I'm Steve Hendricks, author of the new fasting book The Oldest Cure in the World. AMA!

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Just listened to you on the Where We Go Next podcast. Very interesting.

The historical stuff is the most fascinating to me.

I’m curious, and I know you are a journalist, not a doctor or researcher, but what is your take on electrolytes while fasting? Have you seen most extended fasters using them? Do you use electrolytes yourself during extended fasts, or just water?

Thank you.

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Tommy Woods, M.D., Phd made an interesting comment on a relatively recent interview on the Diet Doctor YouTube channel. IIRC he said that 30 minutes of exercise at 70% VO2 max would create as much autophagy as a 3 day fast. I was wondering what was his source for this comment. Have you come across anything that substantiates his claim?

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Mr. Hendricks - loved the podcast interview! Curious if you are aware of The Phoenix Protocol? Any thoughts on it? In short - an ex-NASA engineer named August Dunning wrote a book and has a YouTube channel where he encourages once or twice a year 7-day dry fasts for longevity. He cites lots of Russian literature on dry fasting and has lots of experience doing it himself as a healthy 70 year old man. I’d love to hear your take on it? 🙏

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Here’s another question u/ketosisMD submitted a few days ago about a section at the end of my book called “Sources on Diet.” ketosisMD was concerned that it contains, as he wrote, an “extremely one sided list of plant based ADVOCATES. Do you feel you are biased towards plant based eating? or do you feel your plant based list of sources on diet are evidence based? What evidence would that be?”

My answer: Fair questions. Let me take them a bit out of order.

For a start, I see nothing wrong with citing advocates. Virtually all scientific authorities, once they’ve conducted their research and drawn their conclusions, advocate for what they’ve found. If I didn’t cite them, I’d just be quoting Joe on the street. The real question for me is, does this or that scientist or doctor have the research to back up his or her view? Einstein advocated for the theory of relativity, and rather than ignore him because he’s an advocate, I think the better course is to consider the science he had to offer.

You ask whether my sources are “evidence based.” Short answer: Entirely. Long answer: I think maybe you missed the sentence in that section that says, “Below are some of the leading experts who have put the science before the public in a clear, accessible way and who have provided ample scholarly citations for curious readers” (emphasis added). Whether you agree with their presentation of the evidence is up to you, but their arguments are based on peer-reviewed scientific evidence. To take just one of my sources: Dr. Michael Greger’s recent book How Not to Diet runs 600 pages and has 5,000 citations, the vast majority to peer-reviewed academic articles. Greger also has thousands of informational videos, complete with transcripts and ample citations, at his site NutritionFacts.org, which I also cite.

Am I’m biased? I don’t think so. It’s not bias to weigh the arguments of researchers and others, to read a raft of scientific studies, and to become convinced by the evidence to follow a vegan (or any other) diet. That’s reasoning, whereas bias is adopting an unfair belief that’s impervious to reason. Also, I’ve taken what I believe is the journalistically responsible course by making my beliefs known to my readers, with brief explanations why and sources they can look at for themselves, so if they want to adjust the lens through which I present things, they can.

Could I be wrong about my diet? Of course. And if new evidence emerges to change my mind, I’ll change my diet.

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The old adage that breakfast is the most important meal of the day never seemed to apply to me. I eat almost exclusively between 12 noon and 7pm each day. I’ve read about intermittent fasting and I think it’s what I do permanently. Is this healthy?

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Oh! What an opportunity to ask a question that I’ve been wondering for a while.

Do you know how fasting effects the adrenals? I have cortisol/adrenaline balance issues, and I’ve heard that my fasting/keto dieting isn’t great for it.

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Here’s a question u/CayaMaya submitted a few days ago:

1. The general statement I read is: Calories break autophagy. Period. I get that if I take a snack like a boiled egg or something bigger, that’s a no no. . But if, for instance, I take a little bit of skimmed milk in my coffee (25ml, 10 calories, 1 carb) does that break autophagy if I have one cup of coffee?

