The Department of Physiological Hygiene

In the final year of the Second World War, 36 men spent a year in a dingy set of rooms under the University of Minnesota football stadium. They were part of an experiment none of them would ever forget. What happened in the Department of Physiological Hygiene? Revisionist History uncovers a forgotten box of interviews in the archives of the Library of Congress. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Hello, Hello, Revisionist History listeners. Malcolm here, I just
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(00:36):
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Minneapolis forty four busy sidewalks, miles of street car tracks,
businessmen in gray suits and hats, shop girls in knee

(01:17):
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, an energy
that makes the downtown feel like Chicago or New York.
City unless you look closely and pay attention day after day,

(01:42):
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

(02:03):
spring of nineteen forty five, you would see them start
to change. You'd see them start to move slowly, as
if they were old men. Their clothes are one, then two,
then three sizes too big, eyes, hollowed out, hair, thinning,
skin like parchment. They sit in restaurants and soda fountains
and drink cup after cup of coffee, but never eat ever,

(02:27):
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 warren 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

(02:52):
does he look like, 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. That's Sarah Tracy, a historian at the
Versity of Oklahoma who's writing a biography of ansel Keys.

(03:12):
Do you know he was a child genius. He was
one of Lewis Terman's fifteen hundred gifted children whom he tracked.
He was a termite. Yes, he was a termite. You
know about the termite I do. I do. The termites
were a group of children with super high IQs. You
had to be very smart to be a termite. He
was very self possessed as a child. You know, if

(03:35):
he set his mind to doing something, he did it.
He left high school three times. Wants to become a
powder monkey and some mines gold mines. Wants to become
a lumberjack, and wants to collect bat guano from caves
in Arizona. Ansel Keys was America's first true celebrity doctor,

(03:58):
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 in your naples. The Army has developed
a now famous k Ration, the completely streamlined meal. Back
before the Second World War, the Army came to him
and asked him to make a high calorie preprepared meal.

(04:22):
It was called the k Ration K for Keys, of course,
and millions of gis ended up carrying his creation into battle.
Originally designed for parrot rules, K proved ideal for tank busters,
commandos and all isolated units. Each package contains a balanced
by them and rich meal. With the k Ration under

(04:44):
his belt and so, 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

(05:07):
Things Overlooked and miss a Understood. 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, signs Ansel Keys. So, for purposes at the tape,

(05:32):
if you could just state your name and the location
and date of your birth. This is Earl Heckman living
at eight eight eight had a line drive in elves
in Illinois, and I was born on December one, nineteen eighteen.
The best record we have of what exactly happened in
Ansel Keys's laboratory is in a box of taped interviews

(05:54):
stored away in the archives of the Library of Congress.
Each tape runs roughly two hours in length. They contain
the recollections of eighteen of Ansel Keys's subjects, who sat
down in their eighties to leave a perminent record of
their experience. My name is Sam Legg. I was born
in Hackensack, New Jersey, on November tenth, nineteen sixteen. Max

(06:19):
Campbell meant that with an M in the middle initial
and November seventh, nineteen twenty. The interviews were conducted by
two researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Richard Semba and Leah Calm.
The tapes were given to the library shortly thereafter, where
they have sat on a shelf ever since, untouched, a

(06:40):
forgotten record of eighteen voices talking about an experience none
of them will ever forget. It was known as the
Minnesota Starvation Experiment. We were in Stadium South Tower, the
football stadium underneath the stadium had quite a complex of
four research there, and we had there was a We

(07:03):
lived in a dormitory there. All the activities at the
diversity were open to us. 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

(07:24):
in restaurants, drinking coffee, but never eating a thing. The
men called themselves the guinea pigs. We were all in
excellent physical health, and as far as as far as
they knew, we were all in good metal health at
the time. We did not stay that way in during
the experiment, but we were. You can go to the

(07:47):
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?
When I hear somebody say, oh, I'm simply starved, I
know they don't know what they're saying, because there's a

(08:08):
real difference between what's your body craves for from the
jurisulves starvation, then what you normally feel as hunger. 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

(08:30):
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

(08:51):
he convinced the Akrone 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. To

(09:12):
attempt this experiment to prevent goiter would be a usually
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. These days,

(09:35):
most experiments involving human subjects are closely regulated. They involve
consent forms, disclosure statements, the right to drop out of
a study at any given time. Kaplan'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

(10:02):
Alabama between the nineteen thirties and the nineteen seventies, the
Public Health Service launched the Tuskegee Siphlist, 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.

