Integrative Health for Optimal Aging | Andrew Weil, MD

hello greetings from the university of arizona innovations and healthy aging initiative my name is kathy yinzl and i want to tell you a little bit about the initiative and then i will allow other people to speak so i won't be doing this very long because i know you're here to hear dr andrew weil in arizona some fast facts the number of people age 65 or older has increased about 52 percent from 2010 to 2019. we can consider this a surge in the number of americans aged 65 and older in this decade which has outpaced the growth of the working age population more than 1.3 million people in arizona 17.3 of the state's population are now 65 and older so that presents us with challenges and many opportunities and what we're trying to do and our primary aim is to influence the critical factors that affect the health of an aging population just briefly there are four goals to this innovations and healthy aging uh initiative one is to create an age-friendly university of arizona so we're trying to help you bring in bring you into the university of arizona and help you feel comfortable here and like you're a part of our world here at the university but also we're trying to go out into the community in places that you live and work and reside and and create a sort of back and forth and give and take and collaboration we also want to partner with developers of senior living communities and aging industry experts to re-imagine senior living we want to expand our capacity and research and discovery focused on aging and we want to increase the workforce to meet both the opportunities and challenges of our aging population i want to give you a heads up on the next lecture that we will be offering and that will be on may 25th on sleep and healthy aging with michael dr michael grandner who's the director of sleep and healthy health research program and associate professor of medicine and associate professor of psychiatry at the university of arizona college of medicine please do go on our website which i'll show you here and register for this event you can find it at https colon backslash backslash healthyaging.arizona.edu or there's another website for you if you would like to join our mailing list so that we can get you information now here to introduce dr andrew weil is dr esther sternberg she is the research director for the andrew weil center for integrative medicine at the university of arizona she is also our innovations and healthy aging associate director for biomedical and environmental research and i welcome her as she welcomes dr weil well thank you so much kathy for that we are so thrilled to have dr andrew weil here as one of our first speakers in this lecture series dr weil is a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine combining a harvard education and a lifetime of practicing natural and preventive medicine he is founder and director of the andrew wiles center for integrative medicine here at the university of arizona in tucson he holds the lovell jones endowed chair in integrative medicine and his clinical professor of medicine and professor of public health at the university of arizona tucson a new york times best-selling author dr weil has published 15 books on health and well-being including most relevant to this presentation healthy aging and eight weeks to optimum health he is also editorial director of dr weill.com and a founder and partner in the growing family of true food kitchen restaurants but beyond this impressive bio dr weil is a courageous visionary who bucked the naysayers when the field was dismissed as pseudoscience and shepherded it to where it is today an essential approach to well-being embedded in mainstream medicine and health as dr weil often says integrative medicine is just good medicine so without further ado it is my great pleasure to bring you dr andrew weil to speak on integrative health for optimal aging andy please take it away thank you so much dr sternberg it is a pleasure to be in here on june 8th a a very short time from today i turned 80. uh i have no idea how that happened that seems to have happened in the blink of an eye and i feel very cheated that i received no instructions on how to age you know i was never given a manual on what aging was um growing up 80 seemed ancient and i heard an awful lot of people in in that age range talk about it wasn't fun getting old uh so some years ago as you said i wrote a book called healthy aging and when i started that the main question that i wanted to answer was is it necessary to get sick as you get old because we see that many old people are sick and in fact the oldest older now the fastest growing segment of our population this is an unprecedented demographic change never before will a human population have had so many members in the ranks of the old and the oldest old and a lot of those people are not well you know we have a lot of centenarians around now they used to be quite rare but now they're all over the place and enough of them that we could do studies of them you know most of them are not in good health and so this is to me like the big question you know is it is it necessary that we're going to get sick as we get old and there are large categories of disease that become much more frequent after the age of 60. the big ones are cardiovascular disease neurodegenerative diseases like parkinson's and alzheimer's and cancer you know these are the big diseases that cause most premature death and disability and so i wondered you know is it inevitable that we're going to get these if we live long enough and in the course of of doing research for that book it seemed to me pretty clear from the science that the answer that question is no that you can separate the aging process from age-related disease and therefore it seems to me that the goal is how do you stay healthy as you get old how do you reduce the risk and delay the onset of age-related diseases and so the goal there's a technical term for for this it's called compression of morbidity where morbidity has the medical meaning of sickness and the idea is that you want to squeeze the time of disability and decline at the end of life into a shorter period as possible i think this is what we'd all like to do you want to live long and well and have a rapid drop-off at the end and that