Been a while— his research assistant has a website, directed at the Vitamin C IV work am thinking. The ice was in the building shadow just outside the door transom. Should not have been there, salt had gotten the rest.
Thank you so much for the thoughtful and well considered replies. My wife and I both come from athletic backgrounds as well. I was once a state champion and nationally ranked cyclist. I used to ride over 10,000 miles a year so my diet was very important to me, but more to maintain my energy level and weight. I was so happy to be able to consult with dieticians at the Olympic Training Center when I went there to try out for the worlds team.
My wife is highly competitive at everything that she does. When I met her she was the Northwest Regional Aerobics Dance Champion. I had never even heard of such a thing. But I found a real respect for her athletic abilities, after trying to keep up with her routines and especially afte I put her on the back of a tandem.
Normally riding a tandem is a bit of a drag for a bicycle racer, but she took to it like no other stoker that I had ever ridden with male or female. Within a week we were both standing in perfect sync when powering over short steep upgrades and dropping almost everyone who tried to catch our wheel even when ascending hills - which if you have any tandem bicycle experience is basically unheard of. I knew that I had to marry her for her power to weight ratio if nothing else. Even after we were hit by a car she refused to give it up.
She even let me talk her into hang gliding with me. And one day when I returned to the airport in my homemade ultralight airplane she said, “We need an airplane that I can go flying in too.” So I always liked to joke at our vintage and experimental aircraft club meetings that she was the first wife in the history of aviation who had said such a thing.
I was familiar with the high dose vitamin C fad and tried it for awhile but it seemed to have no effect on my riding performance and I was worried that it contributed to dehydration during my training regimen.
As far as ice being in the shadows when Dr. Atkins fell... it had been weeks since the overnight temperatures in New York City had fallen below freezing with daytime highs mostly in the 50s and 60s. It is basically impossible that he managed to find an icy piece of pavement to fall on. He could easily have tripped, or the fall which caused his head injury could have been the result of a cardiac event which I saw many times during my career, especially considering that he had a history of heart problems related to his low HDL levels.
So you will have to forgive me for remaining skeptical about this somewhat irrelevant point which none the less is a tenant of the mythology surrounding your friend. As far as I am concerned his death came at much too young of an age, but I have known many others who died at the same age and even earlier from heart problems that were at least partly the result of very poor dietary choices.
I just received a lecture myself in a conversation at my latest checkup from my Doctor who is an older gentleman, about my choice of what he said was too much meat in my diet. He is a bit of a character but he keeps up with all the latest research and I trust his advice. He noticed that I had put on 5 pounds from my previous visit and I blamed all the smoked meat that I had prepared since Thanksgiving.