(10:27):
In the early nineteen sixties, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram
ran his infamous Obedient Study two eighty five volts, where
a Milgram deceived otherwise unsuspecting subjects into thinking that they
were delivering high voltage electric shocks to someone they'd never met.
I absolutely refers to answer anymore cut the out of me.

(10:48):
You can't all read cut the ouse, keep me out
at the next words green place. 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 back,

(11:09):
someone whose well being was secondary to the larger cause.
The answer to the vitamin question is not pilled but
good food in plenty of variety. According to doctor Keys,
the vitamins were missing from his food. A soldier might
have to take concentrated vitamins. If he had vitamins but

(11:30):
no food, he was still starved. The first way, naturally,
is the supply vitamins in the food. Now, remember the
stature of Ansal 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
great acclaim, and he looks around the world and he

(11:51):
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 ansal. Keys knew
how little his field understood about prolonged malnutrition. What was
the effect of long term hunger on physical well being,

(12:12):
unpsychological health, and what was the best way to bring
the undernourished back to health? What was more important how
much you've fed someone or what you've fed someone. So
Keys designs an experiment. He would need thirty six subjects

(12:33):
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

(12:54):
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.

(13:18):
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.

(13:44):
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 of his wife. Quote.
We are here because of the problem of relief feeding
in general, and particularly in the war devastated areas today.

(14:06):
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 an emotional response, but starvation is quantitative and must
be met with quantitative answers. Grand words tailor made for

(14:28):
men of idealism, eager for a chance to serve their country.
And then are you ready to begin? And a deafening
cheer goes up, Woman, start this experiment. We were all

(14:59):
given the same amount of proof. Right listening to the
oral histories from the veterans of the Minnesota starvation experiment
is a strange experience. We had six slices of bread,
thirty take away two slices and four slices six slices,
and we still didn't lose weight. Then they started taking

(15:20):
away your potato. 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

(15:40):
they've been reliving the long year between the fall of
nineteen forty four and the fall of nineteen forty five
ever since. Do you remember what your lowest weight got
down to? A hundred and thirty four? I believe what

(16:02):
was sort of your standard weight entering. I went in
at two twenty and they they standardized me down to
one before the real experiment began, so I got down
to one thirty four. The thirty six subjects started the
experiment with high hopes. Keys had arranged for them to

(16:25):
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 in all
women's dormitory nearby for those, as he put it, who

(16:49):
wanted to be a guinea pig by day and a
wolf by night. What happened after once the semi servation started,
things went downhill very fast. Were not real fast. It
didn't seem much change at first, But when we got

(17:12):
down to the to the place where we really knew
what the word hunger meant. Instead of just saying 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,

(17:33):
and so forth, we began to be more and more irritable.
After the three months of initial rigor, while they stabilize
their weight, the severe calorie restrictions kicked in. Everyone now
got just two meals a day cabbage, potatoes, bread slices,
Ruda vegas, and occasional treats of macaroni and cheese. I

(17:56):
was one of the few, now I shouldn't say a few.
I was one of the many that metally was transfixed
on cookbooks, and I collected probably one hundred cooks books.
I would read cookbooks like you would read readers digest.
Some of the men would walk into Minneapolis, sit in
restaurants and watch other people eat the way they might

(18:19):
have once gone to a concert or watched the play.
They dreamt about food, They argued about food. At meal times,
they fixated on their plates. I mean we would lick
the plates, and I remember I heard that caused a
bit of That caused a bit of tention. I think
it did, particularly evening, for instance, one of the first

(18:40):
that I saw doing that, and I thought, that's disgusting.
I'm pretty scold. I would doing it myself, so oh yeah,
I mean I just thought, this is that you would
actually degrade yourself to the extended licking a plate. Give
me a break, And that pretty soon we were all

(19:01):
looking it. Coffee was one of the few indulgences they
were allowed, so they drank it to except twelve eighteen
cups a day. They chewed enormous amounts of bubble gum.
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

(19:23):
date to see to Have and Have Not, starring Humphrey
Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I'm sorry, Slim, but I still
say you're awful good And I wouldn't oh, I forgot.
You wouldn't take anything from anybody, would you. That's right?
One of the great romantic dramas of the Warriors. But
he couldn't concentrate except for the part where Bogart goes

(19:44):
to a restaurant. 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.
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

(20:06):
dreams of cannibalism. He went into seventeen different soda fountains
and gulp down a milkshake at each one. After that,
we could not go out without a buddy, And if
we had a girlfriend, we could bring the girlfriend and
the doctors would interview the girl and goal care, so

(20:29):
when we went on a date, she'd be your buddy. Finally,
after six months of starvation recovery, on the final day,
when you were able to finally break what do you
remember what you did? Yes, they did a big breakfast
for us, and that most of us stuffed ourselves. And

