Challenging conventional dietary guidelines by Prof Tim Noakes | PHC Conference 2018

I want I want us to really give a great round applause not just for Tim but for Marilyn and I think I know he had a standing ovation yesterday but I think he deserves another one today thanks tonight done thank you [Applause] well thank you very much that's that the trouble is how can I now give a talk I spent the whole night worrying about this because yesterday was so amazing for me thank you I thought anything I say is gonna be it's gonna not gonna live up to that so anyway let's hope I can do it I thank you again for everything that it's really been very very special you might think that I'm welcome in my own country but I've never had a reception like this ever in anywhere so thank you you know I was listening as a seemless talking and I had to conclude this is the most important conference I've ever attended in my life and I've been going to conferences for more than 42 years and it's you don't underestimate how important it is that what you've heard it is just incredibly important so I just wanted to say Sam thank you for all you've done this is an amazing movement [Applause] so I could spend hours thanking everyone but I've already got a talk it's too long I've had a move on so this is about the story behind my trial and I want to thank Mariko's Boris is sitting here because she's the co-author and although this is recognized as my book it's not it was a joint job and she produced at least half of the value in this book is what she provided so I'll begin by the opening acknowledgments because they expressed something I felt was important so I it's it reads this I survived sanity intact and that there was a possibility I wouldn't have survived sanity intact once you've been through this you you understand that it's there are moments when it's you're on the edge so anywhere I survived sanity intact the unfathomable cruelty of the bigotry the bullying and the betrayal described in this book only because a small group of gracious and tenacious heroes the righteous and the holy was guiding my train now many of you don't know what I mean by that and so we refer to this very famous song but this train is Bound for Glory and if you don't know the story it is that during the before the Civil War there were still slavery in the United States the southern slaves could be transported to the north through a train of houses which existed and so that there were 20 miles apart and that would be a nice travel so that a slave who was who managed to escape could go from one house to the next 20 miles apart that so far they could travel at night and eventually they were to reach the the north and they would be emancipated and my favorite music video of all time is about that so the trade this train is Bound for Glory is a gospel song which the slaves used to express how they were going to get to north and my view is that we're on that train so [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay and so it goes on so the tweet that I have sent out that has received the most coverage is this one and it says this train don't carry no stat inators and they sugar slaves no diet dictators this train is Bound for Glory this train and IVA come and split this up and I sees just walked in and this is what the books about you know this is the people that we're dealing with or talking to the wall and this is what they're ignoring and the book is about that happens elenimia and I when I hear people talking the cardiology nonsense I just think you know that's what it is you're just mumbling to the wall and you're ignoring the elephant in the room so where where does my story begin my story begins in Liverpool and this is for Peter Bruckner of course that my parents are from Liverpool at the end of the second world war they made to Africa to sort a new life and we eventually arrived in Cape Town and I was studied at the University of Cape Town and so this is our University on the slopes of Table Mountain I've spent many hours running behind this a running became a portent issue for me and one at whilst I was starting my PhD thesis it started to work with a guy called Johan Chris luck who was really interested in post exercise ketosis because no one had studied it for a long time and the reason I show you this data is to show you that I could have diagnosed my type two diabetes my insulin resistance when I was 28 not when I was 58 so so we did an experiment where we did what the reason was we didn't know what post exercise ketosis what caused it but my wife made the diagnosis because in those days we would before a marathon we'd have three days we wouldn't eat anything any carbohydrates we'd eat a high fat diet and then we'd eat a high carbohydrate diet and she told me your breath smells terrible for those three days so this ketosis so maybe keto has got something to do with carbohydrates and lack of carbohydrates so the two over to my friend and our ran on the treadmill for two hours on various there is one when we a a normal diet a high carbohydrate diet and we've got no ketosis one day when we did no exercise that was the control group and then one day when we'd eaten three three days low carbohydrates and so we've got this quite nice ketosis and that that's kind of one of the first studies showing that okay carbohydrates are rather important but there were two of us and so we started with quite low ketones finished with high ketones but here was the interesting stuff which I only discovered and went back two years later so we've also measured free fatty acids glucose and insulin and the key is to notice that when we exercise on the high carbohydrate diet or glucose went up the two of us and that's actually unusual and I think that's amok ravines and resistance I've come back to it but really what happened look at when we did the narrow exercise this was my off fasting insolence they were about five times normal and they're only dropped back that in fact they still weren't normal after a whole day of not eating so the answer was that the two of us were profoundly insulin resistant despite the fact that we were running marathons and we were both extremely lean at the tongue so there we were high glucose which got worse during X I should never every study you look at glucose