Banting be gone – carbs keep us clever
AS a medical practitioner for more than 40 years and a published researcher (although not in the same league as Professor Tim Noakes), I am also mystified at the hearings against Professor Noakes by the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA).
One only has to watch Carte Blanche to realise there are many of our colleagues more deserving of their attention.
Nutrition is really much more simple than he or many nutritionists would like us to believe or else there would not be 7 billion humans on the planet. To survive, we need only a modicum of protein and an energy source – fat or carbohydrates, it does not matter. Human misery in the form of famines and starvation during internment in concentration camps has given us tremendous nutritional insight which is rarely mentioned because of the source.
There are two problems with the Banting diet which are never mentioned. First, it is socially irresponsible. Seven billion people cannot eat mainly protein.
The rain forests are disappearing as they are cleared to farm beef to satisfy the voracious American appetite for meat. Even if we could move to vegetable protein instead it would be a problem as the energy yields are much lower than for wheat and other carbohydrates.
Professor Noakes described how a Banting diet cured diabetes in a Canadian First Nations population. This is not surprising, since they historically existed on a largely meat diet (bison).
My second caveat regarding the Banting diet is that the First Nations – Eskimos, Maasai tribes and so on who practised this diet – have been so occupied they’ve had little time for ingenuity.
Everything around us that we love so much, such as smartphones, computers, air travel and the like, is as the result of eating carbohydrates – the only substance the brain can use as food.
How many generations of avoiding carbohydrates will it take before we lose our ingenuity? Think about this before abandoning all carbohydrates.