These Foods & Habits BOOST BRAIN HEALTH & End Inflammation! | Andrew Weil & Lewis Howes

we're in such a mess in this country with regard to food and nutrition it's hard to know where to start where i would start i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really yeah please welcome us you've been doing integrative nutrition and i guess integrative functional medicine for all not functional functional functional is actual medicine like pills right yeah it functions a lot of biochemistry and stuff integrative medicine it's the whole it's the whole picture you know everything else mind-boggling spiritual gotcha okay um and you got in this in the 70s yes well uh i studied botany as an undergraduate wow and got really interested in ethnobotany and native plants i did a lot of traveling in south america looking at the medicinal plants psychoactive plants then i went to medical school got very disillusioned with what i had learned at medical school yeah i mean i i learned nothing about health or healing uh you know and the methods that i was taught i saw it do too much harm so when i finished my clinical training this was 1968 69 i just decided i didn't want to learn anymore that i that was i wanted to learn how to keep people well and you know i didn't know how to do that so i found ways to travel around the world look at healing practices in other cultures gradually put together my own system that i first called natural and preventive medicine then i came to call integrative medicine and then my car broke down in tucson arizona and uh i ended up living in this remote canyon and i started writing about you know what i'd seen and uh in tucson and outside of tucson yeah and then uh wait so your car broke down and you stayed i stayed it took six weeks to get fixed and really it was an english land rover that i had driven to south america without incident uh but when i got it back here i didn't get parts for it and uh so anyway it was february of a warm wet year the desert was in full bloom and i never left and then the university of arizona found out i was there and they asked me to start giving lectures to medical students first about marijuana because i had done the first human experiments with with marijuana in 1968 and uh then about other people were experimenting with it before yeah but nobody knew you know the in the medical world there was a medical world anything about it um and then i started giving lectures on alternative medicine nobody even knew what that was in those days and uh what is alternative medicine well it was things like other systems like chinese medicine and chiropractic and osteopathy and naturopathy and yeah all that you know people in the world of medicine didn't know anything about that really no they didn't even know they existed so uh i had also i was really always interested in how the mind and body interacted i studied medical hypnosis at columbia university which was fascinating what is medical hypnosis it's like using hypnosis using a suggestive state to access healing in the body and it has incredible potential uh you know i i watched a film of someone having a cesarean delivery with no anesthesia except hypnosis uh i you know you can c-section a c-section cut open cut open no medicine no injections no she was told to sing row row row your boat and she was wide awake and they cut her open no pain i mean that's just an example you can take a good hypnotic subject and touch them with a finger and say it's a piece of red hot metal and they get a blister a real blister so you know that's an example of you know how the mind and body interact and you can take advantage of that to access healing so i was you know all this i all put all this together into this system of integrative medicine anyway patients started showing up at my doorstep and it was not an easy doorstep to get to i lifted this i kept hearing about this guy somewhere in the middle arizona and uh you know i i began seeing really interesting people and i i refined my system and through the 1980s uh i got a larger and larger following in the general public but none of my medical colleagues paid any attention to me they didn't they didn't respect you or trust you or think you were incredible off the wall yeah and there was a period in the late 1970s there was a holistic medical movement in this country and i remember in arizona there was a southern arizona holistic medical society and it was nurses psychologists social workers not one single physician you know joined it so that's the way it was in those days anyway that changed around in the early 1990s um my best friend from harvard medical school who was a cardiologist was named chief of medicine at the university of arizona college of medicine and he came with a new dean they both came from the university of massachusetts and when they got here he i had dinner with him and he said well now you have friends in high places what do you want to do i said i want to change all of medicine so he said how do you want to do that and i said i'd like to start a residency in a field that i want to call integrative medicine he said let's talk to the dean so the dean said you can't start a residency in a field that doesn't exist he said why don't you back up a step and think about creating a fellowship which is how you know what people do after residency to specialize and he said then you wouldn't be accused of tampering with unformed minds wow so anyway he gave me a green light no money but you know i was given a a actually it was a glorified broom closet in a trailer in the parking lot behind the college of medicine and i had one assistant and um this was uh you know around 1990 and uh i put a think tank together we met at canyon ranch in tucson and we hammered out a basic curriculum and then advertised for people to come and we got four physicians who took a big risk to come to tucson for two years wow and do this fellowship in this field that didn't exist that covered all the things that doctors should learn but don't like nutrition and mind-body interactions and herbal medicine and the strength work and you know we began training four people a year and the main criticism i got was how possibly you're going to change anything by training four people a year but over the years we graduated about 35 people from this and some of them are now in very powerful positions in academic medicine but more importantly we got to refine the curriculum and then translate it to a distance learning format and now we have graduated over 2000 physicians from this very intensive training and we also have a shorter curriculum that's in 80 or 90 residency programs throughout the world uh and you know it's really becoming we're really influencing people now and we've trained people in every specialty all ages so the goal is one day you know whether you go to a dermatologist or a psychiatrist or a gastroenterologist that person will have learned the basics of nutrition and mind-body medicine and we'll know what chinese medicine is good for and you know all the rest that they should know it seems like there's been a movement especially the last five years that i've seen many doctors leaving the i guess what would be called the functional practice yeah the traditional practice then functional medicine yeah leaving their practices because they're realizing it's not working you know it's not working and they're really unhappy you know when i was in medical school medicine looked like a very desirable profession uh one of the one of the things it promised was autonomy you could be your own boss well that's all gone out the window you know you have to work for somebody these days you have to work for a corporation that tells you how to do it and and what pills to use and yes you have no autonomy anymore and the all the satisfaction of a doctor-patient relationship has disappeared you know if you've got eight minutes to see a patient it's unlikely that you can form that kind of therapeutic relationship yes and as you say a lot of it's not working and the uh you know i could go on a great week about this but the the our so-called health care system is a total mess you know we are we spend more per capita than any other country in the world on on health care you know by a long shot if you look at a bar graph of nato nations per capita expenditures on health we're off the chart and at the same time we have worse health outcomes than any developed country the world health organization rates us 38th on a par with serbia and that's any way you look at it infant mortality longevity rates of chronic disease something is what's wrong with this picture you know and the a problem is we've got these epidemics of lifestyle related diseases that conventional medicine doesn't work for as you say and we're trying to deal with that all in the same way mostly by giving you know medication a pill right what's the in your experience it's been 50 years now you've been working on this yeah 50 roughly 50 years what's been the common theme for the root of most pain that people have well lifestyle is it food is it relationships is it i have to say that in in my clinical experience uh more often than not i find the root causes of problems to be in not in the physical body but more in the mental emotional or spiritual the holding on to anger whatever i mean it's often unconscious stuff you know but it but it's it's unless you work in that area if you just deal with the physical body it doesn't solve it it's superficial yeah superficial i mean if you just look at look at pain are you familiar with john sarno's work he wrote uh he was he's passed about a couple years ago he was a rehab medicine specialist in new york and a healer and he has a one book called healing back pain another called mind over back pain and he taught that almost all back pain is of psychological origin that's not to say it's not real but you know that the problem is it's it's spasms of small muscles that cut off blood supply and it becomes a vicious cycle in which the contraction of muscles further you know cuts off blood supply but the origin of this problem is in the mental compartment and he he used to require that people who came to him go to two evening lectures he gave in in one week a great many people who did that their pain disappeared forever what was that the thing they realized it's it's just hearing this message from this guy that it was not in their back right uh anyway i i and and you know that this goes along with the fact that you can look at x-rays and scans of people's backs and they look so horrible you can't believe that this person could move and they have no symptoms and you look at other ones that look terrific and the people are crippled by pain so there's no correlation between objective findings and subjective