New book streamlines low-carb, high-fat diet craze to ‘save humanity’
YOU get bad propaganda, you get good propaganda. Banting activists’ Real Meal Revolution: Banting 2.0 falls on the excellent side of this edgy topic.
It makes some pretty amazing claims about the health benefits of Banting’s low-carbohydrate, highfat eating plan which borders on miracle making.
“I lost 62kg, my husband lost 10kg and my son, who has drugresistant epilepsy, lost 30kg and is now seizure free”.
Chef and author Jonno Proudfoot and team make no bones about it (though they do make a ton of bone broth) – this is not a book about looking good and getting laid. That is the least of the team’s worries.
Theirs is a mission to save humanity. No flies on these people.
So it’s an odd combination of messages.
You get the inyour-face stars and flashes, such as the front page WOB (white type on a black blob) which trumpets: “The upgrade to the phenomenal best-selling cookbook”, and then you get the terrifyingly serious message: we are all victims of a food industry conspiracy to make us fat addicts.
For the authors, chef Proudfoot, with their sports science icon Professor Tim Noakes in the background, the message is a warning against what will happen if we continue to eat without considering the damage a bad diet does to our bodies.
Sugar and wheat are devilish. Corporate power and a panoply of mind-altering ad agency propaganda are seemingly whipping us masses to the trough to devour more candied preservative-laced, refined franchised, junk. We are all falling face-first into obesity and illness.
Food wars are not for the fainthearted. Nosh is a dirty, dirty business full of preservatives and financial preservation.
Former president of the Association for Dietetics in SA Claire Julsing-Strydom has hauled Noakes before the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) over his utterances about “real (LCHF) food” for infants.
Despite the council’s apparent haste in sending out a press release declaring him “guilty of unprofessional conduct” in October, this august body had to apologise because it had yet to come to a decision.
Proceedings are adjourned to April 4-5 and, no pun intended, the stakes are high.
There appears to be a growing mass of people who are grumpy with food manufacturers who treat us like proverbial mushrooms, which the Urban Dictionary defines as: “Feed ’em a bunch of sh*t and keep them in the dark”. Many are turning into Banters. Tried reading a food label recently? You need a telescope and a degree in pharmico-gobbledygook to understand the ingredients.
The main argument of the “real meal” revolutionaries is actually about addiction.
Simply put: Sugar, that temptatious, yummy devil, is widely believed to be as addictive as cocaine and carbs are not far behind with claims that they cause uncomfortable bloat termed “wheat belly” (and all the unwelcome symphonic outbursts that go behind that).
The unwholesome combination of these two apparent miscreants is leading to an almighty confusion between that newfound champion of organic health, your gut “biome”, and your noggin, which is the driver pulling the lever on when to burn fat and when to store up the larder. The “real meal” revolutionaries say that if you cut out those two demons, and pamper your tenniscourt-sized colon (apparently that’s how big it is when all its knobs and nibbles are stretched out – euw!) with a spoon of “fertilising” apple cider or natural sugar-free yoghurt or pickles a day, then you can sort-of eat a lot of formerly really terrible things.
And as you do so, you will transform from a doughnut into an Adonis.
It is trite to explain it now, but you are invited to eat yourself.
Ketogenesis is when you burn your own body fat and don’t relentlessly store fat you don’t need. There’s a lot of science talk about it. It’s in the book.
Having tried it myself, Banting works. You do indeed feel “awesome”. Not craving sugar is a liberating sensation.
But I’m often asking myself if that pile of eggs and bacon and pork chop burbling and spitting in butter are really that wholesome?
This is where Banting 2:0 makes some adjustments.
The first big book The Real Meal Revolution was too extreme (and possibly in need of dropping a few page sizes) and experience with a multitude of babbling Banters has confirmed, they argue, that it is better to go slowly, wean yourself off gently and phase it all in.
And I think they are genuine when they urge meat-sloughing Banters to graze more greens.
I’m also finding the ultimate “transition” stage a little slow to drop the needle of the scale in the right direction, but they urge patience. Decades of compressed, useless fat is going to take a few months to burn.
My estimate is that if I continue to lose a kilogram a week, by Christmas I will have starved to death!
I do, however, find it questionable that Proudfoot does not seem to care if you scoff a thumb or two a day of Grade A feedlot artificially-fattened animal rather than Grade C – which has omega-rich yellow fat, is grass fed and is supposedly good stuff, as long as you are not the cow.
This is one of the anomalies facing Banters and other Paleo cave people.
I am full of admiration for the overall philosophy of sticking it to the corporate peddlers of ill-health, but there will come a day when Banters will have to own up to feelings of doubt about sacrificing the bleating lamb, breaking the neck of that happy chicken toodling around the scratch patch, and blatting that kudu poised on a Karoo koppie skyline at sunset.
All this to satisfy our carnivorous, grandiose, cravings to be the top apex animal?
Perhaps meat is our final addiction. My suspicion is that Banting stayers will eat less and less meat. It will be a natural way to go.
But I am dik in the game, and, despite my loathing of prescriptive, happy clappy, mind-crushing propaganda, I’m enjoying flipping through Banting 2:0 to keep me on the path to turning around some bad, mindless habits.
In essence, Proudfoot and team, with Noakes egging them on (sorry!) in the background, are exhorting us to change our lives and make them healthier, happier and lighter. That’s is indeed, as they say, awesome.
Real Meal Revolution Banting 2.0 by Jonno Proudfoot and the Real Meal Revolution Team is published by Burnet Media