This is the most effective treatment

that's ever been shown in treating the

leading cause of death and disability,

which is high blood pressure. It also

reduces insulin resistance. It can

enhance cognitive capacities, and you

also see it affecting things like

depression and anxiety. It's called

fasting, and there's more. Fasting

introduces not just a chance to lose

weight. It also mobilizes visceral fat,

which is the fat around the belly and

the organs, which is giving off

inflammatory products that's causing

heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and

many people are maintaining higher

visceral fat than what they should be.

So, I spent 40 years helping people get

healthy, and I can tell you that I think

you should be fasting every day.

>> So, tell me about that, then. But, also,

isn't the game here just to not eat as

much?

>> Well, here's the problem.

>> Dr. Alan Goldhamer is a pioneering

physician

>> who has spent his life helping thousands

of people reverse chronic disease,

eliminate medication,

>> and reclaim their health using one of

the most ancient healing tools known to

humanity.

>> Today, we live in a world designed to

make you fat, sick, and miserable, where

76% of people are overweight or obese,

and where people think that health comes

from pills, potions, and powders. And

yet, most of us are big ignorant of the

proven health benefits of fasting. In

fact, if you look at all the chemical

changes that happen with exercise, they

also happen with fasting, things like

increase in BDNF, a neurochemical

protecting the brain from Alzheimer's

disease.

>> And what about water fasting?

>> So, people that have not been successful

resolving their conditions with

medications, including patients with

polycystic ovarian syndrome, have been

profoundly affected by water fasting.

And we'll go through fabulous research.

But, one thing you want to realize is

that all human beings have the capacity

to fast.

>> Okay. So, let's run through the unique

selling points versus any other diet or

intervention.

>> Let's do it.

>> I see messages all the time in the

comment section that some of you didn't

realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you

could do me a favor and double-check if

you're a subscriber to this channel,

that would be tremendously appreciated.

It's the simple, it's the free thing

that anybody that watches this show

frequently can do to help us here to

keep everything going in this show in

the trajectory it's on. So, please do

double check if you subscribed and thank

you so much because in a strange way you

are you're part of our history and

you're on this journey with us and I

appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank

you.

Dr. Alan Goldhamer.

My first question is who are you and

what have you spent the last four

decades of your life doing and why?

>> Yeah, I've spent my entire life really

focused on one topic. And that's this

idea that

you know, health results from healthful

living. I got interested really young. I

was

uh in elementary school

and I had decided that I wanted to

pursue this as a career. And when I

finished training in the United States,

I had an opportunity to go to Australia

and I studied with a guy named Alec

Burton who was the world's leading

expert in the use of medically

supervised water only fasting. And I saw

things there that weren't supposed to be

happening.

People were getting better.

I saw people with chronic diseases like

high blood pressure resolving their

hypertension, getting off the

medications. And so we began to

carefully evaluate patients with

hypertension.

In this study, 174 consecutive patients

with high blood pressure and 174 people

normalized their blood pressure without

the need for medication.

After we published that paper, we went

on and we've published a couple dozen

papers now

on the use of diet and fasting in the

literature and we've written a book.

It's called Can Fasting Save Your Life

which summarizes our work and other

people's work on this use of fasting to

help uh the body do what it really does

best and which is heal itself if you get

out of the way.

>> So, fasting, the

the word has become incredibly popular

but there's a variety of different types

of fasting.

So, what is what is the type of fasting

that you spend most of your time doing,

working on, administering to patients?

>> Right. Well, fasting is the complete

abstinence of all substances in an

environment of complete rest.

So, what does that mean? That means That

means that you're actually resting while

you're fasting in order to get

therapeutic fasting to be most

effective. And the reason is if you're

very active when you're fasting, your

body has to produce more glucose in

order to carry on the extra muscular and

brain activity. And the only way that it

does that after glycogen reserves are

depleted is through a process called

gluconeogenesis, where the body breaks

down lean tissue.

So, when you're fasting, if your goal is

to maximize fat loss and minimize lean

tissue loss, it's important that resting

be a part of the protocol.

Um it's true if people are more active

when they're fasting, they'll lose more

weight. But that extra weight won't be

fat. It'll be lean tissue.

>> So, so what happens to the body when

someone fasts? And can you give me like

an hour by hour

or play by play in terms of what

actually is the sort of physiological

sequence of events that are beneficial

for one's health?

>> So, it's a really interesting, fairly

well-studied, and complex physiological

adaptation that human beings make to

fasting. Normally, your brain burns

glucose.

>> Which is what I get if I have a piece of

bread or a a bar of chocolate.

>> Or if you uh break down protein.

Uh which can also break down into

glucose. Which is what happens after 24

hours of fasting. You've depleted your

glycogen stores. You're the sugar stores

in your muscles.

And so then the body, in order to get

the glucose it needs, has to either

convert to burning fat or break down

muscle in order to form glucose. What

the human being does

is it converts its main burner of

glucose, which is the brain,

from burning sugar to burning fat. Now,

if it didn't do that, you could fast

about a week, you'd enter starvation,

deplete your protein stores, and you'd

starve to death.

Because you can convert your brain to

burning fat instead of sugar,

a 70-kg male can fast about 70 days.

Now, that doesn't mean they should fast

70 days, but they

could fast up to 70 days because your

main burner of glucose, your brain,

um will convert to burning a completely

different fuel, which is fat.

>> So, let me see if I've got this correct.

So, if I'm on a typical American diet,

I'm going to be eating lots of things,

and my body's going to be breaking that

down into this fuel source called

glucose. If I stop eating the glucose,

my body has this sort of evolutionary

switch where it's going to start burning

my fat and turning that into this thing

called ketones, which my brain can run

on as well.

>> That's correct. And you have about 24

hours of glycogen stores or sugar stores

in your in your muscles, in your liver.

So, when you stop eating, for the first

24 hours, you're still able to produce

glucose from your glycogen stores. But,

once you've depleted your glycogen

stores, now you're you're stuck. You

either burn fat or you break down lean

tissue. Now, because the human brain is

so ridiculously large, I mean, it's two

and a half times a chimp's or just it's

a huge glucose-burning machine, you had

to have a way of being able to use some

kind of other fuel for that brain.

Otherwise, the first time spring comes

late, all the human beings would have

died.

>> Mhm.

>> And so, this biological adaptation was

clearly important for our survival in

large part because we have

disproportionately large brains that

burn, you know, ridiculous amounts of

glucose.

>> Just because the body does it as a

survival mechanism doesn't posit that

it's necessarily healthy, though, right?

>> Absolutely.

Uh and what we've done, though, is we've

taken this biological adaptation, which

by definition would be, you know,

something the body's capable of doing

safely and efficiently, and utilizing it

in a very unusual situation. And that's

where people have consistently been

exposed to dietary excess. You know, in

the world of our ancient ancestors,

getting enough to eat and not getting

eaten was the biological imperative of

life. It was difficult to get enough to

eat. In fact, most human beings that

were born, modern humans, probably

didn't live to reproduce. They didn't

pass on their DNA. We're the results of

the winners. You know, most people,

starvation, predation, they had all

kinds of challenges that would prevent

people from reaching reproductive age.

