The Mennonite National Anthem | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell

Lester glitch diary July 28 1945 this morning I looked in the mirror and hated what I saw my face is now emaciated sad and flecked with black dots Lester Glick was one of the 36 young men who signed up for the Minnesota starvation experiment unlike so many of his counterparts Glick did not leave an oral history of his experience at the Library of Congress all we have is what he wrote in his diary this entry is from late in the study after months of hunger my nose is bony my cheeks protrude my lips are big and flabby my fluffy wavy hair has become coarse and straight my comb is always Laden with Globs of loose hair I can count my ribs in the mirror and my collarbone sticks out as though dislocated by our muscles have dwindled so that I could reach around my arm above the elbow with my thumb and third finger I am so weak I can scarcely walk I am tired discouraged my life has all been drained from me and here's what Lester Glick wrote on October 19th the second to last day of the experiment today he turned out to be the worst day of my life this evening Dr Taylor called me into his office and told me I have developed a tuberculosis lesion on the Apex of my left lung I am to go home enter a sanatorium and begin a six-month rehabilitation program I couldn't have received any worse news my tuberculosis came into sharp Focus however as we gathered for the Last Supper celebration all of the subjects in fear of my dread disease moved away from me and I sat alone completely isolated from the others [Music] my name is Malcolm Gladwell you're listening to revisionist history my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood this is the final episode of our look at the starvation experiment run by Ansel Keyes during the second World War today I want to tell a story of Lester Glick the story of what happened to him after the experiment and how he made sense of all the suffering he'd been through foreign just tell me a little bit about your father first of all so I look very much like him he had dark curly hair he was um about five five I think maybe five six if we really if he stood on his tiptoes maybe he was down to 114 pounds at his lowest weight Lester Glick died in 2003 but I spoke with two of his children that's his daughter Chris and he was a very thin man until he got out of the starvation experiment I mean before he went there he was then but then he had an eating disorder the rest of his life so he gained and lost hundreds of pounds throughout the rest of his life he was kind of roly-poly is how I remember him after I spoke to Chris I called up Lester glick's son Byron how do you think the experience of being involved in that experiment changed him [Laughter] completely and not at all it's clear to me that Daddy's relationship with food and with his body was utterly and completely disordered and changed by the starvation experiment in that regard he never got over the starvation experiment and Dad talks as he was talking about his struggles with his weight that um he never this is just amazing to think about he never got over being hungry he was always hungry even when he had all the food he wanted that it's something had happened in his physiology that broke the connection between his stomach and his brain and it it never cured you know I never saw my father cry but I saw him as close to tears when he would talk about that experience it's making me cry um like he would always keep candy underneath his seat his the driver's seat in the car because he always wanted to have food close to him just in case he got hungry and he he described starvation as the worst deprivation there is for humankind as a kid sometimes I I felt like he was detached looking back on it I think he was scared and he was scared because he had experienced things that most people don't experience I think my dad was scarred in the same way you hear about veterans being scarred about active War that there's just some stuff you can't explain and you can't control and it's scary and [Music] part of me wishes that my dad had never had to experience that that he had had a sweet real life than he had and he had a pretty sweet life he had a good life he would say he had a good life [Music] but he paid a price for what he believed and he kept paying that price his whole life he was an amazing man [Music] Byron and Chris both know what their father went through but they also know what he became as a result [Music] for as long as scientists have puzzled about human physiology they've wondered how the body responds to Extended deprivation when you don't eat enough you get weak we all know that but beyond that the details quickly get complicated and those critical details obsessed Ansel Keys as he set out to design the starvation experiment in 2021 the journal obesity reviews devoted an entire issue to the legacy of answer keys the issue was organized by a physiologist at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland his name is Abdul dulu give me an example of a question that is very difficult to answer in your world I mean we knew right from beginning of 1900 from prisoners of wars from people being malnourished and recovering that there was a tendency for body fat to be recovered faster than lean mass when muscle mass and so forth and this was quite a problem because when you think of you are rehabilitating a patient who has basic cancer or infection or whatever that will they lose weight because