BUILT-IN PANTRIES

       In March 1963, newspapers around the world described the almost incredible story of the seven weeks deprivation of food and the survival of Ralph Flores, a forty-two-year-old pilot of San Bruno, California, and twenty-one-year-old Helen Klaben, a co-ed of Brooklyn, New York, following a plane crash on a mountainside in Northern British Columbia. The couple was rescued March 25, 1963, after forty-nine days in the wilderness in the dead of winter, over thirty days of this time without any food at all. Miss Klaben, who was “pleasing plump” at the time of the plane crash, was happily surprised, at the ordeal’s end, to learn that her weight loss totaled thirty pounds. Flores, who was more physically active during their enforced fast, had lost forty pounds. Physicians who examined them after the rescue found them to be in “remarkably good” condition. (Excerpted from RawFoodExplained.com, Lesson 45: Introduction to Fasting,

Article #1, “Living Without Eating” by Dr. Herbert M. Shelton.)

         The interesting question that arises from his observation is not how long a person can survive a fast, but what enables that individual to do so. All the hallmarks of life, such as movement, thought, heartbeat, and digestion, do not magically halt during a fast—regardless of whether it is voluntary or

enforced.

The body normally must prepare itself for such an unintended happenstance. If not, all of the evolutionary prowess that resulted in humanity’s preeminent stature in the animal kingdom would have been for naught. Neither human beings nor animals can survive prolonged abstinence without a readily accessible store of reserve food (our fatty tissue) to tide them over. Many observations have confirmed the fact that when an organism goes without eating, the bodily tissues are sacrificed as a source of energy in reverse order of their importance. Hence, fat is the first to go. Herein lies the importance of fat stores—our “built-in pantries.”

Make no mistake, the ability to store energy when we don’t know where the next meal is coming from—or if it will ever arrive—is vital for survival. Not only that; imagine what life would be like if we weren’t able to store the energy from food and had to eat continuously. Sleep and many other functions would be impossible. So, whether it involves getting from breakfast to lunch or surviving a famine, the ability to store food energy and other nutrients internally and to be able to carry them around with us is a real lifesaver.