Fasting and Eating for Health (11 page)

When we contract a viral infection and lose our appetites, nature is telling us to fast. It is a means the body has of powerfully exciting white blood cell activity and releasing more immune system modulators, such as interferon, thus enabling the body to more quickly and effectively recover.

The best way to guard against nutritional excesses, while still maintaining optimal assimilation of all essential nutrients, is to consume an abundance of natural plant products that are rich in vitamins and minerals. At the same time one must avoid empty-calorie, processed foods, fats, refined carbohydrates, and animal products, which are high in fat and protein and deficient in the nutrients that are most protective to our system.

In the last thousand years, poor societies with constant low caloric intake have had a monotonous, sometimes nutrient-deficient diet, while prosperous, well-nourished societies have blatantly over consumed calories, fat, and protein. Fortunately, today's modern transportation and refrigeration methods allow us to have an assortment of fresh fruits and vegetables year round, affording us an opportunity to practice a nutrient-rich diet low in fat and empty calories. This has been difficult to achieve in the past. We should take advantage of this opportunity.

Fasting Enhances Immune Responsiveness

Deficiency of nutrients can occur from the consumption of an insufficient diet over a prolonged period of time. Much of our population is indeed deficient in essential plant-derived nutrients because of their overconsumption of fat, protein, and. refined carbohydrate. Chronic exposure of experimental animals to diets severely deficient in calories or essential nutrients results in compromised cellular immunity. By contrast, short-term fasting followed by controlled caloric restriction without malnutrition greatly increases longevity and enhances immune responsiveness.

As early as 1911, researchers demonstrated that restricting the diets of animals greatly improved their disease resistance and markedly increased longevity14,15 as long as the restricted diet was not deficient in vitamins or minerals. Subsequent research has shown that underfeeding reduces the development of both spontaneous and induced tumors in rodents. Specifically, underfeeding enhances cell-mediated immune function and prevents the decrease in immune function associated with aging.

In nonobese humans the immunological response to caloric restriction and weight loss has been studied under conditions of malnutrition, anorexia 59

nervosa, and voluntary fasting. The effect on immune function is marked.

Severe chronic malnutrition results in suppression of immune function and increased infections. Anorexia nervosa patients, if consuming very few calories, develop significant reductions in cellular immunity.16,17 However, no impairment of immunity is seen until the patients become severely emaciated.18,19

In Dr. Anton Keys's classic study of the biology of human starvation, healthy volunteers who fasted repeatedly had a decreased incidence of infection.20 More recently researchers evaluated the immune competence of patients before and after a 14-day fast and noted enhancement in serum immunoglobulin levels, skin testing response, and the bacteriocidal capacity of monocytes and natural killer T cell activity. These researchers draw a parallel between their findings and the enhanced immune responses seen in experimental animals following fasting.21

Fasting is very different from chronic malnutrition. Deficiency disease does not occur as a result of the fast. Rather than suppressing immunity, which is what happens in cases of long-term malnutrition and anorexia, fasting actually does the opposite; it normalizes and enhances immune function.

Our Bodies Follow the Law of Cause and Effect
The body has certain needs. It operates according to strict law and order, not at random. If the laws that govern the body are broken, the body will naturally begin to malfunction and break down. This is really another way of describing what we call disease.

The opposite is health. If you provide the causes of outstanding health, you get outstanding health. If you provide the causes of disease, you get disease.

Every level of health, which extends on a spectrum from optimal health and vitality to the disease states of chronic illness, is directly related to and governed by the law of cause and effect.

The general population is bombarded by health information generated by the health profession, drug companies, and food manufacturers, whose intention is to maintain the status quo. Unfortunately, the average consumer can become more confused than ever. The holistic practitioners, the alternative and complementary physician groups, and the suppliers of vitamins and other natural remedies and treatments add to the giant net of confusion. Everyone claims to have the magic cure. But the sobering facts are undeniable: cure doesn't really exist, so long as the cause is permitted to continue unchecked.

In reality, cure occurs only when the body has rid itself of disease-causing factors and has had a chance to recuperate from their ill effects. What we commonly refer to as being cured is usually the diminishing of symptoms through pharmacology or the removal of diseased tissue through surgery. This is always a short-term solution, does not leave the body in better shape, and sets the body up for a reoccurrence of the same set of symptoms or, in the case of surgery, affliction at a future date elsewhere in the body. The cause, not identified and removed, does not allow the body the chance to heal itself.

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Healing by means that do not require changing personal habits and taking more responsibility, though always appealing, will commonly fail. Daily, I witness the failure of this approach, representative of the failure of modem medicine.

True recovery that does not increase one's later risk of serious illness can result only from positive steps that remove stress from the body. This requires significant personal responsibility and dedication to achieving wellness.

Sometimes people really must undertake a fast to recover. Through fasting, individuals are allowed to catch up on elimination of retained waste, thus raising themselves to new levels of superior health. Though most people would rather take pills, potions, and drinks, they often do not make an adequate recovery without the powerful detoxification effect of a total fast.

We all have our inherited weaknesses; genetics always plays a role in the body's form and function. Often this genetic influence determines how disease will express itself as cumulative stresses expose the weakest links in the body's structure. However, these inherited flaws rarely would be given the chance to express themselves if not for disease-causing influences. Improper lifestyle and primarily improper dietary habits are responsible for the majority of chronic diseases, as well as being the major causes of death in our country.

When individuals make aggressive positive changes in their diet, the results can be easily illustrated.

