My father, staunch vegetarian Brahmin, has been a patient of cardiovascular heart disease for 20 years now. A while back, his cardiologist brother recommended a book by Dr. Dean Ornish, an advocate of an vegetarian ultra-low-fat diet. 20 yrs later, he still has heart disease.
Today, my TL threw me this tweet, a debunking of Ornish's fraudulent science, dubious experiment models, non-replicated results, etc etc:
The real zinger was this bit for me from the above blog: 
To clarify, Dr. Dean Ornish, an MD in Internal Medicine, had a spiritual awakening with a Gounder Hindu guru advocating yoga and vegetarianism, and then went on to author an entire diet & lifestyle regimen based on vegetarianism & light fitness.
Now Swami Satchidananda, who travelled widely & spoke at Woodstock fest among other things, was himself inducted into the ways of the Divine Life Society by its founder Swami Sivanand Saraswati, a once-physician who wrote the first books on yoga in English. He was also an Iyer.
Wiki helpfully notes that Swami Satchidananda had also earlier studied under Ramana Maharshi, another Iyer. The influences of both these Iyers, and their brand of Hindu yogic vegetarianism seems to be the foundations of Yogaville & Integral Yoga™, based out of Virginia.
The fact that Brahminical constructions of a vegetarian "spiritual diet" of sorts attains scientific legitimacy through a leading American doctor, then mistakenly hailed to be a cardiological authority by Indian docs is to me hilariously tragic.
Ornish's bad science should have been caught by peer reviewers of the journals he published in. It was not. His unscientific advocacy of an ultra low-fat vegetarianis has been detrimental. It should have been traced back to his "inspirations" as a pseudo-science. It was not.
Yesterday, the BMJ put up an analysis of WHO draft guidelines on dietary saturated & trans fatty acids. Their verdict: this science is unsound & "food-based translation" is necessary to design healthy diets that do not demonize all fats (as Ornish did). bmj.com/content/366/bm…
Now sending this to my father, who as a doctor himself could not catch Ornish's pseudo-science, and who will continue to be a vegetarian (to be fair, switching to meat & healthy fats at this point may not make a huge difference to his health).
The intersections of caste + science + this globalized white-gaze Hindu orientalism though, make me freaking mad. Science is socially constructed through race. Through caste. Through capitalism. And all of those are damn personal. *sigh*
