NEW “SURVIVAL” DIET

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25389, 12 January 1948, Page 3

NEW “SURVIVAL” DIET

PERFECTION BY U.S. SCIENTISTS (From Our Own Correspondent.) NEW YORK, December 20. After more than three years of research, scientists of the metropolitan research unit at New York Medical College, have perfected an extremely low calory - “survival” diet that may have broad value in the event of an atom war. Word of this development was made public for the first time at a nutrition symposium sponsored by the School of Public Health of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, in a report by Dr. David Schwimmer. Work is still in progress on Welfare Island under the sponsorship of the committee on food research of the United States Army Quartermaster’s Food and Container Institute. Subjects in the research programme have been Army men and conscientious objectors. After 50 other experimental diets were tried and found unsuitable Dr. Schwimmer and his associates discovered that the subjects could get along in excellent health on a daily diet containing 900 calories, or about one-third to one-quarter of what is considered an adequate caloric intake. Over a period of 40 days, 16 men at a time were fed this food, which came in the form of small biscuits. .They ate four times a day, consuming in* all about one-third of a pound, in terms of weight, plus 800 cubic certimentres of water, or about three glasses. Dr. Schwimmer emphasised that neither the weight of the diet nor the caloric content were so important as the fat. protein and starch components. The biscuits were, composed of These in the following proportions: egg protein, 25 per cent.; fat, 30 per cent.;, starch or carbohydrate, 45 per cent. Dr Schwimmer said that for four or five days the men were hungry. After that they got used to the scanty diet and. as ambulatory patients, played ping pong and walked about the ward. They were found to be in “relatively good clinical condition” and their morale high wherj the experiments were completed. . . “Work on the problem of survival feeding was begun in 1944 in an effort to improve the standard Army Air Corps life raft ration,” said Dr. Schwimmer. “In the last two years the objectives of the research have been broadened to cover other situations where such diets would be useful. Civilian feeding has been too much concerned with calories and not enough with the components of a diet, he asserted.