Taking a biological adaptation,

something that's natural to the body,

and applying it in a situation where

people had consistent exposure to

dietary excess.

>> When you say dietary excess, you mean

too much calories?

>> Too much calories. In fact, the diseases

that we suffer today, the heart disease,

the diabetes, the autoimmune diseases,

some of the cancer, these used to be

rare conditions that were called the

diseases of kings. It was the wealthy

elite, kings, that could consistently

overeat that would get the gout, that

would get the heart disease. These

weren't common conditions that were

present for the peasants. These were uh

rarefied conditions. They've become

common conditions because now people are

consistently being exposed to dietary

excess. And more importantly, we're

fooling our brains' tidying mechanisms

into overeating by putting chemicals in

our food.

And as the consequence,

we have a situation today where 76% of

people are overweight or obese. And the

extra fat comes with something called

visceral fat. It's the fat that tends to

accumulate around the belly and the

organs. And it's pro-inflammatory,

hypermetabolic, hypertrophic. It acts

like a tumor.

You have people walking around that are

maybe they have 20 lb of extra adipose

tissue. They have 2 lb of visceral fat.

And that visceral fat is giving off

inflammatory products that's causing

heart disease, cancer, diabetes,

autoimmune diseases. And what's weird is

these conditions are treated as if

they're completely independent,

unrelated conditions. You have to go to

a different kind of doctor to be even

diagnosed and treated with these

conditions. And yet, they all seem to be

associated with dietary excess, excess

fat, excess visceral fat, and the

inflammation that's associated with that

visceral fat.

>> Let's run through what happens inside

the body when I start fasting. And then

I want to I want to talk about fasting

in a little bit more specifics. But

what's what's going on in the body? So,

you said in the first sort of 24 hours,

48 hours, my body is going to switch

from using glucose as a fuel source to

ketones.

>> It's going to predominantly shift the

brain and liver, muscles are going to

begin shifting. There's it's a

progression depending on your glycogen

stores.

So, that you know, within 16 hours, 24

hours up to 48 hours, in that

transition, you'll be going from burning

almost exclusively glucose in the brain

to burning

uh predominantly uh byproducts of fat

metabolism, ketones, and specifically

beta-hydroxybutyric acid.

>> Is that basically ketones?

>> Ketones break down into different

components. Beta-hydroxybutyric acid

becomes the predominant fuel of the

brain. It's a byproduct of fat

metabolism.

>> Okay.

>> And the higher your beta-hydroxybutyric

acid is, the more BDNF is produced.

BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor,

is a neurochemical that's thought to be

protective in the brain from oxidative

damage. So, that can result in things

like Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

You know, when they do rat studies,

rats in a cage, 30 rats, both cages,

everything's identical, they give half

the rats a wheel.

The rats with the wheel will run on the

wheel,

and they don't get Alzheimer's disease.

And they said, "Why? What is it about

the exercise that's preventing these

rats from getting oxidative damage in

the brain that results in dementia or

Alzheimer's type disease?"

And they found it was BDNF is

dramatically higher with exercise. It

also goes up with fasting.

In fact, it's interesting, if you look

at all the cardiometabolic improvements

that happen with exercise, the chemical

changes that they

they also happen with fasting.

And that's not intuitively obvious

because in fasting, you know, you're

resting, and exercise, you're vigorous.

You might say, "What do these two

seemingly unrelated uh phenomena have in

common?"

And what I think is going on is that

both exercise and fasting undo the

consequences of dietary excess. They

reduce the fat, specifically the

visceral fat, and the inflammation that

leads to all these different diseases.

And so every time you look at the

benefits of exercise, you often times

see these corollaries with fasting.

>> And at some point in this fasting

process, your brain your body moves into

a state of autophagy. I've heard that

word a few times.

>> Yeah.

>> What is that?

>> So, autophagy or autophagy is how the

body gets rid of senescent cells and and

waste products and cancer cells and you

know, it kind of eats up that debris and

does the housekeeping. And there's some

things that increase autophagy.

And one of those things is fasting. Um,

you know, if you take uh, rodents for

example, and you let them eat ad

libitum,

>> What's ad libitum?

>> Uh, as much as they want. They they will

uh, live to a certain amount of time.

If you take those rats and you

periodically fast them, you can increase

their lifespan from 30% to 100%.

Even though the diet's the same, just

with periodic fasting or with systematic

underfeeding, if you limit instead of

giving them as much to eat as they want,

you feed them at 60% of what they would

eat if they ate unlimited amounts, and

you can dramatically increase their

lifespan.

It's an it's an interesting way of

looking at it. From my viewpoint,

though, they're looking at it wrong.

It's not that fasting doubles your

lifespan, it's overfeeding cuts it in

half.

>> Mhm.

>> By overfeeding the rodents, they're

developing fat, visceral fat, they get

the inflammation, and you cut their

lifespan in half. So, what fasting is

doing is allowing them to live their

full span by getting rid of the

consequences of dietary excess.

>> So, isn't the game here then just to not

eat as much?

>> The

>> versus fasting.

>> Absolutely. The idea is to avoid excess

intake that results in excess fat that

results in excess visceral fat.

The problem is it's very difficult to do

that when they are putting chemicals in

your feed that fool your satiety

mechanisms and lead to overeating.

>> Satiety mechanisms being mechanisms that

tell you whether you're hungry or not.

>> Right. Whether your brain signals you

accurately that the amount of calories

you have. If you, for example, just sit

down and and eat your fill of whole

plant foods, you eat a certain amount

and then you feel full.

But if you put certain chemicals in the

feed, you'll eat significantly more

before you trigger those satiety

mechanisms and feel full. Those

chemicals that we put in our food are

salt, oil, and sugar.

Salt, oil, and sugar are not food.

They're hyper concentrated components

derived from food that are put back into

food. And we put them into food to make

food taste better. And what tasting

better actually means is it results in

more stimulation of dopamine in your

brain. Dopamine's the neurochemical

associated with pleasure. The more

dopamine, the more pleasure. The more

you like it. And so it turns out that

higher caloric density foods or foods

that have chemicals like salt, oil, and

sugar in the food will stimulate more

dopamine in the brain. And that's

because your brain evolved in an

environment of scarcity. It evolved

where it was difficult to get enough to

eat and avoid being eaten. And so richer

foods had more value. And so the people

that recognized the value of more

concentrated foods tend to live to

reproduce and pass on their DNA. Today,

we live in a world where we've um

correct the whole system. And so now we

have unlimited amounts of

hyperconcentrated foods with these

chemicals like salt, oil, and sugar. So

when you eat those foods, you will

overeat. The only question is how much

and what are the consequences?

>> Should we be intermittent fasting or

should we just be restricting our

calories? Are they the same thing?

