Those of us, who have some sense of the traditional Indian ways of living, have always known that fasting is great for health. Even today, for religious or other reasons, the poor fast by choice once or twice a week on fixed days. It is the urban Westernised Indians who believe in gorging on every meal and look down upon fasting as a quaint tradition of self-abnegation at worse or tolerable religious practice at best. Interestingly, many naturopaths and even medical practitioners in the West, aware of the limitations of modern medicine, advocate regular fasting.
One of the popular proponents of this is Dr Joel Fuhrman, once a 20-year old world-class athlete and Olympic ice-skating hopeful who suffered a severe injury to his leg which gave him excruciating pain. His heel was so swollen and sensitive that the mere weight of a bedsheet caused intense discomfort.
After months of medical tests and examination by one of the top orthopaedic surgeons, and still unable to walk after a year in pain, Dr Fuhrman was depressed. As a last resort, the doctor wanted to perform an experimental surgery to promote the healing of his foot. When the young man refused to participate in such an experiment, the doctor angrily told him that if he did not have the surgery he would never walk again.
Dr Fuhrman was aware that, a few years earlier, his arthritic father had restored his health by fasting. He travelled to Dr Herbert Shelton’s Health School in San Antonio (Texas) and fasted for a total of 46 days! At the end of the fast, he was able to walk again. In a little over a year, he was placed third in the World Professional Figure Skating Championships.
At Dr Shelton’s Health School, Dr Fuhrman saw asthmatics cured so they no longer needed medication. As he writes in the book he subsequently penned, Fasting and Eating for Health, he “met colitis patients with bleeding bowels who recovered without drugs or surgery… people with chest pain who had been told they needed bypass surgery. They were riding bicycles and jogging for the first time in years.” He went on to get a medical degree and is now a top physician who advocates drug-free treatment, mainly through plant-based nutrition.
A latest research report by Kyoung-Han Kim and Yun Hye Kim in the journal Cell Research, published by Springer Nature, shows why fasting is beneficial. The research team led by Hoon-Ki Sung of The Hospital for Sick Children in Ontario (Canada) wanted to better understand the reactions that interventions such as fasting trigger on a molecular level in the body.
They exposed groups of mice to 16 weeks of intermittent fasting.The animals were fed for two days, followed by one day of fasting. Four months later, apart from lower body weight, the fasting regime “helped lower fat build-up in the white fat by increasing the brown-like fat (involved in burning energy and producing body heat) of mice on the high fat diet. Their glucose and insulin systems also remained more stable. In a further experiment, similar benefits were already seen after only six weeks of intermittent fasting,” says a report in Science Daily.
According to the report “The researchers found that such intermittent fasting tempers an immune reaction in fat cells.There are changes in certain gene pathways involved in the immune system and the body’s reaction to inflammation. A type of white blood cell known to play a role in fighting inflammation is triggered. Known as anti-inflammatory macrophages, these cells stimulate the fat cells to burn stored fats or lipids by generating heat. This happens during periods of intermittent fasting because there is an increase in vascular growth factor that helps form blood vessels and activate anti-inflammatory macrophage.”
Kyoung-Han Kim has been quoted as saying that “Intermittent fasting without a reduction in calorie intake can be a preventative and therapeutic approach against obesity and metabolic disorders.” According to doctors, our unhealthy eating habits and sedentary lifestyles are causing lifestyle-related metabolic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity. To counter this, cleansing through intermittent fasting may be beneficial.
