Undo It! Book Summary - Undo It! Book explained in key points

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Undo It! summary

Name: Undo It!
Rating: 4.2 (99 reviews)
Author: Anne Ornish and Dean Ornish

Anne Ornish and Dean Ornish

How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases

4.2 (99 ratings)

25 mins

Brief summary

'Undo It!' by Anne Ornish and Dean Ornish is a health and wellness book that provides evidence-based guidance on how to prevent and reverse chronic diseases through lifestyle changes. It encourages readers to adopt four key pillars of well-being, including mindfulness, physical activity, stress management, and nutrition.

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Undo It!
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Prevent and reverse chronic disease through simple lifestyle changes.

When you make a mistake on your computer, there’s often a very simple way to fix it: just select the “undo” option. It’s like magic – allowing you to reverse what you’ve done and proceed as if it never happened. If only there were as simple a solution to our health problems!

But that would require such a powerful “undo” button that it would be like something straight out of science fiction, wouldn’t it? After all, chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes are often the result of longstanding mistakes we’ve made in taking care of ourselves. Surely they cannot be reversed quickly or simply, right?

Well, guess what? There is a solution! It’s not a magic pill or a new form of surgery; it’s just a matter of shifting your lifestyle. By changing your approach to your diet, exercise, stress management and social relationships, you can prevent and even reverse the chronic diseases that are ravaging so many people in modern societies.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how chronic diseases share many of the same causes and, therefore, solutions;
why diet and exercise are even more important than you might think; and
why the most important factors in health are also some of the most surprising.

There’s a growing scientific and medical consensus that lifestyle changes can prevent and reverse chronic diseases.

With so much conflicting medical advice out there, and with so many quacks, grifters and charlatans dispensing it, you’d be justified in feeling skeptical toward yet another miracle cure-all. That’s especially true of the lifestyle medicine program outlined in these blinks, which claims to be able to prevent and reverse serious chronic diseases through simple lifestyle changes. However, there’s a significant body of scientific evidence and a growing consensus in the medical community that lifestyle programs in general, and this one in particular, are effective.

Let’s start with the evidence. To begin with, the research on which the authors have based their program has been published in peer-reviewed medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Even more impressive is the evidence on which the authors’ stake the program’s efficacy. They have collected clinical outcomes data from tens of thousands of patients from a variety of socioeconomic, ethnic and age groups.

Studies by the author and other scientific investigators have demonstrated that the program can stop, slow or reverse a wide range of chronic diseases, including severe coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, early-stage non-aggressive prostate cancer, depression, anxiety and certain types of autoimmune conditions and early-stage dementia.

The program has also been embraced by a number of American hospitals, clinics, physician groups, commercial and governmental healthcare insurance providers, and leading figures of the medical community, such as the director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

For those who have followed recent developments in the field of medicine, all of this enthusiasm and evidence in favor of a lifestyle program may come as no surprise. The field is in the midst of a significant shift in thinking about chronic diseases – changing its focus from expensive, cutting-edge drugs and surgery to the low-cost power of lifestyle changes.

That’s not to pooh-pooh drugs and surgery, which often provide necessary, lifesaving remedies for chronic diseases, especially when they lead to emergencies like heart attacks. But there is growing evidence that lifestyle changes can be more effective than drugs alone in treating many of the chronic diseases already mentioned. That evidence comes from studies and findings published by highly respected sources, such as the Harvard School of Public Health, the Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study Group and the Mayo Clinic.

When it comes to lifestyle changes, slow and steady does not win the race.

When making a big change to your lifestyle, you might think that it’s a good idea to take a gradual approach – tackling one area at a time and changing habits slowly. But it’s easier to make a radical, comprehensive shift in all areas at once.

Let’s say you make a small change to your diet. You tell yourself, “OK, I’m just going to eliminate dessert and remove meat from one meal per week.” Now you’re denying yourself habits you enjoy, which is difficult – but you’re not going to experience a major improvement in your health just from cutting out chocolate ice cream at night or the steak from your Thursday dinner.

The underlying causes of chronic illness can be found in, and removed from, our modern lifestyles.

