Open Future Health Blog

Your habits when you are in your 40's and 50's are the foundation for your good health and fitness at 85. Improved diet is the low cost alternative to extensive medical intervention later in life. The body has the ability to heal itself, if we treat it with respect. ANYBODY who adopts a healthy diet, at ANY AGE, will benefit, and as the months go by, those benefits will multiply.

February 2017 - 5 items

The Noakes Foundation Publishes 37 Videos

Wonderful news, for those of us following the nutritional evidence trial, HPCSA v Dr Tim Noakes, because now we can see the balance of the evidence presented by the Dr Noakes in his defense.

Sadly for most people this is a painful way to access the critical information presented in the trial. For most of the readers here you'll need to understand what the fuss is about. I explain that here, "HPCSA v Prof. Tim Noakes in Context - Challenging Beliefs."

I've tried to make the videos more accessible by adding notes and some of the graphics Dr Noakes uses in his disposition. The beginning is a good place to start.

Here is another quick summary of the positions of the two parties in dispute.

Prof. Tim Noakes then goes on to explain what Insulin Resistance is and how that affects our health. He also demonstrates that ketone production is a normal process, normal in breast-fed babies and normal for people eating a diet based on animal based foods. The human body has two modes of normal metabolism, glucose burning and fatty acid burning. The Banting diet encourages people who have problems controlling their weight or who are insulin resistant, or type two diabetic, or who have metabolic syndrome, to learn how to eat a diet that limits glucose in the blood, and to minimise the production of insulin.

Yalow and Berson, in 1965, demonstrated that in a low insulin environment (they called it negative insulin) the body produces ketones from fatty acids, and that ketones become the major energy source for the body and the brain. It remains true that the brain needs a small amount of glucose to function well, but when using the ketosis metabolism, the brain conserves glucose and ketones produce more than 80% of the required energy.

The new material begins with video 39, talking about the importance of high quality research, and there a thirty new parts to the evidence that Dr Noakes gives. In addition there are sixteen new videos with the evidence of Dr Zoe Harcombe, Nina Teicholz and Dr Caryn Zinn.

This is a goldmine of new material for those of us who are not health science professionals. If the videos are 15min each that's about 12 hours of viewing. That's a lot of time, and the material is repetitive. There is value in that, learning increases when you re-learn the same key ideas over and over. We all need a new nutritional education much more than we need a new diet. Once your education is complete, you will know how to discover the best diet for yourself and your lifestyle. If you give me a few weeks I'll publish, a guide to the videos, for you.

Meanwhile I still recommend, again, beginning with the Take Out Diet. That will get you 70% or more on the journey to Banting. Use four to six months on the Take Out Diet, to improve your nutritional education. Hugh Butlers book is a good resource of simple, short, and scientifically valid chapters. When you think you understand the philosophy and the methods behind Banting, you should begin to practise that lifestyle.

Please accept this invitation to join the Banting Lifestyle Forum on Facebook, so you can continue your own health journey. This is a free public discussion group. Where you can ask questions and get help from group members or the moderators. Please use this link.

We all need encouragement and support. For the same reason, if you can afford it, go to the the Banting Courses for the Public page and take one of excellent Banting Nutrition courses available.

(Note 2022:) Alternatively, Join the "Defeat Diabetes" programme, now available from Australia.

Taking Care to Present Quality Information

I've not written here for 14 days. As mentioned in the previous post the Noakes Foundation released many more videos in late January and the beginning of February. I've take the time to view it all, more than 11 hours. I have written 64 pages of notes, and taken 454 screen shots of data being presented at the trial. Enough material to write an interesting blog every day for more than a year. That's not my intention.

I do intend to present the most useful and practical knowledge revealed by the "trial." I'll try to make it understandable and I'll link it to other sources, as we go.

The big picture

Dr Timothy Noakes, is accused by the Health Professions Council of South Africa, of two offenses. Of giving professional advice on social media. And of giving advice that is not supported by evidence based standards, and is therefore unprofessional. Dr Noakes' professional reputation is being attacked.

