Dr. Alan Goldhamer discusses water fasting for hypertension, autoimmune disease, and type 2 diabetes. In a study of 174 hypertensive patients, fasting for 5-24 days lowered blood pressure by an average of 60 mmHg and let them stop medication. Fasting appears to reduce inflammatory markers and reverse insulin resistance, with emerging evidence in lymphoma cases.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. What's the number one reason that people come to you for longer fasts? Well, I can tell you that there are four primary classifications of conditions that people come for. One is high blood pressure. And the reason for that is we've published studies on the treatment of high blood pressure. In fact, we've published a study over 10 years ago that involved 174 consecutive patients that had high blood pressure. And 174 people lowered their pressure enough to eliminate the need for medication. With the largest effect size that's ever been shown in treating high blood pressure in humans. With an average effect size of 60 points in stage three hypertension. And that 60 points not taking into account that they started on medications and end up off medications. And those fasts range from five to 24 days. In that study, we have a second study treating borderline hypertension. Five to 40 days. And again, virtually every essential hypertensive patient will normalize their blood pressure. And if they're willing to do really dangerous and radical things like eat well, exercise and go to bed on time, they can sustain those results. So this is my next question. Does it stick around? Yeah, because we've treated a lot of it. We also treat a lot of autoimmune disease. So you know, as your viewers know, autoimmune diseases are diseases where your own immune system is attacking your own tissues. And so these are the itis conditions, the colitis, the Crohn's disease, the vasculitis, the systemic lupus erythematosis. These autoimmune conditions are often thought to be aggravated by a process of gut leakage where proteins that enter the body, the immune system reacts genetically vulnerable people, the immune system gets infused, attacks its own tissues. If the protein, for example, if you happen to have the HLA DQ gene and you're sensitive to gluten and you eat gluten and your body attacks your colon, we call it celiac disease. But if our stomach, if it attacks the thyroid, we might call it Hashimoto's thyroiditis. If you notice joint symptoms, we've got rheumatoid arthritis. Whatever. The idea being these gut leakage related autoimmune conditions respond well, as you'd expect to fasting because number one, there's no dietary antigens. Number two, there's a powerful anti inflammatory effect of fasting. 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. And then if you follow the fasting with a health promoting diet, you can avoid the free radicals and the pro inflammatory materials that lead to the gut leakage. And yes, you can control autoimmune disease. You're not curing it because if you go back to the stuff that causes it, it comes back, but you can manage it and you can manage it effectively off the prednisone and methotrexate and the other medications that have such dire long term consequences. We also treat a lot of type 2 diabetes. So type 2 diabetes is an insulin resistance caused problem. And insulin resistance means that people are making insulin but it's not being effectively used. And fasting has a powerful effect at resolving insulin resistance. In fact, it's probably the most powerful tool we have at normalizing the body's ability to use insulin. And so what happens when insulin levels normalize? Obviously blood sugar levels normalize. A lot of the cravings and the binging and a lot of the problems that people have normalized because now their insulin levels aren't bouncing all over the place telling their brain that they're starving to death, even though they've got plenty of reserves on board. The other condition that we've been seeing a lot of lately is lymphoma. So lymphoma is a type of cancer involving the lymph system. And what happened was we had some positive results in individual cases with lymphoma. And we published a paper a couple years ago in the British Medical Journal that involved the effective treatment of lymphoma using fasting and diet and with long term follow up. And so then after that case was published, it got a lot of exposure and and then we've been seeing a lot of patients, doctors referring us patients for the treatment of lymphoma. So we're now trying to publish enough a number of case reports so that we can justify doing a clinical trial. So between high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune diseases and lymphoma, that's a big part of the patients that we're treating. And the research that we're doing right now in conjunction with our colleagues at the Mayo Clinic, at the Buck Institute at Washington University and other places that we're affiliating with because we've gone from being criminal quacks to cutting edge researchers.
