Never mind the fat, watch out for the sugar

Diet marks how we live and die – prof

In his book Lore of Nutrition, Professor Tim Noakes says: “What you believe about your personal nutrition will determine not just how you live, but also how you die.” This is an edited extract: It took me many months to pluck up the courage to take my story to a wider audience. The first chance was a regular column I was then writing for Discovery Health, the company that was generously funding my research and the work of the Sports Science Institute of South Africa (SSISA).

In the winter 2011 edition of its health magazine, Discovery, I broke my silence, describing for the first time my initial uncertain steps into the world of the low-carbohydrate diet. The title, Against the Grains, identified the focus – it was a report of how and why I had removed grains and other carbohydrates from my diet.

Low-carbohydrate diets produce weight-loss results ‘at least as good as those achieved with the traditional low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets’.

High-protein diets produce satiation, whereas carbohydrates drive hunger.

It is the unrestricted intake of especially refined and hence addictive carbohydrates that fuels an overconsumption of calories, not a high fat intake as is usually believed.

If a low-carbohydrate intake is more healthy, then why is that fact hidden? The answer is that some very large industries do not want us to know this.

That final statement would perhaps prove to be truest, since it would lead to the events described in this book.

One immediate consequence of that first article was that Discovery cancelled my regular column.

By the end of 2011, the message that I had abruptly reversed my dietary advice was beginning to spread across SA. My publisher approached me to add new material to Challenging Beliefs.

Bolstered by a growing certainty that I now had a novel dietary message of value for a much larger group of South Africans, I added 35 pages.

These are the key themes that I introduced:

● The low-carbohydrate diet cannot be labelled a fad diet, because William Banting described its first successful adoption in the 1860s.

● Industries determine what we believe about nutrition to increase food and beverage sales, not to protect or improve our health. In fact, most of what we have been taught is detrimental to our health.

● Humans can be classified as either carbohydrate tolerant or carbohydrate intolerant.

● Dietary carbohydrates, not fat, cause obesity and lead to diabetes in those who are insulin resistant. There is no evidence that a high-fat diet is harmful to health.

● Sugar is the single most toxic ingredient of the modern diet. It is also the most ubiquitous foodstuff on the planet. (Today I would add that sugar is not a foodstuff; it is a drug.)