From :http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/well-good/inspire-me/67744102/fasting-could-help-us-cope-with-a-number-of-diseases
We usually think of
fasting as a weight loss measure, but advocates say it has therapeutic benefits
too.
Francoise Wilhelmi de
Toledo combines a passion for her subject with a precision one would expect of
a doctor and scientist with a raft of publications to her name.
"Real medicine is
lifestyle. It is how we live," she says. "Drugs, any drugs, must be
complementary to that."
As medical director of
the renowned Buchinger Wilhelmi Clinic in Germany, she is an authority on
therapeutic fasting and responsible at least in part for the current interest
in its role in the management of chronic diseases including obesity, diabetes,
high blood pressure, high cholesterol and cancer. And, of course, as a means of
weight control made popular by the diet du jour, the 5:2.
The capacity to fast derives from periods when
our ancestors ate more than they needed and built up fat reserves for winter
when access to food was reduced.
Fasting – as part of a
lifestyle – is undoubtedly a good thing, she says, but her focus is on making
it part of the armamentarium available to doctors coping with an epidemic of
lifestyle diseases in the West that threaten to cripple healthcare
systems.
She says there is
strong evidence gathered over many decades to show how it can lower blood
pressure, reduce excess fat and glucose in the blood, modulate the immune
system, increase the effect of the mood and sleep-regulating neuro-transmitter
serotonin, boost protein repair, and reduce inflammation.
Fasting has been
likened to a "reset" button that returns the human body to its –
healthy – factory settings. A study published last year in the United States,
drawing on animal and human trials, concluded that three days of fasting can
rejuvenate the immune system, triggering the production of new white blood
cells. Other studies show that fasting can enable healthy cells to endure
better the toxic impact of chemotherapy while cancer cells die more rapidly. It
is a fascinating area of research that draws on the body's evolutionary
adaptation.
"Human beings are
not programmed for abundance," de Toledo says. "Humans are programmed
for loss." The capacity to fast derives from periods when our ancestors
ate more than they needed and built up fat reserves and surplus nutrients, such
as vitamins and minerals, in summer and autumn.
In winter and spring,
when access to food was much reduced, they endured periods of fasting in which
their metabolism switched automatically from "external nutrition to
nutrition taken from fat reserves".
In the absence of
carbohydrates as a source of energy (glucose) for the cells, fatty acids, from
fat supplies, were broken down in the liver to produce molecules known as
ketone bodies which were used for fuel instead.
Of course we retain
this ability to fast and exist on a ketogenic diet but rarely use it in the
affluent West because food shortages are largely unknown. Nor is there much
incentive to invest in fasting research, despite preliminary evidence that it
may help in Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's. In Russia, there
is a vast, largely unexplored archive built up by a psychiatrist Dr Yuri
Nikolayev, who used fasting or "the hunger cure" to treat a range of
mental disorders.
This lack of interest
frustrates de Toledo.
"Take type 2
diabetes," she says. "This is a disease we know that we can cure
[through fasting]. But there is an industry that sells all these drugs and
devices. We have a type of medicine [in fasting] that is highly successful but
there is no return on investment."
It was as a
17-year-old in Geneva that de Toledo embarked on her first fast with the aid of
a book, because she "was at odds with my weight and wanted to match the
ideal of the slim beauty". She says it was a revelation, that she felt
"buoyant, sometimes euphoric" while fasting.
She says people who
turn to fasting include some seeking help for intractable health problems while
for others weight loss is the primary goal. Many, however, are seeking respite
from stress of work in the "spiritual dimension of fasting" that de
Toledo claims is one of its most beneficial side effects.
She still fasts twice
a year, during a 12-day annual retreat, and to counteract a severe seasonal
allergy to birch pollen. She says suspicion and cynicism about fasting is still
rife among doctors and nutritionists and she is determined to challenge it. "We
want to document and show that fasting is therapeutically efficient, safe and
enjoyable," she says.
The science, it would
seem, is increasingly on her side.
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