Written by Christopher Kelly
Aug. 28, 2015
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly. And today, I'm joined by Professor Tim Noakes. Hi, Tim. Thanks for coming on.
Tim: Thanks, Chris. Pleasure to be with you.
Christopher: I can't believe this is happening. I'm actually going to interview Tim Noakes. This is really fantastic. Where should people start? If people have not heard of you, where is the best place to start? I've just finished reading "Challenging Beliefs: Memoirs of a Career." Do you think that's the best place for people to find out about the work that you've done over the last three decades?
Tim: Yes, definitely I think so, Chris. That will give a good idea of all the different things that I've done. As you'll see, I've many different interests. Well, they're all sport-related. They are different. Kind of my career was I would change every five or ten years I'd change direction a bit. That kind of encompasses all those changes I've made over the years.
Christopher: When I thought about this interview ahead of time, I almost died having an anxiety attack because like where do I even begin with someone that's discovered so much ground and done so much important work? And yes, so I think this book is really fantastic.
And when I first saw it, I thought, "Well, I've read all of the books. Am I really going to enjoy all of the books put together in one?" And it kind of reminded me when you've got your favorite band and you've got all of their albums and then they bring out a compilation album. And you're like, "Oh, no. I've got all of those. Like I don't need that." And then two minutes later you bought it and you're loving it. And I think that book is the same.
Tim: Well, that's very kind of you to make that analogy. I appreciate it very much. It is for people who want to get a succinct review of what I've done. But I think that does it very nicely.
Christopher: Uh-hmm. There's two main areas that I'd like to cover today. And the first is hydration and the other is what's going on with a low carbohydrate diet and the work that you've done more recently. And the reason I want to talk about those two subjects is because those are the two places that you've had some profound influence upon my life.
And you mentioned this in the book specifically that maybe not to call you the professor or a doctor, but to call you a coach. And absolutely, I would think of you as being one of the most influential coaches I've ever had in my life. So yeah. Thank you again for that.
Tim: That's very kind of you again, Chris. Thank you.
Christopher: Yes. So okay. So I'll stop the ass kissing now and get into it. So the story is I'm a pro mountain biker and obviously I wasn't always a pro mountain biker. And back in the day, I used to ride everywhere with this ginormous camel back thing. So I'm not sure if you've heard of a camel back, but it's just like a big container of fluid.
So everywhere I went I would have two liters of 6% carbohydrate solution. And I thought that was the answer to hydration and for exercise performance. Then I read your book, Waterlogged, and of course that changed everything. And the story has a very happy ending where I no longer do that anymore. I just drink according to thirst.
But the thing I think is interesting because Waterlogged is not a new book and yet I still see really -- maybe that kind of the recommendations for hydration have become less aggressive. But the message hasn't really changed.
Tim: No. We know they haven't changed because there was a death in the Frankfurt Ironman Triathlon in this last month and that was completely avoidable. So had the athlete read it and had the doctors treating that athlete read it, that wouldn't have had to happen. And that's tragedy and that's really why I wrote the book because I got so frustrated that I could see there was this new disease which had appeared in running and in triathlons and in the military which didn't exist before.
And it was completely iatrogenic. In other words, it was induced by the doctors and the scientists and the industries that were advising us to drink. And I got more and more frustrated. And because the scientists had all ganged up against me as well and they were going down one path which I knew was a catastrophe.
And I remember in 1993, we had a visit from the Runner's World editors. And I said to them, "The first death will occur in a women marathon runner in America and we will have an epidemic of deaths amongst women runners in America." And they said, "How do you know?" I said, "Because this is the perfect storm that we're waiting for."
The industry is telling us to drink too much. There's a sudden expansion of women running marathons in six, seven, eight hours. And they're being told to drink ahead of thirst as much as they possibly can.
And I said, "That is what's going to cause this condition." And I was absolutely right. The first death occurred in '93 in Arroz [Phonetic] in California. And it hasn't stopped despite the fact that we know exactly what's causing it and how to prevent it.
Christopher: Well, let me just read you -- so this is straight off the website from a hydration company and this is on the product detail page. And it says, "The science is simple. Hydration which refers to the maintenance of water in your blood is critical to maximizing power, endurance and reducing fatigue. When you're thirsty, you've already lost 2% of your body water and 11% of your power."
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So quite specific claims there. And if I didn't know better, I would read that and think, "Well, I need to drink a lot of water to stop myself from slowing down." And what do you think? Is that true?
Tim: No, it's not true. Those claims are completely false. The reality is that -- firstly, the thirst mechanism is completely individual. And so some people may indeed be thirsty at 2%. Others might not be thirsty at 10% of body weight loss. That's around 0.2 is.
Your body has about two liters extra fluid in it anyway. As a specie, we're slightly overhydrated and it's probably because we've got all these extra fluid in the gut which we don't really need except when we perhaps eat. But that fluid, when you become dehydrated, and they did this in the Second World War, and they used it as one of their techniques of prolonging survival in people lost at sea.
They said, "You don't drink for the first day because you've got this extra two liters of fluid. And if you did drink during that day you just would excrete that excess anyway." And we've done now studies in the last four years where we've weighed people before and after extreme events.
People exercising at 43 degrees centigrade I might add, which is this is [0:06:29] [Indiscernible] military personnel involving competitive sport at 43 degrees centigrade fully dressed with bed rifles and a 20 kilogram pack. And they're forced to go 25 or 50 kilometers as fast as they can. Of course, they go slowly and they stop and they wait and they drink.
But the point is in all of these studies, we show that they can lose at least two liters or two kilograms before we can detect they've lost any water from their body. Because the extra water is sitting in the gut probably and then they just reabsorb it.
And so you only start to lose real body water content after you've lost about two liters of fluid of this two liter excess. And that two liters is a lot of fluid. It can keep you going for two to three hours exercise without drinking. And so that I think we've been able to establish that you have an excess of fluid in your body and you don't need to replace all of the weight you lose during exercise.
And the second point we've shown and is now accepted is that it's thirst that slows you down. It's the brain that slows you down during exercise. So if you're not drinking appropriately, the brain is very clever and it induces symptoms. And the symptoms is thirst.
And if you get really thirsty, you will be so thirsty you will stop exercising because you want to find the water. So thirst is a mechanism to make sure that you drink. And if you're not going to drink the brain says, "Fine. You can stop exercising. I'm going to make you so thirsty that you will stop."
And indeed, if you get lost in the desert what generally happens you'll try to walk 20 or 30 kilometers at night preferably. And in the morning you've walked your 30 kilometers and now you're severely dehydrated and you've lost about eight to 10% of your body weight.
