Extreme Nutrition: The Diet of Eskimos

The carnivorous diet of traditional Eskimo inhabitants of the frozen, northern, circumpolar regions of planet Earth (Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland), serves as a testament to the strengths and adaptability of the human species. The foods consumed by these hardy people are in "polar" opposition to those recommended by me (the McDougall Diet of starches, vegetables, and fruits): a carnivore vs. an herbivore diet. Unfortunately, misinformation surrounding the all-meat diet of the Eskimo has promoted dangerous eating habits to the modern-day general public.

For more than 6,000 years, natives of the frozen North have lived with almost no contact with the rest of the world. Not until the mid-1800s were reliable records made of their daily lives, their diets, and their health. Early reports describe these people as looking beautiful and athletic when they were young, but then they aged quickly, and "men and women who appeared to be 60 or over were rare."

Rumors have since circulated that traditional Eskimos have lived free of heart disease, cancer, and most other chronic diseases affecting western civilizations these days. Research published in the mid-1970s tried to explain this "Eskimo paradox" of living healthy with very few plant foods, on a high-fat, high-cholesterol, no-dietary-fiber diet. The omega-3 fish fats were noted as the miracle ingredient providing protection. Dietetic and medical experts have uncritically accepted this theory in the face of libraries filled with incriminating evidence to the contrary. They tell patients to eat more fish, poultry, and even red meat—like the Eskimos – and plenty of fish oil - in order to stay healthy.

Pushing the Nutritional Envelope

Hunted animals, including birds, caribou, seals, walrus, polar bears, whales, and fish provided all the nutrition for the Eskimos for at least 10 months of the year. And in the summer season people gathered a few plant foods such as berries, grasses, tubers, roots, stems, and seaweeds. Frozen snow-covered lands were unfit for the cultivation of plants. Animal flesh was, by necessity, the only food available most of the time.

The fat, not the protein, from animal foods provided most of the 3,100 calories required daily for these active people. Plants are the primary source of all carbohydrates, including digestible sugars and non-digestible dietary fibers. Eating raw meat indirectly provided Eskimos with enough carbohydrates in the form of glycogen (found in the muscles and liver of animals) to meet their necessary nutrient requirements and keep them out of a starvation condition called ketosis. Muscle tissue contains almost no calcium, and as a result the daily intake was about 120 mg/day versus the 800 mg and more commonly recommended for good health. Plants (not people) synthesize Vitamin C, yet the Eskimo was able to avoid scurvy with the 30 mg of vitamin C consumed daily found in land and sea animals. Recommendations for vitamin C are 60 mg/day and higher daily. Low levels of sunlight, and preformed vitamin D from fish, met the "sunshine D vitamin" requirement for Eskimo health. By the grace of environmental design, Nature made sure there was just enough nutrition for the Eskimo to survive.

There Is No Eskimo Paradox

The human being is designed to thrive on a diet of starches, vegetables and fruits. The Eskimo experience serves as a testament to the miraculous strengths and adaptability of our bodies. We can survive on raw and cooked meat, but we thrive on starches, vegetables and fruits. These hardy people survived living at the edge of the nutritional envelope, but not in good health. Here are some of the health costs they paid:
Eskimos Suffer from Atherosclerosis
Claims that Eskimos were free of heart (artery) disease are untrue. A thorough review of the evidence concludes that "Eskimos have a similar prevalence of CAD (coronary artery disease) as non-Eskimo populations, they have excessive mortality due to cerebrovascular strokes, their overall mortality is twice as high as that of non-Eskimo populations, and their life expectancy is approximately 10 years shorter than the Danish population."

Mummified remains of Eskimos dating back 2,000 years have shown extensive hardening of the arteries throughout their brains, hearts and limbs; as a direct consequence of following a carnivorous diet of birds, caribou, seals, walrus, polar bears, whales, and fish. The June 1987 issue of National Geographic magazine carried an article about two Eskimo women, one in her twenties and the other in her forties, frozen for five centuries in a tomb of ice. When discovered and medically examined they both showed signs of severe osteoporosis and also suffered extensive atherosclerosis, "probably the result of a heavy diet of whale and seal blubber."

Eskimos Suffer from Severe Bone Loss

Their low-calcium diet and lack of sunshine (vitamin D) are only minor factors contributing to the extensive osteoporosis found in recent and ancient Eskimos. Alaskan Eskimos older than age 40 have been found to have a 10% to 15% greater deficit in bone mineral density compared to Caucasians in the US. This research published in 1974 on 107 elderly people concluded, "Aging bone loss, which occurs in many populations, has an earlier onset and greater intensity in the Eskimos. Nutritional factors of high protein, high nitrogen, high phosphorus, and low calcium intakes maybe implicated."

Protein, and especially animal protein, consumed in excess of our needs places serious burdens on the body. The liver and kidneys work hard to process the excess protein and excrete its byproducts along with the urine. As a result of this extra work, Eskimos have been reported to have an enlarged liver while living on meat, and to produce larger than average volumes of urine in order to excrete the byproducts of protein metabolism. The bones also play a role in managing excess animal protein (acidic by nature) by neutralizing large amounts of dietary acids. In this process bone structure and bone mineral content are lost through the kidney system, depleting the bones into a condition called osteoporosis.

Eskimos Are Infected with Parasites

Diseases of animals are readily transmitted to humans when eaten. One example is trichinosis (an infection with the roundworm Trichinella spiralis), which is found in about 12% of older Eskimos; a result of eating raw and infected walrus, seal, and polar bear meat. In most cases this parasite infestation causes no symptoms, but illness and death can result.

Meat-derived Chemical Pollution

Since the 1970s the diet of the Eskimo has contained high levels of toxic, organic pollutants and heavy metals. These lipophilic chemicals are attracted to and concentrated in the fatty-tissues of land and sea animals. As a direct result of the traditional Eskimo diet (now contaminated by industry wastes), the bodies of these Arctic people contain the highest human concentrations of environmental chemicals found anywhere on Earth: "levels so extreme that the breast milk and tissues of some Greenlanders could be classified as hazardous waste." Eskimo women have been found to have levels of PCBs in their breast milk five to ten times higher than women in southern Canada. These chemicals cause and promote many forms of cancer and cause brain diseases, including Parkinson's disease.

Nutrition Has Gone Downhill for the Eskimo

The notion that consuming meat, fish, and fish oil will promote health and healing has captured the attention of the scientific community in large part because of the misinterpretation** of the Eskimo experience. But life has gotten worse for the Eskimo. Over the past 50 years their traditional diet has been further modified with the addition of western foods. Rather than using a hook, spear, or club to catch their meal, as in the past, people living in this part of the world use the "green lure" (the dollar bill) and catch their meals through an open car window at the local fast-food restaurant. Obesity, type-2 diabetes, tooth decay, and cancers of the breast, prostate, and colon have been added to the Eskimo's traditional health problems of artery disease, bone loss, and infectious diseases.

People living in the frozen north these days have heated homes and drive around in comfortable SUVs. The challenging environment their ancestors barely survived through required a carnivorous diet. Those days of needing 3100 calories a day to counter the freezing cold and hunt for dinner are gone. The idea that current epidemics of obesity and sickness in these Northern people would be best fixed by returning to the old ways of carnivorous diet would not work unless they also returned to living in igloo homes and hunted their lands for every meal. Physicians and dietitians now caring for these people suffering from the western diet with the addition of too much traditional food (ancestral meat) should be prescribing a starch-based diet to help them lose excess weight and cure common dietary diseases.


*The term "Eskimo" comes from a Native American word that may have meant "eater of raw meat." The word "Eskimo" has come to be considered offensive, especially in Canada. Many prefer the name "Inuit," which means "the people" or "real people." However, "Eskimo" is the term used in the scientific and historical literature and will be used here.

**Misinterpretation is easy to spread because:

1) People love to hear good news about their bad habits.
2) Nutritional "facts," even when false and harmful, are used to sell meat, fish, and other foods.
3) The media loves headlines that sell their products, like "The Eskimo Diet proves Meat's Good."

Fasting Diets Are Gaining Acceptance

Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Aging in Maryland, has not had breakfast in 35 years. Most days he practices a form of fasting — skipping lunch, taking a midafternoon run, and then eating all of his daily calories (about 2,000) in a six-hour window starting in the afternoon.

“Once you get used to it, it’s not a big deal,” said Dr. Mattson, chief of the institute’s laboratory of neurosciences. “I’m not hungry at all in the morning, and this is other people’s experience as well. It’s just a matter of getting adapted to it.”

In a culture in which it’s customary to eat three large meals a day while snacking from morning to midnight, the idea of regularly skipping meals may sound extreme. But in recent years intermittent fasting has been gaining popular attention and scientific endorsement.

It has been promoted in best-selling books and endorsed by celebrities like the actors Hugh Jackman and Benedict Cumberbatch. The late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel claims that for the past two years he has followed an intermittent fasting program known as the 5:2 diet, which entails normal eating for five days and fasting for two — a practice Mr. Kimmel credits for his significant weight loss.
Fasting to improve health dates back thousands of years, with Hippocrates and Plato among its earliest proponents. Dr. Mattson argues that humans are well suited for it: For much of human history, sporadic access to food was likely the norm, especially for hunter-gatherers. As a result, we’ve evolved with livers and muscles that store quickly accessible carbohydrates in the form of glycogen, and our fat tissue holds long-lasting energy reserves that can sustain the body for weeks when food is not available.

“From an evolutionary perspective, it’s pretty clear that our ancestors did not eat three meals a day plus snacks,” Dr. Mattson said.

Across the world, millions of people fast periodically for religious and spiritual reasons. But some are now looking at the practice as a source of health and longevity.

Valter Longo, the director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, initially studied fasting in mice that showed that two to five days of fasting each month reduced biomarkers for diabetes, cancer and heart disease. The research has since been expanded to people, and scientists saw a similar reduction in disease risk factors.

Dr. Longo said the health benefits of fasting might result from the fact that fasting lowers insulin and another hormone called insulinlike growth factor, or IGF-1, which is linked to cancer and diabetes. Lowering these hormones may slow cell growth and development, which in turn helps slow the aging process and reduces risk factors for disease.

“When you have low insulin and low IGF-1, the body goes into a state of maintenance, a state of standby,” Dr. Longo said. “There is not a lot of push for cells to grow, and in general the cells enter a protected mode.”

Critics say that health benefits or not, various forms of intermittent fasting are too impractical for most people.

The 5:2 diet, for example, advocates eating without restrictions for five days and then consuming just 500 calories — roughly the equivalent of a light meal — on each of the other two days of the week. Another regimen, called alternate-day fasting, involves eating no more than 500 calories every other day.

A third regimen, which Dr. Mattson follows, is known as time-restricted feeding. The idea is to consume all of the day’s calories in a narrow window, typically six to eight hours, and fasting for the remaining 16 to 18 hours in a day. Studies of time-restricted feeding practices in both animals and humans have suggested that the practice may lower cancer risk and help people maintain their weight.

The scientific community remains divided about the value of intermittent fasting. Critics say that the science is not yet strong enough to justify widespread recommendations for fasting as a way to lose weight or boost health, and that most of the evidence supporting it comes from animal research. Advocates say the body of research on intermittent fasting is growing rapidly and indicates that the health benefits are striking.

The 5:2 diet, in particular, is backed by “promising” studies that show that it lowers weight and improves blood sugar, inflammation and other aspects of metabolic health, said Joy Dubost, a registered dietitian and a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the country’s largest organization of dietitians. She noted that fasting isn’t appropriate for pregnant women, people with diabetes and people on medications.

“Most people who do this understand that it’s not about binge eating,” Dr. Dubost said. “But they like that it gives them the freedom not to worry about calories, carbs and other restrictions on days when they’re not fasting.”

Krista Varady, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has studied the effects of alternate-day fasting on hundreds of obese adults. In trials lasting eight to 10 weeks, she has found that people lose on average about 13 pounds and experience marked reductions in LDL cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides and insulin, the fat-storage hormone.

