Update on Andrew Weil

by Nancy Wardle, M.D.

Dr. Andrew Weil, "America’s most trusted doctor" was in Vancouver recently to address the Alternative and Integrated Medicine Conference at the University of British Columbia. He is a warm, affable, approachable man who clearly has absolute faith in his vision/version of wellness.

His talk, "Nutrition and Healthy Lifestyle," was prefaced by an anecdote about his attempts to improve the food at his hospital’s cafeteria (owned and operated by the Marriott Hotel chain). The hospital’s cafeteria had long been a bastion of poor food choices, except for a modest salad bar. It was time for a renovation and Weil saw this as an opportunity for the hospital to practice preventative medicine by having a healthy cafeteria kitchen. Several meetings and several proposals later, the renovation was complete. Replete with more fast food and depleted of most of the already modest salad bar! America’s leading proponent of healthy nutrition was not even able to get his own institution to, as he said, "budge one inch, we even lost ground!" Go figure?

Weil’s point to this story is one that "WELL" agrees with…we need to make and act on healthy choices about our lifestyle if we want to experience wellness, and we live in a culture that often discourages us. If you want to shift from low level to high level wellness, start "hanging around those with healthy habits."

Some of the healthy habits of which he spoke include:

Be wary of extreme diets

• e.g. Blood Type, Suzanne Somers, Dr. Atkins

The importance of Omega 3 fatty acids

• We need more Omega 3 in our diets and need to change the current unbalanced ratio of Omega 3/Omega 6 in our diets towards1/1. Fish oils, salmon, nuts and seeds are great Omega 3 sources.

Decrease saturated fats.

• Eat an anti-inflammatory diet; inflammation is at the root of many illnesses that currently seem unrelated.
• Arterial plaque causes inflammation which can increase weakness in arterial walls leading to coronary artery disease.
• Alzheimer’s may have its origins with nerve inflammation which causes damage to nerves over time. Omega 3 fatty acids are anti-inflammatory and are also nerve cell restorers.
• Pay attention to on-going carbohydrate research. High glycemic index foods can stress the pancreas.

According to some recent research, chocolate is good for you. Weil’s advice is to eat it now before the pendulum swings back! His new book, ‘Eating Well For Optimum Health’ gives detailed information on the above and emphasizes that how we eat influences how we feel, look and age. He also puts forth the idea that food is to be nourishment for the body and the soul.

He spoke at the end of the day on the issue of stress and illness. When people are in stress reactive mode over a long period of time and feel less and less control, the predictors and the incidence of illness increase. This is partly due to wear and tear of the fight or flight reflex on the body and because when under stress, many of us make poor lifestyle choices. Consumption of fat, sugar, tobacco and alcohol goes up and physical activity goes down. Sustained levels of catecholamines (the stress hormones: adrenaline, cortisol and glucocoticosteroids) depress the production and effectiveness of immune system components, the biochemistry associated with mood and sleep stability and with normal pain perception. Increased and sustained cortisol levels are now being linked with brain toxicity that may have implications for early onset dementia.

One of the easiest and most efficient stress handlers is "right under our noses" using our breath as a tool to increase parasympathetic tone and elicit the relaxation response. See "WELL" Spring 1999, vol. I, Issue I. Eating well, seeing activity as a natural and necessary part of life, and practicing stress resiliency, are all a part of his lifestyle medicine approach. He is on a mission to change medical education so that more physicians are, first of all, well themselves, and able to encourage the practice of wellness in their patients. The word ‘doctor’ comes from the Latin word for teacher and in his mind, it is the role of physicians to prevent illness by teaching wellness.

‘Integrative medicine,’ is Dr. Weil’s term for the use of a combination of conventional and complementary modalities in wellness and illness care and, in his view, offers the best hope for individual and collective healing.

In a conversation with him, I said that people buy all the books and get lots of information and yet struggle to make healthy changes. In fact, they do not change when they see the light and sometimes not even when they feel the heat (or get what I call ‘the cosmic two by four’). He laughed. I noticed in his books that almost all his case studies are of people who are in some form of medical crisis before they embark on his programs. Prevention, and inspiring prevention, are issues yet to be clearly addressed.

Just why has he become ‘America’s most trusted physician?’ He doesn’t say a lot that is new, some of it is what mom has always said, "eat your fruit and veggies and go out and play!" and some of it is just plain common sense. I think his appeal lies in his ability to make the concept of being healthy doable and pleasurable. He is low on jargon, high on wonder at what the human body is capable of and doesn’t use the fear factor. He is egalitarian and takes the pomposity out of medicine.In person, Weil exudes a calm and powerful belief in what he says and does. He clearly walks his talk, looking fit, relaxed and energetic. And that is the key to his message…advice on wellness does not replace action taken on wellness. As Gandhi says, "We must become the changes we wish to see in this world."