Fasting in France

 

 By Gisbert Bölling,

president of the French Federation for Fasting and Walking

(Fédération Française de Jeûne et Randonnée) - www.ffjr.com

 

I am extremely delighted to have the honor to talk to you about fasting in France. Being of German origin and living in France for 35 years, I knew the Buchinger system of fasting in Germany and imported the "Fasting and Walking" method for healthy people to France. Here is what I found out about the history of fasting in France:

 

The hygienist movement of the American Biologist SHELTON was introduced in France since the end of World War II, represented by Albert Mosseri and Désiré Mérien, more recently by Jean-Claude Reygade. Here fasting is integrated in a dietetic and philosophical teaching of vital cleanliness. They propose therapeutical fasting without being medical doctors.

 

The naturopathic schools of Marchesseau, Passebecq, Kieffer et Rousseau teach and practice fasting on naturopathic bases. Doctor Jean-Pierre Willem includes fasting in his teachings for "Barefooted medecins" (Third-world-practitioners, acting by necessity without any medical structure.). He underlines the importance of fasting as an active prevention of cancer.

 

Doctor Yves Vivini practiced fasting in his clinic during the sixties and seventies, first in France and later on the Balearic Islands, having problems with the French medical establishment. Jacques Lang, later Minister of Education, was one of his patients.

Yves Vivini died by sorrow in the early eighties at the age of 68, having come back to France as a simple country doctor. His basic book in French is out of print, but I made it available on the internet site www.ffjr.com (besides many other French texts on fasting). At that time, his knowledge was on the same level as the Buchinger-clinics in neighbouring countries. He used many alternative medical methods besides fasting.

 

We have to go back more than a century to find the "French Connection" of the Buchinger-Movement:

 

Otto Buchinger was a medical doctor of the German Naval Army, had to leave the army because of a severe gastric illness. An officer of the German Navy gave him the council to be treated by fasting in the clinic of Doctor Siegfried Möller, pupil of the French doctor of Italian origin Guillaume Guelpa, author of several books on therapeutic fasting, like "La methode Guelpa" (1913), well known all over Western Europe at that time.

 

 

How Guelpa did develop his cure ?

 

 

Berthollet tells it this way:

"In 1889 already, the Doctor Dujardin-Beaumetz ordered the research by his assistant, the Doctor Stackler, concerning weight-variation of typhus patients in his clinic of the Cochin-Hospital of Paris. He constructed a special recording balance supporting the bed of the patient which indicated smallest weight-variations of the patient. Comparing numerous weight-graphics, it was found that the patients who developed toward healing were the patients who lost weight in a regularly manner. Those who did not loose weight had a long sickness and, in most times, died. The weight-loss showed that the body was still able to burn his reserves, fight sickness and eliminate waste. For Guelpa, this was a sign that the body is charged with quantities of liquids, cells, old tissues and poisons he has to get rid of before being able to restore health. That is why, as soon as we can clean the patient of those interior poisons as soon he will come back to health.

Ever since these memorable experiences I did no longer worry about the weakness of my patients. Their fault sense of weakness is in fact the expression of the existence of a garbage of toxic products and cellular waste of which they have to get rid of as soon as possible."

This led the doctor Guelpa to propose repeated 7-days fasts on water with everyday purging by mineral salts. Buchinger tells the story of a painter who fasted 80 days in five months with 75 purges - which healed him of gutter. Buchinger asks why Guelpa did not go further than 7 days of fasting at a time ... Buchinger cites a Russian author, von Seegesser, who knew about two dissertations about Guelpa: "La Cure Guelpa" - Lille (France) 1911, and "Tratamentul lui Guelpa in Diabet" Bucarest.

In his book, Otto Buchinger wonders why Guelpa, who was a subject of discussion "à la mode" in the saloons of Paris before the first war, had absolutely no follower in France after the second war.

 

In the thirties, there was the Doctor P. Carton who wrote: "Fasting is one of the most efficient therapies which exist. It is a big error to refuse this therapy. Fasting has remarkable clinical applications. It diminishes the violence of intoxication troubles, liberates respiration and circulation. The energy of the decongestionated patient, liberated of the digestion work, is entirely available for the accomplishment of toxic neutralization. Finally, well-nourished sedentary people, very often arthritic as the majority is today, periodic fasting is a guarantee for good physical health and a moral equilibration, said otherwise: longevity and wisdom." (Cited by Berthollet, p. 137-138)

 

There is no more fasting clinic in France since Yves Vivini finished his career. Personally, I know two dozens of doctors who work with fasting.

