Dr. Andrew Weil on Matcha Tea and Psychedelics for Depression
Andrew Weil, one of the most influential doctors in America, is known as a pioneer of integrative medicine who has always advocated for a natural approach to healthcare that focuses on healing and overall wellness. In this episode, Dr. Weil is weighing on everything from matcha tea to psychedelics, even issuing a warning about one of the biggest viral health trends that he says everyone needs to hear. For more, check out: www.drweil.com and www.matcha.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I think this is on the horizon of medicine in the very near future.
I think we're going to be able to have individualized treatment.
We'll be able to prescribe drugs with the assurance that they're going to affect an individual in the way we want them to be effective.
We can make dietary changes based on individual genetic profiling.
I don't think we're quite there yet.
yet.
I think, first of all, there's a lot of inaccuracies in this information.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Thank you.
He's one of the most influential doctors in America.
Andrew Weil is known as a pioneer of integrative medicine who has always advocated for a natural approach to healthcare that focuses on healing and overall wellness.
Today, Dr. Weil is weighing in on everything from machete to psychedelics, even issuing a warning about one of the biggest viral health trends that he says everyone needs to hear.
I love you.
You've done incredible things in your career.
You've been a mentor to me, and I appreciate you taking time to spend some time in our studio.
Thank you.
I'm delighted to be here.
I want to start off with something that a lot of folks don't appreciate, but the sentinel role you played in American medicine is evidenced by the fact that the University of Arizona Center of Integrative Medicine, it's a mouthful, is going to sound much better with its new name because it'll be called the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine.
I mean, that's pretty cool.
You'll be having states named after you pretty soon.
Yeah, it's hard for me to refer to myself in the third person, so I just call it the Center for Integrative Medicine.
It is pretty cool, though.
There are not many physicians who are still alive.
Yeah, that's right.
I feel lucky that I've been able to see this in my lifetime.
Ed, did you ever anticipate when you first started out, having graduated at Harvard, you know, in remarkable pedigree, voyaging out into an area that I'm sure most of your colleagues thought was absolutely wacky and crazy, that you'd end up where you are now?
No.
You know, I always knew that I was doing the right thing.
I put one foot ahead of the other, and I really didn't care if I got reinforcement from the outer world.
It's been very gratifying to watch mainstream society catch up with me.
Why didn't you care?
Most human beings care what their fellow humans say about them.
I knew what I was doing was right.
I knew that there were better ways to do medicine.
I knew that this is what consumers wanted.
I knew that conventional medicine was doing too much harm, especially with adverse drug reactions.
Um, I saw great deficiencies in my medical education, starting with nutrition and understanding mind-body interactions and learning about these other systems that were out there.
So I knew all that had to be corrected.
So we tap into that wisdom.
Yep.
First, my mom.
Just diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
As many have written, and I'll embrace what they're saying, one of the biggest challenging and most challenging aspects of being a caregiver, and there's 16 million of us taking care of people with Alzheimer's, is that you don't even know what you don't know, and your relatives don't appreciate that they have a disease that you're trying to help them with.
You've focused on mental health, but more specifically cognitive health at the center.
Give me the toolkit you give to your family.
Well, first of all, I emphasize prevention because I think taking care of your brain really starts by not doing harmful things to it, such as playing football.
It's too late for me.
But I think avoiding concussions, that's a big one.
Another one is probably avoiding environmental toxins because I would bet money that some of the neurodegenerative diseases, not Alzheimer's, but certainly Parkinson's and probably ALS are going to be due to environmental toxic damage.
Is that right with ALS as well?
ALS I'm certain of.
And Parkinson's also.
I'll tell you why.
Maybe you remember this.
I think it was in the 70s.
There was an epidemic of...
Deaths from a synthetic heroin called China White that was on the streets of San Francisco.
And people who survived developed Parkinson's.
And this was traced not to the China White, but to a contaminant.
It was identified, the molecule was identified, but it was present in extremely tiny amounts.
So the fact that something in such minuscule amounts could cause that degeneration of the brain, I find very significant.
Parkinson's, I get this.
Someone very well known, whose name I'm not going to say here, but he told me that he...
He grew up in an environment where there was toxins around his home, and there were high doses of it for families in the military, and he believes that's why he got Parkinson's, but I'd never heard of ALS. Okay, in Guam, there is a high incidence of a disease that looks just ALS that has been found to be due to consumption of seeds of a sago palm that have in them an algae growing disease.
an extremely potent neurotoxin.
