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Starvation

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Starvation is a severe deficiency in caloric energy, nutrient, and vitamin intake. It is the most extreme form of malnutrition. The term inanition refers to the symptoms and effects of starvation. According to the World Health Organization, hunger is the single gravest threat to the world's public health. The WHO also states that malnutrition is by far the biggest contributor to child mortality, present in half of all cases.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
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A

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  • The mighty peril is the entire starvation of the country [India] by foreign exploiters and its complete and hopeless dependence on aliens for almost all articles of common use.

B

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Annie Besant: You see somewhere a man who is starving and if you misunderstand karma — as too many of you do, to the shame of India, in a land where this teaching is of immemorial antiquity — you turn aside from that starving man and say that it is his karma to starve and perish; in those hardened heart of yours you use the will of God as a cover for your lack of love.
Annie Besant: Who can count the hundreds and thousands driven out from home, the broken families, the miseries, the poverty, and starvation intolerable, which marked the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors from Spain.
David Beasley: I don’t go to bed at night thinking about the children we saved; I go to bed weeping over the children we could not save. And when we don’t have enough money nor the access we need, we have to decide which children eat and which children do not eat, which children live, which children die. How would you like that job? Please, don’t ask us to choose who lives and who dies. In the spirit of Alfred Nobel, as inscribed on this medal, “peace and brotherhood,” let’s feed them all. Food is the pathway to peace.
  • What tears me up inside is this. This coming year, millions and millions and millions of my equals, my neighbors, your neighbors, are marching to the brink of starvation. We stand at what may be the most ironic moment in modern history. On the one hand, after a century of massive strides in eliminating extreme poverty, today those 200 million of our neighbors are on the brink of starvation. That’s more than the entire population of Western Europe. On the other hand, there is $400 trillion of wealth in our world today. Even at the height of the COVID pandemic, in just 90 days, an additional [$2.7] trillion of wealth was created. And we only need $5 billion to save 30 million lives from famine. What am I missing here?...
    I don’t go to bed at night thinking about the children we saved; I go to bed weeping over the children we could not save. And when we don’t have enough money nor the access we need, we have to decide which children eat and which children do not eat, which children live, which children die. How would you like that job? Please, don’t ask us to choose who lives and who dies. In the spirit of Alfred Nobel, as inscribed on this medal, “peace and brotherhood,” let’s feed them all. Food is the pathway to peace.
    • David Beasley, Food Is the Pathway to Peace: World Food Programme Wins Nobel Peace Prize & Warns of Hunger Pandemic, Democracy Now! (10 December 2020)
  • You see somewhere a man who is starving and if you misunderstand karma — as too many of you do, to the shame of India, in a land where this teaching is of immemorial antiquity — you turn aside from that starving man and say that it is his karma to starve and perish; in those hardened heart of yours you use the will of God as a cover for your lack of love. That man’s karma to starve? Aye, and therefore he is starving! But if a Deva guides you to the place where your brother is starving, it is because he would make you the agent of his beneficence to that man whose evil karma of the present moment has been exhausted by his suffering; the Deva thus says to you: “Man your brother man is starving give him the relief it is his karma to receive, and be my agent in carrying out the law.

C

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Criss Jami: Feel what it's like to truly starve, and I guarantee that you'll forever think twice before wasting food.
  • Feel what it's like to truly starve, and I guarantee that you'll forever think twice before wasting food.
    • Criss Jami, in Killosophy, (8 January 2015), p. 103
  • In the absence of all food the body's supply of energy is, after the first day or two, derived from its stock of protein and fat-13% being derived from the former and 87% from 'the latter. Thus the fat content may largely measure the days of survival. Even in partial inanition body protein will be used up and the extent to which the different organs will be depleted is almost certainly inversely proportional to their importance in survival. Insufficient information exists for us to know exactly the order of priority of the various organs and tissues but it is obvious that the vital organs must be kept functioning.

D

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Emily Dickinson: Anger as soon as fed is dead-
'Tis starving makes it fat.

