How much fat is too much? The American Heart Association says 30% of a day's calories. That may sound strict, but it doesn't go nearly far enough to satisfy Dr. Dean Ornish, a University of California cardiologist and dean of the eat-right-for-a-healthy-heart school of medicine. Ornish has long maintained that changes in diet and lifestyle can treat heart disease as effectively as drugs and surgery--perhaps even more so. But modest reductions in fat intake, he says, usually do your heart no good at all.
Ornish puts his heart patients on a strict vegetarian diet allowing for--at most--a third of the fat...