Book review
Eight Weeks to Optimum Health
In brief
Weil brings diet, exercise, and meditation into a holistic account of health. Floris finds some practical value but criticizes outdated evidence, anecdotes, and unsupported claims about supplements and healing.
Eight Weeks to Optimum Health by Andrew Weil was not my cup of green tea. I think the biggest problem was that his information is based on outdated science and many anecdotes. So although he is coming from the right place, I couldn’t agree with many of the specifics.
I can say that his advice is much better than the average American diet. It also does do a good job of seeing food as part of something larger and includes things like meditation. It’s more holistic than how we normally look at diet.
Some more notes:
- Dietary advice includes the following: Brocolli, fish or flax, fruits and vegetables (organic – although that also loses some of it’s meaning nowadays), soy foods, whole grains, cooked greens, garlic and ginger
- Antioxidants (but as far as I know the evidence is fleeting for them)
- And he mentions quite a lot of supplements to take. At the same time I’m contemplating some supplements (vit D, B12), so it does make some sense
- Walk and stretch (good advice)
- I didn’t like his definition of spontaneous healing, it’s just our body doing it’s thing – nothing special about it or that it will be activated by X, Y, or Z. And yes we can sometimes beat cancer without a doctors interventions, but that doesn’t mean it should be the way to go.
- The book relies on testimony – way too much
- “… which gave me a means to access cellular memory” – WTF