In fact the trial is about other things entirely. Which other things is not clear, because the powers driving this court case are not named and are not present in court. Dr Noakes tries several times during his evidence to identify the source of the court action. At the end of his professional career, several things happened. Firstly, Noakes himself was diagnosed as type two diabetic. That was a wake up call, it led him to examine closely his own medical understanding (he had believed that his marathon running would protect him) and to consult with his professional colleagues. Eventually that led him to completely change his own diet. That was made public in an interview online, in February 2012. (Listen from 27.30 to about 40min.)

Dr Noakes writes about his own diabetes and personal experiment with a low carbohydrate diet in his book "Challenging Beliefs: Memoirs of a Career" which was written but not yet published. (March 2012) In that book he accuses the food industry of manipulating science and creating public environment full of "health messages" that are both untrue and unhealthy. The tobacco industry did this, and the industrial food giants today, continue the practice.

In November 2013, "The Real Meal Revolution" was published (Only in South Africa). The book was highly successful, with 160,000 copies being sold in the first 6 months. There was wide public interest in the Banting Diet, apparently much to the displeasure of Stellenbosch University, The Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department of Global Health, Division of Human Nutrition, which is "Striving to be innovative and transformative leaders excelling in Nutrition." They see themselves as the leading nutritional authority in South Africa, aligning themselves with Harvard in the USA, Cambridge in the UK, or Otago in New Zealand. These "elite" universities align themselves with the "gold standard" in nutrition, the USA's Dietary Guidelines, supported by Harvard.

These institutions don't take kindly to being told that their "gold standard" healthy diet is tarnished. Therefore it's not gold at all, but some fake, an imitation of what the human diet should be. That sort of talk will not be tolerated. Too many people in high places are affected. Too much money is at stake. The reputation of established institutions is essential to their funding and survival.

In addition, heart specialists in South Africa have taken exception to Dr Noakes questioning the Heart Diet Hypothesis, and concluding that it's nonsense. Besides he believes that the focus on cholesterol has been unhelpful, and that statins are vastly over prescribed.

Finally, Dr Noakes has claimed that the symptoms of type two diabetes can be reversed by simple low carbohydrate dietary practice. Diabetes is a very important and growing public health problem, and by conventional treatment is both progressive and incurable. The Noakes view that insulin use is the cause of worse diabetes and not the best treatment for diabetics, ruffles a lot of feathers. Noakes has never claimed that the diet "cures" type two diabetes, although it's possible that "no symptoms" and "cured" are the same thing.

So that's one side of what's happening in the trial. There are many possible reason why various health professionals in South Africa, are unhappy with Dr Noakes, and would like to see his views discredited. I will write some more tomorrow.

Food As Medicine

About 400 D.C., Hippocrates was said to say; "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." Quite likely that's not true, it's an invention of much later times. But Hippocrates was interested in the quality of the food he ate.

In contrast, Dr Tim Noakes, and many other medical doctors confirm that in their medical degree, there was no focus at all on the possibility that good food itself was the best medicine. In fact no emphasis on food as a critical aspect of good health.

This topic has become very contentious. The anti-meat lobby is very strong. There is huge propaganda in favour of a plant based, preferably a vegan diet. A great deal of investment is being made in plant based meat alternatives and plant base milk alternatives. At Open Future Health, our belief is that animal based foods are essential to good health. Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride, (See below) says that in here clinical observations she has yet to meet a healthy vegetarian. In nature, animals that eat mainly plants have special digestive systems, multiple stomachs, and pre gut, or hind gut organs where the fermentation of plant fibre can take place. The human gut has almost no capacity to do that. Then people wonder why they have digestive problems.

WHO Recommendations are not Reliable

If you look at the recommendations of the WHO, as an example, they are interested in encouraging you to eat a wide variety of food. Such a wide variety that the recommendations are not really useful.

