Where did the idea of therapeutic fasting come from?
The history of life on Earth. is a story of hunger. Ash from volcanoes and massive asteroids blocked the sun, which killed plants, which then killed almost everything else. Like Darwin pointed He says: “Thus, from the war of nature, from hunger and death, arose the most excellent object that we are capable of conceiving”, that is, us.
“Among apes, we humans are particularly well off adapted to prolonged fasting.” Evolving in a context of scarcity is believed to have shaped “our exceptional ability to store large amounts of energy.” [calories] when there is food available.” Of course, today, our ability to gain weight easily is leading to modern diseases, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. But, without the ability to store so much body fat, we might not have been able to count it.
The shortage wasn’t just caused by asteroids millions of years ago. “All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger,” reads an inscription in an Egyptian tomb from about 4,000 years ago, “to such an extent that each one had come to eat his children…” Just hundreds of years ago, “[p]Parents killed their children and children killed their parents” and ate them, and “the bodies of the executed criminals were eagerly snatched from the gallows.” Hunger cleaned up to two thirds of the population of Italy and one third of the population of Paris. So we don’t have to go go back to ancient history. “Even the most secure and prosperous populations today only need to trace their history back a little to find evidence of famines that would have affected their ancestors.” For example, there have been almost 200 famines in Britain over the last 2,000 years.
Now, we tend to suffer from overeating, which comes with its problems, but “what about the consequences of never eating?” hungry?” This was a question that was asked almost 60 years ago. If our physiology is so well adapted to periodic famine, by eliminating it, could we be harming our overall well-being? We just didn’t know.
The lack of research in the area of hunger was attributed to the “difficulty of obtaining willing human subjects.” So what little we had may have done it. come of unwilling subjects. Warsaw ghetto doctors gave detailed accounts before succumbing, and Irish Republican Army prisoners in Northern Ireland starved to death after being on hunger strike for 73 days. However, hunger it’s not necessarily the same as fasting, a topic raised in medical journals more than a century ago. “Hunger is normally a forced, mentally stressful and chronic condition, while [therapeutic] Fasting is voluntary, of limited duration and is generally practiced by people in an adequate nutritional state”, that is, people who start with adequate nutrition.
Therapeutic fasting? Where did we get this idea of fasting therapy? “Fasting for medical purposes”? As I analyze it in my video. The benefits of fasting for healingmay have originally been emerged from the observation that when people become seriously ill, they tend to lose their appetite, so perhaps there is something in our body’s wisdom to stop eating. Presumably that’s where everything”starve a fever” where the folklore came from.
There was a feeling that “fasting offers “Physiological rest” for the body, not just for the digestive tract, but for the entire body, allowing the body to focus on healing. It was evidently “an open secret” that veterinarians often hospitalized dogs with “various dyspeptic and metabolic ailments” just to speed up their recovery. So, the theory goes, maybe it could work for people too.
Beyond alone releasing By consuming all the resources that would normally be used for digestion and nutrient storage, there is a concept that, during fasting, our cells switch into some type of protective mode. Why fasting reduce Do free radicals “oxidative damage and inflammation, optimize energy metabolism and reinforce cellular protection”? It is the “what is not” kill makes us stronger” concept known as hormesis. That’s kind of the opposite of the “let the body rest” theory. It’s more like “letting the body stress out.” The stress of fasting can strengthen the body against other stresses that come our way. This was demonstrated perhaps most starkly in a series of cringeworthy experiments in which damned with enough Hiroshima-level gamma radiation to kill 50 percent in two weeks, but of the mice that had been fasted intermittently for six weeks before, not a single one died, as you can see in the graph below and in the minute 4:33 in me video.
It is this type of dramatic data that led Extraordinary claims such as therapeutic fasting could bankrupt half of doctors. You don’t know until you put it to the test, and we’ll explore that below.
In recent years there has been an explosion in research interest in fasting. Stay tuned for The world’s largest fasting study.
Due to my work in How not to dietI have discussed several studies in videos that are now available on fasting and weight loss. Check out related posts below.
