Master Fast System - A Rational Opinion

There are hundreds of diets around which claim magical things. These range from diets asking you to do things like drink just juices, eat nothing for days, eat raw food, eat ‘superfoods’, avoid acidic food, avoid sugar completely, avoid fats completely, eat according to your blood type and even binge on one big meal a day.  Many of them contradict each other. Not only do these life-changing diets claim to help you lose weight, they claim to improve your well-being to a point where you will feel superhuman.

Having been overweight for a decade in my teenage years, I have studied, considered and even tried following these magical diets in the quest to lose weight and improve my quality of life. Interestingly, I found that there are two things common between all these magical diets:

1. They make the inventor of the diet a lot of money in the form of book sales, TV show deals, merchandise sales, supplement sales and advertising revenue from websites/blogs
2. They can potentially destroy your health in the long run

By the end 2017, the health and wellness industry is estimated to be worth $1 trillion. That’s 1 with twelve zeroes after it. $1,000 billion. So it’s no surprise that new ‘health experts’ crop up every day, many with their own magic diets or with their own take on an already-popular diet. However, many of these experts have shady credentials and the diets they recommend might make you under-nourished or over-nourished, both of which can have long-term negative effects.

Master Fast System

I happened to come across one such ‘magical’ diet plan called the ‘MasterFast System’ - MFS for short. It seems to be the invention of Canadian alternative health entrepreneur Luigi Gino Di Sergio. It should not be confused with the ‘Master Cleanse’ aka the Lemonade Diet which is a juice diet geared for rapid weight loss.

I found Mr. Luigi’s website (the site has been taken down after this article was published), but have no clue what’s going on there; however, I am sure it is the same person. Luigi seems to be part of some sort of cult called Keshe Space Ship Institute (KSSI) and much of MFS seems to be based on its teachings. Unfortunately, I could not find much in the way of medical qualifications or educational qualifications of Mr. Di Sergio. Below are some of his posts from the MFS support group on Facebook:

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What piqued my interest in MFS were the testimonials on Youtube and the MFS Facebook support group (which contains 22,430 members at the time writing this article) from people claiming that MFS has helped them immensely in improving mental and physical health. Some even claimed their eye colour started changing! Since eye colour usually only changes with age or due to disease, this was really interesting to me. Here are some of the testimonials:

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What’s more, people even claimed that unlike regular fasts which make you tired and frustrated, MFS can even be practiced by working individuals:

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Wow! It was time to go into further detail.

MFS – The Science

The crux of MFS is a concept called ‘dry fasting’ which is an extreme method of fasting, where a person abstains completely from food and water for a certain number of days. It is not recommended for people who have never fasted before because of the risk of complications caused by dehydration. Studies have shown the benefits of fasting for a period of 3 days, such as a boosted immune system and improving mental health; however, it is unknown if the subjects of the study underwent a dry fast. The twist with MFS is that it lasts for a period of 108 days and involves a lot of enemas.

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The MFS home page looks like one of those spiritual blogs which teach reiki, talk about opening your third eye and aligning your chakras, and other pseudoscientific nonsense. But let’s not judge a book by its cover. Going deeper, below is an excerpt from the website about what MFS is:

"Cleansing and purification is a gateway of energy for reconnection to source.  Once the path is opened, it is important that one understands energy flow and direction. This is called the universal law of reciprocity (my understanding of plasma science Keshe SSI). This Universal law is put into action when you use soul-centred Intent and Emotion to guide your decision-making process. Every long journey starts with a first step. Focus only on your clearly written down goals, keep the faith and know that the Universal or Natures operating table without a knife is Divine perfection.

So, What are the options for true healing? While eating, not much, even if it’s only fruit you will plateau as eating and healing do not belong in the same sentence.

We use dry fasting as it’s as vast as the stars. MFS is a gloried dry fast.

There is dry fasting, water fasting, raw Juice fasting and here we now have the Master Fast System which uses the best of all worlds based on plasma science."

To summarize, food is the enemy of the body and you must avoid food to reach the peak of health, instead relying on nourishment from something called ‘plasma’. I could not find anything which could relate to this on Wikipedia, so I headed to the KSSI website and found a page dedicated to ‘plasma’ which contains more information about it.

There is also a lot of talk of cleansing oneself of ‘mucoid plaque’.

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Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Mucoid plaque:

"Mucoid plaque (or mucoid cap or rope) is a pseudoscientific term used by some alternative medicine advocates to describe what is claimed to be a combination of allegedly harmful mucus-like material and food residue that they say coats the gastrointestinal tract of most people. The term was coined by Richard Anderson, a naturopath and entrepreneur, who sells a range of products that claim to "cleanse" the body of such purported plaques.

Many such "colon cleansing" products are promoted to the public on websites that have been described as making misleading medical claims. The presence of laxatives, bentonite clay, and fibrous thickening agents in some of these "cleansing agents" has led to suggestions that the products themselves produce the excreted product regarded as the plaque. The concept of a 'mucoid plaque' has been dismissed as having no anatomical or physiological basis."

But of course, Wikipedia alone should not be trusted. So I found some more seemingly-credible sources also alleging that ‘mucoid plaque’ is a myth perpetrated by quacks. 

MFS also requires regular enemas to cleanse yourself of all kinds of 'toxins'. Many MFS bloggers have posted pictures of parasites like tape worms being ejected from their body because of enemas and there are dozens on the facebook group claiming that they spotted parasite eggs upon examining their enema craps. However,there is no science to support the fact that regular enemas are required for good health and excessively indulging in enemas can, in fact, harm your body. 

Sadly, MFS does not seem to be scientifically sound.

MFS – The Protocol

There’s a page on the MFS website called ‘Protocol’ which outlines the rules for practising MFS. Here’s the first rule:

The rest of the page highlights the benefits of the various ingredients you need for MFS and has a big ‘SHOP NOW’ button, which is helpful because you absolutely need to buy the ingredients being sold on this website for your fast to be successful.

The rest of the page goes into great detail about how to start the fast, how to use the ingredients and how to end it. There’s also a list of warning signs for when to break the fast:

Moving on to the shop, MFS seems to be an expensive affair with the whole tincture kit costing around USD 1,000 and ‘Specialist Protocol Guidance’ available for an additional USD 300.

Here’s what the website has to say about it:

Should I try MFS?

Probably not. While fasting has proven to be beneficial, MFS is a dry fast and an extreme one at that. The reason MFS even requires a support group is because such kind of fasting is stressful for the mind and body, so you need encouragement from others to keep going. Personally, it is difficult to look past the pseudoscience and obvious business aspect of MFS (what with the entire MFS website littered with trademark and copyright symbols) and buy into the claims of spiritual enlightenment. However, the biggest alarm bell was that most of the glowingly positive reviews are from wellness bloggers who make a living writing about, talking about and peddling fictional therapies. The MFS was also endorsed by Belle Gibson, who is infamous for having claimed that a ‘natural diet’ cured her of a terminal case of brain cancer and was exposed as a fraud.

I would not recommend MFS to anyone. However, if you have the habit of fasting, are fully aware of the risks and pain that a 108 day dry fast entails, like giving yourself enemas and have money to spare for buying the ingredients…go ahead and feel the plasma love. And if you join the Facebook support group, get ready for lots of pictures of literal crap.  

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