Dr. Varady found in her research that intermittent fasting was easiest when people ate a moderately high-fat diet and were allowed to consume up to 500 calories on their fasting days. In her studies, 10 percent to 20 percent of people usually find the diet too difficult and quickly stop. Those who stick with it typically adjust after a rocky first few weeks.

“We’ve run close to 700 people through various trials,” Dr. Varady said. “We thought people would overeat on their feast days to compensate. But people for some reason, regardless of their body weight, can only eat about 10 or 15 percent more than usual. They don’t really overeat, and I think that’s why this works.”

In 2011, Dr. Mattson and his colleagues reported a study of the 5:2 program that followed 107 overweight and obese women. Half of the subjects were assigned to eat no more than 500 calories each on two consecutive days each week. A control group was assigned to follow a low-calorie diet.

After six months, both groups had lost weight. But the intermittent fasting group lost slightly more — about 14 pounds on average — and had greater reductions in belly fat. They also retained more muscle and had greater improvements in blood sugar regulation.

Dr. Mattson’s interest in intermittent fasting grew out of work on animals that showed that alternate-day fasting protected mice from strokes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and consistently extended their life spans by 30 percent. Dr. Mattson and his colleagues found that alternate-day fasting increased the production of proteins that protect brain cells, enhancing their ability to repair damaged DNA. Fasting, he said, acts as a mild stress that makes cells throughout the body stronger, shoring up their ability to adapt to later insults.

In this way, intermittent fasting is like exercise, which causes immediate stress and inflammation, but protects against chronic disease in the long run. Eating fruits and vegetables may have a similar effect. While very large doses of antioxidants can cause cancer in humans, moderate amounts of exposure can make cells more resilient, Dr. Mattson said.

“There is overlap between the way cells respond to exercise, to fasting, and even to exposure to some of the chemicals in fruits and vegetables,” he added.

Dr. Mattson is now starting a rigorous clinical trial of people 55 to 70 years old who are prediabetic and at high risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease. He plans to study whether intermittent fasting may slow cognitive decline.

Dr. David Ludwig, a professor of nutrition at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said one benefit of fasting is that it forces the body to shift from using glucose for fuel to using fat. During this process, the fat is converted to compounds known as ketones, a “clean” energy source that burns more efficiently than glucose, like high-octane gasoline, Dr. Ludwig said.

The same process, known as ketosis, occurs when people go on extremely low-carb, high-fat diets. Dr. Ludwig said ketones seem to have unique effects on the brain. High-fat diets, for example, have been used for years to treat people who suffer from epileptic seizures.

“There are extensive reports of children who had debilitating seizures who were cured on ketogenic diets,” Dr. Ludwig said. “If it benefits the brain to prevent seizures, then maybe it benefits the brain in other ways.”

Dr. Ludwig noted that the long-term effectiveness of fasting had not been well studied. He cautioned that for many people, fasting is simply too difficult and may slow metabolism. A potentially more practical approach is to limit sugar and other processed carbohydrates, replacing them with natural fats, protein and unrefined carbohydrates, he said.

“It takes a very disciplined person to skip a couple meals every day,” he added.

But Dr. Mattson, who has been skipping meals for decades, said the adjustment to skipping breakfast and lunch was a lot like the change that occurs when a couch potato starts exercising.

“If you’ve been sedentary for years and then you go out and try to run five miles, you’re not going to feel very good until you get in shape,” he said. “ It’s not going to be a smooth transition right away. It takes two weeks to a month to adapt.”

FASTING: BACK TO THE FUTURE

Although the notion of electing to go without food for prolonged periods of time to improve one's health has not been something commonly considered in recent times, fasting has a long and important history. In fact, fasting played a vitally large part in early human survival. Fortunately, this ancient knowledge is making a dramatic comeback and is beginning to transform the way modern healthcare providers view their responsibilities to patients.

Human beings have the capability to survive extended periods of fasting. This was certainly known in our hunter-gatherer days, since many humans were forced to live through periods when little or no food was available to them. However, since the advent of agriculture and increasing technological advancement, modern humans have largely lost their awareness of this powerful, innate capability.

For example, the 1937 edition of The New Standard Encyclopedia stated that for humans, "Generally death occurs after eight days of deprivation of food." By 1956, this grim pronouncement inched somewhat closer to reality. That year's edition of the American Peoples Encyclopedia stated that survival time in men during water-only fasting ranged from 17 to 76 days.

In actuality, the "authorities" writing in these encyclopedias had no idea what they were talking about, but their conclusions are consistent with what most people might think. However, if we go back in time to earlier writings, we see that more "primitive" cultures were often more aware of the extent of our fasting capability. In the Bible, for example, Moses, David, Jesus, and Elijah were said to have fasted for up to 40 days.

Physiological Benefits of Fasting

Fasting can be thought of as a period of profound rest, during which time your body is free to rapidly undertake a wide variety of beneficial physiological activities, some of which are described below.

1. Neuroadaptation

Fasting helps your taste sensors adapt to a low salt intake. By allowing your body to "neuroadapt" to low-salt food, fasting rapidly facilitates the adoption of a health- promoting diet. This process of neuroadaptation appears to take place more rapidly during fasting than merely eating a low salt diet.

2. Enzymatic Recalibration

During fasting your body induces enzymatic changes that can affect numerous systems ranging from detoxification of endogenous and exogenous substances to the mobilization of fat, glycogen and protein reserves. These changes seem to persist after the fasting process, which may explain some of the dramatic clinical changes seen in patients after fasting.

3. Weight Loss

Although fasting is not generally recommended as a primary weight loss strategy, weight loss is a predictable consequence of fasting. Most people average a loss of approximately one pound per day over the course of a fast.  (When weight loss is your primary concern, a health- promoting diet coupled with exercise is usually your best approach.)

4. Detoxification

Fasting is generally thought of as a tool to facilitate detoxification, promoting the mobilization and elimination of endogenous substances such as cholesterol and uric acid and exogenous substances such as dioxin, PCBs, and other toxic chemical residue.

5. Insulin Resistance

Fasting appears to have a profound effect on insulin resistance, which is thought to be intimately involved with diabetes and high blood pressure. When your body produces adequate insulin, but it is ineffective due to resistance at the cells in the liver and elsewhere, your blood sugar levels rise. This can lead to serious clinical consequences.  Fortunately, after a period of fasting, this problem is often dramatically improved.

6. Natriuresis

Water-only fasting induces a powerful natriuretic effect, which allows the body to eliminate excess sodium and water from your body. This process allows for the resolution of chronic problems with edema and helps reduce the increased blood volume associated with high blood pressure.

7. Reducing Gut Leakage

When chronic inflammation involves the intestinal mucosa, a condition arises whereby small particles of incompletely digested foods can be absorbed into the blood stream. This introduction of foreign peptide molecules to the blood stream may stimulate an immunological cascade of effects collectively known as gut leakage. In genetically vulnerable individuals, gut leakage may be associated with the aggravation of numerous clinical entities including arthritis, colitis, asthma, allergies, and fatigue.

8. Sympathictonia

Hypersympathictonia (increased tone of the sympathetic nervous system) is thought to be associated with many problems ranging from digestive disturbances to anxiety disorders. Fasting appears to have a profound normalizing effect on the overall tone of the autonomic nervous system.

In all there are many mechanisms through which fasting may be having its profound effect. Further research into these and other areas should prove illuminating.

A Serendipitous Survival

In light of the clear misunderstanding of fasting by the medical profession, the unexpected, successful fasting experience of Henry Tanner, M.D., is truly remarkable. In 1877, Dr. Tanner was a respected, middle-aged physician living in Duluth, Minnesota. He had suffered for years with rheumatism and had consulted with seven fellow physicians, all of whom considered his case to be "hopeless." He also suffered from asthma, which chronically disrupted his sleep. He spent his waking hours in constant pain.

Tanner had been taught in medical school that humans could live only ten days without food and in this knowledge he found solace. Not believing in suicide, he determined that he would simply starve himself to death. As he stated later, "Life to me under the circumstances was not worth living... and I had made up my mind to rest from physical suffering in the arms of death." But fate had an agreeable surprise for Dr. Tanner. By unwittingly invoking a constellation of health-promoting responses associated with water-only fasting, he rapidly recovered.

By the fifth day of his fast, he was able to begin to sleep more peacefully. By the eleventh day, he reported feeling "as well as in my youthful days." Fully expecting that by this point he should be near death, he asked a fellow physician, Dr. Moyer, to examine him. Not surprisingly, Dr. Moyer was amazed.

According to Tanner's recollection, Moyer told him, "You ought to be at death's door, but you certainly look better than I ever saw you before." Henry Tanner continued to fast, under Dr. Moyer's supervision, for an additional 31 days, a total of 42 days in all.

When fellow physicians heard his story, which was sensationalized in the press, they responded with disbelief and intense criticism. Though widely rebuked as a fraud, Tanner at least had the last laugh. After his fast, Tanner had no symptoms of asthma, rheumatism, or chronic pain and lived a full life until he died at the age of ninety.

Human Fasting Capabilities

Many fasts of longer than 100 days have been documented in recent scientific literature, the longest of which was 368 days. At the TrueNorth Health Center in California, we routinely supervise water-only fasts of up to 40 days, and in certain circumstances, even longer.

In our experience, fasting has never been lethal and is often remarkably helpful. During our 20 years of supervising the care of more than 5,000 patients, fasting has proven to be both safe and effective. It has provided many patients a new lease on life.

Reawakening to an Ancient Truth

Throughout most of the 20th century, which witnessed a period of remarkable medical innovation in surgical techniques, radiation therapies, and new "miracle" drugs, the self-healing mechanisms that are unleashed during water-only fasting were largely unappreciated. 

However, as the century drew to a close, something extraordinary began to occur. After decades of collective awe of modern medicine and its purveyors, a strong undercurrent of disillusionment began to appear. There came the beginnings of a philosophical revolution that would lead health science in a promising new direction.

This new direction centers on the realization that health and healing are best supported when the biological roots of our nature are understood and respected. This new philosophical approach is based on the awareness that health and healing are natural processes. As a result, the focus of attention has increasingly shifted away from the traditional medical emphasis on drugs and surgery toward an exploration of the circumstances and requirements necessary to unleash and enhance these natural processes.

Fortunately, unlike health problems in the past, including such phenomena as water-borne diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and epidemics of tuberculosis and pneumonia that at one time were confusing puzzles - our present day epidemics of obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer are not nearly so mysterious. It is becoming increasingly clear that the majority of present day health problems are the result of modern dietary excesses.

Simply put, most of our health problems are the result of our eating too much of the wrong things. We ingest too much fat and protein (especially animal fat and animal protein); too much refined sugar and other refined carbohydrates; and too many drugs, including tobacco, coffee, tea, alcohol, and soda. It is not surprising that nearly 50% of American teenagers are overweight when you consider that the average teenager consumes 25% of his or her calories from soda pop.

In the face of the current unprecedented epidemics of disease caused by dietary excess, it is understandable that the ancient healing method of water-only fasting is beginning to make intuitive sense to many people. Going without food for a period of time provides the ultimate opportunity for the reversal of the consequences of dietary excess, a chance to let an overfed and overburdened body take steps to restore health.

Rest assured that the appeal of fasting is not based solely on mere intuition. With the recent publication of the first-ever large-scale study conducted on the use of water-only fasting with life-threatening illness, what was previously considered intuitive has become scientifically apparent. Water-only fasting offers extraordinary potential for health and healing, and for some conditions it appears to be the most effective treatment available.

Fasting and High Blood Pressure

High blood pressure (also known as hypertension) is the leading contributing cause of morbidity and mortality in industrialized societies, and is the leading reason for visits to doctors and for the use of prescription medication. It is diagnosed when a patient's pressures exceed 140/90 mm Hg. The human and financial costs of this condition are staggering.

In 1984, doctors at the TrueNorth Health Center began to investigate the use of fasting in the treatment of this devastating condition. Our study involved 174 high blood pressure patients, all of whom were admitted to the Center for treatment involving water-only fasting.

