Leave It to Someone to Commercialize Fasting
Heard about this. Isn’t it Valter Longo’s thing? Fasting without fasting, five days of about 800 calories a day from a strict vegetarian Mediterranean style diet, for people who want to fast but don’t want to fast and have too much money to spend.
Not just free; it saves you money. Not eating for 1-3 days keeps my wallet in my back pocket.
Yep! I would rather stick to water than 800 calories. That’s just enough to tease your stomach into thinking you are really going to feed it. When I am fasting I just tell mine “fagetta bout it” and it slinks off into the corner.
Somewhat in his defense: I’ve heard him say in interviews that he donates all his proceeds (to research? I don’t remember, but just had the impression that he’s not making a lot of of money off of Prolon ) and also I think his research is great.
Longo had to fight doctors so much to get them to agree to fast their patients before chemo, and after years of fruitless effort he finally came up with FMD and got some oncologists on board for that particular study on chemo and fasting. I think that the bias against fasting in the medical community is so strong, and he had to find some way around it.
But in any case, I agree with all of you: outright fasting just makes so much more sense!
Yep.
Specifically, Prolon was something that doctors would get behind AND something they could actually prescribe. It’s sad that the second bit is necessary but the way the (American) system is organized there are really legitimate practical reasons for that.
At least in the couple of interviews that I’ve listened to him, Longo seems totally in for actual fasting for this specific purpose*, and Prolon is a compromise.
*He’s more equivocal about it for several other purposes, but he’s a verrrrrry cautious guy.