Science Friday NPR aired "Combating Depression with Meditation and Diet" program today click HERE to listen
excerpt:
"FLATOW: Let me go back - we only have a couple of minutes, but you
touched on a very interesting topic that we've been talking about for
years from a traditional medicine side, and you're now bringing it from
another side. And that is the role of inflammation in disease.
WEIL:
Now, for years, I've been recommending an anti-inflammatory diet as the
best strategy for optimizing health, extending longevity, reducing
overall risks of disease, and I have devised an anti-inflammatory diet.
You can find this in the book or in my website, DrWeil.com. It's a
version of the Mediterranean diet for which we have great evidence of
general health benefits. I've tweaked it to make it even more effective.
But the theory here is that all of the major chronic diseases -
cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease - begin as
inflammatory processes.
And I think most
people in our culture go through life in pro-inflammatory states. Many
reasons for that - genetics, stress, exposure to environmental toxins.
Diet plays a huge role. The mainstream diet, which is heavy in
industrialized food-like stuff is strongly pro-inflammatory. It gives us
all the wrong things, the wrong fats, the wrong kinds of carbohydrate
and it's deficient in all that can protect us from the damage from
inflammation. And now, there is this new connection that our emotional
health may also be tied here. So that following an anti-inflammatory
diet and lifestyle may offer great protection as well as a new treatment
strategy for managing depression."
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