of the of the disease when you have to make them recover you would prefer them to recover tissue organ and muscle because that's where the functionality is critical right but we have problem to recover muscle mass muscle function and relatively ease to recover fat and especially in the abdominal area which is the where the bad fat is situated muscle is a lot more important to regaining your health and fat but the body wants to recover fat first after extended weight loss and not just a little fat not only the recover their fat faster but they they recover more fat than they lost so I mean so they recover more weight and it's mostly fat why does the body do that and is there something that science could do to make the body switch tactics and build lean muscle instead you could imagine all the areas where the answers to these questions would be useful Keys was focused on people suffering from malnutrition during the war concentration camp survivors for example that's one area dulu mentioned people recovering from serious illness cancer patients after chemotherapy that's another [Music] there's also people trying to recover from eating disorders people struggling with obesity trying to maintain weight loss 85 to 90 percent of those who lose weight gain it back we need to understand that process but there's a problem there's no easy way to do good experiments on starvation and its aftermath I mean how would you do it you need to carefully control what people eat when they eat how much they eat and you have to do that for months on end because nothing useful about diet can be learned from a few weeks of observations you can't run experiments with prisoners or people locked up in a psychiatric hospital because that would be unethical you need people who consent to be starved and have the discipline to follow up on their commitment but how do you find people who fit that profile [Music] a few years ago the National Institutes of Health organized something called the calorie study where 143 adults signed up for two years of stringent dieting the goal was for them to cut their caloric intake by 25 percent and they received quote an intensive lifestyle intervention to Foster adherence Individual Counseling Group sessions Consultants how much caloric intake did the volunteers end up cutting from their diets when all was said and done not 25 percent 12 percent after all that effort the volunteers on average only got halfway to their goal [Music] and can you blame them it's just too much to ask someone to give up a quarter of the calories they consume and to do that every day for months on end except that is if we're talking about Ansel Keys as guinea pigs Abdel dulu told me that when he started working in the field of obesity and Metabolism almost 30 years ago he quickly realized that the best source of data on some problems and in some cases the only source of data was the Minnesota starvation experiment and so Keys kept meticulous comprehensive records on what six months of starvation looked like and then Keys collected Another Mountain of data that could help answer questions about body fat once the Volunteers started eating normally again what we know about the human body of a normal weight person reacting to starvation is based on the Minnesota experiment the Minnesota experiment is the gold standard I did a thing in my podcast this season where I asked researchers for their magic wand experiment which is the experiment that they would do if I gave them a magic wand and they could wave away all logistical Financial practical ethical whatever constraints and I'm curious if I gave you a magic wand what is the diet or nutrition study that you would do you mean ethical also is uh yeah we forget about it wow to try to do a similar study but now we have so much more technology we can monitor physical activity a lot of the changes of uh of functions functional whether it's muscle whether it's uh immune function and all that you think is you simply redo the Minnesota study only this time use modern methods to gather an order of magnitude more data right the whole point of a magic wand experiment is that it's the experiment you could never do in real life Ansel Keys did the perfect experiment without a magic wand and why was Ansel Keys able to do that because he was lucky enough to find volunteers willing to starve themselves to the point where their faces reflect with black dots their noses were bony their cheeks protruding their hair coarse and straight and falling out in big clubs this is a really really really huge contribution to humanity no the humanity and they were not forced to do it [Music] when the U.S entered World War II Lester Glick was 23 years old he declared himself a conscientious objector he had grown up in a Mennonite family attending one of the historic peace churches where pacifism is a tenant of faith Glick was assigned to ipsilanti Michigan to the State Mental Hospital he was the night charge attendant on the active tuberculosis Ward then one day he saw a notice on a bulletin board and at the top there was a a statement that said will you starve that they'd be better fed so Lester Glick would have seen this that spoke to him in his language that's Dwayne stiltzfus a historian at the same Mennonite School Leicester Glick once attended Goshen College [Music] I think when I was hungry did you feed me when I was thirsty did you give me something to drink it is that kind of language so it very much is um responding to Christ's invitation to go out into