>> Well, there's different tools available

to allow for us to eat ad libitum but

still

meet optimum nutritional intake. One

tool is intermittent fasting. That is or

time restricted feeding, which we've

practiced for 40 years, which is

basically don't eat 3 to 4 hours before

you go to bed at night. So, instead of

eating right up to the time you go to

sleep, you withhold calories after the

last meal so that you have 3 to 4 hours

of fasting

um every day. That gives you a 12-hour

fast every day. And if you're trying to

lose weight, some people believe you

could extend that fast period another 4

hours in the morning, do some exercise

in the morning preferentially burning

fat. And so, that would give you a

16-hour fast and limit your feeding

window to 8 hours.

>> And what's the benefit of that feeding

window?

>> find by limiting the feeding window, um

they can uh limit some of the

overeating. That a lot of eating is

being done for reasons other than being

hungry. Sometimes people at night, you

know, they've had a big dinner and now

they're eating additional food, not

necessarily because they're hungry, but

because they're bored, they're tired, or

they're fatigued. And sometimes when

they're fatigued and they eat and they

feel stimulated, they think, "Oh, they

must have been hungry." When in reality,

they were tired. Our suggestion is when

you're tired, go to sleep. And uh when

you're bored, you know, engage in

productive activities. And when you're

hungry, then you eat. And if you limit

your feeding window to 8 hours, some

people find that it's a helpful tool at

minimizing some of the overeating. Now,

it's not going to work for everybody. If

you have very high caloric needs, you

know, you're a competitive athlete, 8

hours uh feeding window, particularly on

high nutrient density, low caloric

density foods, may not give you enough

feeding window in order to get the

calories that you need. When you're

trying to burn 3,500 4,000 calories a

day on very low caloric density foods,

you may need to have a 12-hour feeding

window in order to be able to get the

calorie density need. But for most of us

that are trying to maintain or lose

weight, having a narrow feeding window

uh may prove to be of of some benefit.

>> When I'm in a ketogenic diet or when I

guess I'm fasted, which is very rare,

why is it that my cognitive performance

seems to be significantly better?

Because when I people have heard me say

this so many times, but it's so true.

When I'm eating, you know, a normal

Western diet,

my ability to articulate myself and

think and be creative seems to be

diminished. Whereas when I'm avoiding

carbohydrates

um and sugar,

I seem to be able to think and talk

better.

>> I think again, it may not be that the

ketones are helping you think better. It

may be that the sugar vacillations are

are interfering with your cognitive

function. For example, when people eat

particularly refined carbohydrates,

their insulin levels go up, drive the

sugar down, they end up with low blood

sugar levels, which can interfere with

cognitive function as a consequence of

this vacillation that's taking place

with their blood sugar levels between

insulin and glucose. When you go on a

ketogenic type of an approach or you're

in a fasting state, your everything is

very stable as far as glucose is

concerned and insulin is concerned.

>> Okay, so you don't want to be on a sugar

roller coaster if you you're doing

important work.

>> Getting stable seems to help uh uh

people in their cognitive function, so.

>> But people talk a lot about juice

fasting.

And I don't know, there's something

about when people say that they're on a

juice fast, I always think, "Oh God,

you're going to be missing important

nutrients. You're not going to be

getting the same quantity of protein

necessarily. Maybe, I don't know, your

gut microbiome's going to pay the price

if you're restricting yourself from

having certain things."

Is juice fasting

advisable? Is it a healthy approach?

>> So, juice fasting isn't technically

fasting cuz fasting is the complete

absence of all substances. It's a it's a

modified form of eating. So, it's a diet

that's high in sugar, very low in fiber,

virtually no fiber on on these juices.

Where it can be helpful is people that

are trying to make dietary changes and

they're addicted to the artificial

stimulation of dopamine in their brain

that comes from the use of their highly

refined diets. They're trying to make a

change, they're trying to make a break.

And because it's sweet and very

appealing, they'll drink the juices,

they'll get their 6 or 800 calories,

they'll feel relatively satiated, and it

allows them to avoid the greasy fatty

processed foods that sometimes they're

trying to get away from. Um personally,

I think that water fasting has

advantages over juice fasting in terms

of the magnitude of the detoxifying

effect, the impact that it has. But the

advantages to juice fasting or what they

call juice fasting is that it can be

done without modifying medications,

you're still in a feeding physiology, it

could be done safely by people without

having to be in a controlled setting

like you would for water fasting. So

there's advantages to the intermittent

or modified fasting approaches. It's not

the basis of the research that we've

published, which is actually water only

fasting. We're fasting people on water

only from 5 to 40 days.

>> 5 to 40 days. So tell me about that

then. So who exactly would you prescribe

a 40-day water fast to? And presumably

in those 40 days, they have nothing but

water.

>> Right. Patients that are fasting in our

facility are on uh fractionally steamed

distilled water only. That's the only

something they take. They're not taking

supplements, medications.

>> fractionally?

>> What's you know distilled water, so it's

purified water, highly purified water.

So in our case, we're using

distillation, some people use reverse

osmosis, different ways of getting all

the hydrogenated hydrocarbons and the

chlorine and everything out of the

water. So just essentially what rain

water would be if the environment wasn't

polluted.

>> Okay.

>> Now in in fairness, not everybody's a

good candidate for that type of uh

fasting. In order to determine if you're

a good candidate, obviously you you have

to review the medical history and make

take a look at what people are doing in

terms of their medical treatment,

particularly in terms of medications.

Basic laboratory testing to make sure

kidney and liver function are intact,

are capable of adapting to fasting. And

when people fast, they need to rest. If

people are active, we've already

mentioned they'll increase their weight

loss, but that weight will be derived

from breaking down lean tissue. We want

to minimize lean tissue, maximize fat,

particularly visceral fat.

It's also important that they be

monitored because people do have issues

that can be aggravated by fasting.

Fasting presents a dehydration response.

There's a physiological dehydration that

occurs with fasting. There's uh changes

in electrolytes. So, you need to make

sure that people are being monitored

appropriately. And then the most

important part probably is they need to

be refed uh progressively.

>> Refed?

>> Yeah, so when when they're eating after

the fast, if they go back to too rapid

rapid refeeding, you can get into

problem with post fasting edema. You can

get refeeding syndrome. That could be a

very serious or even potentially,

you know, fatal problem. That can be

completely avoided by following a

reasonable protocol of a realimentation

after fasting. Uh which we is is the

reason why we encourage patients that

are doing fasting to do it either in a

controlled setting or under some

supervision so that they don't make uh

catastrophic errors in terms of how they

do it.

>> When it's that length? When it's long?

>> Well, uh water fasting we're doing

fasting anywhere from 5 to 40 days. So,

anywhere in that range, you want to make

sure the person's a good candidate, that

they're fasting in a controlled setting,

that they rest, and they refeed

properly.

So, a person that has to say a 20-day

fast would have 10 days of controlled

refeeding. It'll take about half the

length of the fast to properly realiment

after the fast so that you're ready to

go back to hopefully a whole plant food

SOS free type diet.

>> And when you say SOS, you mean sugar,

salt, and oil for context?

>> Yeah, SOS is the international symbol of

danger, but it also stands for the

chemicals added to food that make people

fat, sick, and miserable. And those are

salt, oil, and sugar.

