Short Stuff: The Man Who Didn’t Eat for a Year

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome. Do 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 was 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.

(00:25):
Did we do a show on only fasting? Yeah, we
did have like I think it was called fasting Colin
Deadly or what right? And I know we covered like
the very famous hunger strikes here and there maybe in
that episode, but this one was not a hunger strike
so much. Um as a man that weighed four hundred
and fifty six pounds in Scotland, which which little known

(00:49):
fact is twenty one stone, that's right. And he was
not little known if if you're if you're from Scotland,
a 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 the scown of fast. He's gonna lose
a little weight. UM don't know if he'll keep it
off or not, but maybe this will kick start a
better lifestyle for him. Once he started not eating, he

(01:12):
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 want to get down
to one eight from four six, so I am going
to uh not eat. Well, he didn't proclaim at the beginning,
but in the end he did not eat for three
d and eighty two days, nothing at all, no nothing like,

(01:35):
not fruit, not nothing. He drank coffee, he drank tea,
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 at

(01:56):
dun in Dundee. Um, he went about his normal life.
He had to quit his job at his father's fish
and chips store. Yeah, I would think that's the first
first line of business. But other than that, you know,
like he was going to and from the hospital, he
would go and spend a couple of nights overnight. Um.
But he was being treated for for um as an outpatient.

(02:17):
And so you might think, well, okay, clearly this guy
was was fudging this. He didn't really go a year
without eating. Well, his doctors thought of that too, and
they they tested him, and the test showed that he
probably was really not eating this whole time. Yeah. So
you mentioned the vitamins. Um, he had a lot of
body fat obviously at four fifty six pounds, and he

(02:40):
you can survive your on your body fat for a while. Um.
But he also took a multi vitamin vitamin. See, he
took a yeast supplement, a sodium supplement, and a potassium supplement. Uh.
That's gonna help maintain his electrical conductivity. And he was
doing okay like he would be. Uh. He would described
I being like weak sometimes in a little feint here

(03:02):
and there, but he was not like falling over every
couple of hours. Uh he I mean, it's pretty remarkable
that he was able to do this on an outpatient
and not completely underdoctor's care and supervision. Yeah, not bed
bedridden for a year. He was walking in and out
of the hospital. He was just living his life. You know,

(03:22):
he just wasn't eating this whole time. And it is
astounding to the point where he's it's basically a medical mystery,
and it's not so much like Angus Barbieri was particularly
special well, 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. They

(03:44):
just have no idea how he did this. We just
know that he did it because it's documented. There was
a um plenty of newspaper stories after he broke the
fast and news news came out. But his doctors also
documented it scientifically and released it as an an article
in the Postgraduate Medical Journal in And it's only like
ten ten pages, maybe a little longer, but it's a

(04:07):
really interesting read about, you know what, detailing this this
process that this guy went through and what what his
body was doing at the time. Alright, so let's take
a quick break and during the the message break, everyone
try and think of what he did not do besides
eat as well. Very often that was very awkwardly worded.

(04:30):
And we'll give you the answer right after this. M Okay,

(04:51):
so he's not eating much anything. A little teaser question
before the break on what else he was not doing.
And if you guessed poop, you're correct. What did they get? Chuck?
They get? They get nothing they have had on the
back for me virtually through the air waves. Uh, he
went between generally between like forty and fifty days without pooping. Um,

(05:14):
so he did poop occasionally, And I don't even know
what that would have been. Just they say, they say
in this body, yes, they say in the in the
study that it was basically just like cell detritus, cell deletrious.
You've mentioned that. Uh, yeah, I don't cellular poop. I guess, yeah,
but I don't know if it'd be any better or worse.

