“Steve Jobs, the genius behind Apple Computer, died October 5, and the animal rights organization PETA quickly lifted a tall glass of carrot juice to his memory. That’s what Jobs gave out to trick or treaters one Halloween, and PETA reminded us not only of that, but of other positive steps Jobs took for health and the environment,” Dr. Kaayla T. Daniel, Ph.D., C.C.N. writes for Psychology Today. “Jobs played a role in Disney’s 2006 decision not to renew its Happy Meal toy deal with McDonalds, for example, and more recently ‘greened up’ Apple’s manufacturing operations in China and elsewhere.”
“Sadly, PETA has yet to acknowledge the role that Jobs’s near vegan diet and frequent fruitarianism may have played in his death,” Daniel writes. “Indeed, PETA continues to maintain that their vegan brand of ‘right eating’ will virtually guarantee freedom from cancer and other major health problems despite the fact that most alternative MDs and health practitioners find serious illnesses among health-conscious vegans in their clinical practices.”
Daniel writes, “None of us, of course, knows what caused the pancreatic cancer that led to Steve Jobs’s death, or what, if anything could have saved him. Diet doubtless played a role, but lifestyle factors, environmental toxicity and genetic proclivities would have contributed as well. Certainly, Jobs was exposed over the years to massive bombardment from WiFi and other electromagnetic fields (EMFs). Medical treatments involving radiation, chemotherapy, a modified Whipple surgery, a liver transplant and immuno-suppressive drugs may also have contributed to his demise. That said, not long after Jobs’s death in October, people began asking me to comment on how his diet—and especially soy—might have contributed to his cancer and death.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “frisbee” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Hindsight is kind to Steve Jobs’ decision to delay cancer surgery – November 1, 2011
Steve Jobs tried everything from exotic diets to cutting-edge treatments in brave battle with cancer – October 21, 2011
Biographer: Steve Jobs refused early and potentially life-saving surgery for nine months (with video) – October 20, 2011
Doctor: There’s no way of knowing if nine-month surgery delay shortened Steve Jobs’ life – October 15, 2011
Harvard Medical School researcher: Steve Jobs’ trust in alternative medicine likely shortened his life – October 14, 2011
You don’t get cancer from a vegan diet, or can you?
Cancer, sadly, is just a scurge on mankind.
How do you explain a non-smoker from getting lung cancer like the case of Dana Reeve, wife of actor Christopher Reeve?
As in Dana’s case, Steve was just a victim of sad circumstances.
The pancreas is a gland organ in the digestive and endocrine system. It is both an endocrine gland producing several important hormones as well as a digestive organ, secreting pancreatic juice containing digestive enzymes that assist the absorption of nutrients and the digestion in the small intestine. These enzymes help to further break down the carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids in the chyme.
With that background, I submit that Jobs, being the control freak he is, screwed up his pancreas in the first place, long before he doomed himself by wasting 9 months with “special alternative medicines and diets.”
From his official biographer Walter Isaacson’s article, “American Icon,” in Time Magazine (October 17, 2011):
“The unified field theory that ties together Jobs’ personality and products begins with his most salient trait, his intensity. It was evident even in high school. By then he had begun his lifelong experimentation with compulsive diets…” (bold emphasis mine)
Jobs thought he knew better than everyone else. That resulted in wonderful products. It also caused him to ravage his pancreas to the point of collapse.
Even then, he still thought he knew better, and blew 9 crucial months doing God knows what else to his poor digestive system.
I believe that the very intensity and steadfast belief in himself that made him so great also resulted in his untimely death.
Utter rubbish. Levels of nutrients may decrease/increase with vegetarian diets, but there is NO WAY that eating fruit will cause pancreatic cancer.
He probably got cancer because he had to listen to idiots like you.
I’m not sure that’s what they guy said
Jobs died from pancreatic cancer of which the causes are unknown and for which there is no cure.
Scientifically, it is irresponsible to suggest this without clinically demonstrating the causality between this diet and pancreatic cancer.
MDN is a bullshit machine.
Jobs got the very rare kind of pancreatic cancer that can be successfully treated and survived. It’s not a “cure”, but then there’s no such thing in any cancer.
Also:
Scientifically, it is irresponsible to suggest that eating/drinking certain things, and avoiding medical treatments at all, is a good or even valid way to fight cancer. And yet I see this being put forth all the time as the alternative treatment for all forms of cancer (if it was for specific cancers then they’re negligent in not singling them out).
Steve Jobs is 100% a perfect counter-point to those proponents. It doesn’t matter at all whether there was or wasn’t a causal relationship between his diet and his cancer, because bottom line it didn’t work. Alternative diets and treatments may seem to work for a very tiny minority. But for all we know, for that tiny minority the cancer would have disappeared on its own, regardless of diet.
