Living without food

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by pluto2, Aug 30, 2012.

  1. pluto2 Banned Valued Senior Member

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    How is it that some people are able to go for very extended periods of time without food (sometimes months and even years) and still have quite high levels of energy?

    What is the biological or physical explanation for this?

    I would really like to know so maybe I could do what they are doing too.
     
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  3. MacGyver1968 Fixin' Shit that Ain't Broke Valued Senior Member

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    It's simple...They don't.
     
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  5. pluto2 Banned Valued Senior Member

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  7. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Sorry dude, it's BS. Frauds. Simply using your brain takes calories. You can't get something for nothing. I suppose you could live on water and semen or something and semi-honestly say you don't eat food. But the calories need to come from somewhere. What if there were some parasite that ate debris from your skin and then deposited it in your anus? It would do all the eating for you, but I wager this method would be inefficient. Barring some photosynthetic parasite, I think these gurus are raking in the dough in more ways than one.
     
  8. R1D2 many leagues under the sea. Valued Senior Member

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    You can go with out food for about 1 week. An you can only go without water for 3 days. Survival people will tell you this. You ever see survivor man or dual survival. You will see that you can eat some narly things. Even in small portions. But you can't go completely without food for over a week. You will either end up in a hospital in bad condition. Or worse. I will try finding something else for you to go on than just my word. If you want me to.
     
  9. R1D2 many leagues under the sea. Valued Senior Member

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    I forgot to add that if you try going longer than a week your body attacks its own self for what it needs. That's why its not good for going over one week.

    ~ this site http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_long_can_the_human_body_go_without_eating
    says

    The human body can go for an extended period of time without food (but not without water), especially if you have some body fat. People have gone for two weeks or more.
    Note that is not safe, and it is not an effective method of dieting. Your body will consume its own muscles for energy, your metabolism will be altered, and there will be other problems. *
    Answer

    Basically your body will find stuff e.g. muscle to survive off for a while. Then after eating EVERYTHING possible you will start to deteriorate. This is quite terrifying but I was anorexic for 6 years. Not eating is bad and will cause serious damage to your system.
     
  10. R1D2 many leagues under the sea. Valued Senior Member

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    Depending where you are you may need more or less water. In hot environments like say texas in August you may need more water per day.
    Second to oxygen, water is the most important compound that the human body needs for survival. If you question this statement, try not drinking water for one day. By day three let's just say you feel like rolling in a ball. Under a rock. Hoping for a doctor with a IV to be there.

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  11. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    I was unable to eat for three weeks. After 10 days, they gave me IV fluids and electrolytes; no food. I lost about 50lb, but was alert, able to walk around and generally function fairly well, though easily tired. Could probably have made several more days without falling down. (Had lots of reserve - skinny people should not try this.)
    I understand people who go on hunger strikes can hold out three to four weeks without permanent harm. I've heard of 56 days, but he died.
     
  12. LaurieAG Registered Senior Member

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    This is a good reference.
    http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Inedia
     
  13. arauca Banned Banned

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    Check with some survivors from the concentration camp. Mengale must have some pertinent information for you.
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The short answer: they aren't. Such claims are all fraudulent. None have withstood actual scientific scrutiny. For example, they may be able to sneak food, but does someone follow them around to see if they are excreting stool? This feces can easily be analyzed to determine what they've been eating. Even their urine will be full of telltales. Even their breath!

    People who go without food for extended periods of time develop severe symptoms that require medical attention. Even morbidly obese people cannot safely go without food for more than a few weeks because their bodies need water-soluble vitamins that cannot be stored. People who have tried extended fasts and were able to avoid intervention by the authorities simply died. The so-called "breatharians" fall into this category. Their deaths are documented.

    Neither. The explanation is fraud. These events typically take place in countries whose government authorities and news reporters can be bribed. Most notably India, where, as it's said, absolutely anything can be had for the right price, and where police chiefs say that they trust their dogs more than their human officers.

