The Latest Trend in Wellness Tourism: Fasting Clinics

Guests at Lanserhof, a 35-year-old clinic less than five miles outside of the Austrian city of Innsbruck that attracts architects, entrepreneurs, financiers, and other well-heeled clientele, often leave hungry. The health retreat is known for its fasting program: a minimum of seven days consuming 650 calories per day, on average. The benefits include a gut bacteria reboot, cell and liver regeneration, and reduced inflammation. A 2019 study demonstrated patients with chronic conditions improved after fasting between four and 21 days.

Medically supervised fasting has long been popular at clinics in Germany and Austria, where spending a week focusing only on your health is not unusual. But the desire to combine a wellness holiday with science-based treatments is on the rise beyond European borders.

Wellness tourism is set to grow from US$436 billion to over US$1 trillion by 2025, according to a report by the Global Wellness Institute. A growing movement called biohacking is accelerating the trend, driven by consumers seeking healthier as well as longer lives.

Melanie Gatt has practiced cellular, also called mitochondrial medicine, at Lanserhof since 2018. She’s seen an increase in clients seeking to reduce inflammation and optimise performance.

“There’s greater demand for improving the immune system, cellular regeneration and longevity,” she says. “Cellular repair is one of the most important issues for this. In the last week, I received three emails from regular clients all interested in longevity treatments.”

James Stewart supervises an ice bath at Sand Valley Resort, Wisconsin.

Biohacking Goes Mainstream

Entrepreneur and author Tim Ferriss has evangelised intermittent and longer-term fasting, dubbing it a “hack” to manage joint pain and other conditions. Ferriss and others, like Dutch wellness guru Wim Hof, have helped make biohacking mainstream.

Hof built a successful business and cult following globally with his two-pronged approach to combating wear and tear on the mind and body: mood-boosting ice baths and stress-reducing breath work requiring slow breathing.

Hundreds of certified Hof disciples around the world lead weekend and week-long retreats, including Chicago-based James Stewart. He started teaching Hof’s methods 10 years ago, and said one of the secrets to Hof’s success is his universal appeal to both men and women.

“The ice bath is a challenge,” Stewart says. “It’s a bit more robust and active, which makes it more appealing from a masculine point of view. And Wim Hof has made breathwork more palatable to people who might have been on the fence about it 10 years ago.”

A decade ago, Stewart says, he was the only person to brave the cold weather surrounding Lake Michigan for year-round dips. “Now, there are anywhere between 50 to 70 people who dip in winter. There’s something that grabs you physiologically; you’re getting that spike in epinephrine, norepinephrine, and you feel alive.”

Low-tech and high-tech treatments are being embraced by practitioners and consumers. In Los Angeles, Upgrade Labs bills itself as the first biohacking gym in the U.S., with an emphasis on specialized technology to assess cells and repair damage, along with a cryo chamber delivering cold immersion therapy with three-minute sessions in a sub-zero, temperature-controlled room or tank.

A Physical and Mental Reset

At Lanserhof’s clinic, a window stretching the length of an entire wall faces snow-covered mountains in a state-of-the-art setting that feels more like a futuristic command center than a medical office. Doctors provide detailed analysis from a wide range of diagnostics.

A 24-hour heart rate variability monitor reveals how activities like working, resting and eating impact energy levels and sleep quality. Intermittent hypoxic training uses an oxygen mask to simulate mountain climbing to measure how cells adapt to reduced oxygen availability, the study of which won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2019.

Stimulated by oxygen regulation, cells reject and replace damaged ones with healthy, new cells. An endurance test, called spiroergometry, tracks a patient’s individual fat burning zones, versus sugars. The information illustrates what intensity levels are necessary, or not, for an efficient and effective workout. Results dictate treatments like vitamin infusions, and sports scientists devise training plans to achieve peak performance, as well as recovery.

Historically, patients at Lanserhof and other fasting clinics tended to be older; seeking to improve a heart condition or rheumatic pain, but in the last 10 years, the average age of clientele has dropped from 55 to 47 years old.

Now, Gatt says, guests frequently visit as a physical and mental reset. “Some guests want to optimise their endurance, and some have reduced energy after experiencing infections and they want to understand what’s going on with their immune system and restore their energy levels.”

While it is possible to gather excessive amounts of information, extracting and understanding data related to specific health concerns, like burnout, can underline the impact of lifestyle habits.

Witnessing the impact of stress on the body and how quickly or slowly it recovers, is a great motivator to stop ignoring advice to meditate. For many of Lanserhof’s younger clients, Gatt says, the key to living healthier for longer may lie in obsessing less, rather than more about biohacking.

“We don’t suggest extremes, like doing something every day or eating one meal a day, which is not enough, because you start to lose the benefit and it becomes a stressor for the system,” Gatt says. “It’s easy to go too far. Part of longevity and regeneration comes from balance and knowing how to take a vacation.”

There is ample and alarming evidence that artificial intelligence can help humans do bad things, such as committing cyberattacks, building weapons and even killing themselves or others. The Hugging Face hacking episode—and a growing list of others by poorly constrained swarms of agents—indicate just how powerful and potentially dangerous AI has quickly become.

Yet many inside the U.S. AI industry insist far worse is coming, on account of the imminent arrival of AI with superhuman and self-improving abilities.

Plenty of experts, including many who study AI harms for a living, are skeptical. The so-called doomers’ assertion that AI might decide to wipe out all of humanity—or even “just” topple human civilization—is contingent on it achieving a pace of development not yet seen.

