Amy Winehouse died of bulimia, not drugs or alcohol, says her brother

While the “Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait” exhibit, opening soon at London’s Jewish Museum, will show the public a different version of the singer’s life than the one we saw in the tabloids, her brother has just come forward with a new angle on how she died.

While he doesn’t deny her very struggle with drugs and alcohol, that isn’t what killed her, says Alex Winehouse. Instead, he claims, it was bulimia that actually led to his sister’s death. (The coroner’s inquest listed alcohol poisoning as the cause of death).

“She would have died eventually, the way she was going, but what really killed her was the bulimia,” he told The Observer. “Had she not have had an eating disorder, she would have been physically stronger.”

According to Winehouse, she developed bulimia in her late teens, when all of her friends were doing it. “They’d put loads of rich sauces on their food, scarf it down and throw it up. They stopped doing it, but Amy never really stopped. We all knew she was doing it but it’s almost impossible [to tackle], especially if you’re not talking about it.”

Winehouse died in 2011 at age 27. Tragic, no matter how exactly it happened.