stays normal during exercise so there's something going on then I think that might be a good marker insulin resistance is if your glucose goes up during high-intensity exercise and then the insulin so how I was profoundly hyperinsulinemic put it simply that people said you'd ate this high carbohydrate diet for 33 years and it made you healthy and then you converted to a high fat diet and with three months you've developed type 2 diabetes so they ignore the 33 years of a person with insulin resistance and a high carbohydrate diet so so the answer was that Tim Noakes and the friend had instant resistance happens anemia despite youth and marathon training and it improved on the high fat diet you could see that and they must develop type 2 diabetes with time if they continued eating a high carbohydrate diet which I did as I'll show my friend I don't know he went to New Zealand I haven't caught up with him so while we were doing these studies we became world authorities on carbohydrate metabolism during exercise and that was what I became well-known for and the reason we became well-known for because we could we were able to study liver metabolism muscle metabolism and also we looked at what happens when you take in carbohydrates so we did intensive studies for about 15 years on muscle glycogen use during exercise so we knew all these pathways we worked them are three quantified exactly where each gram of carbohydrate was coming from we quantified exactly what's the best things to drink during exercise to give you additional carbohydrate we even studied lactate coming from the inactive muscle and being oxidized so I say this the point I'm making is we really studied carbohydrates at great length and what we didn't worry about was fat oxidation it wasn't on the agenda we completely ignored it and so here are some of the studies that we did Andrew Bush did this for his PhD so we had people exercise for 3 hours at about 70% of the maximum and we showed that energy from muscle glycogen fell like the energy from blood glucose increased with time and that made us worried because you might get hypoglycemic if the liver can't produce the glucose it wasn't going to come from your gonna collapse and die of hyperglycemia and here we use a there's a little bit more fat oxidation but when you take carbohydrates you don't burn as much fat that must be good it must be good because this is the way you want to be you want to just burn muscle glycogen that's going to make you run faster and so in hindsight it seems that we wanted to prevent all that oxidation or carbohydrates research tries to shut down all fat oxidation but we couldn't see that at the time nor do still many still to do today they don't understand that and then we even studied what happens if you provide exogenous carbohydrate from drinking and we showed that if you provide an exogenous carbohydrate you could spare some of the glucose coming from the liver and gosh that's going to be good because you're not going to run out of glycogen in the liver you not to become hypoglycemic so that's going to be even better and so the focus was and is on maximizing carbohydrate use and sparing like by increasing exogenous glucose delivery and that's why Gatorade tells you you must drink a hundred grams of carbohydrate every hour that you do the Ironman there's the diet regard not so in a twit tin arm Ironman you must eat a kilogram of carbohydrates or else you're not going to finish but the best way to spare muscle glycogen use is to burn more fat so but we but we couldn't see it now I'm trying to make the point that when you become so engrossed in a dogma you can't see the wood for the trees and that's what happened to us so at then at the time I was involved with this guy Bruce Fordyce who became the the sort of iconic South African runner he won this famous comrades marathon race tie nine times which has never be equaled and we worked with him and we got him to take lots of carbohydrate during the races and I even got him to tell me this you see he's not possible for me to run my best in a long-distance race without ingesting a high carbohydrate drink especially for the last few hours of the race he has since converted to the high-fat diet and he said Tim you know we made one error if you put me on the high-fat diet here I would have won another team comrades and why because he put on weight you put on two kilograms which is a 50 50 kilogram guy the two kilograms makes a difference and we produced a product the first energy GU in the world press produced by myself and Bruce and it was called FRN here you are there's lip and sport for dice Rose Noakes squeezy is the original carbohydrate gel produce available to endurance athletes this is someone else's rhythm so that's so I apologize for for doing that so so why were we wrong why were you wrong because you couldn't see the elephant in the room and the elephant in the room is that it's the fat that's we just ignored it so and you have to ask why well because no one was selling products that that we could test and it's very difficult to study fat metabolism it's easy to study these they're all there are radio label traces that you can use but the factors are very difficult to study so we became experts on this because this was difficult and we just ignored it it didn't matter and this is the problem this is the elephant in the room that this is how much fat you having the 20 fat energy and the so much carbohydrate initiative so you know so how can you continue to ignore it in which which we did so it's been estimated you all know this that adipose tissue stores the nine could supply sufficient energy for nearly four days of running compared to less than two hours using only muscle glycogen and there are many athletes around the world who are now running the Ironman or doing 100-mile races without eating at all and it's obvious once you get your fat oxidation rights after you can you don't need carbohydrate at all so so the I apologize for 33 years I was completely wrong and didn't see the elephant in the room so I understand it now and what the other elephant in the room was that the great athletes in that we after the war right up till the 1969's we're not eating high carbohydrate diets and you just ask them and they'll tell you this Jim peel is