For Gaza, she said, “It’s harder to predict but if there is nearly no food to feed young children, and illness involved, I would say it could be exactly the same. You go from being reasonably OK to being on some level of malnutrition, maybe not severely wasted, but still wasted, within a span of a few days. Particularly for the young, less than 2 years old, for sure that is likely to be the case.”
The trajectory for people with some access to food would be different, said Dr. Stanley Zlotkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of Toronto and an expert on the effects of critical food shortage. An adult may be able to survive for an extended period with only intermittent access to calories or with only foods that offer limited nutrients, he said. In a situation like Gaza’s, where there is still sporadic availability of some food, most adults would be able to survive for some time, but that would not be enough for children to prevent a progression to malnutrition.
What happens in the body
A malnourished body first burns fat reserves, said Heather Stobaugh, an expert on nutrition and emergencies with the aid agency Action Against Hunger, until those are depleted. Then, “The body will resort to using muscle, and eventually vital organs will begin to break down,” she said. “In the most severe forms of malnutrition, immune systems are weakened and vital organs actually start to shrink — the heart, lungs and so on.”
“When a child or an adult reaches this point,” she added, “their body is literally wasting away.”
Ms. Weise Prinzo said that people in this state minimize energy expenditure. “They stop any movement not necessary for immediate survival, but also within the organs, there are changes in how the heart and liver function,” she said. “They really try to manage, but eventually one or the other of the systems starts to fail.”
At this point, a starving person has a range of physical degradations, including extreme fatigue, an inability to regulate temperature and emotional impairment.
