Dr. Joel Kahn on heart disease: what the evidence says · JRE #1175
SUBJECT: HEART DISEASE
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
He put half of them on a low animal diet with very high plants, let half of them eat like Los Angeles people. Eight years later, 50% on the high plant, low fat diet were alive, 0% on the standard Los Angeles diet.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Los Angeles cardiologist Lester Morrison did run a diet-heart study beginning in 1948, assigning about 100 post-heart-attack patients (50 per group) to a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet or to a usual-diet control group using sequential/alternate, non-randomized, unblinded allocation in his own practice. His own published data do not match Kahn's figures: an interim report (Am Heart J, 1951) found roughly 56% survival in the diet group versus 24% in controls after 8 years, while his final 1960 JAMA report found 19 of 50 diet-group patients (38%) alive versus 0 of 50 controls alive at 12 years, not 8. Kahn's "50% vs 0% at eight years" appears to conflate the diet group's approximate 8-year survival rate with the control group's 0%-alive figure, which only occurred at the later 12-year mark, and the original study's small size, lack of randomization, and lack of blinding make its numbers unsuitable as proof that diet "reverses" heart disease. Larger modern evidence, based on cohort studies of over 400,000 people, does associate plant-based diets with modestly lower cardiovascular mortality (about 8%) and incidence (about 10%), but no randomized trial has tested plant-based diets against hard cardiovascular endpoints, so the causal "reversal" framing goes beyond what current evidence establishes.
Evidence sources 03 / EXHIBITS
Who Benefits
Kahn sells a plant-based-diet book ("The Plant-Based Solution") and health products/supplements through his own clinic and online store, premised on the claim that plant-based diets prevent and reverse heart disease, the same claim this anecdote is used to support.