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261 pages

English

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A journalist delves into the history, science, and practice of fasting, an ancient cure enjoying a dynamic resurgence.When should we eat, and when shouldn't we? The answers to these simple questions are not what you might expect. As Steve Hendricks shows in The Oldest Cure in the World, stop eating long enough, and you'll set in motion cellular repairs that can slow aging and prevent and reverse diseases like diabetes and hypertension. Fasting has improved the lives of people with epilepsy, asthma, and arthritis, and has even protected patients from the worst of chemotherapy's side effects. But for such an elegant and effective treatment, fasting has had a surprisingly long and fraught history. From the earliest days of humanity and the Greek fathers of medicine through Christianity's "fasting saints" and a nineteenth-century doctor whose stupendous forty-day fast on a New York City stage inaugurated the modern era of therapeutic fasting, Hendricks takes readers on a rich and comprehensive tour. Threaded throughout are Hendricks's own adventures in fasting, including a stay at a luxurious fasting clinic in Germany and in a more spartan one closer to home in Northern California. This is a playful, insightful, and persuasive exploration of our bodies and when we should-and should not-feed them.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	06 septembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781647000028
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1166€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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ALSO BY STEVE HENDRICKS
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial
The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country

Copyright 2022 Steve Hendricks
Cover 2022 Abrams
Published in 2022 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933711
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4847-9 eISBN: 978-1-64700-002-8
The medical information contained in this book is not intended as a substitute for the advice of skilled medical practitioners. The publisher and author accept no responsibility for any liability, loss or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly from the use and application of any of the contents of this publication.
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.
Abrams Press is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
For Jennifer, naturally
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Criminal Quackery
Fasting for a cure
CHAPTER 1
Tanner s Folly
The birth of modern fasting
CHAPTER 2
I forget I have four limbs
Prehistory and the ancient East
CHAPTER 3
Christ s Athletes
The ancient West
CHAPTER 4
A Lesser Me
I fast to slim
CHAPTER 5
The most complicated cage
The Middle Ages and Renaissance
CHAPTER 6
This cheap, simple, and vulgar remedy
American doctors find the lost cure
CHAPTER 7
Arresting My Decline
I fast to heal
CHAPTER 8
Refuse to be an invalid!
Fasting blooms in America
CHAPTER 9
Truth though the heavens fall
America s foremost fasting doctor
CHAPTER 10
A Gentle Deprivation, 1
I fast at a German clinic
CHAPTER 11
What s considered too difficult?
The starts and stops of fasting research
CHAPTER 12
A crazy idea with no relevance
Fasting against cancer
CHAPTER 13
A Gentle Deprivation, 2
My German fast, continued
CHAPTER 14
What the Soviets Knew
The psychotherapeutic fast
CHAPTER 15
A Wine Country Abstention, 1
I fast at a California clinic
CHAPTER 16
You Are When You Eat
The how of time-restricted eating
CHAPTER 17
A Wine Country Abstention, 2
My California fast, continued
EPILOGUE
Moral Malpractice
Toward a future less benighted
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCES ON DIET
NOTES
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
In the sciences, that which has been handed down or taught at the universities is also looked upon as property. And if anyone advances anything new which contradicts, perhaps threatens to overturn, the creed which we have for years repeated, and have handed down to others, all passions are raised against him, and every effort is made to crush him. People resist with all their might; they act as if they neither heard nor could comprehend; they speak of the new view with contempt, as if it were not worth the trouble of even so much as an investigation or a regard, and thus a new truth may wait a long time before it can make its way.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
PROLOGUE
CRIMINAL QUACKERY
Ten years before she found the lump in her groin, cancer took Ivonne Vielman s father. It started in his lungs, although he had never smoked, and chewed through his body with such swiftness that by the time it was diagnosed there was nothing to be done. He died at fifty-seven. In the decade since, Vielman-a mother, wife, and corporate secretary, aged forty-two and living on the exurban fringe of San Francisco-had harbored a barely suppressed dread that cancer would someday come for her too. The knot in her groin felt like her fear made manifest. Big as a golf ball and nearly as hard as one, it must have been fast growing because she hadn t noticed it the last time she massaged the area, which she had done regularly after a bladder surgery left the spot tender. Since her father s death, the mere mention of cancer had disquieted her, and she tried to push the word from her mind in the days she waited to see her doctor, but it got a toehold in her thoughts and wouldn t be budged.
