I saw the item about the woman who attempted to demonstrate that humans can live on “light” instead of food the other day, but opted to ignore it out of my usual tact and compassion. But Roger sent me a link to the Guardian’s coverage and my tact and compassion faded away when I read her profound thoughts on the subject.
A Seattle woman is attempting to go 100 days without eating to prove that humans can “live on light”.
Naveena Shine says she believes it is possible for human beings to survive without food and is conducting what she describes as an experiment to prove it.
Well it wouldn’t prove that. It would show that one woman could survive a hunger strike of 100 days. That wouldn’t show that humans can survive without food.
The 65-year-old, originally from Birmingham in the UK, has been consuming just water and “one, maybe two cups of tea a day” for the past 41 days, losing 30lbs in the process.
Hm. You would think she’d be able to spot a trend there, and then extrapolate from the trend, and thus figure out that she didn’t seem to be on the road to showing (much less proving) that humans can survive without food.
A doctor pointed out that humans aren’t plants and so they can’t live on “light”; it isn’t physically possible.
Shine contends that “a doctor can’t see living on light because he looks through different lenses” and has said she is not undergoing medical tests as during the experiment. She said she had experienced a “calling” which inspired her to stop eating.
“It came as an idea that became so powerful, I knew I had to do it,” she said. “And this has happened a few times in my life; I suddenly got this strong desire or need to do something that nobody in my world could imagine but it came so strongly to me, it was just like: ‘This is what I need to do.’ It’s intuition.”
Intuition that humans can survive without food? That’s a dopy intuition.
She said she had heard of others who claim to be able to forgo conventional nutrition, including a friend who claimed to have survived without food for three years.
“I know that people say it is [possible] and I don’t disbelieve them, and I don’t believe them, so the only way to find out is to do it,” she said.
No, it isn’t. There are other ways to find out, which are much less trouble and less hard on the body.
While Shine says her inspiration to eschew food does not come from a particular set of beliefs, her website praises Jasmuheen, an Australian woman who describes herself as an “ambassador of peace” and “international lecturer”, and whose teachings that it is possible to subsist on light alone have been linked to the deaths of four people.
Oh! Well how inspiring.
Jasmuheen claims to have lived for years on light alone, but tried and failed to go without food and water for 10 days in an experiment for Australian television program 60 Minutes in 1999. A doctor for the network noted that after 48 hours Jasmuheen displayed symptoms of dehydration, stress and high blood pressure. The network cancelled the experiment after four days when Jasmuheen’s health continued to deteriorate.
Without food and water? That’s idiotic.
Shine has eschewed medical evaluations.
“Doctors can’t really have that much to say with this, because it’s not within the doctors’ paradigm. A doctor can’t see living on light because he looks through different lenses, he looks through different eyes.”
That’s some dangerous woo.