(05:37):
It'd be no more offensive than warm biscuits. I would think,
nice skull back, thank you, thank you. But he 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 poop, you know, that's a lot

(05:57):
of dead, dead cells that he was getting rid of.
I mean, I guess he only pooped probably like what seven, eight,
eight or nine times? Yeah, for this whole year. Not bad,
not bad. He had a clean fannie the whole time.
So oh, this is for our friends in the UK,
so you shouldn't say, yeah, that's right. He had a
clean rectum, a clean vomit. Isn't that the universal name?

(06:19):
I think? So? Okay. So at the end of this
whole thing, he got down to that ideal weight of
a hundred and eighty pounds um if you think, well, sure,
but then he starts eating and puts it all back on.
Not not so. Five years later he just weighed one
not too bad at all when he came back from
his fast. And this is very important. I was waiting
tables in Arizona one time and a woman, oh yeah,

(06:42):
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 gotta you gotta take baby steps.
And that's he did. He broke his fast with a
breakfast of boiled egg, a slice of bread with butter,

(07:05):
and then that black coffee that he had been drinking before.
He ate that. He he said that I forgot what
food even tastes like, and afterwards said, you know, I
feel a little full, but I enjoyed it and it
went down. Okay, yeah, and so again, like like, his
doctors were testing him on a pretty much a daily basis.

(07:25):
You're intest blood tests and he um. They were keeping
track of like things like his blood glucoast level, and
that's a really good indicator. You can't really fake a
blood glucoast level. If you eat something, it's gonna show
up on a daily test. And one of the reasons
why Angus Barbieria is this medical marvel is that he
was walking around with a blood clue blood glucoast level

(07:49):
of thirty. If you are eating normally, your blood glucoast
level is about one forty. 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 seventy. This guy was walking around with the
thirty and the fact that he wasn't just feigning constantly

(08:09):
is really impressive. But the thing that gets me chuck
is the hyper calcemia. That's right, as expected, he developed
hyper calcemia, 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 you know, higher than
normal amounts of calcium in his key. So the fact

(08:31):
that he had a lot of extra calcium, people 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 should skeleton too. That's amazing. It is amazing,
so much weight that the Guinness Book of World's Records

(08:54):
in one before they decided it's probably not good to
encourage world records for fast sting. Yeah. They he was
the last one to be I guess awarded um, you
know by the Guinness Book for for that kind of notoriety.
And then after that they said due to its specialist
nature and not due to the sheer danger, Uh, we're

(09:15):
not gonna open this up for any other people. There
is one other Guinness record about eating um that's even
longer than Angus Barbieri's um. The world record holder for
a hunger strike. Angus didn't eat for three d eighty
two days. A guy named Dennis Glor Goodwin didn't eat
for three d and eighty five days. So he went

(09:37):
three 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 three hundred and eighty
five days. Yeah, and I love that. On day three
eighty five, they're like, we've had enough, right, right, can

(10:00):
force feeds you through a tube? They didn't do that
on day forty or sixty or two or three. Really,
they're like, all right, fine, you you got the record,
Now stop showing off. We're gonna force feed you. Uh.
And so as you know, if you listen to our
fasting episode, UM, fasting is is not a good way
to lose weight. It's very extreme. It can be deadly.

(10:22):
UM Like, you can literally drop dead of of what
they just called sudden death UM 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

(10:43):
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 to like that lady that
that um fainted from eating steak and wine after fasting

(11:05):
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. It's and like, we don't understand

(11:26):
how that works or how to refeed somebody which makes
long extended fast over like something like forty days from
what I've seen UM, which seems really biblical if you
ask me, it doesn't sound scientific. Basically that UM, anything
over that period is is very very very dangerous because
after like six eight weeks you start to enter a

(11:46):
danger zone. Don't do it, folks, if you're getta fast
just keep it in a couple of days. Sure, that's
my advice. But even that, let's just c o a
chuck No doctor, don't listen to Chuck No eat responsibly.
That's what Dr Chuck says. There you, uh well, thanks
a lot for joining us here on short stuff. We
hope you were thrilled and amazed, maybe even a little amused.

(12:09):
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