04 Mar 2015 Banting myth, madness and magic
The first international low-carb, high-fat summit was a moveable feast for body and brain, and a virtual construction site for nutrition science, writes Marika Sboras of BizNews.com. It demolished deeply held myths about diet, weight loss, food as optimum fuel for body and mind, food as medicine, and medicine as food.
It built up dreams of a gentle, safe alternative to modern medicine’s rampant polypharmacy to stem the tsunami of obesity, diabetes, and other chronic disease epidemics sweeping over the planet.
It proved that diabetes is not an irreversible condition, and does not always need drugs to control it best, despite what some doctors and dietitians persist in telling their patients.
The summit was hosted by Cape Town sports scientist Prof Tim Noakes, a pioneer of low-carb, high-fat (LCHF, aka Banting, aka ketogenic) in South Africa, and organised by Karen Thomson, granddaughter of the late pioneering heart surgeon, Prof Chris Barnard.
Attendance by speakers and delegates was high. It exceeded expectations, given fierce and vicious medical, dietetic and academic establishments’ resistance to LCHF – and Noakes – in South Africa. They haven’t yet forgiven Noakes for an about-turn on the role of carbs in the diet in favour of LCHF four years ago. They have relentlessly attacked him ever since for challenging conventional medical and dietetic wisdom.
Antidote to venom
Therein lies the genesis of this unique event: a vision of the irrepressible, vivacious and ever gracious Thomson, founder of HELP (Harmony Eating & Lifestyle Programme) to overcome addiction to sugar (carbohydrate).
Thomson was so incensed by the venomous attacks on Noakes, she decided an antidote was needed: she invited the world’s top experts in LCHF to attend a summit in South Africa, to present the science, and stand up for Noakes.
Thomson and Noakes quickly assembled a stellar group of speakers from across the globe, all highly respected, many internationally renowned medical doctors, scientists and researchers specialising in obesity and LCHF. They included a cardiologist, nephrologist, psychiatrist, bariatric surgeon and an orthopaedic surgeon. They all said they came to show support for Noakes, and to spread the word to the world about growing evidence for LCHF.
Among the more than 400 delegates were local and foreign medical doctors, dentists, dietitians, nutritionists, psychologists and complementary medicine practitioners who attended three days for professionals. The fourth day open to the public was similarly packed.
Summit speaker Dr Stephen Phinney (pictured above), a US physician scientist and emeritus professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis, and “father of LCHF”, said the summit was the biggest conference audience he had addressed so far.
Even food at the summit venue, the Cape Town International Conference Centre, was a coherent element that supported the scientific content: delicious satiating meats, bacon wraps, biltong, fish, nuts, cheeses, yoghurt (full-fat of course) and low-carb vegetables – all LCHF staples, designed to keep blood sugar levels stable.
Summit speaker Dr Andreas Eenfeldt, Sweden’s “diet doctor”, was so impressed with the culinary offering, he declared it “the best food I’ve eaten at any conference, ever”. It gave delegates a literal taste of another major summit theme that was eloquently expressed by Canadian kidney specialist Dr Jason Fung: the insulin theory of obesity and diabetes.
Fung advocates a dietary intervention to diabetes – what he calls the “rational, natural approach”.
Other speakers, including Noakes, presented compelling evidence that the epidemic of chronic conditions facing the world today – cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, even dementia – is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath lies insulin resistance (IR), a metabolic condition driven by excess sugar/carbohydrates in the diet, and in particular refined carbohydrates.
Phinney’s presentations underpinned the insulin theory, and focused on another major summit theme, one which he has spent more than 30 years researching: nutritional ketosis. He coined the term 30 years ago because of confusion and fear around ketones, ketosis induced by dietary carbohydrate restriction (nutritional ketosis), and ketosis caused by absence of insulin – a condition known as ketoacidosis that can be fatal.
So why are doctors and dietitians still so fearful of ketosis and ketones that they instill the fear in patients? Ignorance.
Phinney says doctors and dietitians are classically taught that ketones are “toxic byproducts of fat metabolism”, which they can be, but only in extremely high levels and in the complete absence of insulin that occurs in type 1 diabetics, or more rarely in end-stage type 2 diabetics.
For the rest, ketosis is a benign state, and ketones (natural chemicals the body produces in response to fat metabolism) are “helpful substrates”, he says.
As well, as Noakes and others point out like broken records in the face of what doctors and dietitians have to say: humans actually have no need for ingested carbohydrate. That makes even more sense why Mother Nature has designed it so that ketones are hardly ever a threat to human health.
Diet-heart hypothesis
Other myths that came in for a thorough demolition job were the diet-heart hypothesis (the demonisation of saturated fat in the diet as the cause of heart disease), the idea that “a calorie is a calorie” ( the body can’t and doesn’t distinguish calories), CICO (calories-in, calories-out), and the “energy imbalance hypothesis” – that people are fat because they eat too much and move too little.
Zoë Harcombe, a Cambridge University graduate, nutrition specialist and obesity researcher who is currently completing a PhD, told the summit that for CICO to be true, the second law of thermodynamics would have to be violated.
The junk food industry spends billions of dollars trying to convince everyone that CICO is true, and a calorie is a calorie, because that makes them “automatically innocent” of any role in rampant obesity and diabetes rates, Harcombe said.
US science and investigative journalist Gary Taubes, author of groundbreaking books on the science of nutrition, Calories In and Calories Out, and Why We Get Fat, was similarly dismissive. Taubes is co-founder of the Nutrition Science Initiative, a non-profit organisation devoted to reducing the individual, social and economic toll of obesity and its related diseases by improving the quality of science in nutrition and obesity research.
He said CICO is the “original sin” of obesity and diabetes research. It has become “written in stone, passed down from the mountain”, yet it has no science behind it.
Obesity has “nothing to do with gluttony and sloth”, Taubes said.
Eenfeldt agreed that “it just doesn’t make sense that people have become fat and lazy Homer Simpsons overnight”…..