REVIEW
Ancient discipline Joseph Shaw looks at fasting for Catholics
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ntermittent fasting is the diet trend of the moment. That is not in itself a recommendation: the world of nutrition has been plagued by mutually contradictory theories and passing fads for decades, some ineffective, some not very healthy, and some lucrative to their promoters. I’m no expert on nutrition, so while I’ll try to explain the theory as presented in two books, I can’t really assess its claims: readers must use their own judgement. The reason I’m bringing it to the attention of Mass of Ages readers derives from two aspects of this approach to diet which set it apart from others: its relationship with the ancient Catholic discipline of fasting, and its relationship with ordinary culinary culture. To understand these two issues, I need to explain the intermittent fasting
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theory. Its major populariser, Jason Fung, gives in his book a very interesting account of the modern history of nutrition, the science of blood-sugar regulation, diabetes, and why things have gone so wrong: which clearly, they have, particularly in the USA and the UK, where the rates of obesity (and diabetes) are so high. But a helpful way of introducing the fundamental point would be to compare two fasts: the Minnesota Starvation Experiment of 1944-5, and Angus Barbieri of Tayport, Scotland, in 1965-6. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment isolated the subjects, 36 conscientious objectors, and progressively reduced their food intake to make them lose an average of 25% of their total body weight, over 24 weeks, before allowing them to recover.
The idea was to study the effects of malnourishment, which was a major problem in war-torn Europe. What they discovered is that the human body has an amazing capacity to cut its energy usage when it has to: it was surprisingly difficult to get the men to lose the weight the experimenters had planned. In the meantime, the wretched subjects felt the cold acutely, lacked strength in standardised activities, and became obsessed with food: thinking about it, dreaming about it, and in some cases stealing it, and being thrown out of the experiment as a result. Contrasting Anyone who has been on a calorycontrolled diet will know exactly how they felt. However, Angus Barbieri presents a contrasting case. He was
SPRING 2021
