Dr. Esselstyn Replies

Remember those posts last week about Dr. Esselstyn's name being on one of many who authored a study on CVD that "concluded" nuts and oils are heart healthy? Well, we were right to be skeptical.

Apparently, Dr. McDougall wrote him about it, and Dr. McDougall shared his reply on the forums:

John, 
As I crawl from underneath the bus, it is essential for me to clarify your criticism of me in regards to this week’s committee authored American College of Cardiology (ACC) publication. 
On page 1182 of the ACC paper there is reference to three of my publications immediately followed by the statement “On this basis, it appears that a whole food plant based diet may halt progression of coronary atherosclerosis and achieve evidence of angiographic disease regression.” The reference to my publications numbers 133, 134, and 135 appear on page 1187 of the ACC paper. To update you further, in 2016 I published an article in the Journal of The American College of Lifestyle Medicine entitled “Defining an Overdue Requiem for Palliative Cardiovascular Medicine” and I just completed a paper entitled “Coronary Artery Disease: A Mandate for Effective Therapy.” to be published later this year in a geriatric journal issue edited by Robert Ostfeld. In two weeks, on March 19th, I have been given 12 minutes to preset my research and clinical strategies how to prevent and reverse heart disease before the membership of the American College of Cardiology in Washington, D.C. 
My point is that in none of these writings or presentations in the past, present, or future have I deviated from my “NO OIL” plant based nutrition message. 
While I would like nothing more than to have the ACC paper echo my hard and fast no oil plant based approach, you can appreciate the conflicts of some of the authors resulting in compromise and in brutal editing, not surprising in a committee authored article. 
Thank you for sharing my response with your audience. 
Es

As a reminder, the whole thread with links to the study can be found here.