You might have seen a story circulating recently in a number of news outlets about a couple who legitimately think of themselves as “breatharians”.
News.com.au, News Corp papers, ‘The Daily Mail‘, ‘The New Zealand Herald‘, ‘The Independent’ and a bunch of others have all republished an article originally by ‘The Sun‘, in which couple Akahi Ricardo and Camila Castello purport to have just… stopped eating nine years ago.
To which we – and fact-checking site Snopes.com – must respectfully call bullshit.
Breatharianism insists that humans don’t actually need to eat, but can survive on air and sunlight (or in the case of Ricardo and Castello, “the universe’s energy“). Stories about New Age-types who follow a breatharian regime surface pretty regularly, and they’re woefully irresponsible every single time.
Just in case you weren’t 100% clear, you as a human being do actually need to ingest nutrition in order to survive. Unlike plants, we do not have cells in our body that transform sunlight into glucose; we’ve got to eat our food, not make it in-house.
And breatharianism has definitely killed people. Y’know, as starvation does.
No-one has ever proven they can survive indefinitely without food, but at least four people have died while attempting to do just that, including an Australian woman called Lani Morris in 1999.
Most of the people who claim to be successful breatharians apparently vastly underestimate their “occasional” snacking, which they usually claim to do only for social reasons or because they enjoy the sensation of tasting stuff.
As ‘The Independent’ reported back in 1999, famous Brisbane breatharian Jasmuheen stunned journalists with a fridge fully stocked with food that she supposedly didn’t actually eat. The same article includes this acutely satisfying paragraph:
“An American Breatharian guru, Wiley Brooks, who claimed not to have eaten for 19 years, was discredited in the 1980s after he was spotted emerging from a fast food shop clutching a chicken pie.”
But apparently that hasn’t stopped people from swearing up and down that they’ve got bloody superpowers. Castello has even claimed that she didn’t get hungry once during her pregnancy, according to ‘The Sun’:
“I didn’t feel the need or desire to eat solid food during the entire nine months and so I only ate 5 times, all of which were in social situations.”
Come the fuck on. Women cop enough bullshit about their bodies and eating habits as it is, especially during the socially fraught period of pregnancy. No-one needs some Burning Man-enlightened fisherman-pantsed berk showing up to tell them that actually, they don’t even need those naughty Chicken Crimpy shapes – only the sweet kiss of the vast, indifferent universe. It’s cruel and dangerous nonsense.
All we can say is this: if it sounds like something Pete Evans would give some serious thought to, it’s probably safe to immediately forget about it. Go get a croissant. Tastes a hell of a lot better than sunlight.
Image: Facebook / Akahi Ricardo.
