When I took pathology in Chiropractic school it was taught by a gentleman from India. He was a pathology professor at USC and was moonlighting by teaching at our little school. His cultural viewpoint provided a valuable perspective on understanding disease that was not available from the Western perspective. He taught that all the thousands of diseases we had to study really came down to only three physiologic problems – excess, confusion, and deficiency. All the named diseases are really just names for what specific tissue type one of these three problems is occurring within and what the cause of this imbalance is.
Throughout history the primary cause of disease has been nutritional deficiency and infections. Infections fall under the excess category because of the inflammation they cause. Disease from confusions in the body was rare in our history, but would occur from certain environmental poisons. It has only been over the last 100 years or so that we have had diseases caused by nutritional excess, yet at this point it is these diseases that are the most likely to kill us. These are the diseases of modern civilization and include such favorites as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, kidney disease, strokes, lung disease, and liver disease. In fact of the top ten killer diseases in this country, only two are from infections – pneumonia and septicemia.
This is a very different situation from 100 years ago. An interesting article I read a couple weeks ago about the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 pointed out how 47,000 Japanese died in the fighting while 27,000 died of thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency from eating polished rice. The polished rice had been used as an enticement to get villagers to enlist as soldiers because polished rice was considered a rich person’s food. The poor had to eat the sticky unpolished rice. Unfortunately when you polish off the outer hull of the rice grain, you eliminate all the vitamin B1. The new recruits would stuff themselves on this rich persons delicacy and eat nothing else. In short order they developed beriberi – thiamine deficiency disease.
Modern science has identified the food factors vital to staying alive and so in this country we don’t see the issues with deficiency diseases like we used to. There are still many nutritional deficiencies, but not the obvious killers there were a hundred years ago. No, now we have the exact opposite problem. Modern disease is driven by the consumption of too much – too much food in general, and too much consumption of toxic substances we pretend are food. We also take in way too much stuff that is completely foreign to our carefully balanced chemistry in the form of petrochemicals – plastics, medicines, food additives, air born pollutants, and chemicals in our water supply. Our bodies are bombarded with too much, and we don’t know how to handle it, so we get sick.
If you over fill a glass of water, what do you do? You dump some of the water out. How can we do that with our body? We have overfilled our bodies with excess calories and poisons. How do we pour out the excess so we won’t get sick? It would be a good idea to not put the excess into our bodies in the first place. It is also an excellent idea to stop putting more excess in on top of the excess we already have. So eating clean and lean is a very important step to regaining or keeping our health. But how do we get rid of what has already been stored in our body?
This is the challenge for healthcare providers today. Everyone is obsessed with getting rid of the stored excess calories, otherwise known as fat. We have a massive weight loss industry in this country, but excess weight is just the tip of the iceberg. How do we get rid of the poisons stored in our bodies, the junk damaged proteins clogging up our brains, or the wrong structural materials we used to make every cell in our body? It is not like we can unscrew our belly buttons and drain out the bad stuff like the old oil in our car. Every cell in our body has some degree of poisoning and structural damage created by our modern food supply, water supply, and the very air we breathe.
No, there will never be a pill we can take to get rid of this problem. You can’t add more to a problem and make it less. If your garage is overflowing with trash, the only way to get rid of that trash is to start hauling it out a bit at a time until it is gone. If the trash was toxic you will have to tear out damaged parts of your garage and build new replacement parts. Your body is no different.
For years now I have been writing about stopping the poisons going into our bodies. Not just eating clean, but stopping the chemical barrage we are exposed to from household products, water supply, and the air we breathe. However, stopping the daily intake of poisons will not get rid of the poisons we have already dumped into the nooks and crannies of our body. Our liver tries to eliminate some of those poisons, but it is over burdened with the daily food processing needs to have much time to do this. Besides, in a normal fed state, the body does not release these poisons from where they have been stored.
That last sentence carries the key to this problem – “in a normal fed state.” The body has processes and methods built in for removing poisons when it is not in a normal fed state. These processes are turned on when we have not been fed for a few days. These processes turn on when we fast from food.
I have written about intermittent fasting for activating the liver to spend more time doing its job of poison removal, and that is a good first step in cleaning out the trash in our bodies, but this is not the same thing as what happens during real fasting – fasting for 3 to 40+ days. Fasting for 16 to 18 hours allows the liver to better clean out the blood, but it does not initiate what is known as autophagy. Autophagy literally means “self eating.” Autophagy is how you clean out the trash for real, because most of the trash has become stored inside various tissues in our body. The only way to get rid of the trash is to break down these poisoned cells and replace them with new ones. This is how the body renews itself naturally, but we have messed up this process by never letting our bodies go into the natural fasting state. We consume all the time. We never stop.
Throughout history fasting has been the most universally recognized method for improving health. Fasting triggers self renewal. It does not work for problems arising out of deficiency like malnutrition or vitamin deficiencies. Generally it is not helpful for infections.
But for the onslaught of diseases of excess, the so called diseases of modern life, it is the perfect remedy. The remedy for too much is less. This is the ultimate in obvious, and yet we refuse to see it. We are convinced that the remedy to everything is more of something. The idea of abstaining as a means to resolving issues of too much never crosses our minds.
The science of fasting is deep and complex, but the practice is the ultimate in simplicity – don’t eat. Drink lots of pure clean water and don’t eat. It sounds outrageous, but it is very doable. Throughout my 20’s and 30’s I did a lot of fasting. I fasted every Thursday night to Saturday morning as a religious discipline. I also fasted for two weeks a year on water only, and would do a few five day fasts here and there during the year. I slowed down with the water fasting in my 40’s, and now it has been years since I have done a water fast, preferring a green fast instead. I have begun
thinking that pure water fasting may be necessary for me once again, as my green fasting is not cleaning me out well enough to keep aging at bay as much as possible. I am experimenting on myself to see if there is a benefit to water fasting over green fasting. I just finished a week of water fasting preceded by a week of green fasting. I took a ton of blood work before starting and again yesterday. I am awaiting the results. I do see a big difference in how I feel and water loss with the water fasting that I did not get with the green fasting.
In the mean time this article is to introduce you to the concept of fasting as the remedy to the illnesses of modern life. Of course there is much more to the subject, but this is just an introduction.