FASTING THROUGH THE AGES

I know that fasting may seem like a fad, right up there with low-fat and gluten-free, but it is not a new phenomenon or a flash in the pan. It is actually an ancient tried-and-true healing strategy that has been integral to the survival of the human race.

The truth is, up until just about 150 years ago, most of our ancestors couldn’t rely on regular access to food, and a significant number of those alive today still feel this unpredictability. Humans have sometimes fasted because we don’t have a choice. But humans have also known for thousands of years that periodically going without food provides a wide variety of benefits, whether health-related, mental, or even spiritual.

Major religions that observe regular fasting include:

• Judaism. The Talmud, a sacred Jewish text written around the 3rd century B.C.E., references several communal fasting days including Yom Kippur and Tisha B’Av, which are daylong dry fasts.
• Christianity. Think of Lent, the 40-day partial fast undertaken in memory of Jesus’s 40-day fast.
• Islam. During the month-long Ramadan, Muslims abstain from food and drink from sunup to sundown.
• Buddhism. Some Buddhist monks, such as from the Theravada sect, eat only one meal a day.

Fasting for better health has been recommended at least since the time of ancient Greece. Plato, Plutarch, and Hippocrates—widely heralded as the father of modern medicine—all hailed the health-promoting effects of fasting. Plato wrote, “I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency.” Plutarch declared, “Instead of using medicine, better fast today.” And Hippocrates said about fasting, “To eat when you are sick is to feed your sickness.”

Great American thinkers have praised fasting, too, including Benjamin Franklin, who said, “The best of all medicines is resting and fasting,” and Mark Twain, who wrote, “A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors.”

Fasting for better health has been part of the American medical landscape since at least 1811, when Isaac Jennings, regarded as the first physician in the United States to use therapeutic fasting in lieu of medicinal drugs, started the Natural Hygiene movement. Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister, proponent of healthy living, and creator of the graham cracker, helped popularize Jennings’ teachings.

In 1928, Herbert M. Shelton, D.C., N.D., founded a fasting institution and health school that provided services for more than 40 years. He also published numerous books on fasting and Natural Hygiene and developed a fasting protocol that specified consuming only water, avoiding enemas, exercise, or treatments, and observing complete rest. This is the foundation of the therapeutic fasting protocol used by Dr. Alan Goldhamer—a consultant on my book KetoFast—at his TrueNorth Health Center, which has overseen 16,000 people as they have undergone extended water fasting.