The Fasting Delusion and the Metabolic Trap: Jeff Berwick With Christian Yordanov

I’ve tried just about every diet on earth on my quest to discover the best way to live. I was vegetarian for five years, vegan for two (though I was the worst vegan ever, mostly surviving on spaghetti with margarine and potato chips), and then I swung hard the other way into the Atkins diet, dropping down to near 0% body fat. For years, I also swore by intermittent fasting until I heard some information that long term intermittent fasting has its own problems. It had become such an ingrained habit that forcing myself to eat before noon was a struggle!

But like many people in our community, I’ve started questioning whether some of these health trends are actually doing us long-term favors. That’s why I’m talking to functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner Christian Yordanov today.

Christian has a new book out called The Fasting Delusion (following his earlier book, How to Actually Live Longer), and his science-backed research goes directly against conventional health dogma. Get ready to get triggered, because what he has to say turns a lot of sacred cows upside down… like, why Omega 3s are probably one of the biggest scams in the supplement industry. A $10 billion-a-year scam.

When Christian told Dave Weiss he was writing a book on fasting, Dave joked, “You’d have an easier time convincing people the earth is flat than convincing them fasting is bad for them.”

It’s true… people love their fasting. But in our chat today, Christian lays out a stark three-part thesis on why fasting is heavily overrated:

It's a terrible long-term health and longevity strategy.

It's a terrible strategy for long-term weight loss.

It's a terrible strategy for addressing chronic health problems (like gut dysfunction, autoimmune disease, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer) despite any short-term benefits.

We’ve all heard the party line from the algorithms: Fast, burn fat, make ketones, and heal your body through the magic of autophagy.

In reality, when you fast, the first 24 hours are rough. As your liver glycogen depletes, your body panics to keep your blood sugar from dropping low enough to put you into a coma. Your cortisol and adrenaline spike, and your body enters a stress response where it literally starts degenerating its own lean tissues (muscle, bone collagen, joints, skin, and organs) to manufacture glucose through gluconeogenesis.

That “high” or surge of energy people feel around day three? Christian sayss that isn't magic healing; it's high-octane s