The FastDay Forum

I am not sure if this is the right section to post this or if someone has already done so but here goes

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/artic ... sting.aspx

Thanks Cobham x i need to read thse sort of articles a lot and get all the info thru my thick skull!
Maybe post it in the ADF Tent also? X

Thanks @Cobhamfor taking this to the ADF Tent as well! x

Thanks, that was very interesting

Ballerina x

He is posting on same topic today

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/artic ... efits.aspx

Thanks really appreciated this thread

Thanks cobham.
I enjoyed that interview

Dr. Mercola is NOT one of my favorite self-appointed health experts, because he promotes so many highly questionable (and even more highly expensive) fad supplements.

So while it was great to see Dr. Varady (who looks all of maybe 17 years old) I found much of what he interpolated into her advice to be, as is so often the case with him, dead wrong.

You do not want 50-85% of your calories to be fat when you are eating 500 calories, because if you do that there is no way you can get enough protein to prevent your body burning muscle. Loss of muscle instead of fat is the big problem with many starvation diets, and long term it will damage your heart.

If you were to eat 85% of your calories in the form of fat you'd be eating 425 calories worth of fat, which leaves only 75 calories for protein. The most you could cram in would be 2 ounces in the form of Greek Yogurt, which is about 12 grams of protein . That is no where near enough for an adult large enough to be working at weight loss! You need anywhere from 55 g up depending on your size.

But that he said such a thing suggests to me that he didn't pay attention to a word Dr. Varady said, and simply pasted in his usual fad diet advice--I've noticed over many years ears that he adopts whatever is the current bestselling fad diet developed by someone else and promotes it as if he invented it. Right now it's a high fat "paleo" diet he's pushing, so the description of what to eat taken from that diet is what he tacks on to Dr. Varady's explanations.

He is also completely wrong that eliminating fructose will prevent hypoglycemia. Indeed, such a statement makes it clear he knows nothing about blood sugar metabolism, since fructose never enters the blood stream but goes right to the liver where it is turned into liver fat. Hypoglycemic attacks are a reaction to high blood glucose, which occur only when you eat starches and sugars containing glucose. Pure fructose will leave your blood sugar completely flat, though once it is metabolized in the liver into intercellular fat it will, over time impede the liver's ability to operate and raise your insulin resistance. But but there is zero way that eating fructose could give you a hypoglycemic attack, none.

And in the same vein, you are not going to go unconscious from low blood sugar caused by fasting unless while fasting you inject a large dose of insulin. To list seizures and unconsciousness as being caused by diet-induced low blood sugar is irresponsible and suggests, like so much else I have seen this man write, that he knows very little about anything except how to sell hope in the form of very expensive self-branded rip-off pills.

It's a shame that charlatans like Mercola control access to the population who consume health information so that someone like Dr. Varady has to go through them--and their self-promoting junk science--to be heard.

I'd expect she'll have to appear on Dr. Oz's show next. (Waving garlic, wildly, to keep off that vampire!)

An interesting article. As always I ignore the bits I do not agree with, although I am not highly educated in the field of nutrition. I fully embrace the fasting concept and will stay with the form I have chosen until goal. Meanwhile I have cleaned up my food, eating very little factory made stuff. I guess there will always be those who jump on the current band wagon, there is so much money involved in the 'diet' industry. I will no longer be taken in by these people.

Bobs house, I could have written your post myself as it's exactly how I feel. By the way, your website is great, where you live looks fantastic, lucky lady even if you do get home sick sometimes

Ballerina x

I appreciated his overview of how fasting works and how it is beneficial long term to our health. I must actually view the Dr Varady video! His commercial website is a bit 'in your face' with his products coming up first but I just whizz to the bits of interest lower down. Also the comments section from wider public can be interesting.

He is widely influential so it is good to see he has adopted the basic premise of the fasting diet. In this case there is no linked supplement to be bought.

In this case there is no linked supplement to be bought.

Just wait. There will be.

He is extremely influential, which is why every other diet board I have spent time on except this one is full of people singing the praises of whatever the junk-du-jour supplement might be. I have been at this since the 1990s and have seen every single one of these once-popular supplements either a) vanish without a trace or b) turn out to be dangerous.

It's notable, too, that consuming the most beloved supplements of the past, antioxidants, have been shown in repeated independent studies to be correlated with a higher risk of death. My daughter who is getting the advanced degree in biophysics explains this is because antioxidants damage the oxygenated molecules that are a necessary part of the signaling process used to alert the immune system that a cell needs to be destroyed because it has become cancerous or otherwise defective. Too much antioxidants, and you end up with lots of malfunctioning cells.

More recently we have seen the fish oils to be shown to be useless, not that that keeps Dr. M from selling them for $60+ a bottle. The research shows that adding coconut oil to your diet will make you gain weight unless you remove an equivalent amount of other fat. No fat burning miracle there, but Dr. M continues to push it. And the rest of the magic fat burners... ugh.

Perhaps in the UK people are less prone to fall for this kind of malarky--or perhaps there are more stringent laws on selling it. But here in the US they can sell you bottles of neatly packaged baby poop and claim whatever they want for them as long as the claim is not on the bottle but is disseminated through blog posts (opinion, free speech!)

[carorees]

Yes, it seems that all these veg that are touted as being good for us because they are full of antioxidants are probably actually good for us because they contain mild poisons which stress the body in the same way as does fasting, exercise and cold-exposure and the benefit is from this stress (the principle of hormesis) which stimulates the body to be more resilient.

But still the "it's full of antioxidants" mantra is heard everywhere to support the sales of various so-called 'superfoods'.

Caro,

Did you see the research that was in the news recently about how fasting for several days apparently helps restore the immune systems of people who are undergoing chemotherapy?

[carorees]

Caro,

Did you see the research that was in the news recently about how fasting for several days apparently helps restore the immune systems of people who are undergoing chemotherapy?

Hi @peebles
Was it this research?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24905167

I've added it to the page in the Fasting section on benefits of fasting for cancer. Thanks!