Something is causing the huge uptick in heart disease. I’m pretty confident it is not Lent. Tell that to the international press, which has recently decided to scapegoat fasting for ill health and base that claim on fake science.
Every major religion has a tradition of fasting. Certainly, Christianity has historically practiced it, and not only as a symbolic homage to the suffering of Christ in the desert and then on the cross. It’s also an excellent way to reset one’s biological functioning in body and mind. It serves to focus us on what’s truly important. It’s a cleanse, physical and spiritual.
So, too, for Ramadan for Islam. It’s different from Christianity but shares the same spirit. In Judaism, we have Yom Kippur and Tisha B’Av. Hinduism implores its followers to fast often throughout the year, and the same is true of Buddhism and Jainism.
Religion aside, fasting is ever more common in secular culture. Dry January took over this year for some reason, and to the great benefit of many. Intermittent fasting has also become a norm among a multitude of people. The model is simple: no eating for 18 hours following dinner, which in practice simply means skipping breakfast.
A friend of mine recently did a shocking six-day fast of just water and tea, with salt and vinegar. That inspired me to do a three-day version, and I must say that it produced one of the most physically invigorating experiences of my adult life. It completely changed my outlook on food, drink, exercise, and so on. I’m thrilled that I did it.
Moving into what Christians call Holy Week before Easter, the headlines the world over suddenly blared that fasting is associated with a 91 percent increase in heart disease (notice the fake precision!) leading to mortality. You can summarize this claim with a short refrain: Skip breakfast and die. To anyone over the past four years who has “followed the science,” one can only laugh with derision at such absurd claims.
And yet they were repeated in headlines all over the world.
But still one wonders: How many people will take this seriously? The lead headline in Google right now is that fasting leads to heart disease and death. The media is right now blaring this out the world over. Truly, the whole thing is beyond belief. It’s fundamentally an attack not only on religious practices the world over, during this very week, but also on science and health. It’s utterly bogus in every way.
How so? The short version: The study teases out a correlation, not causation, from population data that are likely compromised by bad reporting (only two days of unverified behavior) and a health bias in the studied group (there might be reasons why people didn’t eat other than deliberate fasting). Nor did the study question what precisely the alleged fasters were eating when they finally got around to scarfing down food.
In short, this study is completely worthless and yet amplified the world over.
“In this case, researchers used a really useful research tool, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a survey given to 5,000 people a year about eating and dietary habits, as a starting point. ... People who choose to be on a diet, or those who stay on it, might be fundamentally different from those who don’t in ways that we cannot measure. Perhaps people go on time-restricted diets because they are worried about their health. Perhaps the people who stay on such diets have bodies that work differently than those who can’t fast that long. Perhaps, for whatever reason, the people who were on the diet were different from those who were not simply by random chance.”
Or maybe the people listed as intermittent fasters were hungover from a late night of drinking and slept through breakfast. Smokers are another possibility; how many prefer coffee and a cig to eggs and cereal?
But get this: We actually cannot do a detailed critique of the study yet, and you know why? Because it is not yet released! All we have is the stupid press release. It is on this basis that world headlines trumpeted the conclusions, if you can believe it! It was presented at an event by the American Heart Association. It has not even appeared in a journal, much less a peer-reviewed one, not that this is quality assurance.
For now, this study is nothing but a conclusion from a data massage. Anyone in academia knows the hoax at work here. This is about résumé padding, racking up the publication hits for promotion and tenure. Anyone who is part of this racket knows the game. You massage the data sets until they cough up notable results, even if they have nothing to do with any plausible truth.
But do average people see this for what it is? It’s hard to know. It’s possible given the flurry of media attention that immediately people dropped their fasts and started scarfing down food again, thus adding to the problem of obesity, which approaches being the No. 1 health issue in the Western world.
As a friend of mine demanded to know, why is “the science” so dedicated to either making us sicker or killing us? It’s a good question.
After four years of watching fake science take over the world, with hundreds of thousands of fake papers followed by ridiculous headlines, all pushing some agenda that ruins people’s lives, I’ve finally developed a rule-based system for ferreting out fraud.
Rule one: If it is a press release without complete disclosure of every bit of data and method, alongside possible conflicts of interest, dismiss it.
Rule two: If it relies entirely on correlation and makes no attempt at plausible causal inference, dismiss it.
Rule three: If the paper does not correct for obvious bias that could provide a completely different explanation of the prevailing trend, dismiss it.
Under those three rules, all but the tiniest number of studies can be crumpled up and thrown in the waste bin. The remarkable fact is that we actually do have (or did have) a journal that does cumulative studies of only the highest quality science. It is not perfect, but it does get us there pretty far down the path. It is called the Cochrane Review. It strongly and for many years reported the prevailing science that said lockdowns do no work to control the spread of respiratory infections.
The actual science was completely ignored, even as the world was and is flooded by fake science.
Now consider the claims about the supposed climate emergency in that context. They are as true as the suggestions (made seriously) that sunlight is bad for health, that eating eggs and meat is dangerous, and that fasting is bad for the heart.
You are likely far better off following religious tradition—which is rooted in a broad range of actual human experience—than these religious fake studies purporting to have discovered some new truth that contradicts every human intuition. Another possible path to dieting truth is to get healthy and then listen to your body. One way toward that end is, you guessed it, fasting.
