174 Patients With High Blood Pressure Normalized Without Medication Using This Method (All 174 of Them)

Dr. Alan Goldhamer has supervised over 25,000 prolonged fasts in his 40-year career at True North Health Center.

His findings challenge conventional medical wisdom about weight loss, disease treatment, and longevity.

The results he’s documented reveal something remarkable: fasting doesn’t just help people lose weight—it fundamentally transforms how bodies handle inflammation, disease, and aging itself.

What makes his approach revolutionary isn’t just the fasting protocol, but the scientific rigor behind it and the peer-reviewed studies proving its effectiveness.

The Visceral Fat Connection

Modern chronic diseases—cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune conditions, certain cancers—share common inflammatory roots.

About 10% of body fat is visceral fat, accumulating around organs and bellies. This isn’t ordinary fat tissue.

It’s hypertrophic. It’s hyperplastic. It acts like a tumor.

Visceral fat generates inflammatory compounds that create systemic problems throughout the body. Different doctors diagnose these conditions separately—high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune disease—but they stem from unified inflammation driven largely by dietary excess.

Fasting offers a biological pathway to reverse this process.

What Actually Happens During Prolonged Fasting

Dr. Goldhamer’s research using DEXA scans on male subjects revealed striking body composition changes after two-week fasts.

Participants lost 10% of body weight, but the distribution was remarkable:

• 20% reduction in total fat
• 40% reduction in visceral fat
• 6% temporary lean tissue loss

At six week followup 100% of the lean tissue had recovered but the fat loss continued.

This preferential mobilization of dangerous visceral fat while preserving muscle long-term represents a significant advantage over conventional weight loss methods.

The Brain Fuel Switch

Human survival depends on fasting adaptation. Without it, humans could only survive about a week without food.

The brain normally burns massive amounts of glucose. During fasting, it switches to burning beta-hydroxybutyric acid (ketones) from fat stores—a more efficient fuel allowing 70-day survival periods in healthy individuals.

Every human on Earth possesses this ability. It’s not optional biology—it’s survival machinery inherited from ancestors who faced seasonal food scarcity.

Clinical Results That Challenge Medical Norms

Dr. Goldhamer’s clinic has published over 20 peer-reviewed studies documenting fasting outcomes across various conditions.

High Blood Pressure

A study of 174 consecutive hypertensive patients showed 100% normalized blood pressure without medication during medically supervised fasting.

Long-term follow-up of stage two hypertension patients revealed 26 of 27 subjects maintained normal pressure at six weeks. At one year, 76% sustained weight loss and most remained medication-free.

Type 2 Diabetes

Approximately 80% of patients eliminate medication needs on their first fast by achieving normal blood sugar levels.

Type 2 diabetes stems from insulin resistance, not insulin deficiency. Fasting reduces that resistance dramatically.

Autoimmune Diseases

Conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spondylitis, asthma, eczema, and psoriasis show reversal patterns during fasting.

The mechanism likely involves multiple pathways: elimination of gut leakage, reduction of systemic inflammation, removal of visceral fat, and gut microbiome rebalancing.

Cancer

Published research in the British Medical Journal documented complete reversal and 10-year maintenance in stage three lymphoma patients.

Cancer cells and autoimmune conditions represent opposite sides of metabolic dysfunction—one from cells growing faster than immune clearance, the other from overactive immune systems attacking healthy tissue.

The Rebooting Effect

It’s like rebooting the hard drive in a computer that’s become corrupted. You turn the thing off, you turn it back on, now it’s working again.

Fasting creates systemic recalibration. Inflammatory processes, gut microbiome composition, immune responses—all reset toward baseline function.

Think about gut microbiome: five pounds of living organisms—bacteria, protozoa—eating, drinking, and producing waste products inside digestive systems.

Their waste becomes either toxic compounds like trimethylamine oxidase (linked to heart disease) or beneficial substances like vitamin K. What determines which organisms thrive? Diet.

Meat eaters harbor completely different microbiomes than plant eaters, with dramatically different waste product profiles. Fasting provides opportunity to rebalance these populations.

Debunking Fasting Myths

Myth: Fasting Equals Starvation

Fasting occurs while bodies still possess fat reserves. Starvation begins only after depleting micro and macronutrient stores—a completely different physiological state.

True North routinely supervises fasts ranging from 5 to 40 days. Safety depends on proper patient selection, rest, hydration, and careful refeeding protocols.

Myth: Fasting Destroys Muscle

Resting during fasts preserves lean tissue. Active fasting burns more weight but increases lean tissue loss.