E

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Henry B. Eyring:...Since there is enough and to spare, the enemy of human happiness as well as the cause of poverty and starvation is not the birth of children.
  • We can pray for world peace; we can pray to end world hunger and feed the starving children; we can pray to end genocide; we can pray for things to work out or whatever we desperately want or desire. Unless we take the initiative to make it chances are our prayers will not be answered. If we don’t stop the aggressive nations, terrorists, and gangs that attack innocent people, then there won’t be peace in the world. The poor, the weak, and the innocent will go hungry for another decade or longer. If we don’t deliver food to the starving children, they will not have anything to eat and they will starve to death. This is truth and god is truth! Those who create the turbulent environment are evil; they must be dealt with before evil deals with us.

F

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  • I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it. I hate war, and never again will I sanction or support another.

G

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  • Furthermore, they were constantly informed by all the camp authorities that they had been abandoned by the world: they were beggars and lucky to receive the daily soup of starvation.

H

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O. Henry: Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

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J

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A. J. Jacobs:I tried the paleo diet, which is the caveman diet - lots of meat. And I tried the calorie restriction diet: The idea is that if you eat very, very little - if you're on the verge of starvation, you will live a very long time, whether or not you want to, of course.

K

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L

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  • Starvation results from inadequate intake of macronutrients (proteins, fats and carbohydrates). It may be partial or complete. In fasting, all food energy is excluded, whereas in semi-starvation insufficient energy and protein are ingested. Human starvation and semi-starvation result from deprivation of food, not specific nutrients, so both micronutrient and macronutrient deficiencies result, causing clinical disease. The body defends against these deficiencies by triggering hunger, a cognitive state in which there is motivation to eat food.
    Preliminary results of the long-term effects of semi-starvation were presented at the 9th International Congress on Eating Disorders, held in New York City on May 4-7, 2000.1 Elke Eckert and Scott Crow presented details from the landmark study of Ancel Keys, carried out at the University of Minnesota in the 1930s, and a 50-year follow-up of most of the volunteers alive today. Keys wanted to establish the best way of refeeding people who had starved in Europe as a result of World War II. One hundred men volunteered for his study, in which the effects of a 24-week period of semi-starvation were examined. All of the men had been screened for exceptional physical and psychological health. Of the 40 chosen, 4 dropped out because they could not tolerate semi-starvation: 3 developed binge-eating, 2 began to steal food, 1 suffered severe depression, and 2 were admitted to hospital because of symptoms of psychosis. In the 50-year follow-up, abnormal eating behaviours (although less severe than those just described) and ruminations persisted in all of the 25 volunteers who consented to interview. Eckert and Crow concluded that the effects of hunger are powerful and long-lasting.
    • Laird Birmingham, C. (2000). "Child hunger: semi-starvation study repeated in Canada". Canadian Medical Association Journal. 163 (8): 985–986.
  • Inadequate government assistance to poor people has resulted in what could be thought of as a naturalistic study. This ”study” is too costly and will give no new data. Keys‚ study of malnutrition already showed that people who undergo semi-starvation will experience hunger, weakness, lack of drive, decreased ability to feel happiness, osteoporosis, hypoalbuminemia, dependent edema, decreased muscle mass, alopecia, hypotension, poor wound healing and depression. ”Children of hunger” will be less productive, will learn more slowly and are more likely to have behavioural problems. Canadian health care costs will also be greatly increased owing to health problems, including complications during pregnancy and birth, in malnourished mothers who attempt to offset the hunger of their children by depriving themselves of food.
  • —O, tranquil earth and heaven—but their repose,
    What influence hath it on the mourner there !
    Her eye is fix’d in terrible despair,
    Her lip is white with pain, and, spectre-like,
    Her shape is worn with famine—on her arm
    Rests a dead child—she does not weep for it.
    Two more are at her side, she’d weep for them,
    But that she is too desperate to weep:

