End stage starvation is end stage starvation. I'd rather live. A fairly lean man has enough body fat to live for about a month. I'd take the 24 weeks. My point is just that, they were not eating enough food. There are limits to the benefit of low carb, compensating for a lack of fat reserves during limited food intake is one of those limits.

It's possible that starvation on a ketogenic diet would be less awful. But I don't think this is something we can be sure about. I think we have to differentiate between the sort of metabolic starvation Taubes writes about in the obese, and in the lean. The obese are carrying substantial reserves--if they can just get at them, they won't actually be starving. The men in the Minnesota study, if they ate 1600 calories of protein and fat, might still have been starving. My guess is that they would have been. These men were not having trouble accessing the calories from their food (or from their fat cells, clearly), they were burning through them easily, even though their metabolisms slowed way down by the end of the experiment. Once fat stores got below a certain point, I think these guys were probably going to be in trouble no matter what form their 1600 calories came in.

But an overweight person does have those reserves, and may be better able to access them on a 1600 calorie ketogenic diet than on a 1600 calorie high carb diet. That's the thing; if you have and can access the accumulated fat, then you aren't starving in the sense that your body is forced to start burning up lean tissue in an attempt to prolong survival.

Of course, this is pretty much what Taubes writes about in his book. I don't always have a point, sometimes stuff just rattles around in my head and I end up posting it here.