The point of using Steve Jobs as an example is that statistically, the odds of alternative treatments and diet alone working for you, or for the vast majority, is extremely small.
What about his use of psychedelic drugs? Those could have helped with his cancer?
Oops! Those could have help cause his cancer.
There is no connection established. Not even theoretical reasoning how this could possibly inflict any probability of cancer, based on biochemistry of psychedelic drugs. (By the way, there were like twenty years between the drugs and Jobs’ cancer.)
Drugs do have influence on other aspects of health, this is proven.
Oops.. Those could have helped cause his cancer.
You can do everything right and still have perfectly terrible things happen to you. The game of life is NOT one of “do everything right and everything will go your way.”
And it’s also not a game of “let’s pick at a dead man’s misfortune to see if we can blame it on him.” Come on.
I’ll second that. He’s dead leave him alone. Move on. Too many obsessing about his life and death. It’s not normal and it’s not healthy, speaking of healthy. And he gave out carrot juice to children at Halloween? Sad.
Kutcher said his pancreas went into a “‘fit” after he tried to emulate Jobs’ fruit diet. He was hospitalized with a pancreatic disorder. Think there could be a connection. Don’t know for sure, but sounds fishy.
Could be psychosomatic (an actor really getting into his role) or Kutcher just exaggerating a wee bit (wouldn’t hurt ticket sales).
To be fair, there is huge quantity of vegans, and there is no correlation between this and cancer probability whatsoever.
True, and considering that the vegaterian diet was devised over 5000 years ago by Vedic scientist at the behest of the Brahman to help ‘free’ oneself from the negative karma associated with meat eating. There’s a hella long track record to fall back on here. I’ve been eating a lactose vegaterian diet for nearly twenty years now and though I’ve never had a doctor tell me to start eating meat or die, the day that I do, I intend to grind his nose into this very history. It’s beyond rock solid.
Vegetarian is ONE thing. Fruitopian is totally another.
Yeah, I suppose there has to be a serious protein shortage with a ‘fruitopian’ diet, whatever that is… absolutely NOT what the Vedic scientist recommended to their Brahman to be sure. And thanks to all for not nailing me with the misspelled ‘vegatarian’… gawd, after twenty years one would think I would at least be able to spell it correctly. Peace and…
Go Apple!
Kutcher is suffering from entitlement syndrome and a large wallet – typical Hollywood hypochondriac.
What is certain is that Job’s belief in alternate therapy and diet delayed his treatment causing his death. He admitted to this himself.
Not at all; Jobs’ wife denied tabloidish Walter Isaacson slant of this episode of Jobs “delaying” the surgery for cancer. At the time when he was “delaying” there was no established recommendation that an absolute speed of the surgery would do any difference. This type of cancer can develop for years without ever being detected on MRT or any other way. Besiding “eating grass”, Jobs was consulting leading specialist from the world on better ways to treat the disease, so, according to Jobs’ wife, he was not “insane” contrary how it was portrayed by the biography.
I’ll go for the biographer’s take on the situation:
“Everyone else wanted Steve Jobs to move quickly against his tumor. His friends wanted him to get an operation. His wife wanted him to get an operation. But the Apple CEO, so used to swimming against the tide of popular opinion, insisted on trying alternative therapies for nine crucial months. Before he died, Jobs resolved to let the world know he deeply regretted the critical decision, biographer Walter Isaacson has told 60 Minutes.
“We talked about this a lot,” Isaacson told 60 Minutes of Jobs’s decision to treat a neuroendocrine tumor in his pancreas with an alternative diet rather than medically recommended surgery. “He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it….I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner… He said, ‘I didn’t want my body to be opened…I didn’t want to be violated in that way.’”
He waited 9 months – far long enough for progression of metastatic disease.
Open up NetFlix and check out the documentary “Forks over knives” it outlines the link between meat and diary diet and cancer and blood vascular problems. Seems to be some serious facts behind the theory at least on a larger scale.
After reading this, I am going to find a goose and rip its head off and eat its liver, on camera, and send it to the fsckups at PETA. LOL!
Every Vegan ever born will die. Excepting those who already have.
The article is deplorable.
Cancer from Vegies, Wi-Fi, EMF, is ridiculous. I am not a tree hugger, nor anti GMO and such. However I don’t like Monsanto, nor PETA, or any extremist organization.
I bet there are Apple employees, who were exposed to tons more Wi-Fi, EMF, Chems, Drugs, are Veg, and living healthy.
Jobs pulled the short straw, it’s that simple. RIP
Don’t disrespect others.