probably the greatest marathoner of all time and Englishmen who say who lowered the world marathon time by about seven minutes over three years it's just astonishing no one has ever touched that so he writes we were still rationed for me to none extra could be obtained at the time of the 1948 Olympics we were given extra meat and also received food parcels from overseas but by the 1952 Olympics we weren't so lucky people had forgotten about Britain and they weren't going to survive food to the poor the British who were starving the only thing that could be done was to try to make up with extra bread and potatoes which is probably not the best food on which to run over a hundred miles a week in training so how can the greatest runner of all time at that time say this but yet we were trying to force people to eat carbohydrates so this really began to change me by Stephanie I started to change this in 1984 when he published this paper and this was the first modern study of fat adaptation and he put five people on a high-fat diet for four weeks and this is what he found he showed that this is the exercise performance before minutes to exhaustion at 65 cent vo2 is not a great test but anyway it's good enough and what he found was that for two people the results dramatically increased and for two people that dramatically worse and then one was pretty much the same which is really interesting because of the individual variability in the response and so he probably might have concluded that for some people it's really beneficial for others it's actually horrible and for some people it's kind of neutral but he concluded that four weeks of adaptation to the ketogenic diet resulted in no change in endurance performance what really influenced him was his father at a massive library and in his father's library he found this book the long arctic search and these guys went to look for the Franklin expedition had got lost looking for the Northwest Passage and it's one of the great tragedies that these people just got lost and then they found them eventually these guys found them so the author he has the author talking to the local Inuit who helped them and fed them while they were looking for these these ships and this is what what Stephanie had Rick read in the book when first Rowan wholly upon a diet of reindeer meat it seems inadequate to properly nourish the system and there is an apparent weakness and inability to perform severe exerting fatiguing journeys but this spoon passes away in the course of two or three weeks so that was why I thought your Meister studies have been too short duration but if we do a longer study we may find that fat adaptational works and that influenced us so now here we are promoting carbohydrates telling Bruce he can't win the comrades unless he eats lots of carbohydrate but behind the scenes we're doing studies of high-fat diets so I only look back now and think well what were you thinking so sorry sorry and the one other thing before we get there the I'm from Zimbabwe I was born in Zimbabwe and this lady was also born in Zimbabwe her name is Paul and yuba Fraser many of you weren't nervous she's one of the greatest athletes of all time and she went to America to become a professional triathlete and here are some pictures of her victories and her racing and it turns out that she won 28 Ironman triathlons including eight World Championships no male has ever reached that equal that and she was named the triathlete of the millennium when she got there in 1984 she found me because she'd read Stephanie's work and she said Tim should I drop the high fat tart and I said something to her so misinterpreting my advice I said yes go for it she fine she followed a low-carbohydrate all her career I never said either low-carbohydrate I said just eat some more fat she believes it was the most important advice she ever received the entire career and she said you can't change the unknown and pasture and salads and so and she I asked her but Paula vibe she said well I grew up in in Zimbabwe and we were always eating meats we were always chewing on biltong that's the beef jerky and that's what she would eat the non man she would eat meat as she was doing the Iron Man and this years and days are typical you can tell that this is a carnival so so while this was going on I was we were inspired to do some high fat studies so here's one enhanced endurance in training cyclists during moderate intensity exercise following two weeks at lap - no - Todd published in 1994 and so here were the results that actually win these people we tested them we did a couple of pretest so that we look like two depleted and guess what the high fat thought they did much better than in the high carbohydrate diet my point is I'm still not accepting this I'm still promoting a high carbohydrate diet and he has another one which which was a very similar study and we found that if we trained these people and then we put them back on a high carbohydrate diet for the last day before competition they actually did better their performance was quicker in a 20k time trial after the high fat diet and but this was two weeks had adapted for two weeks and then we made the durable error of doing this study and this now became the gold standard this is called by Louise Burke who you were introduced to yesterday the nail in the coffin study for the high fat diet during exercise so this was one of our PhD students and what she did we did 100 K time trials so that they did a high carbohydrate diets here we go they did a high carbohydrate diet followed by one day of carbohydrate loading so it was six days and one day and then they did a time trial over 100 kilometres then that of course they were randomized also did a high-fat diet and what you'll see is that one two three get worse on the high carbohydrate diet and one two three four five get better on the high carbohydrate so it's five to three which is very similar to what Steve Finney had had found and overall there was no difference but unfortunately we also reported the data and it turns out that when they did the the four kilometer splints Sprint's they were slightly slower for the second and third but not for the fourth so the final sprint was exactly the same in both groups and what was happening they were pacing themselves