One of the most documented medical cases involving prolonged fasting dates back to the 1960s: a man in Scotland fasted, with minimal caloric intake and constant medical supervision, for 382 consecutive days – a full year and a half.
The case has stayed in medical literature precisely because of how exceptional it was, and because of the careful monitoring behind it – it was never, in any way, an accessible attempt, but an isolated clinical experiment, carried out in a very specific context.
Intermittent fasting, as practiced today by millions of people, has absolutely no comparison in scale to this case – we’re usually talking about windows of a few hours within a normal day, not months without solid food.
But the story remains a useful reference point for one simple thing: the enormous distance between an extreme medical experiment and an everyday eating habit.
See also: