Is fasting the solution for what makes us ill and inflating healthcare costs?

Is fasting the solution for what makes us ill and inflating healthcare costs?

Have you ever fasted?  Certain religions have fasting rituals that are done at certain times around the year.  Fasting is seen as a cleanse but can it also make us healthier?

Years ago, people did not have a regular breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Many of us missed meals but with the industrial age, the idea of a breakfast, lunch and dinner took hold, as did many of todays modern diseases that are partly from our age as we live longer but also are likely due to our lifestyle.

If you wanted a meal years ago, you would have to kill and pluck the chicken and harvest the vegetables.   Today, we go to a supermarket and buy what we need and cook it up, or worse, we purchase a prepared meal which is often less healthier and has a high salt content.

According to a recent article in Forbes, we are over fed and there are an excess of diseases that have developed from the phenomenon, especially in the poor.  Dr. Jason Fung, a Canadian Nephrologist recently wrote a book about the problem with the modern food pyramid, which has recently changed as so many of us stayed away from healthy fats and loaded up with simple carbs and sugar.  The result has been many metabolic diseases such as obesity, insulin resistance and of course diabetes.

He believes the secret to better health is not through medication, but through proper eating habits, and the profit motive and business that include pharmaceuticals that have developed as a result of the illnesses are hardly the solution, and are actually part of the problem.

Diabetes, by the way is the number one most costly disease being treated with insulin, and drug companies have been consistently raising the cost of the drug yearly, making it more expensive than ever.  Should we as a society, take another approach, with fasting being one of the most effective means of addressing metabolic syndrome?

Check the article out here

Is fasting a solution for what makes us ill and inflates healthcare costs?

Jerry Bowyer , CONTRIBUTOR

More than two centuries ago Thomas Malthus predicted that food production growth would fail to keep up with population growth and that the world would suffer from mass starvation. He couldn’t have been more wrong. In his native Britain, and in her former colony across the Atlantic, our major drivers of mortality are not starvation related but rather obesity related. Malthus and his allies were an almost perfect contrarian indicator, issuing their dire warnings at the very beginning of the great hockey stick curve take-off, about a danger which was the exact opposite of the health crisis that actually occurred. The developed world, with a few exceptions, is not underfed: it is overfed, and we are now looking at an epidemic of the diseases which come from excess body weight especially among the poor.

Before you cue the calls for a new round of spending for another government program to deal with our health care crisis consider this: what if the most powerful solution doesn’t cost anything at all? What if implementing this solution not only involves no new spending but even involves anti-spending, the elimination of a cost center? What if the solution was not a newfangled invention, but the oldest dietary intervention known? What if the solution was not secret, but the most obvious answer?

Perhaps, this needs to become a conversation in the march toward healthcare reform; what is more appropriate, solving the problem with a medication or fixing the mechanism of the problem which is driving costs through the roof.

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