(20:51):
then I think I went downtown in one restaurant, and
when the d a another meal, and then it got
out and went and another one, and and just I mean,
one couldn't satisfy your craving for food by filling up
your stomach. Many of us, I think didn't unreasonable things.
I was invited out for I think a Swiss stake dinner,

(21:15):
and though I was filled to the brim, I went
and stuffed a little bit more on in on top,
and then got on a bus writing back to the
to the stadium and jostling up and down on all
of a sudden I lost it all. Now I got

(21:36):
off at the next time, so I felt sorry for
the guy that was going to have to clean it up.
But then I didn't stay around. In nineteen fifty five,
years after the study ended, Keys published The Biology of

(21:58):
Human Starvation, his landmark two volume account of what was
learned during the study. To this day, that book helps
doctors understand everything from them in relief to eating disorders.
If you've ever used the terms metabolism, intermittent fasting, calories in,
and calories out, then you're talking about concepts that go

(22:20):
back to the Keys experiment. Ancial 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 ancal Keys. By then an

(22:40):
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 the interviews

(23:09):
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 with someone
the other guinea pigs looked up to, that is, until
his behavior took a sharp turn during the six month

(23:32):
starvation period. His mooths 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
Leg started to eat. He combined all the food on

(23:55):
his tray into one pile. He then took his fork
and stirred it and mashed it all together, 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,

(24:19):
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 it how during the
starvation phase he felt his character start to slip away.

(24:39):
I'll tell you what a nasty moment. I was walking
along and I obviously had a buddy, but I don't
know who it was, and it was deep into the
semi starvation, and we were tired. When they crossed the street,

(25:01):
they didn't have the energy to take the half step
up onto the sidewalk. We were tired and weak, and
so 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.
I said, I wonder where he's going, And then I

(25:22):
said ted 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

(25:46):
very well for me, but I have remembered it with
our guests horror that I could feel such a thing,
so utterly irrational, But there was, and you ask an
experience that I remember. I sure remember that the interview

(26:13):
is almost over. Just one final question. Anything that we
haven't talked about, or that I should have asked you,
or you'd like to add that seems to Elivan, you
should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my
left hand. Okay. I keep saying to myself that this

(26:36):
was because I was so weak and I was chopping wood,
and I got the act caught up in a tree,
and I didn't have an rapid enough reaction time to
pull my hand away, so I removed some fingers. He

(26:58):
was at the house of two elderly ladies in Minneapolis
who had befriended some of the subjects. Leg and his buddy,
We're going watch the women eat, then go outside to
split wood to steal them. Elves against the temptation to
take any of the women's food. I recognize that a
human being can go through a period of mental illness.

(27:19):
I think I was mentally ill. Was I mentally ill
at the time that I removed the fingers, I don't know.
I like to think that I wasn't. I like to
think it was an accident. I'm not gonna sit here
and categorically say that I didn't do it on purpose.

(27:40):
Leg was rushed to the hospital. Pencil Keys 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

(28:02):
hand was a bloody mess. I'm quoting now from Tucker's account.
Is there any thing I can do for you, Sam
asked doctor Keys. Yes, said Sam. Keys leaned closer to here.
Keep me in the experiment, he said, Sam. I'm afraid
I can't keep you in, said Keys. You need rest

(28:23):
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. Quote. And so for the next five days,

(28:49):
until Leg was released from the hospital, they brought him
his meals from the laboratory kitchen in a cardboard take
up box, because of course, he couldn't eat the hospital food.
That would be cheating. Could answer, Keys do that experiment today?
I asked the ethosicist Art Captain about Keys's experiment. Kaplan

(29:10):
knew the story well. He taught for years at the
University of Minnesota, Putting people on starvation diets, having them
run around a city Minneapolis, being confronted with food everywhere,
having them stressed out. Not a chance. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment,

(29:35):
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

(30:01):
by Eloise Linton Leaving Gustu and Jacob Smith, with Tali
Emlyn and Harrison VJ. Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Our executive producer is Mila Bell. Original scoring by Luis Gara,
mastering by Flawn Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Beth
Johnson is our fact checker. Special thanks to Todd Tucker

(30:22):
go read his book The Great Starvation Experiment, Ansel Keys
and The Men Who Starve for Science Special. Thanks also
to Ariella Markowitz for production help on this episode. I'm
Malcolm Glaube. Much of all, if you target towns and cities,

(31:03):
it's as clear as day that there will be civilian victims.
And then Jet 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.

(31:27):
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 paper City
film dot com and follow at paper City Tokyo on
social media.