M

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  • In the terminal stages of starvation in man, signs and symptoms related to the gastro-intestinal tract are conspicuous features. These are copious and persistent diarrhoea with progressive dehydration and the other effects which follow from the inability to absorb-food and fluid.
    Observations made by medical men at an earlier period of the war on people in the extreme stages of starvation indicate that the onset of these symptoms almost invariably presages a fatal end, in spite of treatment. The source of this evidence I cannot reveal at present but' corroboration has come from China (Laycock, 1944) and from Bengal (Cuthbertson, 1944). Subsequent speakers will give their experience of starvation in liberated Europe. I confine myself to the physiological basis of the symptomatology and of the method of treatment by intravenous protein hydrolysates.
    Between 1927 and 1933 I had, with several colleagues, been studying in different animals the functions of the alimentary canal and particularly absorption by the small intestine.
    Absorption is fundamental to all the other nutritional processes; it is the 'bottle-neck and if it fails then all the other processes fail too. Failure of absorptionseems to me to be the essential lesion in starvation. The experimental evidence I quote points to progressive decline in the efficiency of absorption as the period of fasting is increased; the evidence also suggests that the metabolic processes also suffer.
  • These findings indicate that deprivation of food progressively destroys the digestive, absorptive and protective functions of the alimentary canal and also, it would seem, impairs the metabolic function. The small intestine is the great portal of entry of nutrients into the body and if the essential cells of this viscus are destroved, as they are in extreme starvation, then the administration of food will act merely as an irritant,causing diarrhoea and withdrawal of water from the bodv. Therefore, the aim in such cases should be the restoration of the structure and of the function of the intestinal epithelium. Since this cannot be done by giving food by mouth, suitable "building stones" in appropriate amounts must be given by vein. I would emphasize that amino-acids and not whole proteins, e.g. blood proteins, are required, because we must assume that the ability of the starved organism to break down whole proteins would be seriously impaired. Doubtless blood proteins would help in a general way to maintain the patient's vitality but they could not be expected to provide at the required speed sufficient building stones to effect rapid restoration of the damaged epithelial cells. It follows that sufficient glucose should be given, preferably before the proteins, to cover the body's energy needs so as to prevent the amino-acids administered from being used up for energy purposes. It also follows that sufficient B vitamins should be administered at the same time to cover the oxidation of the glulcose.
  • The loss of the protective function of the epithelium lays open the intestine to infection by organisms present in the food and would explain the presence of ulcers so frequently found in persons dying from starvation. The evidence in the confidential report mentioned above dealing with observations on people who had died of starvation during this war cam: into my hands when, early in 1943, Dr. Gaunt drew my attention to the work of Elman and others in U.S.A. The findings of these observers were to the effect that suitable hydrolysates had been used with considerable success in the treatment of starvation arising out of pathological conditions which prevented the consumption, digestion or absorption of food administered in the ordinary way. Dr. Gaunt showed me a review on the subject which he had prepared. At my suggestion, he published it (Gaunt, 1944). I encouraged him, and subsequently the representatives of another firm, to pursue their researches as vigorously as possible, because I was of opinion that the method of treatment, evidently having proved successful in U.S.A., would be of inestimable benefit to people suffering from acute starvation.
  • During prolonged fasting, hormonal and metabolic changes are aimed at preventing protein and muscle breakdown. Muscle and other tissues decrease their use of ketone bodies and use fatty acids as the main energy source. This results in an increase in blood levels of ketone bodies, stimulating the brain to switch from glucose to ketone bodies as its main energy source. The liver decreases its rate of gluconeogenesis, thus preserving muscle protein. During the period of prolonged starvation, several intracellular minerals become severely depleted. However, serum concentrations of these minerals (including phosphate) may remain normal. This is because these minerals are mainly in the intracellular compartment, which contracts during starvation. In addition, there is a reduction in renal excretion.

N

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O

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  • Afghanistan is becoming the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. The Food and Agricultural Organization said that 18.8 million Afghans are unable to feed themselves every day. This number is set to rise to nearly 23 million by the end of the year. Nearly nine million people are close to starvation. At least one million children under five with severe acute malnutrition and 2.2 million children under five with moderate acute malnutrition need malnutrition treatment services. However, starvation is not the only issue faced by children. As UNICEF warns “Afghanistan was already one of the toughest places on earth to be a child. Right now, the situation is desperate.” The situation deteriorates quickly as the country is on a brink of famine.
    Recent weeks have seen yet another trend: families selling their children, and mostly girls, so that families could buy food. In one of reported cases, a six-year-old girl and 18-month-old toddler were sold for $3,350 and $2,800 respectively. In another reporting, a 9-year-old girl was sold for about $2,200 in the form of sheep, land and cash. There are many more such stories.