The 6% temporary lean tissue reduction includes water and glycogen stores (about two pounds stored in muscles). Muscle cells don’t disappear—they shrink temporarily, then rehydrate.

At six weeks post-fast, lean tissue mass proportionally exceeds baseline levels while fat loss continues.

Myth: Hunger Becomes Unbearable

After 48-72 hours, ketone bodies create hunger-blunting effects in the brain.

Even people two, three, four weeks into a fast really don’t have much in the way of hunger or anything like that.

Patients attend cooking classes and social dinners without eating, experiencing minimal discomfort. True hunger—a mouth and throat sensation—only returns approaching starvation, which supervised fasting never reaches.

Intermittent Fasting vs. Prolonged Fasting

Dr. Goldhamer recommends nearly everyone practice basic intermittent fasting: stop eating 3-4 hours before bed.

This creates 12-hour daily fasts. Those seeking weight loss might extend morning fasting a few hours, creating 16-hour fasting windows.

Intermittent fasting primarily:

• Prevents overeating
• Reduces nighttime calorie conversion to fat
• Provides cumulative cleansing benefits
• Helps maintain weight

Prolonged medically supervised fasting:

• Reverses disease processes
• Dramatically reduces visceral fat
• Normalizes blood pressure and blood sugar
• Triggers profound anti-inflammatory responses
• Catalyzes long-term dietary changes

They’re different tools serving different purposes, both addressing dietary excess consequences.

The Salt, Oil, Sugar Problem

Dr. Goldhamer uses “SOS”—the international danger symbol—to represent salt, oil, and sugar.

These chemicals artificially stimulate dopamine production, the neurochemical associated with pleasure and addiction.

It’s the same dopamine that leads to alcoholism, cocaine addiction. It also is a problem with the ultraprocessed chemicals in food, salt, oil, and sugar. It’s amazing how many problems go with white powdery substances.

Adding these to bird feed causes weight gain preventing flight. Rodents gain 40% body weight in months. Humans respond identically—eating more before natural satiety mechanisms activate.

Ice cream perfectly illustrates this manipulation. At room temperature, melted ice cream tastes “sickly sweet”—so sweet it causes nausea.

Artificial cold temperatures dull taste sensitivity, requiring sugar supersaturation to register sweetness. The excessive sugar remains equally harmful whether detected or not.

Why Diets Fail (And Fasting Succeeds)

The statistics are sobering:

• Alcoholism treatment: 83% failure rate at 12 months
• Heroin addiction: 90% failure rate
• Weight loss (5% body weight): 95% failure rate at one year

Doctors have a better chance treating heroin addiction than they do overweight.

Why? Because medical advice typically suggests eating the same foods in smaller quantities—equivalent to telling alcoholics to “just drink less.”

Complete cessation works for alcoholism and smoking. The same principle applies to obesity: eliminate the chemicals fooling brains into overeating.

Nobody chooses to become overweight. If willpower alone worked, people would have controlled it.

Taste Adaptation During Fasting

Fasting objectively changes perception of sweet and salt—Dr. Goldhamer’s research documents this phenomenon.

After fasting, foods previously considered bland taste flavorful. Items once enjoyed become overwhelmingly salty or sweet.

Patients eating Swiss chard post-fast report it tastes intensely salty—the same chard that seemed bland before. The chard didn’t change. Taste sensitivity returned to normal levels after being dulled by processed foods.

This adaptation makes whole plant foods naturally appealing, facilitating long-term dietary adherence.

The Proper Way to Fast

Before Fasting

Transition preparation dramatically eases the fasting experience. Two days eating exclusively fruit, salad, and steamed vegetables—avoiding meat, fish, poultry, eggs, dairy, salt, sugar, alcohol, and processed foods—makes the shift smoother.

Many symptoms attributed to fasting actually represent caffeine withdrawal, alcohol withdrawal, or refined carbohydrate withdrawal.

During Fasting

Water only. No electrolyte supplements, no powders, no modifications.

Supplementing individual electrolytes creates monitoring problems—rate-limiting factors become unmeasurable, potentially dangerous.

Critical requirements:

• Complete rest: No work, no driving, no exercise
• Adequate hydration
• Medical supervision for fasts over 48 hours
• Medication withdrawal under doctor guidance

Exercising during fasts increases weight loss but decreases fat loss—more lean tissue burns instead. Resting preserves muscle while preferentially mobilizing fat.

