Breatharian crank Jasmuheen believes she doesn’t need food or water to live — she claims to absorb nutrients from sunlight and air. She was rather easily exposed, as are all these breatharians, by putting her up in a nice hotel with people to monitor her eating, and observing the subsequent quite rapid deterioration as she failed to thrive and wasted away quite dangerously.

The people who were testing her terminated the experiment to avoid risking her health. Breatharian claims are absurd and trivially debunked, but what is fascinating is Jasmuheen’s logic as she is gradually falling apart. She has to know that in her day-to-day life she is regularly drinking and eating; she has to know that she’s hungry and thirsty during the test; she has to know that she’s physically suffering from dehydration and starvation. Yet she denies it all.

I think she was trusting the common sense of her testers: she knew that they could not in good conscience allow her to go on, that the experiment would be terminated while she protested that she was fine, and that she could get out of the dangerous situation while maintaining her fiction of dietary abstinence, no problem.

Her claims are not interesting at all — they’re ludicrous — but I find her psychology fascinating. Last year she was in a bogus documentary about ‘living on light’, and now, years after her failed test, she twists it into a triumphant victory.

Wow. New Age delusion at its finest. I loved this statement, though:

What was recorded, what was presented to the world was not my truth, was not how I interpreted it.

So truth is entirely subjective, it’s whatever you decide it should be, and we can entirely disregard physiology…or video technology. Nothing can beat that rationalization — these are people living lives of radical solipsism. It’s too bad that people are dying trying to follow their claims.

Speaking of psychology, another odd thing in the documentary jumped out at me. It’s a German documentary. I’ve run into these breatharian loons sporadically over the years, and they always babble about not eating anything ever…but leave it to the Germans to focus on something I hadn’t heard much about before, that breatharianism meant never pooping. The German obsession with all matters fecal is just a little odd. Odd but harmless, compared to the American obsession with shooting things and blowing them up, I suppose.