A critical look at tests for breatharianism

Some tests of breatharians have simply isolated and watched the person for a period of time.  For example Prahlad Jani and Hira Ratan Manek.

The reason I am so sceptical of such tests when performed by doctors, is that the first thing any doctor should want to do is a thorough physical examination.  In the previous posts I have suggested a number of possible tests which a doctor could perform, which would all but prove whether a person is or isn't living without food. 

To any genuine breatharian, such physical tests should seem by far preferable, for some of the following reasons.  First, being locked up and watched for weeks or months on end is extremely invasive of a person's privacy, and extremely demanding on a person's time.  Allowing a doctor to take blood samples, scans and xrays, on the other hand, should take up less than a day of their time. 

What is more, many people are very sceptical of tests which lock people away, as it would be easy for an accomplass to slip the 'breatharian' food.  Even with CC TV watching the person 24 hours a day, a dodgy doctor who was an accomplass could easily put the tv on a loop while the 'breatharian' was in bed, and then the breatharian could be given food, water, and allowed to go to the loo.  Safely back in bed, the CC TV could be made live again.  It would probably take just one dishonest accomplass on a team of honest doctors.  There are many other ways the test could be rigged, this is just one.  A genuine breatharian should want to run from this kind of test, as they bring so much scepticism.

Such tests are also expensive - mainly due to paying people's wages for months to watch the person.

What is more, if anyone more sceptical wanted to repeat the 'isolate for weeks' test, it would again take up a large block of the breatharian's life.  The difficulty of repeating tests may be another source for scepticism, as subjects probably wouldn't want to go through the experience twice.

But for a physical examination, if there really were unusual results found, such as the breatharian not breathing out carbon dioxide, repeat tests could be performed with little disturbance to the person tested.  Physical tests should be far cheaper, easier, and less intrusive on breatharians, as well as providing more solid evidence.  What is more, the results would be far more useful to truly advance science and understand human potential, than simply seeing if someone can live without food and drink when isolated.

Other tests for breatharianism

Other tests for breathariansim which a doctor could perform, include:

* Whether there is anything in their stomach or guts (reasons for this should be fairly straightforward!)

* Whether they have any foreign proteins or other components in their blood, which often 'accidentally' get absorbed into our bloodstream from food.  Prana would never create a protein usually only found in a cow's body, but foreign and harmful to a human body, for example.  (Usually our bodies recognise such foreign proteins as invaders, and our immune systems destroy them.  However they can still be found in our blood.)

* For a long-term breatharian, a test would be whether they have the same amount of toxins in their body as another person of the same age living in the same area.  Toxins such as heavy metals, pesticides, etc, accumulate on or in food, and when we eat food they often just accumulate in our flesh as our bodies are not good at getting rid of them.  While there are some of these in the air, which a breatharian would breathe in, the vast majority come from food, so it would be expected a long-term breatharian would have far less than a person who eats normal amounts of food.

* I am not a doctor, and only understand the basics of how our bodies work.  A doctor could no doubt come up with other factors to test for, based on the claims of breatharians having very pure bodies, receiving energy directly, and without producing toxins.

A caution for doctors who want to test for breatharianism:

It would also be necessary to consider the possibility the test subject actually has a diet of mainly fruit, or liquid (juice etc), or a raw plant food diet, or vegan diet - when done well, people can live on these indefinitely and very healthily, but people on these diets would have different components and levels of impurities in their blood, compared with the majority of people on traditional meat-and-veg diets. 

 

Therefore, in any tests comparing a breatharian with people who eat, perhaps the control subjects could be people who eat only raw plant food (raw foodists), or similar fairly pure diets with low levels of toxins.

minerals

Our bodies need adequate amounts of various elements (atoms) to form our structure and to create components needed to perform properly: calcium, iron, iodine, selenium, magnesium, zinc, sodium, potassium, phosphorous, chloride, chromium, copper, molybdenum, sulphur, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and perhaps others.

ATOMS such as these bond together to form the MOLECULES, which in turn form the essential components in our bodies, from the smallest enzymes, cells and vitamins, to proteins, fats, our bones, blood, skin, organs etc. 
Some of these elements are needed only in extremely small quantities, and some in much larger quantities. 

Deficiencies in any leads to sickness, or even death in extreme cases.

To have these elements available in our bodies, we need to eat them - they are found in good quantities in a variety of foods in a healthy, well-rounded diet.

As current science understands, atoms are very difficult to create or destroy.  Under most conditions, including in our bodies, atoms are neither created nor destroyed - they do however bond together to form MOLECULES, which CAN and do often form and break apart easily.  But to create or destroy ATOMS requires extreme compression, heat, and other conditions, such as in a star or a nuclear reactor.  And even then, the new atoms are created out of old atoms.  Matter itself is never created nor destroyed, it just changes form.

Our bodies form many of the molecules needed to live healthily, however many we can not make ourselves, so we need to get them from our food.  A good example is amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.  There are about 22 types of amino acid all together, and our bodies can make 14 of these with non-amino acid components.  However there are 8 types of amino acid our bodies can't make, so we have to get these from our food - these 8 are called essential amino acids for this reason.  Similarly, there are some vitamins our bodies can make ourselves - such as vitamin D, which is made out of other components when sunlight hits our skin.  However, our bodies can't make vitamin C so we need to eat this.  Vitamin C is found in fruits and vegetables, and essential amino acids in fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, and animal products.

