The Department of Physiological Hygiene

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Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, Hello, Revision's History listeners. Malcolm here, I just wanted to let you know that you can hear all the remaining episodes of season seven right now.

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Speaker 2: If you like.

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Speaker 1: All you need to do is become a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Pushkin Plus subscribers get access to Revision's History and many other Pushkin shows add free for just four to ninety nine a month, and you get bonus content and special early access. In this case, you won't have to wait two weeks for the rest of the season, which is an eternity considering just how good the rest of the season is. You can find Pushkin Plus on the Revision's History show page, in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash Plus. Minneapolis forty four busy sidewalks, miles of street car tracks, businessmen in gray suits and hats, shop girls in knee length skirts. The Mississippi snakes through the middle of the city. The Fauchet Tower looms overhead. Overseas, the war in Europe and the South Pacific still rages. So many of the younger men are gone, but there is bustle and energy that makes the downtown feel like Chicago or New York City unless you look closely and pay attention day after day, and if you did that, you would see a strange sight that set Minneapolis in that moment apart. You would see men in groups of two walk in the streets early twenties, dressed identically in khakis and white shirts. They would seem healthy at first, but then as the fall of nineteen forty four turns into the long winter and spring of nineteen forty five, you would see them start to change, could see them start to move slowly as if they were old men. Their clothes are one, then two, then three sizes, two, big eyes, hollowed out hair, thinning, skin like parchment. They sit in restaurants and soda fountains and drink cup after a cup of coffee, but never eat ever, even if you invited one of them to join your table, they just stare at your food with blank eyes, then move on, shuffling down the sidewalk across the Mississippi and back to a warn of rooms under the football stadium at the University of Minnesota. Back to the Department of Physiological Hygiene run by a man named Ansel Keys. What does he look like?

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Speaker 3: Ansel Keys? He was short. You know, I think that bothered him a little bit. He was very muscular, He was very I think, very good looking in his youth.

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Speaker 1: That's Sarah Tracy, a historian at the Universe Versity of Oklahoma who's writing a biography of ansel Keys.

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Speaker 3: You know, he was a child genius. He was one of Lewis Urman's fifteen hundred gifted children whom he tracked.

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Speaker 1: He was a termite.

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Speaker 3: Yes, he was a termite. You know about the termite I do.

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Speaker 2: I do.

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Speaker 1: The termites were a group of children with super high IQs. You had to be very smart to be a termite.

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Speaker 3: He was very self possessed as a child. You know, if he set his mind to doing something, he did it. He left high school three times, once to become a powder monkey and some mines gold mines, once to become a lumberjack, and once to collect bat guano from caves in Arizona.

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Speaker 1: Ansel Keys was America's first true celebrity doctor, a mountain climber, an adventurer. He was on the cover of Time back when that was the real measure of celebrity. He wrote best selling cookbooks with his wife. He had a fabulous villain near Naples.

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Speaker 4: The Army has developed a now famous k Ration, the completely streamlined meal.

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Speaker 1: Back before the Second World War, the army came to him and asked him to make a high calorie pre prepared meal. It was called the k Ration K for Keys, of course, and millions of gis ended up carrying his creation into battle.

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Speaker 4: Originally designed for paratroops, K proved ideal for tankbusters, commandos and all isolated units. Each package contains a balanced by them and rich meal.

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Speaker 1: With the k Ration under his belt, Ansel Keys then turned his attention to an even bigger question, one that had long obsessed those who study human physiology. What happens to people when, for months on end, you deny them food. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and missuno stood. This episode is about an audacious experiment conducted at the end of the Second World War by one of the most remarkable figures in twentieth century science, Ansel Keys.

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Speaker 5: So, for purposes of the tape, if you could just state your name and the location and date of your birth.

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Speaker 6: This is Earl Hackman, living at eight eight eight Hadlai and drive in elves And, Illinois, and I was born on December one, nineteen eighteen.

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Speaker 1: The best record we have of what exactly happened in ansel Kes's laboratory is in a box of taped interviews stored away in the archives of the Library of Congress. Each tape runs roughly two hours in length. They contained the recollections of eighteen of ansel Keys's subjects, who sat down in their eighties to leave a record of their experience.

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Speaker 2: My name is Sam Legg.

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Speaker 7: I was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, on November tenth, nineteen sixteen.

