
World No.1 Fasting Expert: The Link Between Cancer & Fasting That They're Hiding From You!
Dr. Alan Goldhamer (guest), Steven Bartlett (host), Narrator
In this episode of The Diary of a CEO, featuring Dr. Alan Goldhamer and Steven Bartlett, World No.1 Fasting Expert: The Link Between Cancer & Fasting That They're Hiding From You! explores world’s Top Fasting Doctor Reveals Radical Evidence Against Modern Medicine’s Approach Dr. Alan Goldhamer, a physician with 40 years’ experience supervising water-only fasts, argues that medically supervised fasting is the most effective known treatment for hypertension and a powerful tool for reversing chronic disease. He explains the physiology of fasting, including the shift from glucose to ketones, visceral fat loss, autophagy, microbiome ‘rebooting,’ and autonomic nervous system rebalancing. Goldhamer contrasts water fasting with intermittent fasting, ketogenic diets, and juice fasts, emphasizing fasting’s superior impact on visceral fat, insulin resistance, blood pressure, and gut health. He frames fasting as both a therapeutic medical intervention and a psychological reset that can recalibrate taste, dopamine responses, and long‑term adherence to a whole-food, SOS‑free (no salt, oil, sugar) plant-based diet.
World’s Top Fasting Doctor Reveals Radical Evidence Against Modern Medicine’s Approach
Dr. Alan Goldhamer, a physician with 40 years’ experience supervising water-only fasts, argues that medically supervised fasting is the most effective known treatment for hypertension and a powerful tool for reversing chronic disease. He explains the physiology of fasting, including the shift from glucose to ketones, visceral fat loss, autophagy, microbiome ‘rebooting,’ and autonomic nervous system rebalancing. Goldhamer contrasts water fasting with intermittent fasting, ketogenic diets, and juice fasts, emphasizing fasting’s superior impact on visceral fat, insulin resistance, blood pressure, and gut health. He frames fasting as both a therapeutic medical intervention and a psychological reset that can recalibrate taste, dopamine responses, and long‑term adherence to a whole-food, SOS‑free (no salt, oil, sugar) plant-based diet.
Key Takeaways
Medically supervised water-only fasting can normalize high blood pressure more effectively than drugs.
Goldhamer cites a study of 174 consecutive hypertensive patients, all of whom achieved normal blood pressure without medication after supervised water-only fasting and refeeding. ...
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Fasting preferentially targets visceral fat and reduces systemic inflammation.
During a typical two-week fast, patients in Goldhamer’s data lost about 10% of total body weight, 20% of total fat, and roughly 40% of visceral fat, while lean tissue loss averaged only ~6% and was fully recovered within six weeks. ...
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Fasting triggers a metabolic switch in the brain, improving stability and potentially cognition.
After roughly 16–48 hours of not eating, glycogen stores deplete and the brain shifts from using glucose to ketones, especially beta-hydroxybutyrate, as its primary fuel. ...
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Water fasting may ‘reboot’ the gut microbiome and hormone balance, influencing GI, mood, and reproductive disorders.
Goldhamer describes large drops in total microbial load during fasting followed by repopulation during refeeding, with composition depending on the post-fast diet. ...
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A core part of fasting’s power is behavioral: it resets taste, dopamine responses, and learned helplessness.
Fasting increases sensitivity to salt and sugar, making whole plant foods taste better and processed foods less appealing, which Goldhamer calls ‘taste neuroadaptation. ...
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Safety and proper refeeding are critical; long water fasts should be medically supervised.
Goldhamer stresses that fasting is not simply “not eating. ...
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Everyday and intermittent fasting can be useful tools even for “healthy” people.
Goldhamer recommends that virtually everyone practice a daily 12-hour fast by not eating three to four hours before bed and delaying breakfast appropriately. ...
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Notable Quotes
“Health is the direct result of healthful living, not pills, potions, and powders.”
— Dr. Alan Goldhamer
“This is the most effective treatment that's ever been shown in treating the leading cause of death and disability, which is high blood pressure.”
— Dr. Alan Goldhamer
“It's not that fasting doubles your lifespan. It's overfeeding cuts it in half.”
— Dr. Alan Goldhamer
“People are trying to sell the pleasure trap. They're trying to tell you what you want to hear, not what you need to know.”
