I’ve been blogging recently about food alarmism, that annoying tendency some people have to demonize certain foods by talking about how they’ll kill you.
But the most out-there food fad that’s ever come to my attention has got to be “breatharianism.” Sam sent me a link to “‘Breatharian’ couple survives on ‘the universe’s energy’ instead of food.”
This couple–Akahi Ricardo and Camila Castello–claims that humans don’t need food and water, that they can survive on the ‘energy of the universe’ alone. Apparently, since 2008 “they have survived on a piece of fruit or vegetable broth just three times a week.” Castello claims to have eaten nothing during the entire nine months of her pregnancy with her first child. Since she wasn’t used to feeling the sensation of hunger, she says, she “lived fully on light and ate nothing.” Considering pregnant women are meant to eat more not fewer calories to support the growing fetus, it doesn’t sound like the best approach to pregnancy.
She said living on air in the breatharian lifestyle also cured her PMS. Ricardo made the astute observation that “breatharianism” is a great way to slash the cost of your food bills. Now that they have two children, they eat from time to time so they can share that experience with the kids. Castello says:
“Now, Akahi and I eat very sporadically — perhaps three or four times per week at the most. I might have a few vegetables, a juice or a bite of an apple with my children. Sometimes we have a glass of water too.”
“Whenever I eat now, it’s not because I’m hungry — I just don’t remember that sensation.”
Okay. I consider myself a fairly open-minded person who believes in reserving judgment and letting people live their lives as they wish, with the rough qualification that they not harm others. This pair claims not to impose their breatharian lifestyle on their children.
But when they say they don’t eat and instead exist only on the ‘universe’s energy,’ my first thought is that they have to be lying. I’m no scientist (or mystic), but I think we can say with a fair bit of confidence that you can’t live on ‘universal energy’ alone. My second thought is that okay, so they might eat something (a piece of fruit here, veggie broth there, the occasional glass of water every few days), but it’s not enough. In reading about their approach, it’s not exactly that they demonize food. They just consider it unnecessary. Food is not unnecessary. Granted, the air we breathe is also necessary. But surely it’s not sufficient to sustain a person? Don’t we have all sorts of science to back this up? This approach to eating, where the end result is to lose the sensation of hunger and eat very little (if not nothing) sounds alarmingly like an eating disorder.
It seems that I’m not the first person to question the veracity and sense of their claims. After the first article (quoted above), they released a clarificatory statement explaining that they actually do eat a bit more than they originally said:
“We do eat, just not with the same frequency or intensity as the average person,” the couple said in a statement to The Post Wednesday. “When we went through the ‘Breatharian’ transition 21-day process, our intention wasn’t to stop eating, but rather to heal on a genetic level, information that gets passed through the generations and manifests in each person in different ways (like ‘hereditary’ information). The not-eating was like a side effect that we freely explored when we were a young couple, without children, and also through Camila’s pregnancy.”
There might be more to it than what I’ve talked about here. They say it involves “conscious breathing” techniques as well. And guess what? They offer courses on that which range in price from $200 to $1700.
The upshot here is this: it’s a variation on a food fad. You can dress it up with “universal energy” and “conscious breathing,” but in the end it’s just another way of depriving yourself of food. I’m the last person to tell people what they should eat. But please, please, eat something. And eat enough.
If you’ve heard of any other equally outrageous food fads, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
How do you find this weird stuff? Money-making unproven theory.
Probably the fad now is linking enough sleep (6-8) hrs. to weight loss. It is for me, with my sleep..but I’m getting there. I do believe there is SOME truth to regular enough sleep and regular hormonal function, which includes metabolism.
“Where do you find this weird stuff?” Ask Sam. She sends it my way; I blog about it! lol.
Ya know, I think you have been too kind in your critique. They are scammers, fraudsters and this is dangerous. We need to eat. This isn’t a food fad, it’s b%**&^%$.
You’re probably right. I wrote this at the end of a log day and all the fight that was in me when I first planned to write on these people had left me.
Their clarification almost makes it sound like they practice intuitive eating (“We don’t have a formula as to how much we eat and when. We do it when we want to and when we don’t want to, we don’t.”). Which is a fine practice, but pretty far from the dangerous idea of not eating they’re promoting for other people. My feeling is that they eat more than they claim, but that other people hoping to lose weight or “cleanse” themselves might listen to them and harm themselves.
I’m glad to hear that their children eat regular meals, but yikes! I hope that they don’t internalize too many of these ideas.
The first thing I thought of when I read about these guys was Emma Donoghue’s book The Wonder.
Here’s the blurb: “In the latest masterpiece by Emma Donoghue, bestselling author of Room, an English nurse brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle-a girl said to have survived without food for months-soon finds herself fighting to save the child’s life. Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale’s Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl.
Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, THE WONDER works beautifully on many levels–a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.”
It’s a great audiobook.
Wow. I’ve never heard of this before!