The History of Fasting as Medicine: From 1911 to Today
Upton Sinclair's 1911 guide to fasting as medicine foreshadowed what modern science now proves. Here's how fasting history connects to the research we have today.
When Upton Sinclair published The Fasting Cure in 1911, the medical establishment called him a "shallow and unscrupulous sensationalist." The New York Times was particularly unsparing. Within decades, much of what he described — digestive rest, cellular renewal, metabolic switching — would be validated by research that eventually won a Nobel Prize. The journey from Victorian fringe medicine to peer-reviewed science is not just a historical curiosity. It tells us something important about how fasting works, and why it took…
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