The Fasting Fix: Eat Smarter, Fast Better, Live Longer - Hardcover

Michalsen, Andreas

 
9781984880154: The Fasting Fix: Eat Smarter, Fast Better, Live Longer
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1984880152 ISBN 13: 9781984880154
Verlag: Penguin Life, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Fasting: we’ve all heard of it. Countless celebrities and bestselling books have touted the benefits of fasting for weight loss, but what most of us don’t know is that the benefits of fasting extend far beyond that: the latest scientific findings show that fasting is the best and easiest way for us to fight disease and slow aging.

In The Fasting Fix, Dr. Andreas Michalsen—one of the world’s leading experts on fasting—lays out the clear, indisputable science that fasting, when combined with a healthy diet, is the key to healing chronic illnesses and living longer.

Dr. Michalsen draws from his decades of medical practice and original, cutting-edge scientific research, along with his deep knowledge about the human body and evolutionary history, to distill the simple truth about what and how we should eat in order to live healthier, longer lives.

Learn which foods to eat and which we should avoid. And learn the specific fasting program—therapeutic fasting, intermittent fasting, or a combination of both—that will most benefit your specific lifestyle and health needs.

With stories from patients he has successfully treated and detailed treatment programs for the most common chronic diseases—obesity, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, arthrosis, rheumatism, irritable bowel syndrome, skin diseases, allergies and asthma, migraines, depression, neurological diseases, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer—Dr. Michalsen shows us why other diets have failed, and how we can finally be healthy.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andreas Michalsen, MD, PhD, is professor of clinical complementary medicine at the Charité University Medical Center Berlin, the largest university hospital in Europe. He is also head of the department of internal and complementary medicine at Immanuel Hospital Berlin. Dr. Michalsen is board certified in internal medicine, emergency medicine, nutritional medicine, and physical medicine and rehabilitation. He has published more than two hundred scientific articles in top medical journals and has collaborated with Stanford University, Harvard University, the University of Southern California, the Mayo Clinic, and many other institutions. He is the author of the international bestseller The Nature Cure.

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Chapter One

Re-Discovering the Natural and Healthy Rhythm of Eating
 
Up until roughly 10,000 years ago, our ancestors roamed the earth as hunter-gatherers without a permanent home. They collected berries, seeds, roots, and mushrooms, hunted rabbits or buffalo. Gathering was more essential than hunting, because fruit, seeds, and insects covered most of their daily calorie needs and provided important vitamins and minerals. It is believed that meeting this daily caloric requirement took three to six hours of work.

Once humans harnessed the power of fire, they were able to consume many parts of plants that had previously been inedible, broadening their diets immensely. Though scientists haven’t been able to determine exactly when mankind learned to light fires, it’s likely that even prehistoric humans such as homo erectus were able to utilize natural fires caused by lightning as early as a million years ago. In any case, heating plants dissolved fibrous components and destroyed many toxins. It seems plausible, therefore, that many foods were made more digestible by being heated, and that this was beneficial to a person’s health. Which is still true today.



Raw Foods
 
Nutrition experts and naturopaths have long been debating whether raw foods are healthy, and if so, in what quantity. The fact is that heating, chewing, and insalivating food relieves the gastro-intestinal tract from a large share of its work. Heating food has likely protected people from infections in the past, and has therefore prevailed throughout evolution. But it is doubtful that, given the optimal storage and refrigeration options we have in our modern world, we still need to heat up everything we eat. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to note that the bacteria required in our intestine to digest raw food are different than those needed to digest cooked food. Where raw foods are concerned, my opinion is that everyone should decide for themselves, depending on their physical constitution, health, and tolerance. If, for example, your body is weakened due to an illness, your digestive tract is usually also affected. In that case, I would advise eating steamed or warmed-up meals rather than raw foods to relieve the stomach and the intestine.