would also by the way make it much easier for society to deal with this huge and growing population of old people being much less of a drain on our health care resources so i was very interested in thinking about how what can you do to increase your chances of experiencing compression of morbidity as you go through life and the answer to that question well the next question that comes up is how much of your aging destiny is genetically determined and how much has to do with environmental factors and factors under your control i don't think there's a way of giving an exact answer to that question i think it's always both and there's no clear line between them but i have to tell you my strong prejudice and this also i think resonates with the science is that we're all dealt a certain hand of genetic cards but we have a lot of latitude in how we play them and we're just seeing more and more the extent to which environmental influences can modify genetic expression and this is not only factors like diet and physical activity but even mental emotional factors there's some papers that i came across from japan which i i don't know many people here in the science community are familiar with but these were these were studies done at very reputable japanese uh medical universities showing that laughter can modify the expression of genes involved in the development of prostate cancer and this was done both in in mice and in humans now how you get mice to laugh i'm not sure i think it was done by tickling but you know how astonishing that a non-physical factor uh something like laughter could cause genes to turn on and off so and an another observation that goes along with this idea that our genetic destiny is modifiable is that we can see with our own eyes today that people are aging differently from the way their parents and grandparents aged you know we commonly hear people say that that 70 is the new 60 and 80 is the new 70. and it's true this is we we see this right before us you know what's changed in this time it's not genetics that's the same but i think people have first of all access to better preventive medical care they have much greater knowledge about what eating sensibly is about the importance of exercise you know all sorts of resources that were not available to our parents and grandparents and it just shows in the physical expression of aging today a lot of people you know when as i said when i was growing up 80s seemed to me like ancient and a lot of people i knew who were 80 look decrepit i don't think i would decrepit today we'll see that's hard for me to judge myself but you know i think that that things are different and this is a concrete evidence of how much we can modify our genetic destiny so then then the practical question is what can you do what what's under your control that you can do to increase your chances of experiencing uh compression morbidity as you go through life and here's where i think the great relevance of integrative medicine is uh so let me just say integrative medicine is not alternative medicine it's not complementary medicine it's not functional medicine as you said integrative medicine is good medicine it is enhanced conventional medicine you know we are trying to make conventional medicine more effective more cost-effective less productive of harm and we're doing that by trying to shift some of the focus from disease management to health promotion and disease prevention and a lot of that is their emphasis on lifestyle medicine uh which to me is the the meat of prevention and also we're trying to bring into the mainstream um treatments that are not dependent on expensive technology um everything from mind mind-body approaches to breathing techniques to use of natural remedies and so forth so that whole mix is integrative medicine and i think the the very strong piece of that is lifestyle medicine and that has great relevance to the question that i asked about what we can do to to influence how we age so i think you you have to look at all the factors under our control that we know influence our risk of disease and the state of our health now let's start with nutrition and uh you know i have to say and learn next to nothing about that in my medical education uh something that we're trying to remedy in uh in at the center for integrative medicine and our training of doctors and other health professionals it's very hard to generalize and say what is an optimum diet given that we're all biochemically different we come from different cultures we have different taste preferences and and when you talk to in fact i'm amused in looking at the answers that you get when you ask very old people who are healthy you know what they did or what what they attribute their health to there was a russian woman that i saw an interview with i think she was 104 and was asked you know the secret of her longevity and she said i never eat vegetables but given all these things i think one thing that's pretty clear is that it is desirable not to eat refined processed and manufactured food and i think that's what really is undermining health today uh you know michael pollan wrote that our great grandparents would not even recognize as food what many people eat today and i think that's quite true so the closer you can eat foods to the way that nature produces them i think the better off you are and as you know esther i uh really quite some time ago began looking at the hypothesis that chronic low level inflammation is the common root cause of many of these age-related diseases you know when i was in medical school i was taught that that coronary artery disease had nothing to do with alzheimer's disease that had nothing to do with cancer these were completely independent disease entities and now it appears that there is a common root there and it is in chronic low level inflammation inflammation um is the the root cause of of neurodegenerative diseases that's why ibuprofen has a preventive effect in alzheimer's disease we know that atherosclerosis begins as inflammation in the lining of arteries and cancer is related as well because anything that increases inflammation simultaneously increases cell division and the risk of of malignant change aspirin has an anti-cancer effect because it is an anti-inflammatory agent so this to me argues that anything we can do to control