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Speaker 8: Max Campbellman with an M in the middle initial November seventh, nineteen twenty.

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Speaker 1: The interviews were conducted by two researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Richard Semba and Leah kOhm. The tapes were given to the library shortly thereafter, where they have sat on a shelf ever since, untouched, a forgotten record of eighteen voices talking about an experience none of them will ever forget. It was known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.

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Speaker 6: We were in Stadium South Tower, the football stadium. Underneath the stadium had quite a complex for research there, and there was a dormit. We lived in a dormitory there. All the activities at the university we're open to us.

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Speaker 1: During their off hours, the men would roam the city. People living near the university saw them all the time, young men in white shirts and khaki pants, taking long walks along the Mississippi, sitting in restaurants, drinking coffee, but never eating a thing. The men called themselves the guinea pigs.

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Speaker 8: We were all in excellent physical health, and as far as as far as they knew, we were all in good mental health at the time. We did not stay that way during the experiment, but we were.

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Speaker 1: You can go to the Library of Congress and listen to the tapes in the reading room yourself if you like. You might end up wondering what was ansel Keys trying to accomplish by putting his subjects through so much? And was it worth it?

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Speaker 9: When I hear somebody say, oh, I'm simply starved, I know they don't know what they're saying, because there's a real difference between what your body craves for from Thessouri's heals of starvation then what you normally feel as hunger.

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Speaker 1: The second episode of this season of Provision's history was devoted in large part to the story of the famous iodine experiments in Akron, Ohio. During the First World War. A doctor named David Marine was trying to figure out how to treat goiter, a condition that causes severe enlargement of the thyroid gland. Goiter was widespread in the early part of the twentieth century. Millions of people walked around with baseball sized bulges on their necks. Marine wanted to see if regular doses of iodine could solve the problem, so he convinced the Akron school board to let him run a study on thousands of schoolgirls feeding them regular doses of iodine to see if it prevented goiter. Could that experiment, I wondered, be conducted today. I called up the bioethicist Art Kaplan, who teaches at New York University today.

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Speaker 10: To attempt this experiment to prevent goiter would be a hugely different experience for that researcher and for the subjects, the school board and their families. For one thing, when that experiment was done, there were no federal regulations. There was no federal oversight of what was going on.

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Speaker 1: These days, most experiments involving human subjects are closely regulated. They involved consent forms, disclosure statements, the right to drop out of a study at any given time. Caplan's point was that, compared to today, medical research in the past starts to look like the wild West. If you could find the money and talk people into participating, off you went. In Alabama, between the nineteen thirties and the nineteen seventies, the Public Health Service launched the Tuskegee Syphilista, where a group of African American men were tricked into signing up for what they thought was medical treatment, when in fact all the researchers wanted to do was to find out what happened when you let untreated syphilis run its course. It was maybe the lowest moment in twentieth century American medicine. In the early nineteen sixties, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram ran his infamous Obedient Study two.

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Speaker 10: One hundred and eighty five volts.

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Speaker 1: Where Milgram deceived otherwise unsuspecting subjects into thinking that they were delivering high voltage electric shocks to someone they'd never met.

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Speaker 3: I have reduced to ancel anymore, cut me out of me who kid al readers cut me.

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Speaker 11: Out, keet me out of contending.

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Speaker 2: The next word is green played.

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Speaker 1: In today's era, the number one consideration in any proposed experiment is its effect on a subject. Back then, the number one consideration was the value of what you could learn from the subject. The subject was thought of like a soldier in battle, someone whose well being was secondary to the larger cause.

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Speaker 4: The answer to the vitamin question is not pill, but good food in plenty of variety. According to doctor Key, if vitamins.

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Speaker 7: Were missing from his food, the soldier might have to take concentrated vitamins.

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Speaker 4: If he had vitamins but no food.

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Speaker 10: He was still starved.

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Speaker 5: Best way, naturally is supply vitamins and the food.