because they hadn't been experienced to this start and that was interpreted that the second and third Sprint's were weaker because there was the carbohydrate effect or the Fed effect it wasn't the case in my view they were pacing themselves because they certainly they weren't used to using the dot and that was picked up and it was said in the conclusion that was the conclusion that their conclusion was this that you compromises high intensity sprint performance but we actually didn't show that we showed that their pacing was different now all this time we've also did this study also with dr. Louise Burke did the study with us in which we used the first placebo ever in a carbohydrate loading trial and guess what we found no difference so carbohydrate loading versus placebo there was no difference in time to perform these these 1k and 4k Sprint's or the total time so this this proves the high carbohydrate diet this is now 2,000 and one of the co-authors is the lady who called me a criminal but she all said and doesn't tell her people that the carbohydrates didn't work so what did we write in placebo control study showing the carbohydrate loading did not improve performance of 100 K cycling time trial during which carbohydrate was consumed so that the null hypothesis is there for carbohydrate loading doesn't work but what is Tim Noakes right because he can't get can't release the old idea he has to have an ad hoc explanation and that ad hoc is by preventing any fall in blood glucose concentration carbohydrate ingestion during exercise said any detrimental effect on performance of lower pre-exercise muscle rocks and liver blocks of concentration that is garbage you're not allowed to do that and that's what happens and the biggest example of that is the Women's Health Initiative because they did exactly the same the null hypothesis was that a low-fat diet will not in change your heart attack risk it didn't so the Women's Health Initiative should have been reported there was no difference therefore the low-fat diet doesn't work not they said own I didn't drop the cholesterol enough and have now not enough women followed the diet properly no no no you can't do it that right so we're all guilty of this of doing that yeah I think this was this is the slots it got out of sequence so this is now we're gonna go back to the the high fat diet and here you see these are the 1k sprints during a hundred K time trial and what you see is that the group on the high fat diet on the second the third and the four sprint they're actually lower but on the fifth sprint they're the same so if it's a metabolic effect it can't be working here because it's not working there so there cannot be there cannot be a metabolic effect it's a pacing strategy and when they did 1k of Sprint's they were fine oh yeah that's these are these are forecast prints they were the same so we misinterpret that information and so conclusion the high fat carbohydrate diet reap at an increased fed acceleration but compromised high-intensity sprint performance and it's not I don't believe it I think it changed the pacing strategy so this is in the background and during this time I'm writing this book nineteen eighty six alright it this is 2002 and so despite all that I've shown you please understand that what I've shown you what do I conclude I conclude athletes must be advised to eat high carbohydrate diets and why because I was being funded by industry and that's that's why you conclude that and it you don't think it affects you but it does because the only thing you worried about it I'm not gonna have money for next year that's that's what it becomes and I don't say that's not true because obviously you're looking for the truth but you you always behind the scene you're believing this thing works because it has to because that's where the funding comes from so it's very subtle and people do it because they think they're cheating let that actively do it it just happens that way so this interpretation forms the central pillar of the profession of sports nutrition that's high carbohydrate diets and are considered ideal for both health and sport that is 2002 now following my own advice I developed type 2 diabetes despite running 70 marathons and ultramarathons and so what happened next was that I started to question a few things so here's a picture of me graduating with my MD in 1981 on my list my mother obviously that's my father and they're very proud because they gave me the opportunity to go to university which they did not have and these are two very special people obviously I get a very emotional my dad is 68 I'm 68 today he had just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes ten years later he was dead and he had the worst death possible because that's the diabetes death he had had strokes and he lost both his legs and it was just he could not speak to me when he died so now at 68 I've I've actually had diabetes diagnosis for eight years so am I gonna have two years time there was the question I faced actually when I made the diagnosis was I gonna last 10 years and I liked him or not and so I had to think about doing differently now this was the advice my dad was given and I don't blame this lady at all cuz she's a personal friend but this was this was a book that was available to him that she wrote funded by yeah yeah yes a sugar Association and nowadays the diet recommended for diabetics is high in complex carbohydrates and low in fat so that was the advice he was going given and the point is I know now that that that advice killed him that's the key diabetes you don't die of diabetes you die of the treatment you die have the management of the disease and that's the crucial point and so then this we fast-forward to South Africa 2014 and this is the advice that's being given carbohydrates are an important source of energy in the body and glucose which is the product of the digestion of carbohydrates is there any source I mean it's just this is simply wrong but and why is it wrong because in diabetes you have hyperglycemia you've got too much glucose so why should you be worrying about glucose being too low it is nonsensical and my point is my father did not die from hypoglycemia he died from disseminated arterial disease and that is what type 2 diabetes is you have to