Dr. Leland Stillman and Amy Arp discuss water fasting for cancer, citing two case studies showing tumor shrinkage during 39-day and 21-day fasts. Most formal research focuses on short fasts around chemotherapy, while longer fasts remain largely anecdotal. Stillman notes patients report dramatic symptom relief from multi-day water fasts, but rigorous studies are lacking.
Good morning, everyone. Dr. Stillman and Amy Arp here for another episode of Monday Masterclass. It's July 22nd. Hello, Amy. How are you? What are we talking about today?
Today we're gonna touch on a little bit of fasting research from last time, a couple follow-up questions, and then we will also touch on nightshades. So we had a premium subscriber question asked specifically about nightshade vegetables and So we will go into that today. So let me present my screen and go to the first one. Can you see it?
I can.
Great. So last time you asked a question as we were talking about time-restricted feeding, specifically on longer prolonged fasting and cancer. And so I would love to have gotten great research articles on, you know, fasting, long, longer term fasting reduces cancer by this amount. However, as expected, they're not out there. So, yeah, I know, shocking. So I did look, you know, very widely and broadly to see what was out there, just in terms of what has been done. And so the couple of things that I did find were some case studies. So we'll just go through just briefly one and I'll summarize it. So in this case study, they did talk about a patient doing a 39-day water fast, water-only fast. And in that case study showed reduced size of different lymph nodes and the cancerous parts of their lymph nodes. And then another patient did a 21-day water fast, and then they reported significant decrease in tumor size and also, um, other improved markers. So there's just case studies out there at this point. We don't have much. The research that's being done is on cancer treatment. So the effects of fasting on cancer treatment at as opposed to the effects of like actually getting rid of cancer. Surprise, surprise. So, um, this is just the research that's being done is just kind of like, you know, having people fast for 24 to 48 hours around chemotherapy sessions or radiation. So we won't go into this today, but I just wanted to show kind of what is being done in terms of research. And so a lot of the fasting research that we would love to hear is all really anecdotal right now and not actually published or really done significantly in any way. So I just wanted to touch on that since you talked— asked about that, Dr. Stillman. Is there anything you want to add on that?
Absolutely. There's a couple things, and thank you for bringing all that up, Amy. It's very interesting. I'm not surprised at all by the lack of research in this area. Very sad that the academicians who get paid with our tax dollars are not on this, because I think there's tremendous value in fasting for, I'm sure, both treatment of cancer and then prevention of cancer. Now, my chief interest in fasting for health and longevity really grew out of the number of cases where people were coming to me and saying, "Oh my gosh! I did a 3-day water fast and my allergies went away." Mm-hmm. "I did a 3-day water fast and my— or a 30-day water— I mean crazy fasts and my autoimmune diseases or this or that or the other disease went away." I've heard similar things. Yeah, and I think that's great.
