This week welcome to the show Jason Fung. He is a Toronto based nephrologist. He completed medical school and internal medicine at the University of Toronto before finishing his nephrology fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles at the Cedars-Sinai hospital. He joined Scarborough General Hospital in 2001 where he continues to practice.

Questions we ask in this episode:

• Fasting can be intimidating and scary. ie: I will starve, waste-away and lose my muscle. Should we be fearful?
• Is fasting for everyone?
• The weight loss industry tells us to eat less calories, but snack between meals. Won’t fasting put us into starvation mode?
• Does fasting give us a license to eat whatever we want when we are not fasting?
• Can fasting benefit athletes and how would they apply it?

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This week, our awesome guest is Dr. Jason Fung, and we are getting into the topic of fasting. Now, fasting is a topic that we haven’t really covered on the podcast before. I do personally implement little bits of fasting in my life, so it’s great to get a guy that’s been studying it for the last four years and applying it to hundreds and hundreds of patients in his medical practice in the US. We cover things from fasting as an application to obesity, to diabetes, especially Type II, to then obviously just weight loss and the health maintenance and even in athleticism as well, you know, what are the precautions around it, what should be looking for, is fasting hard, can we eat whatever we do outside of fasting and so forth, and why should we do it. Should we be scared of it? Are we going to lose muscle mass? You know, all sorts of stuff. It’s all in there and it was fantastic.

[00:01:30] We had Jason on and basically grilled him for 55 minutes to unleash as much knowledge as we could. No doubt you’re going to enjoy guys, and if you are enjoying the show, please leave us a review on iTunes if you can. Only if you enjoy them of course, but if you subscribe to it, five star it and leave a review for us. It just really helps other people find this podcast as well and get the information, just like yourself right now if you’re a regular listener. That’s one thing I’d ask for guys, and really appreciate it if you do. I read all the reviews and now we’d be happy to read them out on the podcast as well. Anyway, let’s go over to Jason Fung, enjoy.

Hi, this is Guy Lawrence. I’m joined with Stuart Cook. Hi Stu, good morning.

Stu

Hello guys.

Guy

Our awesome guest today is Mr. Jason Fung. Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason

Hey, how are you? [inaudible 00:02:04] be here.

Guy

Thank you, mate. Did I pronounce your surname right? I should have asked you before we started

Jason

Yeah.

Guy

Yeah? Beautiful. Look, the first question I ask everyone on the show is if a complete stranger stopped you on the street and asked you what you did for a living, what would you say?

Jason

[00:03:00] I’m a kidney specialist by trade, so I’m a physician. I trained very conventionally, through internal medicine, and then I did a couple of years in Los Angeles for my nephrology. About 10 years ago now, 8 years ago now, I became very interested in the question of nutrition, obesity, because that’s really the core problem of what faces us in the medical world. A lot of the problems that we face are not what we used to face, which is infections and so on. They’re all metabolic problems, that is, Type II diabetes and all the problems that go along with obesity such as sleep apnea, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and all those sorts of problems. They really take up probably about 40%–50% of the health care budget, so you know, modern Western nations, it’s a huge problem, and worse than that, it’s a growing problem. You’ve all seen the statistics on obesity and Type II diabetes kind of rises right along with that.

[00:04:00] That’s where I really got interested in, trying to see where we kind of went wrong, because obviously what we’re doing was not working. We told everybody, you know, cut calories, eat less, move more. We’ve been saying the same thing for 30 years, we’ve been singing the same song, and nothing has worked. I don’t know why we would keep using it because we knew it didn’t work. That’s really where it came from, that I really started looking into, first, the problems with obesity and the very much related problems of Type II diabetes and how our treatments are really quite incorrect, and really how to properly treat them.

Full Transcript & Video Version:

http://180nutrition.com.au/180-tv/jason-fung-interview/