The guy in the story basically survived 6 days without water and traveled up to 160 miles during that time.
It's almost unbelievable. I thought that once you loose 4-6 kg of water due to sweat the body does not function any more due to the changed concentration of minerals in the cells.
Uhmm, No... no it will not. That is dangerously incorrect.
Mineral water may have a small amount of trace minerals, but it has basically zero electrolytes at relevant physiologic concentrations. Functionally, there'd be almost no difference between distilled and mineral water fasting with respect to electrolyte management.
Imbalances in sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium can get VERY serious very quickly. Mineral water does not really have relevant concentrations of those.
I think you're conflating the idea that distilled water isn't particularly good for you since it starts leaching out the trace minerals from parts of your body, with the entire concept of electrolyte management. These are VERY different things, occurring with VERY different relevant concentrations... like at least 1-2 orders of magnitude.
> Mineral water may have a small amount of trace minerals, but it has basically zero electrolytes at relevant physiologic concentrations. Functionally, there'd be almost no difference between distilled and mineral water fasting with respect to electrolyte management.
This might be correct for what is considered mineralwater in the US (I honestly don't know), but 1l of typical sparkling mineralwater in Germany has about a third of your daily magnesium and calcium recommended amounts (as well as relevant amounts of a view others).
https://www.gerolsteiner.de/wissensquellen/wasserwissen/mine...
And there are waters with even higher concentrations.
Just a note, most mineral waters are not entirely natural, and contain added minerals and electrolytes. The water coming out of your tap, for instance, does not contain anywhere near the levels of minerals and electrolytes as a bottled mineral water product.
The GGP mentioned "regular mineral water" - but most of us (at least in the US) do not purchase bottled mineral water to drink on a day-to-day basis. Most of our water consumption, in one way or another, comes out of the tap.
Where do you get that from? No, it is the amount of minerals you are recommended to get during one day, no matter the source.
And for Na the recommended ammount is 1.5 g (from D-A-CH)
But in the example linked above, 1 l of the water gives 118 mg of Na, so 13 l of water would be needed to get the required Na amount. Not practical, but most mineral waters actually come rather with an artifically reduced amount of Na. Natural sources probably have higher values.
The number comes from the NEJM. For low Na diet, 6g Na per day. I do not know any medical association called D-A-CH or any guidelines (Leitlinien or Richtlinien) which are universal for those countries; can you cite better?
And 13l of water is not unpractical but poisonous. You just die.
Ok Orientierungswert von 6 NaCl g/Tag. Which is 2.3g Na. Back to the beginning: trying to get that from water alone, ni matter how good publicity Eaainger hat, will kill you.
BTW the elefant in the room: getting some less than 2.3 g/day will kill a healthy person relatively quick, while a diet with well above 5g/day will be shedded by healthy individuals without any problem…
Tendai "Marathon monks" in mount Hiei finish 1,000-day kaihōgyō with 9-day period without food, water, and sleep but they have to walk only 400m in those last 9-days. Only 46 men have finished.
If I remember correctly the 9-day period was shortened to something like 6 or 7 days, because too many of them died.
Since it seems like a group that already practices and values feats of fasting and endurance it's probably most likely that it commemorates a single particularly notable fast attributed to a specific individual in the community's history. It's possible that that individual didn't actually succeed and it was based on a myth. But I seriously doubt some guy decided one day to try to trick his peers into doing a brutal fast that had never been done.
See my other replies. But I can speak for others a bit, prolonged fasting, even just water fasting, is a spiritual experience. It has unique health benefits. I do it for health, mainly, although I enjoy the experience itself, I'm functioning very differently during a fast, obviously I'm physically weakened, sleep patterns are dramatically altered, but the mind is sharper than ever, in a way that's frankly indescribable. Water fasting does this to a lesser degree, it can be a preview for those that are not ready or interested in something as "extreme" as dry fasting, as even water fasters look upon us as crazy.
