CHAPTER X
Professor Morgulis says: "Laboratory as well as clinical experience corroborates the rejuvenating effects of inanition. If it is not too pro-longed it is distinctly beneficent and may be used in overcoming som-nolence and lassitude as well as in improving the fundamental organic functions (circulation, respiration), muscular strength, or the acuity of the senses." These improvements are typical of the improvements which occur, both in structure and function throughout the body when one fasts.
The medical profession and the public have been slow in recognizing the benefits to be derived from judicious fasting. Even today there are few doctors of any and all of the rival schools of "healing" who under-stand fasting and who are qualified to properly conduct a fast. Few
"natural therapists" and almost no medical men are sufficiently ac-quainted with fasting to properly carry one through it. Practically all of them insist on supplementing the fast and "aiding nature" with their various stimulating and suppressive measures. Many of the evils attrib-uted to fasting are due to these measures and are common in patients treated by such methods, but who have not fasted. The other "evils of fasting" are imaginary evils.
PHYSIOLOGICAL REST
An important object secured by the fast is the rest of the organs of the body. The overworking of the physiological functions, which results from over-eating, weakens and impairs them. Fasting reverses this and permits them to recuperate. During the rest thus afforded, these organs are enabled to repair their damaged structures and restore their fagging energies, thus they are prepared for renewed function and are given a new lease on life. A fast is to the organs of the body what a night of restful repose is to the tired laborer.
Digestion and assimilation of food are a tax on the vital powers of the organism and increase the work of the stomach, liver, intestines, heart, lungs, kidneys, glands, etc. The more food eaten the more work these already overworked organs are called upon to perform. How can increasing the work of the organs help the sick? If feeding does not prevent sickness how may overfeeding restore health?
That fasting is a period of physiological rest was emphasized by all
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the early Hygienists—Jennings, Graham, Trail, etc. Nichols (1881) says: "In fevers and all inflammatory diseases fasting . . . is a matter of the first importance. As a rule, nature herself points out this remedy.
When animals have any malady, they stop eating. Loss of appetite is a symptom of disease, and it points also to the mode of cure.... Not only must the stomach have rest, but all the organs of nutrition, and the nerves which produce their action. When we stop food in fevers and inflammations, we diminish the volume of the blood and relieve the action of the heart; and by relieving the system of the labor of digestion and assimilation, we allow the nervous force to expend itself in recupera-tive action . . . a cold is a sort of fever and there is no better remedy for a cold than abstinence from food." After pointing out that the loss of appetite, seen in all acute diseases and common in chronic disease, is
"the voice of nature forbidding us to eat," and lamenting the fact that physicians and nurses disregard this "voice of nature" and force food down the throats of "disgusted patients," Nichols says, "rest for the stomach, the liver, all the organs of the nutritive system, may be the one thing needful. It is the only rest we will not permit... In certain states of disease, where the organs of digestion are weakened and disordered, the best beginning of a cure may be total abstinence from all kinds of food. There is no cure like it. If the stomach cannot digest, the best way is to give it a rest. It is the one thing which it needs."
Dewey referred to fasting as the "rest cure," and said that rest "is not to do any of the curing (healing) any more than it heals the broken bone or the wound; it is only going to furnish the condition for cure." Here he was speaking of physiological rest or fasting. Mr. Carrington also insists upon the necessity of physiological rest in disease, but he stresses particularly rest of the digestive system, even prescribing forcing mea-sures that prevent rest of other systems of the body. Both Tilden and Weger emphasized the fact that fasting is a period of physiological rest.
Perhaps Walter stressed this fact more than anyone else.
I think it necessary to emphasize the rest that fasting affords to the other organs of the body and not overstress the rest the digestive system receives. Let us take the heart: it is no uncommon thing to have patients come to us whose hearts are pulsating eighty or more times a minute against increased resistance. This is to say, the heart is rapid and the blood pressure is increased. The heart is slowly wearing itself out by this work.
I have seen many diseased hearts that were supposed to be "incurable"
fully recover during an extended fast. A few years ago a business execu-tive came to me for care. Repeatedly during the preceding two years he had been refused life insurance because his heart was diseased. One month after a forty days' fast he bought ten thousand dollars worth of life insurance.
The ductless glands, the respiratory system, the nervous system, in fact, the whole organism rests during a fast. The exception is the ex-cretory system. This system does more work, at least through a large part of the fast, in freeing the body of its accumulated toxins. This inner
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rest, that is, this rest of the internal organs which fasting affords, is what is meant by physiological rest.
Rest! Where is there a rest like fasting? People go away for a rest.
They get a change of scenery, a change of food, a change of activity, but they fail to secure the rest they need. If they would but fast a few days they would return to their old duties with renewed zest and increased energy. Nothing can give renewed power of digestion to a worn-out digestive system, nothing affords such rest to over-wrought nerves, to fatigued bowels, or to an over-worked heart and glandular system as a fast—physiological rest.
