Cape Town -
Controversial diet guru Tim Noakes is expected to star alongside UK nutritionist Patrick Holford in a reality TV show comparing the results of their eating plans.
The show will be filmed in Cape Town later this year, and ordinary South Africans will get a chance to appear on the small screen.
Participants will have to stick to Holford’s low-sugar diet or the Banting eating plan, which rules out pasta, rice, bread and potatoes and which Noakes promotes. They will have to overcome certain food addictions too.
The show has a working title My Food Addiction, and British TV chef Jamie Oliver, who encourages people to make healthy food choices, could also make an appearance.
“If he's in the show, he would talk about the effects of a low-sugar diet and about community projects where people are learning to cook. A lot of people have not cooked their own food,” says Holford.
“We have to go back to the basics. We are making ourselves sick. We are digging our graves with a knife and fork.”
Holford and Noakes are to give talks in Cape Town next week about their diets.
Holford, a regular TV show host in the UK, is to present two health seminars at the V&A Waterfront on Monday to “show you a simple way to get 100 percent motivated to reclaim your energy, shift that weight, reduce stress”.
Holford said his diet did not prohibit anything, and required only cutting down on certain types of sugar. He said anyone who followed it could “eat a wide range of delicious foods and lose weight”.
Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille has called on Holford to talk at a city-organised event to share his research findings about the health benefits of reducing sugar intake.
“We are hooked on sugar. It leads to obesity. We need to talk about sustainable eating,” said Holford.
Although Noakes has been criticised for advocating a diet named for 19th-century British coffin maker William Banter, who extolled its benefits, he remains adamant about the need to cut out carbohydrates.
On Tuesday, Noakes is to “challenge beliefs about carbohydrates in our diet and in particular in the diets of children”, at the Cape Town Science Centre in Observatory.
Noakes says he has the cure for obesity, which he says is to “reduce the consumption of highly addictive carbohydrate-rich foods”.
“The diet debate is critical for South Africa because it is my contention that a healthy population cannot be developed if our children are exposed to high carbohydrate diets from an increasingly young age.
“The optimum development of the brain at all ages requires diets that are high in protein, and especially fat, and low in refined carbohydrates.”
Saturday Star