I used to know a lot of Hispanic immigrants in Chicago. One of them told me his story. It start with his mom sewing two hidden amounts of dollars into the lining of his pants. When the coyotes he'd hired dumped him and 12 others in the desert near the border they were surrounded within minutes by gunmen who put them on their knees. He said a gunman tore straight into his pants and found one of the bundles (but clearly wasn't expecting a second one and didn't find it). He said the gunmen were slashing everyone's water bottles. He begged his captor not to slash his, and him and one other person got lucky. All the bad dudes then left these people to their own fates.
He said he spent three days walking in the desert. They shared the little water they had, but it was gone after a day. Most of the people fell in the desert and didn't get up. At one point a woman with a baby fell and refused to get up. He went back to try and carry her but his two friends dragged him off and told him if he tried to save that woman and her baby that he would die with her. He says a day doesn't go by when he doesn't think about this woman.
On the third night Border Patrol found the three of them, and they all ran, getting split up. He said he spent the entire night hiding in some brush.
In the morning he found a backroad and started following it and a pickup pulled up to him with a Mexican family in it. They took him home, fed and watered him and asked him if he had any money. He gave them everything he had left ($180) and they put him back in the truck and drove him to Chicago and dropped him there with nothing and wished him good luck.
I suppose you are welcome to judge people as you please, but essentially everyone who hikes, skis, climbs, kayaks, skates, surfs, runs, or plays any sort of contact sport will disagree with you.
Dehydration was not the intent, it was supposed to be just a long desert hike:
> "I thought, I’m pretty tough. I can do that," Broyles says. He planned ahead and buried water caches at strategic points of the journey, which he described in a 1982 article. "Intending to parallel [Valencia’s] route, I had no design to parallel his plight," he wrote. "But the desert doesn’t always honor human plans."
Almost everyone who did sport on the highest level suffered irreversible damage. Of course modest training is very important and healthy in all aspects.
He offers criticism based upon a biological outcome to a spiritual practice, he does not need to understand to declare the outcome stupid. The cultural practices are protected from criticism stuff does not fly- less all insanity of the past comes back crawling from the cracks. Cant criticise witch burnings as they are a "cultural" practice..
Human sacrifice, genital mutilation and various forms of slavery have all been excused as a 'spiritual practice'. "Understanding" will not make me go 'oh, sure...now your destructive practice makes total sense...carry on'. Get over yourself.
It's part of the human condition I'd say. Drinking causes harm in some way, but most people do it. Sticking to a diet can be harmful in some way, but especially people claiming to be pursuing good health go for them. Sports harms your body in that it causes small injuries that the body has to heal.
Without this stupidity as you call it, we'd be nowhere. Yeah it's stupid to try and hunt a wooly mammoth given they're ten times our size but if our ancestors didn't we wouldn't be here.
I don't know why you're being down voted. You're right.
Most social norms are really weird when you think about them.
Shaking hands. Why is it considered a sign of, I don't know respect maybe, to grab someone's hand and shake it? The chances of them carrying a weapon today are pretty slim. But the handshake still exists. Weird.
While I did in the safety and chillness of my own apartment, I did a 10 day "dry" fast last year. As opposed to water fasting, with dry fasting you are not hungry AT ALL, but the thirst is something else. It's not unrelenting though, it can fade into the background if the air is humid enough and you refrain from talking too much, the mouth hydrates by itself.
During dry fasting the body gets H20 from lipolysis (this is called "metabolic" water), sort of like a camel (though camels have obviously a lot of specialization for this).
Anyway, thought it was a propos, so AMA if curious.
It is incredibly dangerous, hypernatremia sadly occurs way too often in elderly patients in care homes where the patients are weak or mentally incapacitated and can't/don't ask for a drink of water and/or are ignored by their carers for long enough.
It does indeed sound incredibly dangerous, it isn't though. Russians (and some other European nations chiefly Germany) are into fasting, though I only know about Russians organizing dry fasting retreats, like Dr. Filinov https://www.wildestvitality.com/portfolio/items/winter-2023-...
