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Why being 'overweight' means you live longer: The way scientists twist the facts.
             by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, M.D.

I have been studying medical research for many years, and the single most outstanding thing I have learned is that many medical "facts" are simply not true. Let's take as an example the health risks of drinking alcohol. If you are a man, it has virtually become gospel that drinking more than 21 units of alcohol a week is damaging to your health. But where did the evidence to support this well-known "fact" come from?

The answer may surprise you. According to Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, the level for safe drinking was "plucked out of the air". He was on a Royal College of Physicians team that helped produce the guidelines in 1987. He told The Times newspaper that the committee's epidemiologist had conceded that there was no data about safe limits available and that "it's impossible to say what's safe and what isn't". Smith said the drinking limits were "not based on any firm evidence at all", but were an "intelligent guess".

In time, the intelligent guess becomes an undisputed fact. On much the same lines, we have the inarguable "fact" that being overweight is bad for your health. I should say that, by definition, being "overweight" must be bad for your health – or we wouldn't call it overweight. But we do not define overweight as being the weight above which you are damaging your health; it has an exact definition.

To be overweight means having a BMI of between 25 and 30. Not as bad for you as obesity, but still damaging. Why else would all hospitals and doctors surgeries have BMI charts plastered on the wall with little green squares, orange squares and red squares? Green is normal weight, orange is overweight and red is obese. Even Wikipedia confirms this: "The generally accepted view is that being overweight causes similar health problems to obesity, but to a lesser degree. Adams et al estimated that the risk of death increases by 20 to 40 per cent among overweight people, and the Framingham heart study found that being overweight at age 40 reduced life expectancy by three years."

You can also find papers in prestigious medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama) with the following headline: "Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight and obesity." That certainly suggests that overweight is bad for you. However, if you look more closely at the paper in Jama, we can find these words: "Overweight was not associated with excess mortality." (My italics). Perhaps more extraordinarily, wha...

Here's a copy of the most recent article in Dr. Jason Fung's series on Fasting.

Fasting and Hunger – Fasting 17
      by Dr. Jason Fung
           Intensive Dietary Management .com

Does fasting increase your hunger to unimaginable and uncontrollable dimensions? This is often how fasting is portrayed, but is it really true? From a purely practical standpoint, it is not. From my personal experience with hundreds of patients, one of the most consistent, yet surprising things reported is the reduction, not an augmentation of hunger. They often say things like, “I thought I would be consumed by hunger, but now I only eat 1/3 of what I used to, because I am full!” That’s great, because now you are working with your body’s hunger signalling to lose weight instead of constantly fighting it.

The number 1, most common misperception of fasting is it will leave us overwhelmed with hunger and therefore prone to severe overeating. Thus you get pronouncements from ‘experts’ like “Don’t even think about fasting, otherwise you will be so hungry that you will stuff your face full of Krispy Kreme donuts”. Funny enough, these ‘experts’ often have zero experience with fasting either personally or with clients. So why does it seem so reasonable?

Approximately 4-8 hours after we eat a meal, we start to feel hunger pangs and may become slightly cranky. Occasionally they are quite strong. So we imagine that fasting for a full 24 hours creates hunger sensations 5 times stronger – and that will be intolerable. But this is exactly what does NOT happen. Why?

Hunger is, in fact, a highly suggestible state. That is, we may not be hungry one second, but after smelling a steak and hearing the sizzle, we may become quite ravenous.  Hunger is also a learned phenomenon, asdemonstrated by the classic experiments of Pavlov’s dogs – known in psychology as Pavlovian, or classical conditioning.

In the 1890s, Ivan Pavlov was studying salivation in dogs. Dogs will salivate when they see food and expect to eat (unconditioned stimulus – UCS) – that is, this reaction occurs naturally and without teaching. In his experiments, lab assistants would go in to feed the dogs and the dogs soon began to associate lab coats (conditioned stimulus -CS) with eating. There is nothing intrinsically appetizing about a man in a lab coat (yummy!), but the consistent association between the lab coat and food paired these two in the dog’s mind.

Very soon, the dogs began to salivate at the sight of the lab coats alone (having now been conditioned) even if food was not available. Ivan Pavlov, genius that he was, noticed this association and started to work with bells instead and before you know it, he was packing his bags to Stockholm to get his Nobel Prize and taste some of those oh-so-delicious Swedish meatballs. By pairing bells and food, the dogs began to anticipate food (salivate) at hearing bells alone without the food. This was the Conditioned Response.

The applicability of this Psychology 101 lesson to hunger is obvious. That is, we can become hungry for many reasons – some of which are natural (smell and sizzle of steak) and others which...