Everyone's heard the heartbreaking stories of Allied troops liberating the concentration

camps at the end of World War II and giving all their rations to the starving victims,

only to see those victims die almost immediately from the unfamiliar rush of food.

It's called refeeding syndrome, and it is a real medical phenomenon.

Today we're going to find out just how realistic these particular stories are.

Can you really die so quickly from just a few bites of food?

And we're going to find out right now on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid.

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

Refeeding syndrome and sudden death.

We've all seen it in the newsreels, Europe, 1945, Allied forces liberating the prisoners

in the Nazi concentration camps.

Shocked at the skeletal condition of some of the prisoners who've been subsisting on starvation

diets for months or even years, the soldiers hand over every scrap of food they can lay their

hands on.

But then, many of these reports say, the sucker has an unexpected and horrifying effect.

Some of the prisoners fall instantly dead at the first bite, within minutes many others

have followed.

Today, we're going to look at the facts behind stories of starved people suddenly dying

upon receiving their first bites of food.

The most infamous of these stories comes from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern

Germany, best known as the camp where Anne Frank died after her family's arrest.

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