inappropriate inflammation in the body is one strategy for increasing our chances of experiencing compression morbidity and there are many factors that influence your inflammatory status genetics environmental exposures uh secondhand cigarette smoke is a powerful pro-inflammatory agent for example uh but diet has a tremendous influence and that's under our control and as you know i've developed an anti-inflammatory diet and an anti-inflammatory diet pyramid that's in on my website dr weil.com and in all my books and people are generally very happy to hear that dark chocolate is at the very top of the anti-inflammatory period uh pyramid that has that chocolate has a you know a i think is a health food if eaten in moderation and it's a you know 70 cocoa content and not milk chocolate and so forth um but i think this this means an anti-inflammatory diet begins with eliminating refined processed and manufactured foods and then learning which fats are desirable and what kinds of carbohydrates are better and which are worse and so forth there are a number of natural products that can help us contain inflammation the most powerful and most well-studied one is turmeric the yellow spice that makes mustard american mustard yellow and curry yellow there's tremendous amount of research on on turmeric as a safe effective anti-dynamic reagent and this is a good thing to incorporate in the diet or to take as a supplement so you know that's one set of of strategies some years ago the macarthur foundation did a study of what they called successful aging you know they identified you know a number of subjects people who were old oldest old who they identified as being healthy and then interviewed them to see what they had in common and the two factors that most stood out uh first was maintenance of physical activity throughout life that did not mean necessarily working with trainers or going to gyms it could be just walking regularly and the other was maintenance of social intellectual connectivity and those two factors outweighed everything else they looked at whether how people ate whether they took dietary supplements and so forth so i think that's that's interesting to ponder uh and maintenance of physical activity of course that's something you know that anyone we're all capable of i think the maintenance of social and intellectual connectivity is trickier especially in our culture because you know well let me make it a side here in the course of researching my book i made a number of trips to okinawa because at that time milk and i was a group of islands at the southern end of japan okinawans are not japanese they're a different ethnic group they they had at the time that i went over there the highest number of centenarians in the world and as soon as i got there it was obvious to me you couldn't disentangle all the factors that might account for okinawa and longevity they live in a tropical pacific paradise have clean air clean water a remarkable diet full of all sorts of protective compounds from land plants and seed plants fish and they were physically active what most struck me was the different um cultural value placed on aging in that society um the the old people there were considered living treasures and whole communities made efforts to include them in all community activities the the the best illustration of this that i got is was that i was told that a common cause of sibling fighting in traditional okinawan society is over who is going to get to take care of the aging parents that's a little different from what we see here uh you know i think we live in a culture that places an extremely negative value in aging you know marketers market to people under 30 a lot of the media are geared to young people i think there is a general cultural sense that the worth of life diminishes with aging and one consequence of that is that we tend to isolate old people with other old people you know we don't want to look at them we don't want to have them around we'd rather have them out of sight and i don't think it's particularly healthy to live only with people of your age and i think it is it is very desirable to mix with people of all ages so i think we're handicapped in this society because of that cultural prejudice and all of that has gotten worse during pandemic times which has greatly increased social isolation you know there there is a possib i think there is a potential for computers and the internet to connect people uh but it cuts both ways you know whether those interactions are productive or not um my mother when she was in her she she lived to 93 and in her last years i tried very hard to get her to use a computer because i thought it'd be great for her to be on email and i i got her several successive simpler and simpler models of computers i had tutors come in to try to help her with it and one day i walked into her apartment and she put a decorative cloth over the computer and a potted plant on top and that was her way of saying that she'd had you know had enough of this well too bad you know there has been a dividing line in our culture between the computer literate and illiterate i think that may change things but on the other hand as you well know social media uh there are great arguments that social media is actually worsening social isolation or is it toxic in many ways so as i say it cuts it cuts both ways but i think especially during these past few years when we've been struggling with the pandemic we see how damaging social isolation is to our physical and mental well-being and you know the importance of taking steps to to correct that um i am disturbed uh by the popularity of anti-aging medicine in our culture you know there's a very large uh professional organization called the american association of anti-aging medicine thousands of physicians have joined it and are this is not really an officially accredited specialty but it's very rapidly growing and the the premise of this field i think is totally flawed you know i think there is there is a waste of time to think about stopping the aging process reversing the aging process you know aging is universal and inevitable animals age plants age you know mountains age stars age if everything ages and you set your goal as anti-aging i think you've put yourself in a very long relationship with the universe and that's not a good place