the world not to stay in your in your in your church but to go out into the world and and to do good work and be judged by those actions Matthew 25 verse 35 the same crucial verse I talked about a few episodes ago in talking about refugees and acts of kindness my friend Jim lepticen who's a Mennonite Pastor calls Matthew 25 the national anthem of the Mennonite Church the verse that defines the Mennonite religious calling to welcome the stranger to clothe the naked and to feed the hungry for Mennonites certainly of luster Glicks generation but I would say across Generations the reading of of Matthew 25 is is a literal reading it is a powerful invitation to um step out of your your comfort zone and go to places that are dangerous and risky and uncomfortable in order to do good and this is another front spread over the face of America like the other fronts it is big and complicated so big that only a few men in the whole nation can understand its real capacity for Waging War so Leicester Glick moved to Minneapolis and took one of the long line of cots that answer keys had set up underneath the School's football stadium he became a guinea pig now did Lester Glick understand in that moment what he was getting into of course not nobody did that's the point of an experiment the subject commits to an uncertain outcome but over the course of his long year in Minneapolis he documents in his Diaries his descent into a kind of hell it was just one of the gracious people but as he writes about his experience he writes about getting really angry angry with the officials in charge because they've taken away his allotment of bread he you know he's no longer getting the two slices he thought he was going to get because he's not losing weight fast enough back when Lester Glick had been working at the State Mental Hospital in Michigan he wrote with pride about the connections he made with patients who could not speak he loved to work with patients and help them but now in his hunger he was becoming isolated anti-social he started to dislike the company of his fellow guinea pigs and so there is this the separation that starts to take place this breakdown in in relations that is not at all in keeping with the with the real Lester Glick but it was the new malnourished luster Glick who was separated from all the people around him he understands that what it means to be hungry is not a momentary physiological deficit it is a profound and overwhelming deprivation on every level yeah it's a deep isolation and an isolation that goes against the building up of community that he's been a part of since childhood that that church Community the family community was shaped who he was in the most basic ways in the bit of scripture so essential to Mennonites for I was hungry and you fed me Lester Glick now understands what Hungary means it's not just calorie deprivation it's the absence of any kind of sustenance and then at the end of his time in Minneapolis he discovers he has developed tuberculosis as a result of his ordeal [Music] foreign so Daddy's plan had been to go to medical school when he was in college and he was going to be a doctor and then when he got TB during the starvation experiment that his doctors told him that he couldn't withstand the rigors of medical school and medical education and then medical practice and so they advised him to do something else and he chose social work his life took a profoundly different turn he got a masters and then he got his uh PhD at Washington University in St Louis because he felt like uh as he practiced social work that social work education was what his calling was so he wanted to teach other people how to practice social work with the principles of loving kindness and not just as a sort of mechanical practice of obtaining services for people click started a School of Social Work at Goshen College his alma mater in Indiana he went on to start another School of Social Work at Syracuse University then one at the University of Southern Mississippi he's a social work school planter yes that's exactly right in glick's self-published Memoirs there's a chart called places I have called home which takes up an entire page 38 addresses in all Webster Groves Missouri South Main Street Goshen Indiana Ramsey Avenue Syracuse New York Montague Street Hattiesburg Mississippi crisscrossing the country his entire adult life in pursuit of the hungry one of the things one of the practices that he enforced while we were growing up is that he wanted us to know what hunger was like as well so we could be empathic for people who were not able to eat like we were so Wednesdays every Wednesday all we could eat was white rice all day and we had limited servings some of my first memories was you know eating rice on Wednesdays and then I mean I did that until I went to college how did you and your siblings feel about that did you did you understand the point of it I I don't think we did except we we knew how important it was to our father and we laughed about it and kind of kitted him about it but I don't remember any of us ever saying this is stupid we're not doing this we just we did it it's not a trivial thing if you're hungry to be fed it's it's one of the greatest Services you can do to a not a human being when he was dying they lived in a little Retirement Community and they had these little individual sort of Apartments where people could live that were freestanding and Daddy he always was a gardener he had a really great green thumb and so he had a large garden