Re: Human Experiment: The Effects of Starvation on Behavior

It's an interesting study to be sure.  It's hard in such an experiment to isolate the variable you are attempting to research, in this case what they refer to as "semi-starvation".  I kept thinking how these guys were basically prisoners, unable to return to their homes or to their normal lives... and how much of the symptoms they exhibited related to this rather than to the inadequate portions of food.   Nothing specifically is mentioned about the control group and exactly how it was employed.  A well controlled study would have had an equal number of subjects living in similar "prison like" conditions but with full rations of food to compare the differences in behavior between the two groups.  Perhaps this is what the researchers did, but by the article, we don't know. The article neither goes into what the control group consisted of nor what kind of behaviors these subjects were exhibiting. 

Hording non-food items didn't seem to be common in this study, seems just one individual was mentioned.  Who knows what was going on with him and why he did it, but he seemed to be vastly in the minority. 

What would also have been interesting would have been to have a 3rd group, semi-starved but educated on how best to emerge from this test, the importance of not eating too much too soon and the reasons behind it, much the way we in this forum are educated to do.  It would be very easy to binge post-fast and to over-eat, just as it was for the "prisoners" from their "semi-starvation diet", but one big factor which separates those that do and those that don't is their level of knowledge in the area of how to properly break a fast (or in this case "semi-starvation diet") and how to continue to eat properly thereafter.