The only medical books acknowledging “bloat” are veterinary manuals.

For example, The Merck Veterinary Manual, Seventh Edition, 1991, deals with “bloat” in lambs on pages 160-161, ruminant animals on pages 163-166, and dogs and small animals on pages 234-236.

If an animal’s life-threatening emergency crisis known as gastric dilatation-volvulus syndrome, or GDV, is tuned down to a preclinical condition and applied to humans, it has distinct correlations to human “bloat.”

In the words of the aforementioned 1991 edition of The Merck …

“Ingestion of food and water, and aerophagia initiate gastric dilatation. Vigorous exercise or altered body position appears to escalate the process. Gastric volvulus prevents effective vomiting, but still allows air to be swallowed (and an orogastric tube to be passed). The pylorus is also obstructed. Gastric dilatation leads to increased intra-abdominal pressure, which significantly reduces caudal vena caval and portal venous blood flow. Cardiac output diminishes because of decreased venous return. As the dilatation and volvulus progress, gastric arterial blood flow may be compromised. Stasis of blood and tissue hypoxia result in sequestration of fluid and endotoxin accumulation in the splanchnic organs. Arterial hypotension causes decreased coronary blood flow and myocardial hypoxia. Hence, cardiogenic, hypovolemic, and endotoxic forms of shock all contribute to the physiologic derangements seen in GDV. Additional complications include production of myocardial depressant factor from the hypoxic pancreas, hypoxemia due to reduced diaphragmatic excursion (hypoventilation) and altered pulmonary gas exchange, multiple acid-base abnormalities, and disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC).”

Applied to the fat cells of human beings, a brand-new dimension of etiology and a unifying factor is added to countless mysterious cardiac, pancreatic, gastric, esophageal, pyloric, intestinal, and hepatic ailments.

Fritjof Capra (The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, 1996) wrote …

“By blending water and minerals from below with sunlight and CO2 from above, green plants link the earth and the sky. We tend to believe that plants grow out of the soil, but in fact most of their substance comes from the air. The bulk of the cellulose and the other organic compounds produced through photosynthesis consists of heavy carbon and oxygen atoms, which plants take directly from the air in the form of CO2. Thus the weight of a wooden log comes almost directly from the air. When we burn a log in a fireplace, oxygen and carbon combine once more into CO2, and in the light and heat of the fire we recover part of the solar energy that went into making the wood.”

A redwood tree is rock-hard if you try to karate-chop it, yet it got that way by absorbing nothing but carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen and oxygen (water) from the soil, plus a marginal amount of minerals.

If a redwood tree really was composed of nothing but minerals from the soil, it would have to dig out a massive hole in the ground just to obtain its necessary construction materials.

When a food is hydroponically grown without soil, what produces its mass and volume?

Kevin Trudeau (Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About, Updated Edition, 2004) wrote …
“You take a pot and you put soil in it. You put in ten pounds of soil, and you put in one little tiny seed, and every day you add some water, and at the end of a year you have this big plant. Well, take the plant out, shake off the soil from the roots and weigh the soil. Guess what? You still have ten pounds of soil. The only thing you added was some water. If you were to measure the water, you may have added about five pounds of water. Theoretically, the plant should weigh no more than five pounds if it grabbed 100 percent of the water. But the plant weighs fifty pounds. Wow! What happened? How did fifty pounds of mass and matter magically appear? It didn’t eat the soil, the ten pounds of soil is still there, and there were only five pounds of water added. How did that plant appear out of virtually nothing? [...] The plant, like all living things, was virtually created out of ‘energy.’ Energy is ‘invisible matter.’”

No other food or drink – not even water – was consumed for over 24 hours.

My desire was to gain weight, not lose it, so I force-fed myself for a week in an effort to gain even more weight.

I stuffed my face with food and drink for seven days.

I not only didn’t gain any more weight, but the ten pounds I gained on my “fast” disappeared.

One day of “fasting” followed by one week of immoderate binge eating had been a zero-sum game.