Verschiedenes » Warum starb Seth Roberts?

Der frühe Tod von Seth Roberts hat mich berührt.

Seth Roberts war nicht zuletzt durch seine Pionieer-Arbeit in Sachen Selbstexperimente international bekannt. Im April 2014 erlitt er mit einen Herzinfarkt. Er wurde ca. 62 Jahre alt.
Ich denke, der Versuch einer Analyse der Todesumstände wäre auch in seinem Sinne gewesen. Seine Mutter schreibt dazu posthum in seinem Blog:

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The only information about his blood pressure was in the Beijing report where it was recorded at 117/87.
I could find no information about cholesterol levels, though it has not been a familial problem.
Of the remaining Framingham Study risk factors: Seth did not smoke or have diabetes.
He was not overweight and was physically active. Seth’s father died of a heart attack at 72.

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http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/05/10/cause-of-death/

Er starb also 10 Jahre früher als sein Vater, aber mit derselben Todesursache, ohne dass offentlichtliche zusätzliche Risikofaktoren vorgelegen hätten. Schauen wir uns jetzt einmal einige seiner eigenen Erkenntnisse an:
Bis zum Jahr 2009 vermied er tierische Fette in seiner Ernährung. Bis er im Rahmen seiner Selbstexperimente herausfand, dass tierische Fette durchaus auch positive Effekte aufwiesen: Eine bessere Gehirnfunktion! Die Beweisführung im Selbstexperiment ist brilliant, deswegen hier im Orignaltext:

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In 2009, I bought some pork from Devils Gulch Ranch, a family farm in California. I ate the familiar cuts and was left with an unfamiliar cut that was almost all fat (which I later learned was pork belly). At the time, like all sensible Americans, I avoided animal fat. The pork belly repulsed me but I didn’t want to throw it out.
It stayed in my freezer for months. Finally I ate it. The next morning I woke up full of energy, much more than usual. It must have been the pork belly. I felt full of energy all day. Eventually I did experiments to measure the effect of pork belly on my sleep. I woke up more rested after days I ate pork belly.
These results made me stop believing saturated fat is bad. The results were very clear. Sleep is central to health. Something that improves your sleep is likely to improve your health. My experiments were far from perfect but I found them more convincing than any of the evidence used to claim saturated fat is bad. Almost all that evidence came from surveys that compared people who ate more saturated fat with people who ate less. The two groups always differed in other ways (e.g., income) besides fat intake.
I tried to eat pork belly every day. One day it was going to be too hard to do this, so I ate butter instead. At lunch, at a restaurant, I asked for more butter twice. A few hours after lunch, I felt a pleasant warmth in my head. Pork belly hadn’t done that. Maybe butter was better for the brain than pork belly. I switched from pork belly to butter. A few days later, my arithmetic scores suddenly improved. This graph shows my daily scores.

The upper graph shows all my scores up to the day with the outlier (the rightmost day). The day with the outlier was unusual in several ways. For example, I ate a lot of butter; I also stood on a Chinese cobblestone mat. The next day I repeated all the unusual features and got an unusually fast score again. That’s what the lower graph shows.

After that – after I was sure the improvement was repeatable — I tested each unusual feature separately. It turned out that the one that mattered was eating butter. So I continued to eat butter daily – half a stick (about 60 g) per day. My arithmetic speed remained faster than usual, as this graph shows.
After I gave a talk about this, a cardiologist in the audience said I was killing myself. It turned out he didn’t understand the evidence that animal fat is bad. He thought the Framingham study found an association between animal fat and heart disease. In fact, it found no difference in diet between those who had heart attacks and those who didn’t (so the name was changed from the Framingham Diet Study to the Framingham Heart Study).

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http://betabeat.com/2014/04/seth-roberts.../#ixzz3E4ZaM663

Nun, Roberts hatte recht bezüglich seiner Kritik an der Framingham-Studie.
Allerdings beruhte der Einspruch des Kardiologen sicherlich nicht nur auf der Framingham-Studie. Auch die viel gescholtene Ärzteschaft greift nicht ausschließlich auf "evidenzbasierte" Erfahrung zu sondern auch auf jahrhundertealtes, von Generation zu Generation weitergegebenes Wissen. Im konkreten Fall hervorragend illustriert von Frank Netter:


Ein Mann,nicht ganz hager, etwa Mitte 50, tritt nach einem ausgiebigem, aber vermutlich stressigem Geschäftsessen hinaus in die Kälte, steigt eine Treppe hoch (körperliche Belastung), die Zigarrete fällt aus der Hand. Hier sind viele Risikofaktoren für ein Herzereignis prägnant in einem Bild zusammengefasst.

Genau genommen geht es gar nicht nur um Atheriosklerose. Bei derartigen akuten Herzattacken geht es in erster Linie um die Dynamik der Blutgerinnung.

Spielt Butter hier eine Rolle?

Schon 1956 war bekannt, dass Butter die Blutgerinnung maximal fördert, genau genommen die Phospholipide der Butter:

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The effect of a number of the usual dietary fats on
this system showed that the clotting effect was
almost entirely confined to milk fats and was
maximal in butter (Maclagan & Billimoria, 1956).
The activity was associated with the lipoprotein in butter,
and further separation indicated that the
active materials were phospholipids.

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles...j01005-0196.pdf

Phospholipide begünstigen Hyperkoagulabilität. Ob das wirklich der entscheidende Faktor für Seth Roberts leider viel zu frühen Tod war, bleibt spekulativ und es wäre maßlos übertrieben, deswegen Butter zu meiden. Nachdenklich stimmt es mich trotzdem.