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Leslie Dennis Taylor’s father had type 2 diabetes for thirty years. He saw doctors and took the medications they prescribed; the condition was managed pharmaceutically across three decades while his cardiovascular system absorbed the slow damage of unaddressed insulin elevation. Late in his life he read Jason Fung’s The Diabetes Code and followed it. The diabetes reversed, but the heart damage by then was permanent, and he died of heart failure in 2022.
The same year, Leslie found out she was prediabetic. She was the exact age her father had been when he was first diagnosed. She began intermittent fasting. Her prediabetes reversed and she lost forty-five pounds. Then her migraines of two decades and her interstitial cystitis — a chronic bladder pain disorder she had carried for twenty-five years — both simply went away.
The intervention that would have saved her father from thirty years of progressive damage was available throughout those thirty years, in books that were not hidden, written by physicians who were not silent — and no doctor across those thirty years told him about it. This is the gap the new book attempts to close.
The Fasting Cure: A Century of Evidence That the Body Heals Itself brings together eleven pieces — book summaries, an interview, two original essays — that document fasting as a therapeutic modality across roughly a century of practice.
Herbert Shelton supervised more than thirty thousand fasts across forty years of clinical practice. Writing in an era when medical authorities were certain the heart would collapse within six days without food, he documented hearts strengthening rather than weakening during fasts that ran for weeks and sometimes months. His framework was toxemia — accumulated metabolic waste cleared by physiological rest. His clinical record remains the largest single body of fasting documentation in the Western tradition.
Edward Purinton, a semi-invalid taking six medicines simultaneously, undertook a thirty-day fast in 1906 that not only restored his health but produced two hundred poems in the ten months that followed and a book that anticipates almost every observation modern fasting research has made.
Henry Bieler, a physician with over fifty years of practice, abandoned pharmaceutical medicine after his own collapsed health was restored by dietary reform. His 1966 book identified the liver as master chemist, the endocrine glands as emergency elimination routes, and food as the primary medicine. He treated thousands of patients without drugs.
August Dunning’s Phoenix Protocol provides the contemporary cellular biology — autophagy, stem cell activation, the metabolic water produced from fat oxidation during dry fasting, the suppression of Protein Kinase A that allows dormant stem cells to proliferate.
Sergei Filonov, a Russian physician working in the Altai mountains, has supervised thousands through extended dry fasting for conditions Western medicine has abandoned. Michelle Slater, a scholar dying of late-stage Lyme disease who had failed antibiotics, Ayurveda, and every conventional intervention, recovered fully under his care.
Jason Fung’s Toronto practice has become the contemporary reference point for fasting in clinical medicine. His patients reverse decades of insulin-dependent diabetes in weeks. The “It’s the Insulin” essay synthesises his work alongside seven other physicians — a cardiologist, a cell biologist, an MRI specialist, a pediatric endocrinologist, an internal medicine doctor, a physical therapist, a family physician — all of whom, using independent methodologies, arrived at the same conclusion: insulin is the master regulator of fat storage, and the metabolic syndrome now affecting roughly seventy-five percent of American adults is its downstream consequence.
The “How Seed Oils Break Insulin” essay extends the case upstream. Five investigators — an evolutionary biologist studying hibernation, a molecular biologist studying mitochondrial damage, an epidemiologist tracking population health across 150 years, a family physician tracking patient outcomes, a clinician analysing the suppressed clinical trials — converge on linoleic acid as the variable that programmes the body into storage mode in the first place. Americans consumed roughly two percent of calories as linoleic acid in 1865. The figure is now eight to twelve percent. The mitochondrial damage that follows from this excess is what fasting then has to repair.
The book is followed by four appendices that make the material operational.
Appendix A — The Fasting Protocols Compendium lays out five protocols end-to-end: 16:8 and one-meal-a-day, the 24-hour fast, the 3-day water fast, the extended water fast of seven to fourteen days, and the seven-day Phoenix Protocol dry fast. Each is presented the same way — who it suits, contraindications, preparation, daily phases, breaking guidance, common troubles, what to expect.
Appendix B — Breaking the Fast addresses what every source in the book agrees is the most dangerous part of fasting. It contains Shelton’s day-by-day refeeding schedule for fasts of two weeks or longer, Fung’s compressed protocol for shorter fasts, Dunning’s specific guidance for breaking a dry fast, the mechanics of refeeding syndrome and how to avoid it, and the common mistakes that undo a fast in a single carbohydrate-heavy meal.
Appendix C — Fasting Through the Terrain Lens reads the eleven voices through the unifying framework. Shelton’s toxemia, Bieler’s endocrine cascade, Purinton’s spiritual transformation, Dunning’s cellular biology, Fung’s insulin, Marshall’s torpor signalling — these are not eleven competing theories. They are eleven witnesses to the same body, observing the same restoration in different vocabularies.
Appendix D — The Insulin–Seed Oil–Fasting Triangle makes the operational case explicit: seed oils break the mitochondrial machinery, chronic insulin elevation enforces the broken state, and fasting — combined with seed oil elimination and lower-insulin eating between fasts — reverses both. Fasting alone, without removing the upstream input, is doing repair work while the damage continues.
The metabolic conditions this book addresses — type 2 diabetes, hypertension, fatty liver, cardiovascular disease, dementia, certain cancers, the entire constellation now called metabolic syndrome — are more prevalent than at any previous point in recorded human history. Roughly seventy-five percent of American adults have some degree of insulin resistance. The pharmaceutical management model has had fifty years to address this. Obesity rates continue to climb. Diabetes rates continue to climb. The patients who follow the standard advice most carefully often suffer most, as Danny Cahill of The Biggest Loser discovered when his metabolic rate dropped by 800 calories per day permanently after aggressive caloric restriction.
The intervention these eleven voices describe is free. It requires no products, no prescriptions, no institutional permission. The body, given the conditions of rest and absence of incoming load, does the work that medicine has been trying and failing to do pharmaceutically for half a century.
What it requires is the willingness to take ancient evidence seriously, to read what careful practitioners have been documenting across a century, and to act on the synthesis that no single source provides on its own.
Unbekoming investigates what medicine got wrong — from screening and vaccines to psychiatry and chronic disease. It’s a growing archive of 1,200+ essays, interviews, and book summaries, all freely available and searchable.
Article republished with permission from Lies Are Unbekoming on Substack.
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