29 Sep 2014 Noakes wants Cape Town to be ‘cradle of meal revolution’
Ardent evangelist of the low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, Prof Tim Noakes, wants Cape Town to be the cradle of the “meal revolution” which he hopes to spread across the world.
The book that the professor co-authored “The Real Meal Revolution” is now in its 16th edition with more than 120 000 copies sold in SA alone. The book has exceeded expectations as the publishers only anticipated selling 3 000 of the first print-run of 10,000.
In February next year the book will be launched in six Commonwealth countries by publisher Little Brown, which is also negotiating the rights for a foreign language edition. The book will be also promoted at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest, in Germany next month.
Also on the cards next year is the first international low-carbohydrate conference which will be held in Cape Town and has already secured the participation of 14 of the best low-carbohydrate scientists in the world.
Noakes said on the sidelines of his address to the Cape Town Press Club last week that the scientists regarded Cape Town as the centre of a global change in eating habits and wanted to support him in the face of the attacks he had faced by academia and the medical profession over his views on the harmful effects of eating carbohydrates and the positive spinoffs of consuming animal fats.
He said most of the scientists were coming to the conference at their own cost, a rare occurrence for such events as “they want to make a statement about the way I have been treated. There is a huge resistance to change all over the world,” he said.
However, the biggest obstacle to the professor’s theory gaining academic credibility, say reports, is detractors says that it is not backed up by scientific research, despite the fact that 24 recent studies have come out in favour of a low carbohydrate diet over a low fat one in terms of the key markers of good health.
The soon to be retired Noakes — who is attached the University of Cape Town’s faculty of health sciences — wants to use the proceeds from the sale of the book to fund a research institute to undertake this scientific study.
“I do want to raise a lot of money for research and I think that will come out of book sales. If the book does as well overseas as it has here it will generate a huge amount.”
Noakes said he wanted to research the reversibility of type-2 diabetes, a disease that affects about 400-million people worldwide and one which he believes is caused by insulin-resistance. “There is a lot of evidence that the diet works in addressing insulin resistance and there is a lot of evidence that it does address diabetes but that has not been documented properly and the way it works has not been researched properly.”
Noakes said he wanted to prove that type-2 diabetes was a preventable disease. He also wanted to investigate the affect of the diet on the other organs of the body.
Source: BDLive