Fasting changes brain fuel from glucose to beta-hydroxybutyric acid. Reaction times alter. Driving becomes unsafe.

After Fasting

Refeeding takes approximately half the fasting duration. A 14-day fast requires 7 days controlled refeeding.

Progressive refeeding schedule (per week fasted):

• Day 1: Fruit and vegetable juices
• Day 2: Raw fruits and vegetables
• Day 3+: Steamed vegetables, then grains, legumes, nuts, seeds

Too-rapid refeeding or returning to processed foods risks post-fasting edema (fluid retention, ankle swelling) or refeeding syndrome (dangerous electrolyte imbalances potentially fatal).

Who Shouldn’t Fast

Type 1 diabetics: Insulin production is essential for fasting adaptation. Without it, severe hypoglycemic crises can become fatal.

People on medications: Don’t fast while taking medications. Anticoagulants and steroids are especially dangerous to discontinue arbitrarily—risking pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis, cardiac arrest, or stroke.

Consult prescribing physicians about safely withdrawing medications. If impossible, modified fasting using 600 calories from vegetable broth and juice prevents compounding medication-fasting effects.

Those with pathology: Consult fasting-familiar doctors before prolonged water-only fasts.

Home fasting should never exceed two weeks without direct medical supervision.

Fasting for Healthy People

Dr. Goldhamer’s research on metabolically healthy individuals revealed surprising findings: proportionally, healthy people experience greater benefits from 3-7 day fasts than sick people.

It turns out if you treat the situation before you develop disease, it’s a lot easier than waiting till you get sick and then trying to undo the consequences.

Blood pressure at 120/80 is considered normal. But 110 systolic reduces all-cause mortality risk by 10%.

Healthy people achieve clinical stability quickly—sometimes within 3-5 days. Their blood values normalize, cardio-metabolic risk factors improve, body fat percentage optimizes.

The goal: making the last 20 years of life the best years instead of the worst, avoiding disability that consumes healthcare resources without reducing mortality.

The Longevity Question

Caloric deprivation and fasting consistently affect longevity in animal studies. Systematically underfed or periodically fasted rats live 30% longer—sometimes double normal lifespans.

Dr. Goldhamer reframes this:

I don’t think fasting is extending their life. I think overfeeding is cutting it.

In natural settings, rats eat about 40% less than ad libitum (unlimited access) environments. Overfeeding represents the intervention—fasting merely returns to baseline.

Of 80 billion humans ever born, only 10 have documented lifespans exceeding 117 years—all women. That’s one in eight billion odds.

Lifespan depends largely on genetics and luck. But healthspan—how well people live remaining years—depends predominantly on diet and lifestyle choices.

Why Fasting Isn’t Standard Medical Practice

Until recently, peer-reviewed fasting literature barely existed. Dr. Goldhamer’s group pioneered publishing systematic research in journals like the British Medical Journal.

His book Can Fasting Save Your Life? provides the first comprehensive physician reference with cited literature and practical protocols.

Change is accelerating. The fastest-growing patient demographic at True North Health Center? Physicians themselves—seeking treatment for their own cardiovascular disease and diabetes after following conventional practices.

Functional medicine and lifestyle medicine represent emerging medical fields where thousands of doctors now practice preventative approaches.

Traditional medicine promises patients with high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune disease, or lymphoma: lifelong medication, guaranteed never to recover, perpetual sickness.

Fasting medicine offers actual recovery through treating root causes—not leading causes of death, but actual causes: smoking, drinking, diets based on animal foods and ultraprocessed carbohydrates.

The Economics Problem

There’s no money in fasting itself. Water is free.

Dr. Valter Longo monetized fasting concepts through ProLon—fasting-mimicking diet products sold in 10,000 offices. Creating economically viable products introduced fasting concepts to medical practices.

Meanwhile, treating sick people remains extraordinarily lucrative. Infusion centers—where patients receive IV immunotherapy drugs for cancer or autoimmune diseases—are often owned by prescribing doctors.

More drugs prescribed equals more money earned. Economics powerfully influence healthcare today.

The GLP-1 Reality

Medications like Ozempic and Wegovy represent pharmaceutical attempts to replicate fasting’s hunger-modulation effects.

They work short-term—affecting satiety through nausea and gastric motility issues so people eat less without changing diet quality.

Brilliant from a business perspective: lifelong usage required, immediate weight loss achieved, no dietary changes necessary.

Stop injections, weight returns. Being overweight is so dangerous that even “poisoning yourself to lose weight may have some short-term benefit.”