2. If autophagy is being broken with this coffee, how long does it take to be in autophagy again, since the glucose levels are already low?

My answers:

1. We don’t know if a single cup of coffee, either black or with 10 calories of skim milk, breaks autophagy. The leading scientists in the field say caffeine disrupts the body’s fasting metabolism, but they don’t the full extent that metabolism is disrupted, and they don’t know whether autophagy is interrupted.

A little more info . . . They say eating or drinking as little as 5 calories (about 1.5 grapes) disrupts fasting metabolism, but again, they don’t know to what extent or its effect of autophagy. We know from the experience of European fasting clinics that you can stay in fasting metabolism (for ex., stay in ketosis) while consuming up to about 250 calories a day, mostly in vegetable broths. Then again, it also seems to be the case that on a modified fast like that, the fast is not as deep as on a water-only fast. Many diseases, for example, seem to take longer to reverse on a modified fast than on a water-only fast.

Short story: if you want to maximize the benefits of your daily fast, drink your coffee during your eating window. But if you must drink coffee, it’s probably not as disruptive as, say, eating a meal.

2. I don’t think scientists know exactly how long it takes to scale autophagy back up once it ramps down because you ate or drank something. But it takes about 12 hours after our last calories for our other repairs to really start to kick into overdrive, so that’d be a reasonable guess: minimum 12 hours after your last caloric intake.

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Here’s a question u/ketosisMD submitted a few days ago: What’s your best guess as [to] the science at play when people feel their “stomach feels smaller” [during a fast] (i’m sure the stomach isn’t smaller).

My answer: Yeah, you hear people say that a lot. This is indeed a guess on my part, but I’d speculate 2 causes:

First, our stomachs are equipped with different types of receptors to tell us when we’ve eaten enough. Some of these are nutrient receptors, which tell us how much of a certain nutrient (e.g. fat) we’ve eaten, and some are stretch receptors that sense engorgement of the stomach. I’d guess that during a fast the stretch receptors sense the near-total emptiness of the stomach, and that contributes to the “shrunk stomach” feeling.

Second, the intestines empty and may actually shrink slightly. This is because a faster will eventually poop out all of the food she’d eaten before her fast, and most of the gut microbiome inside her intestines will also die off. That comes to a few pounds of weight, and I imagine we feel the emptying as an actual shrinking of the abdomen.

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And here’s another question u/ketosisMD submitted a few days ago: Are there any reliable markers for autophagy commercially available?

My answer: I’m not aware of any tests for autophagy markers that an average person can buy, or for that matter that the average doctor can order. From time to time I hear of commercial tests for markers of autophagy that are in development (e.g. this one by SAHMRI in Australia: https://sahmri.org.au/news/sahmri-blood-test-for-autophagy-to-guide-healthy-ageing), but I’ve never seen a test brought to market. If you search the PubMed.gov research database, you’ll find some (pretty technical) articles, including a couple by SAHMRI’s Timothy Sargent, about the state of measuring autophagy and the hurdles that remain before such a test becomes commonly available.

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Another question the prolific u/ketosisMD submitted a few days ago: If you were given access to medical students during their nutrition education what would you teach them in 30 minutes?

My answer: Only 30 minutes? Could I get 30 hours? I imagine I’d tell them that evolution has equipped the human body (as it has so many other animal species) to heal itself of a wide range of diseases when food is taken away and that the best course of treatment is often to resist the urge to treat—at least, to treat with a pill or procedure rather than a fast.

I’d give them some examples. Take high blood pressure. The American Heart Association says high blood pressure can’t be cured, but in fact we have peer-reviewed studies dating back two decades that show a fast of about ten days can completely eliminate hypertension in the great majority of sufferers.

