat, or salt.

Live Longer Now, was published in 1974, written with Jon N. Leonard and J.L. Hofer.

In 1976, he rented half of a Howard Johnson motel in Santa Barbara and, assisted by Dr. Stephen Kaye, opened the Pritikin Longevity Center, a residential program of controlled diet, graduated exercise, and lifestyle education. His wife was in charge of the kitchen. Patients began to arrive from all over the world. While his initial concern had been heart disease, he discovered that his program was also effective against diabetes, gout, and arthritis. This was a pleasant surprise. Half of the adult-onset diabetic patients had normalized their blood sugar levels and discontinued insulin by the end of three weeks.

This did not sit well with the medical community. The doctors were kind of upset about it. People who had arrived at death's door were leaving without symptoms, having discontinued their medications. As is their practice with innovators, they attacked him mercilessly. His lack of credentials was a severe handicap. After all, he had no medical training. His methods were seen to be bizarre, patently worthless and absurd. His approach was seen as irrational. Since he was unable to publish in peer-reviewed journals, his failure to publish was seen as lack of evidence of objective benefit and suggested a mindset of secretiveness and paranoia. Many criticized Pritikin's unsubstantiated claim that his program could reverse heart disease. Some criticized his diet as being unnecessarily severe. They didn't have much use for him, and the feeling was mutual. Pritikin was pretty critical of the medical community, as well. They just didn't get along. Although the scientific evidence supported his views on the link between diet and disease, this was largely ignored by the medical profession. They saw him as a wild man, an outlaw, and an enemy.

In 1977, the "60 Minutes" crew arrived with the intention of exposing Pritikin as a fraud. In the time it took them to film the two segments, they changed their mind and wound up presenting a very positive picture, the first segment of which aired on October 16, 1977.

The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise was first published in 1979, co-authored by Patrick M. McGrady.

The Pritikin Permanent Weight Loss Manual was published in 1981.

The Pritikin Promise was published in 1983, co-authored with Patrick M. McGrady.

The Official Pritrikin Guide to Dining Out was published in 1984.

In 1984, New York City's Mount Sinai Medical School agreed to co-sponsor a medical conference with Pritikin. It took place in April, and Pritikin delivered a speech before hundreds of health professionals.

Diet for Runners was published in 1985.

Just months before he died, the National Institute of Health published the “Lipid Research Clinical Trial,” which confirmed that lowering cholesterol reduces heart disease risk.

As a young man he had suffered from pruritus ani. This was successfully treated with high doses of full body radiation, but the treatment resulted in leukemia. It went into remission for 27 years, but eventually came back. In the early 1980s, he began to suffer complications from chemotherapy (diabetes, kidney failure, and severe pain). He committed suicide on February 21, 1985, by cutting his arteries at the elbows. .

On July 4, 1985, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report on Pritikin's autopsy, noting that his coronary arteries were in excellent condition.

On June 19, 1987, the Journal of the American Medical Association announced a study by David Blankenhorn and his associates at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles that showed regression of atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries of humans, using diet and drugs.

The significance of Pritikin's contribution is that he was an effective change agent. He had the ability to read through mountains of research papers and focus on the really important information. He was also right. Being right is always an advantage, but Ignaz Semmelweis was right about Puerperal Fever, too. Being right did not help him at all. As a practitioner, Semmelweis saved the lives of probably hundreds of women. As a change agent, he was a complete flop. This has to do with how science deals with innovation--something it does not handle gracefully. When confronted with innovation, science will always drag its feet. It does not want to change, and acts on the (correct) assumption that the burden of proof lies with the innovater, who will be viciously, cruelly, and brutally attacked by his colleagues. This is how science is done. It has often been said that medical innovation takes 40 or 50 years, giving a generation of doctors enough time to die off. Only when a new generation of doctors arrives, does the innovation have any chance of being adopted. Pritikin had the courage to stand up to the medical and scientific communities in defense of his ideas. Surprisingly, he received considerable validation and acceptance for his ideas within his lifetime. This is not typically the way things work. Nathan Pritikin was very controversial. His message was quite unpopular with the medical establishment. He was a remarkable man.

Julian Whitaker

Dr. Julian Whitaker graduated from Dartmouth College in 1966. He received his MD in 1970 from Emory University Medical School. He completed his surgical internship at Grady Memorial Hospital in 1971. His residency in orthopedic surgery was at the University of California in San Francisco.

It was here that he met a young woman who was so healthy that her eyes sparkled. This was his first experience with vibrant good health. This encounter would be a turning point in his life. This woman sold vitamins, and took them herself. Before he knew what was happening, Dr. Whitaker was taking vitamins and studying them passionately.

In 1974, Dr. Whitaker met with four other physicians in a Motel 6 conference room to form the California Orthomolecular Medical Society. Linus Pauling endorsed this organization.

In 1976, he went to work at the Pritikin Longevity Center, working with Nathan Pritikin himself. Here, for the first time in his medical career, he saw patients get well.

In 1979, he started the Whitaker Wellness Institute Medical Clinic, where he offered an intensive program of diet, exercise, nutritional and herbal supplementation, and lifestyle changes. For over 30 years he has served his (over 40,000) patients with a combination of conventional medicine with some alternative approaches.

I attended one of his lectures at Rancho Mirage in the mid-1990's. I was especially impressed with his understanding of the scientific literature. During this lecture, he made several half-joking references to his anxiety about the orthodox medical community's animosity towards him. I now suspect that he was more serious about this than he seemed at the time.

He is the author of quite a few books. Among these are the following:

Reversing Diabetes

Reversing Heart Disease

A Guide to Natural Healing

The Whitaker Wellness Weight Loss Program

Reversing Hypertension

Recipes From the Whitaker Wellness Institute

The significance of Dr. Whitaker is primarily as an essentially mainstream practitioner with good credentials, and tendencies towards alternative medicine. In addition, he has served as an educator through his writings. He seems to have enjoyed excellent results with his patients.

Dean Ornish

Dean Michael Ornish was born July 16, 1953 in Dallas, Texas. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin. He studied at the Baylor College of Medicine, receiving his MD there. He attended Harvard Medical School. He served a medical internship at Massachusetts General Hospital. He served a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He is president and founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California.

Research that he has participated in has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Circulation, The New England Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Cardiology, and in other prestigious peer-reviewed journals.

He directed the Lifestyle Heart trial, scientifically demonstrating for the first time that a lifestyle regimen featuring yoga, meditation, a low-fat vegetarian diet, smoking cessation, and regular exercise can reverse coronary artery disease, without drugs or surgery--as evidenced by decreased narrowing of the coronary arteries after one year of treatment. Most patients in the control group had narrower coronary arteries at the end of the trial. This was a rigorously controlled trial. The results of this experiment were published in The Lancet in 1990.

He is the author of several books:

Stress, Diet, and Your Heart: A Lifetime Program for Healing Your Heart without Drugs or Surgery (1984)

Dr. Dean Ornish's Programme for Reversing Heart Disease, Ivy Books, U.S. (1996)

Everyday Cooking With Dr. Dean Ornish: 150 Easy, Low-Fat, High-Flavor Recipes Harper Collins (1996)

Eat More, Weigh Less. Harper Collins (2001)

Love & Survival - 8 Pathways to Intimacy and Health, Harper Collins, U.S. (1998)

The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health

His significance rests on his impeccable mainstream scientific credentials. He proved what Pritikin had taught, in a way that the medical and scientific communities could understand and support.