How bizarre. Any time you hear of a rapper or producer dying young, it’s crime, beef, or gang-related. Kidney Failure from Malnutrition (as the article appears to point to) is just confusing. Does this sound like a weird cover story to anyone else?
Tragic either way. He made great beats. Though he wasn’t my favorite, there were some straight-up retarded moments on the Jaylib record that he did with Madlib a few years back, and some of his a la carte beats for different artists were really hot. He’ll be missed.
Could also be drugs. Methamphetamine, heroin… Quite a few drug addicts wind up severely malnourished because they stop eating because they’re high all the time.
I doubt it’s anorexia. It’s almost exclusively a women’s disorder. There is the rare male with the condition, but it’s a very, very small percentage.
Sad that he died so young. I don’t know anything about how this guy lived, but as a general observation, malnutrition is a common problem for alcoholics. They tend to drink alcohol instead of eating food, and the alcohol inhibits absorption of nutrients from whatever they do eat.
I guess it’s possible that he just ate a lot of the wrong things. You could develop protein malnutrition if all you ever ate was candy. That seems much less likely than substance abuse, though.
About 10% of anorexics are male (which is not that small of a percentage).
There’s also thinking that fewer guys get diagnosed with anorexia than actually have it. Much like it was thought for a while that only upper middle class, white girls suffered from anorexia - it was more that someone who was older, poorer, or non-white showed the same symptoms, they wouldn’t get rushed to a doctor as quickly and when they did show up in front of medical professionals, the diagnosis would be different for the same symptoms; because they didn’t fit the socio-economic profile for anorexia they must not have it.
Renal failure is complicated, and malnutrition means more than just anorexia. For example, the two largest contributing causes to renal failure at this time are diabetes and hypertension. The article doesn’t really speak to his health, other than a direct quote:
I can’t say whether or not Jay Dee was hypertensive, although he certainly fits in categories that lend to it (black, over 30), and if he had a family history of either that or diabetes, I’d say those were contributing factors as well. It’s amazing how much food you can eat without getting any real nutritional value whatsoever.