experience which which goes along with his theory anyway this is just my observation is that more you know this is the i think one of the great limitations of conventional medicine is it's only focused on the physical body and it does not it ignores this whole other realm yeah i interviewed i don't know if you know dr lissa rankin i interviewed her years ago maybe six seven years ago where she had more of a traditional practice and then i think she was taking seven or eight medications herself she was unhappy sick and then she started healing her relationship uh she started you know healing other things in her life and she realized she didn't need as much medication right and then she started kind of doing talk therapy in a little bit where she would say to her patients well why don't you go you know heal this with your partner your husband or whoever and then the pain started to go away for these individuals she realized and other doctors have done this as well you know they realized okay just prescribing medicine and it's not just pain i i've written a lot of these cases up in my book i'll tell you just two yeah stories and this one caught my attention because they both i saw these two women both at the same time there were two women uh both in there i think they were late 30s early 40s who had very severe uh systemic lupus you know a major autoimmune disease okay uh what does lupus create what is that is that well it it it can affect any system of the body but usually there's joint involvement and there's usually arthritis skin problems like axon type problems yeah but this is a severe one it's not just the surface of the body it goes in internally yeah so one one of the one woman had a had brain involvement and was psychotic as a result of this and the other woman had her kidneys were involved and she was near death in the hospital so the first woman the one with the brain involvement had a religious conversion to some variety of fundamentalist christianity in the hospital and the other woman fell in love and subsequently got married and both of them the disease disappeared and i often say you know i can't always arrange for my patients to have religious conversions or fall in love but to see that just to know that that's possible you know then you want to sort of find some way to flip that switch and and the switch is in the mind it's not in the body if people believed in a higher power yeah and felt loved yeah you think that would help with a lot of i could help a lot yeah i think it would help a lot is it the is it the fear in the mind the loneliness the anxiety the stress that causes the tension in the back yeah it could be all of that and and you know what's what sarno's teaching was you just constantly re tell yourself over and over it's not my back and my back is fine and he was actually opposed to any therapies directed at the back you know he said you shouldn't even do massage or accurate pressure because it reinforces the illusion that the problem is there interesting it's always so easy and i i had one i also wrote this guy up this was a friend of mine who was my age he was in his late 30s at the time this happened he was a basketball player he was a professor at princeton uh worked with drug policy very bright guy crippled by back pain had had injuries in sports and he was within literally within 24 hours of having neurosurgery the neurosurgeon said they'd never seen a spine in such bad condition and you know the only option was surgery right neurosurgery in the brain no back spine okay in the spine yeah the spinal nerves were being the nerves gotcha i told him to read sarno's book he said this is and i said he was in new york i said why don't you go see him and he said that this made no sense to him this was completely silly he had you know he'd seen these neurosurgeons and it was back anyway he went he heard he saw no psalm told him to come to his evening lecture uh he he was laughing during the lecture really that this was so silly and he went home and was having dinner and suddenly the middle dinner realized his back pain was gone you know amazing this kind of stuff is is it more of the awareness having the awareness that the the pain is not in the back for that example or is it the the information on how to continue to show the tricky part is that the part of the mind that does this is the unconscious mind and you can't directly access that so i don't know you have to trick yourself in some way how do we tap into the unconscious mind well i mean there are things you can do to make it more likely you can meditate you can uh you know you can do affirmations you can do hypnosis you can see somebody who is a healer but i think it's these are all ways of somehow getting around whatever that gap is between where you think and the part of the brain that connects to the body what's been the biggest challenge you've faced in your body the biggest pain you've had to overcome and what was the practice you used to overcome it you know i had uh well there i've had can give you many examples but one was this must be about 12 years ago i had had a meniscus pain in my right knee and i'm not sure it was from i can't relate it to any specific injury but you know i've been very active and you know with that episodes i got got bad i came to california on a business trip and suddenly in the space of a few hours the pain got so bad i couldn't walk and i actually had to get in a wheelchair to get back home to tucson and i saw you know it subsided a bit i went to see an orthopedist who x-rayed my knees he said there was no cartilage left i started talking about knee replacement i had a a a friend and colleague in new york who's a very good body worker that i'd seen and been great and i went to see him and he said you know this is all a matter of balance and weight and weight bearing and he did some work on me vanished really vanished you could walk fine after that yeah and never maybe you were leaning on one side too much or something something but if i had uh so the one doctor is saying you have no cartilage you gotta you have surgery right otherwise you're gonna walk and maybe that's true maybe i don't have cartilage but but you know you can live with that and not have pain right you look like you're in pretty you look like you're jacked yeah pretty much pretty good shape not bad what do you what do you attribute to staying so young physically again i think it's really mental you know like hanging out with people that uh make you feel alive i mean i'm you know i'm i'm reasonably active i swim every day i have two big dogs that take me for walks uh but i think it's like i don't know i think it's an attitude and uh you know doing things that i'm i'm engaged with and that i you know turn me on and yeah have you had any surgeries no i had my tonsils out when i was really little yeah and uh no nothing major wow so that was one is since the knee was there another oh i can give you some i can give you so many things like that i mean some of these i put in my books uh stories like this but uh you know and when i i like to tell people about this because in my experience most people do not have great confidence in their body's ability to repair itself and i think this is where all good medicine starts is with the body has incredible healing potential uh and it's i find it you know it's it's easier to talk with kids about that than doctors you know when a kid gets an owie you say look what happens you know watch how your body heals that and you can plant the seed of the idea that the body has a healing system you know it can repair itself most doctors think that's new age but it's not i mean it's like that the body has unbelievable capacity to adapt to prepare to regenerate yeah and and i i feel one of my jobs as an integrative physician is to instill that kind of confidence in people to make them you know you don't have to run off to a practitioner uh you know every time something goes wrong when something goes wrong what's to be the first thought we have physical pain well you know you you really want to have a sense of when things are beyond your ability to deal with you know when you really do need outside help what is that so if you have if you have a symptom you've never had before if you have a symptom that you've had before but it's more severe than anything you've had before you know then maybe it's worth checking to see what that's about right uh but you know as i say i think people just don't have that kind of confidence i remember once interviewing uh for our fellowship a family medicine doctor she was a native german and she came to this country when she was a teenager i think and she said that growing up in germany that neither she nor her siblings nor any of her friends ever went to a doctor uh she said you don't go to a doctor in germany unless there's something really wrong with you that her parents had a father yeah her parents had a whole repertory of home remedies that worked and that's very different from what you see in our in our right of the world it's interesting i grew up uh in a religion called christian science oh sure great and so i grew up in a what you might consider yeah really which i never went to the doctor i never had you know took medicine i never got vaccinated for anything you know i had to have like permission slips like i don't need to go to go to school for vaccinations and things like that which is seems like the world is changing these days or even religious uh acceptance to nerdy vaccination um and i was trained in an early mind early time that the mind heals the body right this was something that was constant and my father would just ingrain this in any time i felt like sick or whatever he was just like know the truth that your mind has power your body can heal itself and constantly focusing on the mind the mind and it was just like you're you are love right you are truth you're conscious and like and focusing on that but i'd be like but i think it hurts yeah i'll be like but why is this hurt why why is this like so i was always conflicted but that training i had multiple quick healings multiple quick healings where i was like huh i shouldn't have been able to like heal the bone this quick and so i saw these instances that i was like okay this is believable and the body can heal with the mind in the right place but if the mind's in constant fear and anxiety it's hard to heal and so i was always interested in learning this process of like and what i really learned is like have a common sense you know if you're in a lot of pain like okay if you can't clear your mind you just get it checked out you know and so that's what i do now it's like okay yeah exactly usually i can heal right minor stuff but sometimes you need help and go get it checked out