The Minnesota Starvation Experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

by elil17 • 7 years ago

3 2 7 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

Someone• 7 years ago

“The motivation of the study was twofold: first, to produce a definitive treatise on the subject of human starvation […]

The study […] used 36 men […] The subjects were all white males, with ages ranging from 22 to 33 years old.“

No ethics committee would allow a truly definitive study, as that would include kids and pregnant women, and female volunteers would be harder to find, but this was either “everyday sexism” or just laziness. Male volunteers in that age range were easier to find, given military conscription.

elil17• 7 years ago

No ethics board today would allow this study at all. That said, the key finding was that people recovering from starvation need very large amounts of calories but specific nutrients don’t matter very much. There’s no reason to expect this wouldn’t be generalizable.

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment

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