The results of the study were astonishing. Every patient experienced blood pressure reductions sufficient to eliminate the need for medication, and over ninety percent of patients achieved completely normal blood pressure. A stunning reduction of over 60 points in systolic (upper) blood pressure was noted in those patients with highly elevated pressures (known as Stage III Hypertension), where systolic pressures are greater than 180 mm Hg. These results represent the largest effect size ever shown in lowering blood pressure, and they are estimated to be five times the effect expected from medications alone.

With assistance from our colleagues at Cornell University, our study, "Medically Supervised Water-only Fasting in the Treatment of Hypertension" was completed and accepted for publication by the peer-reviewed and indexed Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics. It appeared in the June, 2001 issue of JMPT.

A second study, also conducted at the Center, was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. In this investigation, we evaluated the effect of water-only fasting on 64 patients admitted with so-called "borderline" hypertension. These are individuals who have systolic blood pressures between 120 and 140 mm Hg.

Patients with blood pressures in this range are often led to believe that their blood pressures are "normal." For example, a patient with a systolic blood pressure of 138/88 would be considered "normal" by conventional medical standards, despite the fact that they are five times more likely to die from a heart attack or stroke than an individual who has a systolic blood pressure of 110 mm Hg. Sixty-eight percent of all deaths attributed to the effects of high blood pressure occur in individuals whose systolic blood pressure is in this range.

The patients in our second study had a mean reduction in systolic blood pressure of 20 mm Hg. The average patient in the study, beginning with a systolic blood pressure of nearly 130 mm Hg, ended his stay with systolic blood pressure of just below 109 mm Hg. This represents a very substantial improvement in health. As just stated, he is now five times less likely to die from a heart attack or stroke than he was before.

Fasting Studies Draw Attention

As a result of the publication of these studies, the fasting program at TrueNorth Health Center attracted the attention of the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE), a large, national labor union. In March 2001, the Center's residential health education program, including the supervision of water-only fasting, became a fully covered medical benefit for all union members and spouses who have high blood pressure or diabetes.
 
In conjunction with this association with IUOE, the doctors at the Center are conducting a third fasting study. It is a prospective study with long-term follow-up to evaluate the use of fasting in the treatment of high blood pressure and diabetes. We are looking not only at the clinical outcomes of the patients (improved health and reduced morbidity), but also the effect on long-term costs of care for the patients who undergo fasting compared to those who choose conventional medical care.

The initial results are outstanding. Based on data from the first group of subjects with one-year follow-ups, the average cost reduction for fasting patients compared to patients receiving conventional medical care appears to be substantial. Once a large enough number of patients have completed the program and the long-term outcomes are calculated, we expect to publish additional papers documenting what appears to be a tremendously cost effective approach to managing these high risk, high medical cost, high blood pressure and diabetes patients.

Hope for the Future

Hopefully, these results of the TrueNorth Health Center's studies will be a contributing force in both a philosophical and practical revolution in health care. With clear and convincing evidence to guide them, and substantial cost savings to motivate them, other unions and insurance companies may decide to encourage and support the use of fasting for those they serve. In doing so, they could make available to the millions of sick and suffering patients the most profound health rediscovery of our time: the understanding that fasting allows the body to heal itself without the risk and excess cost associated with conventional medical care and drug use.

Do You Need to Fast?

Throughout history, people have noticed that when they become acutely ill, they lose their appetites.  The early Hygienic physicians reasoned that there must be some physiological reason for this loss of appetite.  Through observation and experimentation, they discovered that fasting - the complete abstinence from all substances except pure water, in an environment of complete rest - allows the body to make a unique physiological adaptation.

In the fasting state, the duration and intensity of the symptoms of illness, such as inflammation, mucus production, fever, diarrhea, etc., are often dramatically reduced.  Fasting has been found to be the most efficient and powerful means available to facilitate self-healing.

Further experimentation and observation found that fasting is also effective in the resolution of chronic disease.  Chronic disease, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, respiratory illness, autoimmune disease, etc., can be the result of several different factors. These factors include inappropriate diet, such as the consumption of animal products and refined foods, the use of drugs, including tobacco, alcohol, coffee, etc., a lack of adequate sleep or exercise, or exposure to environmental stressors such as pollution, radiation, excess noise, etc., or excess psychological stress and hereditary factors.

Fasting is an important tool in resolving the symptoms of acute illness and chronic disease, but its benefits are not limited to dealing with symptoms.

Making the transition to healthful living

It is difficult to break habits and patterns of behavior established over many years. The typical Western lifestyle leads to taste buds acclimated to stimulating foods, muscles that are flabby, and a nervous system that depends on stimulatory drugs (such as caffeine) to keep it going despite a lack of sleep. Often, as people attempt to change their diets and lifestyles, they find healthful foods unappetizing, exercise painful, and the symptoms of withdrawal from stimulants unbearable. The slow process of detoxification that accompanies the cessation of bad habits can cause unpleasant symptoms that persist for weeks or months.

Speeding up the process

Fasting is a method of speeding up the detoxification process.  It can be an intense and sometimes unpleasant experience, but it is highly effective. After fasting, healthful foods often taste delicious, and pernicious habits often have much less appeal.  Fasting is the most efficient means available to overcome dependencies of a variety of drugs, including caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana and others.  Educational programs available at institutions specializing in fasting supervision help people to develop the skills necessary to select and prepare healthful foods, develop a sensible exercise program, and find emotional support.

Overcoming signs of illness

Some individuals appear and feel healthy but still manifest abnormal signs, such as high blood pressure, elevated blood levels of cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose, uric acid, or liver enzymes, etc.  Fasting is often extremely effective at allowing the body to eliminate the signs associated with disease.

Prevention

Many individuals have adopted a health-promoting diet and lifestyle to overcome disease. They may be completely free of all signs and symptoms of disease but choose to use fasting as a preventive measure to allow the body to eliminate the metabolic products that can accumulate within the cells of the body despite our best efforts. Fasting may offer its greatest potential in the prevention of disease.  Fasting also can be used as a diagnostic tool in uncovering sub-clinical pathology that may exist.

Doing it right

Whether fasting is used in the transition to a healthful diet and lifestyle, to overcome the signs and symptoms of disease, or as a preventive measure, it is a powerful tool for helping sick people to get well and healthy people to stay healthy.

The most important advice about fasting is: Do it right or don't do it.  Complete rest, a supportive environment, and professional supervision are required to ensure that fasting will be a safe and effective experience.

Case studies

The following case studies will give some insight into the many ways people can benefit from fasting.

J.W., a 36-year-old female, 5 feet 4 inches tall and 215 pounds, decided that she wanted to quit smoking, lose weight, overcome her "food addictions," and resolve a 15-year history of chronic constipation.  She also suffered from severe back pain and sciatica.  She had, in her own words, tried "everything," and in desperation came to the Center for Conservative Therapy's residential health care program on the advice of a friend who had undertaken a fast there two years earlier.

After her initial examination and two days of preparatory feeding, J.W. underwent a fast of 12 days.  She experienced numerous symptoms during her fast but did not experience any significant craving for cigarettes despite her one-pack-per-day habit of over 20 years duration.  She also did not experience any hunger after the second day of fasting.  She did experience nausea, a foul taste in her mouth, headaches, and low back pain.  After 12 days of fasting, J.W. underwent a 14-day re-feeding program.  By the fourth day of re-feeding, she was having normal bowel movements for the first time in many years.  She lost a total of 31 pounds.  During her re-feeding time, she received chiropractic manipulation and physiotherapy for her joint dysfunction, in conjunction with instruction on stretching and proper body use.  At the time of her release, she was free of sciatica and felt prepared to face the "real" world.

At her six-month follow-up, J.W. had managed to lose an additional 15 pounds, had successfully become an ardent non-smoker, had completely normal bowel function, and had remained free of back pain and sciatica.

M.T., a 46-year-old male, was suffering from macular degeneration [loss of central vision], high blood pressure, joint pain, and fatigue.  Despite his efforts at making dietary changes, his symptoms continued to progress, which was upsetting to him.  Blood pressure medications were only successful at reducing his blood pressure to 180/110, and they seemed to be interfering with his sexual function.

After three weeks of fasting and two weeks of re-feeding, M.T. was a "new" man. His blood pressure normalized without medications at 114/74, and his joint pain completely resolved.  At his follow-up a year later, he reported no return of the visual problems from macular degeneration, and his blood pressure was 120/74.

S.S., a 34-year-old female, had been ill for several years. She had been previously diagnosed as having chronic fatigue immune deficiency syndrome, Epstein-Barr viral infection, and chronic candidiasis.  She reported a history of depression, panic attacks, palpitations, and sleep disruption.  She seemed sensitive to everything she ate, including fruits and vegetables.

S.S. underwent a fast with the hope of reducing her extreme hypersensitivity.  Her fast was quite difficult, and after just 12 days it had to be discontinued due to extreme emotional volatility.  She had a slow recovery, but within four months of her fast she reported substantial improvement.  She was much less fatigued, was sleeping better, and could tolerate a wider variety of whole natural foods. S.S. will undergo another fast soon.

A.S., a 74-year-old female, had been diagnosed as having breast cancer 10 years ago.  She had undergone a lumpectomy, but had refused all other medical treatment.  Since then, she has been totally committed to healthful living and has been absolutely compliant with all the diet and lifestyle recommendations.

Once each year she comes to the Center for "preventive" fasting.  She usually fasts for 10 days without significant symptoms.  On her most recent fast, although she arrived feeling great, by the second day she had a fever of 101 degrees and was in extreme discomfort.  It was not until the eighth day that her fever broke and she felt wonderful again.  I believe that this represented a significant healing crisis, since all her laboratory results were within normal limits.  She has had no recurrences of cancer and continues to do well.

禁食饥饿疗法

禁食或者说饥饿疗法，属于食疗范畴，在中医被称为辟谷疗法。如广州有个习惯，小儿发热时，老人会让孩子禁食，这样可以不用药物治疗，饿两顿饭就好了；还有患急性胃肠炎的病人，也是不吃饭为好，配合药物治疗有利病情康复。轻度疾病的可单独应用禁食即饥饿疗法，往往能奏效。至于外科手术后的禁食，那是在情理之中的，更容易理解。人们为了治病健身而主动在短期内辟谷，使肌体在饥饿状态下靠自身机能治愈某些疾病或强身健体，这就是辟谷疗法。

许多人认为自然辟谷不就是饿肚子，不吃饭，其实自然辟谷与绝食（饥饿疗法）表面上殊途同归，都是不吃饭，但是却有着本质的区别，因为在辟谷期间，通常都要配合一定方法，通过吸气，意念调控，心理能量的一系列方法来调理身体，治疗疾病，健身强体。

自然辟谷与饥饿不同

绝食都能激发潜能，但程度深浅不一；自然辟谷或绝食期，当人体处于某一生理极限的时候，生理系统应急性反应，竭力维持生命活动的正常运行，必将不惜一切，拿出老本---原气（潜能），供生命活动的需要，灵性激活，潜能激发。但自然辟谷通过一定方法或者有一定修为，或慧根颇佳；潜能开发，元气固秘，不依赖于食源，而是通过方法采吸自然能量来维持人体所需要的能量，也可以通过调动潜能配合自身能量合成物质供生命活动需要。这样可坚持一月、二月，一年、二年，甚至更长时间。饥饿疗法虽能开发潜能，但元气不固，营气涣散，合成物质的能力很薇弱，体能主要来自身体的物质分解，一般不能超过七天左右。时间太长，势必造成严重的营养不良，甚至加重病情。

行气者不一定要辟谷，但辟谷者必须要兼练行气之功，故“辟谷服气”每则相提并论。具体方法可参见自健养生的系列服气方法，特别强调的一点是应该强化吞津纳气，吸气，入静法。吞津、采气、静养应相辅相成，如此通过这一系列方法不会造成对身体的伤害。

自然辟谷有能量作为基础

苏联从事体育生命科学研究的，作了这样一组长跑实验：有一组是按照正常运动员的标准补给，因为消耗大，吃的也比较多；另一组运动量同样大，但补给不按标准，而且仅给予极少量，接近辟谷形式。但苏联人不懂辟谷，而称之为减食。几天跑下来，吃东西少的这一组，精力充沛，体质基本如前；大吃大喝那组体重反而下降。苏联人从生理解剖进行探讨，发现人体胃里有一种固氮菌。这种东西把人体从空中摄入胃中的氮气固定下来，制成氨基酸蛋白质，以供人体需要。而这个理论恰恰与古代中国养生实践相吻合。

