How does starvation kill you

The second phase is the longest of the starvation process. Its duration is dependant on the fat reserves of the individual. In this phase, the brain starts to use ketone bodies in conjunction with glucose for energy. The ketone bodies the brain feeds from are made by the liver metabolizing the fatty acids. However, non-essential proteins are still broken down and consumed during this phase. Phase two is the turning point for starvation survivability. If you are still in this phase, the correct approach to diet can guide an individual back to health.

However, if you proceed into phase three, it is improbable that you will survive. Once all the fat reserves have been depleted, the body has to rely on the remaining protein reserves for energy.

Muscle mass deteriorates rapidly at this point, including heart muscle, and essential proteins for cellular function are consumed. The heart fails either due to arrhythmia from the lack of electrolytes or failure due to tissue degradation. The process of starvation wreaks havoc on the human body.

The sufferer will experience a variety of symptoms as the process proceeds. As starvation begins, a person will start to feel lethargic and begin to withdraw from others.

Despite water being essential, the signaling for thirst is compromised, and consequently, many die from dehydration before the starvation process completes. Over time, a starving individual will sleep extensively, become listless, irritable, and have apathy for life. Your body is doing everything it can to preserve the energy resources it has.

Movement is also painful as the muscles start to atrophy. Slowly you will notice the lack of nourishment on the exterior of the individual too. Their skin will become flaky, and itching by the sufferer can break the skin and be a natural site of infection. Eventually, the body cannot fight infections due to a lack of vitamins and minerals in their bloodstream. As a result, most people undergoing starvation die from an infection or disease caused by malnourishment.

Instead of feeling pain, the patient experienced the sense of euphoria that accompanies a complete lack of food and water. She was cogent for weeks, chatting with her caregivers in the nursing home and writing letters to family and friends. As her organs failed, she slipped painlessly into a coma and died.

Perry G. This study surveyed nurses about experiences with VSED patients. Note that a few patients resumed eating and drinking due to discomfort. Out of patients who started VSED, completed it through until death, while 16 stopped. The outcomes for the other 8 are unknown. Fortunately, that fraction was relatively small.

Another caveat is that the set of people who did VSED might have differed from the set who requested and got physician-assisted suicide; this allows for potential confounders in the comparison.

For example:. Table 1 of the study shows demographic traits of the VSED patients vs. VSED patients were an average of 10 years older than physician-assisted-suicide patients. It is intolerable. Terri Schiavo 's brother wrote :. I watched my own sister, Terri Schiavo, anguish through almost two weeks without food or water and there are no words that can properly describe the inhumanity. This article reports:. Efstratia Tuson, an year-old retired teacher from Middlesex, was terminally ill but her requests for a lethal dose of barbiturates were refused by her doctors.

She was told she would have to wait for a month for an appointment in a Swiss euthanasia clinic so began refusing food and drink in January. It took her five agonising days to die. Mrs Tuson's daughter, Pamela, said: "Her body mass reduced, her face became drawn, her skin very dry. She was dying of thirst.

It was like being in the desert. I feel my mother was tortured until she died. But a year-old from Scotland, who had advanced motor neurone disease, took 25 days to starve and dehydrate to death [ As the days turned into weeks, however, she used a communication aid to write: "You wouldn't put a dog through this. You would give it a lethal injection. Dr Wilson, who was in contact with the woman, whose Christian name was Lily, said her agony had been prolonged by her sucking ice cubes and frequently rinsing her mouth with water.

This post describes a daughter watching her mother undergo VSED:. I answered [the nursing staff], she can feel: she's squeezing my hand, and if I try to take my hand out of hers, she squeezes tighter, and when I hold a little piece of gauze to her lips, she tries to suck the water out of it.

She's thirsty! This is a horror; this is cruelty! No, they said. She's not thirsty. It's just reflex. But, I tell them, I watched her clamp her lips on the gauze so tightly that I had to pull to get it out of her mouth. She reacts when you touch her feet, her legs, and her hair. If she can feel that she can feel thirst, I plead with them. Since hospice patients may be given pain relievers, reports of the painfulness of starving or dehydrating may sound less severe than what an animal would experience without the luxury of pain relief.

This article says "death by VSED is described as a peaceful and comfortable death, and terminally ill patients dying of dehydration or starvation do not suffer if adequate palliative care is provided [16, 31, 40]. This article reports that the elderly man starving himself without pain was on a painkiller, though he only used it "sparingly". This post says a woman dying of VSED had to be medicated when she became distressed.

Rarely, as death nears, some clients experience agitation or delirium as a result of organ failure and dehydration. Access to hospice or other medical support is important to provide sedation should this occur. Many advocates of VSED say it is painless, however their claim is based on the requirement that individuals receive medical supervision including pain and symptom control as they dehydrate to death.

Without powerful sedatives and other palliative measures and, sometimes even with such measures , dehydration deaths have been described as horrific. In , I developed a condition known as esophagitis for an unknown reason. I described the ordeal more here. When the esophagitis first developed, I felt excruciatingly nauseous for a few hours after eating, such that I could only squeeze my chair and pace around my room for hours on end waiting for the pain to subside.

I soon learned to basically stop eating, except for a few oyster crackers every few hours. Going hungry was much less painful than the alternative. The first night after I stopped eating, it took me several hours to get to sleep, because I was so hungry and therefore restless. But by the next night, I felt better. Soon, I mostly stopped feeling the pain of hunger per se and instead transitioned to a general feeling of achy listlessness.

In case of starvation, the cells activate certain 'death receptors' on their membrane which in a normal scenario are used by the lymphocytes of the immune system to fight and kill infectious cells. For the latest food news , health tips and recipes , like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and YouTube. Diet Weight Loss. Log in. Forgotten your password? Want an ad-free experience? View offers.