did you ever read mark twain's essay on christian science i i bought the book because he wrote a book called christians right but there's a one very funny essay where he he has a broken leg and he first goes to he says a horse doctor who wanted to charge him for setting the bone and then he sees a christian science practitioner and she tells him that the pain is all imaginary it's in the mind right yeah and um so he pays her in imaginary money i love that and she sends him a very real bill and threatening letter that she's going to take him to court yeah well i guess it's kind of crazy because mario baker eddie and mark twain were like kind of rivals yeah yeah yeah they respected but didn't respect each other and right i think he was upset because she kept having best seller after best seller yes in the same book now another another piece of information like that because i was really interested in could you study christianity yeah i did really yeah is that when christian scientists have to go to doctors yes they respond fantastically to treatment uh and doc and doctors that i know who've dealt with christian science love working with them and i think okay because i think their belief is so focused it's negative you know that that conventional medicine but it's very strong belief and it doesn't matter whether it's a plus or minus sign it's once you go to them exactly and you believe it's gonna work work and then it works for you yeah it's the belief that no this is not real the pain is not for the belief that conventional medicine is evil but i'm gonna have to do it but it's like you're believing believing it right and it works i think belief is a lot of it terrific isn't it yeah belief in general like i mean that's what placebo is right it's like you believe this pill is gonna actually help me whether it actually chemically does or not studies have shown that absolutely it's so interesting the the two free the way commonest way i heard the word placebo used in medicine is in how do you know that's not just the placebo effect and the most interesting word there is just or we have to rule out the placebo effect that's what you should be trying to rule in that's what you want you know that's the that's pure healing from within you know mediated by the mind believing it whether you're taking something or not right believing inside so i never give patients sugar pills i give them things i believe in but i prefer to give people things that are dilute that are less potent you know like like botanicals rather than pharmaceuticals if i can but you know you you want you the art of medicine is how you present treatments to people in ways that activate their belief how how would you approach this say i'm i'm i'm having extreme stomach pain okay and it just keeps coming for days and i don't know how to get rid of the stomach pain um well first i'm gonna and i'm gonna ask you what you're eating what you're doing by the way that's a good one because you know the one of the worst categories of medications out there are these proton pump inhibitors the acid blocking drugs and the nexium the purple pill these are really bad back of the gut right bad once you start taking them it's very hard to stop taking you know because it relieves pain temporarily it suppresses when you suppress something like acid production in the stomach what's the body going to try to do it's going to try to produce more acid so when you try to reduce the dose or stop there's an outpouring of acid and then you're in more pain you're in more pain anyway so you shouldn't even get on them in the first place but that you know that's a great example but i cannot tell you how many people i've seen who are put on these things without ever a dietary history being taken nobody asked them what they're eating how much coffee you're drinking are you drinking alcohol do you smoke what's your stress level you know often by addressing those things you can deal with a lot of that for more and then there's natural remedies that you know that there's a licorice extract that increases the mucus coating in the stomach it's benign anyway but it but uh for more serious stuff a strategy i can't again can't always do this but if you can introduce a patient to someone who has had their condition and is now well that is a very powerful way to you know get their belief in the possibility why is that and someone else has done through that gone through this and they got better yeah you can see it with your own eyes that they you know it's possible because often people get the message in especially in their interactions with regular medicine that there's you have to live with it you can't get better and so forth i i've one of things that i've written you know our national institutes of health it's funny if you look at the list of the institutes that make it up you know where is the institute of health and healing there isn't one these are the national institutes of diseases and body parts it's the national cancer institute the national kidney and blah blah blah not health there's nothing about health so what i would do if i were king i would create a national institute of health and healing and one of its missions would be to compile a national registry of remission so if you get diagnosed with something serious you know ulcerative colitis whatever you can contact this insta this agency and they will put you in touch with people in your area who have had your disease and are now well isn't it true that just connecting to a group of someone or someone's who've gone through something similar gives you more relief and and connections yeah if the outcomes are good you know one of the problems like you know with like with cancer patients someone newly diagnosed with cancer and then it's told they have to start chemotherapy so they go to oncologists office and they're sitting in the waiting room and what do you see you know you see really not good looking people you know encourage you it doesn't encourage you so you know it's really important to have be able to have those messages about that it's possible to get better that you can be well and that's you know something that i often often find that in my work with patients is to constantly give that message that you know sometimes i'll say to people you know i know you can get better i don't know exactly how you can get better i'm going to give you suggestions of things to try and you let me know what works and what doesn't but i know you can get better yeah and i've heard you say before that every you know every body or every human type should be treated differently you can try different things but you might need something else and exactly work for this person yeah and so you've got to address your whole life yeah your whole life strategies and what you've been up to what would you say if you could choose how old you want to live till what age would you love to well until it's till it's you know not fun anymore yeah what would what would that be i don't know it might be mid 80s 90 i don't know i don't know that i want to live much longer than that really really well yeah i mean when i look around me i mean there are there are some exceptional individuals you know i have one for you seems super sharp and healthy yeah but who knows i mean i you know who knows we don't know uh at some point you know you see people uh when bodies begin to break down and it's not fun anymore right and another problem is that you know when people live too long all your contemporaries are gone you know you've gotta have friends right you lose all your friends and another one i quoted i wrote a book on healthy aging and i quoted a woman who was in her she was 102 something like that and she said that you know look at the way the world is now look at the way it's going and look what it's going to be you know yeah i don't know that i want to see it wow you know so there's there's it's not as simple as just wanting to live a certain number of years you know if you want to live without relative without pain right you want to be having fun and connected with things and you know you don't want to live when the world gets increasingly terrible which it could for people that do want to live over a hundred yeah let's say for people that aspire uh to live over a hundred healthy sharp minds you know memory can see everything can move functionally what would you say would be three to five okay so you know with some years ago the macarthur foundation did a study of what they called successful aging and they interviewed a fairly large number of people who were identified as being successful agers to see what they had in common the two factors that stood out above everything else were maintenance of physical activity throughout life and that doesn't mean you know running marathons or working out with trainers it's just being physically active and the second was maintaining social and intellectual connectivity and those two factors overrode nutrition whether people were taking supplements yeah those were the two that most stood out now when i was researching that book i made several trips to okinawa which at the times in the 80s 90s blue zone there yeah it was okinawa had the highest concentration of centenarians in the world so i went there you know it's a fabulous place it's a tropical pacific paradise clean air clean water it's not japan it's a very different culture different genetics different culture it's halfway between southeast asia and japan the people look some people look more cambodian than japanese okinawa okinawa it's a chain of islands at the southern end of japan and it wasn't part of japan until relatively recently anyway um you know it's the first thing i realized when i went there everything is so different you know you can't say that any one thing is responsible for this you know it's clean air clean water people are the diet amazing i mean one of the most varied interesting diets i've ever seen not different from the japanese diet they eat more pork than the japanese and the pork is long cooked to remove fat they drink jasmine tea not green tea they eat a tremendous variety of land and sea vegetables seafood they very physically active you know they don't work out with trainers they but you know they they hold them that fishing nets and garden and stuff like that but the so very hard to disentangle you know what may be responsible for but the one thing that really struck me going there from america was the different value placed on aging there that and the best example i can give you is that a story that i got repeatedly in traditional okinawan society a major cause of sibling fighting was over who was going to get to take care of the aging parents no that's a little different come on a little different from what we see here fighting