Scientific Basis
Nutritional science indicates that fasting for extended periods leads to starvation, dehydration, and eventual death. In the absence of calorie intake, the body normally burns its own reserves of glycogen, body fat, and muscle. Breatharians claim that their bodies do not consume these reserves while fasting.
Few breatharians have submitted themselves to medical testing; of those that have, including a hospital's observation of an Indian mystic surviving without food or water for 15 days, none have undergone peer review with results independently reproduced. In a handful of documented cases, individuals attempting breatharian fasting have died, and among the claims investigated by the Indian Rationalist Association, all were found to be fraudulent.
Read more about this topic: Inedia
Famous quotes containing the words scientific and/or basis:
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)