What are the real benefits of fasting?. Depriving yourself of food would be a panacea, according to the promoters of this fashionable practice.
But what are its proven effects on health? What do Mahatma Gandhi and reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian have in common? They are both fans of fasting – for moral and political reasons for the first, for the weight loss it would induce and better health for the second. This ancestral practice found in all human societies has long been spiritual: Ramadan, Lent, Yom Kippur; Hindu and Buddhist fasts.