Blueberry eating doctor ages well
Published: November 6, 2005
His signature beard is more cloud than black-peppered Brillo pad these days, and travel takes a toll he’d never have predicted when he started exploring far corners of the world at age 17. He wakes once or twice a night to visit the bathroom.
Andrew Weil, arguably America’s doctor, turned 63 in June, and signs like these remind him he has stepped squarely into the second half of his life.
Not that you’d guess it to watch him on this toasty October morning at his ranch in Vail, Ariz.
He strides, a hale figure in cotton shirt, crumpled shorts and Birkenstocks, from the personal office-meditation space-guest quarters at his ranch outside Tucson to his house, where roasting vegetables scent the air. Quickly, he’s out the door.
Up with the sun, he has meditated, fed his dogs and himself, sipped green tea, checked e-mail, consulted with staff in another building and prepared for a conference call, which he’ll follow with laps in his sun-warmed, copper-silver ion generator-disinfected swimming pool.
He’s living, in other words, by the fitness principles he espouses in his 11th book, Healthy Aging : A Lifelong Guide to Your Physical and Spiritual Well-Being.
Finding his path
Healthy Aging : A Lifelong Guide to Your Physical and Spiritual Well-BeingHe points out a towering Arizona cypress on his property, past its maximum lifespan of about 60 years and brown on top. A one-time linguistics major turned student of botany and medicine, he’s probably one of the few people who can recognize the tree as metaphor and give you its scientific name as well.
The Cupressus arizonica has been diagnosed with a fungal disease. Even with treatment, the old age that made it susceptible also means death is imminent.
Weil says turning back the clock isn’t possible in humans either, at least not yet, contrary to claims of the anti-aging industry.
Nor is it necessarily to be desired.
His mother, who traveled to Antarctica at 89, “would occasionally say getting old is no fun, but mostly she was pretty sure she didn’t want to go back.
“I don’t think I would want to either. I had an energy in my 20s and 30s that I don’t have now, but in a lot of ways, life was more difficult then.”
The young Andy Weil was restless and curious and not sure where he fit in.
“I had a nice time growing up in Philadelphia,” he says, “but I think I knew there was more beyond that.”
He likes where he has landed in life and the journey that brought him here.
His path in medicine began almost by accident and proceeded conventionally enough with degrees in biology and medicine from Harvard.
“Going to medical school — and this sounds funny — was a way of putting off having to make a decision,” he says.
Stuck in Tucson
The Harvard- and government-approved experiments he conducted there, the first double blind human studies of the effects of marijuana, were a hint of the unconventional physician he would become.
After interning at a San Francisco hospital, he worked for the National Institutes of Health and studied medicinal plants in North and South America and Africa. Traditional medicine wasn’t encompassing enough to suit him.
Then in 1973, his car broke down in Tucson.
“It took six weeks to get it fixed,” Weil says. “It was a very warm, wet winter, the desert was in bloom, and I fell in love with it.”
He joined the University of Arizona College of Medicine faculty in 1978 and began the groundbreaking Program in Integrative Medicine in 1994, an outgrowth of his research in natural healing.
Integrative medicine, he explains, uses the best and most appropriate therapies from conventional and alternative medicine. It’s how he leads his life, eating fresh blueberries because they taste good and their phytonutrients can reduce the risks of age-related disease and getting a flu shot because he doesn’t want to be laid up in bed for four days like he was once.
Weil discovered an unexpected wellspring of health in his 120-acre ranch, nestled in the Rincon Mountains at 3,500 feet. He moved there from Tucson in 1994.
One day, a grocery cashier recognized him as she rang up his purchases and said she followed all his health advice.
In his cart that day? Nothing but several trays of cheap stew beef for the food he prepared for his dogs, an experiment since given up, and a single pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia frozen yogurt (a rare treat, honest!) tottering on top.
When he reaches 93, the age at which his mother died, Weil hopes his health regimen will have left him still able to take pleasure in things like crossing the wooden bridge to his tree house and swimming and walking.
“One thing I’d like,” he says, “is to live in a community, not an old-age home, where I had my private space but also had friends around. We could have meals together, watch movies and do other things together. That’s something I’d like.”
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