The doctor, a by-the-numbers sort whom we might call Hughes, felt the node and asked whether anyone in Vielman s family had had a lump before. Vielman barely got the story about her father out before Hughes picked up a phone and told someone on the other end that she had a patient who needed emergency CT scans-today.
The next day Vielman went back to Hughes s office for the results, her husband along for support. The doctor said the scans showed tumors on both sides of her groin and in her right armpit, and they hadn t been there when she was scanned prior to the bladder surgery two years earlier. There was little doubt they were cancerous, and she referred Vielman to an oncologist. Oncologist was another word whose mention unnerved Vielman, four syllables that struck her momentarily dumb. But she composed herself, turned to her husband, and said with as level a voice as she could manage, We are going to take care of this. I ll be fine.
Then she burst into tears.
The oncologist, whom I ll call Greenfield, biopsied one of Vielman s tumors and told her there was no doubt it was follicular lymphoma, a cancer that attacks the white blood cells of the lymphatic system, the network of vessels and organs whose dual duty is to fight disease and rid the body of waste. Vielman s tumors were in her lymph nodes, and the diagnosis contained good news and bad news. The bad news was that because the lymphoma was in both the upper and lower parts of Vielman s torso and on both the left and right sides, it had to be considered advanced, stage III out of IV. Worse, there was no cure. The good news was follicular lymphoma grew very slowly. Four out of five people at Vielman s stage were still alive at least a decade after diagnosis, and a sizable number lived two decades or more. Greenfield said she could reasonably hope for another twenty years. It was a death sentence but one that carried a long stay of execution.
Greenfield didn t recommend treatment, not yet anyway. For the moment, chemotherapy and radiation were poor options because they could only slow the cancer, and since it was slow growing already, the toxic side effects of the treatment would far outweigh the modest potential for benefit. Once matters grew dire, such therapies might make sense, but for now he suggested they simply monitor the cancer with checkups every three months. There was, he said, nothing more to do.
* * *
Vielman was of another mind. A few years before her diagnosis, her fear of dying young like her father had driven her to look for ways to live more healthily, and her search led her to an odd little clinic in Santa Rosa, just ninety minutes up the road from her home. In lectures she watched online, doctors from the clinic argued that many of the chronic diseases that had become epidemic in the developed world-type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, obesity-were caused by eating the standard American diet and could frequently be reversed simply by eating a healthier diet of minimally processed plants. For those wishing to speed up the healing process, another treatment usually helped: prolonged fasting. The doctors had some science to back their claims. In one study they published in a peer-reviewed journal, 154 of 174 patients with high blood pressure who fasted for a week and a half on nothing but water normalized their blood pressure. Doctors elsewhere were talking about managing hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes-incurable, lifelong conditions, to hear most doctors tell it-but the doctors at the TrueNorth Health Center were talking about getting rid of those disorders for good.
In 2010, four years before her cancer diagnosis, Vielman had driven to TrueNorth and consulted with Dr. Michael Klaper, one of the fathers of the modern vegan-health movement. She didn t think she needed to fast, but Klaper s suggestion to eat more plants made sense to her, and she went home and began eliminating meat, dairy, and eggs from her family s diet. She didn t go as far as Klaper and colleagues advocated-the TrueNorth diet was also free of salt, oil, sugar, and processed foods-but even with a lesser veganism, for the first time in a long time Vielman stopped gaining weight and then started losing a few of the 180 pounds she had packed onto her five feet, five inches. She felt more energetic and thought she was on the right track until cancer came calling. When she walked out of Dr. Greenfield s oncology clinic in 2014, she had no doubt what she was going to do: she was going back to TrueNorth to fast.
On a gloriously sunny Monday in November she presented herself, suitcase in hand, at the doorstep of the clinic, a former apartment block on a nondescript thoroughfare in a not especially distinguished precinct of Santa Rosa. She planned a fast of fourteen days, which seemed dauntingly long but in fact proved rather easy, even buoying. Toward the end of her second week, she got to chatting with another patient who said her own fast of several weeks had healed a traumatic head injury. The clinic was swirling with stories like hers, fantastic-seeming tales of rheumatoid arthritis and lupus and colitis either going into remission or being greatly lessened with fasting. A theme of the stories was that the people who healed most thoroughly usually fasted the longest. The woman with the head injury, for instance, said she hadn t begun to get well until the third week of her fast. Vielman thought of her two sons at home who, she would later write,