Breatharianism is one of the subjects I have a personal vendetta with so there might be an undertone of aggression in this post, as opposed to (yeah, right!) my other posts.

According to this site, one of the top sites if you Google breatharianism, it is this:

This is a state of man (breatharian, inediate, non-eater) characterized (among other things) by the absence of eating, resulting from (or rather being a stage on the way to) expanding of the Consciousness sphere in which a person lives. In general an ideal (fully realized) inediate, breatharian, non-eater has no need to eat or drink to keep the body working perfectly. A breatharian consumes no food and no drink, he/she needs only air to nourish the body.

This source says it is the light that they live on. Alright, we have the facts: a breatharian needs no food or water to survive and function. At least it would be cheap, right? Right?

Sooo, this sunlight diet, is it possible? 
Are you some sort of crazy flower mutant? NO: Of course it isn’t possible!
Here is why:
You are a human, we do not use photosynthesis. Do I really have to explain this further?

Very simplified: a human needs liquid, in form of water, along with fat, carbohydrates and proteins found in food, as well as various vitamins and minerals to survive. Is any of this found in air? No. In sunlight? Yes, in sunlight we can find vitamin D which is essential for our survival. That’s it. Nothing else in the form of nutrition can be found in air or sunlight. Sunlight is energy, yes, but we cannot magically transform it into energy that the human body can use.

Here is another quote from the site mentioned above, explaining, from a scientific (yes, really, though they also have one ‘open-minded’, one religious and one esoteric explanation) angle, how breatharianism is possible:

Of all the other organisms, the human body is the most complicated, integrated and self-regulated energetic system. […] This complicated machine can be adapted to all possible living conditions on Earth, if given enough time and developed in right way.
[…] One of the ways of powering human body is energy and substances created by the chemical and physical factory of the body (excretory and respiratory system). Apart from this powering system, there is another, a reserve one (or maybe major one but moved away to the reserve role), which is able to transform the available energy directly.

I cut out a few bits; those guys love the sight of their own pen. For the full quote just go to the site. I promise I didn’t cut out anything important…
Anyway, what they mean is that the human body can transform light and air into energy. This is, to me, absolute bullshit. In fact I would love to hear what Penn & Teller has to say about this. I bet it would be epic.
There are millions of people on our planet who live in extreme poverty and starvation and if the body could adapt to living on light then surely they would have done so. This kind of shit makes me really angry, because it is so devoid of any respect for the people who are in true need. Reading the forum at Breatharian.info cited above – a true entertainment by the way- I found this post quoting yogi Giri Bala explaining why the starving people cannot, in fact, be taught to live on light since they don’t do so already:

“No.” She shook her head. “I was strictly commanded by my guru not to divulge the secret. It is not his wish to tamper with God’s drama of creation. The farmers would not thank me if I taught many people to live without eating! The luscious fruits would lie uselessly on the ground. It appears that misery, starvation, and disease are whips of our karma which ultimately drive us to seek the true meaning of life.”

Right, the starving people have bad karma now? Bullshit. I still don’t buy it; and that is no true yogi in my opinion. In fact I find it so ignorant and disrespectful it should be killed with fire (the opinion, not the yogi). We have had millions of years to evolve and nowhere did people stop eating or drinking. We have done the very opposite, in fact, by developing our agriculture.
So let me present you with some facts.

What happens if you don’t eat?
When you don’t eat enough your body starts to use its own resources first of fat and then muscle. If you stop eating for an extended period your body will eventually devour itself, as it were, and you will die.

What happens if you don’t drink?
According to Riverina Environmental Education Centre this is what will happen:

Early signs that you are mildly dehydrated may include light-headiness, dizziness, irritability and headaches.

As you get more dehydrated the symptoms get more severe and can lead to clumsiness, dim vision and exhaustion. When dehydrated your attention and concentration can decrease by 13% and short term memory by 7%.

As dehydration progresses, nausea and vomiting may be experienced and by 5% reduction in total body weight, performance has dropped by 30%. Fluid losses greater than this lead to coma and death.

Nice, huh? And funnily enough, even the most advanced breatharians such as Jasmuheen (I would never trust a website looking like that, though she makes a fortune from her lectures) cannot actually survive on this ‘diet’ when put to the test. Surprising? Not at all. In 1999 this ‘enlightened’ woman could have died of dehydration had not a doctor seen fit to cancel the test she had volunteered doing. Her efforts did reward her with the Bent Spoon award in 2000, though I am not certain that is something you want to boast with. She probably hasn’t listed it on her very colourful website.

As you can see you cannot sustain on sunlight or prana unless you are some sort of flower mutant. Personally I don’t even get how you can be so stupid as to believe shit like that. If it was true then why do we have world starvation? That’s just to mention one problem, apart from the obvious fact that we don’t have any photosynthesis process. Because… we are not plants. The problem is, though, not only that some people proclaim this shit; obviously some people will do anything for their fifteen minutes, but also that other people actually believe them. Don’t ask me why because I can’t for the life of me understand how you can, but the truth of the matter is that they may or may not die as an effect of this. Pretty nasty.

I told one of my friends about this shit, and her comment was:

This can only be thought up in the Western world.

And she is so right. Only here, where we throw away kilos and kilos of food every year per person, can something so stupid and disrespectful be thought up. If this was the case and indeed possible, I bet the children in Africa would be chubby and well-fed; not starving to death. So stop talking shit. If you still claim you don’t need your food, then start sending it down to people where it would make a difference between life and death instead of pretending you have become an enlightened better person who doesn’t need to eat.