to be and i think that trying to reverse aging whether it's through very bizarre dietary strategies or taking uh questionable supplements or hormones i think not only is that a waste of energy i think it diverts us from the what i see is the important goal of working to maintain health as we go through life so you know maybe there are there is interesting research going on on looking at genes that that influence how we age and maybe changing the lifespan some in in lower animals but i'm very skeptical that this will pan out in humans i do think we will see in the near future some quite remarkable technological breakthroughs particularly with the use of stem cells to the development of real regenerative medicine i don't think this is ready for prime time yet and i would not i would dissuade people from going to clinics in this country are abroad that offer stem cell therapies i just don't think they're safe and effective but i think it's something that's coming and it may well be that one day not too distant future will be able to regenerate severed spinal cords and pancreases that have failed to produce insulin and heart muscle cells that have died you know that that kind of regenerative medicine is on the horizon um and that may have an influence on uh how we age and whether it will actually increase lifespan i don't know but as i say at the moment i think that the fascination with anti-aging medicine is a waste of time and diverts us from the really important goal i could i mean if you want really specific detail about my recommendations i would refer you to my book healthy aging which has you know very detailed programs and information about nutrition and use of supplements and so forth um i'll i'll mention one thing that my mother used to say repeatedly she died at 93 and she was a pretty good example of compression of morbidity she was in pretty good health until her last year but one of the things that she always said and said repeatedly is you must never lose your sense of humor she said it is very important to be able to laugh at the ridiculous side of life and i have many pleasant memories of laughing with her and i think that's something we shared and i think that that is useful uh i also tell people piece of practical advice uh if you want to change your habits that have influence on health spend more time in the company of people who have the habits you want if you want to have better habits of exercise and more time with people who have more physically active if you want to eat better spend more time in the company of people you know who eat well and i think this is very important in the area of mental emotional health as well you know if you if you are prone to depression uh and you have a propensity to read sad books and watch sad movies and listen to sad music and hang out with sad people you know that's going to make things worse for you so i think you want to be you want our moods are contagious uh and it is important to associate with people who in whose company you feel better you feel more uplifted and i think it is useful to spend time in the company of people who are examples of healthy aging uh you know that that it is very inspiring to be with uh older people who exemplify health uh and you know whether that's how much of that is genetic how much is lifestyle i i don't know but it is very useful to spend time with them and see what you can learn um how about if i stop there esther and invite questions because i really would like to have dialogue with people who are listening sure and um so i'm going to start um with a question that came to my mind after hearing your wonderful talk so first of all thank you thank you for that guidance uh i uh i'm moving into that healthy aging age group and i need all the advice so um you spoke about the importance of intellectual connectivity uh social interactions intergenerational actually these are part of our key um missions of the innovations in healthy aging the intellectual connectivity through the university through engaging people in of all ages and that brings to intergenerational um interactions through the university is the vehicle um so i i think that people will find that easier to engage in my question is what about adherence um you know we all on january 1st say we're going to go to the gym or we're going to exercise more um and we're going to eat a healthy diet but and and you gave us you suggested one one way is to be with people who are engaging in these healthy activities but what other kinds of uh motivations can you suggest to help okay let me give you one other piece of practical advice and you know you mentioned new year's resolutions i think a common mistake that i see people make is to try to make global change uh and i don't think that's very effective i think that's doomed to fail so much better is to go for incremental change and i this is why i wrote that book eight-week stockton health you know each week i suggested that people try something you know for example um in week one to just take a ten minute walk a day and then over the course of eight weeks you can increase that by the way another suggestion i had in that book which i think is even more relevant today was to begin to take news fasts uh that is to to see if you could go a day without letting any news into your consciousness particularly television groups but really through any channels and then it work up to seeing at the you know in the end if you can go all week and not do that and see what effect that that has but i find that to be an effective strategy like just go for small steps or pick the one area in which you want to make change and make some incremental steps there and build on it and i think this the strategy of spending time in the company of people who have the habits you want is very just very key well and that brings up i'm going to give a shout out to the andrew weil center for integrative medicine my wellness coach app which actually helps people to decide which of the seven domains or seven core areas of integrative health they want to work on so do you want to speak more to that tool sure i think that it is a useful practical tool i i would say give it a try and see and it is the same thing it allows you to choose you know where you want to put your energy by the way you know another principle that i have long taught