Weil spoke as part of the Tulsa Town Hall series of speakers.
The United States has an expensive health-care system that doesn’t produce good results, he said.
“Something is very wrong with this picture,” he said. “We’re spending more and more and we have less and less to show for it.”
Changes in diet can be an effective treatment for many conditions, but American physicians are functionally illiterate in nutrition, he said.
“The whole subject of nutrition is omitted in medical education,” he said.
There are many ways of managing diseases other than drugs, he said. Integrative medicine, which can include dietary supplements and practices like meditation, is the future of health care, he said.
The health system is resistant to change because of entrenched vested interests. That includes pharmaceutical companies that do direct-to-consumer advertising, which should be stopped, he said.
“As dysfunctional as our health-care system is at the moment – and it is very dysfunctional – it is generating rivers of money,” he said. “That money is going into very few pockets.”
Weil has developed an anti-inflammatory diet based on the Mediterranean diet but with Asian influences.
Inflammation is associated with some heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and some cancers, he said. And as a result, people should be eating real, unprocessed foods and whole grains. They should stay away from sugar-sweetened beverages, including fruit juice, he said.
“The new research that’s being done on sugar is not very comforting,” he said.
The aging process can’t be avoided, but age-related diseases can be avoided by proper care, he said.
“The goal should be to live long and well with a big drop off at the end,” he said.
Weil is the director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine.
Tickets to the Tulsa Town Hall series are sold as a $ 75 subscription and cover five lectures. Tickets for individual lectures are not available.
To subscribe, visit tulsaworld.com/tulsatownhall, call 918-749-5965 or write to: Tulsa Town Hall, Box 52266, Tulsa, OK 74152.
Future speakers include journalist Ann Compton on Feb. 8; author James B. Stewart on April 5; historian and cinematographer Rex Ziak on May 10.
Original Print Headline: Speaker highlights nutrition
Shannon Muchmore 918-581-8378
shannon.muchmore@tulsaworld.com
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Tulsa Town Hall: Nutrition a valuable tool in health care