was all over who is going to get no i'm going to take care of grandma or parents exactly yeah no i'm going to take care of them no yeah wait a minute people hear like it's like yes why is that well we're i don't think we don't like to look at old you know old makes us think of our own mortality and and uh we want it out of sight anyway the old people that i saw there uh they the oldest old are considered living treasures and whole communities make efforts to include them in all community activities and they have a glow about them you know they were they're idolized almost yeah exactly and they they look old i mean they don't use botox they're wrinkled and some of them are stoop but they have a a glow that i don't see among many a wisdom a confidence uh yeah they're valued wow so to me that was very striking and such a different from something that i see here now also i have to tell you that in the years that i was going there okinawan longevity plummeted especially among men and that was attributed entirely to the popularity of american fast food particularly mcdonald's which became very popular there and you wonder i you know i saw there was an article in new york times about that and they quoted a middle-aged okinawan man who said the first time he tasted a mcdonald's hamburger he thought he had died and gone to heaven i mean how could that be they have the most wonderful food available it really makes you think that the people who design that kind of stuff have really done a lot of research to figure out what appeals to some the brand basic wiring in the brain you know it's some combinations of salt crunch fat sugar and all of it that's like ah this is like yeah yeah turning my mind on that i want more and more and more but anyway i i think you know you asked me in fact i think being physically active throughout life um personally i i know i i think diet does have a big role and but very hard to make you know recommendations that apply to everyone but i think the one i feel sure of is you want to really try to avoid refined processed and manufactured food yeah and eat foods as close to the way nature produces them as possible yeah i think the social intellectual connectedness is huge and you know really saw that in okinawa um what is the thing you fear the most at your age uh that's hard to say i guess you know i i i i i don't feel any changes in my mental function i mean i feel the same as i did when i was you know seven or eight really yeah uh my body is obviously different i have more aches and pains and i don't have the energy level that i had um and you know i don't i don't want i you know i don't want my bodily complaints to take over my awareness so you know that's that's i guess what i would be afraid of right are there things that you can do to to prevent that or to well i think i'm doing them you know i i do as much as i can but nonetheless time marches on you know i'm going to be 79 in a month and uh you know it's getting up there yeah i was talking with um josh a doctor from uh harvard on anti-aging forgetting his name right now um and he said you know it's horrible what we see with our elders these days in america where they get sick and we extend their lives in pain for 10 20 years of suffering whereas the key would be they live a long time they get sick and then they die right so there's a technical term for that it's called compression of morbidity where morbidity has the medical meaning of sickness so the idea is you want to squeeze the time of inevitable disability decline at the end of life into a a period as possible right so you live long and well and then you have a rapid drop off at the end yes so that's what we'd like to do what's it called compression of morbidity as opposed to what are we doing right now in general where it's extension of morbidity prolongation of that period just keeping someone alive to bring them alive so how do you do that i mean what how do you increase your chances of experiencing that so i think it's by attending to all the factors under our control that we know no influence how you age so it is it is diet it's uh physical activity it's getting good rest and sleep it's it's managing stress which i think is huge you know you want to find some you can't live without stress but you can find ways to neutralize its harmful effects it's it's being socially and intellectually connected have you done a lot of research on the person you marry or the per your partner and how long you'll live like yeah how important it is to have a certain level of peace in your marriage or absolutely i don't know what the factors are that'll help extend the quality of your health and lifespan yeah do you know what those factors are no i can guess like the more stress that a marriage i'm assuming is chances for more pain and suffering and shorter yeah short of death yeah short of life i mean yeah i mean i think the more stress in any area of your life you know whether it's work or or or relationships or you know whatever i think that as i said i don't think we can live without stress that's part of living but you can learn and practice methods to neutralize its harmful effects what would be the uh the five foods that if you could only have these five foods to support the overall quality of your your mind your body your health your longevity what would those five foods be for that's tricky i would say for you personally okay maybe salmon okay uh why why salmon because it's a good source of omega-3 fatty acids and i like it yeah broccoli because it's a cruciferous vegetable that has lots of protective compounds in it berries which i think are you know really good fruits that are low in glycemic load and have a lot of protective compounds in them i would say green tea really microwave over jasmine tea yeah my friend my preferred form is matcha oh yeah which we'll talk about why green tea over jasmine tea like the okinawa community um i think that there's been more studies on green tea and it's antioxidant uh and its association with healthy longevity and the fifth and the fifth one maybe dark chocolate yeah at least 70 cocoa yeah okay and maybe olive oil that would be a toss-up yeah olive oils why is olive oil being talked about so much dr stephen gundry obsesses about olive oil like getting as much in your body on a daily as possible like liters a week or something he's saying well the average italian family i found out goes through a liter a week uh it is first of all tastes great it's from a fruit you know there aren't many oils from fruits and most loves are fruits most yeah most oils come from seeds and the fatty acid composition of oils that come from fruits uh the other one is avocado are really heart-healthy and olive oil is unique in having a an anti-inflammatory compound in it that no other oil has and it that is very good to contain inappropriate inflammation and it tastes great it does a lot of calories but it tastes good right it tastes good what would be um the non-negotiables for you on a daily basis right now at this stage of your life moving forward that you need to think about a meditation a prayer practice a wake-up time an activity what's the not a conversation you have with your daughter i go to bed early you know i have for a long time you know i'm usually in bed by 8 30 or 9. i get up at usually 4 4 30. that's just my pattern yeah uh i meditate when i get up which i've done for a long time i practice breath work which for me is you know that's both a spiritual practice and a physical practice and and i think that i teach that to all people i think that's the real key to good physical health i you know have relationships that i value with my daughter with my wife i have companion animals i'm a dog lover and i can't imagine life without dogs um you know i spend time outdoors and i have use i have rewarding work yeah and it's very satisfying how important is nature in your opinion versus living in a concrete jungle well even if you're living in a concrete jungle you can have plants indoors you can go to a park you know so you you can find ways to access nature even if you're in a even fear in a city right how important is it for you to just be able to walk around in the in the nature in your backyard and it's a garden important really yeah i i've always liked the garden i grow a lot of my own food i take great pleasure in that my house is filled with plants and i have uh you know i live in the desert in tucson but i have a summer place on an island in british columbia which is the exact opposite yeah you know it's all green and lush yeah so you know i get that best of those worlds that's exciting what um what brings you more peace which which location desert or they vote both except the desert not in not in july no you can't go outside and british columbia not in january february see flip-flop yeah how long you been married well this is my second marriage and i've been married for two years okay and when we go when you go through um challenging times and relationships you have to get into details yeah but when you've been through challenging times whether it be a family member yeah partner friends colleagues how much does that impact your health enormous really yeah enormous is it the conflict itself or the unresolved conflict that's a hard question i guess it's the unresolved conflict that's more damaging but you know i'm very sensitive to that and it it really affects my sleep my digestion really yeah when you realize that you start to resolve the conflict in your life what happens to your health do you notice it physically in your stomach digestion yeah and sleep especially yeah and how important is sleep for very important [Laughter] yeah i think there's a there's a the percentage of people that don't either get enough sleep or good quality sleep is very high in this country and there's enormous consumption of medications both prescribed over the counter for sleep and they're all horrible really none of them reproduce natural sleep they suppress dreaming they're addictive interfere with cognitive function what happens when we take an over-the-counter pill or prescription pill in general when we take a substance a chemical substance no matter what it's treating for the stomach well you know the body is our bodies are very good at dealing with all sorts of stuff and uh you know we can handle things like that but in one of the over the counter or well it doesn't matter some of the strongest ones are over the counter like with sleep you know the the most common over-the-counter sleep aid uh in products like unisom for example and salman x is benadryl it's diphenhydramine and antihistamine that makes you drowsy and it's now been found to increase long-term dementia risks if you take it regularly yeah so that's an over-the-counter you know