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Maybe this breaking news will interest you:

http://www.sport24.co.za/OtherSport/Dal ... e-20120612

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/ ... 0820120612

http://espn.go.com/olympics/swimming/st ... rt-disease

This young world champion swimmer had a team of top class medical professionals around him to care about his health. Being a professional elite athlete, no expense was spared.

In the media, no doctor has mentioned diet as a possible cause of his heart disease.

I have not been able to gather what his diet was. Had he been on a vegetarian diet though, I am sure it would have been known.

wow, thanks for sharing.

This is why we keep hammering the message home that you don't know how much time you have when heart disease is your issue. This guy didn't even know he had heart disease. His first warning was also his last. At 26 it's not only shocking it's tragic. We forget this happens every day. So if you are in your 40's and 50's and you think you probably have lot's of time to turn your diet around remember this poor guy. He probably had advanced diseasewhen he hit his teen years. When we say you can't outwork a bad diet this is exactly what we are taking about. He was probably in the top percentages of people if we measure fitness. Unfortunately his health was very poor. The gap between fitness and health can be wide indeed. I am quite sure his family and friends are utterly shocked.
f1jim

Oh my goodness, I have to show this to my husband. He was just talking to me today about a friend of his that is "super healthy and fit" and swims every single day. He is addicted to candy and goes through a couple of large bags daily (his friend). My husband was "explaining" to me...

"so... see... all you have to do is eat what you enjoy and work a little bit harder to stay fit."

I think this will speak to him in a way that I cannot. Thank you for sharing this. Very sad indeed.

This is exactly the message I need to hear. Thanks for posting! Very sad.

I hope this being in the news helps a lot of people make the right connections. (Sometimes you just have to be an optimist.)

What a tragedy.

This is truly a tragedy and even worse I doubt anyone will learn from it. Every year Perfectly "fit" and "Healthy" people die this way and its almost always the same reaction.

His coaches/trainers/doctors probably just chalk it up to unfortunate genetics. Non-atheletes will simply say he obviously worked out too hard and too much and destroyed his heart giving them even more reason to not workout.

Very few if any, will think his diet was what pulled the trigger, despite any genetics and despite his high level of "fitness". Even fewer will understand that fitness does not equate to health directly.

Those of us following this lifestyle can only shake our heads in wonderment that these tragedies even still happen. What will it take to open people's eyes?

Unfortunately, with the food industry taking over more of our lives everyday to help fatten us up (opps I mean provide us with proper nutrition) and the medical industry fighting so hard to ensure that our symptoms of such nutrition are being alleviated as best they can, I think we can all look forward to just more of the same, in even more ever increasing numbers.

And thats the real tragedy here...our futures depend on us, because everyone elses futures are not very bright right now...

If he did eat meat, dairy and fats, how come we didn't see headlines about it? Apparently according to the press and other media, no one who eats animal food or fats ever dies because of his diet. Only vegetarians and vegans succumb to poor diet.

Didi

Of course in reality, the media will probably treat the story as if he had some obscure genetic disorder and it will be a wake up call to no one.

I dunno. It seems to me that when someone that young dies it probably IS genetic--not a genetic tendency towards heart disease but a genetic abnormality. Like what Sergei Grinkov had. Diet won't do a thing to fix an abnormal valve.

Edited to add that I just read the article in full and I guess this was NOT genetic--atherosclerosis would suggest a dietary link. So NOT like S. Grinkov.

The medical examiner in the Reuters article was quoted as saying ""The decedent's only known risk factor for heart disease was familial". If that's actually true, then the death might not have been diet related. I would assume a responsible medical professional would consider poor diet to be a risk factor, but who knows. I have no idea what this guy's diet was like.

Nah. "Familial" means that he had/has relatives w/ heart disease (probably from diet). The don't take diet into account at ALL--most people lie to doctors about what they eat and most doctors think that a "moderate" SAD diet is healthy!

I would hazard a guess that if he were eating a typical modern Scandinavian diet he might be eating quite a bit of fat-laden dairy and fish. But again, that's only a guess. I really don't know anything about the guy's diet, so I don't want to jump to the conclusion that his death was diet-related, any more than I would want someone to jump to the conclusion that the early or sudden death of a vegan or vegetarian person must have been diet-related.