January 1961, and a family of five Chinese citizens have left their village and are on
the road.
What they’ve left behind is utter devastation.
What’s in front of them is most likely death.
First, they lost their home after it was torn down for scrap.
Then, after the little food in the village ran out, they ate bark from the trees and
mud from the ground.
On their perilous journey to find something to eat, they sell most of their clothes for
morsels of food.
They don’t have any boots, having stewed and eaten them already.
Just the other day a man offered to buy one of their children for a bowl of rice.
That didn’t happen, but those kids are already showing distended bellies.
It is only a matter of time until starvation finishes them – a terrible way to die.
Today you’ll hear all about how that happens and when it’s happened.
That story we just told you actually happened to scores of Chinese peasants back then.
While we didn’t choose one particular family, we based the story on events from the book,
“Mao’s Great Famine.”
The book was mostly written after the author searched the Chinese government and local
government archives, but some of those starving kids did live to tell the tale of the horror
that killed around 45 million people.
One of those people, now an elderly woman, was asked in an interview, “How did your
sister die?”
The woman replied, “She starved.”
She adds, “My brother’s name was Xiang Wa…He starved to death.”
The woman then makes a small circle with her thumb and finger and says to the camera, “His
arms were this thin.”
Millions died like this, in what’s been called the single biggest famine the world
has ever seen.
In that book we just mentioned, there are plenty of details of what it’s like to be
on the brink of dying from starvation.
Not surprisingly, the lack of food makes people very ill, but as that happens desperation
like nothing else sets in.
It can be a long-drawn-out way to die.
People really did eat bark, so you could walk into one village and just stare out at a wasteland
of stripped trees.
Some people ate shoots from the ground, and when they weren’t available, they resorted
to eating mud.
When you are starving, you’ll eat almost anything.
Mao Zedong’s so-called “Great Leap Forward” left peasants with no crops, and even if little
was grown, it would often be shipped off.
If people complained or refused to work, or even got sick from lack of nutrition, they
could be beaten to death or face severe punishment.
In a village in Hunan, a young boy stole a handful of grain.
As punishment, the local boss Xiong Changming forced the father to bury that kid alive.
The father died soon after from what was stated as “grief”.
We are giving you that example because we want to show you just how desperate starvation
makes people.
That kid wasn’t naughty, he was famished and dying.
Everyone knew the consequences if they caught stealing but some people still took the risk.
In other cases, when people died, they were eaten, sometimes by family members.
Of course, it destroyed them to do such a thing, but one tries to hold on to life as
long as one can – especially if you have children to protect.
There were many cases of people being exhumed and their rotten bodies feasted on.
In some cases, the starving went for the internal organs, likely because they were in a better
state than some other parts of the body.
In one of the archives dated 25 February 1960, it says a man named Yang Zhongsheng from Hongtai
commune, Yaohejia village, killed Yang Ershun.
Status: poor farmer.
Relationship with victim: brother.
Manner of crime: killed and eaten.
Reason: livelihood issues.
With that in mind, we can safely say that not many people in this world truly know what
it’s like to really starve.
Before we talk about what actually happens to the body, let’s have a look at some more
real-life cases of people starving to death.
There was a case not that long ago in the US where a 14-year old boy was kept in a basement
and hardly fed anything at all for many weeks.
When he was found, still alive, he weighed only 55 pounds (25 kg).
A news report said this about the state he was in:
“He was severely and chronically malnourished, dehydrated, suffering from acute respiratory
distress, shock, hypothermia, and hypothyroidism.”
He was covered in sores and other wounds and wasn’t even able to speak.
It was only after being connected to breathing and eating tubes that he began to recover,
but it was touch and go for a while regarding whether he’d make it.
Basically, his body was shutting down.
His organs were failing.
He was eating himself from the inside.
There were more famines, where people died like that on a large scale.
The Great Famine in Ireland killed many from starvation and a lot of more from diseases
brought on by a lack of nutrition.
Sometimes this period is called, “The Great Hunger” or the “The Great Starvation.”
One man who went over to Ireland to try and help wrote this:
“No pen can describe the distress by which I am surrounded.
It has actually reached such a degree of lamentable extreme that it becomes above the power of
exaggeration and misapprehension.”
Over a million people starved to death or died from a famine-related illness.
People fled to the cities, with one person calling those people, “walking masses of
filth, vermin, and sickness.”
You’ve all likely seen what starvation looks like because you’ve seen images of famines
in Africa, or perhaps you’ve seen photos of Soviet prisoners in German prison camps
during the war.
And of course, you’ve seen the terrible state Jewish prisoners were in when they were
found barely alive in concentration camps.
Because of such images, you’ll know that people who are starving don’t always look
like they are suffering from acute pain.
Instead, they often look listless, gaunt, so weak that they can hardly move or even
speak.
So, what is actually happening to them?
Ok, so during the Chinese great famine the people who were most at risk were children
and old people.
The reason for that was children don’t have as much stored fat as adults and so they wasted
away first.
Old people were also at times very frail and due to their age more vulnerable to disease
and infections.