address the disseminated raw material disease so I was fortunate that on December the 12th and I can remember that I 20 December 12 2010 this book appeared in my life and it came up on my screen on the emails and I was so angry because he has Steve Finney the guy who did the high fat diet and he was a great scientist and now he sold out to Atkins and I was so angry I rushed down to the store and I bought the book and two hours later I said oh my gosh I got it completely wrong and I changed that moment and I had my I said that's it with carbs I'm not eating carbs anymore and you know we need to recognize this guy because he describes instant resistance that books all about instant resistance and it's a it's a magnificent book it's the best book on on diets in my opinion so we really need to recognize him so then so now I've started my journey I've changed my diet and within a six weeks my running gets better going back 20 years I go back from a 60 year old to a 40 year old and that was just unbelievable for me and so now of course I'm completely committed there's no way I'm not going to be committed after that and then of course I read Gary Taubes his book and then I read then eventually I had to acknowledge that I changed I read this book and here it says how a low-carb it shouldn't be that should be moderate protein that will improve your life so this was the the book I wrote and now this then cause started the problems for me because the cardiologists read this and I said that statins are not the treatment for heart disease etc and so that's when the campaign against me started and and as I described in the book when I realized I was in trouble was I was awarded the the premier research award in South Africa on that particularly evening and within 30 but within about two minutes of receiving the award my cell phone rings and it's from the newspaper and they say they've got a letter in the newspaper criticising me for what I've written in this book it's clear to his timed because in the next morning's paper it didn't say Tim Noakes who awarded the best the senior award in science it was about Tim Noakes attacking being wrong and the cardiologists telling him he's wrong it was clearly coordinated so that that was the start so anyway that was the beginning and then I wrote this article because now people were writing to me and they were telling me these stories and I was getting these unbelievable stories about people reversing diabetes and other conditions so I described 127 cases and within a week of this being published I got a letter from my ethics board at the University saying you could didn't get ethical clearance to publish this paper they wanted to a straw it because it was so threatening because it there it is I think we we said here a randomized controlled clinical trials urgently required to disprove the hypothesis that the low-carb eating can reverse case at a two-book diabetes metabolic syndrome and hypertension without formica therapy and they were so threatening so this is now after in 2013 and then the next thing happened was these two guys came in spoke to me with the nutritionist and said let's run a book and the story was that David Greer is a runner and he had run the length of the child Wall of China the first person to do it with another person and they'd reach Mongolia and they were in real trouble they were wasting away and they didn't have any energy and they were told by the Mongolians you better eat pork fat we're not going to finish so they said we're eating pork fat and they add pork fat for the rest of the run and it's funny because he also ran the length of India from sorry that the depth India and of course he was getting many carbohydrates and then she got so weak he decided I've got to eat chicken so he decided out eat a chicken a day and as he started eating his chickens his distance he traveled every day went up and he became much healthier so these two guys said let's write a book and rewrite the book it took five weeks to write it and this then changed the whole nutrition and Skype in South Africa because people started following the diet losing the weight getting all the benefits and realizing that actually the partitions couldn't help them and so now this is a huge threat for the dieticians profession and I'll show you what the consequences were and the genius of the book is the green list and this just is the list of the foods that you should eat and that's that's it you know the genius in the book is that one single page which I didn't give Sally Creed gave it and if you eat that diet you you're not gonna get time to diabetes then of course I read a few months that I read Nina tackle and then I said I can't believe this book it's saying exactly what I've been believing but could never really believe it was true so in this this is the final statement in her book if you haven't read it I'm sure you have the advice that comes out of this book is that a high fat diet almost assuredly healthier than one low in fat and high in carbohydrates the most rigorous science now supports this statement and esteem has given his article about the saturated fat which came out in 2013 and this is article Plus that convinced me that now we were on the right track so then what next happens is the trial begins and this is just to this is one of the local newspapers and this is October 19 2016 so this is the end of my testimony and at one point currently I said that and so let's go back now we'll start the trial so why do I use Twitter I use it for information sharing and I think if you go to my site you'll see that that I in for I care I try to share all the latest information that I pick up from other people who are providing it in my personal education I download about five or six articles a day and store them and I don't know when I'll ever get to read them but they stored and I've my inbox is just full of articles so that there's this person education and it's actually overwhelming the information out there is overwhelming as as Peter Bruckner showed us yesterday you know that the the quality of the information is amazing and then the third one is challenging conventional dietary guidelines so I try to promote the science supporting the medical benefits of the low carbohydrate Banting lifestyle at the same time