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Speaker 1: Now, remember the statue of Ansel Keys has attained during the Second World War. He's the world's greatest nutrition researcher. He's closely involved with the war effort. He just developed the k ration to greater claim, and he looks around the world that he sees millions of people suffering from severe malnutrition. The war disrupted the food supply of entire continents. Millions of people were in concentration camps, reduced to skeletons. Ansel Keys knew how little his field understood about prolonged malnutrition. What was the effect of long term hunger on physical well being, on psychological health, and what was the best way to bring the undernourished back to health? What was more important how much you fed someone or what you fed someone. So Keys designs an experiment. He would need thirty six subjects for at least a year. The first three months would be the control period. Each research subject would be stabilized at what Keys estimated to be their correct weight, three full meals a day intake matching outtake. Then, after stabilization would come six months of severe calorie restriction, with the goal that each man losed twenty five percent of his ideal weight. Exercise would be mandatory throughout the study, twenty two miles a week of walking up and down the Mississippi or through downtown Minneapolis, all through the long Minnesota winter and through the following summer. Each participant tested on a regular basis blood samples, sperm samples, body fat, blood volumes. The men would be asked to keep journals and record their thoughts and dreams, and then after six months of starvation, three months of recovery. The crucial part Keys plan to test out different rehabilitation diets with varying amounts of calories, protein, and vitamins. The experiment begins on November nineteenth, nineteen forty four. Keys gathers his guinea pigs at the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene underneath the football stadium. He stands in front of all thirty six and gives them a speech. He had stayed up the previous night practicing in front.

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Speaker 2: Of his wife.

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Speaker 1: Quote. We are here because of the problem of relief feeding in general, and particularly in the war devastated areas.

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Speaker 2: Today.

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Speaker 1: You can imagine a moment Keys, the brilliant sign, bringing the group of young men before him under his spell. Human misery and want are qualities of life which properly bring in emotional response. But starvation is quantitative and must be met with quantitative answers. Grand words tailor made for men of idealism, eager for a chance to serve their country. And then are you ready to begin? And a deafening cheer goes.

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Speaker 12: Up when we start this experiment. We were all given the same amount of proof.

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Speaker 1: Listening to the oral histories from the veterans of the Minnesota Starvation experiment is a strange experience.

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Speaker 12: We had six slices of bread. They take away two slices and four slices six slices, and if you still didn't lose weight, then they just started taking away your potato.

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Speaker 1: The men are all at the end of their lives. Nearly sixty years have passed since the experiment ended. But rarely do any of them say I don't remember or I don't know. They know, and they remember, and their memories are precise. In fact, it seems like they'd been reliving the long year between the fall of nineteen forty four and the fall of nineteen forty five ever since.

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Speaker 5: Do you remember what your lowest weight got down to?

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Speaker 2: One hundred and thirty four?

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Speaker 5: I believe what was sort of your standard weight entering.

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Speaker 2: I went in at two twenty and they they do standardized me down till.

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Speaker 6: One to eighty before the real experiment began, So I got down to one thirty four.

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Speaker 1: The thirty six subjects started the experiment with high hopes. Keys had arranged for them to take classes at the university. The men themselves organized dramatic productions and planned to hold educational seminars. Many wanted to prepare themselves for relief work after the war was over. In the recruitment leaflet Keys sent out, he mentioned the intriguing possibilities in the fact that there was an all women's dormitory nearby for those, as he put it, who wanted to be a guinea pig by day and a wolf by night.

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Speaker 5: What happened after once the semi servation started.

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Speaker 8: Things went downhill very fast, well, not real fast. It didn't seem much change at first, But when we got down to the place where we really knew what the word hunger meant.

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Speaker 13: Instead of just saying.

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Speaker 8: I'm hungry, let's go eat, which isn't the word hunger, I mean, it's a different different. When we really felt pains of hunger and we began thinking about food most of the time, and so forth, we began to be more and more irritable.

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Speaker 1: After the three months of initial rigor, while they stabilized their weight, the severe calorie restrictions kicked in. Everyone now got just two meals a day cabbage, potatoes, bread slices, ruda begas, and occasional treats of macaroni and cheese.

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Speaker 8: I was one of the few, now I shouldn't say few. I was one of the many that metally was transfixed on cookbooks, and I collected probably one hundred cooks and books.

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Speaker 2: I would read.

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Speaker 8: Cook books like you would read readers digest.

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Speaker 1: Some of the men would walk into Minneapolis, sit in restaurants and watch other people lead the way they might have once gone to a concert or watched a play. They dreamt about food, They argued about food. At meal times, they fixated on their plates.

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Speaker 13: I mean we would lick the plates, really and I remember.

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Speaker 5: Well, I heard that a bit of that caused a bit of tension.

