The (Sad) Downfall Of Steve Jobs

There seem to be those who love and those who really dislike Steve Jobs. There’s no denying that he was pretty talented when it came to building a business.

Starting with Steve Wozniak in 1976, the pair helped launch the home computer revolution with the Apple I and then the Apple II computers. They took the company public in 1980 and helped grow it into the trillion plus dollar company it is today.

An incredibly successful businessman. Unfortunately he didn’t have the same luck with his health.

He died on October 5th, 2011. He was only 56 years old. Younger than me (Gulp). The cause of death was a relapse of his islet-cell pancreatic cancer. The world lost quite a visionary 14 years ago or so.

During his last years of life, he battled with his doctors on how to treat the cancer. He was originally diagnosed with it back in 2003. The islet cell form of pancreatic cancer was a less-aggressive type and the medical world believes it can be treated successfully with surgery.

Jobs fought the surgery for nine months before finally undergoing it. During those nine months he tried:

• A vegan diet

• Acupuncture

• Herbal remedies

• Juice fasts

• Bowel cleanses

He even consulted a psychic. Finally after nine months he did the surgery - a pancreaticduodenectomy. Imagine that word in a high school spelling bee.

The surgery was successful. They seemed to remove the tumor.

In 2006 the cancer returned. They hid his health problems until about 2008 when he underwent a liver transplant because the cancer had spread to his liver. The transplant was successful but Jobs never regained his health.

He resigned from Apple in August of 2011 and passed away two months later.

I think the life of Steve Jobs has many lessons. Before the diagnosis of cancer, Steve Jobs followed an extreme diet:

• He avoided healthy fats

• Refused all protein sources (have you seen how thin he was for most of his life?)

• Believed fruit would cleanse his system

• Often would only eat one type of fruit for weeks

He had been on this extreme diet since his 20’s. All the doctors begged him to change his diet but he wouldn’t. He doubled down and lost 40 pounds during those cancer years.

Ironically when the actor Ashton Kucher played Steve Jobs in a movie, Kucher tried the Jobs diet. He ended up hospitalized with pancreatic inflammation.

The largest lesson I take away from this tragic story is how even the most brilliant people we have can still be duped into following health ‘fads’ that are not healthy at all. It’s the same for financial scams.

It’s a bit like the definition of insanity. Jobs was following this diet since his 20’s. Yet when he received the cancer diagnosis, he kept eating the same things (and added a few other ‘therapies’) expecting a different result.

I’ve gone from eating a standard American diet when I was much younger, to a Paleo, then a Vegan diet to a Keto and eventually carnivore diet. I seem to be the opposite of Steve Jobs - jumping all over the place.

Yet I still will be open to changing my diet if I see lots of other people having success with another way of eating.

What’s truly amazing to me is how important what you put in your body is to your overall health. And yet that doesn’t seem to be a big topic of discussion other than surface-level suggestions. Especially when a medical practitioner meets with their patient.

We need to change that.