Document jgEXyGvoQQrE39gZ7r1aKqngR

156 CHAPTER 5 Health Office made clear in a 1939 report complaining that sleep ing pills were being taken in extraordinarily high dosages--as many as forty per night for one popular brand (Phanodorm). Evi dence began to grow that Germans were using sleeping pills to commit suicide, which obviously did not make the government sleep easy.115 Ordinary foods were also explored for their performance enhancing power. A 1942 study found that a warm meal could "in crease performance by 10 percent" among women doing nightshift work.116 A 1941 investigation reported that workers exposed to extremes of heat were best served by foods high in carbohy drates.117 Reduction of fatigue was a focus of many investigations of this sort: experiments done by Otto Ranke in 1940 and 1941, for example, showed that a high-protein diet could, under certain cir cumstances, stave off fatigue and increase capacity to work.118 One of the goals of such research was to determine how much protein the average adult man had to consume to maintain "full performance" (eighty grams per day, according to one study). Cal orie intake was studied: Ranke, for example, showed that a diet of less than 2,000 calories per day could not be maintained without gradual weight loss, primarily owing to the loss of the body's fat reserves.119 Attention also focused increasingly on finding out how little food a person needed to survive or work in different envi ronments. A 1942 study explored the caloric needs of men and women of different ages and body size, recording how food needs varied with work pace and other variables. The author found that women, on average, needed only 90 percent of what men needed, but that children of both sexes needed almost the same as adult men. Professions involving standing or walking demanded an extra 10 percent, stressful occupations (foundry workers, carpen ters, and camp workers [!], for example) even more, and trades requiring extreme physical exertion (smiths, riveters, construction workers) even more again. Precise calculations of daily caloric needs were made for each of these groups in different types of conditions.120 A 1939 study had found that students helping with the harvest burned an average of 3,610 calories per day, while farmworkers consumed about 5,700 THE NAZI DIET 157 calories. The highest consumption recorded was among mountain climbers and skiers: a 1944 analysis found that people involved in such activities could bum 9,000 or even 10,000 calories a day. Still other studies were done to investigate resistance to cold as a func tion of caloric intake. A series of studies begun in 1944 showed that resistance increased with protein consumption and decreased with fat intake. These last-mentioned studies were continued after the war with support from U.S. military authorities121--though there is often uncertainty concerning where the original experiments were carried out, whether concentration camp prisoners were used as subjects, for example (the published reports rarely say). More research needs to be done in this area--especially to find out whether such studies may have tied in somehow with the starva tion of the handicapped in "euthanasia" institutions. Efforts to rationalize German food can also be seen in the push to discover substitutes for foods made scarce by the war. Synthetic honey and margarine were already features of the First World War, as is clear from the first few pages of Erich Remarque's fa mous 1928 novel. All Quiet on the Western Front. In the Second World War, the list of synthetics was greatly expanded. Mineral oils were used in cooking, yeast was made from wood, and fish protein was encouraged in baking. Searches were launched to find new substitutes for coffee (malt coffee and a brew derived from oats), protein (soybeans were a hot item, earning them the label "Nazi beans"), and diverse fats and oils (hardened walnut oil, for example, used as a lard substitute). Experiments were performed to see whether nutrients could be extracted from fruit pits, and whether alfalfa could serve as a human food. Military, medical, and economic urgencies merged in many of these quests--as when articles began to appear on how to identify wild forest plants suit able for the brewing of herbal teas.122 Children were encouraged to tell their parents to drink these "German teas," the rationale being that they were good for your health, good for the German econ omy, and good for the war effort (see figs. 5.6 and 5.7).123 Artificial fat was an object of special interest. Researchers at Otto Flossner's Reich Health Office laboratory in 1941 conducted both human and animal experiments on synthetic fat, though opinions