nice little over-the-counter substance however you know one of one of the things that uh that happens that that i think many people don't realize a lot of the most of the medications we use are counteractive they they counteract physiological processes and that's why most of the names begin with anti you know it's antihypertensive antihistamines antispasmodics antidisanti that when you use that kind of a medication you're pushing against the body with an outside force what does it do it pushes back now that's something called homeostasis and the body tries to maintain equilibrium so and i think people don't realize this if you give one of these counteractive medications over time long term the homeostatic reaction may get you in more trouble than you had to begin with and that's what happens with these acid blocking drugs you know after there was even a an experiment reported a few years ago where they took a group of young healthy men who had no gi problems put them on one of these medications for i think six weeks and then stopped it suddenly and they all developed reflux disease so the drug caused the problem it was meant to treat you know and this is this is something same thing happens with antidepressants you know that you give these things that increase serotonin at neural junctions in the brain and what happens over time the body stops making serotonin and it drops serotonin receptors so you want to depress when you get off exactly exactly so what's something that people just don't that you know don't think about they don't realize that problem and you know it is it if you're dealing with an acute situation it's nice to have these things that push the body back in the right place but once you get there you want to back off their use and find other ways to maintain that improvement because if you stick with the medication you're going to run more often than not into that kind of problem really yeah so if someone's been i mean it seems like this especially with social media culture comparison culture on social media addictiveness now i i agree everyone has the ability to just put the phone down right right yeah not so easy though everyone has the ability to say i'm turning my phone off and i'm gonna go do something else but with um this culture of not enough instant gratification comparing to all these other people who look better whatever and me needing to fulfill something that i'm not doing what would you say to the younger generation that has all of these things coming in to their mind all this attention to how they're not enough what would you say if they're in extreme depression feeling moody i don't know if that's all teenagers in general but if they're having that how can they start to find more pieces i think you want to limit your time on devices in general yeah you know and realize how addictive and seductive it is and to just set some kind of limits to it because it's it really affects brain function i don't think we know the full extent of that at the moment yeah that's a big problem are you do you use devices a lot i do but i'm pretty i'm better than most people that i see you know and usually at some point in the day which is you know maybe middle of the day i'm out of there you know and i try not to look at email or any of that stuff anymore and you're out in nature you're connecting with family and right and speaking of family how long were you married the first marriage seven years seven years yeah and then how long was there a time between the first marriage and that must have been that was fairly long really i was in a real long-term relationship god's just not married right there yeah um what's the reason for getting remarried at this age and that's a good question what are the benefits or non benefits to your overall health okay well one of the benefits is that i'm married to canadian so i can get into canada she's also much younger than i am uh she's 43 and she's you are i'm 70 about to be 79. wow and she's very athletic and outdoorsy so that's very good for me uh you know she's a runner and all sorts of things so uh she pulls me in directions that otherwise i might not that you'd be like i want to relax yeah exactly let's go yeah right that's good wow yeah that's interesting where do you think your health would be if you weren't in in a relationship where someone was actively trying to i probably would be lazier and uh you know i think my i take pretty good care of myself but probably not as good as it is at the moment really yeah so mary young yeah what would you say are the the brain foods that would actually help increase our mood the function of our mood to feeling better not in an addictive i need this all the time mcdonald's hit right overall calming happy healthy mood well i think the you know omega-3 source sources huge you know we know those are really necessary for brain health so you know oily fish are the best sources i think there are some of the mushrooms and the one most studied as lion's mane which is a very good edible mushroom but that really looks as if it improves cognitive function and protects the brain i think uh anti-inflammatory agents um like turmeric and ginger or grape olive oil olive oil of course do you take supplements yourself i do i take a you know a multi-nutrient supplement i take coq10 i take magnesium i take a number of mushroom formulas really and you make them yourself i don't make them but a friend of mine does and i'm i'm i'm a great believer in mushrooms and they're medicinal benefits how long you've been studying mushrooms geez probably since the 1970s also uh you know i first became interested in uh well i grew up my mother was very fearful of mushrooms as many people were you know she said don't even touch them you'll get poisoned really yeah and uh so i first got interested in food mushrooms and then uh started when i began reading about chinese medicine to see how much they were valued in chinese medicine and in western medicine we never paid any attention to them so that interested me and i began looking at you know what what are the effects of these things and why are they so much loved in asia and they're really interesting you know these a lot of these affect immunity resistance to cancer viruses you know they're just they're great so um i began you know i really became knowledgeable about mushrooms really yeah so you take them daily or weekly yeah i take yeah and i eat mushrooms whenever i get the chance mushrooms are powerful huh they're real powerful wasn't there a documentary called like the magic power of mushrooms i'm sure yeah yeah yeah there's how many species of mushroom countless i don't think we know thousands right yeah thousands and thousands and the percentage of them that can kill you is very tiny so when you go out you know when you learn to pick wild mushrooms the first thing you want to do is learn the ones that can kill you and those are fairly easy to learn and then once you learn those and avoid them you can experiment then the worst thing you're going to get is a stomach ache of one sort or another few hours and you'll be fine yeah um tell me tell me talk to me about ts because i'm interested in t sure and the power of teas and what is the purpose of tea and why do people drink it so much in general okay first of all tea all comes from one plant uh it's camellia sinensis the tea plant a lot of things we people call tease are herbal infusions you know that aren't made from the tea plant so chamomile tea is not tea it's not tea roibose tea is not tea what is it it's just herbs it's an herbal infusion you know but but if you're talking strictly about tea it's all from this one species of plant and where does the species grow it can grow anywhere well yeah it's native to china and india but it can i hear people are cultivating tea in oregon now i haven't tried any of it yet anyway so it can grow over a wide you know in in in it can't take frost but it can grow in you know a lot of it a lot of different areas but then there are many varieties of tea depending on how the tea is grown how it's treated whether it's steamed dried roasted toasted how long it's oxidized and you've got like everything from white tea which is very delicate green tea oolong tea black tea um and you know there's all sorts of different preferences when i was growing up tea was what old people and sick people drank right right or iced tea and rice with a lot of sugar yeah and the uh the only tea that we had available you know was tea and bags and and that's the common stuff is literally the sweepings of from the floor of the estate so it's been only relatively recently that people in this country have become aware of good tea uh what are the benefits of tea why drink tea well it's agreeable i mean throughout for centuries people have found it to be agreeable it's a stimulant it's got caffeine uh malty or i guess all true tea has caffeine some has more than others like a mint tea that's non-caffeine that's not tea there is however mint flavored tea so you don't got to read the label you know that's with caffeine yes that's tea it has caffeine right now the stimulation however of tea is very different from that of coffee coffee has more caffeine in it but they have different other things in them and tea has a compound called l-theanine that you've probably heard of that's a relaxant and i think that combination uh really affects the the quality of stimulation of caffeine so so it's got caffeine which gives you sharper energy but also a relaxation yes so people you know i think it describe it as a relaxed alertness interesting different from the stimulation of coffee which i personally think is much more jangling a jittery alertness versus exactly right a focused exactly now other observation i mean i don't want to bash coffee too badly but uh i see an awful lot of people who are addicted to coffee or physically addicted you know if they try to stop they have a withdrawal syndrome you know it's like a lethargy and then a pounding headache and they can you know last for 48 hours and instantly relieved if you have some coffee right you don't see that with tea you know rare like i need my teeth rarely i'm on my plate exactly and also uh when i was actively seeing patients i i used to say that i would produce one miracle cure a week by getting somebody to stop drinking coffee and it was from everything from hand tremors to irregular heartbeats to bladder problems gi problems stomach problems a whole range of stuff and they had no idea that the coffee was doing it to them you got them off the coffee and they were like two weeks later they were fine fine and and these were often problems that had gone on for years people's hearts and nobody never told them no you're breaking people's hearts right but also there's a huge