This Wasn’t the Plan!

The Publisher looks  at Professor Tim Noakes’ controversial ‘new’ eating plan

Professor Tim Noakes is not getting any younger. But, at 62, he’s getting lighter and running faster than at any point in his last 20 years. He puts this down to eliminating sugar, bread, cereals, rice, pasta and other refined carbohydrates in his diet and replacing them with a high-fat and high-protein diet of meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, nuts and dairy produce. We thought it worth taking a closer look at the nutritional claims of South Africa’s pre-eminent sports scientist to understand why this is.  

First up, the conventional wisdom suggests that high blood pressure, obesity and adult-onset diseases like heart disease are best avoided simply by remaining physically active into your ‘mature’ years and avoiding excessive weight gain by eating a balanced diet. For those that succumb to weight gain, the calorie-restricted diet is the only option – the ‘energy in, energy out’ equation is undoubtedly fact. If you eat more calories than you burn you’ll gain weight, so to lose weight you need to eat less and exercise more. It’s simple.

Except, in practice, it doesn’t work, says Noakes. The moment we either eat less or exercise more, our appetite is stimulated – our mind controls this. So we eat until we are satisfied and return to ‘energy balance’. In fact, most overweight or obese people are actually in (or close to) energy balance, he believes.

What Noakes has highlighted is that, possibly because in large quantities it is toxic to humans, protein is a potent appetite suppressant. In contrast, carbohydrates (especially those that are rapidly assimilated like sugar) may be addictive - which drives overconsumption of all foodstuffs.


So a low carbohydrate, high protein, high fat diet works because you reach satiety at lower levels of calorie intake and you lose weight comfortably by taking yourself out of energy balance and that, without hunger. He tried it himself and it worked. So why aren’t we made more aware of this? His suspicion is that “some very large industries, including the soft-drink, sugar and confectionery industries – all of which produce sugar-based products of no nutritional value - and those pharmaceutical companies that produce drugs to treat the medical consequences of this toxic foodstuff, do not wish us to know this.”
Upon investigation he found no empirical evidence that fat makes you fat or that the amount of saturated fat in your diet is even related to the incidence of heart disease at all - and notes that the French have one of the highest intakes of saturated fat among the developed nations and one of the lowest incidences of heart disease. What is unambiguous is this, however; the ten-fold increase in sugar intake during the 20th century has been matched by an equally dramatic rise in the incidence of obesity and diabetes. “The best evidence at present is that a high intake of omega 6 polyunsaturated fats found in vegetable oils and processed foods together with a low intake of omega 3 fats present in fish oils and grass-fed animals, is the toxic combination of fats that causes heart disease,” says Noakes.

Notwithstanding, US dietary guidelines continue to recommend a ‘balanced’ diet of six to eleven servings of refined carbohydrate a day (bread, cereals, rice and pasta) and endorse that sugar can safely provide up to 15% of the daily calories in a healthy diet. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, first-world dietetic associations are largely funded by those companies “who pro-actively protect their profits by ensuring that the public remains misinformed” – the global soft-drinks and refined carbohydrate producers.

If sugar is, in fact, a highly addictive substance, three things are for sure. Firstly, the global use of sugar will undoubtedly continue to rise – and with it the incidence of diabetes and the single biggest medical problem in the US, obesity. Secondly, the pharmaceutical companies will continue to profit from producing drugs to counter this entirely preventable scenario. And lastly, there is a vested interest in “our not having freedom of access to all the evidence of the toxic effects of dietary sugar” as Noakes so succinctly puts it, since “what we believe about nutrition is engineered by powerful forces,” so not much is likely to change.

History shows the Professor has an unbridled willingness to attack the conventional wisdom and, with it, the knack of being proven right in the end. Is history about to repeat itself?