The Minnesota Starvation Experiment: 3 Reasons You Should Learn About It

If it were up to me to come up with the Canadian high school curriculum, high schoolers everywhere would be in trouble because I don’t know much. But I think I’d get one thing right. And that’s making sure everyone learned about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. 

The first time I learned about this experiment I was an adult. And in the 30 minutes it took me to read a summary, I felt like I better understood the human body. That I better understood my OWN body. 

The Experiment

In a nutshell (and I highly encourage you to read the full summary if this is remotely interesting to you!), we have a researcher named Ancel Keys to thank for this experiment. Toward the end of World War II, Keys became really interested in how the starvation experienced by so many people throughout the war had impacted them, and how it would be best to renourish them. 

To answer his question, he created an experiment. The idea was that 36 “healthy” men would be fed sufficiently for 3 months, then experience 6 months of semi-starvation, and finish with 3 more months of nutrition rehabilitation. All of this under close supervision to see what happened to them - mind, body, and soul. 

The results are truly astounding. What the men experienced emotionally, psychologically, and physically from the semi-starvation period teaches us a lot about how deprivation affects us all.

And here’s the real kicker: the “semi-starvation” period was a quantity of food that is frequently recommended and normalized today. 

Below are just 3 of the findings that jump out at me about the experiment.

1. When we aren’t eating enough, food becomes our personality

What comes to mind when I ask how much of your day you spend thinking about food? We can gather some interesting information from the answer to this question.

When the body is not getting as much energy as it needs, it very resourcefully puts food on our minds as much as possible. What better way to have us seek out food than being fixated on it all day, right?

This phenomenon was seen in a dramatic way in the experiment. Harold Brickenstaff was one of the participants in the experiment and was quoted saying the following:
“ . . . food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life. And life is pretty dull if that’s the only thing. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.” - Harold Brickenstaff

Let me be clear: feeling like you spend a lot of your time and energy thinking about food does not mean there is something wrong with you. To the contrary, it is exactly how we expect the brain and body to respond to certain conditions. What it does mean is that it doesn’t need to be this way forever. Because as much as it may sometimes feel like it is, food is not your personality. We can go from enjoying only the movie scenes in which people are eating, to enjoying the whole movie.

2. The world feels a lot more annoying when we are under-nourished

By now most of us are familiar with the concept of hanger. But we tend to only hear about it in a comical way when we’re out shopping and eat lunch an hour later than usual. 

What we less often hear about is the way our mental health can be impacted by not eating enough. Experiment participant Carlyle Frederick captured it well when he reflected on his experience:
“… noticing what's wrong with everybody else, even your best friend. Their idiosyncrasies became great big deals … little things that wouldn't bother me before or after would really make me upset.” 

I don’t know about you but no diet or eating plan I’ve ever come across has come with the disclaimer that it may make everyone and everything around you feel more annoying. And yet that’s exactly what happens. The Centre for Clinical Interventions says the following: 

“We know that when a person is malnourished, their brain is not adequately fuelled; they struggle to make decisions, solve problems and regulate their emotions (Centre for Clinical Interventions, 2018a).”

3. It can take a longggg time for our bodies to truly trust that famine is over. 

In eating disorder recovery, it can be so disheartening when we are progressing in our healing but feeling like so many of our symptoms are not going away. Why are we still feeling so out of control around food? Why are we still so cold? Why do calories seem to automatically add up in our heads without us wanting them to? The list could go on and on. 

In the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, the participants “all agreed that they were not “back to normal” after the 3-mo rehabilitation period.”
Some of the men described their true recovery periods as closer to 2 years. And keep in mind that this was following 6 months of deprivation. 

Some of them felt out of control around food, despite never experiencing this before the experiment. Participant  Jasper Garner described it as a “year-long cavity” that needed to be filled. 

My takeaway here is not one of discouragement, but rather one of assurance that if you are feeling like you may never experience life without the repercussions of your former deprivation, I hold a lot of hope that you can and will. 

It’s worth noting that all of the men stated they felt there had been “no negative long-term health effects from the experiment”. 

Recovering from an eating disorder or chronic dieting can feel really lonely and isolating, and each person’s experience really is SO unique. But I hope that learning about this seminal experiment helps you to feel less alone. Because the truth is that our culture urges us and teaches HOW to restrict, and then makes us feel crazy when we experience the repercussions of that restriction. We deserve so much better. 

Looking for dietitian support? I offer virtual nutrition counselling to adults in Ottawa and the rest of Ontario.
Learn more about my services.

Interested in this topic? Resources worth exploring:

Summary of the Experiment:
Kalm, L. M., & Semba, R. D. (2005). They starved so that others be better fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the minnesota experiment. The Journal of Nutrition, 135(6), 1347–1352. https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/135.6.1347
Book:
Gaudiani, J. L. (2019). Sick enough: A guide to the medical complications of eating disorders. Routledge.  

This blog post is not a substitute for personal eating disorder care and is intended for educational purposes only.