and which is core to our center is that health professionals should exemplify health they should model health for patients you know you can't if you can't be a lazy person who doesn't eat well as a physician and tell a patient that they should eat better uh and be active so i think it is very important for physicians to be teachers uh and especially to teach people how to live in order not to get sick and make and one way to do that is by modeling health that's a great great advice to us all i'm going to read one question in the chat that asks how do you feel about the japanese energy healing technique of journey well i i've studied jo ray and other japanese and a whole variety of energy techniques and we teach energy medicine that's a in in our center i think this is a growing field you know it is our conventional medicine is very focused on the physical on the material body and we don't pay much attention to the non-material you know we use some forms of energy to diagnose disease and some to treat like using heat treatments for example but we haven't paid attention to all what are called the subtle energies that are used in these asian healing systems um i think they're they're interesting worth trying they can't do any harm and there is actually on joe ray specifically there has been some very good research uh demonstrating its effects in people so this is not really much paid attention to when conventional medicine but we in integrative medicine are very interested in can you describe a little bit of what it is i'm not familiar with well there's a whole range of these techniques there's one called shinjitsu there's therapeutic touch uh in in the general method is that people channel uh subtle energy through a usually through a hand either with physical contact or without physical contact to a patient and this is used to reduce pain to promote healing i'll tell you one story this is quite some time ago when i was teaching medical students i had a weekly discussion group of medical students at the university of arizona i think it was in the 1980s and there was a a phd nursing student at the college of nursing who wrote or she wrote a thesis on therapeutic touch and did controlled experiments um using sham therapeutic touch and real therapeutic touch to see if they can modify pain and she got statistically significant results so i asked her if she'd come in and give a presentation to this group of medical students that met once a week in the evening i think about 40 students there and she did some very interesting exercises with us uh one of them the first one was to have people just rub their hands vigorously together and then separate them with their eyes closed and see if they could get a sense of of what energy felt like whether it was warmth or pressure but then she asked people to pair off and she had people sitting facing each other and one person had their hands out like this to receive energy and the other person had their hands like this and they were the sender and people were supposed to close their eyes and the sender was instructed to send energy through one hand uh to the receiver and when the receiver felt which hand was sending energy they were to tap the hand within 10 minutes the accuracy was about 90 in that group i mean it was really interesting you know this is an observable you know clearly anyway i think there is something to all this and and and since these methods can't cause harm and they're extremely cost effective we may as well see if we can use them i think that's a great advice and one of the things about western medicine as you know andy is unless you understand the mechanism and how it works it's usually dismissed yeah but just because we don't understand how something works doesn't mean it doesn't work so uh you can feel it in the way that we did it was not subtle right well and and also especially as as you say you combine these other approaches with mainstream medicine i mean that's the whole point when you coined the word and you coined the term integrative medicine might correct and it's integrating before it was called complementary and alternative medicine which is pretty dismissive yeah so maybe alternatives suggest that you're replacing conventional medicine which has been my goal right and it's to in in include or in integrate truly disintegrated yeah um i i see i i believe we've had some technical difficulties so a number of people couldn't get on earlier but i'm gonna ask um if you go ahead and ask your questions in the chat uh even if we've covered it in the first 30 minutes that's you know fine go ahead and ask and of course this whole webinar has been recorded and all 1535 of you i think we may have crashed the system uh all 1535 will be able to uh watch the webinar but if you have questions please go ahead uh let me see i see in the chat um uh let's see i think there's one here yeah family is genetically predisposed to celiac disease all of my siblings and myself have celiac what is your understanding of celiac disease well it is you know there's a a genetically influenced familial disease which creates a a great sensitivity to gluten the protein that's in wheat and a number of other grains and if people with celiac disease consume gluten and maybe the amount that they eat this can cause very severe inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract so but that's has a relatively easy solution which is to avoid gluten and if people with celiac disease avoid gluten they can be in normal health so gluten is pretty ubiquitous although um and as you said in prepared foods i mean one of the issues is these highly manufactured prepared foods contain a lot of stuff that can be inflammatory can you speak to that yes we there was a uh there's a book that came out some years ago we had the author come in and speak to our classes it's called the dorito effect and it's about food additives and the argument he makes is that in the uh [Music] i think starting in the 1930s that flavor began to disappear from food as a result of the kinds of animals that we were breeding for food he talked about that new people remember you know from their childhood how chicken used to taste and it doesn't do that anymore and the varieties of vegetables that we began producing in order to compensate for this a multi-billion dollar industry grew up in flavor