As a physician, it is immensely rewarding to watch people recover from serious disease, as well as routine maladies ranging from obesity to the common cold, through fasting. This is especially true for me since I have witnessed the failure of so many current medical treatments for serious chronic diseases. Medical treatments can be very effective in the short term, but because they do not address the cause of the disease, the person's condition gradually deteriorates.

The laws of nature will never change: it always has been and always will be more effective to remove cause and allow the body's self-reparative powers to have their way than to try to add treatments while cause continues unchecked.

Sleep and Fasting Are the Natural Restorers
Therapeutic fasting can be compared to the recuperative therapy we rely on every night when we sleep in order to charge the body for the next day. Excess stresses, whether from excess consumption of substances or from stressful physical and mental activities, impose negative biological effects on the body.

Recuperation through sleep is responsible for rebuilding and preparing the body to handle the increasing demands. Rest and sleep enable the body to recover from the effects of these waking stresses, because the body can concentrate its repair efforts most effectively at this time when fewer demands are placed upon it.

Recuperation takes time, sometimes more time and effort than people recognize. The goal of fasting is to allow time to provide extended physiological 61

rest for the purposes of catching up with recuperative needs generated from the vicious cycle of overactivity, overstimulation, and dietary indiscretions.

If This Diet Is So Healthy, Why Do I Feel So Sick?

If a person truly wants to improve health and rid himself or herself of chronic complaints, it is necessary to recuperate and detoxify. To heal and detoxify, a natural-food, plant-based diet must be followed because natural plant foods not only supply the body with essential nutritive elements needed for optimal function, but also are easy on our organs of digestion and elimination. This diet often does not make a person feel better immediately. Sometimes people initially feel worse when they make positive changes to improve their health.

Before the dietary changes, the digestive tract becomes adjusted to a drier, low-fiber, high-salt diet. After making large changes in one's eating habits, it can take time for the peristaltic waves to adjust themselves to the heavier, higher-fiber, higher-water content stool, which requires less internal pressure to move along. This may temporarily cause some increased gas and diarrhea, which will improve with time.

Withdrawal symptoms from a prior unhealthy diet arc common. Fatigue, headaches, diarrhea, coated tongue, or even a skin rash may occur or intensify at first. These symptoms reflect detoxification and rarely last longer than two weeks.

Occasionally individuals misinterpret detoxification symptoms and think the diet is not working for them, or is lacking in some essential element.

Sometimes because they are so misinformed by other physicians, they believe these symptoms to be hypoglycemia or a yeast overgrowth on their tongue.

Invariably, though, when they persevere, they soon report that their troubling symptoms have resolved, they feel more energetic, have no more indigestion, and feel and look better than ever before.

We Can Extend Our Productive Lives

People aren't aware that our excessive consumption of dietary fat is a modern phenomenon. Before the Civil War in this country there is hardly any mention of heart attacks in medical books because they were so rare. But now heart attacks are our leading cause of death for both men and women.

Years ago, the rich foods that people consume today were simply unavailable and unaffordable. In the Middle Ages, for example, the kings and queens got fat, and developed gout, diabetes, arthritis, and heart disease, while peasants living in the fields never knew of these afflictions.

The incidence of many chronic diseases and cancers has been increasing steadily in this century. Many years ago a high infant mortality rate, including birth-related deaths, and a higher childhood mortality rate affected statistics concerning life spans. Because infant and early childhood mortality rates were added into the formula, it showed that average Americans lived shorter lives 62

than they do today.

Thanks primarily to better sanitation, modern plumbing with flushing toilets, and refrigeration, life-threatening infectious diseases became less prevalent earlier in this century. This was not due to the advent of antibiotics or vaccinations; this tremendous decline in infections occurred many years before these medicines were introduced.

Many mortality studies have been done on the Seventh-Day Adventists, a conservative Christian group that provides dietary and life style advice to its members. They are prohibited from using tobacco, alcohol, and pork, and are discouraged from consuming meats, fish, eggs, and caffeine-containing beverages. Because the latter items are only discouraged and not prohibited, there is a wide range of consumption of these items. For example, some Adventists never eat meat or eggs, whereas others consume them daily.

Furthermore, about one-half join the church as adults and, before converting, these Adventists may have been exposed to a diet high in animal products for most of their lives. If we look at multiple scientific investigations done on this group, we find the following:

1. As a whole, male Adventists live an average of 8.9 years longer than the rest of (nonsmoking) America, and Adventist women 7.5 years longer (this includes both vegetarian and nonvegetarian Adventists).

Vegetarian Adventists live the longest in proportion to the time they had been oh a vegetarian diet.22 If we extrapolate the results to include those on a vegetarian diet for more than half their lives, more than 13 years are added to the life span, compared to the average nonsmoking American.

2. Egg and meat consumption is strongly associated with all causes of mortality. Dairy product and milk consumption is associated with prostate cancer. The earlier in life that Adventists became vegetarians, the lower their risk of coronary heart disease.23 These findings are consistent with the findings of numerous epidemiologic investigations, including those done on dairy products and their relation to prostate cancer.24

3. All-cause mortality shows a significant negative association with green salad consumption, meaning the more leafy green vegetables consumed in the diet, the longer the life span.25 This confirms the importance of raw, natural plant foods, the loss of important factors with cooking, and the protective effect of all of the health-giving nutrients they contain.

The conclusion one must make is that animal food consumption is more of a risk factor for an early death than even cigarette smoking. Of course, I am strongly against smoking, but a smoking, lifetime vegetarian probably has a better chance to reach 75 years of age than a nonsmoking, lifetime meat eater.

The opportunity is ours: we cannot rely on modern medicine to give us health and long life. Good health is our own responsibility, and only through accurate information can we protect ourselves and our families.