P

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Samantha Power: Zimbabweans are severely malnourished, and deaths from starvation occur even in the cities. The country has not yet suffered nationwide famine only because international donors have stepped in.
  • Climate change could further adversely affect food security and exacerbate malnutrition at low latitudes, especially in seasonally dry and tropical regions, where crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases (1–2 °C). By 2020, in some African countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%. Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised. The health status of millions of people is projected to be affected through, for example, increases in malnutrition; increased deaths, diseases, and injury due to extreme weather events; increased burden of diarrhoeal diseases; increased frequency of cardio-respiratory diseases due to higher concentrations of ground-level ozone in urban areas related to climate change; and the altered spatial distribution of some infectious diseases.
  • Over the course of nearly three-and-a-half months, the novel coronavirus outbreak has infected over 127,000 and left over 4,700 dead. While this has sparked global panic and a WHO-declaration of a pandemic, then death toll is still a far cry from that of starvation, Malaria and war. This was the point made by BAFTA-award winning journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger who took to Facebook on Thursday, to highlight how, despite the fact that 24,600 people died each day from starvation and 3,000 children from preventable Malaria, no pandemic has been declared for them.
  • Debout, les damnés de la terre
    Debout, les forçats de la faim
    La raison tonne en son cratère
    C'est l'éruption de la fin

Q

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R

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Tim Rice: Woman, your fine ointment, brand new and expensive
Could have been saved for the poor
Why has it been wasted? We could have raised maybe
Three hundred silver pieces or more
People who are hungry, people who are starving
Matter more than your feet and hair.
Peter Rosett: Too many people are too poor to buy the food that is available or lack land on which to grow it themselves...
  • Finally, attention must be drawn to one of the most important consequences of colonialism on African development, and that is the stunting effect on Africans as a physical species. Colonialism created conditions which led not just to periodic famine but to chronic undernourishment, malnutrition, and deterioration in the physique of the African people. If such a statement sounds wildly extravagant, it is only because bourgeois propaganda has conditioned even Africans to believe that malnutrition and starvation were the natural lot of Africans from time immemorial. A black child with a transparent rib cage, huge head, bloated stomach, protruding eyes, and twigs as arms and legs was the favorite poster of the large British charitable operation known as Oxfam. The poster represented a case of kwashiorkor—extreme malignant malnutrition. Oxfam called upon the people of Europe to save starving African and Asian children from kwashiorkor and such ills. Oxfam never bothered their consciences by telling them that capitalism and colonialism created the starvation, suffering, and misery of the child in the first place.
  • There is an excellent study of the phenomenon of hunger on a world scale by a Brazilian scientist, Josue de Castro. It incorporates considerable data on the food and health conditions among Africans in their independent pre-colonial state or in societies untouched by capitalist pressures; and it then makes comparisons with colonial conditions. '''The study convincingly indicates that African diet was previously more varied, being based on a more diversified agriculture than was possible under colonialism. In terms of specific nutritional deficiencies, those Africans who suffered most under colonialism were those who were brought most fully into the colonial economy: namely, the urban workers.'''
  • Too many people are too poor to buy the food that is available or lack land on which to grow it themselves. The real enemy is the international conglomerates that want to profit by feeding the hungry and selling them genetically modified (GM) food.
    • Peter Rosett, in “Designer Food: Mutant Harvest Or Breadbasket of the World? (2002), quoted by Gregory E. Pence”, p. 149

S

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Marshall Sahlins:One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.
  • It may not be possible to give a very precise and detailed account of the bodily changes in starvation, but it is known that, associated with the extreme emaciation, there is a marked loss of protein in the tissues-and that to save life the first essential in treatment is to restore protein. The exhibition of protein hydrolysates is only one among other methods which might be employed to attain this object.
  • When intake is poor or absent for a long time (weeks), weight loss is associated with organ failure and death. A weight loss of about 18% during complete starvation has been suggested to be the point at which major physiological disturbances can be expected (Peel, 1997). Studies reviewed by Elia (2000a, 2001a) suggest that, in lean individuals, the lethal leval of weight loss is about 40% during acute starvation and 50%during semi-starvation. For example, nine lean Irish hunger strikers survived for between 57 and 73 days without any food, with a mean weight loss of 38% of initial body weight (Elia, 2001a). Autopsy studies in subjects who died of starvation have shown that there is a virtual total depletion of body fat (Elis, 2001a), particularly in women (Henry, 2001), while there is a loss of only 25-50% of most other tissues and organs. The brain and skeleton were relatively well preserved (Elia, 2001a).
    There have been a few case reports of obese persons undergoing a successful ‘total’ fast (no energy) with much longer survival times (even over a year in one case) and much larger weight loss (65-80% or more of initial body weight in severely obese individuals) (Elia, 1992a, 2000a, 2001a; Henry, 2001). Obesity can thus be of benefit for survival in situations of severe food shortage (Elia, 2000a).

