Dean Ornish in his office in Sausalito, Calif. Photo by Peter DaSilva/The New York Times/Redux

Physician and best-selling author Dean Ornish has just two words for older Americans wondering whether they should take advantage of the free yoga classes being offered during September’s National Yoga Month: “Do it!” he urges.

The man who has spent nearly 40 years researching and advocating for yoga as part of a healthful lifestyle, vows that “even in a week, you’ll notice how much better you feel.”

Ornish, 56, founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, Calif., calls the free yoga classes “a great way to jump start” changes that can dramatically improve your health. Since the 1980s, he has been incorporating yoga and meditation in all his studies on how lifestyle alterations can halt or even reverse the effects of serious diseases. The results, he says, have been clear: Combining yoga’s calming effects with other modifications, such as regular exercise and a low-fat diet, can have rapid and significant effects.

A minute a day helps

“What’s particularly exciting for older people is how quickly they can show improvement when they begin making these changes,” Ornish says. In his studies, patients with heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol all improved. Plus, “in all the studies, older patients improved as much as younger patients.”

When he began his research, yoga was considered “weird,” Ornish says. It’s more accepted now, but Ornish notes that his study participants still “think that they’re going to have the hardest time with yoga and meditation.” To their surprise, “it’s often the part they come to value most,” he says.

He has found in his studies that the more yoga and meditation the participants did, the more they improved. But more important than duration, he emphasizes, is consistency. “Even a minute of yoga every day is more important than waiting until you can do an hour a week.”

Last year, Ornish published two studies suggesting that improvements in diet, exercise and stress-management through yoga and meditation could have important benefits in preventing cancer and slowing the effects of aging.

Turning on good genes

One study of 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer, published by the National Academy of Sciences, showed that these lifestyle changes “turned on the good or disease-preventing genes and turned off the genes that cause heart disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer and other illnesses,” Ornish says.

Published last fall in the Lancet, another study of the same group of men with low-risk prostate cancer seemed to suggest that a low-fat diet, regular exercise, support groups, and yoga and meditation might slow the effects of aging by increasing the amount of an enzyme called telomerase, which affects cell growth. 

1 | 2