我们古人，尤其是道家，很多人都经历了服气辟谷这样一个养生阶段，他们不但不象绝食的人昏昏迷迷的，反而生命力更旺盛，而且还能延年益寿。中国的实践和国外的科学研究，证实人体具有直接从宇宙中吸收营养，补充自己的能力。这一观念确定之后，再也不会担忧辟谷不吃饭会饿坏自己，就可以在很自然、很轻松的状态下度过你的辟谷期。从宇宙中摄取能源的渠道不全是通过鼻和口，古人将把全身的穴位都打开后，穴位从宇宙中直接摄取能源，摄取的成分有多少，量有多大，全凭心意用功夫，道家佛家的秘中之密就是意密。在服气辟谷期间，该怎么想，这是最关键的问题。怎么想呢？比如说你要采宇宙间的能源，你就不要光想说采宇宙的真气，那这个范围就小了。你就想光、电、声、能、气，全被你采来，凡是人体需要的养分、能源、凡是你需的，你都往里送。只要按照一定的方法就完全能够成功。

自然辟谷源于道家，通过一些方法积聚能量，再慢慢调理能量于体内，再修丹，练精化气，证得无漏，进入炼气化神阶段，自动出现的‘气满不思食’的现象。唐末钟离权钟“玉龙捧圣，大药过关……自然息住脉停，真炁充满而不思食……”真正的辟谷，没有饥饿感，而且食则胃不适；饥饿疗法是在主观或客观条件下，少食或不食的方法。绝食期没有强烈的饥饿感和食欲，食则胃舒神爽。

通常我们通过静坐，观想宇宙能量，或者其它方式来积聚能量；还有通过采气，吞纳自然之气来培补人体能量。具体修炼方法，在 面授时我们会系统进行心传口授。

饥饿疗法的起源

辟谷治病并不稀奇，当今世界不少国家以此方法治疗疾病。如在日本有“断食寮”，在美国、欧洲和原苏联有“断食疗养院”我国古代就有并流传至今的“辟谷”之说，实际上就是饥饿疗法。我国现存最早的辟谷资料是长沙马王堆出土文物《却谷食气》它与《阴阳十一脉灸经》和《导引图》写在同一幅帘书上。是我国目前所能见到的最早专门论述辟谷的文献之一。“辟”字在古代同“避”因此所谓辟谷就是避开五谷杂粮而不食。司马迁编写的《史记》里也记载着“汉高祖”的军师，张良晚年辟谷一事。可见辟谷养生在我国是历史悠久的。辟谷在世界宗教里也颇为流行，许多宗教和教名为“明心见性”“体悟真理”而进行辟谷。例如释迦牟尼、耶酥和穆默德都有辟谷数天，以悟道的记载，印度的瑜伽功，并有辟谷断食之说。

饥饿疗法的发展

目前世界各国对于辟谷疗法治病已有了系统而深入的探讨，如：英国的卡林顿医学博士著《活力，断食与营养的关系》；美国的洽凯博士著《完全的健康》；马克欧义博士著《断食与健康》；日本小岛八郎著《断食疗法》；以及我国台湾省段木干教授著《断食》等书均陆续问世。从应用方面来看，许多国家设有断食治疗的医院，如柏林的一家断食医院有三百多张床位；前苏联国莫斯科精神病院设禁食部；日本现在有三千多家断食寮；我国台湾省有长青断食中心。又如美国的克拉斯综合病院，澳洲的雪梨健康中心以及由名医薛尔顿，华克尔两位博士主持的美国德洲疗养所等，也都是以辟谷治病而名扬世界的。

古代中医学理论的启示

（一）阴阳与经络学说

阴阳学说认为：人体阴阳之间相对的协调平衡是健康的标志，而“阴阳失调”则是体内阴阳气血，脏腑经络失调的总称，是一切疾病发生发展的根本原因。各种致病因素作用于肌体，破坏了人体阴阳的相对平衡，造成阴盛阳衰或阳衰阴盛就会导致疾病的发生，在论述疾病的预防和发展病因时都十分强调人体正气，认为正气旺盛，邪气就不易侵入，疾病也不会发生，《素问遗篇，刺法论》提出“正气存内，邪不可干”说明增强体质，蓄养正气是抵抗外来邪气侵袭，防御疾病发生的一个重要环节。这里说的“正气”可归属为阳，而“邪气”可归属于阴。又如中医学在论述疾病的治疗原则时，不仅提到调整阴阳而且谈及扶正祛邪与治标治本的问题。如果按阴阳学说来归类，也可以把扶正和治本的“正”与“本”归属为阳；而怯邪和治本中的“邪”与“标”归属于阴。所以我们认为中医学关于疾病预防和治疗原则，均可用“调整阴阳”来概括。即人体健康是阴阳平衡的结果，人体生病是阴阳失调的结果，据此而论治疗疾病就必须从调整阴阳入手。因此说纠正阴阳的偏盛或偏衰是非常必要的、在医疗实践中发现：无论任何治疗手段虽各有特色，但他们又有统一的共性就是“刺激”肌体而治疗疾病，但通过“刺激”并不是直接治疗的，而“刺激”的结果却是一致的，它激活了人体的经络系统，促进经气沿经络正常循行，而只有经气正常，才能充分发挥“自身调控”作用，使阴阳失衡的肌体重新恢复正常平衡状态，所患的疾病也就得到痊愈。这也就是辟谷疗法的最大奇特性。

通过此法强身治病，自古就有先例，也是我国古代一种独特的养身保健方法。现在世界上有不少国家也用此法治病保健，虽然人们对饥饿治病的机理还不十分清楚，但从临床观察发现，辟谷对人体疗效比用药、针灸、推拿等疗效还非常显著。

（二）辟谷疗法的特点

疗效显著，适应广：如神精系统、呼吸系统、运动系统、内分秘系统及心脑血管系统的多种病症都有较好的疗效，收到了疗程短、见效快，比传统的疗法特别显著。除对于常见病外，还对一些疑难杂病有着难以完全解释的特殊疗效。

没有副作用，安全性强，辟谷疗法是不使用药物，故没有用药所带来的毒副作用，可又节省药费开支。所以此疗法比较安全可靠，不会发生医疗事故。

即能治病防病，又能减肥美体，特别是肥胖者更为突出。

(三)辟谷在动物实验中的结果

台湾省家禽试验所对864只产蛋能力退化的纯种来享鸡，做10天停供饲料而供水的实验，当恢复供料、供水40天后发现老母鸡中的75%再度产蛋，说明辟谷对生命的返老还童的作用。美国营养学教授马凯博士作的马凯模范实验，证实，老鼠每周禁食两天，不易生病，且寿命延长一倍。加洲大学“老化”研究中心，华福特教授，在历经30年的动物实验之后，现在自己也坚持每周禁食2天，用以健身。相信人类将来并可通过辟谷疗法治病健身。

辟谷过程中的生理变化和反应

我们吃下的食物，在消化道被吸收之后，其营养成份被肠壁吸收而入血液，这些营养成份在体内大致有三种作用：一是作为“建筑材料”被用于新细胞的构建；二是作为“能源物质”被用于躯体、脏气、运动和各种新陈代谢活动；三是作为调节物质被用于各种生理反应或维持渗透压。但是肌体吸收的营养物质，往往超过身体所需的份量，这些多余的营养成份就是通过化学转化作用，贮藏于体内，一旦辟谷这些贮存的营养成份就被肌体所动用，再次通过化学转化作用，从贮藏部位“析出”而进入血液运至所需部位被重新利用。

（一）体重的变化

在辟谷的第一天至第五天时体重减轻最为明显，一天平均会减轻1至2千克，从第五天前后，每天减轻0.5至1千克。以后几乎都以一定的递减方式在减轻体重（有时也例外）。由于肌体对辟谷的逐步适应，使肌体的消耗趋于最小限度，当体重减少到原来体重的40%时，还不至于造成死亡。但也不会有生命危险，到这种程度，大约需要40天左右，我本人两次辟谷都已超过39天，而且感觉非常好。

（二）内脏器官的变化

从脏器的体积来讲，随着断食天数的增加，肌肉减少较多。肺、骨骼神经等器官的结构不易减少。肾上腺和甲状腺反而增大，辟谷的前3天胃液照常分秘，故有饥饿感是辟谷最难的时期。3天至1周以后胃因长期没有食物，胃液分秘便会减少，饥饿感并降低。

（三）生理机能的变化

辟谷期间高血压患者的血压会显著下降，而低血压患者反而会上升。正常血压者一般也略有降低。脉搏和呼吸频率没有太大变化，但视觉、听觉、触觉会变得更敏锐，记忆力和联想力也会增强。白细胞总数量在此时第1周内没有改变，第7天后开始增加，到第11天起急速增多，日增1.57倍以上，说明辟谷能提高肌体免疫力。

（四）舌苔的变化

辟谷期间，口腔内粘着性增多，照镜子看舌面长了黄白色的舌苔，甚至有些出现黑色舌苔，10天以内很少清洁，若继续辟谷，舌苔会清洁，表示身心、净化可继续辟谷，效果非常理想，已达到排毒标准。

（五）排便与排尿的变化

辟谷期间大便次数一般在开始后的最初1-4天内排一次便，这种大便叫“宿便”，它的颜色一般是黑绿色，黑色或茶褐色，呈泥巴状（也有少数例外）且均有恶臭气味与正常大便差异较大。宿便的排除只见于辟谷期间，宿便一经排出体外，顿觉全身舒爽轻松愉快。在饮水不多情况下尿量会逐渐减少，颜色变浓，排尿次数并减少，如饮水正常，尿量、色，也正常，排尿次数与辟谷前无甚差异。

（六）辟谷的疗法的反应

1、出现失眠现象：在此期间多数人精神反而是振奋的，睡眠时间缩短而出现失眠现象，但不疲劳。但是失眠者在此期间睡眠时间却相对增加很多。

2、出现呕吐或腹泻症状：据观察以消化系统疾病患者出现此症状的较多。

3、出现发热、头痛症状：很少有此症状，个别也有打喷噎，流鼻涕等类似感冒的症状。

4、出现情绪反应：情绪抑郁患者，在辟谷过程中可能会出现发怒，烦躁不安，豪啕大哭等情绪反应。据观察出现此反应者，以中年女性较多，但很少见。

5、皮肤出现丘疹或瘀斑：个别有此现象，临床发现，一个身体健康没病的人参加辟谷一般没有反应，而患有疾病的人在此期间会出现反应，并且辟谷反应很明显，治病效果也就越好。似乎辟谷反应就是愈病的前兆，由于这些反应与辟谷者所患疾病有关，故把这些反应叫排毒排病反应。

6、辟谷期间，口腔内粘着性增多，照镜子看舌面长了黄白色的舌苔，甚至有些出现黑色舌苔，10天以内很少清洁，若继续辟谷，舌苔会清洁，表示身心、净化可继续辟谷，效果非常理想，已达到排毒标准。

辟谷过程中的代谢变化

它是一种人为的主动性的限制进食，属于治疗性饥饿与恶性肿瘤，昏迷或严重肠胃炎症等疾患，所致的病理性饥饿决对不同，但辟谷均可导致肌体内部发生一系列代谢改变。这些变化一般都是在激素的影响下，各组织细胞从依赖食物提供葡萄糖，逐步适应了靠自身储存的脂肪，作为主要能量来源的过程。

辟谷肌体的主要能量来源是储存于体内的蛋白质和脂肪，其中脂肪约占能量来源的85-90%，早期肌体主要靠糖异生和周围组织以脂酸和酮体为燃料，节省葡萄糖的利用，使血糖水平维持恒定，保证脑组织正常活动的需要，辟谷晚期又以脂酸氧化供能为主，而节省酮体的利用，脑则以酮体代替葡萄糖作为主要能源。减少蛋白质的消耗。但饥饿发展到最后，待储脂肪耗尽时又需大量蛋白质长期的净负氮平衡体内蛋白质丢失1/3至1/2时，则可不避免地导致死亡。在整个饥饿适应中，血胰岛素/高血糖素始终具有最重要的调节作用。