>> What kind of candidate would come to

your clinic to do a 5 to 40-day water

fast? What are the symptoms they have?

What are the diseases, illnesses that

they're suffering with?

>> Well, we get a variety of people and

ages. Um the conditions we see are are

often the conditions that we've

published papers on cuz those that's

what people know us for. So, one of the

most common conditions is high blood

pressure. We did a study uh with our

colleague T. Colin Campbell. As I

mentioned, 174 people in a row were able

to achieve normal blood pressure without

medication. We also did a prospective

study recently with a colleague from the

Mayo Clinic recently that we did 20 uh

27 people completed fasting with

hypertension. 26 were able to achieve

normal blood pressure without any

medication. One required half their dose

of medication. And we had 6-week

follow-ups where they did well. And then

we followed them at a year.

And we found that 76% of those people a

year later had maintained their weight

loss and the majority were still normal

blood pressure without medication.

>> Were they still fasting after a year?

>> No, of course they were fasting while

they were at the center. They were back

eating a healthy diet. And they

maintained a healthy enough diet for a

year

>> Okay.

>> that they were able to maintain their

blood pressure and their weight loss.

And that's very unusual cuz you don't

find good long-term follow-up showing

that people are not only able to get

well, but sustain those behavioral

changes.

>> So, it was more of it's more of an

intervention

in that regard. And how And how long

were they fasted for, those people?

>> So, the people in that study ranged uh

the average fasting was about 2 weeks.

So, they had 2 weeks of fasting that

normalized their blood pressure, a week

of refeeding,

>> Mhm.

>> and then even a year later they the

majority were able to sustain the

behavioral changes such that they were

able to keep their weight off and they

were able to keep their blood pressure

down without the need for medication.

>> And And what's going on there because

there's physiological changes that take

place. If I went and did a 40-day water

fast with you, there's some

physiological things that can happen. Of

course, I'm going to go into ketosis. My

my fat's going to start to become my

primary fuel source. But there's also

going to be a physiopsychological

relationship. There's going to be

something that happens in my psychology.

I mean, you talked about dopamine.

There's going to be My brain is going to

change in some respect. My relationship

with food is going to shift in some

respect.

>> Absolutely. If you look at the um

outcome data, for example, we've got

studies we've done with DEXA scanners

that look at body composition changes

during fasting. And so people that would

lose say fast for 2 weeks would lose 10%

of their total body weight, 20% of their

total fat, but 40% of their visceral

fat.

Yeah,

that's the to contribute to disease.

Those same people would have only lost

6% of their lean tissue.

Now, what's interesting like muscle,

water, you know, non-fat tissue.

So the lean tissue mass at 6 weeks was

fully recovered. So that the percentage

of their lean mass was actually higher

at 6 weeks than it was at baseline. But

the fat loss continues. So even though

they're gaining weight after fasting cuz

they're putting their glycogen back in

their muscles, which is about 2 lb,

they're rehydrating, they're putting

fluid in, they're putting fiber back in

the gut. So the scale's going up, but

the fat loss even with that weight gain

is continuing down.

And so what what you look at is their

whole body composition begins to change.

And also their brain composition too

probably in terms of their functional

relationship to themselves. For one

thing, a lot of people feel that any

kind of pain is a bad thing.

Any kind of pain is a bad thing and pain

must always be avoided. If they have a

pain, they have to take a pill, they

have to do something cuz pain's the

evil, you know, issue there.

Athletes learn that pain isn't always

bad. The sometimes discomfort can be

associated with a positive response. We

find it's easier working sometimes with

athletes than people that have not been

athletic because they they've learned to

push their body a little bit and and

fasting creates

hormetic effect as well where as there

is some physiological stress that's

introduced. That stress is associated

with a healing response.

>> Would it not just be healthier if it

were simple to take those people and

remove all the processed food from their

diet and then keep them on like a

Mediterranean diet with like high

protein, high fiber.

Would that not be a a more healthy

intervention because at least then I'm

not going to lose you mentioned there

I'd lose 6% of my lean tissue.

At least then I wouldn't lose any muscle

necessarily.

>> Well, I would agree that if your only

goal is weight loss, diet and exercise

are the key.

Fasting introduces not just a chance to

lose weight, but specifically to

mobilize visceral fat. You will

eventually mobilize that visceral fat

with uh exercise alone. There's an

advantage to getting rid of that sooner

rather than later particularly for

people that have high blood pressure,

diabetes, autoimmune disease because the

sooner you get rid of the visceral fat

and the inflammation, the sooner you can

get them off the medications. The

medications themselves

present their own problems. And people

don't understand if you have high blood

pressure, you're being medicated not for

your high blood pressure, but for the

diet that causes the high blood

pressure. Literally the day you change

the diet to health promoting diet, the

need for medication begins to reduce.

And if you don't reduce the medication

adequately, you can actually shut people

down from you know, consequences of

excess medication.

>> Is there a different advantage between

me doing the the fast, the water fast

versus just going on the ketogenic diet

if I was trying to reduce my visceral

fat which is that sort of stubborn fat

around your organs?

>> Yes, water fasting is a more efficient

method of mobilizing specifically

visceral fat. And the other problem with

the when we talk about a ketogenic diet,

remember there's a lot of different ways

of getting into ketosis. You can do it

with a high fat, high protein diet which

is commonly advocated. You know, the

dead diet Dr. Atkins diet which is the

list or rest in peace or those kind of

programs. Those have some disadvantages.

High protein, particularly high animal

protein is actually thought to be one of

the major contributing factors to many

of these health compromises including

cardiovascular disease and cancer and

inflammation and the rest of it. So, we

need protein. It's an essential

nutrient. You need about 10% of your

calories from protein. When you get

excess protein, you put your risk

yourself at risk for kidney disease,

cardiovascular disease and other

problems. We need fat. Essential fatty

acids are a critical part of our ability

to be healthy. And you also need

carbohydrates. You're designed as a

carbohydrate burning machine, but you

get all the fat, all the protein, and

all the carbohydrates you need from a

whole plant food diet. You don't need to

eat large amounts of animal foods. You

don't need to eat oils. You don't need

to eat refined carbohydrates to get the

foods you need. And in fact, a whole

plant food SOS free diet gives you the

quantity and quality of nutrients you

need without some of the negative

consequences or the risks of dietary

excess that come from these

more processed modern diets.

So, if if you were to

>> pitch to me the unique selling points of

a water fast at your clinic versus any

other intervention, medical or

lifestyle,

it would be the speed in which

you're able to burn visceral fat and the

speed in which you're able to lower

blood pressure is unlike anything else.

>> It also reduces insulin resistance.

There is no drug that reduces insulin

resistance, but um fasting does. And a

significant percentage of our type 2

diabetics will achieve normal blood

sugar levels without the need for

medication with fasting. Again, if you

do diet and exercise consistently

enough, long enough, you're likely to

get many of the same benefits. There are

some things though that seem to change

in fasting that don't change as well

with with these modified feeding

regimes. For example, fasting You know

what when you have a computer and it

gets corrupted and you turn it off and

you turn it back on and you don't know

why, but now it works. You know, you've

kind of rebooted or the flashed the

memory, whatever it is.

