The science of how intermittent fasting works for weight loss. An in-depth lecture given to physicians but easy to understand for everybody.

Dr. Jason Fung completed medical school and internal medicine at the University of Toronto before finishing his nephrology fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles at the Cedars-Sinai hospital.

He now has a practice in Ontario, Canada where he uses his Intensive Dietary Management program to help all sorts of patients, but especially those suffering from the two big epidemics of modern times: obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Dr. Fung uses innovative solutions to these problems, realising that conventional treatments are not that effective in helping people.

What is the perfect treatment that can cure type 2 diabetes (!) and lead to effortless weight loss? Listen to the eloquent Dr. Jason Fung describe it in this 12-minute part of a longer interview.

** Observe: This treatment is extremely effective. If you have diabetes and take blood sugar lowering medication (especially insulin injections) you may need to reduce the doses a lot to avoid potentially dangerous hypoglycemia. You may instantly become too healthy for your medication. **

In the full 45 minute interview Dr. Fung goes into more detail about exactly how to add fasting to your low-carb diet, important things to consider and how to avoid potential problems.

Dr. Jason Fung, MD, is a nephrologist and expert in the use of intermittent fasting and low-carbohydrate diets for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes. In this presentation, delivered on Aug. 2, 2018, at the 2018 CrossFit Health Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, Fung shares his first-hand experiences with “The Mess” and discusses how he shifted his research and medical practices as a result of those experiences.

Fung’s objectives for his presentation include:

1. Understanding why long-term weight loss is so difficult.

2. Introducing the concept of therapeutic fasting.

3. Understanding some myths and misunderstandings associated with the fasting process.

He recalls treating obese and diabetic patients with traditional methods, which included what he characterizes as poor dietary recommendations and a slurry of drugs. He explains, “It became obvious that I’m just sort of holding their hand until they get their heart attack, until they get dialysis, until they go blind, until we chop their feet off.”

“It’s really sad to realize that the profession that you’ve chosen is not really helping people,” he says. This realization compelled him to diagnose the problems associated with traditional care and seek alternative treatment methods for his patients.

“Evidence-based medicine is actually so corrupt as to be useless or harmful,” Marcia Angell wrote in 2009. The statement was less a revelation than something many already knew, but it made waves because of its source. Angell, a medical insider, had spent two decades as the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Jason Fung is also a medical insider who has become wary of scientific research that purports to be “evidence based.” A well-known nephrologist and author, Fung often speaks about Type-2 diabetes reversal and the metabolic effects of intermittent fasting, but in this presentation from Dec. 15, 2018, he turns his focus toward the many ways the foundations of evidence-based medicine have become corrupted by financial conflicts of interest.

The first conflicts of interest he highlights pertain to the corruption of doctors. Practicing physicians who accept gifts from Big Pharma are 225-335% more likely to prescribe drugs from the gift-giving company than those who do not, Fung explains.

The corruption of doctors in prestigious universities is even worse, he claims. “There's a clear correlation: The more prestigious a doctor, the more money they're getting from the pharmaceutical.” Anecdotally, he says, this means you may be better off seeking medical advice from a family physician than from a Harvard professor; the former probably just accepted a $10 pen from Big Pharma while the latter is on the take for $500,000. “It just is a terrible system,” he says. “Yet, these people are the people that are in the newspaper. They're the ones that are teaching medical students, are the ones who are teaching the — the dietitians, the pharmacist — everybody.”

The most insidious corruption affects the published research on particular drugs. Fung highlights the influence industry can have when it finds a medical journal editor willing to take its money. Another problem arises in the form of industry-funded medical research. This conflict of interest leads to the selective publication of positive trials, which can skew the science on particular drugs and lead to unnecessary or even dangerous overprescription. Fung notes how statin prescriptions illustrate the scope of this particular problem.

“We accept this of drug companies … but the problem is that people die,” Fung says. He later adds: “You can make arguments that sugar is a health food, that opioids are good for you … but it harms patients, and we always have to remember that at the end of the day, this is not why we became doctors. The reason we became doctors was to help people, but we're not until we kind of set those same rules as everybody else.”

Dr. Jason Fung explains the science of metabolic syndrome and how intermittent fasting can help reverse this disease. Metabolic syndrome includes abdominal obesity, insulin resistance, high triglycerides, low HDL and hypertension but is better understood as a disease of too much insulin.

Metabolic syndrome is a constellation of 5 related issues, which denotes an underlying common etiology - hyperinsulinemia. It can be reversed by changing the diet.