How Chris McCandless Died

Any of you who read Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild or saw the movie might be interested to learn that the cause of Chris McCandless's death has been unraveled by amateur researcher Ronald Hamilton. Hamilton read Krakauer's book and recognized the symptoms McCandless reported in his diary because they had been described by the inmates of Nazi concentration camps forced to subsist on bread made of grass peas. Grass peas, it turns out, contain the same poison as the wild potato seeds that McCandless began depending on toward the end of his life in the Alaskan wilderness, and which he thought had poisoned him. They had. McCandless was relying on a detailed book about the wild plants of Alaska based largely on native lore, and this book reported (correctly) that natives ate the seeds. The seeds are not poisonous if you eat them as part of a balanced diet. But if you eat too many of them, especially if you are starving, they cause a debilitating nerve condition that disables your legs, making it impossible to walk. For unknown reasons, the effect is worst in young men. That is what probably killed McCandless.