Fasting does a similar thing in humans,

it appears, and particularly when it

comes to the gut microbiome. So, you've

got a trillion creatures, well,

trillions of creatures living just in

your intestinal tract, particularly

bacteria, but all kinds of organisms.

They're an important part of your

digestive mechanisms, your immune

response,

and

they're different depending on what you

eat. So, if you're eating animal-based

diet, you have different organisms than

if you're on a plant-based diet. If

you're on a high-sugar diet, even fruit

sugars and things, you get different

organisms flourishing than you would if

you're in a fasting state. In a fasting

state, there's a big drop-off in total

organisms, and then when you refeed,

depending on how you refeed, you can

actually regrow those organisms and

repopulate that.

>> I'm right in thinking if you do a water

fast, you're going to wipe out a lot of

the bacteria in your gut,

um including the bad ones, but also some

good ones.

>> Right.

>> And then you can

reintroduce certain foods that will

bring back the good bacteria.

>> That's why refeeding after fasting is so

important. If you refeed carefully,

you're have a chance to reestablish that

normal microfloral balance. And that may

be why we see such good response in many

of these GI-related conditions, like

ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease

and chronic constipation, irritable

bowel syndrome. But you also see it

affecting things like depression and

anxiety. And probably, they say 90-95%

of the dopamine and serotonin that's

produced by the body is actually

produced in the gut. And so, the balance

in your gut microbiome may be critically

involved in cognitive function as well

as what's going on in the digestive

system itself. So, we're just now

learning

uh the impact that, you know, fasting

has and the effect that microbiome has

and the relationship that those two

things have together.

>> There was a 2024 study that found after

a 7-day water-only fast, levels of

harmful fusobacteria dropped by more

than 80% and the gut microbiome shifted

to a healthier balance. So, it's clearly

doing some of the work to wipe out some

of the bad um unhealthy

gut microbiome bacteria,

which gives you an opportunity to, I

guess, reset the gut microbiome, which

is really interesting.

Especially if you as you say, you have

some of those sort of gut-centric

diseases.

Is there a

gender component to this between sort of

men and women because obviously women

have menstrual cycles and

>> Yes.

>> certain hormone fluctuations that men

don't have. So, do you have to think

about gender when you're thinking about

fasting?

>> Well, we know that women have

complicated

systems in different ways than men and

they have different diseases, too, that

show up. Fibrocystic breast disease,

dysmenorrhea, menorrhagia, polycystic

ovarian syndrome. All of these

conditions that males don't know

anything about

seem to be associated with

excess estradiol

hormones. When estradiol is high,

there's a higher association with many

of these conditions. Estradiol normally

breaks down to something called estriol

and it's excreted in the urine. And that

what breaks it down is the gut

microbiome and liver function. And the

gut microbiome and liver function are

both profoundly affected by fasting. For

example, we've got in studies we've done

looking at fatty liver disease, we show

significant changes and reversal of

fatty liver disease with fasting.

And as I mentioned, the gut microbiome

goes through a whole kind of rebooting.

And that may be why patients that come

in with those symptoms, the fibrocystic

breast disease, dysmenorrhea,

menorrhagia, etc., often get profound

short-term improvement and long-term

benefit post-fasting. Now, all of these

things that I have to say,

fasting is great, but unless it's a

motivating factor to make the diet

lifestyle changes, I wouldn't be

optimistic about long-term outcomes.

When we use fasting, we're also

providing intense education to try to

get people motivated to adopt healthy

diet and lifestyle habits. And it's

those diet and lifestyle habits that are

going to be necessary to sustain the

benefits.

I mean, I'll give you an example

in lymphoma, which is a type of cancer.

We published a paper in the British

Medical Journal, case reports on a young

woman who had follicular lymphoma had

progressed for a couple years.

And interestingly enough, her

doctor

her oncologist told her that diet didn't

matter.

The diet wasn't related to, you know,

this particular type of cancer. She

could eat whatever she wanted to.

But, nonetheless, she decided to come in

rather than go through chemotherapy and

underwent fasting. And we did 3 weeks of

fasting, during which time you could

literally feel these tumors

disappearing.

Um she had her follow-up CT scan.

Uh and at a year, we we submitted this

case report. And it was interesting cuz

BMJ said, "Well, maybe she got lucky.

And yes, it progressed for 2 years. Yes,

it went away in 21 days of fasting. But,

maybe, you know, it was just naturally

the time for it to go into remission. A

small percentage of lymphoma patients do

go through spontaneous remission." So,

they said, "Why don't you follow her for

3 years and see whether she can sustain

that? Cuz we can treat lymphoma with

drugs and the tumors will go down, but

they tend to come back, and that's the

problem. It doesn't really reduce

necessarily all cause mortality because

the condition isn't actually resolved.

So, we followed her for 3 years, and I

told her that she had to stick strictly

to the dietary protocol or it would be

fatal because I'd track her down and

kill her. And she did stick to the diet,

and at 3 years, we have CT evidence that

she was cancer-free. And we submitted

that

to BMJ, and interestingly enough, at

first, they rejected the follow-up that

they invited.

And we kind of appealed that, and

eventually, they did decide to to

publish the follow-up.

And then, we followed her for 10 years.

And she continues to be cancer-free. And

she continues to follow a whole plant

food SOS free diet. And she went public

with her story. She told

some podcasts about what her experience

was. And so, we got a lot of lymphoma

patients coming to TrueNorth Health. And

now, we've published a case series,

which is a series of lymphoma patients,

including one particular gentleman who

was even more progressive. It was a

stage four. It had already metastasized

into the bones. He had failed

chemotherapy. He also did well. And we

did a 3-week fast with him.

Interestingly enough, his oncologist was

kind of antagonistic cuz he was

concerned the fasting would make him too

weak for treatment. But, he came in, he

did the treatment, did well, went back

to the oncologist who said, "Wow, that's

really impressive. Why don't you go back

and do some more of that?" He came back,

we did another 39-day fast, and he was

able to get dramatic improvement. And

again, those those studies have been

published in peer-review journals. The

>> But, he didn't go into remission?

>> With lymphoma, uh it would be considered

remission, but it's not a cure. It's

just like you can't cure lymphoma any

more than you can cure obesity.

You can lose the weight and keep it off,

but you If you go back to doing the

things that cause it, it's coming back.

You can't cure high blood pressure. You

can normalize the pressure. I've got

people who've been normal pressure for

decades now. But, if they go back to

eating the greasy, fatty, slimy, salty,

processed food, it'll come back.

Because you're managing it. You're not

curing it. The whole concept of a cure

is a little bit of a misnomer. In

medicine, you know, cure just means

you're alive 5 years after treatment.

Doesn't mean that you've actually

resolved the underlying cause of the

condition.

>> Interesting.

And we have them 120 plates here, which

is how much food someone would be

passing up if they did a 40-day diet.

So, that's how many meals that they

would miss

on a 40-day water fast, which is a lot

of food.