Many WHO recommendations have been scientifically proven to be wrong. WHO is dependent on external funding. The recommendations are badly outdated, but they can't be changed without stakeholder approval. For instance they still recommend substituting saturated fats with unsaturated vegetable oils. That recommendation has been shown to increase cancer rates and to badly increase inflammation in the body. It's wrong. There is also a recommendation to prefer white meat to red meat, because white meats are lower in fat. That's also wrong. As is the recommendation to use low-fat dairy products. For fifty years we've been told that a low fat diet protects us from heart disease and strokes, and perhaps also from breast cancer. The Women's Health Initiative demonstrated in 1998 that that was wrong. However reporting that was delayed for eight years, because the negative and unexpected result, caused enormous controversy inside the National Institute of Health, that funded the study. The report was finally published in 2006.

USA's Dietary Guidelines are not Reliable

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, were originally the result of a political agreement (Late 1970's), they were not science based because there was very little science available. The introduction of the guidelines, has led to a huge increase in obesity, and type two diabetes, has not protected us against stroke or heart disease and has made some cancers worse. So what changes have happened to the guidelines in the last 30 years, as the result of new science? Almost nothing at all.

The political deadlock that created the original guidelines remains. It's almost impossible to change them even though the evidence that they are wrong is abundantly clear, so much so that Congress has ordered an inquiry into how the guidelines are set.

The first crack in the facade of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, was at the end of 2015, when the recommendation to limit total fats in the diet, was withdrawn without fanfare.

(This is not the original video.) Here Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride talks about how she began to use food to treat her patients, beginning with her own health, and poor health in her family. Please watch at least the first six minutes or so. In this world of conflicting information, working in a practical way with her patients, Dr Campbell-McBride seems to be making progress where few others are venturing.

For me there are shades of what happened to Dr Robert Atkins here. Widespread support for what Dr Campbell-McBride is doing doesn't exist. The science to support much of what she says doesn't exist. But she's had a lot of success, and there's a good deal of sense in what she says. Personally I think her GAPS theory is nonsense, but a lot of what she says isn't so silly.

The Fault in Each of Us - Cognitive Resistance

In the way our brains work, we struggle to see our own mistakes. It's difficult to accurately proof read your own writing. Once we develop a concept, we use that understanding as a measure of the importance and/or the reliability of new information. We build our knowledge on the foundation of our earlier understandings.

When something comes to our attention that's contrary to "what we know" it's not understandable, and it's usually identified as unimportant or unreliable. If our previous knowledge prepares us for new concepts, we still need to; acknowledge the facts presented, to hold the new information in conscious view, to allow the conflict between what we "know" and the new "knowledge" to reside within us. We have to allow both the conscious mind and the subconscious mind to struggle with the incongruent information: learning takes effort.

Finding "Truth" - or Seeking to Know

Even if the new information is called scientific research, we are likely to make a much easier choice, and reject the new ideas without consideration.

This is well demonstrated by the life of filmmaker Waldo Salt. Salt was 20 when he graduated from Stanford University. He was idealistic, his first film script was released in 1937. In 1938, he joined the Communist Party, fully convinced that Communism was the way to social and economic justice. He suffered for his beliefs, being blacklisted in 1951. Five years later, the news of what was really happening in the USSR and China shocked him. He finally recognised his misguided thinking. But he couldn't immediately adopt a new viewpoint. There was a long period of disillusionment and soul searching, before he could develop a new set of life principles, a new understanding of "the truth."

I first wrote about this in my journal over 20 years ago. Salt also kept a journal, mostly in the form of proposed film frames like a comic book. On one page there are only these words. "To search for truth one must first have lost it." He refers to the basic schooling that we all have, and the difficulty of deschooling ourselves. For Waldo Salt that process began in 1956, when he realized that Communism was not after all a solution to the evils of the world. He was 42, but was lost and unsure of himself. At 53 he was once again writing successfully.

What did you Eat Today?

The last two posts have been heavy going. This one is about real food, it should be interesting in a different way.

I've been eating a low-carbohydrate diet for perhaps 18 months now. I'm getting better at not falling into the little traps like eating too much fruit, or going to a dance and eating sandwiches, because that's what people usually offer as healthy food. One of the things that's quite surprising, is that cakes and really sweet foods don't have any appeal. Unless you eat one. So take the easy route to success, don't.