But there is a movement of preventive fasting, imported from Germany, which is gaining interest among health-conscious people in France: Fasting and walking, destined to improve health enhancement.

 

 

History of Fasting and Walking

 

 

Gandhi was the one of the firsts faster who walked during his fasts, or who fasted during his campaign for independence, consuming only water with citrons and honey.

Later, in 1954, ten Swedish doctors marched from Goeteborg to Stockholm - 520 km in ten days on water only. This march was organized to prove to the Swedish Medical Association that fasting was without danger for the health and that it could be used for therapeutic reasons. The press talked about this event, discretely in the beginning, but the popular interest grew, and at the arrival at Stockholm there were more people in the street than at the Annual Ceremony of the King of Sweden (as reported "Dagens Nyheter"). In spite of this success, only one clinic worked in Sweden at that time (Waerland). In 1964, they repeated the same march with 20 volunteers, this time on the Buchinger diet. The marchers were followed by clinical and laboratory examinations. The result was astonishing: all marchers were in better health at the end of this experience.

The medical and paramedical press related this event and a German teacher, Christoph Michl, engaged in ecological and third-world activities, heard about it. Several times he organized "hunger-marches" to protest against environmental and third-world issues. A television health program showed 15 marchers on an eight day march of 350 km and the public reacted in a very positive way. So Christoph Michl started in 1984 to propose "Fasting and Walking" in Germany and other countries. Today, there are more than hundred organizations in the German speaking countries, and hundreds of health centre propose this program several times a year. Right now, every year about two million German people undergo a one week experience of preventive fasting, most of them in "Fasting and Walking". In 1990, in order to celebrate the reunification of Germany, 24 marchers walked 1050 km from the Baltic Sea to the Lake of Constance in 21 days of Buchinger-diet. "The second week was easier than the first one, and the third one was easier than the second one. One day was really hard; it was the day when we walked 73 kilometers", one participant told me ...

 

Having introduced this method in France in 1990, today there are twelve organizers in France and maybe three thousand people who make the experience every year. Having published a French book on fasting in 2000, reedited in 2004 with a chapter on "Fasting in Russia", thanks to K.L.Godigna and the "Baikal Readings", media give more and more interest to preventive fasting. Radio, television and specialized press treat this subject in an open way.

But up to now, therapeutic fasting is banned from scientific research, medical publications and therapeutic practice. The only form of fasting admitted in certain clinics is "protein-fasting" against obesity: fasting with daily isolated proteins to loose weight "without danger": 5 kg per month. The cures can last up to one year ...

 

 

Why therapeutic fasting is not tolerated in France ?

 

 

Therapeutic fasting is just tolerated in Germany, and several clinics (Buchinger type) treat between five thousand and ten thousand patients per year.

In France, therapeutic fasting is not taught, researched, tolerated. The reason is simple: medical education, research and publication is controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. A method like fasting which does not consume much pharmaceutical products is not financed, is not taught, is not even published. To give you just one personal example: my French book, which is not a scientific publication (I am journalist, M.A. of Literature, Linguistics and Philosophy) was presented to a German medical scientific editor for an eventual German edition. His answer: "There would be a place for your book in our popular line, but the answer is not simple: all our publications are sponsored for by the Pharmaceutical or Alimentary Industry which finances the printing, byes a great part of the copies for its own purposes and only a smaller part arrives on the free market. Do You have ideas in this direction ?" Said otherwise: We can publish your book on Fasting in Germany if you find a sponsor for it in the Alimentary Industry ...

Having discovered Your activity via the Baikal Readings, I got the impression that the "Iron Curtain" (which cut my home-country into two parts) protected Your part of the world from the omnipresent influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry. This influence begins in school-books, continues in medical teaching, research and publicity: a medical doctor receives publicity every day in his post-box to remind him about the latest products. And it ends in the Official Medical Association which radiates doctors using "scientifically unproved methods" like fasting.

 

 

That is why Your scientific research could be of great help for hundreds of doctors in Western Europe who utilize fasting in a discrete manner, that is why, in my book, I announce the necessity to publish a book on "Fasting in Russia", (My editor agrees with this project), that is why I would like to come to Russia to learn more about Your work WHICH IS IMPORTANT FOR ALL OF HUMANITY.

 

Gisbert Bölling, Léoux 26510 VILLEPERDRIX, FRANCE gbolling@orange.fr Telephone: 0033-475 27 41 58

 

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