The brain will stop you and you would just sit there for the rest of time until you're discovered. You won't move. You don't die, but you'll sit there for two days because the brain has paralyzed you. Because you're now so thirsty and you're so dehydrated it just stops you. So we've been able to show and it's now accepted that as long as you're not thirsty, your performance will be maximized.
And it doesn't matter if you've lost two kilograms or ten kilograms. As long as you're not thirsty, your performance will be fine. If you're thirsty, that's your brain telling you, "Hold on. Get a drink. And if you don't get a drink I'm going to slow you down in the future."
Christopher: Okay. So the message is not to encourage people to become dehydrated or to ignore their sense of thirst. It's just to follow that sense of thirst.
Tim: Exactly. And see what the sports drink industry had to do was they had to tell us, disconnect us from our bodies. And they forgot that there's no animal on this planet other than humans who are told what to drink. Isn't that amazing?
Christopher: Yeah, that is a very interesting point, isn't it? So you don't think it's anything to do. So also on this product page or maybe I found this in the FAQ section of the website. A dark, yellow urine is a telltale sign of dehydration. Do you think that's true?
Tim: Well, ninety percent of the time it is true, but in 10% it's wrong. Ten percent of people and these are the ones who get the problem. They oversecrete the hormone, antidiuretic hormone. The reason why you have a dark urine is because you've secreted this hormone, antidiuretic hormone, which retains fluid.
And that's fine if you're dehydrated. But if you're overhydrated, there are some people who produce that hormone even though they overhydrated. And so they have a dark urine, but they're overhydrated. So they're swelling up and eventually will become unconscious.
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But if you check their urine, you'll see that it's dark and you'd think, "My gosh, they're dehydrated." When in fact, they aren't. They're overhydrated. And so that's the problem.
You have to be very careful in thinking that the urine color can tell you anything. It just tells you whether the kidney is responding to antidiuretic hormone or not. That's what it tells you. But the antidiuretic hormone could be secreted because there are other stimuli, not just dehydration which causes ADH secretion.
Christopher: Okay. And is the same true of specific gravity? I've heard of some people recommending that you use this pee strips to measure the specific gravity of your urine to measure whether or not you're dehydrated. Do you think that's a good idea?
Tim: No, not at all. It is true that if you aren't drinking much and your body's retaining water. You could be normally hydrated and have a dark urine. But you could still be normally hydrated because that's a normal response. But if you're going to exercise of course you're going to be dehydrated and you're going to have a dark urine, except in the examples that I've shown you.
Now, the key remains that -- why are we trying to force people to drink so much? That I don't understand. Why are we making them scared of this thing called dehydration? And again, I discussed that at great lengths in Waterlogged.
What happened was the industry made a disease of something that wasn't a disease. And that's a classic example how the pharmaceutical industry works. They make you scared of something so that you overmedicate yourself. And that's precisely what the sports drink industry did.
My point is it's simple. Listen to your body. It'll tell you what to do. The body's designed to save our lives. It's not there to kill you. And as long as you listen to it and you're not thirsty, you'll be fine.
Christopher: Yeah, I know. It makes perfect sense. There's something else quite fundamental here that I've never been taught and you don't hear people talk about too much, which is that physiology has feedback loops, right. So if you stop drinking then something inside your body is going to change. And there's many other examples of that where physiology has lots of feedback loops.
Tim: Oh, absolutely. The best example is for weight control. This is really interesting because we'll come I'm sure to this in the future. But physically inactivity cannot cause obesity. It's impossible because you got a feedback loop. And if you become physically inactive you eat less and that's the homeostatic regulator.
So if you put on weight when you're not exercising, it's because your diet is wrong and it's messing up with your regulator, your controls. And so there's a whole story that, "Oh, I'm saying that diet is much important than exercise for weight control."
It has to be because that's the way the body is designed. It's that feedback mechanism. We're designed to be thin. If you aren't thin it's because the homeostat has been destroyed.
And what destroys a homeostat is sugar and other refined carbohydrates, but we'll come to that. But your point is absolutely correct. We are designed. We are successful. Humans are designed to be successful.
If we weren't, we wouldn't have survived the past three million years. And we survived because we've got all these incredible systems which are so complex. We're only just beginning to understand them in a little bit of detail and they keep us alive.
Christopher: And then another thing I read which I thought was interesting. The afternoon tiredness is often due to low body temperature and a dropping core temperature. Does drinking a warm drink will help hydrate and bring up the core temperature reducing fatigue? Have you ever heard of anything like that before?
Tim: Now, that's a new one for me. A cup of tea can raise your body temperature. You need a thermal regulator and you'd keep it down. But I mean if you have an afternoon loss of energy it's because you're eating too much sugar and carbohydrates.
Christopher: Because it sounds like instant resistance to me. But I thought you'd enjoy that. But more seriously, I have a medical doctor I work with and he's a fantastic resource and an amazing teacher. He's like you. He's like super motivated to teach people and I love him for that.
And he's always sending me lots of scientific studies to read which I really enjoy reading. And something that's popped up twice maybe three times at least is the idea that dehydration may cause hyperintestinal permeability. Did I say that right? So increased intestinal permeability or a leaky gut as someone like me might say.
And I know from doing other reading and other research that maybe this leaky gut could be connected with autoimmunity. So for an athlete, this sounds like a really bad thing. But do you know if there's any truth in it or do you know anything about it?
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Tim: First, your doctor is absolutely right. The leaky gut is a real problem. And it's not even taught in medicine to my knowledge, at least in Cape Town it's not taught. And I've just been meeting some people this morning, with a whole bunch of people who cured their leaky guts and all their medical conditions disappeared.
So it's a real phenomenon. And autoimmunity, I believe, comes from the gut. But my belief is that wheat and other cereals and grains are the key drivers of the leaky gut. And in exercise, I can't see that exercise would do it by itself.
But exercise and lots of carbohydrates, yes. That will do it I would suspect. So I would blame the carbohydrate, but particularly wheat as the cause of the leaky gut. And as we convert more and more people to high fat diet and they cut the wheat. And athletes they say, "We recover so much more quickly now than we used to in the past."
And in my view it's because the gut has been closed up. It's no longer leaking and they haven't got this inflamed response. My opinion, again, not scientifically proven is if you're eating a high carbohydrate diet and you're exercising vigorously, you compound the inflammatory response.
Remember, we used to study that ten years ago, 15 years ago because we realize that exercise is pre-inflammatory. But I'm not sure it's the exercise. I think it's the nutrition that is the problem. I wouldn't put it at the door of dehydration now. I think it's more complex than that.
Christopher: Uh-hmm. Yeah, it's very interesting you should say that because that was certainly my experience. Before, so I'm doing all these mountain bike rides and I'm drinking a ton of fluid with carbohydrate in it and I'm pounding down the maltodextrin gels. And I got to the point where I was consuming one of those every 40 minutes.
