Hey all,

If we, hypothetically, starved a group of people to death, by removing all access to food, but still allowing them to drink water, would the fattest people last longer than the thinner people? If so how much longer? And would the fat people still be fat when they died? Or would they gradually get thinner and thinner and die the same size as all the others did?

clop

That's sort of the point of being fat. Living longer in periods of starvation. However, in "nature" it would be very unusual for hunter gatherers to have no food at all for weeks on end so the little food they might get during a period of hardship might be enough to hold off vitamin deficiency problems and things such as intestinal kinking which might affect a fat person as rapidly as a thin person once they are denied all food. If you gave your hypothetical fat and thin people a thousand kilojoules a day (9% the daily kilojoules eaten by the average US male) then the fat ones should live considerably longer than the thin ones.

There are other people around who can no doubt give you the skinny on this.

Is there a sudden need by BAUT members to kill people off? clop is starving them to death, Big Don is using hypothermia...

Maybe I should be nervous (though that means I can't play tennis).

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i once knew a rather large woman who was medically diagnosed as being malnourished- she is married to a friend of mine, and she told me about the diagnosis while she was sitting in her living room shoveling Doritos into her face literally by the fistful.
i can't imagine how she ever became malnourished..

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I would have thought a slim person would outlast the fat person. I'm no expert but surely the slim person would function better without food than a fat person who is accustomed to a large intake of calories?

The fat person may do better for the first couple of days but i would assume the slim person would have better stamina and because of small body weight, able to conserve energy better than the overweight.

As an example for my point above i think back to watching "I'm a celebrity- get me out of here". It seems to me its always the bigger people who suffer the most on tight rations.

No, quite the opposite, on average. The point of fat is being able to survive lean times. All else being equal fat people are better off than thin people when food is scarce, with and fat people suffer less from hunger. One reason that can contribute to being fat is having a body that is efficient at conserving energy, so fat people may start with an advantage in this area.

Back when my mom was first diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease back in the 80's, the doctors said she had better chance for survival because she was fat (not their exact words).

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Hmm..

So if they can drink as much water as they like (should stop their intestines kinking) and they have a 100% RDI vitamin and mineral pill each morning, you're saying the fat people should far outlive the thin people? I wonder if the body would use up all its fat before it failed, or whether it would fail with energy stores still to go.

clop

By eating food that's low in nutrients. It's not just an issue of mass; it's also about what that mass is made of.

If, by "function better", you mean that they'd be able to get around more and do whatever they need to in order to get more food or accomplish some other important task, then maybe, depending on how fat the "fat" one is. For the mildly fat, mobility isn't much of a problem.

If, by "function better", you mean just not being distracted or depressed by the pain of a growling belly, then maybe, especially for psychological reasons rather than physical, but that will only affect how happy or unhappy they are, not their odds of survival.

About conserving energy: actually it's the opposite. Fat people generally have slower metabolisms, which means not wasting as much energy at rest. If they were born that way, it probably contributed to how they got fat in the first place. And whether they were or not, different types of tissue have different metabolisms, and fat's is slower than muscle's, so, when they got fat, their metabolisms slowed down as a result.

Stamina only matters if someone needs to sustain a high activity level for a long time. That's not a common thing and wasn't specified in the original problem. But even if we add it to the problem now, it still might not necessarily mean the fat person loses. Let's suppose that running or jogging somehow becomes important to survival. The fat person can't run as far and might be at a disadvantage if the reason why running/jogging is important is something that would save or kill immediately. But the other person doesn't have as much energy stored and, while going farther and faster, uses up more of it. So if the need to run or jog is something that doesn't save or kill immediately but pays off in a more gradual way, then they both live at first, but repetition will reveal that the fat person's energy supply is bigger and thus lasts longer.

I think you need some solid food to avoid some of the complications that can result from complete starvation, but anyway, fat people will live longer than thin people on average. The human body designed to hang use the brain, heart and other organs for nutrition last. Before that it will live off fat and muscle. Now you might think it might make sense to live off fat first and then muscle, but by breaking down muscle your body reduces the amount of energy it needs and so can survive starvation longer. This is one reason why dieting can suck. Now it is possible for a fat person to die before they've used up all their fat because starvation is hard on the body and many complications can result, but if people didn't die from internal bleeding from ulcers and other problems, then I imagine they would generally use up all their fat before dying.

In fact, obese people demonstrably have higher metabolic rates, measured in MJ/day, than thin people. But they do have lower metabolic rates per kilogram of body weight, because fat is not as metabolically active as many other tissues.

Grant Hutchison

Edit: For reference, here is a recent very short review of the current understanding of the energy budget in the obese (3-page pdf).

As a fat person, I would certainly hope so, if I ever got in that situation!

Nobody has mentioned it yet, but make it in the dead of winter and outdoors and the advantage of being fat multiplies!

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Here's a variation on the idea. Let's say suddenly all of the food reserves in the United States disappeared and the only food in the country was the food already on shelves, freezers, etc. According to this website, http://calorielab.com/news/2007/08/0...t-states-2007/ the people in certain states are fatter and so may eat their share of the food first and therefore succumb quicker to starvation.

So I would hypothesize that if all food disappeared, fat people would likely survive longest, but if all new food supply disappeared and only the existing food remained, the fatter states would succumb first. (of course this assumes they won't come to your state and take your share)

A few points on the article (which I haven't bothered to read because it sounds ill informed): Firstly, it sounds like they assume that the quanity of food eaten by a fat person is significanty greater than what is eaten by thin people when low metabolism, age and a sedentary lifestyle are associated with being fat.

Secondly, it sounds like they assume fat people are stupider than thin people and would be stupid enough to eat their remaining food quickly, despite suffering less from hunger pangs.

Thirdly, they seem to forget that fat represents a store of food that enables people to live longer in a starvation situation.

Actually I made those assumptions for the purposes of the scenario - not the article. But I did not imply anyone is stupid, just hungry.

I have read a scenario from a WWII Japanese prisoner of war camp:

The prisoners who were cooks were (comparatively) well nourished and whilst probably not fat, no doubt did have excess adipose tissue to "help them survive".

However, once they were removed from duties of being a cook, and returned to the general prisoner population, they died relatively quickly from malnutrition.

The general prisoner population, who were no doubt skeletons, managed to survive "better".

Of course, it could be that anyone who was succeptable to starving to death had already perished, leaving the hardy to survive.

I suspect that the real answer is that there is an individual variation in a person's ability to survive famine and deal with limited food supplies, which may not necessarily be predicted by how obese they currently are.

To speculate, a person's ability to survive famine may be a particular cluster of traits of how well they handle low energy situations, which may be due to a previous winnowing of the gene pool in any particular population by famine.

No doubt some populations (ie most of the first world) have not been subjected to famine for a long time and any "famine survival" genes will be confined to a small segment of the population.

Of course, doing the experiment where you starve a group of people to death to see if fat people have a statistically significant ability to survive longer than skinny people is unethical, so I doubt we will ever know. The best we can do is draw inferences from Lenningrad in WWII, or anecidotal evidence like what I cited above.

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Obese people will, on average, have a higher metabolism rate because they eat more.

The more you eat, the higher your metabolism as your body "burns" the fuel to simple sugars. If there is too much suger for the body to use in its current energy budget, then it is stored as fat.

That's how the obese become obese.

Slim people eat less so their metabolism is lower.

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