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Sunday Morning News

Dr. Andrew Weil Discusses 'Eating Well for Optimal Health'

Aired March 19, 2000 - 8:47 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Well, his latest book is No. 3 on Amazon.com's list of 100 hot books. Dr. Andrew Weil, author of "Eating Well for Optimum Health" is a leader in the field of medicine based on a model of health, not disease. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he is the director of the program in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona. And Dr. Weil joins us on the set this morning here in Atlanta.

Good morning.

DR. ANDREW WEIL, AUTHOR, "EATING WELL FOR OPTIMAL HEALTH": Good morning.

PHILLIPS: OK, I can't tell you how many books I've read on health, how many books are out there. What makes your book so different?

WEIL: Well, this book is about diet and nutrition and I think it really gives the basic facts of human nutrition that everyone needs to know, including health professionals.

PHILLIPS: Such as?

WEIL: Well, it talks a lot about carbohydrate, protein and fat in the diet and tells you that you really need these in the right proportions and that doing drastic rearrangements of them, as is so popular now in some of these strange diets that everyone is on, is not such a good idea.

PHILLIPS: And everybody talks about diets and the certain diet that's worked for them. Is there the perfect diet?

WEIL: I think everyone, there is no one right diet. If there's anything out there in the world that looks like a diet that would work for a lot of people, I think it's the Mediterranean diet. This is a diet that uses meats sparingly, includes fish, uses olive oil as a main cooking fat, lots of fruits and vegetables, lots of whole grainy carbohydrates rather than all the fluffy stuff that we eat in this country.

PHILLIPS: Have you done that diet?

WEIL: It's, I like to eat that way. I mean that's how, that tends to be how I eat and you can adapt that kind of eating to many different situations.

PHILLIPS: You talk about shifting the conversations that people are having about diets.

WEIL: Away from weight loss. I mean that is so much the focus of people. I think it is much better to look at diet as a way of maintaining and improving health than simply losing weight. You know, weight is mostly genetically controlled. We don't think that we can control our height and we don't have that much more power to control our weight. And I think the problem in this culture is we're so bombarded by these messages from the fashion and entertainment industries about how bodies should look and the genetic realities are usually different.

PHILLIPS: Oh, that's true. A lot of people talk about that. We watch it on our network, those shows, the fashion shows. But everybody does talk about diets and losing weight. You can't avoid it.

WEIL: No, and if you want to lose weight, the way you do that is by eating less. You eat less in two ways. One is to decrease portion size. You know, people from other cultures when they come here are just astounded at the size of portions we eat. And the other way is to try to reduce snacking, that is, not eat throughout the day and also to increase activity.

PHILLIPS: OK, easier said than done. Let's talk about the mental aspect. I know places like Weight Watchers have counseling sessions that you can go. How important is that?

WEIL: I think that can be very important for some people. I think another area to work on is learning to like your body the way nature and genetics make it. I think that's key.

PHILLIPS: How do you do that when society tells you skinny, size three, size two?

WEIL: I think it's practice, practice, practice and to remind yourself that we could just as well have been born into an era in which skinny people were thought of as being unattractive and unhealthy.

PHILLIPS: Well, let's talk about, more about the losing weight versus long-term problems. That's another thing that you brought up.

WEIL: Sure. You know, some of the people that, you know, a lot of people out there are following these very low carbohydrate, high protein diets. These are not healthy long-term ways of eating. They'll work as well as any other crash diet for short-term weight loss. But when you eat that amount of protein over time, this is a huge stress on the liver and on the kidneys and also on the immune system.

In addition, I think you're not giving the brain enough carbohydrate. The brain needs glucose to run on and it gets it chiefly from carbohydrate. Some carbohydrates are worse for us than others. The more we refine carbohydrate foods the more we damage their nutritional qualities and increase the problems. So it's better to eat less refined, as I said, instead of fluffy white breads, dense, chewy peasant breads that have pieces of grain in them. It's much better for us.

PHILLIPS: The Atkins Diet, a lot of publicity on this. What's your take on that?

WEIL: You know, a lot of people who've been on low fat diets and then go on Atkins, they go right for bacon. That was the food they couldn't have and so the plates are just heaped with bacon. Well, bacon is not a health food, I'm sorry.

PHILLIPS: Cardiac on a plate right there.

WEIL: Really. They eat too much saturated fat. They eat too much protein. Again, you can lose weight on it short-term, not a good way to live long-term.

PHILLIPS: You have interesting feedback on vitamins. I mean my grandparents swear by vitamins.

WEIL: Sure.

PHILLIPS: And they're doing really great in their 80s.

WEIL: I take a basic antioxidant formula and a B complex, especially to make sure I'm getting enough folic acid, which most of us are deficient in. But I think that vitamin supplements should be looked at as insurance to cover those gaps in nutrition rather than as substitutes for the natural sources of those micronutrients. Fruits and vegetables are your best sources of vitamins and minerals. You want to eat plenty of them of good quality.

PHILLIPS: Now, we see a lot of infomercials. I know of a lot of people who sell these packages vitamins, you have one in the morning, you have two at night, they have their little special routines. What do you think of these marketed vitamin packages?

WEIL: I think a lot of them are scams. The markup on these products are enormous. Again, you can get most of your vitamin and mineral needs met by eating adequate amounts of fruits and vegetables. It's fine to take a good multi-vitamin as insurance, especially if it gives you the right amounts and kinds of the key anti-oxidants and B complex.

PHILLIPS: All right, let's talk about your Web site. We're going to bring that up right now.

WEIL: Yes.

PHILLIPS: Go ahead and roll that and as we take a look at it, you can tell us about it. What is the name -- here it is.

WEIL: It's ask Dr. Weil.

PHILLIPS: OK.

WEIL: And it's www.drweil.com and there's a tremendous amount of information archived there now. So, you know, there's a good search engine. You can plug in almost any condition or any treatment, get information about it and there's a new feature up there, the best diet in the world, which parallels the book. You can put in a condition and you'll be given specific recipes that are beneficial for that condition.

By the way, this is a whole aspect of nutritional medicine I'm very interested in, of using food as medicine, something Hypocrites told us that we should do in the fifth century B.C. In Asia, there are many medicinal food restaurants. You go in and state your complaints to the waiter and you're served dishes that are specific for those conditions.

PHILLIPS: It's like going to see the doctor about the special teas you can take for...

WEIL: Exactly. Right. But what a nice idea. Wouldn't that be great if we had those available to us?

PHILLIPS: Wonderful. Dr. Weil, thank you so much. What a pleasure.

WEIL: Nice to be here.

PHILLIPS: OK, and once again the book is "Eating Well for Optimum Health," there it is. Dr. Andrew Weil, thanks for being with us.

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