Printed in U.S.A. Metabolic Aspects of Acute Starvation

T HERE ARE DIVERSE OPINIONS on the physical and mental effectiveness of men operating in the field without any food but with water ad libitum for 3- to 10-clay periods. Many abnormalities are associated! with long-term starvation and semistarvation. Canadian POW’s who had been on re-strictedi intakes in camps in Singapore and! Hong Kong during World War II wei-e studied more than 10 years after being released (1). Some of the frequent symptoms observed inchmclecl easy fatiga-bility, plofuse sweating for no apparent reason, numbness and! cl-amps in the calf muscles, loss of ambition, poor vision, edema, dyspnea on even the slightest exertion, depression tachycardia, anorexia, nausea, i-estlessness, irritability, and in-somnia. Body composition chamiges are usually quite marked and one must be especially careful in the interpretation of the data on fat loss, especially if good watel- balance data are not available. In a 4.5 day total-stal-vation study by Taylor et al. (2), it was reported that an 18 % decrease in plasma volume and! an 8 % decm-ease of thiocya-nate space occurred. The authors assumed that these fluid losses accounted for 37