Most vacationists go away and increase their physical exercise and eat more because of increased appetite and come back worse than be-fore. Physiological rest, decreased physical activity and long hours of recuperating sleep, will do more for these people in a few days, than months spent in the conventional manner.
METABOLISM DURING THE FAST
No definition of metabolism that I have ever seen is entirely satis-factory. Nor has it ever seemed to me that the measurements of the metabolic rate do more than inaccurately measure the katabolic phase of metabolism. Metabolism is the term applied to the changes that foodstuffs undergo in the body in the process of becoming part of the body and being used and discarded after use. The tendency today is to define metabolism in chemical terms and this enables the pharmacolo-gists to talk of the metabolism of drugs. Drugs do undergo chemical changes in the body, but there is no metabolism of drugs. Metabolism is a physiolgical or a biological process and is confined in its activities to those substances that are susceptible of being used by the living or-ganism.
Metabolism logically falls into two separate sets of activities; the first, a building up process—anabolism; the second, a tearing down process—
katabolism. Perhaps we may say that anabolism is that phase of metab-olism in which the foods taken in are assimilated and made into cell substance; katabolism is that phase of metabolism during which the assimilated foodstuffs are used and disassimilated.
Metabolism is measured by measuring and analyzing the excretions
—the breath, urine, heat, etc. Special emphasis is placed on heat produc-tion. These measurements do not measure anabolism. There is nothing in them that differentiates between a normal and an abnormal metabo-lism. The heat produced by a large tumor or a cancerous growth is measured along with the heat produced by the normal activities of life.
The fact is that measurements of development are never included in studies of metabolism.
If we accept the definition that "katabolism is the process by which body material is broken down as a result of oxidation and cleavage,"
and measure the resulting carbon-dioxide and heat, we certainly have not provided any index to the rate at which the "transformation of food material into body material" is taking place. What does the measure of
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the amount of heat produced and the carbon-dioxide given off tell us of the rate of bone formation or of brain growth? When it is assumed that
"anabolism follows the ingestion of food," and is taken for granted that it is at a standstill when no food is taken, a great mistake is made. The statement is made that when no food is taken, the "anabolic activities may be depressed to such an extent as to make the study (of the metab-olism of the fast) essentially one of katabmetab-olism." I regard such an as-sumption as highly incorrect and think that it must be based on igno-rance of the phenomena of fasting.
Indeed, it seems to me that katabolism may be reduced more than anabolism during a fast of considerable length. Here, I have no reference to the formation of fat and sugar from protein that seems certain to occur during the fast, but to positive constructive activities, by which tissues are repaired, new tissues built, wounds healed, broken bones reunited, and actual growth of structure takes place. There is the same need for tissue repair in fasting as in periods of eating, and if this does not take place at an unslackened rate, the consequences may be disas-trous.
ANABOLISM DURING THE FAST
During fifteen days of fasting the pupa of the honey bee metamor-phoses into a full-grown bee, the change undergone amounting to a transformation of one form of life into another and entirely different one, with different organs, different functions and a radically different way of life. Here is anabolism of a very intense kind and many examples of this kind could be cited. The process is less dramatic in the larger animals, but nonetheless real.
It has previously been pointed out that the functioning tissues of the body must be nourished during the fast and that they are nourished off the food stores that abound. As the fasting body feels among its supplies for proteins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals and vitamins and redistributes, utilizes and conserves these, it exercises an ingenuity that seems almost super-human. By thus analyzing (autolyzing) its food reserves and re-distributing them according to need, the functioning tissues are sup-ported and this means that an intense anabolism is in process. How else could the heart, for instance, go on pulsating sixty or more times a minute, day and night, throughout a long fast, without wearing itself out, were it not replenished as when eating? How could the respiratory muscles keep up the breathing process throughout a long fast if they were not nourished as certainly as when their owner is eating?
What, then, is the basic difference, save, perhaps, in rate, between the anabolism of the fasting period and that of the eating period? Primarily it is this: While eating, the functioning tissues of the body are daily re-plenished from fresh supplies of nutriment that are received from with-out; while fasting, these same tissues are daily replenished from the stored nutritive reserves that are held within.
All of this is so evident to the experienced man that one naturally marvels at the foolish statements that are made by physiologists in
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ing with the subject of metabolism in the fast. A good example is Best and Taylor's (1961) discussion of the metabolism of "starvation." What they say is of little value, as they lump "findings" together without ref-erence to the stage or the period of inanition; without discriminating between the different results in different animals; and without differ-entiating starvation and semi-starvation, much less starvation and fast-ing. They say that the gonads lose from 2 to 8 per cent in what they call prolonged starvation, whereas, it is well known that in many ani-mals the gonads increase in size and functioning power during periods of abstinence. In the fasting salmon, the gonads undergo luxuriant growth during the lengthy fast (accompanied with great physical activity) of their mating season, and they produce enormous numbers of ova and spermatozoa.