And if the assumptions behind this global-doomsday scenario are wrong, it could lead us to curb or regulate AI in ways that don’t address its real harms.

At the center of this debate is the claim that current AI systems might take over the job of training their next versions, a process called “recursive self-improvement.” Think of it like evolution on steroids—billions of years happening at light speed within vast AI supercomputers. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei recently proposed a global agreement to slow down the pace of releasing new AI models, with the goal of delaying the arrival of recursive self-improvement.

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near ‘artificial general intelligence,’” says Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the nonprofit research group Santa Fe Institute who studies AI. She said AI is making impressive strides but thinks claims by engineers that they’ve achieved recursive self-improvement don’t stand up to scrutiny.

She is hardly alone. A recent paper by two dozen academics at Princeton, Stanford and other institutions found that even the most cutting-edge AIs are incapable of doing the original research required to advance the AI frontier.

Two of the authors involved in that paper also threw cold water on the idea that the Hugging Face swarm hack by OpenAI agents occurred because of a breakthrough in intelligence. The attack succeeded primarily because of a lack of basic technical guardrails, not an unmanageable explosion in AI capability, they wrote.

Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, posted that this analysis was “a welcome dose of sanity in an otherwise insane debate.”

OpenAI and Anthropic didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

The people who disagree with the doomers still consider AI to be dangerous, and point out that such systems don’t have to be particularly capable to be powerful. Some argue that AI should undergo regular evaluation by outsiders and that the companies that make it should be held responsible when their systems do harm. AI should also be treated the same as airplanes and elevators, and should be designed to do the least harm possible, they say.

“If you believe that technology is powerful enough to create novel, dangerous viruses, or to essentially take over the whole planet for some reason, then it must also be strong enough to create cures for cancer, to cure aging, to fix socio-economic or political problems,” says Christopher Canal, CEO of EquiStamp, a company that helps companies and governments evaluate AIs.

AI has shown an ability to rapidly advance because it is matching the abilities of humans who are constantly feeding it their knowledge. Sometimes it can recombine that knowledge and exceed what people have been capable of, through a kind of post-training known as reinforcement learning, as we’ve seen in mathematics.

Today’s LLMs are “models of knowledge” rather than actually intelligent, wrote Yi Ma, professor of AI at Hong Kong University.

Researchers at universities and commercial AI research labs in China wrote in a recent paper that autonomous, self-improving AI is likely to be a long way off, due to the sheer number of breakthroughs required. They also argue that humans will probably remain in the loop, supervising that process—and gating how fast it can occur.

Vals AI, a company that evaluates today’s AI models, maintains an RSI Index that benchmarks whether models can “do the research that builds the next model.” So far, no publicly released model is even close.

Yet Rayan Krishnan, CEO of Vals AI, says his team projects models will exceed humans’ ability to improve the next generation of AIs by August 2027, or sooner, and at that point could start building their successors all on their own.

“Once we get to recursive self-improvement, the fear is that all bets are off,” he says. “You could end up with a ‘fast takeoff’ situation, where the models quickly acquire skills and eclipse humans across every possible domain.”

In a reply to the resignation tweet heard round the world from Jacob Coxon, another Anthropic engineer declared his belief that those odds were at least 10% over the next decade. Many others in the industry chimed in to say they thought the percentage was even higher.

Some who argue the end is nigh say they calculate their personal p(doom) based on a chain of conditional probabilities—a bit like the Drake equation for calculating the likelihood of intelligent alien life. Since all those probabilities are based on speculation, estimates range from 0% to nearly 100%. Many land around 10%.

“The weird thing is that if you go back and look at the predictions on this over the last 10 years or more, it’s always been 10%—it’s just a nice round number,” says Mitchell. “I think it’s all vibes, and there’s no actual evidence or calculation.”

One argument against worrying about superintelligent AI is that the world is full of unlikely humanity-ending disasters, and trying to avert them all can make it impossible to prioritize, says Canal.

This has led AI experts and the policymakers who listen to them to propose remedies that don’t get at its real and present dangers.

AI companies’ proposals to “pace the frontier” aren’t addressing the problem in the right way, argues Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence.

“It’s like saying we’re driving toward the cliff at 60 miles per hour and we’re going to drive toward it at 40 miles per hour instead, and everything will be OK,” he says.

Russell and his peers have proposed that AI companies should have to meet the same standards that govern other areas of everyday life, from air travel and buildings to food and drugs. They highlight the “behavioral red lines” AI should not be allowed to cross. Breaking into other computer systems, stealing information or advising terrorists on how to build biological weapons are all illegal for a human to do, and should be illegal for companies’ AIs as well, he argues.

The challenge for AI companies in such a proposal, he adds, is that it would be a de facto ban on today’s advanced AI systems, since the companies behind them don’t know how to make them respect such boundaries all of the time.

Others have proposed something like the Food and Drug Administration, but for AI, but setting up a new agency has so far been a nonstarter in Congress. And some prominent voices in tech have said such a structure would give up America’s AI edge to China.

Given the bipartisan groundswell of support for curbing AI companies and their creations, however, that may soon change.

“The tech industry has had this mantra for decades that regulation is bad,” says Russell. “They don’t accept the liability for any harm, and they hide behind free speech. That, I think, has to change.”

The Latest Trend in Wellness Tourism: Fasting Clinics

Could fears of an AI apocalypse be distracting us from the dangers already here? Experts debate whether regulation should focus on speculative existential threats or present-day harms, including cyberattacks, weapons and unsafe autonomous agents. Read more via the link in bio.