By: Maeve Brady

Starvation is a very common part of suffering, impoverished countries, communities, and so on. When humans are faced with it, there could be numerous consequences. For example, terrible illnesses, continuous suffering, and in many cases, death. Throughout history, many have tried to prevent it, yet famine and the starvation of the human body is too vast and difficult to fully resolve. Yet that hasn’t stopped many from trying to find solutions for it and see the effects of starvation in general. This leads me to a very infamous psychology project conducted at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Starvation Project. Today, I will try my best to give an in depth explanation of what exactly it was and its findings.

To start off, we must know exactly what the project was and its background. Ancel Keys, the psychologist in charge of the University of Minnesota, was eager to take on a huge and impactful challenge of conducting an experiment based around the starvation of its subjects. This experiment had the goal of figuring out not only the physical effects of starvation on its participants, but also the psychological effects it may have. It also worked towards discovering at what point they could essentially be “rehabilitated” back into full health both mentally and physically. Along with Ancel Keys, Josef Brozek also joined in the conducting of the experiments in 1944, after he had newly joined the Minnesota lab in 1941. A couple years after Brozek had joined, in November 1944, thirty-six young men were chosen out of over two hundred to partake in the experiment. Like many experiments, there were requirements, especially for its participants. For the Minnesota Starvation Project, the young men had to be of good health, meaning they had to be a good weight- at least what was considered to be a good weight- and had to have pretty good health in general. Along with the fact that they had to take psychological tests to ensure they were “normal” and all on the same level. This made it so all the men were essentially on “an even playing field”, so when observing the changes in the men, they could find some consistency. After these thirty-six men were chosen out of the hundreds, they took up residence in the corridors of the University of Minnesota’s football stadium due to space requirements and other variables-to prevent getting in the way of the other students.

According to Dr. David Baker and Natasha Keramidas, psychologists who wrote an article about the Minnesota Starvation Project for the American Psychological Association, “The research protocol called for the men to lose 25 percent of their normal body weight. They spent the first three months of the study eating a normal diet of 3,200 calories a day, followed by six months of semi-starvation at 1,570 calories a day (divided between breakfast and lunch), then a restricted rehabilitation period of three months eating 2,000 to 3,200 calories a day, and finally an eight-week unrestricted rehabilitation period during which there were no limits on caloric intake.” This demonstrates that at the start they were required to intake the standard amount of calories just to observe their health and overall mood, yet as the months passed, they slowly started to decrease into this six month period of semi-starvation with the researchers only providing one thousand five hundred and seventy calories for the subjects. This is approximately around one thousand six hundred and thirty calories less than before.

After the six months of the monitored starvation, they switched initiatives into rehabilitation by giving them the standard amount of calories whilst also giving them an unrestricted limit on the weekends and some limits during the weekdays. During this semi-starvation period, the changes in these young men were drastic. Some of the drastic changes were that the men quickly lost weight and had a sickly appearance. Not only was there this significant decrease in weight, but also significant decreases in overall body temperature and heart rate. Also, not only were there physical effects on the men but also psychological effects such as an increased obsession. This obsession was with food. The lack of consumption made some of the men go crazy in a sense, with the constant fantasizing about food in this repetitive way. Along with more physical effects of irritability, depression, and fatigue. This especially proved to be arduous for some men, with three subjects breaking their diet and/or not meeting the weight loss requirements.

But, what may be the most notable about the experiment is the recovery process of the participants. Like I mentioned before, after the semi-starvation period, they started slowly reintroducing more calories into the subject’s life, but as they did so, there were some unexpected results. Many assumed that after introducing food back into the subjects’ lives, they may gain weight very quickly, but in fact it was the opposite of this. Instead of re-gaining all the weight back quickly, the participants actually gained weight even slower than the slowest time the researchers anticipated, along with the fact that many did not gain any weight at the start and in fact lost more. After monitoring the subjects for a while, the results that they found were that the subjects endured gastrointestinal issues, excessive hunger, and even some gaining more weight than before, although staying the same weight after some time into the rehabilitation. This further proved that the weight gain after starvation is an extremely arduous process that can have many different outcomes, although this is still being researched.

Like many experiments, there is a reason for conducting it, and in the case of the Minnesota Starvation Project, it is very complex. During WWII-when this experiment was conducted-many Americans had encountered Europeans being starved, especially in Germany. In Germany, due to Jews being deemed as evil scapegoats, they were placed in concentration camps, with Adolf Hitler, the dictator at the time, having the goal of killing them. And, one way to do this was starving them. So, at these camps all the Jews and other prisoners of war were terribly starved, which was obvious through their physical appearance and overall drowsy and irritable moods. After the United States discovery of this, a complex question arose. “How fast can one be rehabilitated from almost complete and/or complete starvation of the human body, and what psychological effects would that have?” So, in order to test this, many young men who weren’t serving in the military decided to sign up in hopes to help contribute to their country in some form, in this case, medical research. To be more specific, because these men who weren’t fighting in WWII may have been ashamed of not serving their country, many still wanted to help contribute to the war cause and thus signed up to help further medical research.

Thank you for following me along as I gave an in-depth explanation of what the Minnesota Starvation project was and its intentions. I hope you have gained a better understanding and possible interest in this subject!

For more information please go to:

• https://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/10/hunger