Oh my goodness.
So this again suggests to me, you know, it may be that there's multiple toxins out there that cause the same sort of sequence of degeneration in the brain.
Well, even in Alzheimer's, and I've done enough shows on it to get people I trust the most to share, their personal belief that there's probably an infectious element to some Alzheimer's, right?
Yes, could well be, right?
Also, we know that education is protective, that the more education you have, the more redundancy you have in neural synapses.
You can afford to lose more before deficits show up.
Then in terms of diet, we know that Alzheimer's has an inflammatory component, so an anti-inflammatory diet is very helpful.
Ibuprofen has a preventive effect.
Turmeric has a preventive effect.
I think there are things you can do to exercise the brain, like learning a new language.
So these are all in the realm of prevention.
Once Alzheimer's develops, I think our options are very limited because we really don't understand what is the cause of that disease.
Do you recommend, have you, look to see if genetically you're predisposed to Alzheimer's?
I haven't.
I don't think I want that information.
You know, what would I do with it?
Well, you know, I felt the way you do until my mom had...
Changes that were consistent with this.
And my mother has two ApoE4 proteins, the worst possible of all.
How old is she?
She's 81. Okay.
And she actually, I believe her onset of Alzheimer's was delayed because she's been on steroids for many years for asthma.
It turns out the steroids are a, it's what they use for the control to reduce Alzheimer's.
And we don't want to be on lifelong steroids or avoid Alzheimer's.
But the point I was making is she's, she's gone 20 years longer than she should have, probably because of her lifestyle with this condition.
That stated, I got myself checked and did it for my family.
And then I began looking around.
Bria Shriver sort of did the same thing.
And I began to realize, well, what you said is true.
If prevention is important, what I prevent is going to be a higher profile, higher importance to me if I'm actually predisposed to Alzheimer's versus not.
As an example, cholesterol levels.
So LDL cholesterol, you know, mine's not bad.
It's 110. Yeah.
Right?
So normally I wouldn't treat it because my HDL is 90. Right.
So I wouldn't think about treating it for a heart.
And I'm a heart specialist.
I know those numbers well.
However...
In Alzheimer's, it changes the equation.
Maybe an Alzheimer's is worth treating if you're worried about it.
Interesting.
Okay.
So that's why I can see that.
Right.
There's lots more when we come back.
Where will genetic testing allow you as an expert, especially in integrative approaches, to micromanage people better?
Well, I think this is on the horizon of medicine in the very near future.
I think we're going to be able to have individualized treatment.
We'll be able to prescribe drugs with the assurance that they're going to affect an individual in the way we want them to be effective.
We can make dietary changes based on individual genetic profiling.
I don't think we're quite there yet.
I think, first of all, there's a lot of inaccuracies in this information.
And I'm sure you've read these stories of people getting horrendous information that turns out not to be true.
It destroys their life for a year for no reason.
But I think this is coming, and it's coming pretty quickly.
I've always been interested in the things that capture your attention.
I'm going to touch on some of those.
The best hits.
Things in the zeitgeist, some of them make sense, some of them don't.
Matcha tea.
Big deal or not?
I think it's a big deal.
This is something that I discovered many years ago.
I went to Japan when I was 17 in 1959, and I lived with Japanese families.
Were you an AFS student?
Where did that come from?
It was a student exchange program, a strange experimental school.
It was fabulous.
Anyway, I got to live in Japan in 1959, and there was no common language with my host family.
But the second night I was there, the mother took me next door to meet her neighbor, who was a practitioner of tea ceremony.
And the three of us sat around, and this woman performed at the ceremony.
Well, first of all, the bamboo whisk that they used to whisk the matcha, there was something about the shape of that.
It's an arch form.
Yeah, it was a scar from a single piece of bamboo.
And then when she opened the container of matcha, I'd never seen anything so brilliant green.
And she whisked this into this beautiful beverage.
So I was very taken with it.
I brought some back with me.
And then when I'd go to Japan, I'd bring cans of it back.
But nobody had ever seen it here.
And I would make it and turn friends on to it.
And this was also in the 70s, 80s.
And then reading about it, you know, first of all, this information began to come out about how healthy green tea was.
Tea in general, but green tea particularly.
And matcha is the only form of tea that you consume the whole leaf.
