"The Benefits of Fasting for Healing"
The story of life on earth is a story of starvation.
Ash from massive volcanoes and asteroids block out the sun,
killing the plants, which then killed most everything else.
As Darwin pointed out though, from this “war of nature,
from famine and death, the most exalted object that we
are capable of conceiving” arose—namely us.
We are “particularly well adapted to prolonged fasting.”
Evolving in a context of scarcity is believed to have shaped
our exceptional ability to store
large amounts of calories when food is available.
Of course, now our ability to easily pack on the pounds
is leading to modern diseases like obesity and type 2 diabetes,
but without the ability to store so much body fat
we may not have made it to tell the tale.
And it’s not just asteroids millions of years ago.
“All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger,” reads an inscription
on an Egyptian tomb from about 4,000 years ago,
“to such a degree that everyone had come to eating his children...”
Or, just hundreds of years ago –
parents killed their children and children killed their parents
and ate them; "the bodies of executed criminals
were eagerly snatched from the gallows.”
Wiping out as many as two-thirds of the population of Italy,
one-third of the population of Paris.
So, we don’t have to go back to ancient history.
Even the most secure and affluent populations of today
need only trace their history back a short distance.
For example, nearly 200 famines in Britain
over the last 2,000 years.
Now, we tend to be suffering from too much food,
which carries its own problems, but might there be
any negative consequences to not ever starving?
This was a question raised 50 years ago.
I mean, if our physiology is so well-tuned to periodic starvation,
maybe by eliminating that we may be doing harm to our overall well-being?
We just didn’t know.
The lack of research in the area of starvation was attributed
to the “difficulty of securing willing human subjects."
So, what little we had came from unwilling subjects.
Physicians within the Warsaw Ghetto made detailed accounts
before they themselves succumbed; or Irish Republican prisoners
starving themselves to death after up to 73 days on hunger strike.
But starvation isn’t necessarily the same as fasting,
an issue raised in medical journals over a century ago.
Starvation is normally a forced, mentally stressful,
and chronic condition, whereas therapeutic fasting is voluntary,
limited in duration, and usually practiced by people
who start out with adequate nutrition.”
Therapeutic fasting?
Where did we get this idea of fasting therapy,
fasting for medical purposes?
It may have originally arose out of the observation
that when people get acutely ill they tend to lose their appetite;
so, maybe there’s something in the body’s wisdom to stopping eating.
That’s presumably where the whole “starve a fever” folklore came from.
There was this sense that fasting affords physiological rest for the body,
not just the digestive tract, but throughout,
allowing the body to concentrate on healing.
It was evidently an open secret that veterinarians
used to hospitalize dogs only to fast them back to health;
and so maybe, the theory went, it might work for people too.
Beyond just freeing up all the resources that would normally
be used for nutrient digestion and storage,
there’s this concept that during fasting our cells
switch over to some sort of protection mode.
Why would fasting reduce free radical damage and
inflammation and bolster cellular protection?
It’s the that-which-doesn’t-kill- us-makes-us-stronger concept
known as hormesis.
So, that’s kind of the opposite of the let-the-body-rest theory.
It’s more like let-the-body-stress.
The stress of fasting may steel the body against
other stresses coming your way.
This was demonstrated perhaps most starkly in a set of cringe-worthy
experiments in which mice were blasted with Hiroshima-level
gamma radiation sufficient to kill 50% within two weeks,
but of the mice who had first been intermittently fasted
for six weeks before, not a single one died.
It’s this kind of dramatic data that led to extraordinary claims,
like therapeutic fasting could drive half of all doctors out of business.
But you don’t know, until you put it to the test, which we’ll explore next.