Motai Brotherson promotes fasting on camera and within the law

The President of the country is one of the speakers in a documentary on the fast to be aired on a national channel. A recurring axis of practice and communication for the Moitai Brotherson, like Oscar Temaru. But this association with fasting has also had a legal translation: since last August, the Polynesian Health Organization Scheme cites it as a means of prevention, just like sporting activity. On the medical side, we remember that everything is a question of priorities: it is better to learn to eat better than to stop doing it, even occasionally.

Things are going well for Motai Brothers. On Thursday, in the presidential garden, the head of government took part in a question-and-answer game for director Sylvie Gilman, in front of the cameras. With Thierry de Lestrade he is a successful documentarian broadcast on Arte since 2012 and has been rescheduled several times. “Fasting, the new therapy? » which Sylvie Gilman has already exported to bookstores and which she now wants to offer a sequel for the Franco-German chain. So the idea is to meet doctors promoting therapeutic fasting, researchers conducting studies on the subject… and so Motai Brotherson.

Fasting is officially recommended

A request that is not only due to the occasional practice of fasting by the president, who, for example, earlier in the year, did not eat for “six days” while presenting his wishes to the press. Not so much, either, due to the fact that he is a public defender of the practice, as is Oscar Temaru, who never misses an opportunity to call on Polynesians to try it. For example, Moetai Brotherson, from the “French Fasting Medical Academy”, was brought to the presidency in early December, next to a conference on Polynesian Integrative Medicine, Doctor Jacques Rouillier. A meeting to which Faa’s mayor, health minister and naturopath were also invited, and which was an opportunity to press. “The effects No This Practice on diseases of civilization ». But ifThat documentary filmmakers were interested in the pro-independence elected official is also because he, along with his executive, included the fast in official texts.

For the past year, in fact, the Polynesian Health Organization scheme has promoted temporary or intermittent fasting as a prevention tool, “like sports activity”. And if the text published in the official journal on August 8, 2023 clearly states that this practice “is not considered a therapeutic act in the medical sense”, it attributes “notorious” benefits to the “immune system”. , weight, cell renewal or nervous system”.

Benefits, but only

To date, no reaction has been provoked in the Polynesian medical community. In mainland France, however, the fashion for fasting, sometimes extreme and especially praised by critics of “traditional medicine” or influencers on social networks, has generated much debate among health professionals. Many of them expressed concern about the dangers of the practice if it is poorly supervised. The Health Organization Scheme takes a few jabs at this. The “observant requirements” of fasting are certainly considered “weak” by the text, but only “lwhen it is practiced seriously, in an informed manner, by a healthy person” and “unless there is an actual contraindication by the treating physician”.

Columns, columns, and media interventions have also multiplied in recent years within the national medical profession to qualify the benefits of fasting, which are often exaggerated by its promoters. However, the benefits of prevention or combat against specific pathologies have been well documented by specific studies. And the presidency points out that “many other clinical trials are underway around the world”. But be careful, there is not one fast but fasting: water, dry, complete or intermittent, the most studied… In a summary article published last year, the Revue du Praticien pointed out that the current scientific documentation contradicts the benefits. Fasting on “Improvement of Cardiometabolic Risk Factors”. As for their effects on weight loss, they are proven for certain types of youth and in a short period of time. But their results in the long term may not be superior “to those obtained with more traditional diets of daily calorie restriction.”

A question of priority

If the question is not a major debate in Fenua today, some doctors question the advisability of publishing this practice, given the general health status of the Polynesian population. “Teaching people to eat properly seems to me more important than teaching them not to eat, even in between,” sums up Dr Didier Bondoux. The president of a liberal doctors’ union has called for greater awareness of the quantity and portions of food eaten in Fenua.