In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, I’m joined by Dr. Alan Goldhamer, one of the world’s leading experts on medically supervised, water-only fasting. He’s supervised the fasting and care of more than 20,000 patients at TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California, since he founded it in 1984.

His mission is to expand evidence-based knowledge of how medically supervised, water-only fasting and diet impact human health; train clinicians in the use of these interventions; and share findings with researchers and the public.

“We know using this protocol, this process can be done safely,” he says. “We’ve actually published a fasting safety study–the first fasting safety study that's been published in a peer-reviewed journal–that involved tracking all the patients for five years, and all of the symptoms, and classifying them according to the CTCAE criteria, the adverse events criteria on hundreds of patients.”

A few things you may not know about water fasting:

Your Body Self-Cleans: “The body does a really good job of regulating and recycling and restoring electrolyte balance during water-only fasting,” Dr. Goldhamer says. “And as soon as you start supplementing, then it puts increased load on other nutrients, it gets complicated, and there's no good long term safety criteria using supplemented fasting.”

Your Gut Heals: “What we see clinically is that these patients with microbial imbalances tend to improve dramatically,” Dr. Goldhamer says. “We do really well in treating conditions ranging from ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, to the dysbiosis and chronic constipation, and more.”

Your Inflammation Decreases: “There's a powerful anti-inflammatory effect to fasting,” Dr. Goldhamer says. “All the acute phase reactive proteins, high sensitivity CRP, fibrinogen, pepsinogen, whatever you want to measure, tends to consistent and predictably go down during fasting. So the gut leakage appears to be able to heal.”

Our discussion covers research behind water fasting, what health conditions it may benefit and what happens during a water fast. We also get into a lot more information about health.

“There's a lot in common between whether it's intermittent fasting changes, water fasting changes, exercise, and all of these attempts to reduce dietary excess,” Dr. Goldhamer says. “All of them are essentially trying to reduce inflammation, get rid of gut leakage, and give the body a chance to heal itself from the consequences of a highly processed food diet, whether it's processed animal foods or processed plant-based foods.”

Enjoy! And get more resources at https://blog.daveasprey.com/category/podcasts/

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