Staggering when you see it.

>> Yeah, and it's a lot of work for the

body to digest that food. And when you

take that work away, those energies are

able to be diverted to dealing with some

of the accumulated problems that people

have built up, whether it's excess fat

and visceral fat, it's diabetes, it's

autoimmune diseases, where the body's

actually attacking itself. I don't know

if most people realize that, but in

autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid

arthritis, ulcerative colitis,

ankylosing spondylitis, these

conditions, it's actually your immune

system that's attacking your tissues.

And the theory is that a lot of that is

because you have the immune system being

compromised by gut leakage where people

have

leaky tight junctions in their

intestinal tract or absorbing materials

and then genetically vulnerable people

the immune system becomes

hyper reactive and begins to attack its

its own tissues. You know, if it attacks

your thyroid we call it Hashimoto's

thyroiditis. If it attacks your joints

you might call it rheumatoid or

osteoarthritis. Different names for

different inflammatory conditions all

triggered by

leaking of materials into the intestinal

tract. When you go on a fast first of

all you're not eating and so there's not

the inflammatory

oxidative damage and free radicals that

are causing the leaking to begin with.

And second of all the body's healing

processes are able to be accentuated and

so the gut leakage is able to heal.

After you heal the gut and go back to

eating diet that's not full of free

radicals, you're not smoking, you're not

drinking alcohol with all of the free

radicals from peroxidation of alcohol,

you're not eating high fat foods and and

particularly heated fat fat foods and

fried foods etc. There's not the

onslaught of oxidative damage and now

you can manage those conditions with a

whole plant food SOS free diet. Now that

doesn't mean they're cured. If they go

back to eating the other foods they're

going to flare up their condition. But

to the degree they're willing to eat

healthy they can manage their condition

without the medications often times that

are very powerful and have often

long-term side effects.

>> When someone does a a water fast with

you if they're doing a 40 day water

fast, do you make sure that they get

electrolytes and vitamins and other

things? Are there are there other things

that you have to give them?

>> No, we're just giving them water but we

are monitoring their their electrolytes

and their blood levels to make sure that

their reserves are being recycled

adequately and they're normal. If if for

example potassium gets below a certain

point or sodium gets below a certain

point then we go back into a refeeding

mode where we give them broths and

juices and other materials in order to

re

to refeed them. We don't allow them to

develop symptoms secondary to

deficiency. Now, what's interesting is

potassium, for example, normal potassium

might be 3.5.

Fasting tolerances would be 3.0. If it

goes below 3.0, then we're going to

we're going to terminate the fast. But

generally, people are so efficient at

recycling their nutrients during fasting

that they stay within normal limits

without us having to do premature

termination.

>> And when you finish a long fast, like a

40-day fast, what are the or even a

shorter fast, like a 5-day fast, what is

the protocol for

refeeding them?

>> Mhm.

>> What what what do you give them? What do

you avoid? What's the speed in which you

give them calories again?

>> They get a day of fresh fruit and

vegetable juices for every week of

fasting, more or less. So, they're going

to get about 600 calories of fresh fruit

and vegetable juices

if they had a 3-week fast for about 3

days.

>> What's the thinking here? Like, what's

the underlying thought?

>> Mhm. The idea is that we want to

introduce initially food without fiber,

so if there's any digestive challenges,

that's short-lived. Uh we want to

introduce food starting in the morning

rather than at night, so if there's any

challenges, it doesn't disrupt their

sleep. Uh we want to make sure that

they're rehydrating and getting some

glucose without necessarily overloading

their capacities.

Once they've acclimated to the juices,

which are relatively easy to absorb and

bring up blood sugars relatively

quickly, moving them out of the fasting

phase into more of a feeding phase, then

we'll introduce raw fruits and

vegetables, which introduce some fiber.

And then we'll introduce more

concentrated foods, like steamed and

starchy vegetables, until by the length

half the length of the fast refeeding,

they're back to a whole plant food SOS

free diet, the kind of diet that we want

them to sustain

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And what about healthy people?

Healthy people come to you as well and

do fasting. It's not just people that

have these sort of severe

health predicaments.

I think I'm pretty healthy. Is there a

reason or a benefit to someone like me

fasting?

>> You know, we did a study actually on

this very question about what happens to

healthy people that fast.

And although there's tremendous

improvements in sick people, it turns

out when you look at the cardiometabolic

risk factors, when you look at even

things like weight and uh percent body

fat and visceral fat on healthy people,

people that are within healthy limits,

there's additional improvement. Their

blood cholesterol drops even lower,

their blood pressures drop lower, their

percent fat drops even lower. In fact,

proportionally

the people that get the most benefit of

fasting are healthy people that are

doing it preventatively. But they tend

to need short fast, not long fast.

You're not necessarily taking a healthy

person doing a 40-day fast. They're

They're five to 10-day periods of time

rather than the very longer fast.

They're usually because there's a

condition that takes that long to

resolve. We want to fast as short as

possible, but long enough to resolve the

problem. If you come to me with blood

pressure that's 210 over 100, capped on

on five medications, you're likely to

need a longer fast than a person that's

140 over 90 without medication.

>> If I'm a healthy person, how frequently

and for what length should I be thinking

about fasting if at all?

>> I think you should be fasting every day

for

>> I'll introduce

>> 12 hours.

>> Okay.

>> And that, you know, we don't know what

the ideal is. That's one of the things

we're going to be doing in this in the

study is trying to figure that out. But

what we do in practice is we have people

fast once a year for a week. If they're

clinically stable, they don't have any

healing crisis, their numbers are all

good, that's it. We move on. And even

that week of fasting though has a

profound effect on healthy people. I

might mention though that most people

that think they're healthy, when you

actually objectively look at their

biomarkers, aren't as healthy as they

think. Many people are maintaining

higher visceral fat, higher inflammatory

markers, higher lipid levels than what

they probably ideally should be, even

though they're asymptomatic. They say

somewhere around 2 to 2.5% of people are

actually objectively measuring out as

healthy. Some studies say as much as 12%

depending on the standards that you're

using to define health.

>> So, speaking directly to the viewer now

who sat at home and there's a reason why

they clicked on this conversation. They

they found the subject matter in the

title of the thumbnail

somewhat compelling.

If you were speaking directly to the

different personas of people listening,

so you've got maybe someone who is

healthy, someone who is maybe got a

little bit of a weight on that they

might want to shift, someone that's got

specific diseases and has been given

diagnosis and maybe has given pills.

Going through these different personas

one at a time,

how would you prescribe water fasting to

them and what would you sort of

tell them the benefits for them would be

if we're thinking about these different

personas. So, starting with the the

person on the left side of the spectrum

who is

largely healthy

but is interested in maybe how it will

make them feel or whatever.

>> So, for the healthy person, the main

benefit that I see of fasting is it's a

forced period of rest and introspection.

You get a certain clearing of the

palate. We've actually done a study like

this. It's on our site where we looked

at the sensitivity to sugar, the

sensitivity to salt. It's actually

enhanced during fasting. And so, by

fasting once a year, people kind of

recalibrate their palate and it makes it

easier for them to make better choices.

