| Do you realize that there have been hundreds of studies suggesting that fasting has health benefits? There are too many listed on Google for me to link to them all but here is a random sample of a few. Start with this one, which was on Hacker News for awhile: Total Starvation – 382 days without Food http://cristivlad.com/total-starvation-382-days-without-food... "I recently came across this study from 1973 in which a 27 years old male has fasted for 382 days under the supervision of researchers from a Scotland University. This is the longest fast ever been recorded. This patient weighted in 456 pounds (~207 kg) and weighted out 180 pounds (~82 kg). So, he lost 276 pounds (~125kg) during his fast. Five years after the fast ended, the patient’s weight has been constantly around the values of 196 pounds. A.B. had no ill symptoms during and after the fast." Medically supervised water-only fasting in the treatment of hypertension http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11416824 Intermittent fasting: a dietary intervention for prevention of diabetes and cardiovascular disease? http://dvd.sagepub.com/content/13/2/68.long Wikipedia lists all the fasts undertaken by Ghandi, his longest being 21 days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fasts_undertaken_by_Mah... There are all the Christian sites that promote fasting so you can be more like Jesus: https://danielfast.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/christian-fastin... There's endless other religious sites I could link to. In India the yogis are known for very long fasts. You should try to educate yourself on this subject. There is an abundance of information that is only a Google search away. |
And second, what applies to healthy people, metabolically speaking, usually does not apply to people with diabetes. I did a Pubmed search before I posted my comment, and wasn't able to find a single example of prolonged fasting having even been tried in T2DM patients.
As someone with T1DM (the kind caused by autoimmunity, not the kind caused by obesity), my expectation is that a T2DM who tried this in an ICU would probably experience hypoglycemia and abort, while someone who tried it outside an ICU would probably die.