Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Man Who Didn’t Eat for a Year

Episode Date: July 31, 2019

In 1965, a 456-pound man walked into a hospital in Scotland and asked for help with a fast. That was the last day he ate for more than a year. Learn about the medical marvel that was Angus Barbieri. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, and there's Josh. And with us in spirit is a fascinating person

named Angus Barbieri, who is the person who went the one of the longest of all time without eating solid food. Yeah, we've covered fasting before here and there. Did we do a show on only fasting? Yeah, we did have, I think it was called fasting colon, deadly or what? Right, and I know we covered the very famous

hunger strikes here and there, maybe in that episode, but this one was not a hunger strike so much as a man that weighed 456 pounds in Scotland in 1965. Which little known fact is 21 stone. That's right, and he is not little known if you're from Scotland. Little known to me. But he needed help, and he went to the doctors,

they put him on a short fast, thinking that, all right, here's what's gonna happen, we're gonna put this guy on a fast, he's gonna lose a little weight. Don't know if he'll keep it off or not, but maybe this will kickstart a better lifestyle for him. Once he started not eating, he said, I can do this, and he didn't eat for a few weeks,

then he didn't eat for a few more weeks, and he said, I wanna get down to 180 from 456. Yeah, that was his goal week. So I am going to not eat, well, he did proclaim this at the beginning, but in the end, he did not eat for 382 days, nothing at all. No, nothing, like not fruit, not nothing.

He drank coffee, he drank tea, he drank sparkling water, and then he took some vitamins, which we'll talk about in a second, but he just didn't eat for over a year. And what's even more astounding is that he didn't just stay in this hospital in Dundee, he went about his normal life.

He had to quit his job at his father's fish and chip store. Yeah, I would think that's the first line of business. But other than that, he was going to and from the hospital, he would go and spend a couple of nights overnight, but he was being treated as an outpatient. And so you might think, well, okay, clearly this guy was fudging this,

he didn't really go a year without eating. Well, his doctors thought of that too, and they tested him and the test showed that he probably was really not eating this whole time. Yeah, so you mentioned the vitamins. He had a lot of body fat, obviously, at 456 pounds. And you can survive on your body fat for a while, but he also took a multivitamin,

he took vitamin C, he took a yeast supplement, a sodium supplement, and a potassium supplement. Sure. That's gonna help maintain his electrical conductivity. And he was doing okay. Like he would describe being like weak sometimes and a little faint here and there, but he was not like falling over every couple of hours.

Right. It's pretty remarkable that he was able to do this on an outpatient and not completely under doctor's care and supervision. Yeah, not bedridden for a year. He was walking in and out of the hospital. He was just living his life, you know? He just wasn't eating this whole time.

And it is astounding to the point where it's basically a medical mystery. And it's not so much like Angus Barbieri was particularly special. What Angus Barbieri points out is how little we understand how the human body in general functions and how much less we understand how it functions among individuals.

Right. They just have no idea how he did this. We just know that he did it because it's documented. There was plenty of newspaper stories after he broke the fast and news came out, but his doctors also documented it scientifically and released it as an article in the Postgraduate Medical Journal in 1973.

And it's only like 10 pages, maybe a little longer, but it's a really interesting read about, you know, what detailing this process that this guy went through and what his body was doing at the time. All right, so let's take a quick break. And during the message break, everyone, try and think of what he did not do besides eat as well very often.

That was very awkwardly worded. And we'll give you the answer right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

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A little teaser question before the break on what else he was not doing. And if you guessed poop, you're correct. What do they get, Chuck? They get nothing. They get a pat on the back for me virtually through the airwaves. All right. He went between, generally between like 40 and 50 days without pooping. So he did poop occasionally.

And I don't even know what that would have been. Just they say they say in that body. Yes, they say in the in the study that it was basically just like cell detritus. Cell deletrius. Can you imagine that cell? Yeah, I don't. Cellular poop. I guess, yeah.

But I don't know if it'd be any better or worse. It'd be no more offensive than warm biscuits, I would think. Nice callback. Thank you. Thank you. But he did poop, but he's really, that's like bottom of the barrel poop. But I mean, that's a lot of dead cells to form like a visible poop, even if it was just one little bloop, you know?

That's a lot of dead cells that he was getting rid of. Yeah, I mean, I guess he only pooped probably like, what, eight or nine times? Yeah, for this whole year. Not bad. Not bad. He had a clean fanny the whole time. So, oh, this is for our friends in the UK, so you shouldn't say. Yeah, that's right.

