First They Ate the Animals
Categories: History , Cookbooks , Health & Nutrition
Everything after the first chapter of The Great Starvation Experiment is anticlimactic, because it's here that Todd Tucker describes Hitler's 1941-1943 siege of Leningrad. A million Russians may have starved during the 872 days before the Red Army broke through the blockade. After the zoo animals, people killed their pets. They ate wallpaper paste and shoe leather. During the second year, they began breaking more basic taboos.
Thirty-six American conscientious objectors, chosen among other reasons for their sound mental health, volunteered for an experiment whose goal was to study starvation's physiological and psychological effects, and to discover the most effective way to conclude a period of starvation. The Americans' goal was both humanitarian and military: the government assumed that Russians who had been weakened by famine would be physically and mentally unable to resist Stalin's armies at war's end.
The scientists, led by Dr. Ancel Keys, fed the men a diet of around 3,000 calories a day for 12 weeks to study their baseline mental acuity and physical strengh; then the diet was reduced (depending on the volunteer's initial weight) to between 1,000 and 1,500 calories a day for 24 weeks.
Four men left the Laboratory of Physical Hygiene at the University of Minnesota before the year-long experiment was over--or were kicked out for cheating. Some who had initially seemed the strongest were the first to break down emotionally. The war ended, but the experiment continued. The volunteers, weakened and disoriented by hunger, barely noticed events from the outside world. (A partial exception was the volunteer who finished law school during the year.) Most lost just under a quarter of their original weight.
After 24 weeks, their diets were supplemented, slowly at first and then more quickly when it became clear that the year might be over before the men had completed their rehabilitation. One man who completed the experiment developed tuberculosis, and another had a serious accident attributed to the diet. Even six weeks into the rehabilitation period the men were weak and apathetic, and most had gained back very little.
The goal had been for the results of the experiments to help Europe in some practical way, and Keys's group was able to complete a brochure for aid workers after the war with evidence that quantity rather than quality of food was most important when rehabilitating starving people, and that eating by mouth rather than feeding by tube was also preferable. Keys's final study of the experiment, The Biology of Human Starvation, was published in 1950. Scientists studying anorexia nervosa as well as involuntary starvation still cite the book: for obvious reasons, no similar experiment has since been conducted on humans.
Keys later turned to the study of cholesterol and his 25-year study of diets in seven countries clearly established the correlation between saturated fats and heart disease. He and his wife, Margaret Keys, wrote two cookbooks, Eat Well & Stay Well, and How to Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way. He lived to be 100 and participated in the writing of this book.