variation in how people respond to caffeine in general and coffee in particular i i see people who have no idea that the one cup of coffee they have in the morning is the reason they can't sleep at night and i see other people who can drink a pot of coffee at bedtime and fine so you got to find out where you are on that spectrum yeah i can have a cappuccino at night after like 10 o'clock and pass out so you're relatively caffeine insensitive yeah uh not that i need it i know right a little taste or whatever and i wonder and i'll drink it in the mornings and it doesn't like give me more energy i feel like i have energy right but when people say they get energy and coffee it's their energy you know coffee just bunches it up and when it wears off you're left with a depletion of manner really what do you mean it's their energy it bunches it up caffeine isn't giving you a gift of coffee isn't giving you a gift of energy it's like it's forcing your body to give up chemically stored energy that it would normally not release all at once like stored where the fat cells are in the no in in all cells in in it's in all cells and com energetic compounds in all cells but when you when you release that energy then when when the drug wears off you have a depletion of energy and you feel tired yeah you have a crash so and why does t not do that probably because it's first because it's less caffeine so it's gentler stimulation and it's also got this other compound that moderates the the thing so i guess you can find you could find tea addicts i don't see them very often right uh and i don't see many people who say they get a crash from tea drinking what and also coffee does have you know there are health benefits of coffee but there's been a tremendous amount of research on health benefits of tea especially green tea like what are the benefits overall lower death rates yeah there's a huge population study in japan is that because of the tea or because of all the other factors of the environment we don't know but there's there's a clear association between the more tea people drink lower causes all causes of death it's got improved cardiovascular health lower rates of cancer uh and all sorts of stuff like that and of the various forms of tea personally i think green tea has been most studied here's the thing when i drink green tea in the morning with no food it makes me feel a little upset like i've thrown up before i have heard this i've heard this from people i get a little nauseous sometimes i hear this from people so you want to have food in your stomach right that's a fairly simple fix gotcha why is that do you think i don't know and it's coffee i'm fine i mean interesting i don't want to drink coffee in the morning and not eat all day do not know why maybe there's a compound in the team possibly stimulating interesting so my preferred form is matcha green tea which is the powdered tea yeah but matcha doesn't make me feel sick okay i like matcha oh good i'm glad to hear that you got to try air matcha which is the best which you guys have i mean the best domain in the t world with matcha.com yeah that was a good score why why is why did you get in how did you get into that when i was 17 uh i was on a student exchange program this was 1959 no actually it was an experimental school called the international school of america your whole life yeah you're out there which i love this was great i got to travel around the world for uh nine months and live with native families in different countries changed changed my life anyway it's a quick story there before you tell it my dad we had seven exchange students live with us when i was a kid yeah so it's like we didn't have the money to travel right but i brought it to you we brought it to me so we had people from all over the world teaching us the culture and the food and the substitute for that amazing no substitute for that for knowing about other other cultures yeah anyway so i lived with uh with japanese families outside of tokyo and kobe and the japanese family outside of tokyo they were supposed to be a student studying english but there was no language no one spoke no one spoke english so the second night that i was there the mother through gestures made known she wanted to take me next door to her neighbor who was a tea ceremony practitioner so it was cool so the three of us sat around um and this woman when kimono made matcha so first of all the color of the matcha just blew me away i mean it's this brilliant green powder i'd never seen green like that and then the whisk that they whisked it in a bowl to a froth is a marvel of japanese craftsmanship car from a single piece of bamboo and that whisk just oh i loved i wanted one of those so uh i then in the 1970s i began going to japan fairly regularly for different things and whenever i'd go i'd bring matcha back and turn people on to it nobody's ever heard of matcha and i'd make it for people and somewhere in the 80s maybe 90s i started importing matcha from a company in japan that i met and selling it on my website dr weill.com way ahead of its time you know there was no awareness of mine for starbucks made it yeah yeah yeah so but then watching matcha suddenly become popular here i was amazed but also disappointed that so much of the matcha here was terrible well it's just sugar infused well also the matcha itself because it's such a fine powder it's got a huge surface area oxidizes very quickly so if it's not stored properly it it loses that ring color becomes sort of yellowish green or gray green it gets bitter and a lot that's a lot of people that's all the only matcha they've tried is stuff like that so i really wanted to turn people onto good matches what are the benefits of matcha in general well it's the only form of tea in which the whole leaf is consumed and it's got a higher content of antioxidants and flavor compounds and that l-theanine than other forms of tea so it's grown in an unusual way it's like they're they're special tea plants and starting about three weeks before they harvest it they cover the plants with shade cloth that's about a 90 shade cloth so pretty dark and in response to that the leaves get bigger to try to get the sun to get bigger and thinner they produce more chlorophyll to try to make more energy and they produce more antioxidants and more flavor compounds and then the leaves are harvested steamed dried uh aged and then they're ground between stones used to be done by hand now they're sort of mechanically driven but it's these grooved granite stones to this super fine powder and so it's uh you know it's a special form of tea that has higher content of all the good stuff i'm gonna have to come to tucson and have you make me say i would love to do this whisk it up for me or just go to japan i'd love to find a specialty place but meantime you can get it from our uh website matcha.com there you go do you guys teach how to make it yes there's celebrational videos and we sell everything everything everything's all there that's exciting yeah that's fun so it's been fun to turn people onto that so why matcha over jasmine or green what's the i think it's personal preference whatever you like i like that first of all i just like the look of matcha i like the taste of it i like the ritual of of whisking it yeah well you can do it any way you want and is it you know the starbucks ways like you put almond milk in or something but how would you is this with water is this what yeah just i like it just with water no sweetener that's just my way i like it i also like iced matcha uh sort of i use an electric whisk in room temperature water and then put ice cubes in it and then when it's hot weather i like that a lot like to drink green things what's the um are you drinking it uh one tea a day do you have i'd say one a day for you yeah usually one a day or early in the day i mean occasionally i'll have another one but yeah you usually don't need more than one what's your nighttime ritual my nighttime ritual i eat early um what's that five seven four to five i would say that's your dinner yeah i like to cook so even if i'm by myself you know i usually cook for myself simple stuff but i you know i like simple delicious things so uh and i like cooking for other people and then after dinner um i like to often read uh watch movies depending on the weather of course i mean if it's nbc and it's light till 10 o'clock i'm you know outdoors and right right you're living the dream you've done so many different different interesting things what's the thing you're most proud of that you've created you know i i i there is now a center at the university of arizona college of medicine named the andrew wiles center for integrative medicine that's pretty cool yes that's pretty cool and uh we're the world leader in education in this field wow you know as i said we've graduated uh over 2000 physicians from our trainings we train medical students we train we have our curriculum in 80 residency programs we train other health professionals we train uh you know chiropractors dentists nurses uh in integrative medicine and you know as i've always said one day we'll be able to drop the word integrated will just be good medicine and that's coming and integrative is is that the exclusion of medicine like traditional medicine no it builds on conventional so you still can prescribe absolutely traditional matters yeah you know we if i've always said if i'm in a serious car accident i don't want to first go away to a christian science practitioner or a chiropractor or shaman you know i want to go to a trauma center and get put back together but then i'd use other methods i know to speed up healing right so i think the frankly i could one of the things i can see happening i i think that um a lot of uh smaller and community hospitals aren't gonna be there in the future i think nobody's gonna be able to afford you know that stuff and that what we call conventional medicine allopathic medicine that may become a specialty for dealing with trauma for critical illness and there'll be one large facility in cities that has all the hardware and uh there'll be new kinds of institutions that'll come into being you know that i think of as healing centers so that's that's one possible future you've seen the obesity go up in america since the last 50 years it probably wasn't two-thirds back then it was probably a one-third maybe or not even i don't know what it was back then well i remember watching you know a few years ago i watched the whole uh ken burns uh documentary in world war ii okay amazon pbs and there are many crowd scenes both military and civilians thousands of people you don't see a single fat person in those crowds is that because they didn't have the money to buy food is it because there's no it's not and you know