The dangers of binge dieting for over-50s
Shane Warne went on an ‘Operation Shred’ fast before his death. Miranda Levy looks at the dark side of detox
On Friday, the world was shocked by the sudden death of cricketer Shane Warne. The legendary Australian spinner was found face down on a bed by a friend in his holiday villa in Koh Samui, Thailand, after suffering a massive heart attack.
How could this happen to a fit former sportsman, at the astonishingly young age of 52? Family are now suggesting that Warne had “seen a doctor about his heart”, and had been suffering from asthma, as well as “chest pains” and “sweating” in the lead-up to his trip.
Warne had also been treated for Covid last summer. But new information is emerging that, four days before his death, the cricketer had embarked on an extreme caloriecontrolled diet, a programme he had nicknamed “Operation Shred” on Instagram, accompanied by a muscular photo of himself from earlier days.
Could this diet have contributed to Warne’s death? Warne was known to have smoked “for most of his life”. He had a reputation for partying and womanising. However, those close to the cricketer are moving to scotch any rumours that Warne had been on some sort of fatal bender.
“He didn’t drink much,” Warne’s manager James Erskine told Australian newspaper, The Age. “And he never took drugs, ever.” In fact, said Erskine: “Shane was on holiday, having a siesta, he hadn’t been drinking, he’d been on this diet to lose weight”.
But all the signs are that “this diet” was hardly a measured weight-loss programme. The Samujana hotel, where Warne was staying, offered “Juice Queen cleanses … a juice feast, a holiday for the body, the ultimate health indulgence”. There is no evidence he was following one of these programmes, but the cricketer was a fan of similar regimes. Said Erskine: “Shane was a bit ‘all or nothing’. It was either white buns with butter and lasagne stuffed in the middle, or he would be having black and green juices. He did go on these ridiculous sorts of diets and he just finished one, where he basically only had fluids for 14 days and he’d done this three or four times.”
Warne’s weight had famously yo-yo’d. He was photographed regularly with a beer and a pie. Then, in May last year, he told a men’s magazine he had dropped 14kg (two stone two pounds) by using “traditional Chinese medicine”. Warne’s son Jackson has referred to his father’s regular “30-day fasting tea diets”; in 2019 it was reported the cricketer had visited Traditional Chinese Medicine Australia, a company famous for its Wellbeing 101 diet, which replaces all meals with a herbal concoction for up to four weeks. A year earlier, TCMA’S director Dr Shuquan Liu had his medical licence suspended after a patient with a pre-existing heart condition on one of his “wellness programmes” had a “cardiac event” and died. There is nothing to suggest that Warne was under Dr Liu’s treatment.
An autopsy yesterday revealed that Warne died of “natural causes”, and there is currently no evidence to suggest his latest diet led to his death. However, the close proximity of the two events certainly raises questions.
So how dangerous could extreme or crash diets turn out to be? Dr Giles Yeo is a Principal Research Associate at MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit at Cambridge, and an expert in obesity. “It all depends on who you are, and how low calorie the diet,” he says. “Some people need to lose weight, and a VLCD (very low calorie diet) that is balanced and supervised can be very helpful.” Dr Yeo points to a 2011 study at Newcastle University where a group of type 2 diabetics on an 800 calorie a day diet lost significant weight, and their disease went into remission.
Other experts urge caution. Aisling Pigott is a registered dietician and spokesperson for the British Dietetics Association. She says: “Many of these crash diets are very low in energy, very low in protein and very low in vitamins and minerals,” she says. “Essentially what you’re doing is putting your body in a state of starvation without any safeguards and making yourself more vulnerable to infection and illness.”
There is evidence that extreme weight loss is particularly dangerous for people with existing heart problems – which Warne appears to have suffered. In the 1970s, the appropriately-named Last Chance ultra-low-calorie liquid diet promoted by osteopath Robert Linn became a sensation – until American health authorities later linked the diet to the deaths of 17 people, all of whom suffered heart arrhythmia.
More recently, in 2018, a team of scientists from Oxford University published an eight-week study using MRI to look at the hearts of 21 obese volunteers who were on VLCDS of 600 to 800 calories a day. Like Warne, the subjects had an average age of 52. After one week, the subjects lost significant total body fat, and had improved in insulin resistance, cholesterol, and blood pressure. But their heart fat content had risen by 44 per cent in just seven days, a change associated with a deterioration in heart function, including the organ’s ability to pump blood.
“The metabolic improvements with a very low-calorie diet, such as a reduction in liver fat and reversal of diabetes, would be expected to improve heart function,” said lead author Dr Jennifer Rayner, of Oxford University. “Instead, heart function got worse in the first week before starting to improve.” Rayner insisted that patients with heart problems needed to check with their doctors before embarking on a very low calorie diet or fasting, and that their diets should be supervised.
A tendency to “yo-yo” diet – as Warne appeared to do – can also be risky. Says Dr Giles Yeo: “If you yo-yo diet in a crazy way – adding and losing stones – that can put an awful lot of stress on your body.” Piggott says: “Sometimes we have seen big shifts in patients with extreme eating disorders, or who purge and make themselves unwell, which can lead to cardiac arrhythmias and impact kidney function.”
Dr Yeo adds that while being middle-aged, like Warne, is not itself a risk, men are more at risk of heart attacks and other metabolic disorders “because they store fat around their middles – which can lead to cardiovascular problems.”
And what of the “detox diet”? “We do need to detox, but we have kidneys and a liver that detox for us,” says Aisling Piggott. “There’s no food you can eat and no diet you can go on that will enhance the detoxification process.”