This is what current science teaches, anyway.  This is NOT what breatharians claim.

They claim the prana can manifest all these atoms out of nothing at all, despite the fact atoms are usually only created out of something else and only under extreme nuclear-reactor type conditions.

They also claim prana can create the food elements such as essential amino acids and vitamins which usually we have to get from eating food.

Make up your own mind on this one.

Energy - and simple tests - for breatharians

Those claiming to be breatharians claim to derive energy directly from their alternative source - e.g. the spiritual energy prana. 

They claim they do not eat, since they don't need food for energy.  Hence, they wouldn't have fuels such as glucose, derived from food, in their blood. 
This is one simple test a doctor could run on a breatharian: a blood test for the absense of glucose

In the previous post, I showed how oxygen is used in our bodies to help metabolise glucose, forming carbon dioxide as a useless by-product. 

Those claiming to be breatharians claim their cells receive energy directly from prana, and the prana also creates whatever else they need, when they need it.  They claim their bodies are very pure, and don't create useless products.  As carbon dioxide is useless to humans, a breatharian would not be forming or breathing out carbon dioxide. 
This is a second simple test for breatharianism: a test for the absense of carbon dioxide in their breath.

Normal people only have to breathe because oxygen is essential for metabolising food.  So, paradoxially, absense of breathing might have been another test for whether a breatharian really managed to do without the energy derived from food.  However breatharians do claim to still need to breathe for a different reason: in order to derive nutrients, or to absorb prana into their body - the lungs, in effect becoming a breatharian's equivalent of the stomach. 

Normal metabolism

I will describe how normal, food metabolism works in our bodies, based on my understanding of the current and well-established scientific understanding.  Metabolism is the usual way our bodies derive energy from food.

When we eat food, our body breaks it up into various food-fuels which are absorbed into the bloodstream.  The most common food-fuel in healthy people's blood is glucose, which is formed from the breaking up of the carbohydrates we eat.  Other food fuels include fatty acids, coming from the fats we eat, and amino acids, from the proteins we eat.  Each of these is a molecule - a collection of atoms joined by chemical bonds which contain energy. 

In our blood, these molecules are broken down further in a chemical reaction, releasing their energy, which our bodies then use to fuel themselves.  There are also by-products of using up the food fuels, including carbon dioxide (CO2) which is useless to the body, and water (H2O) which can be re-used by the body.  I'll explain this in more detail, using the diagrams below, taking glucose as the example.

Glucose is a molecule which has carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms.  Our bodies at any time should have millions of glucose molecules.  Here is a diagram of one:

~ As you can see, the grey dots represent carbon atoms, the blue dots oxygen atoms, and the aqua/cyan are all hydrogen atoms (I didn't label them all).  The black lines represent chemical bonds, and also show the arrangement in which the atoms are joined to make this one glucose molecule.

For those who didn't take chemistry class, chemical bonds contain energy.  When any chemical reaction happens, the bonds are broken, releasing energy.  New chemicals bonds are then made between some of the atoms, just in a different arrangement.  The number of atoms stay the same - just the position of bonds changes. 

Our bodies take in oxygen when we breathe.  Oxygen gas comes into our lungs and is absorbed into our blood.  Oxygen gas is made up of two oxygen atoms joined by a chemical bond, hence it's symbol O2.

~ Here is a diagram of what starts to happen when a glucose molecule meets 6 oxygen molecules.

~ So, you can see the glucose molecule is still the middle, now with 6 O2's which were absorbed into the blood from the lungs.  The stars represent energy being released when the bonds are broken.  This energy is then available to be used by the body to stay alive and function.

But when the bonds are broken, this means the glucose molecule is destroyed.  The number of atoms remain the same, but they form new molecules - the following diagram shows what is created:

So you can see, when our bodies metabolise glucose, a food-fuel, then our bodies create carbon dioxide (CO2) (a carbon atom with two oxygen atoms), water (H2O) (an oxygen atom with two hydrogen atoms), and in the process gain a bit of energy which we then use to stay alive and do stuff.  Of course, our bodies are doing this continually, with countless glucose molecules. 

What happens to the H2O (water) and CO2 (carbon dioxide)?  We can re-use the water created, just like we can use the water we drink.  The CO2, however, is useless to us - it travels with the blood back to our lungs, where it passes into our breath, and is breathed out.

(For those wondering, glucose's bonds break, releasing energy, but the making of new bonds to form H2O and CO2 takes energy - just far less than the energy released by the glucose, hence our bodies get a net increase in energy.)

What's this blog about?

Breatharianism is the idea that humans can live without food or drink, living solely on 'prana' (a spiritual energy), or other non-food/drink sources of nourishment, such as sunlight, spiritual 'light', air, etc.

The number of people believing this is possible seems to be growing.  This worries me, as I think it is a very dangerous idea.  There have been a number of cases where people have starved themselves to death while trying to go breatharian.  The growing support of breatharianism around the world means more people, who may have previously be sceptical, may start to believe and even try to practise it. 

In this blog, I want to look into the science of breatharianism - how it would manifest in the human body if it were possible.  By doing this, I suggest real breatharianism would be easy to check for by any doctor, via a simple, non-intrusive physical examination.

I also want to expose some of the lies and inconsistencies told by public, self-proclaimed breatharians. 

Each post will look at a different issue around breatharianism.