Prof. Tim Noakes - Nutrition in Decline

Edited video of Dr. Noakes' Testimony is available from the Noakes Foundation, in 38 videos.

The Trial of Prof. Timothy Noakes, was to validate his competence as a professional. Here is the background.

The Decline in Human Nutrition

"I didn't understand insulin resistance in 1979, when I was taking my own blood tests before and after exercise. I didn't understand that Type II Diabetes was caused be a poor diet. We were taught that it was most likely a genetic disease."

This book published in 1990, recommends that we eat a high carbohydrate diet. The Author Joan Huskisson, is a friend of mine. What she wrote, was at the time, the very best nutritional science we knew. I don't blame her at all, but we now know that the dietary advice she gives us is wrong.

Recommending a high-carbohydrate diet for everyone, makes carbohydrate intolerance/insulin resistance worse. The dietary guidelines assume everyone can produce insulin in a normal way, that we are all insulin sensitive. In that case glucose in the blood is easily controlled. If people eat a high-carbohydrate diet for 60 years we might expect insulin resistance to increase. That to produces a whole cascade of health problems, which are common in our society.

Here is the correction that we would make today, given that the science has changed. Just as I was wrong when in the "Lore of Running" I recommended a high carbohydrate diet for athletes, Joan Huskisson give wrong advice to people with diabetes to eat a significant amount of carbohydrates at every meal.

The Food Supply has Changed

From the end of video nine

We imagine that farming improved the food supply, but the quality of the food declined. Weston Price was a dentist from the USA. He noticed the decline in the teeth of Americans during his dental practice and on retirement travelled the world looking for example of people with good teeth, jaw structure and posture. He found many such groups. People with wide faces, teeth all aligned, and no dental decay. He wrote this book, "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration".

Amazon Books in promoting the book write: "First published in 1939, this seminal book startled the worlds of science and nutrition with its documented evidence of primitive populations encountering civilisation, adopting modern diets, and finding that their health worsened. It remains the basic book in this area and is essential reading for those concerned with food and health." The Gutenberg version of the book is available here.

But even more importantly there was no diabetes, heart disease, strokes, very little cancer, auto-immune diseases or neurological problems.

Here's a short quote from a review on Amazon: "Price also published many of his findings in respected peer-reviewed journals like JAMA and JADA during his lifetime. His genius was in consolidating information from many different cultures and examining what they had in common. Modern Western food habits have left a trail of destruction throughout the world, and it was painfully obvious to anyone observing a transition from traditional foods to industrially processed Western foods."

If you care to read the literature it's obvious that there is a serious problem with modern diets. But we refuse to acknowledge that primitive people, with no advanced medical care, were (and are) more healthy that we are. If that is the case, what changed? One possibility, that we refuse to acknowledge, is that we changed our diet. Many modern diseases are based on our nutrition.

The reason we can't comprehend that, is that we think that good health depends on medical services. We have lost the understanding that good health begins with proper nutrition.

We live in a toxic food environment. Compared with indigenous peoples, our food environment is not healthy, we have an abundance of foods, most of which, promote poor health. Many common diseases are caused by our "civilisation," but we find that very hard to accept. The supermarket is not your friend. There is good news. We created this obesidemic environment and we can if we choose change it, both as individuals and as a society.

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