FASCINATING NPR Report on WWII-era Starvation Experiments

I found this report (with various audio & video clips too) on the starvation experiments conducted upon conscientious objectors during WWII quite fascinating, from both a historical standpoint, and looking at it as a person with an interest in what voluntary malnutrition does to the body and mind.

 

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/fea tures/wwii/a1.html

 

A Duty to Starve

During World War II, 16 million Americans served in the military and millions more mobilized on the home front. Through the 1940s, patriotic refrains inundated movies and radio shows.

"Never in the memory of man has there been a war in which the courage, the endurance and the loyalties of civilians played so vital a part," said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a typical wartime address to the nation.

The government had names for those who resisted: "slackers, jellyfish and worms." But more than 44,000 men registered as conscientious objectors.

 

(more at link)

 

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/fea tures/wwii/a1.html

i read the written report. Very interesting. Especially the part where they had difficulties going back to a normal diet.

I've read that before.  It is very, very interesting, and I do believe calorie restricted diets/diets with food limitations, are a few of the causes of this nation's unnatural obsession with food and its rising obesity rates. 

Thank you for posting this link.

Hi,

You might be interested in my recent post to a question on this topic titled, “Why can't I control how much I eat anymore?"

Mary

Perhaps none of the 36 men was changed more by the year-long starvation experiment than Max Kampelman, who started the experiment believing love could overcome evil. That changed on August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

"What the atom bomb illustrated was that the perpetrator never sees the victim," Kampelman says. "So the victim can have all kinds of love but it will have absolutely no impact. There is such a thing as evil in the world. The power of love is inadequate to defeat it. "

I wish I'd never read that.

Original Post by maryhartley:

Hi,

You might be interested in my recent post to a question on this topic titled, “Why can't I control how much I eat anymore?"

Mary

Your link doesn't work. It tells me I don't have permission to see your answers.