Nutritionist Pritikin, Ill With Leukemia, Kills Self

Nutritionist Nathan Pritikin, who advocated a controversial low-cholesterol diet to prevent heart disease, committed suicide in a New York City hospital after fighting leukemia for months, a spokeswoman for his Santa Monica-based institute said today.

Pritikin, 69, killed himself about 8 p.m. Thursday, said Eugenia Killoran, public information director for the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Monica. She did not know the name of the New York hospital where he died.

Killoran said she didn’t know the circumstances of death and added, “We don’t have any details.”

“His leukemia had been diagnosed many years ago, but it had been in remission up until a few months ago,” she said. “As a result of the advancement of the leukemia, he began a treatment program that subsequently produced a chain reaction of side effects--anemia, kidney failure, impending liver failure. This was all within the last three months.

“It did produce a situation where Nathan simply succumbed to the intense suffering he was feeling,” Killoran said.

Pritikin founded and directed Pritikin Longevity Centers in Santa Monica, Downingtown, Pa., and Surfside, Fla. Patients were placed on the controversial, low-cholesterol Pritikin diet and underwent stringent exercise programs.

Pritikin, author of the best-selling book “The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise,” advocated a Spartan, high-grain regimen and urged Americans to revert to the low-meat, low-fat diet that he said primitive peoples had followed for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Pritikin empire included, besides other books on diet and exercise, a commercially marketed high-grain bread.

At the Santa Monica longevity center, couples paid $5,800 and individuals $4,700 for a 26-day program of diet, exercise and indoctrination meant to alter their eating habits.