“The malnourishment of an eating disorder is even more serious than in the Minnesota study”
At the end of the Second World War, researchers in the US military accidentally learned more about the psychological effects of dieting than they bargained for. The experiment was designed to find the best way to re-feed millions of those under German occupation after the war. They found 36 healthy young men, volunteers who were conscientious objectors to combat. These strapping fellows were observed eating and behaving and eating normally for a few months.
In the 2nd phase of the experiment, the volunteers went from their normal diet of an average 3200 calories to only 1800 calories a day, mostly in the form of the kinds of starches and basic foods available to Europe during the war.
As predicted, the men lost weight. They became listless and lethargic. They looked thinner. But they went about their studies and activities and work. They continued to walk over 20 miles a week.
What was surprising is what happened to the men’s thinking. They became moody, socially withdrawn, and keenly focused on food. While watching movies they were uninterested in the love stories but perked up during scenes with food. Mealtimes became very tense, and some developed rituals and strange habits. Some chewed gum to excess. Some collected recipes. Reportedly they lost interest in anything but the next meal.
Is any of this sounding familiar to you as a family member of someone experiencing an eating disorder?
Semi-Starvation can bring on extreme psychological effects and behaviors
The Minnesota study could never be reproduced now: it would be considered unethical.
Yet the most shocking result of the Minnesota Study may be this: when the researchers let the participants begin eating more normally, conflict between men became intense. Some of the volunteers stole and binged on food, one even from a trash can, resulting in tremendous guilt and shame. One found a way to get out of the study by deliberately dropping a car he was working on, resulting in amputation of one of his fingers.
The lesson of the Minnesota Starvation study isn’t the starvation. It isn’t the extremes: it is the edges of malnourishment
The volunteers for the Minnesota study were eventually able to return to normal life, but some suffered from bingeing behavior for a long time and most gained weight after the study above their original levels,which took a year to go back to their individual normal. Some reported psychological effects long after the study, and surviving volunteers interviewed many years later vividly remember the experience.
The volunteers of the study didn’t have eating disorders. But they did show us a lot about what semi-starvation does to the mind and to behaviors.
Patients with eating disorders have one thing in common with those volunteers: a period of inadequate nourishment, and an energy deficit: they consumed fewer calories than their bodies needed. This energy deficit is true for binge eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, and anorexia nervosa. For some, like the 1945 volunteers, a year of eating freely resolved their issues. But for adolescents and young adults with developing brains a bout of low nourishment can result in damage to the brain and development. For those with a predisposition to develop an eating disorder, low nourishment can trigger a life-threatening mental illness that hijacks their lives.
The malnourishment of an eating disorder is even more serious than in the Minnesota study, which lasted one year in full-grown adults. Eating disorder sufferers are often dieting, binging, and purging for far longer and at critical growth stages.
There is no safe level of low nourishment. For those predisposed to an eating disorder, any restriction puts the body, and the brain, into a state of semi-starvation, including:
- Delaying meals
- Restricting calories
- Limited food choices
- Dieting
- New vegetarian or “clean” eating regimes
- Exercising to burn off calories or lower stress
Your loved one’s new ideas about food, about their appearance, withdrawal from social activities, depression, anxiety, uncontrolled eating, and new exercise habits may largely be direct results of and driven by semi-starvation.
With gratitude and appreciation for the Minnesota Starvation Study participants and researchers.
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