Sometimes there's been some slipping and

sliding along the dietary regime as

people go along during the course of the

year. It reboots the gut microbiome. It

tends to

enhance cognitive capacities as well as

probably brain serotonin and dopamine

levels. It can affect people's mood

states and just how they feel about

themselves and the world around them.

It's obviously not as dramatic as when

you take a person that's in agonizing

pain or debility and you see those

dramatic changes.

>> What about then if I want to just lose

some weight? What protocol should I use

for water fasting and what kind of

results would I expect to see in what

time frame?

>> We never know exactly how long a

patient's going to fast until we see how

they respond to fasting because fasting

itself is as much diagnostic as it is

therapeutic. But usually we can get a

pretty good idea. Like for example, I

always like to try to get people as

close to their optimum weight as

possible. Whether it's with diet and

exercise or with fasting. We don't think

maintaining extra fat is a good thing.

We think for every pound of excess fat

you have on your body, there's all kinds

of downstream consequences.

And so if a person say for example 20 lb

overweight, they think I they feel best

at say 150 lb but they're 170 lb. We

know that they could it will take them

about 3 weeks to to lose that weight cuz

people lose an average of about a pound

a day.

So I wouldn't have any concern assuming

everything else looks okay fasting that

person for 3 weeks. I'd be concerned

about fasting them into an emaciated

state. I don't want to get them very

weak. I don't want to have them

debilitated. I don't want to get them

depleted. And so we're going to monitor

them carefully to make sure that we're

well within their their reserves. But

you know, a person that's that's a bit

overweight that has maybe their blood

pressure's a little bit higher, their

blood sugar's a little bit higher, maybe

they have some joint pain, maybe they

have some various symptoms. We want

those things to resolve. So we're going

to estimate how long do we think this

person's going to need to fast to get to

the point when they feed, they'll keep

getting healthier rather than sicker.

>> Can you explain these four graphs to me

here? There's some four graphs that come

from work you've done.

>> Okay, well this is outcome data that

comes from um

studies that we've published. And this

basically is looking at the percent body

weight change. And if you look at the

bottom graph, you'll notice it's over

time.

>> Yeah.

>> Okay. So we're looking at the percentage

body weight change during fasting and

then during refeeding it actually comes

down a little bit more, even though

people are re-alimenting, they're losing

fat, they're regaining water and muscle,

and then they're able to maintain that

percent body change. This is 65-day

follow-up.

>> So, on that for people that aren't

watching the video right now and are

just listening to audio, what what does

it essentially saying happens and in

what period of time with what protocol?

>> So, in this particular study, these

people lost about 10% of their body

weight over an average of 2 weeks of

fasting.

They refed for a week at the facility,

and then they were followed up 65 days

later. And at 65 days later, you'll

notice they'd maintained their total

body weight change and then just a

little bit more. And now they've been

back to eating and exercising.

In the next graph, the percent body

weight, this is the visceral fat mass.

>> And visceral fat again?

>> Visceral fat is the 10% of the fat that

makes up the fat that typically

accumulates around the belly and in the

organs. It's the fat that's

hypertrophic, hypermetabolic, hyper It

it produces inflammation, it acts like a

tumor.

>> So, there's two types of fat.

There's subcutaneous, which is on the

outside.

>> Right.

>> And then there's visceral, which is on

the inside. And the stuff on the inside

is the worst.

>> It's fat that wouldn't normally be

there. Here's the problem. You evolved

in an environment of scarcity. Storing

fat is so critical to survival in a

world of deficiency of or of depletion

that the body does everything it can to

store fat. Cuz the people that store fat

in a natural setting, they live to

reproduce.

In the modern world, it's become a

disadvantage because we live in this

very unnatural environment where you can

get dietary excess. And so, even though

body's designed for an environment of

deficiency, it's responding with that

genetic programming. And so, it stores

fat even though it's not healthful for

you. As far as the body's concerned,

spring might come late, the more fat you

store the better. And as a consequence,

that visceral fat is associated with

these diseases of dietary excess. In

fasting, the body preferentially

mobilizes that visceral fat. It gets rid

of it. Just like if you go on a fast and

have a breast tumor, you lose 10% of

your body fat. You don't necessarily

lose 10% of the tumor. You might lose

50% of the tumor. You might lose the

entire tumor cuz the body's has some

intelligence to it in terms of how it's

mobilizing these tissues. You can take a

person an animal for example and starve

it to death. Um and if you measure its

nervous system, you'll find the nervous

system isn't depleted. Even when it's

starved to death, it will preserve

those tissues in preference to the

the visceral fat or the fat tissues. And

so this graph is showing that visceral

fat not only comes down during fasting,

but it keeps coming down and it

continues to come down with refeeding.

And this particular graph here, this is

blood pressure. So again, blood pressure

comes down during fasting. It comes down

even lower with refeeding. And people

that are following diet and lifestyle

changes are able to maintain that

pressure without medication.

So if you look at our study, people that

start with stage three hypertension, so

they're 180 or higher systolic blood

pressure, they lost an average of 60

points

on systolic blood pressure not counting

the fact that the baselines were often

taken on medication.

Um and the final graph here that you've

got is percent in lean mass. So lean

mass also go down in fasting

>> Cuz your lean mass again is

>> Lean mass is your your fluids, your

muscle. Lean mass goes down, but then it

recovers during refeeding and

realimentation. And the percentage of

lean mass, which includes your muscle

mass, at six-week follow-up was actually

higher in those patients than it was at

baseline.

>> Are they exercising then?

>> During recovery they are, not during

fasting.

>> Okay.

And you mentioned PCOS earlier on when

we were talking about the implications

for women. Have you ever done any

studies or had patients come to your

fasting clinic that have symptoms of

PCOS?

>> Yes, we treat uh had, you know, dozens

and dozens of patients with polycystic

ovarian syndrome. And it's a condition

that responds consistently to fasting.

It also responds to diet and lifestyle

change, but I understand many of the

people that have made the diet changes

but are not been successful are then

referred to us for fasting. We always

want to try the diet first cuz a lot of

things resolve just by getting a person

on a good diet and exercise program.

>> And PCOS for people that don't know, I'm

sure a lot of men don't know about PCOS,

but some of them will because they might

have fertility problems with their

partner. My partner's been very public

that she has PCOS.

Um and she's found that the ketogenic

diet, removing sugar from her diet, has

had a profound impact on recalibrating

her menstrual cycle. Her menstrual cycle

was very um

inconsistent, irregular, could be up to

60 days or longer or not at all. And

then when she removed sugar from her

diet and um carbohydrates, it's now

perfect, right? So it's like every 28

whatever days it is. And so wondering

if, you know, there's lots of women that

are suffering with a variety of

different hormonal challenges or things

like PCOS,

if you have any case studies from your

clinic of that resetting their menstrual

cycles or, you know,

reversing the symptoms of PCOS.

