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Doctor discusses 'Eating Well for Optimal Health' March 22, 2000 His latest book is No. 4 on Amazon.com's list of 100 hot books, and No. 5 on the Wall Street Journal's latest nonfiction bestsellers list. Dr. Andrew Weil, author of Eating Well for Optimum Health (Knopf) is a leader in the field of preventive medicine. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he is the director of the program in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona. Dr. Weil visited CNN recently to discuss his book with anchor Kyra Phillips. Kyra Phillips, CNN Anchor: I can't tell you how many books I've read on health, how many books are out there. What makes your book so different? Weil: Well, this book is about diet and nutrition and I think it really gives the basic facts of human nutrition that everyone needs to know, including health professionals. Q: Such as? Weil: Well, it talks a lot about carbohydrate, protein and fat in the diet and tells you that you really need these in the right proportions and that doing drastic rearrangements of them, as is so popular now in some of these strange diets that everyone is on, is not such a good idea. Q: And everybody talks about diets and the certain diet that's worked for them. Is there the perfect diet? Weil: There is no one right diet. If there's anything out there in the world that looks like a diet that would work for a lot of people, I think it's the Mediterranean diet. This is a diet that uses meats sparingly, includes fish, uses olive oil as a main cooking fat, lots of fruits and vegetables, lots of whole-grainy carbohydrates rather than all the fluffy stuff that we eat in this country. Q: Have you done that diet? Weil: I like to eat that way. I mean that's how, that tends to be how I eat and you can adapt that kind of eating to many different situations. Q: You talk about shifting the conversations that people are having about diets. Weil: Away from weight loss. I mean that is so much the focus of people. I think it is much better to look at diet as a way of maintaining and improving health than simply losing weight. You know, weight is mostly genetically controlled. We don't think that we can control our height and we don't have that much more power to control our weight. And I think the problem in this culture is we're so bombarded by these messages from the fashion and entertainment industries about how bodies should look and the genetic realities are usually different. Q: Oh, that's true. A lot of people talk about that. We watch it on our network, those shows, the fashion shows. But everybody does talk about diets and losing weight. You can't avoid it. Weil: No, and if you want to lose weight, the way you do that is by eating less. You eat less in two ways. One is to decrease portion size. You know, people from other cultures, when they come here, are just astounded at the size of portions we eat. And the other way is to try to reduce snacking