it's the other interesting thing is if you look what people were eating in those days they didn't know a lot of what we know now processing food as much too so yeah so i mean but people ate you know they were eating potato meat and potatoes and pies and gloves but it was real food made from scratch you know they were not eating manufactured food they weren't eating fast enough there was no fast food then right but there's an enormous change in how people looked you know i read there was a book that came out a few years ago that was trying to argue that the obesity epidemic was an artifact of statistics the way we were measuring people he just look at this you know it's like unbelievable how how people have changed everyone was fit or looked for back then right right and now everyone looks yeah fatter yeah what do you think's gonna where do you think in the next 50 years we're going to be as a country in terms of obesity you know i saw i saw uh this is a couple years ago i read that the military is really having problems finding people who are qualified for military service because of obesity so if it's really so if it's threatening national defense you'd think you know it now people are going to take it seriously we've got to do something just because they're not in shape enough to yeah pass the test yeah the physical test yeah uh you know we're in such a mess in this country with regard to food and nutrition it's hard to know where to start where i would start is if we could get people to stop drinking sweet liquids right that would be we'd had to put it so far ahead of the curve soda popping and it's not just soda pop it's also fruit juice it's energy drinks it's putting sugar in coffee and tea all the starbucks yeah yeah that would be that would be one place to start just not drink sweet liquids you know that would that would be a big step what about alcohol consumption i don't you know sure i think you know the whole key with alcohol is moderation yeah uh you know there's constant arguments about whether it's beneficial or harmful and i think moderation is the key i don't think that's nearly as big a factor as as uh as sugar really right and when you created an anti-inflammatory diet right yeah when was that long ago and you know i i i have a history of being ahead of the curve in a lot of areas now that i've been able to foresee trends i was i think the first people to warn people about trans fats ten years before people took notice of that so i became aware of this beginnings this hypothesis that chronic inflammation was the root cause of a lot of different kinds of serious chronic diseases and that just fascinated me because when i was in medical school i was taught that cardiovascular disease had nothing in common with cancer and that had nothing in common with alzheimer's or parkinson's disease and now suddenly it looks like you know all of these things are linked they have a common root of chronic inflammation inflammation and and if that's the case the good news is then there's a common strategy for dealing with them if you can reduce inappropriate inflammation so i think there's a lot of misunderstanding about inflammation you know inflammation is the cornerstone of the body's healing response that's inflammation so inflammation is good we're in pain well it's good you know it's the way the body gets more nourishment and more immune activity to an area that's injured or under attack right so we all know it on the surface of the body you know it's redness swelling you know pain heat uh but we aren't aware of it necessarily internally and especially if it's low level uh it's infamous inflammation is so powerful and it's so potentially destructive that it's very important that it ends when it's supposed to end and stay where it's supposed to stay so you don't want it throughout your nose information persists if it outlives its purpose then it causes disease and it looks now if you if you can't produce enough inflammation you're vulnerable to infection if you produce too much inflammation you're vulnerable to allergies and autoimmunity and it looks like if you've got low level chronic inflammation going on for a long time you greatly increase risks of cardiovascular disease of neurodegenerative disease and cancer and uh so i think one of the best things we can do is learn how to contain it so what are the factors that influence it it's partly genetic it's stress exposure to environmental toxins is a big one uh secondhand cigarette smoke is a very powerful but diet has a huge influence and that's one that's potentially under our control right and i think there's no question that the mainstream north american diet is strongly pro-inflammatory gives us the wrong kinds of fats the wrong kinds of carbs and not enough of the protective elements which are mostly in fruits vegetables herbs spices tea things like that yeah so what would be the an anti-inflammatory diet so uh a base of high quality produce you know and the government always tells us to eat more fruits and vegetables but the emphasis really should be on vegetables okay because fruits are sugar sources and you want to you know veggies more veggies more veggies you want to avoid pro-inflammatory fats which are things like you know hydrogenated fats margarine vegetable shortening and the polyunsaturated vegetable oils okay so you know you want to eat olive oil should be your main main thing fat or avocado or avocado oil yeah uh nuts seeds good they're good yeah yes in terms of carbohydrate it you know it's not that carbohydrates are bad it's that you want to reduce consumption of quick digesting ones the ones that turn quickly into blood sugar so everything made with flour uh and that's all the snack foods all the you know everything everything everything yeah and and uh sweeteners in general i mean that doesn't mean you live without sugar completely but you want to really keep keep that to a minimum so is this all flour is this just it's all flour you know i think the almond flour well that's a nut so okay that's that's better but with grains i think there's such misunderstanding you know if i ask people to name a whole grain food the usual answer i get is whole wheat flour or whole wheat bread where's the whole wheat bread is not a whole grain food where's the grain you know it's and the fda doesn't get that they let that put labels on it saying this is a whole grain food and good for you most whole wheat bread is colored white bread you know when you when you have a grain the starch is tightly compacted very dense and it's surrounded by a more or less by a fibrous bran and it takes time for digestive enzymes to get in there and convert the starch to sugar when you mill a grain into flour whether or not the bran is present whether or not the germ is present you convert the starch into a material with an infinite surface area and it's a snap for digestive enzymes to turn that into sugar so i people don't understand this you know it's that it's that there is a big difference between a whole grain that you can see your grain cracked into a few big pieces and flour can you eat a whole grain like are you supposed to eat the whole grain we do i mean we eat cracked grains gotcha or you cook you cook barley and you get buckwheat and you cook wild rice yeah okay that's what we're supposed to be doing yeah but not convert that's fine but not grinding it into flour really yeah or you just use little bits of that because that's the stuff that raises blood sugar quickly and that's what causes insulin resistance and you know in a lot of people what about oatmeal i think relatively especially steel-cut oatmeal where you're dealing with chewy grains is okay yeah okay steel cut but not like the nut mush [Laughter] not not cream of mush i eat so much cream of wheat when i was growing up that's so bad pouring brown sugar on top man i know oh the sad american diet is what i have growing up you know that just the standard american diet is sad yeah right yeah so this consists of the anti-inflammatory diet how long do you go on that for i think it's it's the way you live you live that way yeah you know and and in terms i think it's also good to reduce animal foods in the diet i don't tell people to become complete vegans or vegetarians but it is desirable to reduce consumption of animal foods and also not only for personal health but for planetary health right you know when you look um you know i've been i've written and thought a lot about the the pandemic and you know that we are a tremendous risk for these they're called zoonotic diseases diseases that jump from animals to people of which this is one if we're consuming it we're more risk right but these diseases are becoming more frequent and worse you know aids is one of these and you know all these things and and covid certainly and uh the reasons that this is happening more and why we're at greater and greater risk it's climate change it's deforestation it's too many people it's too many people living in two dense concentrations it's the way we raise animals and treat them and you look into this and you think like you know which of these things can we do anything about it's not clear the one thing that we could do something about is reducing our dependence on animal foods right right that that that would that would be one concrete step to you know help the environment have you seen this uh documentary see spiricy no yeah like in a minute i love your thoughts on it but um so are you uh do you eat just less food i hear you like fish but you're eating less meat i don't i haven't eaten meat in a very long time really yeah you'd fish a lot of fish i eat fish and vegetables yeah mostly and and i eat a lot of plant protein as well you know and it's great to see more you know good kinds of plant protein foods available you said in japan or okinawa they have more pork pork interestingly i mean they like pork and that's a cultural preference you know i don't i don't i choose not to eat uh animal foods yeah except for for uh fish when did you cut out animal foods uh i can tell you exactly thanksgiving of 1970. come on what happened i was uh the turkey was just not kept right you're like what am i doing no it's funny i was uh i did it as an experiment i was starting to do yoga and uh you know that was part of yoga philosophy and also i had friends who became vegetarian so i thought i would just do it as an experiment see what happened and to my surprise i lost weight i had more energy i felt great and i'm stuck with it stuck with it i didn't eat fish at first i was a lacto-vegetarian for about 15 years and then um you know i was i told you i was going to japan it was not easy to be in japan and not eat fish everything's fish everything's fish you know the sauces the broth uh so so first i was reading