Long-term consequences emerging include gastromotility problems, osteoporosis, and complications now generating class-action lawsuit advertisements.

From a healthspan perspective—extending quality years, not just lifespan—GLP-1 inhibitors likely won’t prove beneficial. But for short-term weight loss and profits? Powerfully effective.

Breaking Food Addiction

Salt, oil, and sugar create genuine addiction through dopamine manipulation—identical neurochemistry underlying alcoholism and cocaine addiction.

By day two of fasting, most smokers report zero nicotine cravings. Alcohol withdrawal accelerates dramatically.

The principle that works for alcoholism and smoking—complete cessation, not moderation—applies equally to obesity triggers.

Telling alcoholics to “just drink beer and wine” doesn’t work. Telling overweight people to “just eat less” equally fails.

The harsh reality: Stop consuming brain-fooling chemicals. If controlling consumption were possible, it would have happened already.

Some people drink without becoming alcoholics. Some eat concentrated foods without becoming overweight. But for those struggling, moderation isn’t the answer—elimination is.

Creating Supportive Environments

Humans evolved designed to worry about deficiency in scarcity environments. Modern abundance creates opposite problems.

For 200,000 years, survival meant eating as much as possible, storing maximum fat. Now those same mechanisms cause disease.

Practical environment strategies:

• Home: Heart-to-heart conversations with family. They don’t need to change, but must respect your changes. Create safe food zones. Keep triggering foods away from shared spaces.
• Work: Similar boundaries. Avoid constant candy bowl exposure—equivalent to making recovering alcoholics work as bartenders.
• Social: Friends don’t need to quit drinking, but must support your sobriety. If they can’t, find new friends.
• Restaurants: Call ahead. Chefs accommodate requests. Order steamed vegetables, baked potatoes, side dishes.

Vietnam War data illustrates environment power: 90% of soldiers used heroin overseas. Returning home, 90% quit without treatment—complete environment change eliminated triggers.

The Whole Plant Food Foundation

True North advocates diets based on fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds—completely free from salt, oil, and sugar.

This isn’t temporary intervention. It’s sustainable eating supporting fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth decades of life.

Ninety-three percent of average American calories come from animal foods or ultraprocessed carbohydrates. Only 7% from fruits and vegetables—mostly potatoes as fries and chips.

Actual fruit and vegetable consumption isn’t statistically significant in most diets.

Dr. Goldhamer has followed this eating pattern since age 16—no meat, fish, poultry, eggs, dairy, oil, salt, sugar, alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine for decades.

He competes in senior basketball tournaments against 65-70 year olds—a joy because peers are young and fit, unlike age-matched populations who’ve “aged out prematurely.”

The Michelangelo Principle

I didn’t sculpt David. I just removed everything that David wasn’t.

Beauty and health emerge through subtraction, not addition.

Society conditions people toward deficiency thinking—add supplements, add protocols, add treatments. But modern illness stems predominantly from excess, not deficiency.

No kwashiorkor exists in industrialized societies. No protein deficiency epidemic. The problem is excess of fat, protein (especially animal sources), and refined carbohydrates.

Overcoming addition-focused thinking requires conscious intellectual effort. It’s counterintuitive because brains evolved to prevent starvation.

That’s why education matters—books, peer-reviewed papers, clinical experiences showing what wellness feels like.

Once people taste food normally, experience life without joint pain, headaches, medications—fighting social consequences of healthy living becomes easier.

The Ultimate Truth

Health results from specific causes, just like disease.

Healthful living involves three pillars:

• Diet: Whole plant foods—fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds. Minimize or avoid animal foods and ultraprocessed carbohydrates.
• Sleep: Adequate rest supporting recovery and cellular repair
• Exercise: Regular movement maintaining strength and cardiovascular health

Superimpose intermittent fasting (12-16 hours daily) plus occasional longer supervised fasts.

This combination can help people avoid disability devastating the last 20 years of life—making those years the most rewarding instead of dependent and suffering.

The choice isn’t between living forever or dying young. It’s between spending final decades in nursing homes waiting for diaper changes after strokes and heart attacks—or remaining cognitively intact, physically capable, socially engaged.

Dr. Goldhamer’s mother at 92 outlived all 50 lifelong friends. She struggled making new friends because people 10-15 years younger were “too old” for bridge and activities she enjoyed.

Her advice? If you’re eating this way and living these principles, make much younger friends.

Aging out happens. But it happens more slowly, with preserved function, maintained independence, continued contribution.

That’s the transformation 25,000 supervised fasts revealed.