CLEVELAND, OH – There’s a Bible verse in Ecclessiastes 1:9 which reflects the thought “there’s nothing new under the sun.” What’s been will be again. What’s coming back is Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad’s message to “eat a day and fast a day” now that FOX and other mainstream media outlets are carrying “new information” stories that “intermittent fasting” will help people live healthier and longer.
Muhammad was born in 1897 and lived to be 77. He died with congestive heart failure, but his body was also struggling with auto-immune disorders like diabetes, bronchitis and asthma after eating a “meal a day” and intermittently fasting for years. In his 1972 book “How to Eat to Live,’ Muhammad suggested that fasting could cause a person to live to 100 or beyond.
He prophetically identified “truths” about cigarettes or the tobacco and alcohol industries that in 1972 were just starting to be widely-discussed in the U.S. health community about their debilitating effects on the human body. He believed scientists then knew how to actually cure rather than “treat” 90 percent of illnesses; but wouldn’t because of the profit motivation connected to the industry.
ALLAH TAUGHT ME that one meal a day would keep us here for a long time; we would live over 100 years. And eating one meal every two days would lengthen our lives just that much longer. He told me you would never be sick, eating one meal every three days. The fact that fasting is the cure to 90 percent of our ills is known by the medicine scientists. But, they do not teach you that.
They know that tobacco, hard whiskey and alcohol are not good for you and will shorten your life and kill you. But most of them are too weak themselves to stop drinking or smoking or chewing tobacco. So they do not teach you that tobacco and alcoholic drinks—made into what is known as whiskey, beer and wine—are not good for you, although they know it to be true.
They will say, “Yes, it is good for you if you are temperate.” But, they know that once you get started on that stuff, it is such an enemy that it just takes you into its power, and it is almost like trying to break an iron chain to get away from the habit. So do not use tobacco in any form and you will live a few years longer.
Fast once a month for three days or four days—or for whatever length of time you are able to go without food without harming yourself—and you will feel good. Did you not know that if you would stop eating pig and the food that you should not eat; stop eating three and four times a day and stop drinking whiskey, beer and wine, you would save much in the way of money?
In prolonging your life by abstaining from the pig, alcoholic drinks and tobacco, you, also, will be adding money to your savings of hundreds and thousands of dollars. You will be depriving those pig raisers and tobacco growers and alcoholic distilleries of millions of dollars that they rob you of which hasten you to your grave.
YOU COULD STOP the tobacco growers from growing that stinking weed, by turning away from the use of it. And you could stop the pig raising by not eating the stinking hog. These things are death to your children in their early ages. And, they even affect the reproductive organs of people in the early ages, as well as affect the heart, the lungs, and your sharpness in thinking. And, after all of this, you die a victim of poison and commercialization. Learn to eat to live. – Elijah Muhammad
The correlation to Muhammad’s thoughts about medical “commercialization” rang true in Cleveland during the early 2000’s when University Hospitals hired a Russian alien named Michael Nochmovitz from South Africa to buy up the practices or patient list of Cleveland area doctors. One of the criteria physician Dr. Fred Harris said Nochomovitz used to evaluate the value of the practice was the number of patients referred for surgery. UH officials wanted Harris’ successful practice.
Muhammad’s own life didn’t support his “live to 100” theory based on the multiple autoimmune “morbidities” or diseases that inflamed his immune system and kept it in a constant state of battle 24-hours a day. With each “morbidity” or disease added to his body’s list of diseases to fight, eating a meal a day and fasting might not have given it the daily nutrition his immune system needed as an agent of apoptosis to win.
Apoptosis is the body’s “program” of cell death. Quite literally when diseased cells gather in the body the immune system “programs” its cells to recognize, learn and then seek out the diseased cell to kill. It’s how the body’s immune system kills cancer cells before they can grow.
The programming and destruction of bad cells is obstructed if the nutrients and micronutrients the immune system needs “daily” to do its job are removed from the diet. In a November 20, 2019 report uploaded to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, reseachers led by Russian physician Natasa Cvetinovic found “micronutrient depletion” was a common connection to people with failing hearts. Their report was titled, “Micronutrient Depletion in Heart Failure: Common, Clinically Relevant and Treatable.”
“Although micronutrient deficiencies are frequent among HF (heart failure) patients, their role in pathogenesis and treatment has not yet been completely elucidated. Besides iron supplementation, which is recommended by ESC, CoQ10 supplementation has the strongest evidence of benefit in HF. The available data suggest consideration of vitamin D supplementation in cases of confirmed deficiency in patients with HF. Some micronutrients (selenium, zinc, vitamin B2, and vitamin B6) showed improvement of various clinical parameters in HF, but were investigated only in a multiple supplementation setting, while the effects of vitamins B1 and B12 were inconsistent due to unclear selection of patients and poorly defined endpoints. The influence of vitamin C supplementation in HF is yet to be determined.”
The research team appear to acknowledge the growing “new” discussion of the 119-year-old “intermittent fasting” concept that Muhammad helped spread in his 1972 book.
Supplementation trials should take into account reduced food intake and poor intestinal absorption of nutrients in these patients, and should investigate not only dosage with beneficial effects, but also the routes of administration (i.e., oral or intravenous). In addition, the available data on micronutrient supplementation in patients with HFpEF are scarce and should be thoroughly researched in the future.
Physicians and researchers J. Rodrigo Mora,* Makoto Iwata,‡ and Ulrich H. von Andrian identified the role of “daily” vitamin consumption on the body’s immune system in September 2008. Their report is titled, “Vitamin effects on the immune system; vitamins A and D take center stage. It includes a quote from Hungarian physician and Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine winner Albert Szen-Gyorgyi in 1937. “A vitamin is a substance that makes you ill if you don’t eat it.”
Unlike intermittent faster Muhammad, Gyorgi lived to be 93. His cause of death is listed as kidney failure. Gyorgi was the master of Vitamin C and its effect on the body during his life. Because of the sugar in citus fruits that makes the purification of Vitamin C difficult, Gyorgi’s research showed the body absorbed the Vitamin C in the spice paprika better.
For anyone thinking of intermittent fasting as a lifestyle there’s a May 2005 report that offers the perspective of how humans actually function when they get “really” hungry after days of intermittent fasting. Doctors R. Michael Anson, Bruce Jones and Raphalel de Cabod authored “The diet restriction paradigm: a brief review of the effects of every-other-day feeding.” Their conclusions are actually quite funny.
“Recently, however, it was found that some species and strains of laboratory animals, when fed AL every other day, are capable of gorging so that their net weekly intake is not greatly decreased.”
