Food Storage Made Fabulous, the 2nd volume of articles from the Prep School Daily blog, is now available on Amazon. With over 100 family-friendly recipes using basic long-term food storage staples, your family will have no idea there's a crisis.
Do you know anyone who has ever dieted? How fun are they to be around? Have you or has anyone you know ever tried the intermittent fasting diet? Now that is fun. You eat normally five days per week, and for the other two days you get 500 calories for women or 600 for men. I lost weight, but I hated diet days. And even though I thought I was doing well with it, my family hated diet days because apparently I was cranky. And that's when we all knew that the diet day would end at bedtime, and that if I really wanted to, I could go eat anyway. What happens when there really isn't any more food, at least for that day's rations?
I
don't know about all of history, but in recent history there have been
conscientious objectors to war. While some probably were just trying to
avoid military service altogether, others truly wanted to serve their
country but had an insurmountable objection to killing another human
being. Some of these men became ambulance drivers and medics. A small
group of others, men aged 22 to 33 years old, volunteered to participate
in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, conducted between November 1944
and December 1945. Of the 400 men who volunteered, 100 were selected
for personal interviews to identify suitability for the study.
Ultimately, 36 of the best and brightest were chosen--men with college
education who exhibited the greatest levels of physical and emotional
stability.
The stated objective of the experiment was
to simulate the effects that starvation resulting from the then-current
war would have on the people of Europe and thus be able to determine
the best ways to help them recover when hostilities ceased. The
volunteers were all healthy young men of military age. During the first
twelve weeks of the study, the men were carefully observed so that
baseline psychological and physiological behaviors could be
established. They consumed an average of 3200 calories per day and were
required to walk 22 miles per week, just over three miles per day.
The
starvation phase lasted 24 weeks. The men continued walking 22 miles
per week, as refugees just might, and were given diets ranging from 1200
to 1800 calories per day. The goal was to get the men to lose 25% of
their original body weight. They were fed twice per day with foods
thought to be common to the starving populations of Europe--potatoes,
rutabagas, dark bread, macaroni, and turnips, among other things. The
diet was very high in carbohydrates and low in protein. And not only is
it similar to what starving populations then were eating, it's also
pretty similar to what a lot of people store now.
During
the starvation phase, the men lost all interest in anything that didn't
involve food. They were hungry all the time. Even just after they
ate, they were still hungry. They also reported a decrease tolerance to
cold and needed extra blankets, even in the summer. They were dizzy,
extremely fatigued, and experienced muscle soreness, hair loss, and
reduced coordination. Some had to quit college because they could not
concentrate. Most of the volunteers exhibited serious distress and
depression.
Of the thirty six volunteers who started
the experiment, four were unable to finish for various reasons. Two
began stealing food to eat, including raw rutabagas, and were treated
for psychiatric issues as well.
During the recovery
phase, the goal was to get men back to their original weight. The men
were given varying amounts for their rehabilitative diets, from 400 to
1200 extra calories per day, to re-nourish them. The volunteers still
felt like they were starving.
After the conclusion of
the experiment, when the men could eat whatever they wanted, some were
consuming up to 10,000 calories per day. It was then that they regained
their weight, and many gained up to 10% more.
When you
store the minimum amounts recommended by members of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, people who have advocated and studied food
storage for over 150 years, you are storing about 2,000 calories per
day. That minimum does not work out well if you are doing heavy labor
or are pregnant or even stressed. Mental stress also demands a lot of
calories. If you've purchased one of those year's storage kits that
touts 1,200 calories per day, do you think your family is really going
to be happy? Will you tell yourself that the crisis will end before the
food runs out, so you eat it more quickly?
Maybe you
should try out living on 1,200 calories a day to see how it goes. Do it
with the whole family. Remember, those men in the experiment were
volunteers and they knew the experiment would come to an end. When the
grid goes down, no one really knows when it will come back up. How are
you going to react when you are hungry. All. The. Time? Are you going
to be patient with your family members? The men in the experiment became
introverted. They easily lost patience with one another over the most
trivial of issues. It won't be any different for us.
One
of the interesting findings of the experiment was that the men needed
over 4,000 calories per day to begin rebuilding their bodies, and it
took them up to two years to do it.
Maybe it's time to do a little more shopping and stocking. There's no time like the present!
