Hey everyone, this is the last episode of the winter season of Disappearing Spoon.

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To the pediatricians, it just did not make sense.

Their patients were caught in a famine during World War II,

and they had a disorder that made them especially prone to starvation.

By all rights,

these children should be dead. So how on earth were they thriving? The setting was Holland,

the winter of 1944, exactly 80 years ago. The doctors specialized in a disease we have probably all heard of, celiac disease.

Today, it's a serious but manageable disorder for most people.

But in the early 1900s, it was one of the most baffling and heartbreaking diseases around.

The pediatricians' victims were seemingly normal children, with access to all the food they wanted,

yet they would starve down into skeletons, and the doctors could not do anything.

During the winter of 1944, things should have been even worse.

The ruling Nazis had disrupted the food supply in Holland and plunged the country into a disaster known as the hunger winter.

By December, daily rations had dropped below 1,000 calories. Millions were starving.

And yet, some of the already starving celiac children were gaining weight during a famine. How?

For one doctor, however, the situation made sense. In fact, for Willem

Dicca, the famine only confirmed his suspicions about celiac disease. Dicka's work would go on to

...