Home › Blog › Fasting and Your Health: The Amazing Doug Orchard

If you’re like most of us, you’ve just woken up this morning after a feeding frenzy followed by a winter food coma. These holiday food celebrations have been going on for thousands of years. The Romans had Saturnalia, the Norse had the Yule celebration, and when Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the world’s most powerful empire, it all eventually switched to Christmas and Hanukkah. Hence, we have been celebrating in the winter with food for millennia. This is perhaps why come January, we all start looking for diets and new exercise programs. This is why Doug Orchard’s new documentary on fasting is timely. This new movie gathers many experts to explore the crazy health benefits of skipping some meals. It even includes yours truly!

Who Is Doug Orchard?

If you’ve enjoyed the crafted art of our patient videos, you already know Doug. He’s the guy that has woven these life-changing Regenexx results into a coherent story and connected you directly to the emotions of these people. What blows me away about Doug is that he was in a corporate job and left it all to pursue his dream of being a creative artist. We have been very lucky to have Doug on the Regenexx team.

Fasting Is a Powerful Drug

I’ve covered before what we know about fasting, the body, and stem cells. For example, one of the researchers in Doug’s video found that a fasting mimicking diet allowed pancreatic cells to repair themselves. We also know that eating too much can cause excess levels of leptin to be released, which can lead to arthritis, so it makes sense that eating less to lower your leptin levels may help your knees. But if you really want to understand why fasting is a powerful drug, you need to watch Doug’s movie. For example, in one recent review article, it was concluded that fasting can also improve stem cell function.

The Fasting Documentary

I’ve known that Doug has been working on this documentary for the last year. I was asked to be interviewed about how I thought fasting might impact a stem cell procedure. The rest of the movie is fantastic, again weaving together the threads of the story of how fasting has changed lives, cured disease, and why this works. Please rent or buy a copy to see for yourself.

What Can You Do?

Fasting before your stem cell or platelet procedure is a good idea. We’ve recommended that patients don’t eat after dinner the night before their procedure for years. However, with all of the data mounting that fasting by itself may be a powerful regenerative therapy, you may want to pursue a more significant fast. One good option is a fasting mimicking diet (FMD). There’s also a commercial product out there called ProLon, which is a prepackaged five-day FMD.

The upshot? Please watch Doug’s new movie and consider trying a fast after our collective holiday pig-out! You may also want to help your stem and other cells work better by trying a fasting mimicking diet, but maybe wait until after New Year’s as we have one more party to finish before New Year’s resolutions begin!

Chris Centeno, MD is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. View Profile