Noakes toasted ‘low fat’ market

THE recent acquittal of Professor Tim Noakes by the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA) for misconduct was highly expected because the charge against him was devoid of any substance.

The desperate mother, who tweeted the professor, wanted to know what was causing her baby to pass so much wind and whether it was safe to give her child dairy and cauliflower.

The mother tweeted Noakes probably because of his fame. When members of the dietetic society heard about about Noakes’s comments on Twitter, they went ahead like a bunch of headless chickens and laid a charge of professional misconduct against him with the HPCSA.

I wonder if it had ever occurred to them or to the HPCSA that Noakes, a doctor, in all likelihood, responded to a mother who was desperately worried that she might be doing something wrong. Any doctor who detects an element of distress in a patient will instinctively try his best to advise to allay their fears.

I don’t think for one moment Noakes regarded himself as a paediatric dietitian when he advised the distraught woman. He gave his advice based on his scientific training for free because he cared.

For the dietetic society to accuse him of stepping outside his boundary of expertise is utterly nonsensical because it is common knowledge that the boundaries demarcating the limits of the scope of practice among different disciplines are wide, with a great deal of overlap. While diet and nutrition are the domain of dietitians’ training, it does not preclude health care practitioners from having some knowledge about the right foods for their clients.

Doctors and nurses are expected to and do give dietary advice to their patients on a daily basis, given the rise of obesity and diabetes in the world, so it is puzzling why the dietetic society reported Noakes to the HPCSA on such a flimsy grounds and why the council even entertained such a nonsensical complaint. It should have dismissed it immediately instead of wasting such huge sums of money for so long and to come up with a decision that was completely obvious.

All that this vexatiously exasperating protracted case did was to cause unnecessary grief to Noakes; made his low carb, high protein and high fat diet even more popular than before and place a huge question mark on the credibility of the dietetic society and its motive for its decision.

It is no secret that Noakes’s promotion of the Banting diet has had a huge negative impact on the sales of sugary drinks and high-carb foods.

What he has been promoting has been followed in the US from the middle of the 1990s when they realised that obesity had doubled on the low- fathigh-carb diets introduced in the 1980s, so what Noakes is promoting is not new.

Very recently, professors from all over the world declared that sugar has no nutritional value at all. In England, the high rate of dental cavaties in children has been attributed to the high sugar intake through sweets and chocolates.

The big question is: Did the dietetic society take issue with Noakes because he blew holes in what they have been taught for the past few generations, or was the food industry behind this?

The sugary food industry may have been behind the HPCSA case

Cape Town