about the health benefits of fish and then i was traveling a lot so i started eating fish and then that's pretty much what i've stuck yeah gotcha and when you think about um the inflammation that people are having a lot is it can inflammation also be caused with the mind or is it only through no i said it's an absolutely absolutely absolutely the mind and suggests rff absolutely a factor in fact there's a whole i mean there's quite a lot of research on how the um the how the brain and the immune system interact and how the mind plays into that in fact here this is fascinating um the you know the the the current theory of depression which is dominant medicine it's called the serotonin hypothesis of depression is that it's a deficiency of serotonin the brain that's why we give these drugs that increase serotonin yes which don't work that well you know there's increasing evidence that they don't work that great well there's an alternate an alternative hypothesis that's been out there that's been building which i which is right it's called the cytokine hypothesis of depression this is an interesting story there's um it's long been known that when adam domestic animals get sick uh cows pig sheep that they exhibit a a cluster of symptoms that's called sickness behavior they and it's usually sick with some sort of infectious disease they stop moving they stop socializing stop eating they lose interest in sex they stop eating so farmers had had always thought this was a result of fatigue associated with infection but in the 1970s to everyone's surprise it was found that it was mediated by a bloodborne factor that you could take blood from an animal with sickness behavior injected into a well animal and that animal showed the same symptoms so nobody knew what it was in blood you know it was called factor x and then it turned out this was identified as a group of regulatory substances called cytokines which mediate inflammation and it looks as if there's a correlation between increased inflammation increased immune activity and depression to the extent now that they find that that some people with severe depression respond to anti-inflammatory drugs much better than to antidepressant drugs so and if you think about it you know evolutionarily that makes sense because if you've got you know if you've got an infectious disease it makes sense to stop moving you know and stop eating you want to conserve your energy but there's a mood change that goes along with that so it's like you know there's a back and forth connection that that depression and inflammation are connected what do you think we should be thinking on a daily basis in terms of our thoughts if the thought is what's you know somewhat regulates our mindset and our mood sets throughout the day what do you think about and what do you prescribe as thought well one thing i you know one reason that i tell people to practice breath work and to do some forms of meditation is that practicing putting your attention on your breath that is a safe place to have your attention yes it's like putting your mind in neutral it's much better than having your attention on your thoughts because very often it's thoughts and images in the mind which are sources of anxiety of negative feelings and you often can't stop them but what you can do is try to just disconnect your attention from them and that's you know breath is one way to do that has there ever been a point in your life where your thoughts took over oh yeah and your mind took over and you went spiraling yes how did you overcome that i think one was just moving through moving through it uh trying various things um you know were you aware of it when it was happening oh yeah so you're like okay this is something i've been practicing for years definitely but i'm in this definitely so you're not immune to these challenges also no not at all sorry i didn't mean to wrap no that's yeah i know that very well really yeah it's been a while since i've gotten caught in that but there were periods of my life when yes that was that was you know and i i tried all sorts of things and you know didn't a lot of things i tried didn't work i think you know having practiced meditation for a long time that it was not a quick fix but long term i think that's been very helpful it helped you know how long was the the worst time of being in that spiral fight i think a couple years just kind of like low level anxiety consistently more depression than anxiety really yeah what age range was this remember i would think that was in my 40s do you know what caused it i think some of it was being isolated i think some of us being socially isolated yeah i think some some i've some i was living in latin america some in tucson um i really also not feeling i had a purpose but you were healing lives and changing the world nonetheless education to so many people well this was before really before that really yeah so a lack of purpose lifestyle purposes social isolation yeah i would try to maintain my habits especially habits of of physical activity uh but my sleep was not good but it was a it was a thing that was with me for some time i wrote about that and i i have a book called spontaneous happiness which is about emotional wellness and i i wrote about that experience interesting i tried an antidepressant drug and didn't do much for me when did you start to see yourself come out of it what were the things that caused the change did you move somewhere did you yeah i think it was when uh i did i moved i got in a relationship that led to my first marriage love heals people love heals people yeah i i wrote a uh my first book that was really a big bestseller you know i just wasn't what was that it's called spontaneous healing that was the one yeah interesting you wrote that one while you were depressed yeah because you were just seeking the answer no i don't know i don't know okay so you had more purpose and you got right but you know i think um having experiences like that uh i feel stronger as a result of it it makes first of all it makes me much more compassionate with people having the pain the frustration the suffering yeah that's powerful i love learning about the mind and the thoughts and how to heal our body through that yeah well it's your background man that's what you're up to yeah i got a couple final questions with you and i'll be respectful your time this is fascinating this is a question i ask everyone towards the end of our show called the three truths hypothetical question and scenario imagine it is your last day on earth many years away yeah and you accomplish everything you want to accomplish but for whatever reason you've got to take all of your work with you all your books this podcast your writing your blog like everything you've written or done audio or video goes with you to the next place but you get to leave behind three things you know to be true about the lessons you've learned in your life that you'd like to share with the world i'd call it the three truths what would you say would be your three truths i think it's all okay it's all over it's all okay um i would say you know don't worry be happy yeah and uh uh just trust in your own trust in yourself you know really find your own light yeah wise words for a wise man um i would acknowledge you dr weil for the consistent relentlessness you have towards finding the information and providing it for us to find healing within ourselves yeah i think uh the world is better for for you in it for teaching us things and bringing us things that we had no idea decades before for being a trailblazer in this space and uh i really acknowledge your openness your honestness your realness and i appreciate you you're showing up today and providing this with our audience yeah thanks i i really enjoyed meeting you and talking with you yeah of course i want people to uh check out your work and go to matcha.com if they want matcha i'm gonna be getting some matcha there as well you're all over social media dr uh weil uh it's dr wild.com as well that's my my website which has a great deal of health information tons of great content resources and blogs articles which has been extremely informative for me uh dr weil everywhere on instagram and yeah and check out the um the university of arizona website too which is integrativemedicine.arizona.edu okay and among other things there there's a find a practitioner link so you can find one of our graduates we have graduates in all states and a lot of places who are doing integrative medicine so if someone's dealing with a pain or anything illness or anything they can go to the website and they can find a practitioner yeah in a specialty that's relevant to them and they've gone through your programming very intensive training yeah how long is that training two years two years and these are already medical doctors medical doctors who've completed residencies yeah so they've gone through the traditional medical school of five years four years plus plus usually a three-year residency and then a fellowship and a specialty so eight years at least then they've gone to your program two years so they have 10 years yeah of medical training from functional to integrative medicine and so they're more uh evolved hopefully and more in tune yeah they've got this philosophy that the body can heal itself and that right you know all these different modalities are available and there's 3 000 of them yeah around the world right a lot in the u.s but we've got people in in many countries now and it's a real movement that's building and so they can go there they can it tells them how to contact yes yes based on location and everything um you've got tons of great books is there anything else that we can support you with in this moment oh no that's plenty a lot of good stuff on your website but uh matcha.com i'm excited to check this yeah we'll get you some of the good stuff of course of course um okay this is my final question for you what's your definition of greatness of greatness uh i think whatever resonates with truth there you go yeah awesome thank you so much appreciate it if you're looking for more ways to improve your life then make sure to check out this powerful video with jordan peterson if you discipline someone properly they become disciplined right they that means they're competent they're organized they have structure they have yeah they can control themselves so i'll give you an example

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 1,524,260

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, andrew weil interview, brain foods, brain health, end inflammation now, how to live longer, age in reverse, health tips, health theory, nutrition tips

Id: Y-5THOItJIc

Length: 89min 52sec (5392 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021