additives and there are literally thousands and thousands of chemicals some of them are natural some of them are synthetic some of them are semi-synthetic that are in our food and they're not listed you know this can be concealed just under flavorings and that can be many many different chemicals and we have no idea what the effects of these things are alone or in combination and there is a strong suspicion that some of these promote obesity for example that some of them uh create addictive cravings and this is probably you know another reason why we should be very cautious about manufactured food uh that it's giving us a lot of unknown stuff you know you talked about your mother my father uh who was a physician in romania escaped uh during world war ii uh in montreal he used to say and this was even you know in the 60s 50s and 60s when things weren't as uh manufactured he used to say that uh strawberries tasted like potatoes and potatoes like cardboard interesting well they're weird and also esther this i talked about you know having uh spent time in okinawa and seeing this the inspiration of all these healthy old people well in the in the time that i made i made i think three trips there over uh i think was eight or nine years in that short space of time okinawan longevity plummeted and it was attributed there was a front page article new york times about this attribute entirely to the growing consumption of american type fast food there uh which really burst suddenly in that society and they quoted one okinawan man who said the first time he tasted the mcdonald's hamburger he thought he had died going to heaven i mean how could that be i mean this is these people have the most wonderful food available to them and and i hear these kinds of stories again and again and it makes me think that the manufacturers of this kind of food have done a lot of research on figuring out combinations of salt crunch fat that really appeal to in sort of hard wired uh things in the human brain and it creates this kind of you know addictive cravings yeah it's the the dopamine effect um there's a question here about the keto diet what do you think about the keto i don't think it's a very wise way to eat i think it has a particular applications for very small numbers of people for people with uh intractable epilepsy for example and and a few other things but i don't think it's a good way to eat you know just just as one example first of all it's environmentally disastrous you know it is a diet high in animal foods and we're reading more and more about the cost of our animal dependent diet on greenhouse on greenhouse gases and global warming and so forth but just as one example um victoria mazes our executive director and i host a podcast called body of wonder and i would recommend this to your listeners we've got a lot of very interesting guests and one of our recent guests was dan buettner who wrote the book about blue zones and in the course of our conversation i asked him about beans uh and he said one of the universals that they had found in their studies of these areas in the world where there was great concentrations of healthy longevity was that people ate beans regularly and this is one of the foods that is excluded completely on the keto diet also on the extreme forms of the paleo diet and that just seems to be very unwise beans first of all they're inexpensive they're great sources of both protein and slow digesting carbohydrates fiber micronutrients and to write them off as being you know bad foods as the keto people and extreme paleo people do i think that's just unwise well there are some other questions here about sticking to diet issues probiotics and the microbiome so there's a couple of questions on microbiome and probiotics so this is a huge revolution in medical thinking when i was in medical school i was taught that people who ate yogurt and took probiotic supplements were health nuts uh you know i was taught that yes we had all these bacteria in the colon but they were just incidentally there and they helped with digestion and suddenly now you really can't open any any medical journal or anything without seeing new research on how the the gut microbiome influences our interactions with the environment that determines not only a lot of our physical health but mental emotional health as well i mean this is remarkable change in medical thinking and the importance of of maintaining health of the gut microbiome i think is crucial and some of the things that are out there that have very harmful effects on it well right at the top of this is antibiotics and i think that indiscriminate and unwise use of antibiotics that's one of the main things to be careful of that wreaks havoc with the microbiome but another one is most non-nutritive sweeteners all the artificial sweeteners have disastrous effects on the microbiome many people don't know that you know one of the one of the big questions is what can you do to support the health of your microbiome or can you change it well clearly eating fermented foods is key whether taking probiotic supplements gives you that benefit i'd say we don't know uh you know most of the microbiome researchers are much more convinced of the value of eating fermented foods and of taking probiotic supplements and if you don't have those in your diet you want to learn how to incorporate them firstly it's very easy to make at home i make my own sauerkraut pickles and kimchi uh it they're these are inexpensive foods they're very easy to make they're delicious and great things to have in your diet so is you you mentioned sauerkraut what about yogurt is that part of that if it has living cultures in it and enough of them so there are there are certain brands of yogurt out there you know that guarantee that you're getting these cultures but i think it's also good to have a mix of you know that the the organisms in sauerkraut are different from the organisms and yogurt are different from the ones that you get in you know in some of these in kombucha and some of these other foods as well so it's probably good to have a mix of them that's great to know and also good to eat prebiotics which are foods that feed the probiotic organisms so generally high fiber foods uh and this is again another argument for having beans in the diet and whole grains and so there was a question