辟谷治病健身的生理生化机制　　

（一）清洁消化道，提高消化吸收能力

大家经常听到“宿便”这一术语，它实际上是指长期停滞淤积于肠内的内容物，包括食物残渣，肠道细菌及发酵食物残渣，所产生的分泌物等。它会滋生大量微生物及有毒有害物质，其结果引起肌体中毒症状。这种病情便是医学上所谓的“食物自身慢性中毒”也是致病之源，要想彻底清除宿便，唯有施行辟谷，做几次“大扫除”才能彻底清“仓”有很好的疗效，在辟谷的同时，消化道壁上的衰老或机能不健全的细胞，则会脱落而随宿便，排出消化道壁上的脂肪成份，并会分解。当进食后消化道壁上机能，旺盛的细胞相对增多，肠胃机能进一步增强，使整个消化系统的肌能状态得以改善，工作效率进一步提高，不仅能避免“食物”本身慢性中毒，而且由此而发的疾病也会自然痊愈，身体会日趋强壮。

（二）分解消耗多余的脂肪减肥降脂

辟谷可使肌体多余脂肪分解，作为能源物质供给辟谷状态下的肌体利用，较长时间的辟谷，会使肌体消耗大量的脂肪，具有明显的减肥降脂效果，由于辟谷刺激，使肌体的调解机能进一步加强，代谢活动得到改善，脂肪的合成代谢与分解代谢，趋于动态平衡，最终动态平衡，最终彻底根除肥胖症，所以采用辟谷疗法减肥降脂，是最好的良方。

（三）疏通和软化血管，避免栓塞和硬化

辟谷后，由于营养物质的匮乏而使肌体的物质合成代谢受抑，物质的分解代谢相对加快，促进物质分解的酶类的分解作用相对加强，在脂肪动员的同时，血管腔内的血栓也会被溶解而使血流畅通，沉积于动脉内膜的脂质（胆固醇）也会分解“析出”，使动脉管辟得到软化，故辟谷疗法能有效地疏通和软化血管，避免血栓塞和硬化所导致的心脑血管疾病。

（四）清除体内有害物质，净化内环境

经常运转的机器，需经常擦洗减少摩擦，才能延长机器寿命，人体需要经常不断地排除积蓄的有害物质，才能保持肌体细胞的活动，如何排除体内有害物质：一是通过正常人体的排泄作用，二是通过辟谷，它可靠肌体通过“内耗”自净作用和排泄作用，从而达到治病健身的目的，也是对细胞的一种强刺激，它可刺激细胞恢复正常代谢，从而提高细胞的活力，辟谷后肌体先消耗的是弱化、病变、衰老的组织细胞附着物等。辟谷能引起肌体的这种废物利用，医学上称为“自身融解”可以说是：辟谷疗法是不使用刀子的内脏手术，且比外科医生作得更自然、更精细、更有效，丝毫无损健康而可去除百病的特异方法。辟谷可刺激“内脏系统”一方面源源不断地向内环境补充细胞代谢所需的营养物质和氧气，同时又持续不断地由内环境向外环境排出细胞所产生的各种代谢废物及二氧化碳气体等，这即实现了细胞与外界环境之间的物质交换，也维持了内环境理化性质的相对稳定，为细胞提供了适宜的生活环境，故辟谷具有净化内环境的作用，所以能够治病，健身，延年益寿。

（五）激活免疫系统，提高肌体免疫力

辟谷作为一种良性刺激，对免疫器官同样起作用，它所造成的营养物质缺乏，会刺激构成免疫器官的细胞，使其代谢活跃。而进食、断食、再进食这种刺激方式会导致构成免疫器官的组织细胞的更新，辟谷造成肌体“内耗”使内环境内，抑制免疫的有害物质分解，并排出体外，从而解除免疫抑制，提高免疫系统的免疫功能。另一方面特别是在辟谷结束后，由于食物的不断补充，而使合成代谢“原材料”充足，合成新蛋白质速率相对加快，结果使肌体老化的组织蛋白质，得到更新和组织机能的改善，从而使肌体的整体机能得到很好的加强，“返老还童”也就在于此。

（六）增加肌体自身调节机能，使器官系统的功能协调一致

临床实践证明，辟谷3-5天之后，其神经系统的兴奋性明显提高，这是表明辟谷对神经系统具有一定的刺激作用，但从最终效果来看，这种刺激对神经系统并无伤害性，而是一种能增强神经调节机能的良性刺激。所以可使肌体调控神经，进行自我调整，使调节机能更灵活，更完善，更精确，以保证肌体各部分协调统一。

Starving your way to vigor

The Benefits of an Empty Stomach

By Steve Hendricks

Two weeks after a Fourth of July at the end of Reconstruction, a doctor in Minneapolis named Henry S. Tanner resolved to end his life. His wife had left him some years earlier in favor of Duluth, which may have spoken to the quality of his husbandship, and his efforts to reacquire her had failed. He had been a lecturer on temperance but not a rousing one, he had owned a Turkish bathhouse but not a successful one, and his health was poor in a manner not specified. The usual methods of self-destruction being too painful or too messy or too likely to succeed, Tanner decided to starve himself. At the time, the consensus among men of science was that a human could not survive more than ten days without food. Christ may have fasted forty, but his was thought a special case.

On July 17, 1877, Tanner drank a pint of milk and repaired to bed. He passed some days, hungrily. His physician, one Dr. Moyer, urged him to eat, but Tanner was firm. Only water crossed his lips. Presently odd things happened. His hunger vanished, and he ceased to think of food. With each new day his ailments, whatever their origin, diminished, and by the tenth day—which should, by the wisdom of the moment, have been his last—the ills that had plagued him were completely gone. Far from nearing death, he was possessed of a renewed strength. It had been his custom to walk one to three miles twice daily, and after the tenth day he resumed these constitutionals. If his step was shaky at first, it quickly grew steady. He judged his recovery complete and bade Dr. Moyer, who had  kept a nervous vigil, bring him food.

But while the food was being prepared, Tanner turned to a thought that had lately come to him: If a man might not only survive but indeed thrive after ten foodless days, what would be the limit of his unfed endurance? Twenty days? Thirty? More? And what would the answer say about us? Did it imply, for example, that we were meant to go without food for long periods? If so, why? Was fasting perhaps a healing mechanism, like sleep? It was the sort of pons asinorum that will gnaw at a Steve Hendricks is the author, most recently, of A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (W. W. Norton). Illustration by Darrel Rees. Henry S. Tanner images courtesy PBA Galleries, San Francisco, and Historyforsale.com 28 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2012 person of a certain turn of mind until he must have an answer. By the time Moyer brought his meal, Tanner had come to a resolution. He would forgo gratification of the stomach for gratification of the mind.

Ten fasted days became fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five. He noted no great changes in his person save loss of weight. (Reconstruction was an era of proud midriffs, and doctors did not regard slimming as a benefit per se.) Tanner did acknowledge a slight slowness in cogitation, chiefly on complicated subjects, but otherwise his mental powers were undiminished. On reaching four foodless weeks, he celebrated by walking ten miles of riverbank to Minnehaha Falls and back. He later walked Lakes Calhoun and Cedar, but after drinking from those bodies, he contracted gastritis, and Moyer again urged him to end his fast. On the forty-first day Tanner relented, taking a small glass of milk. He had bested Christ.

Tanner’s fast might have been lost to history but for a challenge issued one year later by a Manhattan doctor named Hammond. Dr. Hammond had reservations about the well-publicized claims that one Mollie Fancher, a Brooklynite, had lived for years without food and achieved powers of clairvoyance. He wrote Miss Fancher a $1,000 check, sealed it in an envelope, and announced that the draft was hers if she could divine the number of the check and the name of the issuing bank. Furthermore, if she would fast for a month under the observation of doctors, he would add an equal sum to her for tune. Miss Fancher spurned the check-reading challenge on grounds that her divinatorial powers could not be rented, and she declined the fasting challenge on grounds that decency did not allow her to be examined by (male) physicians. Learning of Miss Fancher’s demurral, Tanner traveled to New York to take up the fasting half of the challenge.

When he and Hammond failed to come to terms, Tanner proceeded without the incentive, raising the dare from a month to forty days. He arranged for the use of a public hall in which to fast and for lecturers and students of the United States Medical College to monitor him. Because the college was what would be described today as naturopathic (the term then was eclectic), and because Tanner was himself a naturopathic doctor, establishmentarian doctors eschewed the affair. Establishments like nothing so little as progress not established by themselves. Thus it was that on a summer’s morning in 1880 the unlikely Tanner, his person having been examined for hidden food and his vitals recorded for statistical baselines, took the stage at Clarendon Hall on East 13th Street. His furnishings consisted of a cot, a cane-backed rocker, and a gas-fired chandelier. The spareness of the set and the light of the chandelier were meant to dispel suspicions that he had secreted food about him. At the stroke of noon, he took a seat in the rocker and proceeded to do—nothing. This he supplemented, as the hours passed, with a little reading, a little drinking of water, and a little chatting with his public, the size of which would be familiar to a short-story writer on book tour today. A week into this regimen, he had lost more than a dozen of his 157.5 pounds.

His audience grew with the approach of the lethal tenth day. At the dawn of the eleventh, with Tanner still extant, the public’s curiosity became wonder, and more spectators appeared, at two bits a head. News of Tanner’s survival traveled the continent by telegraph and newspaper. Well-wishers near and far sent him gifts of flowers, slippers, mattresses, exercise gear, roast beef, canned milk, gin, and claret. As many as four hundred letters arrived daily, each screened by the collegians for contraband comestibles. Among his correspondents were a gentlewoman in Philadelphia, who proposed marriage should he live, and the director of a museum in Maine, who proposed to stuff and display him should he not. The ladies of New York arrived to serenade him at piano, and learned gentlemen sounded him on matters of health. Soon telegrams from Europe

were congratulating him on his feat. Toward the end of his allotted time, Tanner was drawing roughly a thousand spectators a day. His share of the gate would come to $137.64.

On the fortieth morning, the collegians weighed him at 121.5 pounds, thirty-six fewer than when he had begun. His other vitals were interesting only for being uninteresting: normal pulse, normal respiration. At noon, he ate a peach, which went down without trauma. He followed with two goblets of milk, which the collegians thought imprudent on a stomach so long inactive. But the milk not troubling him either, he ate most of a Georgia watermelon, to his colleagues’ horror. In succeeding hours he added a modest half-pound of broiled beefsteak, a like amount of sirloin, and four apples. His lubrication was wine and ale. By the following evening he had reclaimed eight and a half pounds. After three days he had regained nineteen and a half, and after five more he had recouped all of the lost thirty-six. The question of which was the greater marvel—surviving his starvation or surviving his wanton refeeding—remains, in light of later learning about fasting, open to debate. In the age of Victoria, however, his ability to recover bulk was a credit in fasting’s ledger, proof his famine had not sapped him.

Tanner had hoped to persuade skeptics that fasting was curative, but in New York he had no disease to heal. He was a pitchman without product. Scientists ignored him, the laity did not experiment at home, and the Times synopsized his feat as “Tanner’s folly,” echoing Seward’s of a decade earlier. But Tanner knew that such benightedness had long greeted men of genius, from Socrates to Galileo. Time, he doubted not, would vindicate him.

It is a thin imagination that would not be titillated by Tanner’s tale, and at the time I became acquainted with it I was thin of neither body nor mind. Several years earlier, for reasons now puzzling, I had been a distance runner, but a pitiable knee injury ended all that, after which lard came upon me. Its accumulation was so gradual that I didn’t perceive it until I saw a couple of family photographs. Who was that shapeless man holding hands with my wife? That doughy guy with his arm around my brother?