One of my early discoveries was the power of a single water biscuit. I can eat up to 50gm of carbohydrate a day. A single water biscuit looks innocent, it contains 3gm of carbs. What harm is there? But that biscuit leaves a taste in the mouth. You want a second and a third. Soon you are binge eating again. Don't do it. Try one quarter of an apple instead. Or better still a single sardine. Just the sardine on it's own, with a little of the oil. You'll feel satisfied and there is no craving that follows.

Typical Breakfast

This is a typical breakfast in our home. Egg, a little bacon, lambs hearts today, but usually some offal meat, and a vegetable, today it's tomato. Followed by tea or coffee. It actually takes very little time to prepare, maybe 10 minutes.

For 25 years (1987 to 2012) we ate home-made muesli and fruit, with low fat milk. There would be a single slice of toast, with margarine, and some peanut butter for me. We thought that was healthy. The toast was removed 10 years ago (2012), when we realised that bread in the diet made us fatter.

I always go past the offal meats in the supermarket. I love liver, or chicken livers and kidneys. Hearts are fine. Beef bones or bacon hocks are a special treat. Offal meats are very dense in nutrition, and contain all the vitamins and minerals that are lacking from the diet of most modern people. So there is a double bonus here. Offal meats are cheap, and the food value is superior.

Don't forget to look for fish offal too. Fish heads and carcasses and fish roe are all delicious.

I think there is a place here for a return of the local butcher. Someone who can give you full fat meat, at a sensible price. If you are Banting, the thing you need most is more fat. We pay extra at the butchers for them to cut the fat off the meat. I want the fat left on, and the price to come down. I imagine buying breakfast chops with lots of wonderful fat, and not paying through the nose for them.

Saturated Coffee - No Craving for Food

Nut and Seed Crackers, Home-made

There's never any need for morning tea. Really there is no need for lunch either, except that it's a habit. So for lunch I eat two of our nut crackers with butter, a lump of cheese, and usually two sardines. If I'm lucky, I can replace the sardines with three muscles.

If we're busy, lunch is often about 2pm, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all. A cup of saturated coffee is a treat, if I'm ever feeling hungry.

I purchased the book, The Real Meal Revolution, as soon as the international edition became available in 2015. There is now a new 2016 edition available. As we've become more familiar with the Banting Diet we are using that book more and more for the excellent recipes it contains.

Here is a list of our favorites:
Nutty Crackers from page 74.
Spicy Bacon nuts from page 84, but that's expensive.
Kale with sliced Chorizo sausage and eggs from page 96.
Nut Granola from page 114.
Beef and Cauli-mash Cottage Pie from page 132.
Not-Butter Chicken from page 162.
Creamy Butter Chicken Curry from page 164.

Anyway, that's how the day goes. There is no supper, but if I work late, after midnight, I'll often eat a couple of those nut crackers. I don't like to drink coffee so late.

Chicken Casserole and lots of Silver Beet from our garden

This diet does cost more. The question is can you do it on $10 per person per day? I'm not sure. But for many people that's an important question. That's why I buy muscles in the shell and steam them myself. They cost $4 a kilogram in the shell and you get about 530gm of cooked muscle for that. That's lunch for three days.

I'm not the cook in our house, and I've never previously filleted a fish, but recently I did. I purchased a trevally weighing 2kg for less that $8. I did manage to get two large fillets off the carcass without making too much of a mess of it. One fillet I ate that night. I pan fried it in butter. I was very pleased.

Whole Fish purchase - Cost cutting

Then I realised I had a large fish head and a carcass. Fish soup. So the following day I made a fish soup stock, and later in the day I converted that into fish soup, adding some muscles, the other fish fillet and lots of vegetables to the stock. It tastes wonderful. I made four 1 litre tubs of fish soup, about four servings in a tub. This was a very successful experiment. I will certainly do that again.

It's NOT Your Fault - Schooling and Deschooling

Overweight Dietician Not Her Fault Blame her Schooling

If I speak to overweight nurses, dietitians or doctors, I find it impossible to talk about the success of their "education," the failure of their dietary practice, and their need for deschooling. These people are super-sensitive on the topic, because they know they carry excess weight and they have tried to do something about it. Their failure is clear indication of the success of schooling, and educational failure.

