1,000 Calories a Day is Torture
In an effort to rationalize the use of dietary manipulation on detainees, Bush administration officials turned to Slim Fast and Jenny Craig.
In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.
“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustained periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”
As disgusting as this is, the equation of severe food deprivation with voluntary commercial diet programs is also spot on. While I don’t doubt the parallel was drawn to trivialize the depravity of the act, no one reading this description of Ancel Key’s classic “Minnesota Experiment” can doubt the physical and psychological damage that goes hand-in-hand with prolonged, low calorie intake.
“Medically safe” is relative. If you read the linked report, it’s obvious Keys’ subjects were medically safe too. Nonetheless, they still suffered. Extreme dietary restriction is a terrible way to try and lose weight.
While very low calorie dieting might be less physically punishing – in the short term – for someone with a lot of excess fat to lose, there are still detrimental changes – to both metabolic rate and lean body mass – that work against the long term success of such an approach. Don’t go there.