Or take rheumatoid arthritis. I’d show them the randomized, controlled trial published in the prestigious Lancet three decades ago showing that a fast of about a week followed by a plant-based diet reversed the symptoms of RA—and kept them reversed throughout the yearlong study. And yet most rheumatologists STILL tell you that RA can only be slowed, not reversed.

I’d go briskly through a list of other disorders that fasting can reverse: diabetes, childhood epilepsy, fibromyalgia, skin diseases like psoriasis and eczema, certain mental illnesses like schizophrenia and depression, etc.

Finally, I’d say that while fasting can cure a lot, the diseases often return if the faster returns to eating what they ate before the fast. Diet is a whole other discussion, but the short story is that the overwhelming majority of fasting doctors over the past two centuries settled on some version of a plant-based diet as the one that kept their patients’ diseases away when they started eating again—and there’s a mountain of science today to back them up.

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I’m currently on day 3 of a water/coffee/tea fast. I feel a little weaker in my body today, have less energy, my eyelids are heavy, I occasionally have trouble finding my words and have a mild headache (all manageable symptoms, just noteworthy).

The times I do have increased energy and mental clarity come in spurts and are not consistent. I’ve done a couple 3 day fasts like this in the past with similar experiences (especially day 3 feeling lightheaded or woozy if I stand up too fast)

My question is, Is there something I can do to decrease these symptoms when I fast and achieve more of the benefits people talk about? Or is this normal for a fast and I’m just not doing it for a long enough period to see those benefits?

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Wow, this is really interesting thank you. Have you seen people using fasting to treat long covid? Every since catching covid I’ve developed fatigue and extreme brain fog. I’ve done a modified version of FMD and felt some improvement. I then earlier this week tried water fasting (only managed 51h before I gave in) and the changes in my body were exactly the same as what happened after the FMD, and generally positive. Id be willing to try a clinic for a longer fast if there’s initial evidence that it helps long haulers.

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And here’s one more excellent question from u/ketosisMD, submitted a few days ago: You wrote a book about fasting and skipped Dr. Fung? I guess so.

My answer: Yep. I realize some people will think it odd to leave out one of the most well-known fasting doctors, and you could certainly make a case that was the wrong choice, but in an already thick book, I had to do a lot of picking and choosing and cutting. I didn’t discuss Dr. Fung specifically because I discuss ketogenic diets and keto-ish diets generally, and his program (like that of other keto doctors) is covered by that discussion. Also, it will be plenty clear to readers of my book that I think eating keto and keto-ish diets for the long term is a mistake at best and dangerous at worst, unless you have a specific, severe disorder (like childhood epilepsy) that makes the handful of benefits of a long-term keto diet outweigh its many great drawbacks.

One reason long-term keto diets concern me deeply is that we have decades of rock-solid studies showing, as I write in the book, that high-fat diets “increase the risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, cancer, dementia, and many other odious conditions.” And “even short- and mid-term studies have found a keto diet can systemically inflame the body, narrow arteries, lay waste to healthy intestinal bacteria, cause deficiencies in up to seventeen vitamins and minerals, and send markers that predict cancer, gallbladder disease, stroke, diabetes, and dementia in the wrong direction.” Then there’s the rather alarming rise in early death.

All that said, it should also be clear from the book that I agree with some aspects of Dr. Fung’s program. If I recall correctly, he thinks we should eliminate refined carbs like white flour and sugar, avoid other processed foods, limit protein, eat more fiber (hence more fruits and vegetables), and narrow our daily eating windows. I think the science strongly supports all of those recommendations, and I congratulate Fung for his success in moving people in this direction. I also, by the bye, think Fung seems to be quite a nice chap who’s truly intent on helping folks.

