Contemporary health wisdom holds that fasting is bad for you – dangerous, even. But Steve Hendricks has a cover story in Harper’s Magazine arguing that fasting may actually be exceptionally good for us (Subscription req’d). It’s eloquently written and deftly weaves science, medicine, and history with personal experience. In many past generations, health thinkers considered fasting a potentially reasonable remedy to a variety of maladies. A surprisingly rich body of research suggests it does hold promise. It can radically extend lifespans in rodents, lower blood pressure by near-epic amounts, help substantially with diabetes, and stop certain types of seizures even when modern drugs fail. It even has some interesting potential for aiding cancer therapy. The evidence is inconclusive, yet it has drawn surprisingly little further research. And this collective unwillingness to entertain the notion of fasting as salubrious is the real point of the article. Perhaps our failure to study fasting is caused by pharmaceutical companies’ inability to make money on fasting. Or maybe it’s caused by the stigma fasting earned through association with decades of quackery and mystical self-flagellation. Or maybe we’re too easily confused between planned and monitored fasting and the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. Ultimately, the article is not an argument for fasting. It is an argument that our health establishment is not so scientific as we pretend. In particular, it seems irrationally convinced that not eating is a terrible idea – a dangerous idea, even. My habit is to read Harper’s while eating an enormous bowl of granola each morning in the pre-dawn hours. So my reaction to the article may have been accentuated by the paradox of reading about fasting while breaking my fast. Still, to me, the article’s message seemed to extend beyond comestibles to other consumer goods. Maybe, Hendricks suggests, we would be healthier if, instead of fixating on medicine and nutrition and omega-3 fatty acids and the latest cross-training regimens, we just stopped eating some of the time. Maybe our bodies adapted to the lean times of our evolutionary home epochs. And maybe we would be a whole lot happier, richer, and more sustainable, if we just stopped buying things some of the time, if we stopped consuming. To me at least, our unwillingness to consider either idea seems like more than a coincidence. It seems like a collective blind spot.