Severe undernutrition in growing and adult animals

The outstanding changes that take place in the chemical structure of the body of an undernourished man or animal are a loss of fat and protein and a gain in the proportion of water.Bischoff & Voit (1860) commented on this situation IOO years ago, and Voit (1881) wrote along the same lines again 20 years later.He stated that the composition of the body was not fixed and invariable, and that the tissues of the very young and of the undernourished contained more water than those of normal adults.This was partly because the undernourished body contained less fat than the well-nourished one, but Voit also noted that the undernourished muscles contained more water than well-nourished ones.Mendel & Rose (191 1-12) described some experimental work on rabbits in which they showed that during starvation the percentage of water in the muscle increased from 75 to 79.Lipschutz found that the same sort of changes took place in the muscle of undernourished carp (Lipschutz, I ~I I ) , and also of eels (Lipschutz, 1915).Terroine, Brenckmann & Feuerbach (1922-3) and Terroine, Feuerbach & Brenckmann ( 1924) considered that their own experiments showed that the composition of the fat-free body of an adult mammal was almost unalterable by undernutrition or by high-and low-protein diets, and that any changes detected by analysis were due to fluctuations in the fat and carbohydrate reserves, but at almost the same time the evidence that the undernourished body and its tissues contained an excessive amount of water was again summarized by Morgulis (1923).Later it was shown that the water retained in undernutrition is accompanied by sodium (Weech, Snelling & Goettsch, 1933), and investigations made on man during and after the Second World War made it clear that in chronic undernutrition there is a great increase in the percentage of the body occupied by extracellular fluid (Cachera