Links to related posts:
Overview of Long-Term Food Storage
Food Storage and Learning from History
For further reading:
https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/135/6/1347/4663828
(highly recommend this one--there are comments from the volunteers when
they were interviewed about their participation sixty years after the
experiment)
08.24.23
I wonder if a multivitamin would help counter react the issue of the lack of nutrition? hmmm. It doesn't say in the article. I keep a big supply of a daily vitamin for us. One for men and one for women. I also stockpile Vit D3 5,000IUs which I have to take every day
ReplyDeleteI've never seen a study on that, but for sure a multivitamin would not combat the decreased tolerance to cold and the fatigue. A body has to have calories for those things.
DeleteI am nobody's nutritionist. I have to think that while vitamin consumption could stave off many diseases, e.g., scurvy, they would be useless in providing energy to get through the physical demands of each passing day.
DeleteVitamins are good for filling in the gaps of the micro-nutrients your food is missing. If you are trying to stay functional you need calories and protein. A lot of both.
DeleteExile1981
Many people look with satisfaction at the substantial volume of canned and packaged goods they have lining their shelves, but really do not understand just how few calories many cans/packages actually provide.
ReplyDeleteWhile I have read numerous articles about preparing Excel sheets concerning the number of cans, contents, number of calories provided, purchase date, etc., let's be realistic. While this idea has considerable merit, very few people are likely to do this unless they have a great deal of time on their hands.
It would probably be a useful exercise for each person reading this article, however, to go to their pantry/food storage area, and to read the nutritional information on a few cans and packages. They may be shocked at just how much a "serving" provides in calories. In food storage, "Calories are king."
People look at a 25 lb. bag of white rice and often say, "That's a whole lotta rice!" One internet source says that a pound of rice provides 590 calories. In the unlikely event that one were to eat only rice, day in and day out, in order to consume 2,000 calories a day, that bag of rice would be depleted in ONE week.
Of course, absent the most desperate of circumstances, no one would eat only rice for a week, but even if the single bag rice were consumed over the course of six weeks, this should give some idea of just how few calories it would add to the diet.
I have seen memes and humorous references about many people gaining weight during the Covid shut-in period. People often eat out of boredom, often yielding to the temptation to raid the fridge or the pantry at night. If, during some new major societal upheaval, people find themselves hunkered down, I expect that that same temptation to munch on "comfort food" will be just as enticing, and it will reduce even further the period of time they had planned to be able to stretch their pantry's/larder's contents, e.g, 6 months of survival storage becomes reduced to 4 1/2 months, or worse.
Back when I first starting prepping over a decade ago I built one of those spread sheets. Spent hours on it. It tracked the number of people and the # of each type of can , calories per serving and the # of servings in that can. It showed me that what I thought was enough was no where enough to store.
DeleteExile1981
If your only trying to survive a few months of troubles most anything dried and canned would do if you get 2K plus calories in the 40-40-20 carbs, fats and proteins ratio.
ReplyDeleteHowever vitamin deficiencies are a real problem. A lot of multi- vitamins are really poor at dissolving in the stomach and intestines. Porti-potty folks used to joke about the pills people take as they pumped them out. I learned to test them using a glass of 50% white vinegar and water to see if they dissolve in 30 minutes to simulate stomach acids.
Happily vitamin C and most other single vitamins dissolve really well. I strongly suggest C and D3 daily to cover most lacks in survival food kits.
Vitamin deficiencies in a collapsed society with unreliable food supplies are going to be a significant problem, I have no doubt. But in a country with foods fortified with everything, it's something almost nobody ever thinks about. Then add in the vitamin deficiencies that develop as we age or with prescription or illicit drugs, and you've got a lot more people with problems. It's going to be really interesting.
DeleteThis has to be one of the most important articles you have authored to date.
ReplyDeleteOur American society has been conditioned to the low calories diet as a positive, healthy pathway. Take for instance the 'constant carb' diet promoted widely by dieticians as healthy for diabetics, with a deemphasis on proteins and particularly fats. What was shown by the Minnesota Experiment was that a diet lacking in same was as much a culprit as the total lack of calories overall.
In support of that statement just made look closely at the 'recovery' phase. The volunteers could have consumed more in the way of carbs (rutabaga, turnips, black bread) than they could physically handle and might have gained in fat but not muscle.
Fats, proteins and vitamins are essential. Carbs have their place but are not what build muscle. People who gained weight during their COVID isolation did not do so because they increased their meat intake but rather their intake of carb-heavy comfort foods.
RR
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ReplyDelete