highlighting the failings of the current pharmacological model of chronic disease management and so obviously this is what gets focused on when when you're criticized and and you people don't don't realize that you're sharing good information and you're trying to educate people so now we come to the start of this catastrophe so on February the 3rd 2014 mrs. pepper Leon Straub tweets this comment is lchf and she sent it to me and to sell creed the co-author of the book is LCA cheating okay for breastfeeding moms worried about all the dairy and cauliflower causing wind in babies question mark and and the point of this is that it's a plural it's a question in the plural and that means anything you do thereafter you just giving general information which you're entitled to do so that all the guidelines in South Africa all that that is fine you if it's an i question if it's a baby and a mother then it's directing medical advice and it falls under a different category so knowing that i said baby doesn't eat the darién cauliflower just very healthy high fat breast milk and then the product the catastrophe key is to wean which I didn't even how to spell green baby's health red and there was a whole story about we don't use the word weaning we talking about complementary feeding and that just shows how ignorant you are if you don't know that you so then this is the problem so I tweeted on the afternoon of Wednesday and the next morning this is sent to the health fund the health professional counselor South Africa by this lady who's the head of the prison of the associate of Dietetics in South Africa and she says to whom it may concern I would like to file a complaint against previous professor Tim Noakes he is giving incorrect medical and it sure that's medical something but it doesn't it's a medical nutrition therapy which incidentally is would be using a ketogenic diet for epilepsy and that wasn't what I was talking about on Twitter that is not evidence-based I've attached the tweet where professor Noakes advices a breastfeeding mother to wean her baby on to low carbohydrate high fat that I urge the HP CSA to please take urgent action against the step of Conda misconduct as Noakes is a celebrity and the public does not have the knowledge to understand that the information is advocating is not evidence-based it especially dangerous dangerous to give this advice for infants and can potentially be life-threatening I await your response so they then then wrote to me and I responded and eventually as we will describe they decided to charge me and so the charges fell under the biomedical ethical issues I acted as gracefully because I abused the doctor-patient relationship by offering medical advice on social media to a patient and her infant without first examining the healthy patient and the second one the biomedical biological issue of the medical advice our proffered was not only wrong and conventional I not evidence-based but it was also dangerous although there was never never any evidence or claim for harm and of course this was a circular argument in a sense because providing medical information on Twitter represents disgraceful conduct because it's not possible to examine the patient on Twitter but it's not possible to examine the patient on Twitter then it's not possible to have a doctor-patient relationship on Twitter but there kind of what they eventually did in as the perp that trial progressed they said no no no no we're not interested in a doctor-patient relationship anymore which was the basis of the charge they said no no no you are tweeting to millions of people around the world and they're getting the wrong advice and it's very dangerous you're gonna kill patients that became the charge so they went away from when they realized that there wasn't the doctor-patient relationship but that the trial was so poorly constructed this is the way they had to do it so that the charge met if her plateau if a patient wishes to form a doctor-patient relationship by Twitter they simply asked for one's contact details she didn't do that and a lot of people do that say I'd like to consult you where how can I contact you patients resort to Twitter to acquire information that will allow them to optimize their the care that they received from the medical profession they simply using a convenient platform to find medical information they're not looking for medical care unless they specifically asked that would be the argument now so this was the basis of the charge and then it went to this preliminary committee who had to decide now do they charge me or not and what they are meant to do is they are meant to gather all the information on the the prosecution side they gather all your information and you are allowed to come before them and say listen this is what the story is I was never given that right which is completely against the the constitution of South Africa my constitutional rights were invaded by that I was not given the constitutional right and these were the the people of callin people who decided to charge me and Riyad this guy was my professor at university this girl was at school of my sister and they still didn't ask me for anything and you ask why well they represented this Africa Medical Association who'd taken a position against me so they were just spokespersons for that and the question was have they ever been on Twitter do they understand Twitter well there's no evidence that any of them has ever been on Twitter they're having a clue our Twitter's about and they're trying to judge a thing like like this so there was no evidence so the problems for the health professional council was I answered a wee Christian and he has an article written in this African medical journal by a lady writing about ethical and legal perspectives on the use of social media by health professionals in South Africa this is written while the case is in in a call because partly because they wanted to clarify and what does she say she said it is advisable that professionals share generic information online so you're encouraged to do it and avoid responding with direct medical advice to individuals so she's saying answer a and a weak question but don't answer an i question which is exactly of course what I did and then she said as a standard precaution it should