And afterwards, I would get home. I mean I would not stop being hungry. It wouldn't matter what time of the day that I would ride. I would still be hungry for the rest of the day. I would just keep eating carbohydrates. And the other thing I noticed was I guess it's inflammation.
But just being completely and utterly exhausted. Like I wouldn't really be able to do anything apart from eat and sit on the couch. It was ridiculous. And now, I've transitioned to a high fat -- well, it's a ketogenic diet. I just don't get the same thing.
I'm not saying I couldn't tell whether I've worked out that day or not, but certainly I'm more than able to carry on working or playing with my kid or something like that. So yes. I mean it's just the whole act of course. I mean it makes total sense to me.
Tim: Yeah. And I think our people kind of already looking at this and I think that's what will show. Also, these people will show that most of this inflammation if you're exercising on a low carbohydrate, high fat diet.
Christopher: So yeah. I think this is a nice point to transition into the low carbohydrate diet. Certainly for me, it was just a completely life-changing experience. The first time in my life to not be hungry. So I've gotten to the point where I was just hungry all of the time.
And I never became obese. I never put on much weight. I guess I must have just managed to balance things out. But when I looked at some of the biomarkers like in particular my fasting blood glucose. It was up to 120 which is really not a good sign I don't think.
So why don't you tell us how you got into this and what's happening now with the Real Meal Revolution?
Tim: Yeah, thanks, Chris. I have this epiphany, this one moment in my life. And in fact, it happened the night that I finished the Waterlogged. So I sent Waterlogged off one evening. And by the way, the title that I sent off to the publishers was The Search for the Killers of Cynthia Lucero.
And Cynthia Lucero was the lady who died in the Boston Marathon drinking as she was told to drink, 1.2 liters per hour or 40 ounces per hour. And it's just utterly tragic. The race was ten degrees centigrade, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And she was told to drink that in order to prevent dehydration and heat stroke. I mean it was just appalling.
I wrote all my anger into this book. It was 30 years of anger. So when Waterlogged was written at first it's only 60% of what I wrote and I had to cut out all the anger. Because they said, "Otherwise, we'll all be in jail." So they cut out.
Anyway, so I went to bed that night and much relieved that this was over. And now, of course my brain was saying, "What are you going to do next?" my subconscious. So in the middle of the night I woke up and said, "You're going to get up at 6:00 tomorrow morning. You're going to put on your running shoes and you're never going to stop running for the rest of your life. You're going to run every day for the rest of your life."
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So I always listen to my brain. So at 5:00 to 6:00, I got up and put on my shoes and sort of got up very lethargically and had the worst run in my life. I ran up this tiny little hill outside our house here. And it was like I reached the summit of Mount Everest. I was finished at the top.
And so when I got home I said, "Something's got to give." I had been running by the way all those time and I was now 61 years old and ran 70 marathons. I knew what fitness is and I knew that I wasn't in good shape. And I got home and I opened my emails and it was an advert and it said, "Lose six kilograms in six weeks without hunger."
And I said, "Well, that's bogus. You have to be hungry if you're going to lose weight." And I was about to delete it and then I saw the name of the authors. They were doctors Westman, Volek and Phinney. And it was called the New Atkins for a New You. That was the book.
And I said, "Westman and Volek and Phinney are really good scientists." Because I followed Volek and Phinney's work on high fat diets and we've done high fat diets in 1984, '85 just after Phinney had done his studies. We were the first in the world to start doing studies like that.
So I knew that they were good scientists and I said, "There's a paradox. How would they link their name to Atkins? They've obviously sold out because Atkins was a murderer. He told us to eat saturated fat." I said, "There's something. Either Volek and Phinney and Westman are complete frauds or else they're onto something." And I said, "I've got to find out."
So I went straight down to the book shop at about 10:00 in the morning and I had the last copy of the book. I bought it, brought it home by 12:00. I've read enough. I said, "That's it. No more carbohydrates for me. I'm obviously carbohydrate intolerant or insulin resistant."
I've been eating too much carbohydrate. I have all the symptoms for insulin resistance and I'm going to change. And within two days, I felt unbelievably better because I was frankly diabetic at that time which I didn't realize until later because I was reluctant to test myself.
And so within two days, I started feeling better. Within six weeks, my running had improved back 20 years to where I was to the age of 40. So I went from 60 to 40 in six weeks. I lost 11 kilograms in eight weeks. So even outperformed what they predicted and I just felt like a new guy.
And my running, it felt like I was a youngster again. And then I realized what the issue was. Then I had discovered that I had type 2 diabetes. And then I realized this is anyway I'm going to live. I've got to eat this diet. And the tragedy was when I thought back, my biggest running was in early 1970s when I've been in this diet.
And then I went to medical school and got educated and was taught by this cardiologist who said, "If you eat fat, you're going to die. You must eat cereals and grains." And I've changed to these dreadful tasting, bland cereals and grain diet and got fatter and sicker and for 33 years I did that.
And it took me 33 years to realize I've done it all wrong. So that was how I came across it. Of course the last four years, I spent six to eight hours a day reading on nutrition. Maybe not every day, but at least a couple of days a week I'll spend that time. And I'm not sure too many people in the nutrition field have read as much as I have.
And it's absolutely abundantly clear to me that nutrition is a single most important determinant of our health. Exercise is terribly, terribly, terribly important. But if you're like me, insulin resistant and you're eating your own foods, the exercise can't fix you up. You have to get the nutrition first.
But when you get the nutrition first and the exercise, then there's no reason why you shouldn't live to be 100. That would be my prediction.
Christopher: There's nothing quite like the moment when you realize you spent the last 35 years doing it wrong. And doing it wrong meant eating something that didn't even taste good. Like maybe you managed to convince yourself. You know the breakfast cereal was actually pretty good the first time you tried it.
But yeah. Maybe this is an appropriate time to ask you if you saw Kevin Hall's study, the NIH study that appeared last week. Did you see it at all?
Tim: Well, I've read it and I read a lot of the critics of it and yes. And I haven't seen the paper and read the paper. But I've read enough to know pretty much what I think about it.
Christopher: Okay. Yeah. Would you care to share that opinion?
Tim: Well, firstly, they're very good scientists and they're experts in their field. They make brilliant measurements. And what they report is what they found. There's one problem that there are two guys missing in the one side of the trial. Although there are I think it was 11 on one side.
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But at one trial, there were two people missing. And the question is why they didn't only analyzed all the complete data. So there's something wrong there. But let's not worry about that one. The problem with the study is that it's irrelevant because the brain is what's important in obesity.