where he provided fresh vegetables for all the people in the 12 little units where they lived and when he got sick that year he couldn't maintain his garden anymore and he was very concerned about where his neighbors were going to get their fresh vegetables if he wasn't able to provide them for him the more time I've spent looking at the starvation experiment the less I've understood why so many people in the scientific Community are uneasy with what happened people say nothing like that could and should be done today but why what exactly is it about the experiment that is so incomprehensible to us today I think the answer is that we focus far too much on what was given up in the moment by the volunteers and we forget about what was gained down the road as the result of that suffering [Music] the Minnesota experiment left a permanent mark on nearly every one of its participants they understood something about food and hunger that they hadn't before their experience of the 18 who left their oral histories with the Library of Congress seven signed up for something called heifers for relief a program that after the war shipped livestock from America to Europe the volunteers took trips back and forth across the Atlantic taking care of the animals another Minnesota participant worked in relief camps after the war Sam Legg one of the leaders of the guinea pigs worked with the Quakers to buy food for the hungry and post-war Europe Marshall Sutton traveled to the Middle East to feed refugees in Gaza several more went to Divinity School Another Man spent 30 years as a missionary in South Africa Mozambique and Kenya and Lester Glick set out to plant Social Work schools throughout the United States feeding the hungry in spirit but also just the hungry because after his year in Minneapolis he no longer made a distinction between spiritual and physical deprivation [Music] in his diary of his experience in Minnesota Glick wrote when he was deep into the starvation phase books on starvation tell us that hungry people eat clay wood bark unclean animals and often become cannibalistic yesterday I took the lead out of a pencil and began chewing the wood [Music] it tasted all right for some crazy reason I crave raw horseradish sassafras roots and rabbit meat I think about how cannibalism is a terrible option for a starving person and try to put it out of my mind can't seem to stop thinking about it you don't really get over feelings like that the best you can do is channel them into something else for Glick it became cinnamon rolls after his year in Minnesota he became obsessed with them he cut out a picture of cinnamon rolls from a magazine and carried it with him at all times it was in his wallet until the day he died so um dad was known for his cinnamon rolls thank you he made these deep fried cinnamon rolls that were just amazingly delicious things and and he would make literally thousands of rolls there's a picture of me or one of my siblings sitting at the kitchen table and the table's covered in rolls there are rolls on the counters behind us and dad took great Delight in taking those roles to people of bringing them into church and people enjoying them and it's kind of a microcosm of what Dad was up to his whole life of giving people some kind of sustenance that brought them to an unexpectedly good place Byron was in a little office in his home in Wisconsin remembering his father who had been dead for 20 years but there was something in that specific memory of the cinnamon rolls that moved him yeah yeah Byron this has been I have one last request of you sure um I would like you can you read that passage from Matthew give me King James let's do it properly um actually let me run get a Bible he left the room and came back with a family heirloom his grandfather's Bible battered leather-bound handed down from his grandfather to his father and from his father to him Byron looked for the passage in Matthew The Meta Knight national anthem for I was in hungered and you gave me me I was thirsty and you gave me drink I was a stranger and you took me in naked and he clothed me I was sick and he visited me I was in prison and you came unto me verily I say unto you in so much as you have done it unto one of the least of my brethren you have also done it unto me [Music] it's beautiful yeah Byron thank you so much this has been oh what a wonderful what a wonderful father oh man foreign [Music] IST history is produced by Eloise Linton Liam and gustu and Jacob Smith with Tali emlin our editor is Julia Barton our executive producer is Mia LaBelle original scoring by Luis Guerra mastering by flan Williams and Engineering by Nina Lawrence fact checking by Beth Johnson voice acting by Tim Heller special thanks to the Pushkin crew Heather feign Eric Sandler Maggie Taylor Sean Carney Morgan Ratner Mary Beth Smith Jordan McMillan Carly Migliore Maya Koenig Royston Missouri Daniela Lacon Nicole Morano Isabella Narvaez Lee tal Malad John schnarz Jason Gambrell Amanda K Wong kazayatan and of course our fearless leader El Jefe Jacob Weisberg I'm Malcolm global foreign

Channel: Malcolm Gladwell

Views: 17,714

Keywords: Malcolm Gladwell, Revisionist History Podcast, Minnesota Starvation Experiment, Ancel Keys, Effects of Starvation, WWII Podcast, Podcast, WWII Science Experiments, WWII Medical Experiments, WWII Human Experiments, Lester Glick, Mennonites, Outliers Audiobook, Blink Audiobook

Id: N5tUC0OGN6M

Length: 30min 39sec (1839 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 06 2022