Blood pressure in 29 hypertensive adults dropped from an average of 147/86 mmHg to 113/77 mmHg after a medically supervised water-only fast averaging eleven days, followed by five days of controlled refeeding. One year later, the majority of participants who provided follow-up data had sustained the reductions without any pharmaceutical intervention. The DASH diet, considered the best-studied dietary approach for hypertension, achieves reductions of roughly 5/3 mmHg. Antihypertensive medications produce modest effects and 45 percent of patients abandon them because of side effects. In Can Fasting Save Your Life? (2024), Dr. Alan Goldhamer and Dr. Toshia Myers document the clinical outcomes and physiological mechanisms of prolonged water-only fasting across more than 25,000 supervised fasts conducted at a single California facility since 1984, with zero deaths.
Goldhamer, a chiropractor who founded the TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California in 1984, has personally supervised prolonged water-only fasts in more than 25,000 patients across four decades. Myers holds a PhD and works as a research scientist at the TrueNorth Health Foundation, the clinical research arm established in 2011 that has conducted multiple prospective studies on fasting physiology, safety, and clinical outcomes. Together they draw on their own case files and on the published literature stretching from Francis Benedict’s 1915 fasting experiments through George Cahill’s metabolic phase mapping in the 1960s. The book is published alongside endorsements from Caldwell Esselstyn, Joel Fuhrman, Neal Barnard, Michael Greger, John McDougall, and T. Colin Campbell, whose foreword places the work within a particular lineage of physicians treating chronic disease through dietary and lifestyle intervention.
The book arrives in a decade when chronic disease rates in the United States have reached levels never previously recorded. Six of ten American adults carry at least one chronic diagnosis, 70 percent chronically use pharmaceutical drugs, and the annual healthcare bill exceeds $3.5 trillion. More than half of Americans on pharmaceuticals remain chronically ill. The hygienic tradition the book draws on, pioneered by Isaac Jennings in the early 1800s, systematized by Herbert Shelton in the mid-twentieth century, and institutionalized through the National Health Association in 1948, was progressively marginalized as the pharmaceutical model came to dominate medical education, research funding, and clinical practice. The current standard of care treats chronic disease as a permanent management problem requiring recurring prescription revenue. Goldhamer and Myers argue, with four decades of case files behind them, that this framework misreads what the body is capable of when the sources of damage are removed.
Within the lineage of Jennings, Graham, Shelton, and the natural hygiene tradition, Can Fasting Save Your Life? is the clinical and research synthesis for medically supervised prolonged water-only fasting as practiced today. The full summary unpacks the Finnell 2018 safety analysis (768 patient visits, zero deaths, mild-to-moderate adverse events in the great majority), the nine-year follicular lymphoma remission achieved without any conventional cancer treatment, the visceral fat reductions of 20 to 50 percent that continue after fasting ends, and a particularly revealing case where uric acid elevations during fasting are routinely treated with the anti-gout drug allopurinol despite the fact that essentially no new cases of gout occur during fasting. The elevation serves a function. It helps maintain blood pressure during caloric deprivation and acts as an antioxidant. The drug suppresses the adaptation.
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