If you disagree with me and like Fung’s program, I would just suggest that you check the science behind his claims. So often when I do, I find what he’s claiming doesn’t square with the best science. Just 3 examples:

1. Fung has said it’s healthy to skip breakfast and take your first daily meal at noon. I wish it were true! This might have been a scientifically defensible possibility a decade or more ago, but over the last several years the science has become awfully clear that we’re hardwired to process nutrients better earlier in the day, and our health suffers when we skip breakfast and stack our calories later, as Fung recommends. I spend a chapter on this in my book, with ample citations for people who want to learn more.

2. Fung advocates drinking up to two glasses of dry wine per day. He points to studies that claim to show moderate intake of wine is good for our health. Unfortunately, these studies are just plain bad science. I know why deadline journalists who are desperate for a great headline like those studies, but health professionals should know how to read a study and see through the bad ones. For a quick explanation of why it’s not in fact healthy to drink wine regularly, see Michael Greger’s video on this at https://nutritionfacts.org/2022/01/25/is-it-better-to-drink-a-little-alcohol-than-none-at-all/. Now, I’m not saying you’ll drop dead if you drink a glass of wine. I drink wine myself on occasion. But wine is an indulgence, like smoking, so let’s please not tell people it’s health food.

3. A similar story goes for eggs, which Fung also says are healthy. Yet we have towers of science to the contrary. If you want to dive into some of that science, I’d recommend Michael Greger’s literally scores of videos examining the egg controversy: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/eggs/.

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I’ve done 18:6 intermittent fasting, which is easy and works well for me. I’ve done 3-5 day fasts, and my only issue is lousy sleep. I’m mindful of electrolytes, hydration, and sleep hygiene in general.

I had similar issues when I was on a ketogenic diet (which I did for the better part of 10 years, and enjoyed, other than the sleep dep problem).

Do you have any suggestions on getting better sleep while fasting?

I’m a woman, past reproductive age, if it makes any difference (and if there are any special approaches for us gals when it comes to fasting in general, feel free to share those.)

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Here’s a great pair of questions u/creations_unlimited submitted a few days ago:

1. Do you have any research on Islamic fasting from sunrise to sunset, for a month every year?

2. Is that any different than fasting at night and eating later in the day in relation to circadian rhythm etc?

My answers:

1. There’s a growing body of research on Islamic fasting during Ramadan, most of it done in predominantly Islamic countries. If you search the research database PubMed.gov for “Ramadan” and “fasting,” you’ll get about 1,500 results. Happy reading!

2. Fasting during daylight hours, as Muslims do in Ramadan, is indeed very different from fasting during the night. Fasting during the night is much more in line with the body’s circadian rhythms. Partly this is because night is when the body makes most of its repairs, so if we eat late and have to digest food and process nutrients well into the small hours of the morning, some of those repairs are interrupted.

Also, our circadian rhythms have hardwired us to process nutrients most efficiently during the daytime, especially morning and early afternoon. We have excellent research showing that when we eat after sunset (or before dawn), food will linger longer in our gut, glucose will linger longer in our arteries, and that can result in damage to gut and arteries. There are other problems along these lines with eating “against” our circadian rhythms—too many to go into here, alas.

The interesting question is whether the long daytime fast of Ramadan can overcome some of the disadvantages of eating at night and before dawn. I’m not well versed on this research, but since some studies report that certain diseases improve among Muslims who observe the Ramadan fast, it’s at least possible that the Ramadan fasting pattern can help certain disorders.

For more on fasting and circadian rhythms generally, you might check out the excellent book The Circadian Code by the Salk Institute’s Satchin Panda, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on the topic. I also have a chapter in my book on eating in harmony with our circadian rhythms.

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I got a bunch of great questions before the AMA started, and I’ll work them in as we go along. Here’s one from u/JohnDRX: What’s the one thing you would want people to know about the benefits of fasting?

Answer: The one thing I’d like people to know about fasting is that it protects and repairs in virtually every cell of the body and, in doing so, can save us from disease, reverse many diseases, and likely prolong our lives.