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Speaker 13: I think it did, particularly abling for instance, one of the first that I saw doing that, and that's disgusting. I'm pretty sud I were doing it myself, so oh yeah, I mean I just just thought, this is that you would actually degrade yourself to the extent of licking a plate, kid me a break, and that we were all looking at.

00:19:04
Speaker 1: Coffee was one of the few indulgences they were allowed, so they drank it to excess, twelve eighteen cups a day. They chewed enormous amounts of bubblegum. They began souping their meals their word for adding water to everything they were given to create the sense that their portions were bigger. One of the men took a date to see to Have and Have Not, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

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Speaker 13: I'm sorry, Slim, but I still say you're awful good And I wouldn't.

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Speaker 5: Oh, I forgot. You wouldn't take anything from anybody, would you.

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Speaker 2: That's right?

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Speaker 1: One of the great romantic dramas of the Warriors. But he couldn't concentrate except for the part where Bogart goes to a restaurant.

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Speaker 9: And if you went to a movie, you weren't particularly interested in a lot of scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.

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Speaker 1: During the long starvation phase, Keys began to lose some of his subjects. One of them went walking through down to Minneapolis, and suddenly his resolve broke. He'd been having dreams of cannibalism. He went into seventeen different soda fountains and gulp down a milkshake at each one.

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Speaker 12: After that, we could not go out without a buddy, and if we had a girlfriend, we could bring the girlfriend in. The doctors would interview the girl and go care So when we were on a date to your buddy.

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Speaker 1: Finally, after six months of starvation recovery.

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Speaker 5: On the final day, when you were able to finally break what, do you remember what you did?

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Speaker 9: Yes, they did a big breakfast for us, and that most of us stuffed ourselves. And then I think I went downtown in one restaurant and went and ate another meal, and then got out and went to another one. And just I mean, one couldn't satisfy your craving for food by filling up your stomach. Many of us, I think did unreasonable things. I was invited out for I think a Swiss steak dinner, and though I was filled to the brim, I went and stuff a little bit more in on top, and then got on a bus writing back to the to the stadium and jostling up and down on the All of a sudden I lost it all. Now I got off at the next time. I felt sorry for the guy that was going to have to clean it up, but I didn't stay around.

00:21:52
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty five, years after the study ended, Keys published The Biology of Human Starvation, his landmark two volume account of what was learned during the study. To this day. That book helps doctors understand everything from in relief to eating disorders. If you've ever used the terms metabolism, intimate and fasting, calories in and calories out, then you're talking about concepts that go back to the Keys experiment. Ansel Keys did exactly what he set out to do, but his subjects they were soldiers in a battle whose well being was secondary to the larger cause. Years later, the subjects of the starvation experiment gathered for a reunion. Ansel Keys, by then an old man, addressed the group. Someone asked him did he think the benefits of what was learned were greater than the costs of what the men went through? He looked out at all the men in front of him and said, well, you're all here, aren't you. Out Of all all the interviews in the box of tapes at the Library of Congress, one stands out the testimony of a man named Sam Legg. His father was a stockbroker in New York City. Sam went to the elite Saint Paul's private school in New Hampshire and then on to Yale. Sam Legg was someone the other guinea pigs looked up to, that is until his behavior took a sharp turn during the six month starvation period. His moods began to swing back and forth. Like many others, he got obsessed with cookbooks, but his obsession was pronounced. He took to eating in the corner by himself. The historian Todd Tucker interviewed Leg for his book The Great Starvation Experiment. He writes about the way Legs started to eat. He combined all the food on his tray into one pile. He then took his fork and stirred it and mashed it altogether, the thimblefuls of fish, chowder, spaghetti, peas, and potatoes until it was a homogeneous, dark gray greenish page on his plate. He then salted and peppered the amalgamation until it was crusted with seasoning. When he had scraped every morsel off his plate, he then picked it up and licked it noisily until not a molecule of food remained. The slurping noise was so loud it made the other men WinCE. In his oral history interview, Leg talks about how during the starvation phase he felt his character start to slip away.

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Speaker 2: I'll tell you a nasty moment.

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Speaker 7: I was walking along and I obviously had a buddy, but I don't know who it was.

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Speaker 2: And it was deep into the semi starvation, and we were tired.