Vanity was not my only concern. Fat, in our era, is disease, decrepitude, and death. The odds of incurring diabetes or high blood pressure, respiratory or kidney failure, thrombosis or embolism, gout or arthritis, migraine or dementia, cardiac arrest or stroke, gallstones or cancer, all increase with one’s ballast. Although by American standards I could not properly be called fat—my weight being somewhere in the loftier 160s—even this mass the World Health Organization deemed unhealthy for a man five-foot-nine, and some distant athletic part of me was compelled to agree. Had my weight seemed likely to settle there, my concern might not have been great, but my gains gave no sign of slowing. As in a bad novel, I could see where the plot was headed. I resolved to fast.

My ambitions were at first un-Tannerly. I fasted a day, and all went well. Two weeks later I repeated the performance, with a similar result. A few weeks after that, I fasted again, then again. Soon I felt myself master of the one-day fast. I upped the stakes to two days, then three, and eventually, in what was a marvel to me, a week. I lost a few pounds, and ambition crept up on me. I thought of a fast of weeks. The plural excited me.

I would aim for 140 pounds, my collegiate weight, although to reach it I would have to fast to 135. Fasting is mildly dehydrating, and the faster, on returning to food, rapidly re-accrues a few liquid pounds; he also again carries a semiconstant pound or two of solids in his gut. The typical long-haul faster (so I had read) loses about a pound a day, so I figured I could reach 135 in a bit over three weeks. I made my preparations. The short fast requires little or no groundwork, but longer deprivations (I had also read) are best undertaken after a week or so on a fibrous, lowfat diet. Vegetables, fruits, and whole grains are counseled, meat and dairy discouraged, the idea being to smoothly move out what is in one’s interior. To do otherwise is to invite meals to linger in the bowels long after the fast starts, which can be painful at best, damaging at worst. I ate according to plan and on a Sunday night had a last supper of wholewheat rigatoni and marinara, bland but purgative. I weighed myself. The scale read 160 pounds—a round 160, you might say. I went to bed with visions of a lesser me dancing in my head.

In the early 1900s, after a couple of fallow decades, fasting enjoyed a brief revival, chiefly by way of Bernarr Macfadden. In books and in magazines of his founding—Physical Culture, The Miracle of Milk, Superb Virility of Manhood—Macfadden propounded then-radical ideas about health, from the salutary effects of salad and vigorous sex to the evils of processed food and “pill-pushers.” He recommended fasts of a week, and to show that they invigorated rather than enervated, he published photographs of his finely carved self at the end of his fasts, lifting, one-armed, hundred-pound weights above his head. Thousands of disciples followed his advice—fasting either at home or in his “healthatorium”— and for a while it seemed might spread into the broader national consciousness. But in time Macfaddenism faded from public attention, and fasting with it.

Out of the public eye, however, a few scientists, less known than Macfadden but more methodical, had become intrigued by the art. One was Frederick Madison Allen, a physician at New York’s Rockefeller Institute who was renowned for his work on childhood diabetes. Allen theorized that since diabetes was a disease of excess glucose, taking glucose away—by, say, fasting—might ease a diabetic’s symptoms. He further theorized that any improvements achieved by fasting might be maintained afterward by a diet very low in carbohydrates, the raw material of glucose. Allen fasted dozens of children for a week or more, and it seemed to him that they did not fall into diabetic comas as readily as patients treated with the standard palliatives. Allen, however, had no control group, and his conclusions were more impressionistic than scientific. The chief deficiency of the Allen Plan, as his therapy became known, was that a large portion of his patients died. With the discovery of insulin a few years later, the Allen Plan fell into disuse.

Contemporaneously, one H. Rawle Geyelin, a professor of medicine at Columbia, was puzzling over the severe seizures of a boy who had not responded to bromide or phenobarbital, the leading epileptic treatments of the day. His parents decided to fast him, and on the second day without food his seizures ceased. Three more times over as many months the child was fasted, and he remained seizure-free for two years, at which point his case record ends. Impressed, Geyelin proceeded to fast twenty-six epileptic subjects for lengths of five to twenty-two days, then fasted some a second and a third time. The great majority of them stopped seizing during their fasts, and the seizures of the rest diminished to one degree or another. Alas, seizures returned in full to six patients on breaking their fasts, but the other twenty had few or no seizures for weeks or months, and two remained seizure-free for at least a year.

A handful of researchers, expanding on Geyelin’s work, hypothesized that since fasters survived by “eating” their own fat, perhaps putting epileptics on a fatty diet would also help them. The researchers fasted patients, then fed them highfat foods, and over the long term the majority of patients had improved dramatically. Many hospitals adopted the treatment, but after a new generation of anticonvulsants was developed in the 1930s, it fell, like the Allen Plan, into disuse. A consumerist pattern was emerging: starvation, a remedy that cost nothing—indeed, cost less than nothing, since the starver stopped purchasing food—was abandoned whenever a costly cure was developed. Decades later, studies would show that fasting followed by a high-fat diet was as effective against seizures as many modern anticonvulsants and that variants of the Allen Diet were effective against diabetes. But America, then as now, preferred the promise of the pill over a modification of menu.

I passed Monday morning, the first of my fast, with no evidence of appetite. By afternoon, however, my stomach—I use the term in its general, nonclinical sense—was encircled by emptiness. Soon I felt it contracting, and now and then it murmured aggrievedly. For recompense, I felt none of the sleepiness I usually feel after lunch. Indeed, I was Illustration by Darrel sharply alert, presumably because my body, not needing energy to digest food, was sending the surplus to my brain. My stomach grew increasingly resentful as the afternoon progressed, but I felt no hunger. This must sound odd to anyone who has skipped a meal or two, but I had learned a few tricks of the antihunger trade. One of my earliest teachers was Gandhi, veteran of seventeen hunger strikes and deviser of a set of precepts about fasting. The majority of the precepts—take regular enemas, sleep out of doors—I honored in the breach. Two, however, I held close. One was to drink as much cool water as possible, a rule that later fasters improved on by recommending that the faster drink whenever a thought of food arises. Gandhi’s other worthy precept was simply to banish thoughts of food the instant they spring up. At first I had thought this advice insipid. It seemed to me that a faster—at least a non-Mahatma faster—could no more will away a mental masala than an alcoholic could a mental whiskey sour. But latter-day fasters had again helpfully elaborated, in this case by likening thoughts of food to Internet pop-up ads, which disappear with a simple click on the red X. A faster, my teachers said, had only to click the X, and they would go away. It worked just so for me, to my appreciative surprise.

For nearly half a century after the 1930s, only the odd doctor, often in both senses of the adjective, prescribed the hunger cure for illness. What few fasting “healthatoriums” and clinics remained were chiefly in Europe, particularly Germany. An American exception was Herbert Macgolfin Shelton, a Macfaddenite who set up a fasting clinic in San Antonio. The location, deep in longhorn steer country, testified to Shelton’s attitude toward convention. From the 1930s through the 1970s, Shelton fasted perhaps thirty thousand patients. Along the way he preached raw foodism, accepted the presidential nomination of the American Vegetarian Party, received an invitation from Gandhi (not consummated) to explore fasting together, and collected a grant of $50,000 from the creator of the Fritos corn chip, who possibly hoped to make amends. In his copious writings, Shelton claimed to have fasted away the ailments of dyspeptics and depressives,

rheumatics and cardiacs, epileptics and diabetics, the cancerous and the gouty. He had even, he wrote, made one or two of the lame rise and walk again.

A historian of fasting, had one existed, might not have looked askance at Shelton’s claims. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen all advised short fasts to rid the mind of clutter and the body of malady. “Instead of employing medicines,” Plutarch counseled, “fast a day.” It is said that Pythagoras, on applying to study in Egypt, was required to fast for forty days. He grumpily complied but afterward declared himself a man reborn and later made his matriculating pupils fast. The ancient belief in curative fasting dribbled down to a few of Tanner’s contemporaries, among them Shaw and Twain, the latter of whom wrote, “A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors speak from experience; starvation has been my cold and fever doctor for fifteen years, and has accomplished a cure in all instances.”

To a perceptive twentieth-century researcher, the line of sages who claimed vigor through fasting might have suggested a topic worthy of study. But perception was rare, and science largely dismissed curative fasting. Shelton in turn dismissed science—or, as he styled it, Science—as unscientific. “Science,” he opined, “stubbornly clings to its errors, and resists all effort to correct these. Once an alleged fact has been well established, no matter how erroneous it is, all the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

On Tuesday morning, thirty-six hours into my fast, I felt not quite right but in a way that is difficult to capture in words. I felt a little weak, or maybe it was a little light, and I had the sensation that my being was centered in my head or was trying to be, but that my head was too full of other things to hold all of me. I did not, however, have a headache. My discomfort was remote, although the alertness I had enjoyed the day before had abandoned me utterly. In its place was a heavy, insistent somnolence. I napped in the morning and again at teatime but did not awake from either respite refreshed. I stumbled through the day lethargic.

Endurance fasters say the hardest part of their labor is from roughly the second through fourth days. During this time the body is exhausting its store of glycogen, the compound that is broken into glucose in order to fuel, among other organs, the brain. The brain is ravenous. Though just 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses 20 percent of its resting energy, and the body’s other main sources of energy—amino acids, which are broken down from proteins, and fatty acids and glycerol, which are broken down from fats—cannot power the brain. This is a bother, because we store pound on pound of fat, which most of us would just as soon burn for fuel, whereas we store only a few ounces of glycogen. Our brains are thus on a nearly constant prowl for sugar.

There is, however, a fallback: ketone bodies, which are highly acidic compounds created when fatty acids are broken down for energy. The best known ketone is acetone, as in the clear flammable liquid used to remove nail polish and scour metal surfaces before painting. Once thought to be waste products, ketones are in fact fuel—and fuel that can power the brain. There is evidence that the brain may even run more efficiently on ketones, perhaps because ounce for ounce they contain more energy than glucose. If so, this may account for the heightened sense of well-being and even euphoria that some fasters describe. From the faster’s perspective, the only drawback to ketones is that the starving brain does not start using them immediately upon exhausting all available glucose. Instead, it nibbles on muscle for a while—two or three days—with dolorous results.

While my brain was dithering thus, further changes were occurring within me. My sense of smell had grown fantastically sharp. And the 32 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2012 blood vessels of my temples had begun pumping heartily. Previous fasts had taught me that over the next few days the pumping would become so robust that I would be able to count my pulse without putting finger to head. The first time I had experienced such throbbing, I worried that it portended stroke. But that proved hypochondriacal. My heart, I later learned, was merely working harder to compensate for a drop in blood pressure. Although the drop was harmless in the main, it had one danger: if I stood up too quickly, my blood might not stand up with me. The few doctors who prescribe fasting today say the greatest risk in a fast lies not where the layman might suppose—damage to stomach, say, or to liver, heart, and other such organs—but in a contusion or concussion brought about by fainting. The remedy is simple: when feeling light-headed, the faster sits or lies down immediately. I found this precept more sensible than a daily enema and honored it punctiliously.

In June of 1965 a Scotsman of twenty-seven years and thirty-two and a half stone, which is to say 456 pounds, presented himself at the Department of Medicine, Royal Infirmary, in Dundee, with the desire to lose weight. The fellows of the department, thinking the dire case might call for dire measures, suggested that not eating for a short period might help him control his appetite. They did not intend a prolonged fast. As recently as midcentury, some reference works still proclaimed the certain fatality of modest fasts. “Generally death occurs after eight days of deprivation of food,” Funk and Wagnalls New Standard Encyclopedia reported—in the same edition in which it reported fasts of forty and sixty days by great hunger artists of old. The Scotsman, known in the annals of science only as A.B., agreed to the fast, and the fellows hospitalized him as a precaution. For several days he took only water and vitamin pills. His vital signs were normal. He asked if he might continue his fast at home, and the doctors released him on condition that he return for periodic tests of his urine and blood. The checkups were not intended to make sure he wasn’t sneaking food, but they had that incidental effect. One week disappeared into the next, taking with it, on par, five of A.B.’s pounds. His checkups showed that he had less sugar in his blood than a normal man, but his movements and thinking were not impaired.