be mandatory that any medical discussion professionals enter into on social platforms be accompanied by advise that patients must consult their practitioners well of course this is nonsensical because if they had consulted their professionals that they had faith in the professional they wouldn't write to you so that's nonsensical and she also doesn't really understand the nature of Twitter but anyway that's how I responded with a letter in the cyberking Medical Journal this is not really to do with the trial but it's just kind of to to lay the ground and and I made the point this is the distinction is the difference between responding to an hour a week wish and the question I answered was a week question seeking generic medical information which of course she agrees was acceptable any doctor willfully attempting to enter a doctor-patient relationship on Twitter you must very likely act unprofessionally since there's a high probability the act of treating a patient on Twitter will involve super session soon as you do that you are probably going to supersede someone this is because patients resorting to Twitter are not actually seeking medical care so I have no reason to address any requests to their professional caregivers and the whole irony of the trial was that the lady who reported me immediately led to papillion straw and said consult me I will give you advice so she superseded me and she gave medical advice on Twitter so she broke all the rules that she was accusing me of breaking and there was another dietitian they did exactly the same so that was the first problem the second problem there was no doctor-patient relationship and we established that in the trial that there was none and the telling point in the we've had an appeal quite recently was the magistrate hearing the appeal came he went through all the tweets and the final tweet from lien straw says I'm confused by all this information he said here you are she was just looking for information she wasn't looking for medical advice so he then realized I hope because he hasn't given his final decision I hope you realized that there was no doctor-patient relationship then Dan and siani who's a president Suffolk Medical Association a great friend of mine he wrote this editorial which in another publication was having a medical journal saying today medical advice athletes Arabic with us all across the globe via both print and electronic media but it's never been suggested that dr. oz as a doctor patient relationship with his variants nor as such a relationship ever been purported to exist in relation to any other medical media advisors on platforms such as Twitter Facebook TV or radio and he said what was all the kerfuffle about I mean if you know at that Tim what's all the nonsense of art so why was I treated different and is it to set an historical precedent and that became one of the real questions for us so there was no doctor-patient relationship the and then the final will not the final but the really important point the information I provided is entirely compatible with South African and international guidelines for complementary feeding of infants which had been drawn up by the individuals who have trying to prosecute me by the very witnesses across the Thames head so so let's look at that here we go this was suitable complementary foods meat poultry fish and eggs should be eaten daily or as often as possible it's exactly what I said and she was an expert witness for the prosecution against me and then this is add sir who also had been in the prosecution foods from animals should be eaten daily or as often as possible to meat protein and other needs so that's answer who are also prosecuting me and then this year lady SD Forster who who was now she wrote she was this the principal prosecution witness she drove the whole case for the prosecution so what are her guidelines from six months of age give your child meat chicken fishery every day was often as possible so we did we detail the stories about dr. Foster in the book and how she was hurting her within five minutes my legal team had completely destroyed their credibility because they showed that she was not trained as a dietitian she'd never given dietary advice she knew nothing about ethics although she was presenting herself as an ethics expert and she'd never done a low carbohydrate diet ever she'd never done Studies on low carbohydrate diets so rocky Ram Dass who you'll meet in a second or two they said well why are you here then if you've got no expertise and I said that's on I said this on and when I was being interviewed yesterday there's a weird in South Africa which is kind of a bit like the F word but it's called cccc says that's completely dismissive said any word she said to me in the 28 days of the trial was seized and that was after she came off the pill off the stand having been interrogated by dr. rocky Ram Dass she said to me cysts and walked around that was it so this yes I'm sorry by the way sorry sorry sorry she funded by is a sugar funded by Nestle and she was also the president of ill see the International Life Sciences Institute in South Africa which is a coca-cola front yeah so and their look here this is what the book says this is what you should be eating is exactly what Gerald histy had said you should be eating no one suffered any harm miss mrs. litzer didn't follow the advice nor did she lay the complaint so that the lady you write the letter or the email she said I would never follow that advice as were so stupid I would never consider putting my son on that path and so here she is and it's in Afrikaans and she says I don't give a damn for the straw that's what she said they cruelly I don't feel a feather I don't feel anything about it and he has his son you might have been on the Banting garden I think he'd look healthier if he had been on the Pentagon and finally in a child like this you can ask for freedom of information and so you can get emails and the one set of emails we needed we got but there's another set which are hidden and they've refused to give it to us and I think that if we lose the case on the appeal we will go and find that material because that will show the real depths of the collusion but there was frank collusion the complaint was laid as part of a collusion between