And the process of making it, the plants are shaded very heavily, 90% shade cloth, for three weeks before they're harvested.
So in response to that, the plants produce larger, thinner leaves with much higher amounts of chlorophyll, which is why matcha is so green.
But also higher amounts of L-theanine, the calming element in matcha that modifies the caffeine, and higher elements of flavor compounds and antioxidants.
So I think it's significant, and I'm delighted to see it becoming so popular here.
However, I'm dismayed that so much matcha here is very poor quality because it deteriorates very quickly.
It oxidizes very quickly.
It always seems the most precious things we have to share with each other tend to be fragile.
So how do you know if you're actually getting the fluorescent matcha?
It should be bright green.
It should taste delicious.
Matcha should have a hint of bitterness, but a sweet, complex flavor.
It shouldn't be bitter.
It shouldn't taste like seaweed.
It shouldn't taste like grass.
AstroTurf?
Definitely not like AstroTurf.
So can I just say, you know, because I was so dismayed by that, I started a matcha company, and I got the URL matcha.com, which is a great coup.
How'd you get that?
It took some doing.
And I made connections with a very good producer of matcha outside of Kyoto.
And, uh, so through that website, uh, sell, you know, variety of qualities of mantra, but they're all really good.
Good for you.
I'm glad you're doing that.
The, um, the interesting place that psychedelics have taken our society is worth putting a few seconds on.
You've lived through the whole thing.
Right.
So in 59, when you came back from Japan, it was right when Timothy Lear and others were starting to drop out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the wisdom at the time, these were all academicians, was that LSD and psilocybin and these other psychedelics could, hallucinogens, could play an important role in getting people to connect.
And I didn't realize at the time that the founder of AA had stopped drinking because...
Yes, because, right, yeah.
So share that story, and if you don't mind, give us a little bit of history lesson.
Where do you think it can play a role in our lives today?
Because people are petrified by it.
I know.
So I began writing about experimenting with psychedelics actually back in the late 60s.
And my first book, The Natural Mind, published in 1972, has a lot about psychedelics and their potential therapeutic uses.
You didn't go to jail.
No.
And I was way ahead of the curve on that one.
Yes, you were.
So first of all, these drugs are probably the safest drugs in medicine.
They are far safer on a physical level than anything we use therapeutically.
You can't kill people with LSD. The danger is psychological.
And those are consequences of set and setting, of people's expectations and the environment and the dose.
So I think it is very important to structure these experiences in the right way to ensure that they're positive.
There's been a lot of talk about the use of these in psychological disorders, psilocybin for OCD and drug-resistant depression, MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder.
But I've always been fascinated about the potential for use in physical medicine.
Because I have seen many times psychedelic experiences change people's experiences of their bodies in a way that allow chronic disease processes to relax or disappear.
And that's not just chronic pain, but autoimmune conditions.
So I think there's tremendous potential there.
And it's fascinating to see these suddenly being so, you know, coming into prominence and people are really interested in them.
So I saw a special K ketamine that was approved for PTSD among U.S. servicemen returning from overseas wars.
You mentioned a couple of the different options.
Be more specific.
Let's say someone was a cigarette addiction, one of the most prevalent problems that ages us.
Seemingly benign.
If you want to get off cigarettes, I'm told, or alcoholism, as the founder of AA did.
Before he found that A, right?
He took Magic McTroom and stopped drinking.
And he tried his whole career to get it back into the curriculum, could never pull it off.
And not surprisingly, in the 1950s, that was not well accepted in the United States.
If someone's listening right now and has an addictive personality or addiction to something like cigarettes or alcohol, how do you actually find the person and treat you?
Is it legal?
That's a very good question.
note, it is not legal at the moment, although it's been legalized in some cities like Denver and Oakland.
Whether that, how that runs up against federal law, I have no idea.
But I think the trend is going to be that these will become available.
But then the problem is, how do you find a guide?
I think, you know, you want to take that with somebody who's qualified by their own experience, you know, to guide people in the right directions with these.
So that's tricky.
I I mean, there's a wonderful organization out there called MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which has made a lot of, done a lot of work in advancing these things to the point where they will become available therapeutically.
They have a good website, maps.org, and that's one place to start.
By the way, if you have not seen this video, I would urge you to watch it and your listeners as well.
Go to YouTube and search for Housewife on LSD. Ha!
It is priceless.
