Take a bite out of the sun.

MoeFaux

Suspicious Mind
MoeFaux
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Sep 3, 2003
Messages
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I'm not sure if it was just a claim I saw, or if Randi actually discussed it and it was up here, but remember that guy who said he didn't need to eat and he got his nourishment from the sun? (run on sentence, anyone?)

I've searched around but I can never get the fields right and I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for. Sungazers? Is that what it is?

Anyway...anyone know anything about this? I'm trying to disprove it and I need the goods to back it up.

xo,
Moe
 
Ooo...it might be. Let me dig around with that as the search word. Thanks.
 
Thanks Patricio, I was looking for Hira Ratan Manek.

My friend says that because the human eye contains retinal, similar to chlorophyll, that this guy has a valid argument as to how he can live off of the sun.

I'm not good at arguing this stuff. Someone tell me what I should say to let him know this is B.S. besides saying "That's bull****", which I already tried.
 
Consider the size of the human eye. Consider the size of a leaf. consider the number of eyes humans have. Consider the number of leaves a plant the size of a human would have. Consider how much more energy a human uses than a plant.
 
MoeFaux said:
Thanks Patricio, I was looking for Hira Ratan Manek.

My friend says that because the human eye contains retinal, similar to chlorophyll, that this guy has a valid argument as to how he can live off of the sun.

I'm not good at arguing this stuff. Someone tell me what I should say to let him know this is B.S. besides saying "That's bull****", which I already tried.
Click to expand...

Try suggesting that the surface area containing the chemical is much smaller than that of the leaves on a plant with the same mass as a human.

--Terry.
 
The human eye contains "retinal"?
It has a retina, the layer of cells with rods and cones that detect light at the back of the eyeball.
It is likely that that person is an ignorant dork.
As far as I know, "retinal" merely refers to this retinal layer of cells.
 
This is what the Cambridge Online Dictionary has to say:

Definition

retina Show phonetics
noun [C] plural retinas or retinae
the area at the back of the eye that receives light and sends pictures of what the eye sees to the brain

retinal Show phonetics
adjective
The disease can result in retinal damage and loss of vision.
 
MoeFaux said:
I'm not sure if it was just a claim I saw, or if Randi actually discussed it and it was up here, but remember that guy who said he didn't need to eat and he got his nourishment from the sun? (run on sentence, anyone?)

I've searched around but I can never get the fields right and I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for. Sungazers? Is that what it is?

Anyway...anyone know anything about this? I'm trying to disprove it and I need the goods to back it up.

xo,
Moe
Click to expand...

Yeah it's called sun gazing. These people advocate staring at the sun. Seriously.

http://www.sungazing.com/
In November of 2002 there were some flyers put up around school (American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, ACTCM), about an Indian man, Hira Ratan Manek (HRM), coming to lecture in Berkeley, CA. The flyer preached this man's ability to store the sun's energy in his brain. It also advertised that HRM hadn't eaten food in seven years!
...
His formula was simple: either at sunrise or sunset (when the intensity of the sun is at its minimum) stand on the earth and stare directly at the sun for 10 seconds. Adding an additional 10 seconds to the total sungazing time each consecutive day. In 6 months your hungers would be under control and understood. Stand there for 10 months you would never need food again. Not only that, but, you would not have to stare at the sun again. After 44 minutes of sungazing one would be 'full', energized, just like a solar charged battery.
Click to expand...

http://www.rawpaleodiet.org/sungazing/
DISCLAIMER: According to many experts within Western medicine, sun gazing may be harmful to the eyes, possibly even resulting in long-term serious damage. My advice is that you do not consider sungazing (at least outside the "safe" time windows of the first 1/2 hour after official sunrise or the last 1/2 hour before official sunset) for even one second without consulting with a qualified and licensed health professional, as well as using your common sense! And, I must note that there are even some folks (albeit a tiny minority) who have sungazed only during so-called safe time windows and who have still reported that they developed some degree of significant eye damage, as detected in expensive and sophisticated fluoroscopic medical tests (due to confidentiality and privacy requests, and to the Privacy Act and comonsense citilivy, no further information is available from this author on this topic. However, I have noticed that at least two other sungazing websites, have, at times, addressed this issue and even included actual reports of such mild damage (do not ask me for these links; you must find them yourself if those pages still exist -- these pages and links move constantly.)
Click to expand...
Scary stuff.
 
Assuming that there was a mechanism in the eye to convert sunlight to food energy, this still would not meet the dietary needs of humans or any other animal. Even if the entire surface of the breatharian were covered with chlorophyll-containing cells, this would not be enough. You would still need a source of nitrogen for protein synthesis. For animals, including breatharians, this usually involves eating other protein. Many ocean animals, including many different corals and clams, contain chlorophyll (actually, a symbiotic organism within the animal contains the chlorophyll). They get carbohydrate energy from sunlight, but they would die if they didn't ingest foods containing protein and other nutrients. What good is energy if you can't build muscle to use it? Even plants can not live off of sunlight alone. They need nutrients from the soil as well. There is no good analogy in nature to compare these breatharians to.
 
Moe, ask your contact if there was any money involved in that Sungazers lecture tour - pay-to-see-the-lecture, "donations accepted", buy the books, etc, etc. You know, the usual scamming stuff. Bet THAT will be the real reason, nothing to do with any "science" or "mysticism".
 
Do they mean Retinol?

There are different pigments, each of which can absorb a characteristic range of photons, including carotenoids such as beta-carotene-derived retinol (the same pigment used by the human eye), and the more predominant chlorophyll.
Click to expand...
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/potm/2004_11/Page1.htm

It's used in photosynthesis to absorb light in the wavelengths chlorophyll can't. I'd guess that it's in the eye to absorb light as part of vision too.

A problem is that in photosynthesis there is a lot more involved than just one type of molecule, and chlorophyll is much more efficient (add that to the surface area problems earlier...)
 
The surface area of the retina is not the limiting factor. It's the 10 mm diameter of the pupil that the body uses to limit the incoming light. Unless the sun puts out beams of plasma, you just ain't gunna get enough energy from the sunrise to put in your eye!
 
There certainly are cells in the retina which transduce light energy to chemical energy. The alpha, beta, and gamma cone photopigments, and rhodopsin in the rod cells (from memory; I may have the last one wrong) are literally bleached by sunlight, converting that energy into a change in electrical potential that initiates a nerve signal. That is the extent of the energy our eyes get from light. In order to believe we can "feed" off of sunlight, they are not only making up stuff, they are ignoring what we already do know. It is remarkable, the detail in which the retina has been studied (we have the ability to place an extraordinarily thin electrode into a single retinal cell to take readings!), and to ignore all that and just make crap up just irritates me.
 
geni said:
Consider the size of the human eye. Consider the size of a leaf. consider the number of eyes humans have. Consider the number of leaves a plant the size of a human would have. Consider how much more energy a human uses than a plant.
Click to expand...

Consider the complete lack of chloroplasts in the human eye cell.
 
It seems to me that anyone who does not eat, scarcely requires an anus.

The simplest test of such a claim would therefore be to stitch it shut.

(I presume he needs his mouth, if only for talking nonsense.)
 
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