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I do intermittent fasting (20/4) to help lose weight and keep the calories down focusing on one (low carb) meal per day, and have recently added a full days water/coffee fast to that. Which means I generally eat 6 meals per week. If I get my minimum calories, am I doing something… bad for my body in your opinion? Anything I should keep an extra eye on?

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IMO, any fasting doctor recommending rice, potatoes, juices,…definitely wants you to keep coming back to his fasting clinic for life 😀. Don’t you think so?

I do IF & well balanced Keto lifestyle which includes eating veggies & salads of course. I eat veggies & salads more than my vegan family members & friends 😀. And no I don’t add fat unnecessarily. I don’t put butter in my coffee nor do I eat bacon all day every day. I just eat normal fat like extra virgin olive oil stir fried veggies, salmon, steak, chicken with skin on, avocados, nuts,…

Saying keto is all about eating fats is like me saying vegan is all about eating fake processed food. Let’s be fair & balanced when comparing the 2 diets, otherwise don’t you think we would be showing our bias?

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Yes, I’m late, maybe you’ll see this anyhow…

I consider fasting a means, not an end/goal ( Vajrayana ).

I’ve learned that it is important to keep pouring something through one’s gut, or proper detoxification can’t happen, because all the toxins one’s liver is trying to get out of one’s body have nothing carrying that bile/gall out , see?

I’m using uncooked white short rice, at the moment ( rinse/soak, then wash ‘em down with water ), and I wish I could afford some citrus-pectin crystals, for soluble-fiber, too.

I have seen a person in spiralling towards the psychiatric-ward, with how fasting was concentrating their toxins, essentially stewing their brain in ‘em.

This fast ( began a month ago, expect it to continue a month or 2 more ), weekly I’m eating pressure-cooked chick-peas, chlorella-“soup”, rice-cooker-cooked green-peas, sesame-seeds ( source of Methionine ), & a few other minor things, spoon of red miso, for micronutrients, to give my body patching-up means. 1 time per week, full, all else sticking as solidly to uncooked-rice & algae-sesame-soup as possible.

( always cook chlorella: it can displace your gut with pond-algae, otherwise! “broken cell wall” seems to mean only some of ‘em )

I’ve learned that the biggest threat in fasting is eating simple-carbs.

That can flip one’s metabolism into Kapha-metabolism.

( it isn’t the obesity epidemic, it actually is the kapha-metabolism epidemic, in North America: foods healthy for a vata-metabolism, or for a pitta-metabolism, are harmful for a kapha, just as foods beneficial for a kapha are harmful for a vata, etc. Blended/mixed metabolisms exist, too. I’ve experienced, & broken, every variation of the dosha/metabolism, so I know they are actual.

If one gets in kapha-metabolism, & eats fries instead of oil-free fava-beans, yellow peas, pinto beans, great northern beans, baked/roasted corn tortilla, millet, etc, one is “walking” into a permanent landslide/avalanche. )

Essentially, it seems that when fasting, it is best to stay as vegan-keto as possible, for best spiritual-results.

Frawley’s “Ayurvedic Healing” has the accuratest ingredients-list for each of the 3 root metabolisms, & if that book is combined with Kozak & Frawley’s “Yoga for Your TYPE”, then one gets a much better picture/understanding of the different metabolic-modes.

I know from experience that the different metabolisms alter one’s mind & instincts.

If I were hiring an accountant, I’d probably want a kapha, or kapha-vata.

Were a firefighter required, pitta.

on youtube, the “harp twins” are pure vata.

All-combined/mixed is held to be best, but pitta-vata mix was best for me ( didn’t like kapha ).

Anyways, maybe if you find some piece of this sparks something for whenever you revise your book, the better it is, the better for the world, right?

Do not credit me with anything, if you find any valid or/and significant idea in this: let karma erase me.

I won’t be able to afford your book.

Please consider “The 1-Page Marketing Plan”, as it is excellent, & authors are dependent on their own marketing.

🙏

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