In the autumn of 1917, Denmark faced a catastrophe. Allied warships tightened their grip around the North Sea, choking off trade and leaving the small Scandinavian nation on the brink of starvation. Without imports of animal feed and grain, the national livestock population loomed as a massive liability. Yet, instead of sliding into famine, Denmark emerged from the Great War healthier than ever. It was a wartime miracle engineered by a rebellious doctor who turned a geopolitical crisis into the largest nutritional experiment in human history.
At the center of this triumph was Dr. Mikkel Hindhede, a pioneering nutritionist who spent his career fighting scientific dogma. For decades, mainstream science insisted that active men needed a massive daily dose of protein, heavily promoting meat consumption. Hindhede disagreed. Raised in a farming family, he realized early on that filtering grain through livestock to produce meat was an ecological and economic disaster. He conducted rigorous human experiments in his state-run laboratory, proving that people could thrive on cheap, low-protein foods like potatoes and whole grains. When the blockade struck, Hindhede was ready with a radical plan.
Rather than feeding precious grain to pigs and cattle only to consume them as meat, Hindhede convinced the government to feed the crops directly to the people. The Danes adapted quickly, shifting almost overnight to a diet centered on rye bread, potatoes, vegetables, and small quantities of milk. Between October of 1917 and October of 1918, the nation became a giant laboratory for a mostly plant-based lifestyle.
The outcome astonished the medical community. During the year of the blockade, Denmark’s national mortality rate plummeted by thirty-four percent. Far fewer Danes died during this restriction than in any equivalent period over the previous eighteen years. Once the blockade was lifted and people returned to their traditional meat-heavy diets, the death rate promptly climbed back to its pre-war levels. The government medical official overseeing the data could not ignore the obvious conclusion. The sudden drop in deaths was directly tied to the forced change in diet.
This wartime anomaly highlights a broader truth about human health that historians and modern medical researchers continue to observe. Diets heavy in meat and saturated fat are closely linked to the modern diseases of affluence, such as heart disease, diabetes, and colon cancer. When populations reduce their animal product intake, their cardiovascular health improves almost immediately. Plant foods contain no cholesterol and very low levels of saturated fat, offering a protective shield against the blockages that cause heart failure.
History and geography offer similar lessons beyond the borders of wartime Denmark. Cultures with diets traditionally low in animal products, including the Hunzakuts of Pakistan and the Yucatan Indians, have historically boasted remarkable lifespans. On the other hand, populations with diets heavily reliant on meat and animal fat have often suffered from shorter life expectancies. The transition of modern Japan over the last several decades further proves this point. As rising wealth brought an influx of meat into the Japanese diet, rates of heart disease and diabetes climbed right along with it.
The Danish blockade of the First World War remains one of the most compelling natural experiments in public health. It proved that a society does not need massive amounts of animal protein to survive, let alone thrive. By bypassing the livestock and eating closer to the earth, an entire country bypassed the grave. The lesson from a century ago is clear. What began as a desperate strategy for survival became a powerful testament to the life-saving potential of a plant-based diet and potato-based diet.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: The Case for Vegetarianism
- Subtitle: Philosophy for a Small Planet
- Author: John Lawrence Hill
- Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
- Publication Year: 1996
- Edition: First Edition (Cloth ISBN:
0-8476-8137-8, Paperback ISBN:0-8476-8138-6) - Historical Period Covered: Antiquity (classical Greece, early Christianity, ancient Eastern civilizations) to the late 20th century (the modern environmental and animal rights movements of the 1970s–1990s).
- Main Subject Areas: Applied Ethics, Moral Philosophy, Animal Rights, Human Health & Nutrition, Environmental Ecology, Agricultural Economics, Global Resource Distribution.
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