Why doesn't it take fat people longer to starve to death?

Well it seems like I’m getting mixed responses.

Does it take longer for fat people to starve to death?

Yes it does, as long as they can drink water. As noted by other posters, being fat doesn’t provide any protection against dying of thirst.

Moreover, you can’t assume that, say, having a BMI twice as high as another person means you’d take twice as long to starve to death. Fat reserves do provide important energy resources for survival when calories are scarce (that’s why we evolved the ability to accumulate fat reserves, after all), but AFAIK there’s no simple equation along the lines of X pounds of extra fat will allow you to go Y extra days without food.

Our fat reserves can’t help with thirst at all? Isn’t that how camels do it?

And yes, I know we’re not camels and appreciate that camels might have processes we don’t. Just curious if that’s it or not.

Cite? My biochemistry textbook disagrees with you.

According to Wikipedia, the position of a camel’s fatty tissue in the hump minimizes the amount of heat that a more generally-spread subcutaneous layer of fat would trap in the body, thus keeping the animal cooler. This among other adaptations like blood-cell shape and better conservation of liquid in the respiration and digestive processes.

I think your question was answered several times.

Answer: “Yes” it takes a fat person longer to starve to death, but fat does not provide everything the body needs metabolically, and starvation puts huge stresses on the body, so a fat person that has nothing at all to eat will last longer than a less fat person, but will likely die well before all their fat reserves are completely used up.

Yes, my question was answered several times.

Thus the “mixed responses” I mentioned.

Thanks for the answers from everyone.

It seems that in actual starvation diet situations like prisoners of war, concentration camps, forced labor without adequate nutrition, that obese people do survive longer than people who were already slender. That saying about ‘the fat guys get skinny and the skinny guys die!’ holds true. The body does adapt to consuming fat stores after an initial brief period where it consumes muscle. If it did not do this, then death from starvation would be more rapid than has been documented. Once the fat has been consumed, then of course it will continue consuming muscle until death occurs. I don’t recall seeing any obese subjects in Somalia, Ethiopia or for that matter, anywhere in the world where there is famine or people being starved in concentration camps. If they were heavy at the start, they are not heavy anymore at the end!

A surprising number of obese people have vitamin-deficiency diseases, often due to an inappropriate diet and in extreme cases, insufficient sun exposure.

What happened to Clockwork, anyway? Posting activity slowly ticked down, hasn’t posted in 3 months…

YAMDS, Young Asian males were dropping over dead in the U.S. at normal weights. They were eating nothing but white rice to save money. Their hearts were being cannibalized for lack of protein.

Zombies don’t starve to death.

I know this thread is almost 7 years old, but I think a discussion of metabolism would be perfectly appropriate for the question.

Now for my next trick; killing a zombie with another zombie: [THREAD=365432]How long could a massively overweight person survive without food?[/THREAD]

Stranger

There was something going around Facebook recently, and I think it was deemed “legitimate” by Snopes, about a study where a significantly obese man ate nothing for a year and lost like ~300lbs. He was under careful supervision and given plenty of vitamins and water.

I can’t find the Snopes article, but here’s a semi-recent news article on the study, which apparently happened in 1965. The guy told the doctors “I’m not going to eat for a year, with or without you, but you might want to monitor this”.

Although the skeptic is a zombie, “Westerners” starve to death all the time (in addition to those, like my Mom, who had their food and water taken from them by their caretakers so they could die).

Anorexia.

From what I’ve read, it was surprisingly common. Enough so that our entire fat storage mechanisms and metabolisms evolved to very easily pack on and stubbornly retain fat, despite our best efforts. Plus we’re wired to prefer the most calorie-dense foods over the less dense ones.

That’s not to say that our forebears were going from some kind of gluttony to literally NO food, but rather from a state of excess to a state of want, and in those days, extra fat literally meant that you lived through the winter. So over time under these conditions, our forebears evolved to pack on weight easily and lose it with difficulty because it was a clear survival advantage.\

Of course in today’s world, famine is an extremely uncommon event, but most everyone, even the poor, can usually get more calories than they need, so our bodies continue to work the same way, but we have to, in essence, engineer personal famines so we can lose our excess body fat.