Cape Town - The city is preparing to hide the bread and stash the potatoes.
UCT professor Tim Noakes says Cape Town is to host to the world’s first “no carbohydrate conference”.
Addressing the Cape Town Press Club in the tiled dining hall of the 6 Spin Street Restaurant on Thursday, he sang the praises of the Banting diet, the low-carb fat-focused lifestyle “revolution” that is garnering more and more followers.
His book, The Real Meal Revolution, was displayed in red stacks on a table at the restaurant.
Before he spoke, plates of food were delivered by hurrying waiters. Staff asked guests if they were “Banting”, swapping dishes of chicken and potatoes for a starch-free variant if the answer was “yes”.
The diners made their allegiance clear. The supporters pushed bowls of bread to the side, while the critics spoke over forkfuls of roasted spuds and stripped corn.
Noakes slathered his chicken in butter, saying later that the meal didn’t have “the fat he needed”.
The sports science professor has become the self-styled leader for a new movement but his vilification of carbohydrates has put him in the firing line of some academics and scientists. He has been called “misguided”, his diet labelled “criminal”. Some of the accusations even stem from within his own university.
“I don’t know if I’m speaking to a belligerent audience or not,” he began om Thursday. “Let me say that for 33 of years of my life I was a good doctor.”
Then he began reading about cutting out carbs and surviving on fats. Contrary to what he had been taught he began to lose weight, he told the Press Club. That kicked off the professor’s rise to fame or infamy – depending on one’s viewpoint.
The “no carbohydrate conference” is planned to take place in Cape Town in February and will have 14 of the diet’s biggest advocates journey to South Africa to defend Noakes against the criticism that has followed him since the beginning.
“Cape Town is globally the centre for change in thinking,” he told the Press Club.
Cape Argus
* This article has been edited to correct the date of the conference. - IOL