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Comment by SteveCoast | Hacker News Reader

Dr Fung has been doing this for a long time, and it's not dangerous at all. My longest fast was for 14 days just water, though I wasn't diabetic.

Fung has lots of articles on Medium and /r/fasting is a great resource. Fung and also Taubes books are great and point out he maddening simplicity, that diabetes is high insulin is high sugar intake and that we treat it with... higher insulin. It's insanity, and because we can't see the wood for the trees we have smart people go study things like how much titanium you have in your body rather than solving the actual problem of carb intake.

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> we have smart people go study things like how much titanium you have in your body rather than solving the actual problem of carb intake

Why can't we have both? We have a lot of smart people and the more ideas we have go through the scientific process of becoming a recognized treatment, the better. It doesn't take an army of smart people to create solutions, just a few. It's drive and motivation to solve problems that's in limited supply.

> "It's insanity, and because we can't see the wood for the trees we have smart people go study things like how much titanium you have in your body rather than solving the actual problem of carb intake."

if we can reduce type 2 diabetes without reducing carb intake, that's a win.

Thanks for jogging my memory. The only reason I mention dangerous is that fasting can in fact be very dangerous depending on a persons physiology and preexisting conditions. That said, it is much less dangerous than having T2D. So the benefits may outweigh the risks in this case.

Everything has a risk though, not even an exaggeration, actions or inactions. The problem with disucssing fasting is that it's not widely supported in modern western health, so there's little discussion or common knowledge about how to recognize problems during fasting.

What is great about problems during fasting though, generally speaking, to solve them is as easy as breaking the fast.

There are fasting clinics where doctors monitor the urine output from patients to determine if their body is expelling too many toxins at one time, and help control the fast.

I completely agree and having your blood and stool checked by a doctor or a lab is certainly a good mitigating control, especially for people that have preexisting issues such as; but not limited to, kidney or liver diseases.

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