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Fasting as a health enhancing method also dates back to prehistory, with records of the great physician Hippocrates employing fasts as part of his healing regime for many patients.

‘When one feeds a sick person, one only feeds the sickness.’ (Hippocrates 460–377 BC)

In more recent times the use of fasting as a therapeutic measure has been most widespread in Germany, the UK, Scandinavia and the USA. In these countries in particular there has been a good deal of research which shows the value of fasting in a wide range of diseases, some of which is recounted below.

One of the first doctors to widely advocate fasting in the USA was Isaac Jennings (1788–1874) who eventually abandoned the use of drugs and relied on a programme of vegetarian eating, pure water, sunshine, exercise, emotional balance, rest and fasting to bring about a restoration of health in his patients. With the assistance of a Presbyterian preacher, Sylvester Graham, Jennings promoted his Natural Hygienic methods which became extremely popular as an alternative to the indiscriminate and dangerous drugs in use at the time (early 1820s).

At much the same time in Germany and other parts of Europe the development of a Nature Cure tradition of healing closely mirrored that of the Hygienists, with priests such as Father Kneipp promoting both herbal methods, hydrotherapy and fasting. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the German physicians Henry Lindlahr and Benjamin Lust took these methods to the USA where, with aspects of the Hygienist concept, they and other doctors using the German tradition developed what became Naturopathic Medicine, which had fasting as one of its core strategies (along with dietary reform, herbal medicine, hydrotherapy, physical exercise and manual methods) of health promotion.

Dr John Kellogg (of corn-flake fame), with his vast Battle Creek Sanatorium (where there were over a thousand patients resident at any one time – most of them fasting), and John Tilden MD were two of the leading American doctors to promote fasting during the first half of this century in the USA.

Tilden’s philosophy was summarized in his book Toxaemia – the basic cause of disease, in which he wrote:

Every disease is built within the mind and body by enervating habits. A fast, rest in bed and giving up the enervating habits, mental and physical, will allow nature to eliminate the accumulated toxins, then, if enervating habits are given up, and rational living habits adopted, health will come to stay.

Tilden was emphasizing the main philosophical core of natural healing, that the body is self-healing if it is given the chance, and that the chance comes most effectively when the causes of the illness are removed (‘giving up enervating habits’) and the body is given the chance to recover (‘fast and rest’).

The naturopathic tradition in the USA is now well established, with three seats of higher education issuing doctorates in the subject (Naturopathic schools in Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Scottsdale, Arizona). Graduates of these are recognized in approximately a quarter of the states of the USA as primary care physicians. The Bastyr College in Seattle, which became Bastyr University in 1994, is arguably the most dynamic of these training establishments, and is named after the last of the great American pioneers of naturopathy, John Bastyr, who died in 1995 at the age of 83.⁴

It was Stanley Lief, ND, DC, who brought naturopathic concepts and methods to the UK just before the First World War. His enthusiastic, widespread and highly successful application of ‘the fasting cure’ at Champneys Health Resort between 1925 and the late 1950s, helped to promote natural healing in Britain. Lief and his cousin Boris Chaitow, ND, DC, and subsequently Lief’s son Peter, established modern naturopathic awareness in Britain. The long-term professional training of naturopaths in Britain was guaranteed thanks to Lief’s founding of the British College of Naturopathy and Osteopathy in London, where a full-time four-year degree course in osteopathy (validated by the University of Westminster) also contains a sound naturopathic education which incorporates training in the use of therapeutic fasting.