Vindictive and bizarre

YOUR pole banner claiming to reveal the “pros and cons” of Tim Noakes’s dietary advice caught my attention. I do some work with Prof Noakes (NB: the disclosure) and was interested to see how balanced the Cape Times’s reporting was.

In the Noakes camp was a review of the Health Professions Council of SA’s (HPCSA) case against the professor at his trial (“HPCSA’s disorganised and incompetent argument is nothing but a spoiler”, December 2), which has received lots of media coverage and attention on social media but not much insightful analysis of what’s going on; it was an interesting read.

Though its author, Rob WorthingtonSmith, is clearly pro-Noakes, he offers real facts and balanced opinion.

Notably, his credentials are spelt out at the end of the piece.

On the other hand, the anti-Noakes writer, one Rohan Millson, appears without any biographical details (“Noakes’s ‘dangerous diet may cause cancer’ “). But a quick Google search reveals Millson to be a “vegan nutritionist” who appears to be active in animal rights campaigning.

To say his attitude to Noakes appears personal, vindictive and agenda-driven is an understatement.

It is also bizarre – at one point he simply writes “Tim’s a ghoul” in the middle of a sentence – and, I’d argue, defamatory.

More to the point, most of the facts Millson offers are unproven, inaccurate or often simply wrong. For absolute starters, Noakes doesn’t recommend “a high-animal diet”, he recommends a medium-protein, high-fat diet; there is a critical difference in the complex world of human nutrition.

There is quite some irony in Millson’s conclusion that Noakes is “the one-eyed village idiot” when he is so clearly one-eyed himself; his meanspirited piece is simply rhetoric wrapped around a less-than-subtle agenda.

How does someone like this, first, not declare his interest up front; and second, get such a prominent platform to spout such rubbish? Tim Richman