Summer turned to fall, and fall to winter, but A.B. continued vigorous. During the fourth and fifth months, the fellows thought it prudent to supplement his daily vitamin with potassium, but that was all. They could find no reason to halt the fast, and A.B. was so determined to reach his target of 180 pounds that he probably would not have heard of it anyway. He celebrated a year without food with a glass of water. Seventeen days later, 276 pounds the lesser, he reached his mark. He ate, but not from hunger.

A.B. did not recidivate. Over the next five years, he added just sixteen pounds to his 180. His case was reported in the Postgraduate Medical Journal in 1973, and The Guinness Book of Records cited him for “Longest Fast,” although Guinness later removed the honor for fear of inspiring unsupervised imitators. “Heaviest Weight Dangled from a Swallowed Sword” remains.

By Thursday much of the odd in-my-head feeling had gone, but a moderate pain now assaulted my lower back. Some fasters believe this lumbago, a fasting commonplace, is caused by toxins dislodged by fats that are burned during a fast. Most toxins (so the hypothesis goes) are flushed out of the body via urine and sweat, but some take up an uncomfortable residence in the lower back. There is little evidence to support the lumbago hypothesis, but there is some evidence more generally that fasting detoxifies. For more than a week in 1984, sixteen Taiwanese victims of PCB poisoning were quasi-fasted (they ate nothing for one day and drank a modest amount of juice thereafter). Subsequently their PCB-induced migraines, hacking coughs, skin pustules, hair loss, numbness, and joint pain either faded or disappeared entirely.

At noon I went for a walk with my wife, who told me I was frigid. I thought this unkind, particularly as I had let her rub my lower back most of the morning, but she clarified that my hand, which she was holding, was cold—an observation never before made of a human hand, living or dead, out of doors in a Tennessee August. By nightfall my feet would become cold, too, and I would have to wear socks to bed. Next day I took to wearing fleece outside and sometimes even in. My coldness, I surmised, was due to my lack of heatgenerating digestion.

In the afternoon I went for a twomile jog, as I had the previous three days, at a pace set by my nine-yearold dog. I felt fine. Later I tried touch football at a pace set by my sevenyear-old son. I nearly collapsed. Similar experiments over coming days taught me that although I could exercise moderately for twenty, forty, even sixty minutes, just a few bursts of vigorous effort sent me gasping to the couch. I later read that such bursts are powered by glycogen, which I had used up days ago.

That night I weighed myself. I had not done so since starting the fast, because I wanted the satisfaction of seeing a substantial drop when finally I did. Even so, I wasn’t prepared when I took to the scale and the needle stopped just shy of 151. A decline of nine pounds—more than two a day? It wasn’t possible. Most fasters lose a pound and a half a day in their first week. Two is rare, let alone more than two. I dismounted, fiddled with the scale’s calibration, remounted. The needle stopped at 151. I did not protest further.

At that rate, I was pleased to calculate, I would reach 135 in just one more week, though I knew I wouldn’t maintain quite that rate. Fasters start like hares, thanks to the rapid emptying of the digestive tract and the initial loss of water, but after that they lope along. Still, if I had accelerated the first dash, it stood to reason that my lope would be accelerated too. I was certain that my daily exercise, which most fasters forgo, had made the difference, and since I would keep exercising, I was equally certain I would see 135 in ten or twelve days rather than the three weeks I had originally envisioned. Clearly I was a fasting prodigy.

In the 1960s a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania named Garfield G. Duncan became troubled by the epidemic of American obesity, which then afflicted a shocking one man in twenty and one woman in nine. (Today it afflicts one in three men and women alike.) Like other researchers, Duncan fasted obese patients and studied how many regained their lost weight.

Unlike other researchers, he noticed that the blood pressure of every patient who was hypertensive fell to within normal limits during these fasts. He reported, for illustration, the case of a man of fifty-three years and 325 pounds whose unmedicated blood pressure was 210/130 and whose medicated pressure was 184/106—still menacingly high. The man fasted for fourteen days without drugs, and his blood pressure fell to 136/90. Six months later, it was 130/75. Duncan did not record how many of his patients sustained such improvements after their fasts, but the possibility of a simple cure for some forms of hypertension seemed well worth pursuing.

Not until 2001, however, was there a definitive follow-up to his work. Its author, Alan Goldhamer, had fasted thousands of patients at his TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California, and had seen high blood pressures trill downward like Coast Range streams. He studied 174 hypertensives who fasted for ten days; 154 of them became normotensive by fast’s end. The others also enjoyed substantial drops in pressure, and all who had been taking medication were able to stop. In patients with stage 3 (the most severe) hypertension, the average drop in systolic pressure was 60 mmHg. In all patients, the average drop in systolic/diastolic was 37/13. According to Goldhamer, this was and remains the largest reported drop in blood pressure achieved by any drug or therapy. Like Duncan, Goldhamer did not formally study how long his subjects maintained their newly lowered blood pressures, but he surveyed forty-two subjects six months after their fasts, and their average blood pressure had risen hardly a jot.

His findings are all but unknown. A drug company can advertise its latest blood-pressure pill with a budget approximating that of the Kingdom of Belgium, but the promotional funds are somewhat less for a program in which people go to a lowcost clinic to receive a treatment consisting of, well, nothing. Then too, fasting labors under the hoary misapprehension that it is not only injurious but requires impossible willpower. Not eat for a week? Most people would rather die.

To test his vow of celibacy, Gandhi slept in the nude with a nubile grandniece. He never advanced on her, but an involuntary emission could prompt weeks of self-recrimination. I lack a grandniece, but I recalled the Mahatma’s test on the day I prepared a meal for my family. When starting my fast, I traded my traditional role of family chef for that of dishwasher. But as time passed, I missed cooking, so on Sunday, my seventh day, I made a trial of penne with olive oil and parmesan for my son. I was surprised that the meal aroused me not at all. On subsequent days I made pad thai, potato and leek soup, chickpea curry, and artichoke and feta pizza, all without yearning.

I was without yearning in other spheres too. My libido, which had been de minimis since Tuesday, had by the weekend become defunctus. I had foreseen this sorry state, another fasting commonplace, but it was still a wound. My avenues of recreation were being hedged in one by one. For paltry redress, the throb in my temples had disappeared, my clarity of mind had returned, and my sense of well-being was once more as intact as a writer’s—a sexless writer’s—could be.

That evening the scale registered 146 pounds, a decline of five pounds in three days, a rate only slightly less than that of my first four days. My waist had shrunk from what I guessed was a pre-fast thirty-four inches—I hadn’t checked in months for fear of what the horror might do to my heart—to less than thirty-two. On Monday I would search half a dozen stores for a new belt and find none. Evidently the circumference of East Tennessee Man ruled out an economy of scale for the thirty-inch belt. I finally found the right baldric in the boys’ section. Over the next week I revisited the section for shirts and pants and paid cheerfully, for it is an economic fact that no one begrudges a new wardrobe so long as it is made of less fabric than the previous one.

Monday dawned flat, even depressive, an unexpected change from my keenness of the previous days. I felt sloth, and I harbored unkind thoughts of Upton Sinclair, a faster of some ardor, who wrote of one of his fasts, “No phase of the experience surprised me more than the activity of my mind: I read and wrote more than I had dared to do for years before”—a horrifying thought, since Sinclair wrote ninety-odd books in as many years.

At bedtime I weighed myself and was distressed to see 146, the same as the night before. I stepped off the scale, checked the calibration, exhaled vigorously to unburden myself of a few ounces, and stepped back on. The figure was unchanged. This was a cheat. I had swum that morning, had taken a long sweaty dog walk in the afternoon, had moved furniture in the evening in preparation for renovations—and had done all despite appalling lethargy and grievous apathy. I had known there would be days when my weight would not move, but today, when I had struggled so heroically against the oppression of fasting?

I went to bed very much wanting a glass of Malbec. I awoke Tuesday to the same mood and energy and at bedtime found my weight the same too. On debarking the accursed scale, my thoughts turned to Nanaimo bars, which consist of a layer of buttery graham-cracker crumbs topped by a layer of custard-flavored icing topped by a layer of melted chocolate. After several defiantly luscious seconds, I clicked an X, trudged to bed, and pulled the comforter over my head.

In 1988 a cadre of young Fischer rats fasted every other day for a week, then were injected “intraperitoneally with 15 million Mat 13762 ascites tumor cells,” which is to say their abdomens were shot full of breast cancer. Another group who ate normally for a week were injected likewise. Nine days after the injections, four fifths of the normally fed rats were dead, but only one third of the fasters were. Come the next day, seven eighths of the feeders were dead, but just half of the fasters were. Two weeks after the injections, only one of the twentyfour feeders remained, but four of the twenty-four fasters were still alive. The researchers concluded that fasting every other day could dramatically slow the growth of breast cancer, at least in adolescent rats.

Other research confirmed that fasting could slow and even prevent cancer in certain lower mammals, although a handful of contradictory studies found that some fasted rodents fared worse against cancer than did their non-fasting peers. The reasons for the contradictory results have not been explained, but they were possibly the result of genetic differences between species and subspecies, and of differences in the duration and timing of the fasts.

In 1997 a promising series of follow- up studies began. In one, at the University of California, Los Angeles, baker’s yeast that was fasted was found to be protected from “oxidative insult.” By “oxidative insult,” researcher Valter Longo and his colleagues meant attacks by free radicals and other agents that damage DNA and thereby cause cancer and other ills. Somewhat paradoxically, oxidative insult also kills cancer— chemotherapy essentially insults cancer cells to death, oxidatively and otherwise. The trouble with chemotherapy, of course, is that it insults healthy cells to death too, and sometimes the patient with them. Hence the oncologist’s recurring dilemma of how to destroy the most cancer and the least patient. The yeast study was promising in this regard because the fasting seemed to protect only healthy cells. To Longo, this raised an intriguing question: If a cancer patient fasted, would her healthy cells be protected from chemotherapy, while her cancerous cells were not? If so, could she be given a dose of chemotherapy that would kill more cancer without killing her?

Longo and his colleagues explored the theory through several studies. In one, from 2008, they fasted a group of mice for forty-eight hours, fed a control group normally, then gave both groups a monstrous dose of chemotherapy—proportionally three times the maximum amount given to humans. Ten days later, 43 percent of the fed group were dead, against only 6 percent of the fasted group. All the surviving feeders showed signs of toxicity—limited movement, hunched backs, ruffled hair—but the fasters looked healthy. Next, the researchers fasted a set of mice for sixty hours and fed another set normally before administering an even higher dose of chemotherapy. Within five days, all the control mice were dead while all the fasters were not only alive but free of visible toxicity. The researchers repeated the experiment, only this time injecting neuroblastomas, one of the most aggressive types of cancer, before the chemotherapy. In a week, half of the fed mice were dead of toxicity but more than 95 percent of the fasters were still alive. Longo theorized that the fasters thrived because when healthy cells are starved, they shift into survival mode—battening down, curbing their activities, repairing old wounds, and rejecting inputs they might otherwise accept, like chemotherapeutic drugs. Cancer cells know no such restraint. Their selfish mission is to grow at all cost, and even when their host is fasting they take inputs almost indiscriminately.

Longo’s group started a pilot trial in humans of fasting before chemotherapy, but ten cancer patients who did not want to wait for the results experimented on themselves. Each patient fasted for two or more days before chemotherapy, and some also fasted afterward. None experienced the weakness, fatigue, and gastroin-testinal misery they had suffered after previous chemotherapies. Whether fasting helped kill more of their cancer is, however, anyone’s guess. Longo’s pilot study yielded promising enough results for a larger trial to begin.

The American Cancer Society, vanguard of battlers against cancer, has received these and similarly propitious studies in a manner befitting what Herbert Shelton might have called Scientific tradition. “Available scientific evidence,” the ACS has declared on its website, “does not support claims that fasting is effective for preventing or treating cancer. Even a short-term fast can have negative health effects, while fasting for a longer time could cause serious health problems. In fact, some animal studies have found that actual fasting in which no food is eaten [for] several days could actually promote the growth of some tumors.” The ACS buttressed its claim by citing just four studies while entirely ignoring the far larger body of contrary research.