>> Right. It's not uncommon for us to have

women that, for example, have their

plumbing's good in terms of their tubes

and whatnot, but they're having

difficulty initiating pregnancy. They

fast, they reboot, and sure enough

within a cycle or two, you know, they're

able to achieve pregnancy. And it's not

unusual to have people that have uh

disrupted uh dysmenorrhea, menorrhagia,

etc. Within usually not the very first

cycle, but the second cycle will

normalize uh function. I think the

reason for that is the hormones and

stuff that for the next cycle are

already kind of set up. And where you

see the change is often, you know, at

that 6-week follow-up.

>> So let's be clear because

if you fast, it is a form of stress on

the body, isn't it? From everything I

know about sort of evolution,

if you're fasting, your menstrual

cycle's probably going to stop if you're

doing an extended fast because your body

sends a signal to say, "Listen, we don't

have the resources in here to to give a

kid life, so we're going to shut down."

>> If you take yourself below optimum

weight or below optimum fat, yes, that's

true. You know, disruption of menstrual

cycle happens with excess weight loss of

any kind or rapid weight loss.

Um but for the patients that were

fasting, often times it's quite the

opposite. They're able to actually

normalize their hormonal cycle. And as I

mentioned, it may be the conversion of

estradiol to estriol because of

improvement in the gut microbiome that's

responsible for normalization of that

and other hormonal issues that maybe we

haven't even been able to measure yet.

>> Cuz your your body needs energy to do to

perform its menstrual cycle. That's it.

Is am I am I right in my thinking that

that

if the body senses you don't have the

energy to have a baby, it's going to

shut down your menstrual cycle because

having a baby would

>> I think if it doesn't have the reserves.

So, if you're in an

The thing is many patients though, even

though they're fasting, they aren't in a

depleted state. And so, you don't see

universal disruption of menstrual

function because people are fasting. Um

but, you know, athletes often times see

it when their percent body fat goes too

low, they will become amenorrheic.

>> Do you see when someone comes to your

clinic and does one of these extended

fasts that there's other areas of their

life that also improve that are

completely sort of like unrelated to

the

benefits from the fast. And I'm talking

about willpower here and their ability

to motivate themselves and be

disciplined and persistent and

>> There's I don't think there's any

question that those factors are

involved. You know, it's also just

education and fear. People think if they

get on a plane in New York and they flew

to California, they would die of

starvation or Colorado. They think the

pretzels that they ate saved their life.

And once people have fasted for 5 days

or 10 days or 40 days, the idea of of to

skip a meal doesn't seem quite so

terrifying. You know, if there's not

something that they that's healthfully

eating, they just skip the meal until

the next one. And they're not afraid of

the of the that they're going to die or

that they're going to enter starvation

or they're going to have depletion. A

lot of people have a lot of fear in

their head that's completely uh

illogical, unnecessary,

and harmful.

>> It's so true. When you tell me that

someone can actually fast for What's the

longest a person could fast for?

>> Well,

>> without severe consequences.

>> They say that a 70 kg male could fast

about 70 days, but the longest we fast

people is 40 days.

And what happens is you get beyond 40

days, everything gets a little bit more

delicate. You have to be a lot more

careful with electrolyte balance and

other things. And so, 40 days,

understand is only 1% of our patients.

The vast majority are fasting between 2

weeks and 4 weeks. So, it's you know,

it's 10 days or 14 days or 20 days.

That's where the big bell curve is. You

have a a small uh number of people that

need to fast longer than that.

>> And you see this as a medical

intervention. You don't see this as

something that these people should be

doing

on a frequent monthly basis. You see

this as a medical intervention for

people with specific issues,

predominantly.

>> I think that everybody should fast every

day for 12 hours. I think that

everybody, including healthy people,

would probably should at least consider

fasting once a year for a week. And that

anybody that has a condition where it's

appropriate to fast should fast however

long it takes to resolve the condition,

however frequently it takes to get well.

So, we do have some patients who are

fasting two or three times during a year

cuz they can't fast long enough the

first fast to to resolve the condition,

uh but you know, they don't have enough

reserves to be able to do, you know, a

longer fast. So, we will we will do it

periodically until the condition

resolves.

>> And what are the safety concerns with

water fasts?

>> Yeah, well, the biggest uh and most

obvious concerns are

orthostatic hypotension. When people are

used to having high blood pressure and

you lower their pressure, their brains

used to higher perfusion levels. So,

when you drop the pressure, they can get

dizzy and uh dizzy at first until they

get used to having normal blood

pressure. And you don't want people

falling over and fainting and, you know,

breaking something or having a problem.

Dehydration is an hormetic effect of

fasting and it's important part of

stimulating the healing crisis.

But, you also don't want to get somebody

so depleted that they get into, you

know, cardiac dysrhythmia or they have,

you know,

problems. And that's why we monitor

people twice a day and we make sure

that, you know, they maintain uh

balance. You know, one of the things we

did in Can Fasting Save Your Life is we

laid out all the protocols of fasting so

a person could really understand what's

going on in fasting, you know, what the

benefits are. But, we also wrote it so

that their physicians would stop

thinking they're crazy because they're

interested in doing something like that.

Cuz at first blush, this sounds like

kind of

crazy that you're going to have a person

do take nothing but water for a

prolonged period of time and somehow

that's going to be a good thing. But,

when you really look at the science and

you look at the experience we've had,

you found when it's done according to

protocol, it is a safe and it can be an

effective intervention in giving the

body a chance to heal itself.

>> What are the big misconceptions about

fasting that you encounter consistently?

>> Well, one thing is people think that

you're going to become depleted because

they don't understand the recycling

capacity of the body when fasting's done

properly.

And that they're going to deplete their

muscles and that the weight they lose in

fasting is immediately regained after

fasting. So, there's no, you know,

beneficial re-proportioning of the body

composition.

And they're driven by the fear uh and I

think instinctive fear that, you know,

we're designed to be intimately

concerned about getting enough to eat

because in the natural setting, that's a

constant biological imperative. You're

always struggling try to get enough to

eat. And because we live in a constant

state of deprivation in the natural

setting, the use of fasting was never

anything other than a survival tool,

some an adaptation the body could make

only under force, not by choice.

But it is interesting that every major

religion, the Jews, the Jains, the

Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians, the

Buddhist, all have a deep respect and

tradition about fasting.

There's a reason cuz it changes the way

you feel about yourself and the world

around you.

>> It's so linked to spiritual traditions

like meditation and clarity of mind and

spiritual experiences.

>> And I think because it is difficult to

do that, you know, some of the benefits

you mentioned earlier may be part of the

you know, part that are hard for us to

quantify.

>> Yeah.

What is the most important thing we

haven't talked about as it pertains to

fasting that we should have talked

about?

>> We haven't talked about the different

kinds of mechanisms which might be going

on in fasting. Uh that sometimes people

are interested. We've talked about

weight loss. You know, that that's kind

of an obvious one. If you don't eat,

you're going to lose weight. But there's

also a natriuretic effect. The body gets

rid of the excess sodium accumulated in

the body. Uh and that has a profound

effect cuz literally people will lose

several pounds of fluid a day early on

in fasting just because the body's been