It is impossible to think that the muscles of the salmon, in almost continuous and vigorous, even violent activity during their long swim up the rivers, are not replenished as certainly as while eating, else would they waste to nothingness before the long journey is completed. The production of milk by the hibernating bear and the fasting gray seal, the laying of eggs by the fasting penguin, and a host of similar phenom-ena of this nature all show unmistakably that an intense anabolism is in progress throughout the whole length of the fast. The bear main-tains a comparatively high body temperature during her long period of hibernation, and secretes milk for her immature young, which weigh at birth, no more than a pound each.
The growth of fasting calves, including growth of bones, the regenera-tion of lost parts by animals that have lost limbs, stomach, head, etc., while fasting, the radical and rapid constructive changes that take place in the metamorphosis of pupa, the changes in the fasting tadpole, the healing of wounds and broken bones in fasting animals and man—
growth of hair and nails—these and many more such phenomena dramatically highlight the anabolic activities that occur during periods of prolonged abstinence.
I must return to the fasting pupa in which we observe a most intense anabolism. Indeed, here is anabolism as it is observed in the embryo.
Here is the most active construction proceeding at a rapid rate, pro-ducing, as a result, a being so unlike the one that wrapped itself in its cocoon as to lead to the thought that it is a different being altogether.
Not only is there autolysis, with the transfer of materials from one part to another, but there is reorganization of the materials on a radically different plan. Something akin to this occurs in the case of the female bear during hibernation. From her own tissues, which are first prepared by autolysis, she supplies the requisite building materials for her un-born young, just as, after the cubs are un-born, she supplies from the same tissues, the materials out of which she produces milk.
A question obtrudes itself at this point: How are we to regard the autolytic disintegration of fat, bone marrow, glycogen and other stored reserves, their transportation, by the circulation, to functioning tissues the body, and their incorporation into these tissues? This is to ask: is
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this total process one of anabolism or one of katabolism? It is my thought that the whole process, beginning with the digestion of reserves and ending with the appropriation by the vital cells of the finished product is one of anabolism. Fat that is oxidized is no longer useful. It has been katabolized and is ready for excretion. Fat that has been auto-lyzed is still useful and is ready to be conveyed to the cells that are in need of the food substances it provides. It is probable that all fat must first be autolyzed and incorporated into the functioning cells before it can be katabolized.
Autolysis is a prominent feature in all utilization of reserves. The fasting tadpole autolyzes its tail, absorbs and redistributes and finally utilizes the substances in it. The fasting salamander, growing a new tail, autolyzes some of its internal stores to provide materials for the production of the new tail, including bones. The growing of bones and organs of the fasting calf can occur only if the growing parts are sup-plied with materials from the stored reserves and these are made avail-able by autolysis. An animal suffering with a broken leg fasts while the bone is healing. Materials for this work of repair are supplied from the food reserves of the animal and are made available by autolysis.
A very remarkable example of regeneration, necessitating, as it does, active anabolism is supplied us by those forms of life that, under condi-tions of surfeit, reproduce parthenogenetically, the male disappearing, and, which, while fasting, reproduce the male and reproduce sexually.
All reproductive activity must be classed as anabolic, and when we observe animals, some of them high in the scale of life, reproducing while fasting, some of them reproducing at no other time, we are faced with a most remarkable evidence of the continuation of anabolism dur-ing the fast.
If we turn our attention to the vegetable kingdom, we find other evi-dences of active anabolism during periods of abstinence. If we take a cutting from such plants as the rose bush, the fig tree or the weeping willow, and stick one end of it into the ground, and water it, it will put out roots and leaves and grow into a full-sized plant. In the absence of roots the cutting is incapable of taking up minerals from the soil; in the absence of leaves it cannot take carbon from the air and, by photo-synthesis, manufacture carbohydrates. It is forced to rely upon its own internal resources.
Roots and leaves are put out, but the materials out of which these are made come from within. Materials stored in the cutting are utilized in their production and only after these have been produced can the cutting take food from the air and soil. These facts prove that there is circula-tion in the cutting, that there is a transfer of autolyzed materials from one part of the cutting to another.
Turn in whatever direction we may, in both plant and animal, we find evidence that anabolism is very active during periods of fasting-More remarkable, however, than this, is the obvious fact, as shown by
Turn in whatever direction we may, in both plant and animal, we find evidence that anabolism is very active during periods of fasting-More remarkable, however, than this, is the obvious fact, as shown by