More From Dr. Esselstyn

I just found this in my Drafts folder. No idea why I never posted it back when I wrote it up in September.

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Dr. and Ann Esselstyn were recently in Australia for a plant-based conference, and a family who post as Plant Based Health Australia were there taking notes. Here's their summary post on FaceBook. Loads of comments, many with clarifying information, so be sure to click to read them.

If you don't "do" FaceBook, here's the post. I'm not going to post all the comments to it, though - sorry.

Plant Based Health AustraliaSeptember 22 at 1:54 AM · 
We attended a 5-hour workshop with Ann and Dr Caldwell Esselstyn today. We had not previously seen Ann in action. She's an extraordinary bundle of energy and highly skilled in presenting the practical food based information that heart patients need to know. She was able to convey a great deal of information while showing us how simple it can be. We've seen Dr Esselstyn present many times before but not at the level of detail he presented today.
Here are some key points we noted from Dr Esselstyn's presentation:
- Patients need to understand endothelium and nitric oxide and avoid eating anything that damages endothelium.
- If you are only 90% doing it then you are further damaging your endothelium 10% of the time.
- The best foods for protecting and enhancing the endothelium are green leafy vegetables. For heart patients he still recommends that you eat these, not drink these, 6 times per day.
- The other core principles of Esselsyn's nutrition are: no animal products; absolutely, definitely no oil; no caffeinated coffee; no sugar; low salt and no avocado or nuts apart from a small quantity of flaxseed meal or chia seeds. The foods to include are grains, legumes, lentils, vegetables and fruit. He only recommends restricting fruit when triglycerides are elevated.
- In Dr Esselstyn's experience if patients adhere perfectly to his diet their heart disease goes into long term remission even if their LDL cholesterol does not reach the 'heart attack proof' target of less than 2.0.
- Coronary artery calcium score (CACS) only measures calcified plaque, i.e. old plaque which has healed into scar tissue. It is the current, inflamed, active plaque that leads to heart attacks. Sometimes the CACS can worsen as active plaque stabilises, heals and calcifies.
- An antioxidant rich WFPB diet reduces the stickiness of the blood and stabilises plaque so that patients may not need to continue taking aspirin after a year or so on the program.
- For weight plateaus he recommends giving up flour products and using water-only fasting from 7am to 7am on up to 2 separate days of the week.
- He recommends against taking vitamin supplements other than B12.

As for those fasting periods, they said Dr. Essy explained the example of doing the water fast on Monday and Thursday. You start your fast immediately after dinner on Sunday and Wednesday and don't eat again until Tuesday and Friday breakfasts. This isn't the first time I read about Dr. Essy recommending fasting - a few women over on the non-official Esselstyn FB groups had mentioned it before. Previously he recommended not water fasting, but eating only non-starchy vegetables 2 days a week. I guess the fasting gurus got to him and got him to change his recommendation.

Also in the comments, the restriction on fruit was mentioned, and there was a little bit of disagreement about that, too. In this talk, or at least in this summary of it, it sounded like like fruit is only restricted if triglycerides are high, but in all his other talks and writings he restricts fruit for everyone to only 2-3 pieces a day. I'm going to assume if you have high triglycerides you need to restrict them even further than those 2-3 a day, like maybe one or none a day, like Dr. McDougall recommends for high triglycerides.