On Rare Occasions, Ham Isn't Funny
“Mama” Cass Elliot didn’t die from choking on a sandwich. I never stopped to think about this story (so I guess I assumed it was true) and now I feel suckered. She was fat, so of course gluttony is what killed her, and her death deserves nothing better than to be turned into a joke.
The urban legend holds that Elliot died choking on a ham sandwich…the rumor spread, with the popular imagination embellishing that it was a ham sandwich (possibly based on an association with ham, pigs, and her obesity)…This urban legend led to the joke that “if Mama Cass had given Karen Carpenter the ham sandwich, they’d both be alive today”.
Yeah, I doubt the ham sandwich story would have been so popular if the rumor started about Janis Joplin. This site says:
Many rumors began to circulate after her death which included she died from a drug overdose, the FBI planned to assassinate her, and she was pregnant with John Lennon’s baby. However, the most well known was she died from [choking] on a ham sandwich. This is simply not true. The official cause of death was a heart attack brought about by fatty degeneration of the heart muscle fiber. Her prolonged obesity and crash diets weakened her heart to the point of failure. [The doctor on the scene] overlooked the significant fact that the sandwich by Cass’s bed had not been touched.
Her Wikipedia page has a lot more information about her, and also says that crash dieting weakened her voice towards the end of her life. I was interested to know exactly how obesity and dieting would destroy heart muscle. This site has an explanation.
Obese people tend to store fat, not only in regular fat cells, but also in muscle tissue. Then, when they try to lose weight (via a weight loss diet), they lose both fat from the fat cells and protein from the muscles—before they lose fat from the muscles
The website that I got that from doesn’t seem like an unbiased source, though. If anyone can find a more sciency explanation for me, that would rule. In the meantime, I’ll be raising a glass to Cass Elliot. She died in July 1974, 33 years ago; she was only 33. She deserves better than to be a punchline.
Posted by mo pie
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great post, and damn right she deserves better than that shoddy punchline. ohhh that voice… will have to dust off my Mamas & the Papas Greatest Hits :)
I had never thought about it either. That really pisses me off. Crash dieting. Goddamn.
Um, indeed it is not an unbiased source. It’s an anti-evolution website (see the front page)! I’ve never heard of anyone losing heart tissue on a crash diet, but fatty degeneration of the heart muscle fiber is a real (but rare) thing and it’s caused by obesity, not by dieting. However, I think her overall lifestyle was pretty unhealthy, which probably didn’t help.
I know, I felt kinda silly myself when I found out that she died of a heart attack. I actually felt a little ashamed that I had honestly allowed myself to believe that she’d choked on a sandwich, because, well, duh! Of course a fat lady would die like that! That’s it, I’m putting my M&P’s on my iPod right now!
The theory is that extreme dieting or fasting will cause you to lose muscle (your body hangs onto the fat to use as a source of energy in the forthcoming famine). The heart is a muscle so you can actually lose weight from your heart too. That’s why the experts recommend that dieters lose no more than one to two pounds a week, because when you lose weight slowly, you will lose fat, not muscle.
So yeah, crash dieting can weaken your heart. And of course, being obese puts a strain on your heart as it has to work harder. So the combination of the two could induce a heart attack.
I always heard that Mama Cass died of a heroin overdose and the ham sandwich story was concocted to cover that up.
Re-reading my earlier post, I realize I should have said that I’ve never heard of a normal-weight or overweight person losing heart tissue on a crash diet. It does happen to anorexics and other underweight people. But under ordinary circumstances, your body works pretty hard to defend crucial tissues like heart muscle.
Also, I realize that I didn’t really explain what fatty degeneration of heart muscle is…and actually, it’s not really well understood why having fat in your heart can lead to sudden death sometimes. Some people think it’s because some of the substances secreted by fat tissue are damaging to heart muscles, and others think that the actual presence of fat makes your heart less electrically conductive which can lead to arrhythmias. It’s not really clear, either way, and not a super widely studied thing, because again, it’s pretty rare to die of this.
I can never figure out where there’s an email address for contributions, so I’m just going to post it here:
The Onion has a great video news segment on “Should we shaming fat children more?”
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/in_the_know_should_we_be_shaming
The part I take exception with is, “Obese people tend to store fat, not only in regular fat cells, but also in muscle tissue.” But uh, it’s not just obese people, it’s thin people too.
