Let’s talk about the time that a bunch of volunteers said ‘sure, starve us for science, why else are we in this labor camp?’
Oh, did I mention this happened in America less than a hundred years ago?
Today’s Moment of Science… starving for peace.
Some questions seem like they have obvious answers. “What does starvation do to a person” sounds like a simple one, right? They get clinically fucking hungry. In the era of WWII, doctors were dealing with treating the effects of famine and starvation. Feeding someone who’s been malnourished for a long period of time is more complicated than giving food to someone who’s been hungry for a few hours. They had also never observed the psychological or physical effects of starvation in a clinical setting.
Ancel Keys was a physiologist whose research still influences our modern ideas about diets in ways most of us are likely unaware. The military’s hyper-caloric K-rations? ‘K’ stood for their inventor’s last initial. The “Mediterranean diet”? For the most part, it was Keys’ brainchild. Guidelines to reduce saturated fat to prevent heart disease? Based on Ancel Keys’ epidemiological research.
Keys was a titan in the field, but a flawed one of course. There’s evidence that he, uh, “accidentally” didn’t publish some research. Might have had to do with it not supporting his hypothesis that switching saturated fat for unsaturated fat could reduce mortality from heart disease. RCTs with unexpected results are a bitch, huh?
So, the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.
In WWII, America said “you’re either with us or you’re with us” for your choices for serving your country. If you were drafted and the thought of even a desk job was too much military involvement for you, they had a spot ready for you at a Civilian Public Service (CPS) workcamp.
Or, if that didn’t work out, jail.
Much patriotism. Very Murika.
Conditions at the camps weren’t comparable to gulags, but they also don’t sound particularly pleasant. It was a bunch of men living in barracks, not being paid for their labor, unable to support the families they left at home. All because they had the audacity to say “maybe let’s not war?” They were allotted various unpaid jobs, including working in agriculture, forestry, firefighting, and working in psychiatric hospitals. They were willing to do hard and dangerous work for their country, just not work that involved killing people.
One camp became known as ‘the guinea pig unit.’ Five-hundred conscientious objectors assigned to Camp #115 volunteered to take part in over thirty medical experiments.
Ancel Keys’ seminal starvation experiment was one of them.
The TL;DR of the experiment goes like this: get a group of thirty-six healthy young men, feed them diets with sufficient calories. Then reduce that caloric intake drastically, and start taking notes.
There were four stages of the experiment. For twelve weeks the men were fed a diet of approximately 3,200 calories per day, a healthy number of calories for their metabolic rates and activity levels. The next twenty-four weeks food intake was slashed down to 1,600 calories. They were also required to walk or run twenty-two miles per week, further inducing a caloric deficit. They then spent twelve weeks on various programs of controlled re-feeding, with doctors and dietitians observing which diets were best suited to treat someone suffering malnutrition. The last eight weeks, participants could eat anything they wanted.
They all lost about 25% of their body weight. Volunteers became depressed, irritable, withdrawn, and in some cases started to show signs of hypochondria. They became obsessed with food, hoarding rations, reading cookbooks like porn while their actual sex drives suffered. Their resting metabolic rates dropped. Though cognition appeared normal in tests, they felt they experienced brain fog.
The Minnesota Starvation experiment demonstrated that the physical and psychological effects of starvation were more profound than the researchers expected. Re-feeding isn’t enough, as they expected going into the experiment. To heal someone who’s been starved, they need mental healthcare too.
In 2002, nineteen of the volunteers were contacted and interviewed about the experience. Though they all reported that their metabolism and health returned to normal, it took a few years of binging and disordered eating patterns to find stasis. All but one said they’d volunteer again. Many of them came from highly religious backgrounds, and saw this as a noble sacrifice they could make for their country while they hoped their friends would come home safely.
Max Kamplemen, one of the volunteers, poetically said of his experience, “why do people who were drafted go to fight wars, without escaping? Because there’s a duty. It’s the same kind of a thing, just a different battlefield. And from our point of view at the time, it was a battlefield consistent with what our conscience would tell us. But it was a battlefield. And battlefields are not supposed to be easy.”
This has been your daily Moment of Science, particularly grateful for a full stomach tonight.
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