Research: A Diet That Might Wipe Out Malnutrition

The 18 inmates on a third-floor wing of the California Medical Facility at Vacaville are not going anyplace for quite a while. Despite its euphemistic name, the facility is a state prison. But the inmates are just as excited about flights to outer space as if they had been picked for a trip to Jupiter; they feel that they are doing as much as anybody to make such a journey possible. The dedicated 18 are trying to live for six months on an entirely synthetic, cold liquid diet.

For Other People. It isn’t easy. “No solid food, no coffee, and nothing hot —it’s hard to take,” says John Havlicheck, a veteran of eleven years in the Marine Corps, combat in Korea, and five years in Folsom Prison, now in for armed robbery. “Food is a lot more important than you think. I dream a lot about food now. But I’m glad to be part of this project. I feel I’m doing something for a lot of people.”

The idea for the diet originated ten years ago with Dr. Milton Winitz, 39, while he was working with amino acids in cancer research. The amino acids are the so-called building blocks of protein; theoretically, a man could live on them if he also got a seasoning of a few vitamins and minute amounts of other body chemicals.

Soon after Sputnik, Dr. Winitz began working on an amino-acid diet with Dr. Wallace L. Chan, a NASA consultant on synthetic foods. Now, with a $400,000 grant from NASA, they are continuing their research at Vacaville. There, each week, they make 30 gallons of their Human Diet No. 9.

Brewing the stuff is no simple matter. First, the water must be distilled, redistilled and further purified to remove all contaminants. Then each of 18 amino acids must be weighed out, to the thousandth of a gram, and dissolved. With the same micrometric accuracy, 16 vitamins are added, plus glucose, eleven salts, and ethyl linoleate—a fatty-acid substance. Finally, flavor is added. So far, only fruit flavors have proved practical. An attempt to give the volunteers a ration with a smoked-ham flavor failed because of interaction with the amino acids.

Each of the volunteers takes three synthetic meals a day. Since the men are not very active (though they can play pingpong and exercise in the gym), 2,400 calories are enough for a lightweight, while a 200-pounder may get 3,700. Each meal makes up a little more than a pint of syrupy liquid. It has to be cold, because some of the vitamins are destroyed by heat.

Two Years in a Capsule? To accustom the men to the rigorous confinement of the test, Medical Director Neil F. Gallagher gave them two weeks of conditioning before they switched to the liquid diet on Labor Day. Some of Diet No. 9’s advantages for space flight are already apparent. The men have lost weight, but the loss seems to have been all fat; their muscle tone is still good. They have a bowel movement only every five or six days. Their mental alertness seems to have improved. Their morale is so good that several of them are talking expectantly about a proposed two-year experiment, with volunteers cramped into a dummy space capsule.

Because amino acids are now produced only in small quantities for research, the synthetic-formula diet comes high: $12 per man per day. But the sources of raw material are inexhaustible; amino acids are synthesized from petroleum byproducts or sugar. Winitz and Chan are sure the price will tumble as demand increases. When the price is right, the researchers believe, a dollop of their formula could be added to the food intake of hundreds of millions of people, and wipe out malnutrition around the world.