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Comment by ryanholiday | Hacker News Reader

I was fortunate enough to publish Seth's final column this morning.

http://betabeat.com/2014/04/seth-roberts-final-column-butter...

You owe it to your readers to say that Seth's death is a warning to those who would flaunt conventional medical wisdom, as he clearly did.

Anyone who stakes their life on a single published meta-analysis is unwise. Anyone who puts faith in a single assessor of cardiac risk, coronary CT, is unwise. It is ironic that the most apt assessment of Seth's life and death comes from a margarine commercial popular in the 1970s: "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

> You owe it to your readers to say that Seth's death is a warning to those who would flaunt conventional medical wisdom, as he clearly did.

Your comments in this thread are inappropriate and untimely. We do not yet know what caused Seth's collapse, and to jump to blame his experiments because you disagree with his methods is shortsighted.

They are completely appropriate and very timely. "Collapsed while hiking." The only way that can happen is with an interruption in blood flow, which means a clot or a bleed. If you want, I can go into details, but with his butter and his omega habits, he was putting himself at risk for both, contradictory as that may sound.

> "Collapsed while hiking." The only way that can happen is with an interruption in blood flow, which means a clot or a bleed. If you want, I can go into details, but with his butter and his omega habits, he was putting himself at risk for both, contradictory as that may sound.

This is not science. You are drawing a conclusion to support your own preconceived medical notions based on incredibly limited evidence.

The world does not need more armchair coroners, claiming they've determined causes of death in comment threads hours after someone has passed.

Yes, exactly, everyone has anecdotes. I knew someone who did "all the right things," as recommended by the most mainstream medical advice, ate low fat, exercised, kept track of his bloodwork, etc., and dropped dead on a hike right around the same age. It happens.

Doing all the right things won't guarantee survival to age 100, 80, 60, or even 40. I think about it like this: We're all born with a genetically determined maximum life span that is unknown to us. Our environment and our choices cannot extend it -- they can only shorten it. It's great that your friend did all the right things, because he would likely have died sooner if he hadn't. Ultimately, he got a raw deal, and I wish medical science had been able to do better for him. There are a lot of dedicated, smart, honest people working to improve our understanding of disease and its prevention so stories like your friend's will end at age 90. n=1 experiments are useful for hypothesis generation, but they can never answer a non-trivial question.

Seth had high quality health cover provided by UC Berkeley, and availed himself of routine checkups, including cholesterol counts. He reported that his numbers had been going down since he started this regime.

His unusual diet may have been connected to his death, and it's certainly reason for concern, but you don't know anything about the causality.

We know for certain that Seth had coronary artery disease. How? Because he had a non-zero score on his coronary CT scan. It is not normal to have calcified coronary arteries -- at any age. It may be so common as to be the statistical norm, but coronary calcification is never physiologically normal. Coronary artery disease is responsible for about half of all deaths in the United States. Seth may have had "quality health cover," but we know he still developed coronary disease. Remember, too, that sudden unexpected death is the first symptom in 20% of cases of coronary artery disease. This is a terrible problem that the field is working hard to solve.

If his condition was the statistical norm, how can you attribute it to his unusual diet?

Death is not the statistical norm at age 60 in the United States among the upper middle class.

You don't know what killed him.

> "Collapsed while hiking." The only way that can happen is with an interruption in blood flow, which means a clot or a bleed.

or just due to plain old heatstroke and/or going beyond your physical limit (on that given day and for you given overall condition for that day). You should at least have mentioned whether you know this hills. I hike a lot in the East Bay, and if i remember the Sat was pretty sunny.

Please. "Plain old heatstroke" -- in northern California in springtime? The high temperature for that day was 63 degrees, according to: http://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/berkeley/historic

It was not heatstroke.

"Going beyond your physical limit" -- what, exactly, does that mean? Thousands of times a day, people get on treadmills in cardiologists' offices, and are taken to their physical limit with a "maximal effort stress test." Even this doesn't precipitate life-threatening complications unless cardiovascular disease is present.

There are some genetic blood disorders that can cause sudden death during extremely heavy exertion (e.g. professional football drills) at altitude, but they are very rare in caucasians, and Berkeley's hills don't qualify as "altitude."

I met Seth a few times and I remember one time he asked to go hiking in a fairly unsafe area when it was getting dark.

Your comment is the most insensitive, self-righteous, arrogant, dismissive comment I have ever seen online! For God's sake--the man died! Have you no compassion for his loss or what his family may be feeling? It appears that you think you have some incredible wisdom about the causes of death or health. SHAME ON YOU! Here's something to think about: No one gets out alive or without tragedy and suffering in life.It is the human condition! So when your health crisis hits or some other life tragedy, please remember vividly your words and callousness about Seth.

Hey, I got an idea. Instead of engaging in virtually baseless speculation and jumping to conclusions, why don't you go fuck yourself?

You may be right about what killed him, asshole, but how about you let his body get cold first before you start tut-tutting and wagging your finger?

Dude, I am trying to save lives here. The more people that think his methods were safe, the more people who are going to die. I would even like to save your life, despite your propensity for name-calling. Now is the teachable moment.

You didn't hear me, bro. GO FUCK YOURSELF.

Seeing as how, right now, at this moment, YOU HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE what killed him, take your "teachable moment" and shove it up your ass.

Uh, shut up. It's a discussion forum and he expressed an opinion, instead you just hurl insults? While his might fall under the "too soon" yours is just inappropriate.

Currently there is no evidence for any relation between his methods and his death. The cause of death either hasn't been determined yet or is currently private.

It's already apparent for reasons exclusive of this that experimenting on yourself is a bad idea. However it is fallacious to just assume that his actions led to his death like this and to claim outright like you are is irresponsible.

That troll was over the top, but your comments in this thread are also borderline trolling. We don't know why Seth Roberts died, and your repeated insistence about it is derailing the thread. Please stop.

If I may, I think that you are wrong about this call, Mod.

On the surface and, in the general case, I agree maj0rhn's comments could be seen as borderline trolling. However, in this case we are discussing an untimely and rare sudden death of a very public figure that, very publicly, was engaging in and tacitly touting the health benefits of a practice that the medical community, wisely or not, widely agrees on as a significant risk factor for some of the most common causes of, precisely, sudden death. I think the public/hacker interest case for openly debating the possibility of a link --and the related possibility that those of us who liked to experiment with ourselves and try out Seth's ideas might, just might, have unknowingly exposed ourselves to an increased risk of a rare sudden death--- is fair and proper in this case.

TL;DR this[1] comment sums up my reaction better than the lousy wall of text above.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663406

It's true that Seth tried all sorts of wacky self-experiments, but it's worth keeping in mind why. Most of them were inspired by the fact that he wasn't sleeping well. He tried all these odd magical remedies - standing on one leg, "morning faces" and nighttime honey are a few I recall offhand - because he had a medical symptom: the inability to sleep well, for which he could find no satisfactory conventional remedy. So he started collecting statistics while trying unconventional remedies, some of which seemed to help.

So perhaps what finally killed Seth relates not to his experimental treatments, but to whatever underlying preexisting conditions inspired him to invest such effort. Seems worth considering, anyway.

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