The book is an excellent example of a sensible approach to healthy eating and living. Nothing new or ground breaking, but instead an approach that is easy to understand and follow. What I love about it is that it not about dieting. I have always believed that as soon as we start to diet and deprive ourselves of things we like to eat, we want them even more. What we resist persists!

Dr Weil promotes eating whole foods, getting moderate exercise and managing stress through breathing techniques. He also considers our spiritual side and suggests simple things like creating beautiful and orderly surroundings.

I’m in my first week and really enjoying it. What’s very different than what I have been doing over the last few years is his approach to supplementation. He doesn’t suggest taking high doses of supplements, but rather low to moderate doses based on research on how much our bodies are able to absorb.

He focuses heavily on cholesterol, but acknowledges a growing body of research showing that other factors such as triglycerides and inflamation are more likely to cause heart disease. He makes no mention of coconut oil or any other tropical oil, I suspect because they are saturated fats which he suggests keeping low (this is the one area where I disagree with him). I was very relieved to read his advice on poly-unsaturated vegetable oils – don’t eat them – throw them away and use olive oil instead.

Dr Weil is also a proponent of drinking filtered tap water for the same reasons we outline on out water page.

I’m looking forward to my eight weeks. The breathing exercises are a revelation and I am learning more about the power we have to heal ourselves.

Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, Revised Edition: A Proven Program for Taking Full Advantage of Your Body’s Natural Healing Power

Top health news on the BBC website today is an article about a research review by researchers in Copenhagen suggesting that vitamins A and E increased the rate of early death. The article is good. Go read it, but make sure you read the whole thing. Read how they carried out the review and how they selected the research to be included. First they took 68 trials, added them together to get a result that suggested that vitamins had no impact on the risk of early death. Then they took out 21 trials that they thought ‘had a slightly higher possibility of producing a skewed result’ and guess what…

the results the suggest that A and E may increase the risk of early death.

I have a lot of difficulty with this kind of research review:

• There is no new research.
• Trials can be cherry picked and results manipulated.
• The trials may not be compatible or comparable – for example one trial may use healthy people and others may use ill people.

At the end of the BBC article there is a response from Dr Ann Walker of the Health Supplements Service who also thinks the study is “worthless” because some of the trials involved patients who were seriously ill.
“How sensible scientists can suggest that a modest intervention of a single antioxidant supplement, can have a major effect in reversing life-threatening pathology, where patients already have advanced cardiovascular disease, is ridiculous.

“Vitamin, mineral and dietary supplements not only have proven health benefits, they are essential to the maintenance of good health and can help bridge the nutritional gap for many people in the UK whose diets are often lacking in essential nutrients.”

It’s up to you to make an informed decision about your health.

Link to our supplements pages.

Link to the BBC.

I’m one of these vitamin gobbling baby boomers and I don’t need a scientist to tell me when something is working for me. Sure, I would like scientific evidence, however, I expect I would be toothless and in my grave before the scientific community got around to carrying out useful research on holistic health practice.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful to scientists. They do fantastic work and our quality of life would be utterly grim without them. Indeed, I would dead if it weren’t for antibiotics. However, while they are great at developing drugs to treat serious illness, they are not great at preventing ill health.