Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

The coronavirus pandemic has made many of us very aware of the importance of maintaining and improving our health.

Make that your silver lining.

Because the more positive change we can make to our diet lifestyle, the better.

There have been a lot of studies that have come out recently about fasting.

In fact, I did a whole series on fasting recently, and here are two more studies to add to our understanding.

We start off today with a study on the origins of therapeutic fasting.

The story of life on Earth is a story of starvation ash from massive volcanoes and asteroids block out the sun,

killing the plants which then killed most everything else.

As Darwin pointed out though, from this war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object,

we are capable of conceiving a rose, namely us.

We are particularly well adapted to prolonged fasting.

Evolving in a contact of scarcity is believed to have shaped our exceptional ability to store large amounts of calories when food is available.

Of course, now our ability to easily pack on the pounds is leading to modern diseases,

like obesity, and type 2 diabetes, but without the ability to store so much body fat, we may not have made it to tell the tale.

And it's not just asteroids millions of years ago, all of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger.

Reason and inscription on an Egyptian tomb from about 4,000 years ago, to such degree that everyone had come to eating his children.

Or just hundreds of years ago, parents killed their children and children killed their parents and ate them.

The bodies of executed criminals were eagerly snatched from the gallows, wiping out as many as two-thirds of the population of Italy,

one-third of the population of Paris.

So we don't have to go back to ancient history, even the most secure and afloen populations of today,

need only trace their history back a short distance.

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