Dean Ornish

You can meditate on almost anything: a prayer, song, image or word. Close your eyes; sit in a comfortable position. Take a breath, and say the word out loud, emphasizing the humming sound at the end. When you come to the end of the breath, take another one and say the word again. And so on.

Not everything that lowers HDL is bad for you. If you change from a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet to a healthy low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, your HDL levels may stay the same or even decrease because there is less need for it. When you have less garbage, you need fewer garbage trucks to remove it, so your body may make less HDL.

Small changes in diet don't have much effect on preventing coronary heart disease and cancer. But bigger changes in diet and lifestyle may prevent heart attacks in almost everyone.

Your genes are not your fate... if you change your lifestyle, you change your genes.

Knowing that changing lifestyle changes our genes is often very motivating - not to blame, but to empower.

Lifestyle changes may slow, stop, or even reverse the progression of early-stage prostate cancer.

Lifestyle changes may help reduce risk, but no study has shown that lifestyle changes alone can eliminate the risk of breast cancer, especially in those carrying the BRCA mutation.

Chronic emotional stress shortens your telomeres.

Having the BRCA mutation significantly increases the risk of breast cancer, but it is not always the only factor. Lifestyle choices may increase or decrease the risk of breast cancer, but that knowledge is an opportunity to empower ourselves, not to blame.

I strongly believe that the Founding Fathers of our country got it right: power corrupts, and any time you have too much power concentrated in one place, it tends to get abused, so checks and balances are always needed.

As a veteran of the diet wars, I think it's time to call a truce. Rather than hear experts argue, most people want practical information they can use.

When we are angry with someone, we empower the person we hate the most in that moment to make us stressed out or even sick. That's not smart.