As to why the ACS would oppose so potentially effective and so cheap an anticancer therapy, the Cancer Prevention Coalition, founded as a counterpoise to the cancer establishment, suggests on its website, “The American Cancer Society is fixated on damage control—diagnosis and treatment . . . with indifference or even hostility to cancer prevention. This myopic mindset is compounded by interlocking conflicts of interest with the cancer drug, mammography, and other industries.” Donations from such industries have helped make the ACS one of the world’s richest charities, with assets topping $1 billion and executives earning up to $2 million annually. If cancer patients remain in the dark about fasting’s potential, what worry is it to the ACS? No pharmaceutical companies died of cancer last year.

On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday—the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth days of my abnegation—my mood climbed somewhat from its low of earlier in the week. Life was not lustrous, but no longer was it gray. It helped that I had finally dropped a pound on Wednesday and had kept declining, to 143 by Friday.

I was truly thinning now. My cheeks had taken on a runner’s concavity, my abdomen was approaching plumb, and my legs could have been taken for a triathlete’s. An unforeseen consequence of my rediscovered thinness, however, was that the rest of humanity looked fat to me. It is of course easy, fasting or no, to see fat in America, where, as in Bahrain, Chile, England, Germany, Hungary, Jordan, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Uruguay,

more than half of all adults are overweight. It is easier still to do so in Tennessee, where obesity afflicts one in three adults and garden-variety fat another one in three. But it was not only fat people who looked bloated to me now. The slightest bulge of tummy, the least hint of jowl repulsed me as a sign of reckless feeding. So quickly do we forget our former selves.

The objects of my repulsion reciprocated in kind—at least, they did on learning the reason for my atrophy. In the early going, I had not advertised my fast. Like the newly expectant mother, I was aware of the possibility of miscarriage and was not eager to receive the painful stream of condolences should the worst come to pass. But as my labor began to show, questions grew apace, and I had to confess.

“You’re an extremist!” cried one of my brunchtime familiars—spitting forth flecks of whipped cream and nearly choking on her waffle—when apprised of my fast. I replied, purely to educate her, that her extreme devotion to three meals a day, every day, might earn her a tumor. In the same altruistic spirit, I said that since she had just passed fifty and was getting on in years, she might care to know that regular fasting showed potential as a means of retarding aging. She was sullen until her side of bacon arrived.

Among the more important studies on fasting’s life-extending possibilities was a 1982 experiment by the National Institute on Aging in which rats were fasted every other day from weaning to death and lived 83 percent—83 percent—longer than the control group. In the seventy-eight years of the typical American life, 83 percent comes to sixty-five years. The rats had lived, in effect, 143 years.

In a later study, fasted mice lived 34 percent longer; in another, fasted rats gained 40 percent. Again, the discrepant outcomes were perhaps the result of genetic variation among species and subspecies, and of differences in when the animals started fasting. To test these possibilities, the NIA in 1989 divided each of three strains of mice into three subgroups, then fasted or fed them on different schedules. One subgroup in each strain was fasted every other day starting at six weeks old, which is adolescence for mice. Another subgroup was fasted starting at six months (young maturity). Another was fasted starting at ten months (middle age). Control subgroups were fed normally. The subgroups that fasted from adolescence lived 12 percent, 20 percent, and 27 percent longer than the controls. Those that fasted from young maturity lived a respective 2 percent, 19 percent, and 11 percent longer. But those that started in middle age lived, in the case of the first strain, 14 percent shorter than, or, in the case of the other two, the same length as the controls.

Not that all hope was lost for middle-aged rodents. They could take heart in a rosier study in which rats that started fasting in either middle age or elderhood lived, respectively, 36 percent and 14 percent longer than normally fed rats.

No one has figured out why animals of different species, subspecies, and ages respond so variously to fasting. Neither has anyone learned what might be done to extend rodent lifespans still further. Would it help, say, to fast three days on, three days off, in perpetuity? To fast ten random days a month? To tweak a gene that is expressed by fasting? There has been almost no research on such questions. Nor has there been much effort to discover whether the benefits of fasting in Rattus norvegicus and Mus musculus might be enjoyed by Homo sapiens. This last oversight, however, is understandable. Experimental outcomes are seldom strictly translatable across species, and the benefit to Homo may be a mere ten or twenty years instead of the sixty-five that Rattus got.

I continued to dwindle. By Wednesday, the seventeenth day of my fast, the report from the bathroom was 138, three pounds from home. So near, I considered for the first time whether I might care to fast longer—a month, say, or the Christly forty days, or even a few days more to out-Tanner Tanner.

I wasn’t long deciding no. Endurance, even with my ugly swings of mood and energy, was not the problem. The problem was that I missed eating. I wanted the sensation of food in my mouth again—the textures, the f lavors, the hots and colds, the surprises, even the disappointments. I also wanted the fellowship of eating. Sitting to meals with family and friends had been sociable enough at first, but in the end it had proved an inadequate substitute for companionship, a word whose roots com (with) and pan (bread) reveal its true meaning: breaking bread with others. Not breaking bread with my intimates, I was an outsider in their rite.

Then too I wanted the rest of my life back. I wanted to run more than a mile or two. I wanted to play touch football with my son. I wanted to play touch anything with my wife. Other people wanted things of me as well. In the previous few days, some persons, maybe one or two in my own family, had described me as irritable, even rude. On Wednesday, my son, himself a bit tetchy that evening, insulted first his mother and then his dinner, whereupon I told him, in a tone I usually reserve for the dog when he eats a whole pizza, to get out of my sight. My fast wasn’t worth that price.

In 1993 the one-year-old son of the Hollywood director Jim Abrahams and his wife, Nancy, began having seizures. Few at first, the seizures soon numbered several a day, then a dozen, then more than a dozen. A barrage of medications had almost no effect, and little Charlie stopped developing—cognitively and behaviorally. Five pediatric neurologists later, the Abrahamses opted for brain surgery, but it, too, failed to slow the seizures. So also the ministrations of two homeopaths and, all else having come to nothing, a faith healer. Charlie seemed destined for mental and physical retardation.

The Abrahamses, however, continued to sift through research on alternative treatments, and eventually they chanced upon a reference to a successful anti-epilepsy regimen that had been common decades ago but was now nearly extinct. Under the regimen, patients fasted for a few days, then ate a high-fat diet for a year or two, then returned to normal fare. It was, in essence, the 1920s therapy inspired by the work of H. Rawle Geyelin, which had since become known as the ketogenic diet—as in ketones, the favored fuel of the fasting body. One of the few places in the United States where the diet was still used was Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. The Abrahamses were appalled that none of their doctors had mentioned it.

Charlie was twenty months old and weighed just nineteen pounds when he went to Hopkins for treatment. By then, notwithstanding the combined powers of Dilantin, Felbatol, Tegretol, and Tranxene, he was having dozens of seizures on most days. Sometimes he had as many as a hundred. On the second day of the ketogenic diet, the seizures stopped. His arrested development became unarrested, and he grew to adulthood as normally as his brother and sister.

A subsequent study would find that the ketogenic diet had been described in nearly every major textbook on epilepsy published between 1941 and 1980. Most of the texts even devoted an entire chapter to administering the diet, but evidently the taboo on fasting counted for more in doctors’ minds than a successful treatment. The Abrahamses endeavored to change that. They founded the Charlie Foundation, which sponsors conferences and produces videos to enlighten doctors, dietitians, and parents. Jim Abrahams produced and directed a TV movie (. . . First Do No Harm) in which Meryl Streep, as the mother of an epileptic child, searches vainly for a cure until she happens upon the ketogenic diet. Thanks largely to the Abrahamses’ efforts, the diet is now used in almost  every major pediatric hospital in the United States. The number of epileptic children it might have helped over the past century but for Scientific blindness makes for grim contemplation.

On Friday evening I became imbued with a mystical conviction that I had reached 135 pounds, even though I had not weighed myself since Wednesday’s 138 pounds, and I had not lost three pounds over two days in more than a week. My faith in mysticism being what it is, I put off my rendezvous with the scale until nearly midnight, the better to wring every ounce-reducing minute from the day. When finally I stood before the machine, I offered a silent prayer to Venus, whose planet rules Libra, bearer of scales, and within whose power it not incidentally lies to bestow a pleasing form. In case the goddess was in a more Grecian than Roman mood, I appealed to Aphrodite as well. I closed my eyes, stepped up, and made sure my feet were properly placed, nothing hanging over the edge. I did not want to look down and find an agreeable number only to discover on repositioning that it was a fraud. I opened my eyes and looked. The needle rested at 135.

This was highly promising, but not, I cautioned myself, conclusive. I examined the position of my toes more carefully. All constituent parts were on the scale. I stepped off, recalibrated, stepped back on, wiggled around so that the needle wiggled with me, and stood as still as my welling excitement would permit. The number remained—135.

Just nineteen days ago I had been a middleweight. I had, in the interim, slimmed to super welterweight, to welterweight, to super lightweight, and now, at blessed last, to lightweight.

I could have KO’d Roberto Duran just then.

I was not the least surprised on Saturday morning when the scale reported 136, the first gain of my fast. During the night I had thought wantonly of food, so it was to be expected that the thoughts would have added a pound. I appraised myself one last time in the full-length mirror. It revealed a stomach that would commonly be called flat, though in fact two ridges of muscle showed through my abdomen. They left me four cans shy of a six-pack, but they endeared themselves to me all the same. My legs were thew and sinew, my tuchis perky. If it was true that my arms were stickish and my chest boyish, I could take consolation in the fact that I was married and didn’t have to be attractive to anyone.

It would have been nice to know whether my fast had done for my insides what it had done for my outsides. Had the walls of my arteries become smooth as spaghetti? Had my cells repaired mutant DNA that might otherwise have grown into a tumor? I didn’t have the money to test those questions laboratorily, but not knowing had its advantages. In my ignorance, I was like a fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society and could believe whatever I wanted about fasting. I decided the fast had put off Alzheimer’s by five years.

I breakfasted at lunch, a few hours short of twenty days. Notwithstanding my desire for mealtime companionship, I dined alone. My fast had been an essentially solitary endeavor, and it seemed fitting that my departure from it should be, too. After heated internal debate, I had chosen for my first course applesauce that my wife had made from our backyard apple tree. I took a spoonful. What occurred within me with this first taste was what occurred in the Starburst commercials of old, the ones in which liquid explosions of kaleidoscopic joy burst forth from the actors’ mouths. It was an inundation. I took another spoonful, then another, each yielding the same joyful psychedelia. I waited ten minutes to see whether my stomach would approve, and when it offered no objection, I gave it a handful of Rainier cherries. These, too, were a wonder—every one its own dessert. Thereafter, at intervals of an hour or two, I took a modest helping of fruit or vegetable, and none was less than stupendous in its savor. I capped my resurrective day with a soup of squash and ginger, though it might have been of ambrosia and nectar. By night’s end I weighed a tad over 137.

At a family reunion the next day, I moved up the food chain to deviled eggs. Also potato cream casserole. Also fried okra. There were other coronary assailants, but they were lost to memory after a few slices of pumpkin pie. I am confident about subsuming the number six in “a few,” since any rational response to pumpkin pie would be to eat ten or twelve slices. My stomach, however, did not rationally respond. It told me I had overdone it well before the scale said so that evening. Specifically, the scale said 140.

A good night’s sleep, however, quieted my stomach, and I resumed eating with what an impartial observer might have called abandon. By Tuesday I weighed 142 pounds. At that rate, I calculated, I would weigh 940 on the one-year anniversary of my fast. I returned to clicking X’s, at least on the more gluttonous of my desires, and my weight leveled.

Two years have passed since my great fast, and although my girth has fluctuated a bit, I have kept it in check with short fasts and such exercise as a bum knee permits. Like the Scotsman A.B., I have not recidivated. At press time I weighed 140 pounds.

My thoughts have turned often since my fast to the rats that fasted every other day and lived, in effect, 143 years. I have thought too of the less fortunate mice that started fasting in middle age and gained not an hour for their trouble—or, worse, lost a few ticks. But I have also thought of their more fortunate cousins that started in middle age, or even dotage, and gained what amounted to years. I have wondered: Is a man in midlife more a lucky rodent or an unlucky one?

There was only one way to find out.