Durban - Losing weight is not just a matter of increasing your willpower or exercising more – obesity is a brain disease, Professor Tim Noakes said in Durban this week.
He blamed high-carbohydrate diets for making us overeat by sabotaging our appestats – the appetite control centre in the brain.
“Carbs are addictive – your brain drives you to eat more,” he said. “If you are insulin resistant, as I am, and 50 percent of the population is, the carbs you eat will turn to fat. Obesity is the escape route by which your body gets rid of excess carbohydrates by storing them as fat.”
At the root of the problem was insulin resistance, which resulted in too much insulin circulating in the body. (Insulin is a hormone made by the pancreas that allows your body to use sugar – glucose – from carbohydrates in the food energy or to store glucose for future use.)
“Insulin is a fat-building hormone. If you have fat around your waist, it is because of excess insulin.”
Noakes was speaking at a lecture titled Is The Low Fat Diet the Worst Dietary Advice in History?, hosted by the Department of Applied Sciences at the Durban University of Technology.
He is also weathering a storm of criticism from scientists to dietitians who claim his doctrine is at best flimsy and at worst dangerous.
“It is not me that is the problem,” he told the more than 300 people who turned up to hear him. “Obesity and diabetes are the problems and we are treating them the wrong way.”
Insulin resistance or pre-diabetes was a major health issue and it was responsible for 85 percent of chronic illnesses, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and dementia.
“Counting calories is a waste of time – you should be cutting carbs.”
So, how low is low? Noakes recommends 25 grams of carbs a day for those who are, like him, severely insulin resistant – that is one slice of bread or one apple.
He likened chronic diseases to the tip of an iceberg. “We are treating the symptoms of these diseases and not the cause, which is the highly processed, high-carbohydrate diet in people with insulin resistance.”
He urged people to get back to real food and to learn to cook.
“The recipes of our grandparents and great-grandparents were full of fat and there was no heart disease, cancer and dementia,” he said. “We changed from eating the foods we had been eating for two million years – animals and, in lean times, plants – to low-fat, highly processed foods and our health has suffered.”
He said 1980 was a turning point.
“Until then, most people were lean. After 1980, we started eating the high-carb way and because carbs made us hungry, we ate more.”
Noakes speaks from experience. For 33 years he ate a high-carb diet recommending it in his book The Lore of Running. Then he started researching a high-protein and high-fat diet. He experimented on himself with dramatic results. His health improved, he lost weight and he ran faster, leading him to admit to being “hopelessly and utterly wrong” in his high-carb advice.
His new book The Real Meal Revolution, co-authored with Jono Proudfoot, David Grier and Sally-Ann Creed, has sold more than 160 000 copies and proceeds from the book will go to the Noakes Foundation, a non-profit organisation whose vision is to provide the most credible, evidence-based information on optimum nutrition.
Noakes says the satiety value of eating animal products is high. He admitted that he had had bone marrow for lunch and he probably would not eat until the following day as he simply would not be hungry.
“Eat the whole animal, from nose to tail,” he said. “I usually eat a big breakfast and a small dinner. Once a month I do a 24-hour fast – and I feel fantastic.”
l Noakes Real Meal way of eating is based on the diet by which London undertaker William Banting lost weight under the guidance of his doctor, William Harvey, in 1862. The high-fat diet that included very little carbohydrates became known as the Banting diet and the term “banting” or “to bant” became popularised. The Banting diet became standard treatment for weight loss at all major European and North American medical schools – but in 1959, it was excluded from all major medical and nutritional textbooks.
In 1977, dietary guidelines advocated high carbs and low fat, exactly the opposite of the diet we had followed for most of our existence.
Source: www.realmealrevolution.co.za
Lindsay Ord, Daily News