    They are not actually doing it. It's all well-choreographed entertainment. If you try it you will either be rescued and taken to a hospital, or you will die.

    Look at it this way. Eating less food, or in extreme circumstances eating no food at all for a short period of time is called "dieting." The result is for the person to lose weight, as his body becomes desperate for fuel and begins using up its stored fat. Eventually it begins to scavenge even subcutaneous fat, leading to that "Auschwitz look" of the concentration camp survivors, with their skin plastered directly onto their bones. After that it will begin burning muscle tissue. Eventually, after you've burned off something like 40% of your body weight (if you weren't overweight when you started) it will run out of fuel for metabolism and you will die, like a fire that runs out of wood.

    People die of starvation in Third World countries every day. What possible reason could you have for believing that these crackpots who call themselves by various fancy names such as "breatharians" have bodies that work any differently from the rest of the human race?

    We have known that all animals require food to live for thousands of years. It's one of the things that even our Stone Age ancestors got right. It hasn't changed.
     
  15. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    Body Detox with Water Fasting

    Many people do this for 7 to 30 days. I asked my doctor about water fasting and he said it messes with your metabolism. Basically it slows down and doesn't speed up very quickly when you start eating again, so any weight you lose usually comes back with a vengeance and then some.

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    http://detoxbodydetox.com/body_detox_water_fast.php
     
  16. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Body cells require nutrition. Without it, they die. You yourself can't live without cells living inside you, where the food goes. Without lots and lots of living cells you would be dead. Without even one living cell, you would be extremely dead. After that, you won't need nutrition. You simply become nutrition. So press pause, peel the potatoes and please pass the peas.
     
  17. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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  18. kx000 Valued Senior Member

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    Maybe you can send your body into a deep deep meditation making it run at a super efficient level.
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    No matter how efficient it is, it still needs some food. Even if you're completely unconscious and motionless, your brain cells require a considerable amount of maintenance to stay alive. Electrical potentials have to be maintained. Otherwise the synapses would degrade and it would become nothing more than a slab of meat--you could never wake up and in fact your now-brainless body would die without immediate life-support. Something like 20% of the food you eat goes directly into the operation and maintenance of your brain. (I'm not going to look it up, it might be more than that.)

    Simple animals with smaller brains, or with no brains at all, can go into suspended animation, during which they require very little nutrition--although they're still feeding very slowly from what they have stored up. But animals with brains require a quantum-increase in the energy required to merely stay alive.

    There is no way for a mammal--much less a human with a brain several times the size of the average mammal--to survive without nutrition. To claim otherwise betrays a lack of comprehension of the basic principles of biology we were taught as children.
     
  20. Emil Valued Senior Member

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    Through photosynthesis maybe, if you paint in green your hair and beard ?

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  21. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Heehee

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    However, since there's bound to be somebody out there who thinks this is a serious possibility:

    You could cover your entire body with photosynthetic tissue and sit in a room with 360-degree sunlight, and it still would not provide enough energy to sustain the life of a warm-blooded animal.

    There's a reason that plants grow so slowly, and can barely "move" at all (bending toward the light as the sun moves across the sky). That's all the energy they can derive from photosynthesis.
     
  22. R1D2 many leagues under the sea. Valued Senior Member

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    maybe you could just live on iv's. There are coma patience that dont eat.
     
  23. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    There was an unscientific experiment conducted in Europe during the 1940s in which millions of people were worked without food or with sub-survivable quantities of food, out of all those people very few of them survived and not without being withered walking skeletons on the brink of death. Evidence shows that countries like North Korea continue these kind of experiments to this day, but alas no viable alternative to food has been found. Perhaps future experiments involving nuclear radiation in combination with lack of food will produce the answer via spontaneous mutation.

    They are usually fed with a tube pumping nutrient paste into their stomachs. By-passing the intestines and liver for extended periods of time could lead to long term complications.
     

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