The Minnesota Starvation Experiment - The Other Ancel Keys

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This is my personal review of the Minnesota starvation experiment conducted by Ancel Keys in the 1940s.

For those who don't know, Ancel Keys and his colleagues began doing experiments of starvation during the 1940s in an effort to understand how starvation and semi-starvation were affecting the physiology and psychology of war victims. His studies ended up in two volumes of 1,400+ pages.

His experiment was divided in four parts:

• phase 1 - 3 months - 3,500 kcals food intake + exercise (control diet)
• phase 2 - 6 months - semi-starvation diet of 1,570 kcals
• phase 3 - 3 months - rehabilitation phase - between 2,500 and 3,500 kcals
• phase 4 - uncontrolled rehabilitation - eat as much as you want.

First, I wouldn't call 1,570 kcals semi-starvation, but I may be wrong. If you look at pictures of these subjects (you can find them via search engine), they were like walking skeletons.

Second, in the uncontrolled rehab phase, some of them were eating north of 10,000 kcals consistently, marking the psychological effects the study left on them. These psychological effects have been described in detail in a couple of papers written about the study.

Alright, I discuss all of these aspects, and much more in the video below.

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Cristi Vlad Self-Experimenter and Author