“Love and Survival” is interesting because it provides a pretty good scientific support to what I consider a plain common sense – a human being needs another human being(s) to have close relationship in order to have good and healthy live.

It makes a perfect evolutionary sense because everybody has periods of temporary weakness physical or psychological or both and need support of somebody else. Besides it is quite obvious that no human being could survive the first 10-15 years of life without external help.

Actually it provides for a very good case for every individual to adhere to boring traditional family values – that is to have, love, and cherish a spouse and take care about young and old not as matter of goodness and morality, but as a matter of self-preservation. As far as I am concern it just makes for a higher quality of life.

Here are a couple samples from the book:

The Harvard Mastery of stress study – In 1952-54 126 healthy Harvard student questioned about relationships with their parents. 35 years later 91% with cold relationships had serious diseases typical for midlife while on 45% with warm relationships had such diseases.

The John Hopkins Study – 1100 medical students followed starting in 1940-s. It was defined that closeness to parents had valid predictive value for good or poor psychological and physiological condition 50 years later.

Overall it contains reference to some 15+ studies that leave no doubt about value of close relationship for human wellbeing.

I do not share Ornish’s interest in eastern philosophy, dieting, and overall science/mystery staff. For me it is just shows the simple way to good live – find somebody to love you and love them back as they are without being judgmental and trying to change them to become more to your liking. If you cannot do that with humans, just get a dog, still would be better for your health then any dieting and even many medicines.