And if you don't include the brain, you don't study the problem. So obesity is a brain disorder and it's caused by malfunction of the appestat. And if you put people on the seven to 10% fat diet, they will be perpetually hungry. And they will never sustain, whatever the metabolic response is that will never sustain it because they will start to eat more calories and eventually they will get fat again.
So that's the problem. It's a brainless model. And so it doesn't have any relevance for understanding how you could treat obesity. It may tell us how you burn carbohydrates and fats when you restrict both. But it doesn't tell us what's going on in the brain which is what is the key driver?
A nations of fat not because they've got a problem with the metabolism of fat or carbohydrate. They're fat because they're overeating and they're always hungry. And that's the key question that we have to answer. And I get frustrated when the scientists don't get it. That you can't take one system and say you're going to explain obesity based on that one system. You've got to include the brain.
Christopher: Right. I understand. So the reason I understand is because I've just interviewed Professor Richard David Feinman. And I think that podcast, it will, it will go out before this one. And he said almost the same thing which was stop looking for a metabolic advantage in the lab because it's not relevant.
The real benefit of eating a low carbohydrate diet is you just spontaneously eat less food. And you do so without hunger. Maybe if you tried hard enough you could find something in the lab that showed a metabolic advantage. Maybe something that was related to insulin, but you're missing the point.
Tim: Yeah, exactly. And when I speak, I say that the reason why we have obesity is because people are forever hungry. The fat people are forever hungry and if you can't address the hunger, you can't sort out the problem. And only when you've been on the low carbohydrate diet you understand that because my hunger basically disappeared.
I mean I can go days without -- well, not quite days. But I can go 24 or 48 hours without eating. And almost forget that I haven't eaten if I'm really busy doing other stuff. Now before, I couldn't last two hours without having to eat. And it's such a freedom.
I was talking a few days ago and a 63 year old lady got up. She said, "Dr. Noakes, for 60 years I was hungry. I went on your diet three years ago. I haven't been hungry since." And that's the difference. And unless you've been on the diet you won't understand.
Christopher: Yeah. I absolutely know what you're talking about. I used to get almost like a mild anxiety if I thought I was going to be away from food. Like something would happen. I'd fly, go through an airport or something. And I'd stop having attacks of anxiety because I wouldn't know where the food was going to come from. It's a horrible place to be and it's so liberating to be free of that.
Tim: Exactly. And I'll give you another example. I gave a whole series of talks, evening, lunch time and breakfast, a few months ago. And I didn't get near food for 24 hours. But normally, what would have happen I would have gotten to the hotel and I would have gone in there and I would have raided all those rubbish that they leave in the hotel room.
All that junk and I would have eaten all of it because I was hungry. I looked at it through a lot. I'll eat breakfast tomorrow. Then it turned out I couldn't get to breakfast. That's fine. I'll go to lunch. I didn't get to lunch, that's fine. I'll get to dinner. Completely different attitude.
Christopher: Yeah, it's amazing. And it's been amazing for my sports performance as well I think on the mountain bike in particular with constantly consuming carbohydrate. I'd experience extreme highs and lows of energy particularly when there's caffeine mixed in with this.
And this is a disaster for mountain biking. For anyone that's ridden a mountain bike will know this. When you're a technical train, you need to be concentrating all of the time. It's no good bonking, think about where your next gel is going to come from when there's a great big rock garden to navigate. It's just going to end in disaster.
So the high fat diet's been spectacularly successful for that too. But let me ask you --
Tim: Let me just back up there quickly. The two sports I think that this diet would be most successful for because of that is cricket and golf because that would give you this placid control. And we converted the Australian cricket team and unfortunately they've just had a terrible Ashes.
But we converted them between the last Ashes where they lost five no in England and then they went back to Australia and they won five no. And they converted in the interim. And four of five of their batsman performed astonishingly well.
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Steve Smith for example and the opening batsman, David -- I'd have to think of his name in a second or two. But they performed incredibly well and they were clearly insulin resistant before and they benefited hugely from this diet. But it's clearly concentration improved. And that's exactly what you've seen.
Christopher: So let me ask you this, how do you define insulin resistance? Do you do it with blood chemistry or do you do it with signs and symptoms? And then the next really important question I think is can insulin resistance be reversed?
Tim: Yeah. My view of insulin resistance is that you're born with it, but in varying degrees. So you could be profoundly insulin resistant when you're born. And if you're exposed to a high carbohydrate diet, what happens with the high carbohydrate diet is you get more and more insulin resistant.
So you oversecrete insulin in response to carbohydrates and that insulin makes you more insulin resistant. That's one of the key points to understand that if you are insulin resistant and you eat carbohydrates you will get more insulin resistant.
And within a short time -- so that is why you have type 2 diabetes at the age of ten. That child was born with profound insulin resistance and exposed to a high carbohydrate diet and then developed type 2 diabetes within a space of ten years.
For most of us like myself, I had a bad family history. My dad died of the disease and I ate this high carbohydrate diet for 33 years. And probably took 20 years before I got or 25 years before I got the diabetes. I think I had diabetes for about five year before it was actually finally diagnosed. So in my case, it took me 20 years of a high carbohydrate diet to develop the disease.
Christopher: And what do you think people should be looking for in terms of biomarkers and signs and symptoms?
Tim: Well, I think the first thing is family history. If you have a strong family history of diabetes it's very highly probably you're going to get diabetic. The second is the weight gain. The weight gain that comes on that extra two kilograms, just one or two kilograms.
And that's what I noticed when in 1977 when I changed this diet. Although I was running sometimes up to 200 kilometers a week, I couldn't get that final two kilograms off. I was always two kilograms heavier. And however much I ran, I couldn't get it off.
But yet when I've been eating a much high fat diet I was the leanest I've ever been even when I was running less. So it's clear to me that the carbohydrates were having an effect. But if you want to metabolically study it, its key is insulin. You oversecrete insulin.
This is a disease of insulin. But we measure glucose and glucose is a secondary marker of the problem. So you mentioned that your blood glucose went up to 120 units. It's not great, but it's not too bad. But I'll bet you if you've measured your insulin at the same time you could have found it was two to three times the normal value.
And what happened is you're oversecreting insulin, but your body is still responding a little bit to it. So the glucose is 120. It's not 200. But the first thing that goes wrong is you can have a perfectly normal fasting blood glucose of 80 or whatever. You're five in all units.
But your insulin can be two to three times higher and that's insulin resistance. So if you really want to pick it up in children the first thing you do is measure fasting insulin. And you'll see it just starts to rise and rise and rise and rise.
Then the glucose comes up and then the marker that the older person should absolutely measure is glycated hemoglobin, HbA1c. And that's a measure of what your glucose has been over the last three months. Because what happens is the glucose when it's elevated it binds to the hemoglobin molecule and damages it. And that we call glycated hemoglobin.