earlier on about acupuncture and massage in aging if that could have an impact well massage feels good and i think things that feel good are probably very helpful and and uh you know we know that touch releases oxytocin uh which is the hormone that makes us feel good and promotes social bonding and massage is certainly one way of increasing oxytocin release and i think that that being deprived of touch is undermines health and probably many older people don't have as many opportunities to be touched so i think getting massage can be great acupuncture you know is i think that's more of a specific therapy that i would use for particular things although in china traditionally acupuncture is often used as a general tune-up you know to sort of rebalance the energy flow of the body so there's a question here um from one of our uh innovations and healthy uh members jenny goudner who asks um what are your thoughts on arts engagement as a pathway to healthy aging i think it's fantastic i think that there's a whole we could probably make a whole list of things that that promote healthy aging i would say singing is one singing with other people is great being out in nature connecting with nature connecting with companion animals arts sure i mean i think there's an endless list and we can all think of what they are well and that speaks again to the to the seven core areas of healthy aging and the my wellness coach app for those people who couldn't get on earlier we talked about the andrew weil center for integrative medicine my wellness coach app that helps you decide which of these areas you want to focus on sleep resilience environment uh social interactions or relationships movement spirituality and nutrition and as andy said a little earlier to try to do all at the same time is daunting yeah pick one and work at that and then you can expand other areas that's right um let's see i'm looking through the the chat i um i guess i had one other question we're coming close to the uh top of the hour um for we talked about intellectual connectivity um and and how to use that to keep your curiosity keep going uh as you age do you have any suggestions for that i think again being around people that that stimulate you intellectually uh you know i think there's no substitute for that and and again this is what worries me in this culture is that as a social isolation tends to increase as you age and unless you actively fight against that you know you're you're at a great disadvantage our culture does not make it easy so i think the initiative here at the university of arizona certainly one you know one step in the right direction well and and you mentioned earlier the difference between okinawa and the admiration for uh the the reverence for older people i i was uh in in crete i tell the story of how i went to crete uh and and healed and and it struck me there too that the you know the older adults the older people were sitting on the beach playing backgammon with the young guys and uh beating them and and they were completely revered and so we're sort of unique or unusual i think in the american culture so how how would you change that i think it's up you know like the baby boomers have been so proactive in many areas maybe they're maybe they're the ones that need to take this on i think we really have to fight the the general conception that's put out there by the media as i said earlier that the worth of life diminishes with aging and that you get sidelined and cheated and i think we have to really demand that people pay attention to us i'll tell you one other uh like funny story from okinawa uh at at cultural at events in okinawa they like to trot out the the oldest old the centenarians they're sort of put on show and i was invited to give a lecture at a at a scientific conference in okinawa and i took my mother along who was then i think 90. and my mother was of a generation she was ashamed to admit how old she was uh you know it would it would kill her when i was on national television and mention how old my mother was but when i took her to this conference in november they had a reception in the opening night and they had i mean there were five or six of their you know hundred and two hundred and three-year-old people and they would bound up to my mother and say i'm 102 how old are you and she was very taken aback by that but i think it was very healthy for her to see that you know it was possible to be in a culture where you were proud of being old that's great advice there's a question here going back to uh more um physical ways of improving healthy aging about tai chi and not only well-being but also fall prevention and i think that's terrific that's there's very good scientific evidence showing that uh people who practice tai chi are much less prone to falling or if they do fall much less prone to getting injured so that's that's i think a very safe effective uh method uh something that uh no matter how old you are that you can do there's uh classes in it there are videos of it i i would recommend it highly there's a question sorry would you be willing to talk about hormone replacement therapy there's a question in the chat on whether or not that you know i think i think that universally uh pushing hormone replacement at menopause on women uh which was done in the latter half of the 20th century especially i think is going to be looked back on as one of the great you know debacles of modern medicine you know that i think many women were made to feel really stupid if they refused to put up an argument against getting hormone replacement and this was offered as a kind of fountain of youth you know that somehow that by taking hormones and menopause this is going to preserve your youthful appearance and sexuality and so forth and there was complete failure to look at the downside of that of the increased risks of cancer and so forth so i think there are specific uh indications for using hormonal replacement you know if there's artificial menopause for example or intractable menopausal symptoms to use it short term but i but i do not think this is a way of maintaining usefulness and it's not just that it's not just female hormone replacement you know the stuff that goes on with testosterone today i think is very disreputable i mean i've i've seen buses in new york with big posters on them you know