The woman who devised the beetroot, spinach, garlic and olive oil diet espoused by health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was a nurse for nine months - 15 years ago - and is no longer registered to practise in South Africa.
Tine van der Maas, who says she taught herself about nutrition by reading many books and Internet articles, explained her diet at a meeting of provincial health ministers last year and a Southern African Development Community meeting in 2002 at the request of the health minister.
With the blessing of Tshabalala-Msimang, she has given the foods to hundreds of patients desperately ill with Aids in South African hospitals.
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"She's quoting me the whole time," said Van der Maas on Thursday of Tshabalala-Msimang's statements about the foodstuffs in parliamentary meetings.
| 'You don't need anti-retrovirals if you are eating these foods' |
"You don't need anti-retrovirals if you are eating these foods," she said in an interview.
"I'm not a quack. If I am, expose me and put me in jail and lock me up. I would be giving people false hopes, and that is the most horrendous thing to do."
Van der Maas says more than 800 patients have been given the foods at an Mpumalanga hospital, 1 500 in an Umtata hospital and 42 at a hospital in Limpopo. She claimed a total of 42 000 South Africans follow her nutritional advice. Van der Maas said that she and her mother, a social worker, came up with the diet together and have worked without pay for three years.
Her youngest patient had been a three-month-old baby.
The diet consists of a whole lemon blended or grated, mixed with extra virgin olive oil and water; crushed garlic; ginger cut in small pieces; spinach, beetroot; several vitamin supplements and a solution containing extracts from the African potato.
| 'All we are saying, is that it boosts the immune system' |
Tshabalala-Msimang on Thursday confirmed her support of these programmes in hospitals.
The minister said that she had met over 100 patients who had "got up and walked" after following Van der Maas's advice.
"Nobody is saying that this diet cures HIV. All we are saying, is that it boosts the immune system. I've seen the results with my own eyes. There's no doubt in my mind that it works," said the health minister.
Doctors who had been very sceptical had "really embraced the programme", she said. "In medicine sometimes you do things, and you prove them scientifically later."
The immune-boosting properties of the foodstuffs Van der Maas recommends are being researched at the Bloemfontein Technical University.
When asked whether her emphasis on nutrition might slow down the provision of anti-retrovirals, the minister said: "The comprehensive plan talks about choices.
"It helps people make informed choices."
Asked whether she could describe the rise in CD4 counts, the health minister said: "All I'm saying is that I've seen people get up and walk."
Two of Van der Maas's "patients" interviewed by the Cape Times were:
A man who had a CD4 count of 520 when he began the diet in May last year. After six weeks his CD4 count was 650, he said
Nozipho Bengu, whose mother MP Ruth Bengu
spoke out in parliament about her daughter having HIV, has been on Van der Maas's diet for a year. Nozipho's CD4 count was 55 when she began the diet. After two months of the diet, her CD4 count rose to 134
"I was extremely sick. The diet played a very big role (in making me better)," she said.
A healthy CD4 count ranges from around 700 to 1 200. Doctors recommend that patients with a count lower than 200 take anti-retrovirals.
Demetre Labadarios, head of the human nutrition department at Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Academic Hospital, said that to claim that people would recover from advanced Aids with a certain diet was to "raise false hopes", given the current lack of scientific evidence supporting such diets.
"If we had magic bullets, HIV and Aids wouldn't be around," he said. "Nutrition on its own for the management of HIV and Aids, helpful as it is, is grossly inadequate and the people concerned should know that. There is alarm in the scientific community because of these unclear statements, which imply a lack of understanding of basic physiological principles."
An editorial late last year in the South African Medical Journal, which is regarded at the voice of the medical community, was based on an article by Labadarios and came to the same conclusions.
- This article was originally published on page 1 of Cape Times on February 27, 2004
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