Here’s just one article on the subject titled, “Fat around organs could put skinny people at risk”: [link created by mo pie]
However this article does end with — in relation to the Mama Cass issue — “Because many factors contribute to heart disease… it’s difficult to determine the precise danger of internal fat. Whether people smoke and family histories, blood pressure and cholesterol rates are more important determinants.”
I found other articles like this, but like you, I’m not always convinced of how sciency they are.
Shoot, I apologize for the length of that link!
A must read for Cass Fans: Eddi Fiegel’s Cass biography Dream a Little Dream of Me. Not only is it one of the few books ever to take Cass seriously as a musician, and the ham-sandwich rumor totally debunked (there was evidently such a sandwich next to her, but it was untouched), but so is the idea that she “died of obesity.” She was, after all, a prodigious abuser of all kinds of drugs, including heroin, and at one point (circa 1971) actually did overdose on barbiturates. That, in addition to crash dieting, would certainly screw with a person’s heart tissue.
Crash dieting can cause heart-damaging low electrolytes; it’s generally a result of prolonged malnutrition and dehydration, which is why it’s one of the more common causes of death related to bulimia. In that era, amphetamines were pretty commonly-prescribed diet pills, and those will contribute to dehydration (and, of course, reduce appetite potentially to a dangerous degree, especially if abused). Also in that era, physicians weren’t implicated in celebrity deaths perhaps to the extent they should have been and would be now.
I don’t doubt she ultimately died from what went in her mouth, but the culprits weren’t sandwich-shaped or ham-flavored.
Contributions can be sent to me, Kendra: piegirl[at]gmail.com. I will take them gladly! And I will check out that link; I love the Onion.
And yes, Wade, that’s what I meant. It’s a crazy right wing site! But I knew you would come tell me if fatty degeneration was a real thing or if it’s totally fake, like the dinosaurs.
I saw an interview with Matt Damon right after Good Will Hunting won the Oscar. He told how he had to lose 40 pounds in very little time for Courage Under Fire, but as a (then) no-name actor, he wasn’t given a nutritionis to help him. When he told his doctor that he had done it by eating only boiled chicken breast and rice, the doctor told him that he was lucky he hadn’t damaged his heart. (IIRC, the phrase he used was “he said I was lucky that my heart hadn’t exploded.”
I think it was a VH1 Behind the Music on The Mamas and the Papas where they addressed the sandwich legend – and the people speaking about it agreed fully with you. Not true, but more importantly – not funny. By the way – I’m not sure how I missed this news, but apparently Denny Doherty died this year. How thoroughly depressing that almost all of these seminal 60s musicians are dead. Sorry, off topic.
Not sure how “crash dieting” is defined, but Karen Collins surveyed the scientific literature on yo-yo dieting and found no evidence of metabolism changes, diabetes risk, or cancer risk from repeated dieting. She only mentioned heart disease in passing, not citing any studies, but the implication was that yo-yo dieting is perfectly safe, so presumably she found nothing about heart dangers in her survey.
It seems like if there were heart dangers from crash dieting, it would be easier to detect them in people who do “cleansing” diets (fasts) for non weight loss motives.
Ah but her survey was highly selective. There ARE studies that have found weight cycling to be associated with long-term weight gain, blood pressure issues, etc. And there are studies that have not found that connection. It all depends on the studies you look at. At this point, from an evidence-based perspective, the research is conflicting on whether weight cycling affects health negatively.
Study design also tends to influence findings. Many of these weight cycling studies define “weight cycling” so mildly that it dilutes any effects from it.
Many define “weight cycling” as a weight change of 10 or 20 pounds 3 or more times in a certain time span (exact figures used vary depending on the study). Well, heck, a loss/regain of 10 lbs or so several times in your life is NOT a very big change, and is probably a lot different in effect than the 50 lb. loss/regain that is more typical for many fat folk.
To look at weight cycling with such a low threshold for defining “cycling” means you’ll dilute its effect…..and is a real weakness of many of these “weight cycling” studies.
At this point, no one should be concluding that weight cycling is benign. The truth is that the evidence is conflicting and better-designed studies (esp ones that look at the realities of more severe cycles) are needed.