Chapter 2: Who's For It and Who's Against It
There are four leading proponents of using fasting protocols for putting autoimmune diseases into remission and I’ll get to those later. Right now I would like to focus on the detractors of using fasting for weight loss and disease prevention/elimination. The detractors of using any form of fasting protocol is pretty much everybody. Back in September of 2017 I did a five day water-only fast and my wife who knows nothing about fasting, and doesn’t want to know anything about it, took every verbal exchange between us to tell me I was an idiot for my effort. Now that I have kept the 45 pounds off that I lost between January and September using intermittent fasting she has pretty much left me alone. If you decide to try fasting, I can promise you will have no support from anyone at any time. Too many myths about it have become truths to most people. You can lose weight to the recommended BMI of 18-25 and keep it off for years and people will still consider you an idiot, a flake, radical, and not credible.
Looking at medical doctors. They receive as little as four clock hours (not credit hours) of nutritional education during their entire medical training career and none of that short time is devoted to fasting. There is absolutely no support for fasting from the medical establishment. Think about it. If you are a medical doctor with a practice, employees, a clinic rent payment, a house payment, and a huge student loan would you recommend a therapy that is free to the patient? That goes for doctors of osteopathy, chiropractors, nutritionists, pharmacists and anyone else who makes a good living with protracted therapies that treat only the symptoms of disease and not the cause.
Let’s look at the food industry. An inscription on the inside of an Egyptian tomb dated 3800 B.C. stated “A man can live on ¼ of what he eats. On the other ¾ lives his doctor”. There are many different fasting protocols. What works for me is four or five days a week I skip breakfast and lunch and eat only a large supper followed by a delicious dessert. Then I graze a bit until about 8 pm and hit the sack at 10 pm. The other 2-3 days I skip just breakfast and eat whatever I want as much as I want for lunch and supper. That amounts to skipping about 500 meals a year. If you’re selling food, is fasting something you would welcome? I saved hundreds of dollars on food last year while losing 45 pounds.
And there is the weight-loss industry. There is a Nutrisystem commercial on television right now as I type this line. I just searched it and it is a $6.2 billion industry. Do you think they have anything nice to say about a guaranteed weight-loss program that is free to the customer?
Lastly, how about Big Pharma. Fasting puts many autoimmune diseases into remission. Drugs are sold for many of these diseases. Next to the medical establishment they have the most to lose by supporting a therapy that is free to the patient.
In a future chapter I will list the autoimmune and mitochondrial health issues that respond favorably to fasting therapies and provide links to my sources (if I can figure out the proper codes to place in my writing for interactive links).
There are four big names in the medical world who have done and are doing research or healing with fasting protocols. In no particular order…
Dr Mark Mattson is Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging Intramural Research Program National Institute on Aging. He is also Professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. You can do a search on his name and read his research results that are in human trials using fasting protocols to prevent and reverse cognitive decline in older people.
Dr. Thomas Seyfried is a biology professor at Boston College and has written a book Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. He recommends fasting protocols to treat cancer and other metabolic diseases. Dr. Seyfried is all over the internet. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed documents. Dr. Seyfried has had remarkable results with treating/managing inoperable cancers.
Dr. Jason Fung is the author of the second best book (IMO) on fasting that I have read. He started a fasting clinic in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His clinic features supervision of fasting to cure type II diabetes and weight loss using a variety of fasting protocols. As with Dr. Seyfried Dr. Fung is on youtube and other internet bastions of independent thought and action.
Dr. Joseph Mercola runs the highest traffic alternative medicine website on the internet. His book titled Fat for Fuel is a “best seller” on Amazon right now (January 31, 2018). He supports fasting as a healing protocol and a ketogenic diet and fasting for disease prevention.
All of these fasting advocates have a huge well organized and funded opposition force that heaps ridicule on them and fasting at every opportunity. Fasting has no return on investment for anyone except the patient and poses a huge threat, perhaps the greatest threat in the history of medicine, to those who make their living in the healing arts.
Forward thinking people that are courageous enough to present their ideas to their peers have always encountered opposition from those same people. Louis Pasteur was laughed at for offering the preposterous theory that germs caused disease and spoiled wine. William Harvey in 1628 was also laughed at in a symposium before his peers for stating that blood circulated in the body meaning that bleeding a patient to heal was useless. And then Ignaz Semmelweis had to run for his life circa 1840 to avoid an angry mob instigated by his peers because he demanded that other doctors wash their hands in chlorinated water before delivery babies. The norm in that day was a birth-mother death rate of nearly 30%. By washing his hands in chlorine his was less than 2%. This resistance to new information became known as the "Semmelweis effect" for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms.
I think what we see in this huge, overwhelming, well-funded opposition to fasting is partly the Semmelweis Effect, but also a fear of destroying industries worth billions and billions of dollars.
In the next chapter I hope to share some fasting facts including the diseases that have been successfully managed using fasting protocols.
Chapter 1: I Lost 45 Pounds by Doing Nothing
https://steemit.com/fasting/@chuck2u32/chapter-1-i-lost-45-pounds-by-doing-nothing