And if you're below five, you're very healthy and you're probably at very low risk of many diseases. Five to 5.5 is probably the sort of normal range. It's fine. But once you go above 5.5 to 5.6, 5.7, you're on the way to diabetes. But you won't get there tomorrow. It'll take you five years or ten years to get your value to 6.5 and then you're in trouble because then you have diabetes.
So if we were measuring HbA1c in our population, not cholesterol because cholesterol is totally, utterly without value. If you know any medicine and a patient tells you their cholesterol, all you can say is, "That helps me not one iota. I cannot help you just knowing your cholesterol."
But if you know the HbA1c you've got a measure of the insulin resistance and the extent to which this person is metabolizing carbohydrate effectively. Then you must also measure triglycerides because if your triglycerides is above 0.75 they're too high. You must get them down to 0.75.
[0:35:05]
And you really have to work hard. You have to be very, very low on the carbohydrates if you are insulin resistant. To get below .75 you really have to eat very little carbohydrates if you're insulin resistant. So those are some of the markers.
The other thing my wife would tell you was that I was telling asleep. I was falling asleep and I was moody although I'm not a moody person. But she was the only one who was able to be exposed to my moods. And she said that, "You're moody."
And I know now if my glucose is high which thank goodness it's not. It almost never is. That I would get -- my personality changes as my glucose goes up, my personality change.
Christopher: You've got this barometer.
Tim: Yeah, exactly. Well, fortunately, I keep my glucose incredibly well controlled. But I had a glucose tolerance test a few months ago just to check how things were going. And I was sick for about a day because my glucose has shot so high. I wasn't used to it anymore and I felt terrible. And that tells you how damaging glucose is to your body and how it influences your mood.
Christopher: You don't think that's anything to do with some sort of physiological insulin resistant. You don't think you may have -- the muscles might have started to become resistant to insulin just to preserve glucose for your brain. Do you think that might be something that's going on there?
Tim: That's a brilliant question. Now, that is biologically normal physiological insulin resistance. That's absolutely correct. And we've just studied -- our first study of seven athletes who're eating a high fat diet. And they are insulin resistant in the muscle exactly as you say. And they burn almost no glucose in the muscles.
Sorry. They do burn some glucose in the muscles. But they conserve all their glucose for their brain. So you're quite right. And that's normal. These people are not sick. They've got perfect glucose control. But that's the normal response to a high fat diet is you just stop using glucose and you spare it for your brain.
When you have type 2 diabetes like myself, it's totally different. We maybe insulin resistant in the muscles, but that's not what's killing us. What's killing us is a liver that is just pouring out glucose all the time. And we now know it's because of unopposed glucagon action which is really interesting.
Insulin is not actually the real problem in diabetes. We oversecrete insulin which then causes all sorts of other damage. But it's not the reason why we have high glucose. The reason why we have a high glucose is because the insulin is not working in the pancreas where it does its job. And there it inhibits glucagon secretion by the other cells in the pancreas.
And diabetes is when the insulin secreted in the pancreas in response to glucose ingestion does not inhibit the other cells, the glucagon secreting cells in the pancreas. So what happens in diabetes that is the pancreatic insulin resistance.
The pancreas is secreting insulin, but it's not acting in the pancreas as it should. And so you overproduce glucagon. And that causes you to overproduce glucose. And it's obviously has to be that because again a homeostat works.
If the muscles just become insulin resistant and they don't take up glucose, the brain will say, "Oops, the glucose has risen. We must inhibit glucose production in the liver." And so you secrete more insulin, bring down the glucagon, bring down the other hormones, of course glucose production. And your blood glucose would stabilize.
The fact that it doesn't stabilize tells us that the homeostat's destroyed again. But in this case, the homeostat is sitting in the pancreas itself. And so that is real insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is actually a disease. It's a disease of the pancreas where you've got excessive insulin secretion, but you can't inhibit the glucagon.
Then when the insulin gets out in the rest of the body, it also doesn't work properly. You don't get rid of the glucose. You can't push the glucose in the muscles because you have insulin resistance there.
You don't probably store enough in the liver. And so the glucose is always circulating. So what happens, you have to secrete even more insulin. And every time you oversecrete insulin, it produces an array of diseases including coronary artery disease because it damages the arteries. It damages your mitochondria.
And that maybe why you benefited from the diet. Your mitochondria start to work better and your performance goes up. And the question I'd ask you which you don't have to answer is do you have a family history of diabetes? Because I found with elite athletes that I've worked with, their performance goes up on this diet.
I just ask them, "Did your dad had diabetes?" And they say, "Yeah. How did you know?"
Christopher: So the answer to that is I don't know. But my mom's dad died in his 50s of causes which are mysterious to me. And then my dad's dad died just in his early 70s. And when I look at my dad now -- sorry, dad, if you're listening. He does look like an insulin resistant person. But I just can't get him to check his blood glucose. So the answer is I don't know.
[0:40:15]
Tim: That's interesting because the last guy I had was -- because normally I don't prescribe this diet for elite athletes because I'm not doing explosive sports. And again, I'm very sensitive to the criticism. Biologically, if you're doing a race that last more than five hours you have to be fatted up and you're going to benefit from this diet.
And I can't see a single day event. The Tour de France, I don't know. Maybe you do need a bit more carbohydrate. I simply don't know. So I'm reluctant to -- but if you're an endurance athlete and you're involved in exercise lasting more than five hours this has to be the right diet because you have to burn fat to benefit.
So I'm reluctant to prescribe it for guys exercising, let's say, every two hours or a short ironman or similar events, even a marathon. But I had a guy the other day, he's a top South-African triathlete. And he's only 22 years old. And he's world ranked.
And he said to me, "My performance had gone out of sight on this diet." And I couldn't believe it because I said, "You do a lot of explosive work." He said, "Unbelievable." And I said, "You must have been so insulin resistant that this is why it worked for you." And they said, "Family history of diabetes, et cetera."
Christopher: Okay. And so do you think this can be reversed then? Say you've got a family history of diabetes. You're genetically insulin resistant. You're basically done eating carbohydrates for life. There's no way of going back. And so insulin resistance can't be reversed.
Tim: No. Yes and no. And the reason I say no is because I don't want to be called a quack. And incidentally, the next book I'm writing which is going to be called Challenging Beliefs 2 and it's going to be called Descent into Quackery because that's what people have called me now in my country and in my profession. "That you're a quack. You're promoting ideas for which there's no signs."
There's plenty of signs, but they're too lazy to read it and they're too reactionary. They won't understand it. But anyway, so that's the book I was writing. Now, I can't remember why I told you that.
