What Really killed the Iconic Singer Prince

As you likely already know, the legendary singer Prince died from an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2016 at his Paisley Park complex near Chanhassen, Minnesota. I have always been a bit obsessed about Prince. After all, I graduated from Saint Louis Park High School, a few miles from Paisley Park. In my not-so-wise youth, I also managed to visit some of the same Lake Street dives that Prince visited in his formative years.

When it comes to “cause of death”, there are several accepted components:

• Immediate cause of death: For Prince, this would be respiratory suppression from narcotics overdose.
• Proximate cause of death: This would be the pattern of narcotics abuse that Prince demonstrated before his death.
• Contributing factors to death: These factors play a role in the death but do not directly cause the death. In this case I propose his diet as a contributing cause.

The interesting thing about “contributing factors”, is that if they were not present, the death might have been avoided. There is a contributing factor to the demise of Prince that has been completely overlooked–that is except by me. What is this mysterious contributing factor? The answer is sugar! Let me explain. Most people are at least vaguely aware of the history of his slow slide into drug abuse. In his younger years Prince was adamantly anti-drug, and he lived the lifestyle of a potential saint. For years he loosely followed a relatively healthy vegan diet, but it wasn’t long before a white powdery substance slowly began to infiltrate his diet: sugar!

Ubiquitous Sweets
For many years long before his narcotic woes, Prince clearly had a sweet tooth. This trait was documented by those who prepared and served his food. He often ate cake for a meal, he loved ice cream and other sweet treats, and it seemed that he always had to eat something very sweet. He also loved high-glycemic carbs like pancakes. One of his favorite meals was spaghetti and organ juice, signs of a dedicated carboholic. He also loved his Dunkaroos, another sugar laden sweet treat.

What does this tell us about Prince and his overall health? After all, many people “like” sweets, and who doesn’t like to end a meal with dessert? When it comes to health, especially brain health, you need to pay careful attention to the difference between “liking” and “craving” sweet and starchy food. Liking is normal, whereas craving is not. In my many decades of clinical experience, these cravings virtually always indicate some degree of diet-induced brain dysfunction. Let me walk you through the process.

The Twisted Tale of Sugar
Humans evolved eating low glycemic carbohydrates with virtually no sucrose or table sugar. Our ancestors only got fructose from ripe fruit, a likely rare treat. As you may know, our modern diet is loaded with various forms of sugar and added sucrose or HFCS. There are several problems with this change. As my friend and classmate Richard Johnson has pointed out, any fructose intake above about 20 grams daily is converted to body fat. Excess body fat tends to lead to insulin resistance. If you have insulin resistance and consume processed food, you end up with sudden glucose spikes, a relatively new development in human evolution. Years ago, I worked with Gottfried Kellermann, who founded the company Neuroscience, Inc. At the time Kellermann was experimenting with urine tests for monoamine neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, GABA, and norepinephrine. Nobody was quite sure how to interpret these urine results. Kellermann gave me some sample tests to use in my medical practice, and I started running tests on some of my patients. At one point I ran the tests on patients undergoing glucose tolerance tests to screen for diabetes. At the beginning of the test, patients are given a large glucose load.

Flush Away Your Monoamines
I immediately noticed an interesting pattern. After getting the glucose load, my patients’ urine would suddenly fill up with high levels of monoamine neurotransmitters. It didn’t make sense that mother nature would flush these valuable chemicals down the toilet, so I recognized that this was a pathological process rather than normal biology. It seems that glucose spikes cause a dumping of monoamines into the synaptic space between cells, overwhelming the reuptake system that evolved to recycle these chemicals. The neurotransmitters would then be taken up by the vascular system and would be cleared by the kidneys. Over time this would lead to a depletion of monoamines, resulting in up to 22 pathological brain dysfunction symptoms. Over time, I recognized that this process fit the pattern of a disease that I named Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome.

Crave versus Like
The lead symptom of CARB syndrome is having strong cravings for sweet and starchy food. These cravings can become quite intense and often dominate a person’s food choices. This causes the person to consume more of the very food that is frying their brain, and they gradually develop the other symptoms of the disorder. The medical and scientific communities completely missed this process. They don’t know what to make of a person’s cravings for sugar and high-glycemic carbs, and they attribute the other symptoms of CARB syndrome to a long list of common brain disorders. They often end up putting these patients on psychiatric medications that make their CARB syndrome worse. These patients are also more prone to developing addiction to narcotics because they have poor impulse control and magnified pain perception, two additional symptoms of CARB syndrome.

This where is gets tricky. Most patients with CARB syndrome store excessive body fat leading to obvious obesity. Some folks store excessive fat but lose a lot of lean body mass. This occurs in those who tend to undereat but still consume a lot of sugar and starch. Anorexia is a good example. In my opinion, all individuals with anorexia and other common eating disorders have CARB syndrome as their prime underlying disease. With these “thin but obese” folks, you need to measure their body composition to see their excessive body fat. I measured the body composition on every patient at every visit for over a decade, so I know this topic inside and out!

The Unnecessary Demise of Prince
Are you starting to see a pattern here? If you read anything about Prince and his woes, and you read through the 22 symptoms of CARB syndrome, it will be obvious that he fits this pattern. If you read about his addiction to narcotics and his strong cravings for sweat and starchy food, the diagnosis is clinched. The sad element of this tale is that CARB syndrome is completely preventable, reversible, and treatable. Several days before his death, Prince had to be revived from a narcotic-induced coma with Narcan. He was taken to a hospital, but he left against medical advice. On the day he died from a fentanyl overdose, a narcotics specialist from California was flying into town to treat him. Even if this had worked, it would not have saved Prince. To do that his underlying CARB syndrome would have needed to be treated. The only person on the face of the earth who could have done so is me.

There’s another example of a talented musician taken away too soon: Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. In my opinion, his demise was clearly driven by untreated CARB syndrome, but the details of this tragic story await a future blog post. I could give many other examples, but I think you get the picture.

Honor Prince by Learning from His Unfortunate Demise
The message here is clear. If you or someone your know fits the CARB syndrome pattern, I strongly recommend that you read my book “Brain Drain” where I teach you to self-diagnose CARB syndrome and arrange for you own treatment. I know, this isn’t an ideal situation, but it will likely be eons before the medical and scientific communities accept this new disease model, if they ever do. Until that happens, you certainly don’t want to end up like Prince. “Purple Rain” was the last song he ever performed, a week before he died. It’s also my favorite song, because it reminds me about the genius of Prince and what CARB syndrome has tragically taken away.

I would like to thank Andy Steinfeldt for his assistance in editing this post.