Pretoria – Is Bil Gates rich because he doesn’t spend his money? To say that would be as stupid as suggesting that weight gain is the result of eating a lot of fat, not using it up and therefore becoming obese, diabetic and getting heart diseases, controversial Cape Town professor Dr Tim Noakes said this week.
He told a packed lecture room at the University of Pretoria on Wednesday night that blaming fat for weight problems lacked the “causality” factor: “Until we recognise and accept that conditions like obesity, gout, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and others are not medical conditions but the output of eating carbohydrates, we will not win this battle,” he said.
Noakes told his audience that cholesterol did not cause heart problems either. “A diet high in carbohydrates does.”
He spoke about the controversial Banting Diet, which promotes a diet high in fat and low on carbs, something he said was the surest way to go in the quest to reverse the biggest blunders in the history of medicine.
Rubbishing the recommended guidelines of low fat and high carbohydrates to avoid getting obese, hypertension, Type 2 diabetes and others like gout, Noakes said: “These problems will not end unless we reverse the trends.”
He said it had never been proven that “the bacon and eggs I had this morning will kill me in 20 years time”.
“We need to understand the science of causality, ignoring that is the biggest problem we have,” he said.
He said carbohydrates like bread, cereals, rice and pasta were among non-foods. “They are replacement foods which add no value to our bodies whatsoever.”
Meat, which is what the diets of human beings centuries ago consisted of mainly, was real food, the fattier bits even healthier.
If one had to eat carbs, the green leafy vegetables were the ones to go for, he added.
The Banting Diet has gained popularity across the country, becoming a fad with a big following and which has produced a community of “banters”. These people have taken up eating food high in fat and greatly reducing their carb intake.
Noakes explained how carbohydrates left the body wanting to eat more, leading to obesity. He said insulin was the fat-building hormone, produced when the body had too much carbs to deal with.