Heart

The only diets shown to reverse heart disease had no animal flesh

By WhyStopHarmingAnimals.com

Most diet research asks whether food can lower the odds of getting heart disease. A smaller set of studies asks whether food can undo the disease once plaque has already narrowed the coronary arteries. The diets that have done that in people contained no meat[1][2][5], and little or no other animal product[4].

The Lifestyle Heart Trial

Dean Ornish’s Lifestyle Heart Trial, published in The Lancet in 1990, randomized 48 patients[1] with coronary artery disease. One group received usual care[1]. The other followed a very-low-fat vegetarian diet with no meat, together with exercise, stress management and group support, and took no cholesterol-lowering drugs[1][2]. In the lifestyle group, average stenosis went from 40.0% to 37.8%[1]. In the usual-care group it went from 42.7% to 46.1%[1]. Of the patients who changed their lifestyle, 82% moved toward regression[1].

The follow-up, published in JAMA in 1998, kept the same shape. Patients on the lifestyle program still took no lipid-lowering drugs, and they did better than controls who were taking them[2]. Their arteries regressed while those of the control group worsened[2], and usual care had more cardiac events, with a risk ratio of about 2.5[2].

The trial was small, and because the program changed diet, exercise, stress and social support all at once, it cannot isolate the food. What it does show is coronary narrowing going backward, without drugs, on a regimen whose diet had no meat in it[1][2].

Esselstyn’s patients

Caldwell Esselstyn took a stricter line: a whole-food plant-based diet, very low in fat, with no meat and almost no other animal products[4]. His first report, in the Journal of Family Practice in 1995, followed 11 patients who kept to a diet under 10% fat for a mean 5.5 years[3]. Of their 25 lesions, 11 regressed and 14 stopped growing[3]. Mean stenosis fell from 53.4% to 46.2%[3], and nobody had a new heart attack[3]. Five patients quit and went back to their old diet, and between them they reported 10 coronary events[3].

A later review of his program reported that the same protocol, devoid of meat and nearly all animal products, was associated with arrest and reversal of coronary artery disease in the patients who stuck with it[4].

These are case series. Patients chose to take part, there was no randomized control group, and the first report covered 11 people[3]. The five who dropped out offer a rough comparison, and nothing more controlled than that.

What the record adds up to

A 2017 paper in the Journal of Geriatric Cardiology argued that a plant-based diet is a mandate for effective therapy of coronary artery disease, since the diets shown to reverse the disease had no meat[5]. No diet that includes meat has a clinical record like the ones from Ornish and Esselstyn[1][2][3][4].

Laboratory work points the same way. In a 2025 study from Georgia State University, a plant-based diet prevented and reversed a form of heart disease in animals with hypertension[6]. It is an animal study, so it supports the mechanism without showing that the same thing happens in people[6].

For anyone already living with coronary disease, these trials are small, but they are the only dietary reversal results there are[5], and both programs took the meat off the plate[2][4].