It is a video from the late 1960s of a psychiatrist who I knew at UCLA who administers a dose of LSD to a very straight woman, and she has a total spiritual non-dual experience that's just fantastic to watch.
I've heard rumors of people that are respected by all of society, microdosing LSD, some jobs typically, but I've heard that you do as well.
I have tried it.
I've tried microdosing with LSD twice.
I didn't like it.
I didn't like the feeling in my body.
There was like a foreign energy and it lasted too long.
I have also experimented with microdosing with mushrooms, and this is about a tenth of the dose that people would take to have a trip.
And I found that I got energized from it.
I found it useful for writing and creative thought.
I have not done it a whole lot, but it's something that I have experimented with.
I know people who do it very regularly and attribute a lot of creative growth to it.
Does it hurt their creativity when they're not on the microdosing?
It doesn't seem to, but I don't know enough about it to give you a really good answer to that.
This transition is CBD. Yes.
It's everywhere, on every street corner.
Every food.
And my concerns, as I'm sure you'll articulate, is that the dosing is often way below what could be therapeutic.
It's expensive.
We've checked it.
Most of what we check in our studio is fake.
Furthermore, I think the only real evidence we have for therapeutic effect It's for drug-resistant seizures in kids.
That is a proved effect.
The rest of it, I think, is hypothetical, and we don't really know.
Some people say it's great for pain, for joint pain, for sleep.
I don't think we have definitive evidence on that.
Do you use it at all in your practice?
I don't.
The one thing I have, I've been told that it's really good for anxiety in dogs.
I have one dog that is prone, if there's lightning and thunder, So I'm going to try giving her some CBD to see what happens.
How about medical marijuana?
Well, I think there's tremendous potential there.
But again, there I think the problem is that there's such a profusion of products on the market.
It's very hard to know what they are.
It's hard to know how to tell people what to use.
Also, in my experience, responses to marijuana are very individual.
So, you know, it can cause some people to fall asleep, some other people to become wakeful.
So you have to experiment to see what it does for you.
And then you have to find the right form of it.
And that's tricky today because there's just so much different stuff out there.
More questions after the break.
There's a lot of pop wisdom around medical marijuana.
I've learned about medical marijuana from people who see themselves as experts.
Many of them aren't in the medical field, but I've also called the scientists for the biggest companies in this space.
Most of them overseas, by the way, because there are big concerns, lots of money pouring into Canada, Israel, etc.
And what I've learned from the scientists is very different from what I'm hearing.
For example, you said some people fall asleep, some people are creative, and the average person out there who smokes pot is thinking, oh, it's sativa versus...
No, no, it's not.
It's not.
The plants are all mixed.
There's no pure plant anymore.
Exactly.
Right.
And also, if doctors are going to use it, they want to have some preparation that looks like a medical preparation.
They're not going to be comfortable telling people to go smoke something.
There is a very good product made in the UK called Sativex.
That's a metered oral spray, a whole cannabis extract.
Mm-hmm.
The FDA will not so far let it in the U.S., but it's available in Canada and the Netherlands and other European countries.
That looks like a medical drug, and I think doctors would be comfortable with recommending that to people.
Do you see a seismic shift with the federal government in the next two or three years saying, enough, we don't want to be in the business of enforcing medications like this, we're getting out?
I think that has to happen.
I think it's going to be when some critical mass of states legalize it and there's just a groundswell of momentum for it.
I think the federal government will have to give in.
Last question, biohacking.
I love touching these little sensitive spots in Andrew Weil's hide.
You know, I'm in touch with a lot of biohackers.
I've done podcasts with a lot of biohackers.
Something about it makes me nervous.
I mean, some of it is like people trying to, you know, they're trying to hack the physiological system with extreme dietary manipulation, use of supplements.
But some of these people are injecting things into themselves and doing stuff that makes me very nervous.
So I think there's some good there, and I'm interested to watch these experiments, but a lot of it I'm very cautious about.
I love the smile you always have on your face.
It's a great honor to spend time with you.
My dear friend, Andrew Weil.
Thank you.
You can hear lots more from Dr. Wild on his brand new podcast, Body of Wonder.
It's coming out this year.
Check it out.
Read the things he says.
He's got a lot of wisdom in this man.
Thanks.
And also, can I tell you that I have a discount code for Matcha for your listeners, which is OZ15. Oh my goodness.