Christopher: So the question was can insulin resistance be reserved? Is it a genetic disorder and you're never be able to eat carbs again or can I just eat a low carb diet for a while and that'll fix insulin resistance? And I can go back to something more normal.
Tim: Fantastic. I published a paper about two years ago and that's when I was called a quack. Because I get letters every day from people around the world saying, "Thank you, Dr. Noakes. You cured me. You saved me. Blah-blah." Whatever it was.
I mean, yesterday I got one from overseas where a terminal patient with a terminal condition called Takayasu's arteritis, which is a condition for which there's no known cure and it is uniformly fatal. This guy went by chance onto the Banting Diet because his wife went into it.
And he was bed-ridden. And I mean they were told that there was nothing medicine can do for you. "Go home and die." And he's now out of bed. He's exercising. He's walking. His wife says it's unbelievable what's happened within one week of changing to Banting Diet. His health improved dramatically. He's no longer bed-ridden, et cetera.
So he's had huge progress. So I get these letters every day. Now, anyone who hear me say that Takayasu's Syndrome can be cured by the Banting Diet. They say, "Well, that's quack Noakes speaking."
So I had to be very cautious. However, I've received plenty of reports of people reversing -- and I won't say it's reversing. I'd say putting it into remission. That's probably a better term. I had a 127 people wrote to me and I eventually analyzed it and published this in a South-African medical journal.
And there were three classic stories there of people who reversed their type 2 diabetes in which their HbA1c were elevated. They were on full medication. And now they have no medication and the HbA1c is in the normal range. And one of them was a medical doctor.
And so I put all that together and it's the most viewed article in this South-African medical journal in recent history. But I was criticized immediately, this is quackery. You didn't examine the patients, blah-blah-blah.
Do you think they lied to me? Why would they? They showed me the pictures. One guy lost 83 kilograms in 28 weeks and he sent the data. Another person dropped his marathon time in an ultra-marathon in Cape Town by three hours, from six hours to three hours and 59. It was just unbelievable.
There's a guy who was profoundly insulin resistant, but was a really good athlete. As soon as he cut the carbs he did very well. So long story short, we have seen cases where people no longer need their medication. And in fact, we've just raised 1.6 million Rands overseas to fund the study of those very patients. The very patients who've written to me and said, "Dr. Noakes, I'm cured of type 2 diabetes."
[0:45:16]
We're going to study them intensively to see are they cured or are they not? And if they are cured, how normal are they? Can we show in fact that they're normal? And I think that's what we will show.
We'll show that they've just got enough. The pancreas works just well enough. That as long as you don't overstress it with carbohydrate, they can cope. But if you put them straight back on a high carbohydrate diet, their diabetes will appear very, very quickly.
So the answer is no, you cannot go back onto your other diet. You have to stick on this very restricted diet. My personal experience is really interesting because I've been now medicating myself for three years, exercise, supplements, various supplements which I've discovered.
And my control has gotten better over the last three years and particularly more recently because I discovered another supplement that seems to have some really important affect. So I'm not cured and I can only eat 25 grams of carbohydrates a day.
But the key is I didn't get worse. I haven't gotten worse in three years. I've definitely got better and that tells me, that is the opposite. And I'm 66 now and I probably had the disease actually for a couple of years without properly treating it. And so I should be on insulin now and I'm not.
I'm actually cutting back on my conventional medication. So that tells me if you really work hard, but I work hard at this. I measuring my glucose three times a day. I change my medication on the base of what I read. And if my glucose goes a little bit higher, about six, I don't eat. I fast for a period to get it back underneath with medication.
So I'm very, very strict. And I think that what I think I can do is I can prevent myself getting a major complications of the disease, arterial disease in my legs or kidney failure. I think you can probably stop those things. I don't think you can stop everything.
But you can stop a lot of the stuff as long, but you have to be very rigid. You see the problem in medicine is because they don't treat the cause, which is the carbohydrate diet, they never remove that. They have people eating high carbohydrate diets and they overmedicate them with insulin.
And they can never get good enough control and then there's no response. And so they're kind of lethargic. They know you can't get your HbA1c below seven if a person's eating a high carbohydrate diet. So they say that's the target. My target is below five.
I know if I can get my HbA1c below five then I'm probably doing as best as I possibly can. And I probably would have a pretty normal life expectancy is my HbA1c is five because that's well in the normal range.
Christopher: Do you worry about the A1c? So perhaps there's less inflammation now, less oxidative stress. Do you think it's possible that your red blood cells might be living longer now and so they have more chance to get glycated and the A1c might rise a bit for that reason other than the sugar?
Tim: Yeah. No, that's of course affected, but I would think that would be quite a small effect. So what then it means it's measuring over five or six months.
Christopher: Well, yes. So maybe the red blood cells living for 120 days rather than 90. And so it's got more chance for sugar to stick to it and so your A1c is going to come out higher than it was before even though the problem has actually gotten better.
Tim: Absolutely. You know that's certainly a possibility. But my point would be that if you get your HbA1c down to the very low fives, you're probably going to be as good as you can be with diabetes because that's way below the South-African average. People my age just don't have HbA1c in the fives. They just don't.
Christopher: Okay. So this same doctor that I mentioned earlier, Dr. Tommy Wood. He's been doing something he calls a systems analysis. And I think that name comes from another industry. And so what he's done is he's taken like all of the research you could find on insulin resistance and assume nothing. And just thrown into a computer and turn to be handled somewhere. And out somewhere at the other end just popped out this great, big diagram which I'm looking at now and maybe Tommy will give me permission to publish this diagram.
But I can describe it to you quite easily. It's got insulin resistance as a bubble in the middle and then there's all these other bubbles all around it. Things like, I can just read it for you these things, like exogenous corticosteroids, there's 25-hydroxy vitamin D, there's movement, there's thyroid activity.
And so I could go on for the next 15 minutes. There are all of these things which somehow are playing a role in the development of insulin resistance. And although restricting carbohydrates works very well, what eventually you might find out is this is a hugely complex process with lots of different moving parts. There's no one cause and effect. It's like a huge massive, moving, morphing system.
[0:50:01]
Tim: Oh, absolutely. And that's where complementary medicine comes in. So traditional medicine has completely failed. In chronic ill heath, traditional medicine completely fails. We know that if we treat your high blood pressure or we treat your diabetes, you're going to die on exactly the same day if the treatment is ineffective.
We never acknowledge that, but the clinical trials absolutely show that. We can put you on cholesterol lowering drugs. You will die on the same day if you don't have other conditions, if you just have a raised cholesterol.
