When the recent news broke that a Crash Diet (600 cal/day) cured diabetes, discussed HERE, HERE, HERE, there was the inevitable invoking of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment in the low carb circles. A while back, I addressed the MSE in a post entitled Starvation Diets shortly after I had blogged on a study in which one part involved putting three obese women on a 1500 cal/day liquid reducing diet.
The point of that last blog post was that in the 1970's, the average intake of American women was 1550 cals. Now folks, keep in mind that averages mean that some women ate less and some ate more. Dr. Michael Dansinger -- he of the famous diet comparison study and consultant on The Biggest Loser -- told Jimmy during his interview with him that they generally cut the contestants' intake in half on that show. I don't have time to go back and listen, and the exact numbers aren't really all that important, but the women generally start out eating around 3000 cal/day, so their reducing diet is 1500 cal/day. Lots of low carbers sneer at TBL as, of course, being the wrong way to lose weight, they could just go low carb and achieve the same results by eating more.
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