I'm an old teacher. In the 1970's Ivan Illich was writing about the failure of traditional education in South America, to meet the needs of the children who were in schools. I guess today we would see this as colonization of the mind. The establishment decides what young people should know, and makes sure that happens. Schooling was seen essential, both for the community and for the future success of each child. But that schooling, wasn't often in the best interests of the child, as Illich pointed out.

Like it or not, schooling in the beginning at least, is indoctrination, of necessity. Learning the rules of the family, the tribe and the wider community, isn't left to chance. You have to understand and reflect to others, certain knowledge and behaviour, to be acceptable as a friend, as a colleague, as a team member, as an employee. Although lip service is given to the process of education, freedom to think independently, to develop creativity and innovation, those abilities are always constrained by "the box," the social and cultural limits our society imposes on us. This is the price of being a member. Without "membership" you can't be accepted in that society.

You can see the failure of the schooling process today, in youth unemployment, alienation, and the failure of young people to engage in the political process. Schooling selects some people and rejects others. That's an old problem, with many new features in an information rich world.

To be accepted you have to demonstrate the success of your schooling. That's what makes it possible for you to find employment and to become a professional. So it's ridiculous to talk about thinking outside the box. To do that is almost certainly, the end of your professional career, and probably the end of many personal and family relationships. This is a cultural trap, that schooling forces upon us. If you are in that trap it's not your fault. The problem is in the whole of the society. We all get fat together. We can also get well together.

Non-Alcoholic Fatty liver disease is killing this man. He is strongly insulin resistant, and probably diabetic. I expect that he could recover his health in 12 months He needs deschooling, and then LCHF nutritional knowledge.

So you succeed at school, and you go to University, and you get a degree. You have earned your professional qualification, which commits you to uphold professional standards. People with a training in any of the health professions, are expected to "know" about eating a quality human diet, and how to control one's weight. What they "know" is the standard diet recommended by the Department of Health in each country. That recommendation in turn, is almost certainly modeled on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. What most health professionals "know," is only schooling, a simple set of rules to follow.

For the last 60 years there has been a bias against fat in the diet, based on the idea that dietary fat might make heart attacks more likely. This was reinforced after 1980 around the world, when the Dietary Guidelines for Americans were generally copied by the health authorities in most countries. Thirty years later, it turns out that the fundamental ideas behind that dietary recommendation are wrong.

There were no health benefits in the recommended diet. Neutral for heart disease. Worse for both diabetes and cancer. Ineffective in reducing body weight.

There have been signals indicating this error since the 1960's, the MRFIT Trial and the Anti-Coronary Club for instance, but we've ignored those results, because the idea that dietary fat was bad for us seemed to make so much sense. Only in the last 15 years, has clinical research in small trials demonstrated in a precise way, how obesity develops and that dietary fat isn't harmful. When the massively large NIH study, the Women's Health Initiative, confirmed that result, in 2006, there should have been rapid change. But there wasn't, instead the schooling of established leaders in nutrition took over, and that "rogue result" of the WHI was set aside.

I have two personal friends, both ex-teachers, well educated, intelligent people, who have this problem. Their schooling tells them that the "know" how to eat a healthy diet, and they've done that for 30 years. So why are they overweight, and why do they have metabolic syndrome? "That's just old age coming on. It happens to everyone." Too true. It happens to 75% of the population. Why is that? I contend that it's not normal and it's certainly not necessary.

The escape from this trap demands two actions. First of all, understanding that one's "knowledge" isn't working as expected, that there is a fault in your knowing and that deschooling is necessary.

It takes time to do that. Unlearning our aversion to dietary fat takes time. In the same way we've been taught that "healthy whole grains" should be a significant part of our diet. So we love our muesli or our porridge, and we eat loaves of grain filled bread each week. Now we know this makes us fat. Understanding that and eliminating bread from your diet requires deschooling.

Once you understand that you don't know how to eat a healthy diet, your real education can begin. I can tell you where to start. I can tell you what to do; but that's just more schooling, and in the long run isn't helpful. You need an education. Education is self driven, a process you need to control yourself. Or I can tell you what others have done, but where your education leads you, will depend on the choices you make.

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