So medicine, unfortunately, has completely failed. And complementary medicine, which is what you're talking about, is looking at the whole human being. It makes a huge difference. That's certainly what I've discovered in my own management of my own diabetes.
Christopher: Even a single night of sleep deprivation could profoundly change your ability to tolerate carbohydrate the next day.
Tim: Absolutely. And I see there's a lot of variation in my fasting glucose and I can't explain it. But I did discover -- a guy said to me, "You must try this complementary product." Amazing. It dropped my glucose by half a millimole per liter which is huge when you're already down in the fives. If you can drop it .5 it's massive.
Christopher: What was that product if you don't mind me asking?
Tim: N-acetyl-L-cysteine. It's astonishing. I think it's very powerful. Again, the evidence is not there because there are only one or two clinical trials that have been done and they're sort of small samples. But it's considered to be as effective as some of the medications that we use.
It acts in the liver by -- and who knows how it works. But in my case, it made a big difference to me. And if I use more of it -- because I don't know how much to use. You always get if you're using too much. And the other thing I use is Berberine and that's got a whole widespread activities. People say you must eat your fruit for the antioxidants and some. But actually, these complementary products are much more effective in their effects.
Christopher: Yeah. I've had the same experience. Berberine worked really well for me and then Alpha-lipoic acid worked really well for me as well.
Tim: And that's interesting. I tried that, but NAC was the one that made an immediate, clear difference to me.
Christopher: Interesting. So why don't we talk about the Real Meal Revolution? I'm quite excited about it. I did it. I did the first. Maybe we should start by having you explain what the Real Meal Revolution is, the online training course.
Tim: Oh, right. Yes. So in about April 2013, a group came to me and they said, "Tim, we're putting together this book. Would you please write the foreword?" And I thought about it and nothing happened. And then we met again in July. They said, "Where's the foreword?"
So I said, "I've done nothing." So they said, "Well, okay. We want this book out in December." This is not what you're saying. This is the first week of July. So they said, "What we have to do is we have to put this whole book together in the next five weeks. Can you do it?"
I said, "Oh, sure. Forewords would be 500 words. I can easily do it." Anyway, I came back about three weeks later and I'd suddenly decided because I've been so attacked that I would write a long story. I'd write the whole story of why the diet heart hypothesis is wrong and why cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease and insulin resistance is the problem.
And after five weeks, I'd written 25,000 words. They put together 120 recipes. So they had to cut it back to 100 recipes. And we put the book together and within another three weeks it had been printed and set up and edited. And by November it was already in the stores in South-Africa and it started selling then.
So that would have been November 2013. In the last year and a half, it sold 200,000 copies, which is just unbelievable for South-Africa. And it continues to sell. We were number for months on end as the best-seller in South-Africa. It continues to sell.
And it's just astonishing because we're the only reading population of 250,000 people in South-Africa and 200,000 bought the book. So there's only 50,000 who didn't buy the book.
Anyway, so the good news is that it's been released in Britain about a month ago and is already doing pretty well there. But the guys who -- when it became such a hit in South-Africa, they decided that we put together an online program teaching you how to cook and teaching you how to eat this way and prepare foods.
And that's also been extremely successful. So it's really started a -- it has been a revolution. The revolution was my word. They originally had the title "Real Meal Eating" or something. I said, "No, no, no. That's not right. It must be Real Meal Revolution."
[0:55:04]
Because revolution was in Atkins' title. He called it the "Diet Revolution." I said, "We better just kind of link to Atkins without people knowing. We have to put there revolution." But the reason why the book has been so successful is because diet doesn't appear in the title.
And you see, I've realized I'm reading the history of obesity and obesity research and the concepts of obesity. And all the books about losing weight, they have the title diet or something in the title. And so it made you think you're the problem. You have to diet.
We said, "No. Actually, you are not the problem." The problem is simple. It's the food. And if you sort the food out, your body will sort the rest out. And that's why it is such a brilliant book because it puts the focus where the problem is.
And then it says, "You can eat these delicious foods, full of fat, full of protein. They are so tasty. We'll make them even more delicious. And you can eat them relatively without restriction provided you stick to these rules and you keep your carbohydrates down to less than 50 or 25 grams a day." And the food, you celebrate when you look at the book. The recipes are so amazing.
Christopher: I'm still salivating looking at the book on Amazon. And it's not available in the US yet. So what's up with that? When is it going to be here in the US?
Tim: For some reason, we've only released it so far in Australia and New Zealand and the United Kingdom. And I don't know when the release in the US is going to happen, but hopefully it will be quite soon because we're with Little, Brown and Company -- one of the biggest publishers in the world. And so it won't be long before it is in the United States.
Christopher: But what is available now is the online training course which I was really enjoying it the weekend. It's not very expensive. I think it's $50, but you get to do the first module for free. And so you get to watch some lecture, videos by Professor Noakes and then there's some cooking demonstrations by [0:57:10] [Indiscernible]. Did I pronounce that right?
It's not a name I'm used to seeing spelled like that. Yeah, I really, really enjoyed that. I scored 100% on the first quiz, you'll be happy to know. And I really, really enjoyed it. And I'll link to it. I highly recommend it.
Tim: Yeah. No, it is brilliant. And I mean our points were eat real foods, limit carbs and learn how to cook. And if you do those three things, that's all you have to do. Then you're going to be healthy. It's not you're going to have to restrict your food and you're going to have to do this and that and it's all your fault. Just eat fabulous food and you'll be healthy.
Christopher: And let me ask you this finally, who's this for, right? So here's my concern is that maybe I've adopted this therapeutic way of eating that's managing some genetic disorder that I have. And I now have a daughter who's just coming up on two years old.
And my wife, she's just an accommodator, right. She's just someone that likes to please people and she's also an excellent cook. And so she's absolutely fine eating high fat diet, has no desire to eat a ton of carbohydrates at all.
So we have this way of eating. It's mostly a plant-based diet. We eat tons of vegetables. But probably 70 or maybe even 80% of the energy comes from fat, particularly animal fat. It's already in the meat that we're eating.
And our daughter eats the same way. I'm wondering, do you think that's a mistake that maybe I should be -- I mean it's not really like I'm forcing her to eat a low carbohydrate. She wants to eat what we eat. And we offer things like sweet potatoes and stuff like that. And she's not really interested and it's probably because she's never tried before and she's not seen us eating it.
So my question is who's this for? Is it just a therapeutic thing or is it for everyone?
Tim: We don't think so. We think that's the way humans were designed to eat. If you look at our history, we hunted out the fattest animals. I mean the history of North America is when the first Homo sapiens arrived in North America, the biggest animals were the mammoths. And they were hunted ruthlessly by these 50,000 year before humans.
