2 researchers digging into MREs
Their mission is ramping up nutrition in combat rations
When Arny Ferrando joined the U.S. Army in 1974, his combat rations included leftovers from World War II — pork loin dated 1945.
“When you’re hungry, it doesn’t really matter,” he said with a laugh. “Almost 30 years later, and it was still palatable.”
Despite the shelf life of combat rations and the upgrades they’ve gotten since then, research has found that soldiers aren’t getting adequate nutrition.
Now a researcher at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, Ferrando has received a $2.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop a better way to feed soldiers in the field.
His collaborator on the five-year project is another U.S. Army veteran, Stefan Pasiakos, a nutritional physiologist in the Military Nutrition Division of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Mass.
“For a very long time now, we’ve been trying to understand how we can best feed our war fighters who are operating in the most extreme conditions, and one of the most common metabolic stressors that affect our guys and females out in the field is the fact that they’re not consuming enough calories to match the metabolic stress,”
Pasiakos said.
Some of the earliest research on the long-term consequences of underfeeding soldiers was done during World War II, he said.
Now, the most widely used version of a combat ration is called the Meal Ready to Eat, or MRE. MREs include entrees such as chicken pesto pasta or beef fried rice, as well as snacks and drink mixes.
Those rations are constructed to meet nutritional requirements established by the Army. If the Army provides sufficient rations that meet the high caloric demands of a particular operation and the soldiers consume the entire ration, they’ll get that recommended amount of nutrients.
But that doesn’t often happen. Factors including limited time and a lack of desire to eat the food provided lead to soldiers not eating enough.
“Eating, when you’re in combat operations or combat training, it’s always a secondary or perhaps tertiary motivation,” Ferrando said. “You gotta eat to keep moving, you’re hungry, but there’s just so many other things that you rarely get the opportunity to actually sit down and eat.”
MREs require the soldier to stop and put the meal together, which isn’t conducive to the conditions troops face, he said.
“You just need the time, and in those scenarios, time is not an asset you have,” Ferrando said. “You throw whatever you can in your mouth and that’s far from optimal, and the longer that goes on, the more your performance is affected.”
The result for those soldiers is severe caloric deficits, and loss of body mass and muscle mass.
The magnitude of the caloric deficit and body mass loss is proportional to physical performance decline, Pasiakos said.
For the first phase of their research, Ferrando and Pasiakos will determine the optimal amount of essential amino acids that soldiers need to stimulate muscle recovery.
They also need to find out the best way to add that to soldiers’ diets, whether it’s through meals or supplemental food products.
Then, the researchers will work with the Combat Feeding Directorate at the Natick Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center on developing prototype food products and testing them in simulated and real-world military operations.
The goal is to create something that delivers the nutrients soldiers need and also tastes good.
“If you give it to a special operator and he’s never going to use it then we’ve failed,” Ferrando said. “It could be the best thing in the world, but if it’s too cumbersome, tastes crummy, [is] too hard to do, he’s still not going to use it. So that’s where the ultimate test would be.”