advertising where you can get testosterone therapy and it's the same thing it's going to be keep you young and keep you sexually active and so forth and it is not as a general principle it is not wise to take hormones unless there is a proved reason for doing so so since we're on somewhat like somewhat controversial topics there's a question about psychedelics and small doses so let me say that well this goes back to pre-pandemic days when i was traveling around a lot giving talks no matter what the subject i was talking whether it was healthy aging the anti-inflammatory diet integrative medicine i would get questions on psychedelics so i'm not surprised uh to hear this i think there's tremendous interest in our culture now in uh and psychedelics many people want to try them whether it's taking small microdoses or large megadoses a few months ago vogue magazine had a cover story on psilocybin and even more recently town and country magazine if you could believe this had a feature article titled why is everybody smoking code in town and country i mean this is clearly rapidly becoming a mainstream phenomenon i think uh psychedelics have tremendous potential not just in in in dealing with mental and emotional problems but also with physical problems and uh i think they are going to be made legally available uh i think we need a you know a new class of of trained practitioners who can act as guides in order to have best experiences with them but i think there's tremendous positive potential there but but let me caution that as in everything to try things on your own uh can really be dangerous well i think you can also just miss out that positive potential because the the experiences that people have with psychedelics are very dependent on what we call sentence setting on expectations and the environment in which the substance is used and that has to be structured properly so it is i think very important to have the advice and guidance of somebody who is trained and how to use those for best effect and i think that's where integrative medicine uh professionals come in um yes and in fact we're we are developing a course uh on [Music] proper use of psychedelics and psychedelic therapy because there's been such a demand from it from our trainees there's another question on hearing hearing loss and the use of hearing aids and trying to encourage people must be someone this person knows who is experiencing hearing loss because it does impact cognitive function if people can't hear and social interaction certainly through social interaction tremendously important and as you know that many people deny that they're they're hearing problems and it's their partners that complain bitterly about it and also i must say that hearing aid technology has gotten much much better recently uh so i think it is it is now possible to get devices that uh you know not only work very well but are cosmetically appealing uh i i think it is very important to get your hearing tested as part of you know general assessment of health as you as you age so very easy there's even places to get audiograms for free uh and and it's very useful to have that information i think we have time for maybe one more question and um it's a question here about antidepressants as you get older well i think the uh it's been very interesting to watch the the tide of history turning against antidepressants you know there is more and more research has shown that it is very difficult to distinguish them from placebos in in many most cases of depression maybe not very severe depression but even then i think they should be used uh not for very long-term management but there is a great question about their efficacy and i i would not see them as a routine you know contribution to healthy aging with with that um i think that one of the take-home messages here is you can help yourself you can engage in all of these integrative approaches but get a guide an expert because a lot of this is very specific to the individual you agree yes absolutely and i'm delighted to know about the innovations and healthy aging program at our university i think it's terrific thank you very much andy and for those of you who had trouble joining at the beginning we will this has been recorded and we will be sending out the link and all 1535 of you will be able to to access the entire hour um andy do you have any other parting comments well you know in in my book healthy aging there's a chapter on on the value of aging and i would urge people to read that because part of this cultural conception that we're saddled with that the worth of human life diminishes with aging one way to to counteract that is to focus on uh things in our experience that get better with age uh in the book i talked about wine and whiskey violins and trees uh and it's and then you know it's very interesting to see what application of this is to human life i've heard many people say that that some aspects of memory get better as they age which is very interesting because they have more more data stored again switch they can compare new experiences i know i've heard many people tell me that they think equilibrium mental equilibrium has gotten better as they've gotten older that they're not thrown off so easily by the ups and downs of of life i mean it's interesting to look at like what what what gets better that's that's a great parting advice and i think i will use that every night before i fall asleep or remind myself what is better so thank you andy this has really been wonderful and um oh one more question people asked about 478 breathing yes uh i highly recommend that it is the most useful uh stress neutralizing measure an anti-anxiety measure i know and you can get the instructions for it if you just go on youtube and put my name and 478 breath you'll get videos in which i'm showing you how to do it that's great thank you so so much andy for taking this time thanks for inviting me thank you very very much very grateful okay bye-bye bye-bye and to the rest of you who are on please remember to join us for our next lecture in the series and you'll receive a message about that thank you all

Channel: University of Arizona Health Sciences

Views: 29,280

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Id: zPZocdqp8JI

Length: 59min 28sec (3568 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022