For a long time, it was undisputedly assumed that the consumption of meat was of vital importance for the brain to increase in size and therefore a crucial step in mankind’s development. This was suggested by archeological discoveries in Africa, which showed that the brain increased in weight just as early man left the African jungle behind and relocated to steppe-like regions. Where our ancestors had mainly been following a plant-based diet before, they now had to change their diet according to their new environment. In this new environment, they consumed desert hares and other animals, because these dry regions lacked fruit-bearing trees and bushes. This, at least, was the assumption for a long time. Since then researchers have come to the realization that this reasoning was faulty: Nowadays, we classify the regions to which early man migrated as steppe or even desert. But at the time, these regions were in fact covered by forest. As a result, the theory linking meat consumption and growth in brain size is no longer very convincing. It seems reasonable to now say that even if prehistoric man was an omnivore, meat was a rarity on his menu.

The diet of our ancestors was ideal from an evolutionary point of view: It was mainly plant-based, and, above all, it was highly diverse. Excavations have shown that the hunter- gatherers of the Stone Age hardly suffered from malnutrition--they were larger in size and of better health than their descendants who had settled down. Moreover, homo sapiens of the time were highly flexible. If there was a draught in one area, they simply moved on; if one food item became inedible due to a pest infestation, they just ate something else. For this reason, the hunter-gatherers of the Stone Age were “the original affluent society,” as they say, because they lived exceptionally well. In addition to their balanced diets, they lived in communities without any major stress factors—at the very least, they never had to work to the point of burn-out. They were in the fresh air all day and got plenty of exercise.
           
Of course this doesn’t mean that life wasn’t hard, especially in regards to the lack of medical care. Nevertheless, I’d like to draw special attention to the dietary habits of the hunter-gatherers: largely plant-based and diverse. This is similar to the traditional diets in the so-called “Blue Zones”--regions of the world where people live to an unusually old age while still remaining healthy.
           
It’s also important to note the natural rhythm of food intake followed in the Stone Age. Nature dictated what and when people ate. If you found a bush laden with berries, you ate as many berries as you could; if you killed an animal, you ate it straight away. Once an area had nothing more to give, you moved on. Sometimes you had to manage without food for days. Once the sun set, you would go to bed. After sunrise, there was no breakfast waiting for you. You had to go out and procure breakfast. The nearest source of food could be far away and hard to reach.

Allowing Your Digestive System to Rest
 
For tens of thousands of years, humans had to grapple with short and long periods of hunger. But this didn’t seem to be a problem for our bodies. In fact, today we know that our cells recover and initiate repair mechanisms when our body is denied food for an extended period of time.
           
When humans started to settle down—cultivating land, farming livestock, storing food for winter—they gained the ability to counter nature’s unpredictability. Questions such as “What are we going to eat?” and “When are we going to eat?” became less of an issue. Even though people were plagued by famine due to occasional crop failures, and life became more exhausting because they had to toil in the fields and the stables from morning to night, there were now more regular meals than before. However, through the systematic cultivation of agricultural crops, food diversity was gradually lost. At the same time, people ate more animal protein (meat and dairy products).
           
This process continued until the industrial revolution radically changed our dietary habits even more. Electricity, refrigerators, and fast transportation gave people almost unlimited access to food. Today, people in many areas of the world have the means to eat whatever they want, whenever they want. At first glance this seems like a victory over the unpredictability of nature; a second glance, however, reveals that this is a major problem for the biology of the human body.
           
Modern progress, particularly in the food industry, has actually had a negative effect on our genes and cells. The ancient program—eating, followed by periods of starvation, followed by eating—is still deeply rooted within them. There are a few recent genetic adaptations and changes in our body, but they are rare. Europeans, for example, have developed the ability to digest cow’s milk over the last 10,000 years because of the advent of cattle farming. The enzyme lactase, which breaks down lactose, enables many people of European descent to consume cow’s milk...

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Verlag
Penguin Life
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1984880152
ISBN 13 
9781984880154
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
432
Kontakt zum Hersteller
VIKING
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