I know it's both a cliché and something that westerners often have forgotten how to do, but you can actually listen to your body and know minute by minute if you're in danger or not. For dry fasting, you are told that if you start getting persistent high heart rate you should stop.
Now what you should find intriguing is why would anyone put themselves through this? Well, it has immense and unique health benefits, that's why. It's been studied, although less than water fasting for obvious reasons. Even water fasters think we're crazy, so I understand.
> Dr Sergey Filonov is a world leader in clinical dry fasting expertise and the successful treatment of diseases, acute illnesses, chronic disorders and undiagnosable conditions.
> you can actually listen to your body and know minute by minute if you're in danger or not
Friend, this is all hocus pocus bogus from a crackpot doctor. Other sources even say dry fasting is rarely done today (because it's hocus pocus), even if it was once popular in the Soviet Union.
You will also notice how this crackpot doctor charges $2,200 for a supervised 2 day dry fast - not 10!
Please don't go 10 days without liquid intake - especially when you are without medial supervision for crying out loud. You cannot monitor yourself properly under these extreme conditions. Even if you survive 10 days without any liquid intake, you may (and probably will) cause irreversible damage to your body and organs.
Well, I did it, and I felt AMAZING for months after.
I don't care about the doctor at all, I only wanted to link to the retreat to people are doing it and paying for it.
I'm not advocating anybody do it either, and since it's so difficult, even though it's less than it appears, I don't see anyone jumping in blindly into this.
Humans are almost uniquely adapted to starvation. Dry fasting is simply a boosted form of water fasting, which is almost mainstream. There's no particular danger to a person in reasonable health. I am so I could do it by myself.
You may not be aware of the Placebo Effect[1]. What you experienced was not real in the sense that anything changed but your belief you felt better.
While the placebo effect can be a powerful mental illusion, it will not prevent damage to your organs (or death) during this 10 day dry fast. Please don't ever do this.
Of course placebo is involved in everything, as you know, whether you are aware of it or not, but the results of fasting are well studied and only a web search away.
> Russian physicians have successfully treated many illnesses and diseases outside
> the standardized support of allopathic medicines, as well as more common
> ailments including, but not limited to, mental disorders, bronchial asthma,
> rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, obesity and diabetes.
I guess the Gulag does cure everything...
(though to be fair, the part of the diseases mentioned that are due to metabolic disease - read: obesity - can be treated early in their course by just losing weight - diabetes and hypertension due to obesity will go away once you drop the weight. Just, you know, drink water if you're fasting. Or join the Darwin Awards, whatever).
Right, I sense a lack of open-mindedness here, or curiosity, fasting is widely recognized as having unique effects on stem cells including the immune system.
I'm sorry if you "sense a lack of open-mindedness" in my skepticism regarding Russian medicine. I'm actually very curious - I've water fasted myself. But I try to be rational, and tend to think anecdotal evidence shouldn't move my priors too much.
I don't know why you're making it about Russian medicine, as I said I've only given this example to show there is interest in structured arrangements for dry fasting, I guess it backfired because those Russians are backwards pre-scientific primitives or something.
Fasting is an ancient practice, perhaps the most ancient medical practice.
There's a difference between not eating food for a day, and not drinking any liquids for 10 days... one of these can and will kill you. Do you know which? It seems you do not.
You don't know what you're talking about though, I'm in the community and I assure you there are MANY of use that do it, some more often then others. I know a guy how once did 3 back-to-back 15 day dry fasts with 3 day breaks in between.
(And regardless - you usually aren't hungry during an extended water fast either - you do get physiological "pings" during your normal meal times. However, I would assume that if you're depriving yourself of water the body naturally overrides everything with signals for thirst)
I have MS, where autoimmune processes deteriorate the conductive coating on the nerves (myelin), and fasting is known for greatly boosting myelin repair. In fact, the most effective currently known remyelination treatment is a fasting mimetic (metformin) alongside an antihistamine (clemastine). It also regenerates the immune system, with obvious benefits for optimal functioning.
