Fasting
I previously wrote about refeeding. Let's talk about fasting to treat serious ailments like my condition, which is a form of Cystic Fibrosis (CF).
Fasting has a reputation for mysteriously improving a lot of ailments.
My son told me it must be freeing up white blood cells. This upgraded my nebulous idiotic hand wavy ideas to actual science.
The gut is where 75 to 80 percent of the white blood cells are found.
Planet Earth: That's completely unimportant TRIVIA! Couldn't possibly imply anything important!
Me and my kids: Maybe it's because eating is the single biggest threat to health as we shovel in God-knows-what voluntarily past a lot of defenses along with sustenance.
So when you fast, you free up white blood cells to do other work that maybe typically gets short shift. Not eating for a few hours is the fastest way to combat infection short term and we already have that concept, a la the saying "Feed a fever. Starve a cold."
Fever burns energy and dehydrates you. You need to up your intake of resources when you have a fever. But people often lose their appetite with minor medical issues, like a cold, and that naturally increases availability of white blood cells for other functions aside from dealing with the food in your gut.
With CF, 95 percent of people are seriously underweight. My understanding is that the detail that kills you when you starve to death is you run out of protein mass. (AKA muscle)
I believe I got that information from this PDF on the role of muscle in health which I submitted to Hacker News. I pull it up what feels like EVERY time I turn around, so you may wish to try to read it if you are following my work (though it seems to no longer be available for free via that link).
For people who are extremely ill and especially underweight:
If you cut food intake by about eighty percent, it provokes the starvation response with much less distress. When I was homeless and routinely going hungry for part of evert month while extremely ill, I always tried to eat SOMETHING on the one day a month my sons ate nothing, though it wasn't much.
Eating something is much much easier than outright fasting if you are seriously ill and don't have the biological resources to spare.
For people who are seriously ill, the goal is to get baseline nutrition up. Until they are stronger, limit it to no more than 36 hours at first (this may well be for a few years). Or even as little as stints of twelve to twenty-four hours at first for very weak individuals.
After getting healthier and getting off the street, I've gone as long as a week seriously underfed while in housing. But not while homeless and not until after I was much much stronger.
I still have a form of CF. It's genetic, in other words incurable, so I still have substantial biological challenges, but my baseline health is a lot better.
You can also nutritionally support bone marrow to improve production of white blood cells and I do that when I have low back pain which is typically immune distress because the pelvic bones are the largest well of marrow in the body, but:
1. Bone marrow is fatty and people with CF misprocess fats, so deficient marrow is probably a major cause of immune dysfunction.
2. It takes like two days to produce new cells. Not eating is a faster way to marshall the troops you need.
Fats I tolerate well, calcium and B vitamins are what I try to up to address low back pain, aka provide bone marrow support. I eat cheese and bacon to get the fats I need.
Try looking for maybe some other animal fat that kosher Jews are willing to eat. I did sometimes eat lamb in my youth if that helps any and cheese from goat or sheep milk, which I've talked about elsewhere if they don't tolerate cheese from cow milk well enough. Feta and Romano are two such cheeses I sometimes eat.
MOST immune cells are glycoproteins. See Protein Folding Notes.
The right carbs and protein are needed to build white blood cells.
This is why I desperately needed glyconutrients for a long time and promptly did worse if I missed a single dose.
Aloe vera works as a glyconutrient AND doesn't trigger blood sugar issues.
Per the refeeding post on this site, egg whites are the single best source of protein assuming they aren't allergic or something. Seriously underweight people with CF and CFRD likely have insulin resistance due to lack of muscle mass per the above linked PDF.
Try to get aloe and egg whites into them to both combat CFRD and improve production of white blood cells AKA immune cells.
I keep referring back to CF because I have CF, but a lot of that generalizes for fasting with a serious medical condition and isn't specific to CF per se.
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