Far from its ‘hangry’ connotations, fasting—when done properly—is associated with well-being and sharpened senses, and even regulates sleep, as this book explains
The stomach translates what we eat into neural signals. Pic/istock
For the most part we willfully ignore what goes on beneath the membrane of the skin. When we do consider that hidden realm, it is with disgust. For at least four thousand years, our guts have been labeled the corrupt baggage we lug around on life’s journey. In ancient Egypt, only souls whose corpses had been rid of impurities by having their insides scooped out could submit themselves to the judgment of the gods.
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Once a person died, Anubis, the jackal-headed lord of the dead, weighed the soul against a feather. Then Thoth, the bird-god of intelligence, thinking, and the creator of language, decided whether the petitioner might enter the afterlife.
In Europe, the notion of the tricky, unknowable body gathered momentum with the teachings of the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of writings from the late fifth to the early fourth century BCE. As people came to identify the human body as the locus for undermining forces, anxiety increased about the lurking chaos within.
Centuries later, emptiness was equated with cleansing and health by Aelius Aristides, who in extensive writings about his own ailments linked self-erasure with growth. Fasting, dieting, and purgatives of all sorts became his prescription for contending with what classics scholar Brooke Holmes elegantly terms the “Odyssean slipperiness of the body.” With absence came regeneration.
Our rejection of our “dirty” interior selves and our focus on clean exteriors continues in the twenty-first century. No horror film is complete without a generous expenditure of blood and guts; the revelation of things more customarily concealed, particularly where waste and genitalia are concerned, shocks most of us.
Day after day, we charge ahead, shoveling calories in one end and expelling waste from the other. If the process comes to a halt, the remarkable, intricate machine that is our body swings into action. The organism reacts first by sending out alarms that rapidly increase in intensity. At the most elemental level, our stomach growls. You can’t control borborygmi, as Hippocrates called stomach growling, unless you eat something. Borborygmi occur as a consequence of the migrating myoelectric complex, or MMC, which in turn is triggered by an empty stomach. MMC stimulates wavelike contractions in gastrointestinal muscles known as peristalsis—and if there is nothing in the stomach, the borborygmi result. Peristaltic contractions move fluid and gas through the gastrointestinal tract. The stomach acts as an amplifier, and as we all know, the results can be disconcertingly loud.
For millennia, the stomach was seen as the source of courage and animal appetite. That the gut plays a role in our sleeping and waking cycles was identified in the postwar period by a microbiologist working at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
In the 1960s, as long-distance jet travel became widespread, humanity encountered a new opponent: jet lag. Gut science played its part through the persona of Dr Charles F Ehret. Ehret’s initial area of scholarly focus was the mating habits of paramecia, leading a colleague to christen him “the Kinsey of the protozoa.” At Argonne, Ehret shifted to chronobiology, or the science of circadian rhythms, and in 1982 he released the “Argonne Anti-Jet-Lag Diet,” suggesting an optimum fast-feast eating schedule for jet-set travelers. It was quickly adopted by everyone from the Canadian national swim team to the U.S. Secret Service. A US military
study conducted in 2002 that involved 238 soldiers confirmed the diet’s effectiveness as an anti–jet lag tool.
While the Argonne diet is still widely recommended, more recently the simple act of fasting before a flight has proven to be just as useful, and easier to implement.
A 2008 study conducted by doctors at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston found that the rhythm of eating can override the body’s internal sleep monitor, normally ruled by the presence or absence of light. “We discovered that a single cycle of starvation followed by refeeding turns on the clock,” Dr Clifford Saper, a Harvard Medical School professor, said at the time. The fast-feast jolt “hijacks all of the circadian rhythms onto a new time zone that corresponds with food availability,” according to Saper. A human has about 16 billion cortical neurons, and in the tip of a woman’s clitoris alone are 8,000 neurons—a man’s penis has a pitiable 4,000. More than 100 million neurons (nerve cells) are in our stomach, and more than 500 million pack the enteric nervous system, which is sometimes called the “brain in the gut.” This number is slightly fewer than the neurons in a dog’s cerebral cortex.
The stomach’s cells and nerves translate what we eat or don’t eat into neural signals that become the sensations that help define our existence. If the cries of the digestive network go unanswered, an amazing internal concatenation of biochemical machinery activates.
Extracted with permission from The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without by John Oakes, published by Bloomsbury
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