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Research indicates that fasting drives the attentional bias of study subjects toward high-calorie food words in alternative modified dot probe tasks containing food words. This finding was true for all study subjects whether they scored low or high on the Eating Disorder Inventory.

The religious practices of fasting and self-mutilation, and the concept of 'deus otiosus,' a god that disappears after creation, can be explained with psychoanalytical concepts based on the infant-parent relationship. Fasting and mutilation are ways by which an infant may gain attention from a parent. The belief that a god is absent from the world may originate in cultures where the father abandons the family to seek other mates.

It has recently been suggested that the cognitions of unrestrained eaters and those of individuals with eating disorders are at opposing ends of a continuum, with restrained eaters occupying an intermediate position. The present study explored the everyday cognitions of 10 restrained and 10 unrestrained eaters under fasting and nonfasting conditions using a random thought-sampling technique. Analysis of the thought transcripts yielded a number of categories related to food, self, and others. The results revealed no differences between restrained and unrestrained eaters in terms of their relative percentages of thoughts about food and self. Differences were evident, however, in the nature of their cognitions. The results from this study suggest that the continuum hypothesis may hold only when it is the nature of cognitions, not their frequency, that is considered.

Pretreatment measures of craving for carbohydrates were related to higher dropout rates during the first month of a protein-sparing fast. 97 patients in a medically supervised weight-loss program, who were at least 50 pounds overweight, completed the Beck Depression Inventory, the Eating Inventory, and a questionnaire about their food habits before beginning a supplemented fast. While self-reported cravers of carbohydrates were significantly more likely to drop out during the first month of treatment than noncravers, this result does not appear to be related to differences in depression, disinhibition, or cognitive restraint.

We examined the effect of winter feeding and fasting, under both high (10 [degrees] C) and low (2.5 [degrees] C temperature, on physiology of coho salmon. Treatments included: Warm-Fed (WF), Warm-Not Fed (WNF), Cold-Fed (CF) or Cold-Not Fed (CNF) during Jan and Feb. Over this period, dramatic differences in size, growth rate, condition factor, hepatosomatic index, liver glycogen, and plasma IGF-1, insulin and T4 were observed among the treatments. In general, values were highest in the WF, lowest in WNF, and intermediate in the CF and CNF groups. However, during spring, when all groups were fed and reared at 10 [degrees] C, all treatments were quite similar with regard to most parameters measured. This study suggests that salmonids are capable of relatively rapid physiological adjustments to changing environmental conditions such as low temperature and minimal food availability during winter and higher temperature and increased food availability during spring. (Funded by BPA #92-022).

A new study investigates the effects of 19 hours of food deprivation on the eating behavior of bulimic patients.