20 Jan 2015 Complete Idiot’s Guide to Tim Noakes’ Diet – and Banting

Cape Town sports scientist Prof Tim Noakes is in great shape. At 65, after four years on his low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diet, his energy levels are stratospheric, and his running has improved spectacularly. Here Noakes clarifies fundamentals of his LCHF diet.

“I don’t run as fast as I ran in my 20s, but I’m running faster and further in training, and with more enjoyment than I did 20 years ago,” he says.

He hasn’t gained a gram of the 20kg he lost in the first two years on the diet, and his health is excellent. Noakes is a type 2 diabetes (it’s in his family history) and developed it despite religiously eating the recommended high-carb, low-fat diet for 33 years that experts told him would prevent diabetes. He controls it well with diet and medication, and could probably do without the drugs, but says he prefers to have “perfect blood glucose control”.

He sleeps like a baby, and no longer snores – for which wife Marilyn is deeply grateful. He also no longer falls asleep in front of the TV. All other ailments – recurring bronchitis, rhinitis, migraine and irritable bowel syndrome – have disappeared

Controversy still peppers his diet, with some saying it’s unscientific and dangerous. Others say it’s solid science. That science will be scrutinised at the first international Low-Carb, High-Fat Summit Noakes is co-hosting in Cape Town from February 20 to 22, with Karen Thomson, granddaughter of the late pioneering cardiac surgeon Prof Chris Barnard, and the cream of international LCHF medical and scientific experts on the speakers’ panel.

Strictly speaking

It’s not quite correct to call the LCHF diet ‘Banting’, but Noakes doesn’t mind if you do.The eponymous William Banting was fat – a heavily overweight, ailing British undertaker, and he ate low carbs on the advice of Dr William Harvey in 1862. Banting lost weight and felt great. Harvey wrote about it, but under pressure from medical colleagues, modified the diet into high-protein, low-fat.

German physician Dr Wilhelm Ebstein took it to Europe, and changed to high-fat, low-carb after realising the key was replacing carbs with fat, not protein, as fat reduced hunger more effectively. So it’s more correct to call Noakes’ diet ‘Ebstein’, or ‘ketogenic’. Banting may stick in SA, where it is a culinary ‘revolution’, with Banting restaurants, meals and products popping up all over the place.

Is your diet Atkins?

No, Atkins is high-protein. Ours is high-fat, moderate-protein.

Is it Paleo?

No. Paleo is low in carbs, but not as low as we go. It excludes cereals and dairy, but includes fruit, which we don’t, except for some berries that are high in nutrition and low in carbs.

Is it Banting?

I’m fine with calling it Banting, but it’s probably more correct to call it Ebstein – after German physician Dr Wilhelm Ebstein who first made it high-fat. That was the diet Sir William Osler promoted in his monumental textbook: The Principles and Practices of Medicine, published in the US in 1892. Anyone who claims that Banting or Ebstein diets are fads simply knows nothing about medical nutrition history. Nutrition didn’t begin in 1977 as our students seem to be taught.

Any weighing of food on your diet?

No. That’s a joke. You can’t predict accurately the absolute calorie content of foods when eaten by humans. You don’t know how many calories each person needs. The only way to work that out is by weighing yourself. If your weight stays stable, you’re eating the same number of calories you are expending. If you are lean, that’ll probably be the correct number of calories for your body and activity level. There’s no other way remotely accurate enough to measure your calorie needs. We say: eat what your appetite directs you to. Once you cut the carbs we think your brain will tell you if you need more fat or protein. It’s about finding the balance that works for you.

Is your diet extreme?

Only in that it’s extremely low in carbohydrate – the one nutrient for which humans have absolutely no essential requirement. In 1977, when we were told to eat diets extremely high in carbohydrates, human health started to fail on a global scale. Moderation is a smug, puritanical word. No mammal eats in moderation. In nature all diets are extreme – lions eat only meat, polar bears mainly fat, panda bears only bamboo shoots, giraffes only acacia leaves.

Critics say the Tim Noakes diet is dangerous because of  high saturated fat. Is saturated fat ever a health threat?

It can be, in the presence of a high carbohydrate/sugar diet that causes elevated insulin concentrations due to the excessive carb intake. Insulin directs an altered metabolism, with the formation of the damaging oxidised (LDL) cholesterol that is probably a key component in heart disease…..

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