I'm sorry to hear about your MS - I can understand seeking whatever treatment might help,
Did you do a pre/post MRI to compare the effect? (or whatever, CSF markers, OCT, what have you)
How did you decide on the type and length of the fast? Have you tried water fasts beforehand?
How long did you find a positive effect? Is the fast something that you plan on doing on continual schedule?
My MRIs are great because of all the "alternative" practices I did over the years, and it's not a new diagnosis either, usually at this stage people have a sizable amount of lesions. My last brain MRI came almost entirely clear, remarked upon by the doctor, with no signs of brain atrophy, which is almost unheard of at this point especially for someone not on a conventional immunosuppressant
I did do water fasts, dry fasts are simply more effective for the same time spend.
I do plan, not there yet because right now I'm focusing on building up exercise capacity and i'm also on high dose vitamin D for which it's recommended do drink lots of fluids, so I cut it out for a while and wait for my D levels to go down and when the weather permits I'll go at it again, probably on a whim which I find easier than setting a date beforehand.
How long ago was the MS diagnosed? What other alternative practices have you done?
Any of them for an appreciable time with consistent good results (or inversely bad results when stopping)?
- "paleo" diet with the usual elimination trifecta of gluten, sugar & dairy, quit alcohol & nicotine <= this is where I was convinced it was the way when in the space of a week or so a lot of my more evident symptoms faded away
- later keto
- much later (6 years ago) carnivore diet
- more recently megadose vitamin D (~2y with breaks)
- even more recently psilocybin (full doses)
- a lot of supplementation over the years which took a long time to figure out because the space is so vast and so hard to read, at least it was back in the early '10s. Nowadays B vitamin megadoses, fish oil, some newer research findings like n-acetylglucosamine, still have a lot to explore in the peptide area for neurogenesis and myelin repair, also mineral balancing, iron management (I'm male so phlebotomy), a few popular and totally mainstream supplements researched for MS like alpha-lipoic acid
That's about it in the most condensed manner. The entire history would be about 30x the size as my supplement drawer proves, though I already threw out a lot
Things I failed at and hurt me: stress management, sleep. Doing much better nowadays but these should probably be #1.
I wonder what would happen if we had a huge truck of fish, then loaded thousand of fish to one of those most dry areas in the world – IE without coyotes – layed out evenly. Would these make good good in few years?
Yes it makes good food, but no you don't need to have an extremely dry place to do this. What you want is a cool climate so there are less issues with insects and bacteria. And it only takes around 3 months.
Adjacent to this I highly recommend the nature writing of Craig Childs, which is somewhat akin in style to John McPhee with a dash of the more lyrical side of Edward Abbey: http://www.houseofrain.com/
> The 1-year-old boy in a green button-up shirt drank milk from a bottle, played with a small purple ball that lit up when it hit the ground and occasionally asked for “agua.”
> Then it was the child’s turn for his court appearance before a Phoenix immigration judge, who could hardly contain his unease with the situation during the portion of the hearing where he asks immigrant defendants whether they understand the proceedings.
> “I’m embarrassed to ask it, because I don’t know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law,” Judge John W. Richardson told the lawyer representing the 1-year-old boy.
> The boy is one of hundreds of children who need to be reunited with their parents after being separated at the border, many of them split from mothers and fathers as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy.” The separations have become an embarrassment to the administration as stories of crying children separated from mothers and kept apart for weeks on end dominated the news in recent weeks.
> Critics have also seized on the nation’s immigration court system that requires children — some still in diapers — to have appearances before judges and go through deportation proceedings while separated from their parents. Such children don’t have a right to a court-appointed attorney, and 90 percent of kids without a lawyer are returned to their home countries, according to Kids in Need of Defense, a group that provides legal representation.
