Do not repeat: 4 of the most dangerous and bizarre food experiments in the history of mankind
'19.06.2021'
Source: Big Picture
Now society is actively fighting against animal experiments. But not so long ago there were people in the role of experimental subjects, says Big Picture.
It is now that scientists mainly use laboratory rats to conduct experiments, and the results of most experiments can be predicted in advance based on already known data. But before, they risked their own lives or the lives of other people - and all in order to find out, for example, whether it is possible to eat only rice, or what will happen if you drink coffee or tea all the time?
We want to tell you about the four strangest and most dangerous experiments with food known in history.
Radioactive oatmeal
In the middle of the last century, an American breakfast cereal company asked employees at the University of Massachusetts to find out how their product behaves inside the body. To make it easier to observe the digestion process, the researchers decided to add a little iron and calcium to the cereals, but not simple ones, but radioactive ones!
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About 70 orphans with various serious diseases took part in the experiment. By the end of the study, their condition had worsened significantly, as most of them developed radiation sickness ...
There were other children in the United States who were affected by the actions of unscrupulous scientists. For example, once the inmates of a boarding school for patients with cerebral palsy were given irradiated milk - again, all for the sake of science!
Cotton wool, balls, ropes
One day, a researcher at the University of Chicago, Fredrik Hellzel, decided to check what would happen if you eat only inedible items. The man's goal was to find out how many calories he will get from such food, and how quickly the body is able to remove it.
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For a long time, Helzel's diet consisted of bird feathers, various ropes, corn cobs, metal balls, and more. During the study, the experimenter noted that a piece of rope came out of the body the fastest - it took him "some" one and a half hours! But most of all, Fredrik loved surgical cotton!
During such a diet, the guy reached an extreme degree of exhaustion and only miraculously survived. But Helzel did not succeed in becoming a scientist, because the deficiency of trace elements in the body affected his success in education.
Monodiet
Doctor Max Moshkovsky once decided to conduct a dangerous experiment on himself. For 200 days, he ate only polished rice to dispel or confirm the belief that beriberi disease, that is, vitamin B1, arises from such a diet.
The doctor stopped the experiment when the heart pains and cramps became unbearable. Max Moshkovsky could not get rid of the consequences of such a mono-diet for about 20 years, because with such a diet he caused great harm to the heart.
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But the mono-diet of the traveler Villalmur Stefansson at one time consisted of meat and fat, most often of seals. To them, the man occasionally added berries or fish - one of the few food items that could be obtained during the trip. At the same time, Stefansson noted that he felt great, although he had slightly lost weight. But upon returning home, the man began to have serious health problems ...
At first it was ordinary diarrhea, but every day Stefansson's condition was getting worse. Soon the traveler guessed that boiled lean meat, from which he had managed to wean himself, was to blame. When the man began to eat the fat and entrails of animals, his condition immediately improved.
Tea or coffee
At the end of the XNUMXth century, the Swedish king Gustav III ordered to find out which is more harmful - tea or coffee. For this, the sovereign pardoned two twin suicide bombers on the condition that until the end of their lives they would regularly drink several cups of these drinks a day: one - tea, the other - coffee.
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The experiment ended with the fact that both brothers survived both the doctors who looked after them and King Gustav himself. The study was "failed" by a man who was told to drink tea - he died first at the age of 83.
Well, we guessed that coffee will prevail in this matter, but still this drink has both positive and negative properties. And you should know about them.
