During the latest episode of the brilliant hot sauce-based interview show Hot Ones, Ashton Kutcher opened up on the topic of Steve Jobs. Kutcher played Jobs in the 2013 biopic, which landed with a thud at the box office.
Kutcher told the story of how he was hospitalized before filming, after trying to follow Jobs’ fruitarian diet. “Don’t drink too much carrot juice is the moral of the story,” Kutcher said.
Kutcher was responding to a question about why it’s a bad idea to follow Jobs’ all-fruit diet.
Jobs experimented with this at various times in his life. He first became interested in the healing value of fruit when he read a book called Mucusless Diet Healing System by Arnold Ehret. “I got into it in my typical nutso way,” Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson.
It became a problem later on when Jobs was suffering from cancer. He initially refused to have surgery to remove the tumor. Instead, he began trying to treat it with a vegan diet, with large amounts of carrots.
Ashton Kutcher’s carrot juice bender
It seems that Kutcher tried to get into a fruitarian diet, thinking it would give him an ‘in’ to playing Steve Jobs.
“I was studying his eating habits and his behaviors and was told that he had drunk a lot of carrot juice,” he said.
“… I thought that if I was going to play the character I’d drink carrot juice [too]. So I started drinking carrot juice non-stop, all day long. Two weeks before we went to start shooting, I had this pain in my back. Through the night it got worse and worse and worse and worse. I ended up in the hospital on the maximum dose of Dilaudid (an used to treat severe pain.) My pancreas was crazy out of whack. I was getting freaked out, like, ‘oh my god, I’ve become Steve Jobs. He died of [pancreatic cancer]. [I felt like] the ghost of Steve Jobs was taking over. I was freaking out.”
Ultimately, Kutcher was told that he was suffering a pancreas issue due to all the carrots he had eaten. The issue cleared up, but Kutcher said that it taught him that Jobs’ food guidance wasn’t necessarily worth following.
You can check out the whole episode below (the Jobs discussion takes place at the 12.5 minute mark.)
