Dr. Jason Fung did an excellent job of destroying the main myths behind the scare tactics people use to discredit fasting. Are they now creating new ones? “Excessive Autophagy”. I see where this is going. Scare people into believing that autophagy attacks fat, muscles, organs, central nervous system, the brain and heart all at the same time and they will never try fasting to supercharge it. Sorry, but the order in which autophagy breaks down tissues to sustain the body were discovered and documented over 100 years ago. Many animals were fasted and autopsied at various stages of aninition even up to death to make these facts known and it is a shame to disregard their sacrifice in an effort to feign ignorance. Humans were also autopsied that through no fault of their own died as a result of some unfortunate incident that either included nothing to eat or could no longer digest food before the invention of intravenous feeding. President James Garfield is an example of one of these unfortunate souls. He was gravely wounded and died 79 days later of starvation having never awakened from a coma.
I was looking for any research into using autophagy to expedite stroke recovery. Dr. Mark Mattson who is head of neurology at both John Hopkins University Hospital and the National Institutes on Aging has done research into healing brain trauma both damage from impact and stroke in mice and found that it was indeed beneficial. During this search I did find a study that demonstrated help for human brain trauma, but cautioned by expressing a fear of autophagy going too far and dissolving good healthy brain cells using the term “excessive” autophagy. My BS alert went off as I recalled the efforts of so many to thoroughly and carefully document the discretionary brilliance of autophagy as it breaks down the body to keep it alive. In the following documents you will find a myriad of adjectives ahead of the word autophagy to describe its multifaceted functionality. As they peel the autophagy onion to reveal its inner workings will they run out of descriptive words that will confuse and clutter this simple healing miracle that has always been with us. Medical history says, “yes”.
These research papers use the term “excessive” autophagy:
https://www.jscimedcentral.com/NeurologicalDisorders/neurologicaldisorders-4-1116.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4146291/
The following information came from Dr. Herbert Shelton’s book Fasting and Sunbathing published in 1934 with several reprints up to 1950.
http://loveandtruth.net/shelton-fasting.html
The percentages below are From Chapter 7: http://loveandtruth.net/shelton-fasting.html#ch7
From the experience of some researchers:
Fat 91% Spleen 63%
Muscle 30% Blood 17%
Liver 56% Nerves ???
From actual animal studies by Charles Chossat (1796-1875) who was a 19th century French scientist:
Fat 93% Nerves 2%
Muscles 43% Pancreas 64%
Liver 52% Spleen 70%
Blood 75%
Clearly, from these actual experiments autophagy is brilliant in breaking down sustenance to keep the body alive by dissolving the least important tissues first with the brain and nervous system the very last to be compromised. Isn’t it nice that God worked all this out for us?
So when do we need to stop fasting before we do unintended damage to our bodies? That’s another thing we don’t need to worry about. The body tells us in an unmistakable way that we need to start eating again else our bodies transition from fasting to starvation. That will be the subject of my next post. “Where Does Fasting Stop and Starvation Begin”.
