The Trial of Prof. Timothy Noakes
A Quick Background
This trial is a deep hole about corrupted science, professional standards and professional malpractice.
You might prefer not to explore this.
Your body is a hybrid system: you can use a glucose metabolism, or use a lipid metabolism, one or the other "energy system" is on, while the other, is off, or mostly off. (This is driven by hormones, it's a balancing process. When people are in ketosis, and almost all of their energy is derived from lipids, the brain might still be burning some glucose. Even more complex in the last few years some people who are not in ketosis, drink exogenous ketone esters. (Many elite athletes, some military people are doing this.) They have high levels of glycogen in their muscles, but with ketones too. The body uses the ketones first, the glycogen is conserved. As a result the athlete's performance is improved. That's an artificial situation. In history, because of the uncertainty of food supply, people switched from lipid metabolism, to glucose metabolism, and back to lipid metabolism, depending on the food supply, probably because of seasonal change.
Today, for most of us, when our food supply comes from a supermarket, that doesn't happen. You can buy out of season, and there is always something to eat. Most of us only use our glucose metabolism. The lipid metabolism is neglected, and apparently that has unfortunate implications for our long term health.
Edited video of Dr. Noakes' Testimony is available from the Noakes Foundation, in over 60 videos. (Sorry about the advertising that now appears first.)
Open Future Health had hoped to reproduce the evidence Prof. Noakes gave in court here. But it's not possible, or sensible. Spoken English has a different style than written English for the Internet. The videos become very repetitive, different studies, but making the same point. The following is a summary written from my own notes, with references to the original videos where I can do so. This is a reconstruction, and may not be entirely as accurate as I (or Dr Noakes) would like.
Thanks to The Food Med Blog By Marika Sboros, for much of this information
The Charge Against Noakes
Claire Julsing Strydom
Noakes faces a charge of unprofessional conduct for giving unconventional advice to a breast feeding mother on a social network (Twitter). That was a single tweet in February 2014 saying good first foods for infant weaning are low-carb, high-fat (LCHF).
Johannesburg dietitian Claire Julsing Strydom, saw his post on Twitter and reported him to the HPCSA. Strydom was president of the Association for Dietetics in SA (ADSA) at the time.
The quotes below are from the Food Med Blog by Marika Sboros
Attacks on Prof. Tim Noakes intensified with publication of the so-called "Stellenbosch review" in PLoS (Public Library of Science) One in 2014: a meta-analysis of 19 international studies, led by Dr Celeste Naudé of Stellenbosch University's Centre for Evidence-based Medicine. The review quickly mustered an cardiologists, endocrinologists, epidemiologists, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of SA, the Association of Dietetics of SA (ADSA), and the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA) that claimed proof that Noakes's "diet" could kill people.
Top UCT academics wrote a letter to a Cape newspaper in August 2014 accusing Noakes of "outrageous, unproven claims about disease prevention". The letter was signed by Prof Wim de Villiers, then dean of Faculty of Health Sciences (now Rector of the University of Stellenbosch), Prof Bongani Mayosi, then head of the Department of Medicine (now Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences), emeritus professor, cardiologist Dr Lionel Opie, and Dr Marjanne Senekal, then Head of UCT's Division of Human Nutrition and still with the university. The authors attacked Noakes for "maligning the integrity and credibility of peers who criticise his diet for being evidence-deficient and not conforming to the tenets of good and responsible science". (Clearly the gloves are off, and the battle is on.)
Diabetes in the Family
The photograph to the left, shows Dr Tim Noakes, MD, newly qualified in 1981, with his parents. His father has just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
Because of the poor medical knowledge of the time, the dietary advice Mr Noakes senior was given was entirely wrong, and made his diabetes progressively worse and eventually killed him. None of this was a surprise. "Diabetes is a progressive disease," and loss of limbs, eyesight and mental capacity was accepted as perfectly normal.
Dr Noakes, junior, says that although we now know better, we continue to practice the medicine of failure. In the history of medical progress it's not unusual for new advances to take 60 or 80 years to be widely adopted. But in the "information age" are we still trapped by a rate of change, dominated by the death rate of respected, but outdated professors?
What's this About?
Health Professions Council of SA is investigating Noakes for "unprofessional conduct". ADSA (Association for Dietetics in SA) president Claire Julsing Strydom laid the charge against Noakes in February 2014.
The Association for Dietetics in SA (ADSA), reported Noakes to the Council for a single tweet, advising a mother to wean her baby onto meat and vegetables.
You should understand that BOTH parties walked into this battle open eyed. BOTH think they are right. Both believe they have good science on their side. EITHER one of them could have backed down, and this "trial" would never have happened.
In the beginning there was confusion and delay. But after the 
Stellenbosch Review was released the HPCSA decided to proceed. Early in 2016 this complaint finally got to court.
I think the HPCSA didn't understand what they were getting into. They thought this would be over quickly. That they would slap Dr Noakes on the wrist, the Real Meal Revolution would get some bad press, and that would be the end of it.
The costs today may be several million rand. And it's still not over. We fully expect Dr Noakes to win based on the evidence, and to claim his costs from the HPCSA. If that happens there will be some red faces. If the decision goes the other way, if the court decides to ignore the evidence, I expect Dr Noakes would appeal.
Essentially it's about two different paradigms of dietary health, the paradigm that's dominated the last 60 years, where glucose was the source of energy (particularly energy for the brain), and a newer paradigm which relies on free fatty acids as the main fuel for the brain and the body.
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| Wrong advice Click to enlarge |
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As Dr Noakes explains in his opening video, both his father and himself were diabetic. His father was given wrong dietary information 30 years ago, and lost a foot and eventually his life to the disease. The book page illustrates the incorrect advice. Today type 2 diabetes is curable, but that same bad advice is still being offered. Diabetes will not kill the son. He knows the advice is wrong.
The principles that underlie each of these two paradigms have such different starting points that the advocates of each system are talking about entirely different concepts while using the same words. There is no communication. The experts talk past each other, and the public is totally misinformed.
This is typically what happens when people with different paradigms, ways of understanding the world, come into conflict. There is heated argument and zero communication. Take time this is worth understanding. You own good health, and the health of your family, may depend on you doing that.
So in a nutshell here are the arguments: (1) We adopted a low fat high carbohydrate diet over 50 years ago, trying to protect ourselves from heart disease, and in the belief that although carbohydrates were fattening, they were a good source of calories (energy).
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| Correct advice Click to enlarge |
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(2) Thirty years later, we find out that fat doesn't cause heart disease, that excessive carbohydrates in the diet creates disseminated vascular disease, inflammation, that's causing a lot of illness, including cancers, heart attacks, and type 2 diabetes. It's also making us fat, which isn't a disease, but most of us would look better and feel better, if we weighed less.
The recommended diet is killing us. Why don't we change it? Good question. The United States Department of Agriculture has the answer, they are committed to supporting the American Farmer. The USA has huge surpluses of corn and wheat. Commercial interests prevent new science from changing the dietary recommendation. We choose to follow the American model. We could choose differently.
Thankfully, because of the Internet, it's not possible for the officials to hide from the new science. But they can delay and delay claiming that the "evidence is not yet in." Since it's your health at stake, you can judge that for yourself if you follow the debate here.