The real interesting questions from my point of view are:
1. One what NOT cause cancer?
2. Why are the cures of cancer and those that come up with them discredited?
One of the side effect of life is death, live with it, die with it.
Reading between the lines of the Isaacson book, or just recalling the numerous instances that are illustrated in small details, others might have put his cause of death as an eating disorder. His cancer was treatable and beatable, but he could not overcome his own behaviour. With or without cancer, which he chose not to treat when advised, you need nutrition to survive. Isaacson recounted numerous instances of doctors telling him he had to eat, and numerous instances of him either not eating or eating only one type of food, the broccoli thing, for example. Or the story about the chef making all the meal shakes, and he takes tiny sips of each before declaring them “inedible”.
Say a terminal cancer patient takes a gun and blows a whole in his head, the ME writes ‘suicide’. Say someone else with non-terminal cancer doesn’t get it treated thus allowing it to advance to a terminal state, and on top of that instead of a gun they slowly starve them self to a condition that everyone in the world can plainly see is having a detrimental affect on their health…
Putting the gun to your head is behavioral, denying yourself
physical needs is also behavioral.
Suicide.
You certainly don’t get cancer from a vegan diet. But sure it won’t prevent cancer either.
Steve Jobs died because he waited 9 months after being diagnosed with cancer to have the surgery to remove it. His belief in Alternative Medicine killed him. He was a brilliant man and one of my heroes, but he was fooled into believing that Science-based medicine was ineffective compared to nutritional remedies. He would be alive today had he not told his physician, who was begging him to have immediate surgery, that he was going to beat the cancer on his own.
There is a lot of fraudulent, quackery out there that pretends to do no harm, but if you need to be reminded of the damage they can do, look at Steve.
It is a well-known fact that vegans have a difficult time getting enough protein in their diet. It is a well-known fact that too much soy is not good for a man, and can lead to elevated amounts of estrogen being produced.
Vegans typically use soy products (like tofu) or beans for their protein. Beans are 70% carbohydrate. Soy is, of course, derived from the soybean. Tofu may be refined to have less carbs, but regardless, they are not adequate protein replacements for meat or eggs.
Man’s body is not designed to be a vegan. Did that have an affect on Jobs’ cancer? Who knows.
However, we DO know that diet plays a major role in disease/conditions: most people are nutritionally deficient, and eating processed foods is not better for you than eating fresh foods. We go to restaurants which give ridiculous portion sizes and pack our foods full of various chemicals (why anything should have a 99 year shelf life is beyond me). Type II diabetes is caused by poor diet and can be fully resolved by changing the diet.
Jobs made his choices, both professionally and personally. Like all of us, some worked out well and others not so much.
The sad thing is that this article takes one piece of information, and with no supporting facts, creates an entire theory just to lash out at a group the author doesn’t like (PETA), not that I care for them either. Just another example of slow news day + opportunism at work.
Steve Jobs grew up in a home where both parents smoked and came of age in an era where most of the adults around him probably smoked for a significant portion of his life. There is a direct relationship between smoking and Pancreatic Cancer and he undoubtedly was exposed to significant second hand smoke during his lifetime.
Next, the worst thing we know he did was wait after having been fortunate enough to have had an early diagnosis of Pancreatic Cancer via a CT scan for Renal Stones. One can only speculate, but his odds would have been magnified significantly had he not tried prayer, fasting and whatever other voodoo instead of having the Whipple procedure. The window of opportunity with Pancreatic Cancers of his kind are not large.
Everybody’s diet contributes to their health problems.
Life is a terminal condition; no one gets out alive. So, why not just starve to death now instead of waiting for your food to kill you?
Everything one reads about diet and health is a bundle of hedges, qualifications, and contradictions. Here’s my approach:
All things in moderation. Please pass the gravy.
Didnt he last much longer than the avg person with the same disease?
talk about extreme, the president at the Weston A. Price Foundation who wrote the piece is a total crackpot, read some of their ideas about diet, they source no proof in their claims only BS of their namesake, they also say things like don’t drink water, get it naturally from the foods (mostly fruits) that you eat. the Weston A. Price Foundation is as anti-Vegan as it gets and pro american industry of food in turn. check the source material folks, cool MDN posts everything apple related, but this is lame propaganda for Weston A. Price Foundation
Maybe Steve should have had let Ballmer do his grocery shopping. Looks like Monkey Boy will live forever.
Nobody has mentioned Steve’s love of the tasty sugared beverage…
… and that would probably be because I’m wrong and he apparently didn’t have one! 🙂
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/5/1171.short
just food for thought.
Not saying fruit killed him for sure but that’s a lot of sugars for the body to deal with over a long time.
That had nothing to do with fruits; the study was on foods with ADDED sugars.