Worse, his recent indulgence had even further damaged the organs of digestion and to survive Cornaro had to cut his daily ration to eight ounces of solid food and eleven of liquids.  On this reduced dietary he again regained his health and lived to be 100.  Cornaro wrote four books on the value of abstinence or “sober living” as he called it, writing the last and perhaps the most interesting at 96 years of age.  Had my patient Jake been able to confine his food intake to the level of his body’s ability to digest, he might still be walking and enjoying life.  But try as I might I could not make him understand.  Perhaps he enjoys doing penance in his wheel chair more than he would enjoy health and life.

Tissue Losses at Death By Starvation

Fat 97%
Muscles 31
Blood 27
Liver 54
Spleen 67
Pancreas 17
Skin 21
Intestines 18
Kidneys 26
Lungs 18
Testes 40
Heart 3
Brain and Spinal Cord 3
Nerves 3
Bone 14

From Keys, Ancel, Joseph Brozek, Austin Henchel, Olaf Mickelson and Henry L. Taylor, (1950)_ The Biology of Human Starvation._ Two Vols.  Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press.

Starvation

It is true that ethical medical doctors use the least-risky procedure they are allowed to use.  But this does not mean there are no risks to allopathic treatment.  The medical doctor justifies taking the risks by saying that the risk/reward ratio is the best possible.  Any sick person is already at risk.  Life comes with only one guarantee:  that none of us gets out of it alive.

Compared to the risks of allopathic medicine, fasting is a far safer method of treating disease.  The oft-repeated scare stories medical doctors and their allies circulate about fasting are not true, and it is important to remember that none of these people portraying fasting as evil and dangerous have ever fasted themselves—­I’ll put money on that one.  Or, on the slim possibility that someone telling fasting horror stories did actually not eat for 24 hours (probably because some accident or acute illness prevented them), they had a terrible experience because they didn’t understand the process, were highly toxic, and were scared to death the whole time.

Or worse yet they fasted for a short period with an “open mind”—­a very dangerous state in which to approach anything new.  I have found through considerable experience with people professing to have open minds that the expression “I’m open minded” usually means that someone has already made up their mind and new data just passes straight through their open mind—­in one ear and out the other.  Or sometimes, the phrase “open mind” means a person that does not believe any information has reality and is entirely unable to make up their mind.