Thomas Clayton retweetledi

Dr Atkins died of a heart attack.
He didn't. He slipped on ice outside his clinic in New York and died of a brain injury nine days later in hospital. He was 72. His heart, by all accounts, was fine.
The rumour started because it was useful. A convenient narrative for people who needed the diet to be dangerous. "The man who invented the diet died of the very thing he said it prevented" is a much better story than "he fell over on a slippery pavement in February."
It's also completely false.
His medical records showed a healthy cardiovascular system. The weight he gained in hospital was oedema from the brain injury. This detail was leaked to the press, stripped of context, and served as evidence of obesity. The man was unconscious in an ICU.
The myth persists because people repeat things that confirm what they already believe. Nobody fact-checks a good villain's death.
The diet works. The story was made up. Both of these things are true simultaneously and the second one doesn't affect the first.
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