T

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  • Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.
  • The king looked sternly upon Thorin, when he was brought before him, and asked him many questions. But Thorin would only say that he was starving.
    Why did you and your folk three times try to attack my people at their merrymaking? asked the king.
    "We did not attack them," answered Thorin, "we came to beg because we were starving."
    "Where are your friends now, and what are they doing?"
    "I don't know, but I expect that they're all starving in the forest."
    "What were you doing in the forest?"
    "Looking for food and drink, because we were starving."
    "And what brought you into the forest at all?" asked the king angrily.
    At that Thorin shut his mouth and would not say another word.”
  • Starvation usually produces a mild metabolic acidosis, but when combined with physiologic stress, starvation may cause a severe metabolic acidosis.
  • With Gandhi starving in jail, legions of Indians fighting for Hitler, and rampant starvation in Bengal, it was near anarchy in India, and no one knew what would happen next.
    • Todd Tucker, in "The Great Starvation Experiment: Ancel Keys and the Men Who Starved for Science (2007)", p. 118
  • The volunteers of the starvation experiment would have been familiar with Christianity’s extensive ties to fasting. Fasting in the Old Testament occurred frequently, and for a variety of reasons.
    • Todd Tucker, in "The Great Starvation Experiment: Ancel Keys and the Men Who Starved for Science (2007)", p. 120

U

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Unicef, the United Nations' children's agency, said this week that fewer than 10m children died before their fifth birthday in 2006—probably the lowest rate ever, and certainly the smallest number since records began in 1960, when twice as many under-fives died, out of a world population half today's level.
  • Unicef, the United Nations' children's agency, said this week that fewer than 10m children died before their fifth birthday in 2006—probably the lowest rate ever, and certainly the smallest number since records began in 1960, when twice as many under-fives died, out of a world population half today's level.

V

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Swami Vivekananda: As a matter of fact spiritualism cannot progress amidst poverty and starvation. Religion and spiritualism are meaningless to a man who cries out for a piece of bread with a parched throat. It is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics.
  • With the sense of possession comes selfishness and under its influence man never thinks for common good, that clears the path for starvation of others.
    • Swami Vivekananda, in "Swami Vivekananda: Messiah of Resurgent India (1 January 2003)", p. 69
  • ...in the name of civilizing our country [India] they exploited our country making us poorer day by day. There were perpetual famine and starvation in India. But the British had always been callous to it.
    • Swami Vivekananda, in "Swami Vivekananda: Messiah of Resurgent India (1 January 2003)", p. 185
  • Culturally it was a time of stagnation. Poverty and starvation were the common phenomenon in the society. The imperial power invested huge capital in India and made enormous profit. The British looked upon India as a place where capital could hope to maintain a heaven. But paradoxically enough, the Indian masses were rotting in poverty and starvation. Thus a great predicament, surrounded India in the 18th and 19th centuries.
    • Swami Vivekananda, in "Swami Vivekananda: Messiah of Resurgent India (1 January 2003)", pp. 205-06
  • They have sucked out blood, they have carried away with them millions of our money, while our people have starved.
    • Swami Vivekananda, in "Swami Vivekananda: Messiah of Resurgent India (1 January 2003)", p. 291
  • Twenty years from 1860-1908 were the years of famine. Nearly 29 million people died during famines from 1854-1901. These famines revealed that poverty and chronic starvation had taken firm roots in colonial India.
    • Swami Vivekananda, in "Swami Vivekananda: Messiah of Resurgent India (1 January 2003)", p. 291
  • ...the imperialistic drain of wealth from the backward parts of the globe and its piling up in capitalistic areas of the West that causes poverty and starvation in one part and plentitude in another part of the world.
    • Swami Vivekananda, in "Swami Vivekananda: Messiah of Resurgent India (1 January 2003)", p. 353
  • I was dying of starvation, barefooted I went from office to office and was refused everywhere. I learnt by experience what human compassion is. This was my first contact with realities of life; and I discovered it...had no room for the weak, the poor, the deserted.
    • Swami Vivekananda, in "Swami Vivekananda: Messiah of Resurgent India (1 January 2003)", p. 7

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See also

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Wikipedia
Wikipedia
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