Dr. Mehmet Oz rose to stardom as Oprah’s energetic, health-focused friend and regular on her self-titled talk show before making a name in TV in his own right. “She’s a great teacher, and I really benefited from the fact that she took me under her wing and was willing to spend time teaching me how to learn her business,” he says. For the past eight years on his afternoon show, he’s entertained audiences while providing medical and lifestyle guidance. Yet the nine-time Emmy winner still finds time to practice medicine and operate one day a week.
For Oz, the road to success was paved by his parents, who immigrated to Cleveland from Turkey in the 1950s (they returned around 1990 after their kids had grown). He often found himself going around with his father, also a doctor, visiting patients. “I loved how [they] would respect him coming into their rooms and giving them advice,” he explains. “When I was 7, my dad asked, ‘What do you want to be?’ I said, ‘I think I’ll be a heart surgeon,’ because that’s what he was, and I never changed my mind.” He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the rest is history. “It’s the perfect fit for my personality,” he adds.
Dr. Oz chats with Arianna Huffington on the set of his talk show.
He joined the Wellness Board for Six Senses in 2015, which he saw as “an opportunity to teach people how to experience more outside their home,” he says. Wellness is no longer “one-size-fits-all, and the more you can take advantage of knowing exactly what’s happening in your body, you can customize a plan for a better lifestyle.” It’s a deeper connection with one’s self that allows for rejuvenation and renewal, he says, and it includes food, activity, and your mental outlook. Spas, it just so happens, are often the facilitators behind this mindset, providing the right tools and encouraging guests to “think differently about their health when they’re on vacation” and carry those tips into everyday life so “you start to apply it to your routine,” he says.
In his new book Food Can Fix You, Oz explores how grocery stores can be viewed as pharmacies because food, like antibiotics, can help heal the body. It points to even graver concerns affecting people and their bodies, including a lack of sleep that leads to myriad problems (“If you sleep more, you’ll live more years,” he says) and how the digital world is impacting stress levels and physical behavior. Oz sees a world where AI-powered assistants like Siri and Alexa will become wellness coaches, taking in those moments of constant observation and delivering a healthy solution like “ordering you a carrot juice,” he says. “[They will] make it easier for you to do the right thing when it comes to wellness.” Indeed, people are looking to gurus like Oz and Six Senses to help them on their health journeys. They have, he says, “a hungry appetite for it.”
