Welcome back to the Barbell Medicine podcast. I'm Dr. Jordan Vagenbaum. I hope you had a great weekend.

What would you say if I told you a young man didn't eat anything for over a year and lived to tell the tale?

Well, that's exactly what happened with Angus Barbieri in 1965 after he checked into the hospital at the Royal Infirmary of Dundee in Scotland.

Today, on Episode 260, we're going to talk about some weird science.

Of the longest fast ever, we'll also discuss what the science says about intermittent fasting regarding training, weight management, and health.

Okay, so let's talk about the longest fast on record. As I mentioned in the intro, this went down in June of 1965 inside of a hospital in Scotland.

The patient, Angus Barbieri, turned up to the hospital and apparently admitted himself to the hospital to get his weight in check.

Now, it's unclear why he chose this hospital, but there is a paper from the same doctors published on another man with obesity that they treated with the long fast three years prior to Angus Barbieri.

In this first case, the man was 440 pounds and complained of being dizzy and he had pain in his lower back and legs.

They treated him for 19 months. The first six and a half months, he would fast for 10 days, where he would consume about 40 calories from milk in his tea, followed by 10 days of a diet consisting of 300 calories per day.

Yep, 300 calories per day. The next eight months, he alternated 10 weeks of an at home diet eating 760 calories per day.

We had to go into the hospital for 10 day stretches where we'd eat nothing and then he would go back home and eat 400 calories per day for the next 10 days and then go back to the hospital for 10 days of fasting.

He kind of repeated the cycle and eventually he lost about 210 pounds going from 440 pounds down to 230 pounds.

Now during this whole period of time, he could drink as much as he wanted as long as he didn't have any calories, so mostly tea, coffee, water, and he was given a multivitamin containing vitamin A, vitamin B1, vitamin C, and vitamin D.

So I think that Angus Barbieri was either recruited to the hospital or he went there because he somehow knew of this previous patient at this particular hospital.

There are about six previous papers of 200 plus day long fast from other physicians in Scotland.

Obviously these groups were in cooots with each other or something, but in any case, Angus Barbieri, well he was 27 at the time and he worked an efficient chip shop that his father owned.

He was 456 pounds when he was admitted to the hospital and that's when the fast started.

He got a multivitamin daily but otherwise didn't eat at all per the case report right up.

But over the next 382 days of the fast, he lost 276 pounds going from 456 pounds to a final weight of 180 pounds.

During the fast, they did a number of tests on Angus to see how things were going.

His blood sugar was very, very low at about 30 milligrams per deciliter after about a month until the very end when it was even lower at 20 milligrams per deciliter.

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