Eli5: how are “feast and famine” animals able to eat massive amounts of food after not eating for months or years, but humans will get re-feeding syndrome if eating a lot after a fast?
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Real answer: When you’re starving your body greatly decreases how much protein and stuff cells make, but there are still some essential things that they constantly need to make to survive. Since you aren’t getting anything from diet, this depletes the amounts of electrolytes and minerals and cells – they get used up making the essential stuff. While you’re starving your body is in full on conservation mode so you aren’t making any insulin. As soon as you eat food your body responds by making insulin again, and starts to store glucose, and this all tells your cells to resume normal production. However your cells still have very low concentrations of some minerals and electrolytes – specifically you’re worried about magnesium, potassium, and maybe phosphates. The cells that are now producing lots of proteins again now need to get these molecules from somewhere. They can take take them in from the blood, but that makes the concentration in your blood – we call it serum concentration – rapidly drop. Your body relies on having a consistent concentration of these things in your blood; as they drop you get seizures, heart arrhythmias or total heart failure, comas, etc.
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