Fasting: It Will Become Standard Medical Practice

Fasting is an ancient practice. Multiple religions incorporated fasting as a way to reach spiritual heights, and cleanse the body. Philosophers and ancient doctors recommended it. We know when you get sick, the last thing in your mind is food. Fasting was part of medical practice at one point. Over the last few generations, fasting was no longer recommended. Old practices were superseded by scientific medicine. The glory age of medicine involved antibiotics, and other drugs that allowed us to control serious diseases. Vaccine meant children did not die before five.

This was critical as it extended both health years and life expectancy. However, our industrial diet is a disaster. We are facing the rise of metabolic diseases that are now killing people in large numbers, instead of infections. We have an epidemic, not of cholera, but diabetes, high blood pressure, and other metabolic maladies. They are taking away health years and killing people in cruel ways. We did not know, but it should not surprise us.

The goal of the modern food system is profit, not health. This is behind medical research and new medications. In the age of scientific medicine, we forgot folkways. Fasting is a folkway. I remember my father saying that the yearly Day of the Atonement fast was cleansing to the body. It’s a dry 27 hour fast. It comes ten days after…