breatharians - people who claim to never eat

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Scientists Baffled by Prahlad Jani, Man Who Doesn't Eat or Drink

Doctors hope to find survival secret to help people during disasters.
ByKAREN RUSSO
May 31, 2010, 5:43 AM

June 1, 2010 -- In a country remarkable for tales powerful deities and exotic mystics, an 82-year-old man who claims he can survive without food or drink has baffled doctors who studied him and did not see him eat or drink anything for more than two weeks.

Prahlad Jani said that he has lived for more than 70 years by absorbing water through a hole in his palate. He is regarded as a holy man by some and a fraud by many.

Jani spent more than two weeks in April and May under the observation of doctors at Sterling Hospital in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad.

"We studied him for 15 days with him taking no water or food," Dr. Sudhir Shah told ABC News.

Shah said that Jani gargled water and took baths, but consumed nothing.

While thin, Jani is healthy, doctors said.

"Somebody doesn't take water for seven or eight days he surely dies," Shah said.

Perhaps as equally interesting for the doctors was the fact that Jani passed no urine or stool during the time period. Shah said the normally when someone has no stool or urine, they need dialysis.

Jani has confounded the scientists.

"We are studying the phenomenon," Shah said.

The scientific research may be able to help soldiers or disaster victims live without food or water for longer stretches of time.

Despite having doctors study Jani, there are skeptics.

"The bottom line is that even fasting for more than a day can be dangerous," said Keri Gans, a registered dietician practicing in New York City and a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. "You need food to function."

Assuming Jani was consuming some sort of water, Gans thought he might be able to survive, but not healthily.

"He might psychologically be able to handle this, but it doesn't matter if you've done it once or done it 20 times. Every time he's doing it he's setting himself up for nutritional deficiencies," said Gans. "How can anyone expect to ingest their vitamin and mineral needs if they're not ingesting food?"

That is a question Indian scientists hope to find out.

"We realized that, if this whole phenomenon really exists in a human being even for 15 days, it would have immense application in unraveling secrets of medical science and its application for human welfare," a statement from a scientific group, that included the Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences, said.

"Instead of ignoring this case, we selected to investigate further, in a rational and scientific way. We again make it clear that the purpose of this study was not to prove or disprove a person, but to explore a possibility in science and study a new phenomenon," the statement said.

70 years without eating? 'Starving yogi' says it's true

May 11, 2010, 2:00 AM UTC
By The Body Odd

Brian Alexander writes:

Prahlad Jani, an 82-year-old Indian yogi, is making headlines by claims that for the past 70 years he has had nothing -- not one calorie -- to eat and not one drop of liquid to drink. To test his claims, Indian military doctors put him under round-the-clock observation during a two-week hospital stay that ended last week, news reports say. During that time he didn’t ingest any food or water – and remained perfectly healthy, the researchers said.

But that’s simply impossible, said Dr. Michael Van Rooyen an emergency physician at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an associate professor at the medical school, and the director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative – which focuses on aid to displaced populations who lack food and water.

Van Rooyen says that depending on climate conditions like temperature and humidity, a human could survive five or six days without water, maybe a day or two longer in extraordinary circumstances. We can go much longer without food – even up to three months if that person is taking liquids fortified with vitamins and electrolytes.

Bobby Sands, an Irish Republican convicted of firearms possession and imprisoned by the British, died in 1981 on the 66th day of his hunger strike. Gandhi was also known to go long stretches without food, including a 21-day hunger strike in 1932.
Sterling Hospitals / AFP - Getty Images file
Prahlad Jani was studied for two weeks.

Jani, dubbed "the starving yogi" by some, did have limited contact with water while gargling and periodically bathing, reported the news wire service AFP. While researchers said they measured what he spit out, Van Rooyen said he's clearly getting fluid somehow.

"You can hold a lot of water in those yogi beards. A sneaky yogi for certain," he said. "He MUST take in water. The human body cannot survive without it." The effects of food and water deprivation are profound, Van Rooyen explained. “Ultimately, instead of metabolizing sugar and glycogen [the body’s energy sources] you start to metabolize fat and then cause muscle breakdown. Without food, your body chemistry changes. Profoundly malnourished people autodigest, they consume their own body’s resources. You get liver failure, tachycardia, heart strain. You fall apart.”

The yogi, though, would already be dead from lack of hydration. If he really went without any liquids at all, his cardiovascular system would have collapsed. “You lose about a liter or two of water per day just by breathing,” Van Rooyen said. You don’t have to sweat, which the yogi claims he never does. That water loss results in thicker blood and a drop in blood pressure.

“You go from being a grape to a raisin,” Van Rooyen said and if you didn’t have a heart attack first, you’d die of kidney failure.

In most microbial communities, nutrients are limited, and fierce competition occurs for the available resources. To cope this resource limitation, bacteria have evolved creative ways to obtain the energy required for growth and maintenance. We recently discovered that one way bacteria do this is by utilising the energy contained within atmospheric trace gases such as hydrogen (H2). Modelling indicates that environmental bacteria consume almost 70 million tonnes of H2 from the atmosphere per year. However, we have not identified the majority of microbes capable of utilising atmospheric H2 as an energy source. Additionally, we do not fully understand how bacteria utilise the energy from this process, to simply survive the bad times in a dormant state, or to supplement other available energy sources and to multiply.

As some background, hydrogen is a really valuable energy source for bacteria. This reflects that, while present only in trace amounts, it is ubiquitous in the atmosphere, has a high energy yield, and is readily diffusible across cell membranes. There have been numerous studies on its utilisation as an energy source for bacterial persistence, including in ecosystems lacking traditional primary producers such as polar deserts and geothermal hot springs. Microbes in these communities replicate very slowly or not at all, and H2 provides the energy they need for persistence. But given our genomic surveys suggest H2 oxidisers are even more ecologically widespread and taxonomically diverse than previously thought, we wondered whether atmospheric H2 could also perhaps support a different purpose: growth. Classically, it has been thought that atmospheric H2 is sufficiently abundant to power persistence, but not growth. Nevertheless, it is plausible that microorganisms in energy-limited environments use atmospheric H2 together with other compounds to support growth.

Someone did point out that there a kind of slug that appropriates chloroplasts from the plants it eats into its own skin and in effect DOES photosynthesize, but its not quite enough for the slug to live off of by itself. It still has to eat.