TruthWithoutFear

Medicine prescribed going without food for 2,400 years, and then a cereal company bought a magazine. 400 BC: Hippocrates tells the sick to stop eating. Feeding an illness, he says, is how you keep one. 100 AD: Plutarch writes that a day without food beats a day of medicine. Nobody in Rome finds this controversial. 200 AD: Galen, physician to emperors, puts fevers on a fast and gets paid in gold for it. 1025: Avicenna writes the textbook Europe will teach from for six hundred years. His cure for most things is three weeks without dinner. 1200s: the Church takes meat, butter and lard off the table for a third of the year and calls the result a healthier soul. The lord keeps the venison. The peasant keeps the fast. 1527: Paracelsus calls fasting the greatest remedy, the physician within. He is drunk for a lot of his career and still right about this. 1742: Benjamin Franklin prints that the best of all medicines are rest and fasting. Poor Richard sells ten thousand copies a year. 1880: Dr Henry Tanner goes forty days without food in New York, under medical watch, with newspapers printing his weight daily. He walks out and lives to 1919. 1900: Dr Edward Dewey, a working physician in Pennsylvania, publishes a book. Its title is The No-Breakfast Plan. It goes through many printings. Patients get better. Nothing is sold. 1911: Upton Sinclair tries fasting on himself, feels extraordinary, and writes The Fasting Cure. It is a bestseller. 1917: a nutritionist called Lenna Cooper writes that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. The magazine is Good Health. The magazine is published by the Kellogg family. The Kellogg family sells breakfast. 1925: a public relations man called Edward Bernays is hired by a bacon company. He writes to 4,500 doctors asking whether a hearty breakfast is healthier than a light one. They say yes. Bacon sales rise. The hearty breakfast is now science. 1965: a Scotsman called Angus Barbieri walks into a Dundee hospital at 33 stone and fasts for 382 days on water, tea and vitamins, with the doctors taking bloods throughout. He leaves at 12 stone and stays there. It goes in the record books and out of the textbooks. 1990s: the gym decides that three hours without protein destroys muscle. The protein is for sale at the desk. 2003: a study finds that people who eat breakfast are leaner. The people who eat breakfast also tend not to be shift workers, smokers or hungover, and nobody reads past the headline. 2016: a Japanese biologist wins the Nobel Prize for showing what a cell does when you stop feeding it. It cleans house. The prize is given in Stockholm with a banquet. 2024: a conference abstract announces that intermittent fasting is linked to a 91% rise in heart deaths. It is based on two days of food recall from a decade earlier. It is on every front page by lunchtime. 2026: the surgery hands you a sheet that says skipping breakfast is a risk factor, next to a bowl of cornflakes in the illustration. Twenty-four centuries of physicians starving the sick and watching them get up. One century of a bacon firm, a cereal firm and a protein desk, and the oldest cure in medicine is now a thing your doctor has been trained to warn you about. Hippocrates had no funding. That turns out to have been his only error.