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Speaker 1: When they crossed the street, they didn't have the energy to take the half step up onto the sidewalk.

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Speaker 2: We were tired and weak and so well.

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Speaker 7: We were standing at a corner waiting for a light or something, and a kid came along on a bicycle and he was really moving, pumping away and going to shoot. I said, I wonder where he's going. And then I said said to myself, I know where he's going. He's going home for supper, and I'm not. And then, for a very brief I hope it was brief moment, I suddenly hated that that boy, and that I hate at this point to tell you this because it doesn't speak very well for me, but I I have remembered it with I guess horror that that I could feel such a thing so utterly irrational, But there was, and uh, you ask an experience that I remember. I sure remember that.

00:26:13
Speaker 1: The interview is almost over. Just one final question.

00:26:19
Speaker 5: Is there anything that we haven't talked about or that I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems all of them.

00:26:27
Speaker 2: He should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand.

00:26:31
Speaker 5: Okay.

00:26:33
Speaker 7: I keep saying to myself that this was because I was so weak and I was chopping wood, and I got the acts caught up in a tree, and I didn't have a rapid enough reaction time to pull my hand away, so I removed some fingers.

00:26:58
Speaker 1: He was at the house of two elderly ladies in Minneapolis who had befriended some of the subjects. Leg and his buddy would go and watch the women eat, then go outside to split wood to steal themselves against the temptation to take any of the women's food.

00:27:12
Speaker 7: I recognized that a human being can go through a period of mental illness.

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Speaker 2: I think I was mentally ill.

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Speaker 7: Was I mentally ill at the time that I removed the fingers, I don't know.

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Speaker 2: I like to think that I wasn't. I like to think it was an accident.

00:27:33
Speaker 7: I'm not going to sit here and categorically say that I didn't do it on purpose.

00:27:40
Speaker 1: Leg was rushed to the hospital. Hansel keyes heard the news and came straight to his bedside. Leg looked like a concentration camp survivor. His eyes had changed color, a strange side effect of deprivation that was common among the men. His corneas were a hard, brilliant white, the color of gleaming teeth. His skin was like flaky tree bark. His hand was a bloody mess. I'm quoting now from Tucker's account. Is there anything I can do for you, Sam asked doctor Keys. Yes, said Sam. Keys leaned closer to hear. Keep being the experiment, he said, Sam. I'm afraid I can't keep you in, said Keys. You need rest and decent meals. The two of them went back and forth, and Leg said Doctor He said, his voice still hoarse and quiet. For the rest of my life, people are going to ask me what I did during the war. This experiment is my chance to give an honorable answer to that question. And so for the next five days, until Leg was released from the hospital, they brought him his meals from the laboratory kitchen in a cardboard takeout box, because of course, he couldn't eat the hospital food. That would be cheating. Could Ansel Keys do that experiment today? I asked the atheicist Art Captain about Keys's experiment. Kaplan knew the story well, he taught for years at the University of Minnesota.

00:29:14
Speaker 10: Putting people on starvation diets, having them run around a city Minneapolis, being confronted with food everywhere, having them stressed out. Not a chance.

00:29:33
Speaker 1: The Minnesota Starvation experiment, or any experiment like it, could never be repeated today. In the next episode of Revisionist History, we ask, are we sure that's a good thing? Revisionist History is produced by Elouise Linton, Leeman Gestu, and Jacob Smith, with Tlly Emlin and Harrison VJ. Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is mie La Belle. Original scoring by Luis Karra, mastering by Jean Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Beth Johnson is our fact checker. Special thanks to Todd Tucker go read his book The Great Starvation Experiment, Hansel Keys and The Men Who Starve for Science Special. Thanks also to Ariela Markowitz for production help on this episode.

00:30:35
Speaker 11: I'm Malcolm Glaba much about Connectur.

00:30:56
Speaker 1: I mean, if you target towns and cities, it's as clear as day that there will be civilian victims. Teen forty five the US firebomb Tokyo, destroying a quarter of the city and killing more than a hundred thousand people. I wrote about this infamous bombing campaign in my audiobook The Bomber Mafia, and one of the survivor's voices we Hear is from a project called Paper City. Paper City is now out as a groundbreaking feature documentary director Adrian Francis explores what we choose to remember and hope to forget. To find out more, visit papercityfilm dot com and follow at paper City Tokyo on social media.