When advising a large audience about a broad topic, it’s common to begin by noting there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. That caveat would seem especially true when giving lifestyle medicine advice to people looking to prevent or reverse chronic diseases. After all, there are so many different types of diseases, and different people respond in different ways to drug-based treatments.

Surprisingly, however, with lifestyle medicine, there is a one-size-fits-all solution. And that’s because chronic diseases share many of the same underlying biological mechanisms, such as gene expression, oxidative stress and inflammation.

A plant-based diet is one of the pillars of maintaining long-term health.

We now come to the first aspect of the radical lifestyle shift advocated by the authors: diet. Fans of meat, cheese and eggs, be warned: this may be a particularly tough pill to swallow – but it’s an equally important truth to accept.

Let’s cut to the chase: within the medical community, there’s a growing consensus that a whole-food, plant-based vegan diet is the healthiest way to eat, while the typical meat and dairy-heavy Western diet is extremely unhealthy. The authors strongly recommend embracing the former while avoiding the latter.

Plant-based foods provide health-boosting substances, while meats and refined carbs do the opposite.

It might be a useful rule of thumb, but it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say that plant-based proteins and carbs are healthy, while meat-based proteins and refined carbs are unhealthy. Really, it’s not so much the proteins and carbs themselves that are healthy or unhealthy, but the other substances that are present or absent alongside them.

Plant-based proteins and carbs come with a variety of substances that help ward off aging, cancer and heart disease. Meanwhile, animal proteins and refined carbs either fail to deliver those protective substances or they actually introduce harmful substances into your body.

Exercise makes you healthier, happier and smarter.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past hundred years, you probably know that exercise is important for your health. Still, you might be surprised to learn to what extent this is true – and how easy it can be to enjoy its advantages. Let’s look at three of the most salient benefits.

First, exercise can increase your longevity. One study showed that just walking 20 to 30 minutes per day can slash people’s rate of premature death by 20 to 30 percent. Another study showed that switching from a sedentary lifestyle to one that incorporates a daily run gives people an extra three years of life. And no, you don’t need to be running marathons – even running five minutes per day at a pace of six miles per hour provides similar longevity benefits to running 30 minutes a day at a faster pace!

Stress is dangerous but also preventable.

As you probably know from first-hand experience, emotional stress can feel pretty crappy – but its pernicious nature goes way beyond that. In addition to the psychological misery it causes, stress also has a wide range of negative effects on our physical health.

Stress is more than just another biological mechanism that causes chronic disease; it’s more like the über-mechanism – a sort of anti-magic pill that fuels all of the other mechanisms. This includes the usual suspects: oxidative stress, inflammation, angiogenesis, the shortening of our telomeres and the overall health of our microbiomes. It also includes adverse effects on gene expression, cellular metabolism and apoptosis, which is the process by which cells die.

Strong social connections are a fundamental part of a healthy life.

When we think about maintaining our physical health, we usually think about taking physical actions, such as improving our diet and exercise. And even if we add stress management to the list, we’re still mostly dealing with physical activities such as breathing and muscle relaxation exercises.

It may surprise you, then, that one of the most fundamental components of our health is something much less tangible: our social connections. The paramount importance of these becomes especially apparent in their absence. Indeed, few things can have a more detrimental effect on our health than loneliness.

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What is Undo It! about?

Undo It! (2019) reveals the astonishing power of making simple lifestyle changes that can not just prevent, but even reverse a wide range of chronic diseases. That might sound like wishful thinking, but it’s backed by a rich array of research that has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and reflects a growing consensus within the mainstream medical community.

Who should read Undo It!?

People with chronic diseases
People looking for motivation to change their diets or exercise habits
People who suffer from stress or loneliness

About the Author

Dr. Dean Ornish is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, San Diego. His research has been published in leading peer-reviewed medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet. He is the author of six bestselling books, including Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease (1990) and The Spectrum (2008).

Anne Ornish is the vice president of program development at the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, which investigates how diet and lifestyle affect health and disease. She is also the digital director of Ornish Lifestyle Medicine – an organization that offers a nine-week lifestyle medicine program implemented by hospitals, clinics and physician groups around the United States.

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