— Dr. Alan Goldhamer
“If you do exactly what we tell you, we guarantee you you'll never get well. You'll be sick the rest of your life and you'll be on these drugs forever.”
— Dr. Alan Goldhamer (describing conventional medical advice)
Questions Answered in This Episode
Your hypertension data are striking: what would a rigorous, randomized trial comparing long water-only fasts to optimized modern drug regimens for blood pressure actually look like, and what endpoints would you prioritize beyond systolic/diastolic readings?
Dr. ...
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You attribute many benefits to changes in the gut microbiome after fasting and refeeding; if you sequenced patients’ microbiomes before, immediately after, and six months after a fast, what specific taxa and functional pathways would you hypothesize are most predictive of sustained remission in conditions like PCOS or ulcerative colitis?
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Some oncologists warn that fasting during cancer could weaken patients or interfere with treatments—how do you respond to that criticism, and what safeguards or inclusion/exclusion criteria would you insist on before ever applying water-only fasting alongside or instead of chemotherapy?
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Given your strong stance against salt, oil, and sugar, what would you say to an endurance athlete who feels and performs best on a higher-sodium, higher-carbohydrate diet and worries that an SOS-free approach plus periodic fasting could impair performance or recovery?
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You emphasize honesty, integrity, and intelligence as keys to healthful living; how would you design a practical, month-long ‘behavioral fasting’ protocol that helps people systematically withdraw from the pleasure trap of ultra-processed foods while testing and strengthening those three traits in daily life?
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Transcript Preview
This is the most effective treatment that's ever been shown in treating the leading cause of death and disability, which is high blood pressure. It also reduces insulin resistance. It can enhance cognitive capacities, and you also see it affecting things like depression and anxiety. It's called fasting, and there's more. Fasting introduces not just a chance to lose weight. It also mobilizes visceral fat, which is the fat around the belly and the organs, which is giving off inflammatory products that's causing heart disease, cancer, diabetes. And many people are maintaining higher visceral fat than what they should be. So, I've spent 40 years helping people get healthy, and I can tell you that I think you should be fasting every day.
So, tell me about that then. But also, isn't the game here just to not eat as much?
Well, here's the problem.
Dr. Alan Goldhamer is a pioneering physician.
Who has spent his life helping thousands of people reverse chronic disease.
Eliminate medication. And reclaim their health using one of the most ancient healing tools known to humanity.
Today, we live in a world designed to make you fat, sick, and miserable, where 76% of people are overweight or obese, and where people think that health comes from pills, potions to powders. And yet most of us are ignorant of the proven health benefits of fasting. In fact, if you look at all of the chemical changes that happen with exercise, they also happen with fasting. Things like an increase in BDNF, a neurochemical protecting the brain from Alzheimer's disease.
And what about water fasting?
So, people that have not been successful resolving their conditions with medications, including patients with polycystic ovarian syndrome, have been profoundly affected by water fasting. And we'll go through fabulous research, but one thing you wanna realize is that all human beings have the capacity to fast.
Okay. So, let's run through the unique selling points versus any other diet or intervention.
Let's do it.
I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe, so if you could do me a favor and double-check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going and this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do double-check if you've subscribed, and, uh, thank you so much. Because in a strange way, you are- you're part of our history, and you're on this journey with us, and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you. Dr. Alan Goldhamer, my first question is, who are you, and what have you spent the last four decades of your life doing, and why?
I've spent my entire life really focused on one topic, and that's this idea that, you know, health results from healthful living. I got interested really young. I was, uh, in elementary school, and I had decided that I wanted to pursue this as a career. And when I finished training in the United States, I had an opportunity to go to Australia, and I studied with a guy named Alec Burton, who was the world's leading expert in the use of medically supervised water-only fasting. And I saw things there that weren't supposed to be happening. People were getting better. I saw people with chronic diseases like high blood pressure resolving their hypertension, getting off the medications. And so we began to carefully evaluate patients with hypertension. In this study, 174 consecutive patients with high blood pressure, and 174 people normalized their blood pressure without the need for medication. After we published that paper, we went on, and we've published couple dozen papers now on the use of diet and fasting and we've written a book. It's called Can Fasting Save Your Life? Which summarizes our work and other people's work on this use of fasting to help, uh, the body do what it really does best, and which is heal itself if you get out of the way.
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