According to scientists, how people react to starvation, whether young or old, can be
very different.
Some people might be more irritable, while others might be more lethargic.
One thing that happens to everyone is the brain becomes damaged over time, but at the
beginning, it’s more likely people will just start having problems concentrating.
There are different phases of starvation, with the first stage being what people experience
when they are fasting.
During this stage, the liver produces something called glycogen and this maintains blood glucose
levels.
The thing is, your liver can only produce enough glycogen for a few hours.
After that, the body starts looking for glucose somewhere else – namely in the breakdown
of fats and proteins.
So, in the case of a starving person, they either have no food or just morsels of food
each day.
Even if they have some crumbs to eat, it’s not enough to give the body the energy it
needs to function.
That’s why the lethargy starts and why the brain can become muddled.
In simple terms, there’s just not enough gas in the tank to keep the machine running.
But as you know, if a human has water, they can survive without food for quite some time.
People actually pay to do 30-day water fasts under supervision.
People have gone on hunger strikes for much longer.
For instance, imprisoned IRA member Bobby Sands lasted 66 days before he died.
The coroner wrote that the cause of death was “starvation, self-imposed.”
How long can we survive without food?
Well, it all depends on the person who’s not eating and the environment they are in,
but an often-cited article in the British Medical Journal said that using data from
hunger strikes most people become severely ill around the 21 to the 40-day mark.
That’s a big difference, but then some people have much more fat in reserve than others.
As for those Chinese peasants, many of them were forced to work while starving.
The upshot of that was they often collapsed and died in the fields.
During the second phase of starvation, the body uses stored fat as energy.
This happens when the liver turns fat into something called ketones.
But as the fat is stripped from the body, the body then starts taking proteins and turning
them into the glucose that the brain needs.
The muscles waste away and so do other body tissues.
This is all to feed the brain, which has led some people to say that the body starts to
cannibalize itself in order to keep the brain functioning.
At this point, the heart has to work really hard because blood pressure is low.
At the same time, the person becomes emaciated.
As those proteins are taken from tissues and blood vessels, fluids can start leaking.
This can make the face, legs, and arms start to swell, as well as the stomach.
This is called “edema” and when it’s bad it can become really hard to move around.
When the bloating is in the belly it is called “kwashiorkor.”
One Chinese survivor of the famine described it like this:
“I was the first to come down with a serious case of edema.
I became emaciated, my ankles swelled, and my legs got so weak I often fell while walking
to the fields for forced labor.”
To make matters worse, people were beaten in this state, and that could result in leakage.
There was a common saying among Chinese peasants along the lines of they were “beaten until
all the water came out.”
When the local cadres hit them with batons, that’s what happened.
There’s another condition related to lack of insufficient calorie intake known as “marasmus”
which comes from the word “withering.”
These people might have shriveled skin and exposed ribs.
Their throat might become so dry they can hardly speak.
They might just curl up into a ball on the floor as their facial skin seems to lose its
elasticity.
At this point, with eyes bulging, they may look as if they have been stripped of their
thoughts.
They are close to death.
With marasmus, there’s something called a point of no return, which means even if
they received food they would still die.
Their hair might change color and then fall out, and at the same time, the skin might
become scaly and just flake off.
With all those tissues and organs breaking down they are super-susceptible to disease,
which is likely what will finish them off if infection doesn’t.
Even if the person is somehow brought back from the dead, it’s possible they will have
suffered irreparable brain damage.
One interesting case we found was from 1993 when a woman in a hospital dying of cancer
said she just wanted it over with and asked not to be given any food and drink.
She was observed by Dr. Robert Sullivan who worked at Duke University Medical Center.
The strange thing is, the doctor noted that during the final stages of this woman’s
life she didn’t feel any pain, although it must be said she may also have been taking
painkillers.
Nonetheless, once she had totally given herself up to death, she was chatty on the way out
and then one day slipped into a coma and died after her organs failed.
Still, it’s the ones who survive on little bits of food who hurt the most – mentally
and physically.
According to that doctor, being ravenous all the time and trying to make it to the next
day is incredibly painful.
Starvation can lead to all sorts of ailments, including chronic watery diarrhea, fever,
disease, bleeding under the skin, loss of eyesight, hallucinations, convulsions, skin
conditions, and irritation in many regions of the body.
It’s just during those very last stages when someone has nothing left in them they
seem to resign themselves to death and perhaps some of the pain recedes.
In the Holocaust, Jewish prisoners were fed very, very little and they soon became terribly
emaciated.
Some of those people in the very last stages were said to lose their will to live and even
seemed apathetic about death.
The name given to these people was, “Muselmann.”
Holocaust survivor and writer, Primo Levi, described them like this:
“Non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already
too empty to really suffer.
One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death, death, in the face of
which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.”
You can only imagine the absolute pain and turmoil a person would have to endure to get
to this point.
As you’ve seen today, people can hang on through the most unimaginable tortures, but
little by little the body breaks down and the brain accepts that there’s no turning
back.
This is why it’s one of the worst ways to die.
Now you need to watch, “Impalement - Worst Ways to Die.”
Or, have a look at this...