Clean fanny. He had a clean rectum. A clean vomit. Isn't that the universal name? I think so. Okay. So at the end of this whole thing, he got down to that ideal weight of 180 pounds. If you think, well, sure, but then he starts eating and puts it all back on.

Nope. Not so. Five years later, he just weighed 196, not too bad at all. Yeah. When he came back from his fast, and this is very important, I was waiting tables in Arizona one time and a woman fell over in the restaurant. And I think this was during the fasting episode, I told the story. And an ambulance came and we were like, what happened?

Her friends like, she fasted for a week and then celebrated by eating steak and drinking wine. Yeah. It's like, that's not how you do it. You got to take baby steps. And that's what he did. He broke his fast with a breakfast of boiled egg, a slice of bread with butter, and then that black coffee that he had been drinking. Right.

Before he ate that, he said that I forgot what food even tastes like. And afterwards said, I feel a little full, but I enjoyed it and it went down okay. Yeah. And so again, his doctors were testing him on a pretty much a daily basis. You're in tests, blood tests. And they were keeping track of things like his blood glucose level. And that's a really good indicator. You can't really fake a blood glucose level.

If you eat something, it's going to show up on a daily test. And one of the reasons why Angus Barbieri is this medical marvel is that he was walking around with a blood glucose level of 30. If you are eating normally, your blood glucose level is about 140. And if you fast overnight, like say you don't eat anything after five or something like that, the next morning when you're tested, you have about a 70. This guy was walking around with a 30. And the fact that he wasn't just feigning constantly is really impressive.

But the thing that gets me, Chuck, is the hypercalcemia. That's right. As expected, he developed hypercalcemia, which is very high, higher than usual, at least, amounts of calcium in the blood. And he's peeing out a lot of calcium or higher than normal amounts of calcium in his pee. So the fact that he had a lot of extra calcium, people are like, what's going on here? And they think it's because he was losing so much weight so fast

that his bones knew that they didn't need to carry that kind of weight anymore. And they started dissolving. He lost so much weight, he shed skeleton too. That's amazing. It is amazing. So much weight that the Guinness Book of World Records in 1971, before they decided, it's probably not good to encourage world records for fasting. He was the last one to be, I guess, awarded by the Guinness Book for that kind of notoriety.

And then after that, they said due to its specialist nature, Right. And not due to the sheer danger, we're not going to open this up for any other people. There is one other Guinness record about eating that's even longer than Angus Barbieri's. The world record holder for a hunger strike, Angus didn't eat for 382 days. A guy named Dennis Gaylor Goodwin didn't eat for 385 days. So, he went three more days without eating before he was force-fed through a tube. He was protesting his innocence about a charge of rape.

I saw no follow-up, no, he was actually guilty, he was actually innocent, whatever became of him. The only mention I can find of him is that he didn't eat for 385 days. Yeah, and I love that on day 385, they're like, we've had enough. Right, right, exactly. We're going to force feed you through a tube. Yeah. They didn't do that on day 40, or 60, or 200, or 300. Right, that's your point.

It's really a long time ago. 385, they're like, all right, fine, you got the record now, stop showing off, we're going to force feed you. And so, as you know, if you listen to our fasting episode, fasting is not a good way to lose weight, it's very extreme, it can be deadly. Like, you can literally drop dead of what they just call sudden death at like the six or seven week mark, or before, depending on how much you weigh. If you're skinny, you can enter that danger zone really fast and just be sitting at your desk,

feel a little faint, and then you're gone. Right, and it's because your body eventually goes through fat, and even if you still have some fat left, it starts eating other things too, like muscle. Well, it turns out that your heart is made of muscle, and eventually your heart tissue might start getting eaten by your body, and that's not good for your heart, it can kill you. And then there's also another danger too, like that lady that fainted from eating steak and wine after fasting for a week.

There's a real issue called refeeding, Chuck, and it's like, that's how, I don't want to say a lot of people, people have died, they survived the fast, but when they started eating food, they actually died as a result of it. Food overdose. Yeah, basically you get an overdose of nutrients, and like we don't understand how that works or how to refeed somebody, which makes long extended fasts over something like 40 days from what I've seen, which seems really biblical if you ask me,

it doesn't sound scientific. 40 days and 40 nights. Basically, that anything over that period is very, very, very dangerous, because after like six, eight weeks, you start to enter a danger zone. Don't do it, folks. If you're going to fast, just keep it to the couple of days. Sure. That's my advice.

Sure. But even that, let's just see you wait. Chuck's no doctor. Don't listen to Chuck. No, eat responsibly. That's what Dr. Chuck says. There you go. Well, thanks a lot for joining us here on short stuff.

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