We were astonishingly successful hunters and we were so successful that we wiped out the biggest, the fattest animals on each continent as soon as we visited within 2,000 years or so. There were no more of these big animals.
And our view is that we're designed to eat fat. And of course there are some variance and some populations do eat a lot of carbohydrate. But by and large, the root stock is that we ate a lot of fat.
And so your daughter is doing what was built into her genes over two to three million years. That's how I would argue it. We have written our next book called "Raising Superheroes" which is this diet for children. It's just been released a month ago and it is a fabulous, fabulous book.
[1:00:05]
And all the evidence is that eating more fat and more protein and avoiding particularly sugars, but refined carbohydrates, your daughter is going to grow up much healthier than if she were to eat the industrial diet. Her teeth, she won't get dental carries or cavities.
She'll have a big, broad face. She'll have the right number of teeth in her mouth. By that I mean, her mandible and the maxilla, the parts of the jaws will be properly developed and she'll have this beautiful set of teeth and this beautiful mouth that will look stunning. It's really interesting on that point.
I was watching the US Olympic team, swimming team at the last Olympics. And every single one had perfect faces and perfect teeth. And they told me they had brilliant nutrition right from the word go. And you just don't see people with bad teeth and bad faces, these squashed in faces that you get if you eat high carbohydrate diets from birth.
So she's going to have a fabulous face, fabulous teeth and she's going to be lean. That's the key. She will never have problems with weight. But if she's raised on processed foods, she can become a sugar addict and that the probability that you'll get fat is much higher.
Christopher: I'll look forward to seeing whether that becomes true. You've been to the UK. You know what British people's teeth are like. It's not good. So yeah, the odds are stacked against her a little bit there, but yeah. So far so good. She does have a lot of teeth and they're all straight. Yeah. So we'll see.
Tim: Yeah. If you're concerned, go and read the book by Weston Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. It's all in there. It's just brilliant. And that shows what people, when they used to eat these diets how their faces were beautiful and their health were perfect.
Traditional societies always had perfect health. Of course, had infectious diseases and they died in child birth and they had traumas and so on. But if they got to about 40 or 50, they were likely to have long, healthy lives. And they didn't die of the chronic, degenerative diseases that we die of today.
Christopher: The other thing that I thought was interesting was I mean I've been checking her blood glucose from the start and it's always -- we think in milligrams per deciliters here. It's always been about 85. So it's really pretty good.
And we also have like one of these breath meters that measures ketones. I don't know if you're aware of these. She's now at the point she can blow into one of those and make it flash. I thought that was kind of interesting and I wondered whether like the machine wasn't working properly. And so I measured her blood ketones and they were 1.6 millimole just after finishing dinner.
Tim: Yes. The fact that she's two years old now, I can say.
Christopher: Yeah, two years old. So I thought, "Well, that's strange, but it's normal for infants to enter into a ketosis that quickly."
Tim: Absolutely and you know why. Do you know what your daughter is doing in the first two years of her life? She's converting ketones into brain tissue. That's what she does. And it's astonishing. In children, ketones are essential and no one tells you that. They are utterly essential. If you block ketone production in the child, they have no brain.
And no one tells you that. So she's ketotic which is fantastic because that means she's building a big, big brain. And the brain size that you have at two years usually predicts your intelligence quotient and your success in life.
Christopher: Sorry. I'm getting a little bit side-tracked here, but I think that's really interesting. You don't think it all just levels out in the end. We've noticed -- I mean probably every parent you ever talk to would say this, but developmentally she's definitely she's up there.
She's not even two yet and she's running around and she's climbing and she's talking and she has a sense of humor. But you don't think that it all just levels out in the end when they get to seven years or something.
Tim: Absolutely. But if you were to compare someone, let's say, who got the maximum benefit of ketosis as a child, a child who had eaten lots of carbohydrates and had little ketosis. I think you would find the difference later on in life because the brain size will be different. They'll have different abilities.
The best one is Dr. Jay Wortman, who's from Vancouver in Canada, who is a native Canadian, who was born in the far north and was raised on these traditional foods, the salmon and other fatty foods. And then he got type 2 diabetes because he went to medical school and ate the usual diet. And then he converted back onto his traditional foods and his type 2 diabetes reversed.
[1:05:00]
He brought his daughter up on this high fat diet. And he was in Cape Town lecturing in February and it's actually on the internet. And he shows his five year old daughter skiing all day. She just goes out there and she skis all day. And what she has for breakfast are a couple of eggs, a bit of bacon.
And then she comes home at night and then she has her next meal. And she's highly skilled and got all this endurance at the age of five just fired up by low carbs. Just think children who are raised on low carbs will have huge advantages to children raised on the usual carbohydrates.
Christopher: That's great to know. Well, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. I'm really, really grateful for your time. Is there anything else we missed? Is there anything else you would like people to know about?
Tim: I just think that medicine got it all wrong. And that nutrition accounts for about 85% of chronic ill health. And if you're sick, it doesn't matter what. If you've got a chronic ill health, you better look at nutrition.
So medicine went the wrong way and we said it's because you're lacking a chemical that's patentable and is being sold by the pharmaceutical industry and that is not true. Chronic ill health is not caused by the lack of a chemical that's produced by the pharmaceutical industry.
In my opinion, it's chronic exposure to the wrong diet which then generates the wrong bacteria in the gut and that destroys your health. And I believe what Hippocrates said that all disease begins and ends in the gut. And what you eat determines the bacteria you have in your gut and they determine your long term health.
And we're entering a fabulous time in medicine which is probably the biggest, greatest advance in the last 140 years since we discovered bacteria. Can you imagine if you've been living at the time that the bacteria were discovered and all these infectious diseases suddenly were brought under control?
I'm not saying we still control them, but initially they were brought under control. And we are at that stage where we're going to discover how you treat chronic ill health by sorting out the gut bacteria. And it's a hugely exciting time.
But it's going to take a lot of people like myself and others who got to stand up and say, "You've got it all wrong, guys. The pharmaceutical industry is not the solution. We have to look to what we're eating and we have to improve the quality of food that we're eating." And that's the way we'll improve our health.
Christopher: I couldn't agree more. I am very sympathetic to that idea. Professor, thank you so much for your time. This has been wonderful. And I will link to Challenging Beliefs: Memoirs of a Career because I think that's a fantastic book and of course Waterlogged.
And the Real Meal Revolution as well, the online training course, I will link to that too so that people can find it easily. But yeah, thank you so much.
Tim: Thanks so much and thanks for being such an intelligent interrogator. I really enjoyed it. It's fabulous to talk to you. Thanks, Chris.
Christopher: Cheers, Tim.
Tim: Thanks so much. Bye-bye.
Christopher: Bye-bye.
[1:08:02] End of Audio
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