ad sir and the HP csa were the person that purpose of silenced me that is denying me my constitutional right of freedom of speech and we've got absolute evidence that that was the case and what is that Evans he has an email chain between your sink stratum which was sent to this lady professor Vincent for you know who's the ads are represented on the HP CSI board and you know that honey I was looking at that Peter Peter Bruckner slide she's one of the authors of the pure study yeah one of the what is the pure study so anyway and she obviously she might have changed I don't think so but she might change her mind but here is what happened this is to Thursday the 30th of January 8:50 a.m. remember my tweet went out on the 5th of February so it's it's six or seven days later Tim likes impact on the Dietetics profession here are other examples of what other people are writing about dieticians due to the negative attention we're getting from Tim Noakes I gave him no negative attention whatsoever I did not criticize the dietitians at all I just read the book the article below text on issues but is written by someone else a woman on the TWiT team next are targeting registered dietician so the complaint was really that South Africans were criticizing ed Sir and they gonna target me as they as the cause the Edelweiss just would like to follow up on the Tim Noakes problem the the bashing of the profession continues I was not bashing the profession and we need interventions from the h pcs ISM as a matter of urgency as ad so we do not comment but the H pcs has a much bigger clot and we are desperate for an intervention thanks Claire now this lady serves on the HP CSI poor and then she said there's still some more hi Claire okay this is my I've been to a meeting we were told clearly by the Advocate who is the senior lawyer for the HP CSA we can't tell you what is the decision of the board however I can tell you that we've got a plan we've got a plan for dr. Knox and so cheers you of us and this is now written on the 4th of June and the trial and he starts in June 2015 so this is what was happening she was colluding these two were colluding and my conclusion is that this lady because she was on the HP CSA Board colluded with those seven people to make sure that I was charged without being given my freedom of speech and right to defend myself before them but that will come out so and then so you're seeing straighten right back thank you for your email I just feel that the process takes very long and the damage gets worse and worse dieticians contact me daily and I feel that I don't have support from the HP CSA I'm glad that it's been discussed could you possibly give me an indication of what timelines are when we can expect action taken Thanks so this is a malicious prosecution that's what it is and so if we were to lose the case we would win the case by simply showing this to any judge and that was the problem because it's a quasi legal case with it doesn't have the power of having a judge present but if a judge was present he'd say okay who got her who got harmed who's the complainant what harm was done and then we were just so but there was collusion and if the case would be thrown out in in a few hours so in the end of the trials lasted more than four years and cost an estimated 1 million pounds you know unfortunately not to me because my two lawyers gave that time for free but perhaps it's great legacy will have brought the lchf diet and even larger global audience and say [Applause] so I need to thank and recognize a few people so my wife has been absolutely extraordinary as a as a sim notice that we wouldn't have made it through without her support I think she's probably the nice clever woman I've ever met it oughta be I've known her for 50 years we've been married for 47 years and that I just realized every day how clever she is and and how stupid I am bad comparison and then this is my league of team and I always cry when I talk about him so he has Adam he was the advocate to plan the whole thing and daily weight worked with me and was just amazing he was at school with my son so that was the linkage and next to him is rocky Ramdas who now he's my brother we are brothers in arms and he is obviously Hindu is vegetarian and so we always discuss that but he finally said is not religious he once went we once went to an abattoir and he couldn't eat meat after that so I said you're never gonna convince me it's but he's an amazing man he's he's one of the great products of South Africa he matriculated he wrote his metric using candlesticks he they did not have money for lights in the house he lived with with three children two parents in one room house astonishing man and when he he then became a doctor and his wife moved to Pietermaritzburg and he couldn't practice medicine there were too many doctors there so he said well I'll study law and he studied law after hours in his general practice he taught himself law and he became it became and thereafter and we I mean I just did we just love each other that's always do it and this is microphone inest who the Senior Council is one of the senior lawyers in the country he found me up six weeks before the trial began and he said I will defend you for no cost each Raja's 5000 ranpur aha yeah which is which is what five hundred pounds or whatever and he gave his time for free and I estimate between the two of them they probably gave me half a million pounds worth of legal advice yeah probably more and that's and they made it possible and so we had and we were competing with really lawyers which weren't in the same league so there was that that group and I'm forever thankful so I just want you to know that behind me there stands some amazing amazing people and then of course there are the three angels [Applause] so you all know Zoey and she just destroyed the prosecution's lawyer he just didn't ever clear where he was coming from she presented her PhD thesis over about a day and he tried to cross-examine her an but that's God God knowing it you know need a title of course and it was even funnier with her because when she finished he said are you enjoying your stay in Cape Town so she said yes so she said well I hope you'll enjoy the next few days you're here he didn't ask her one question that's here is boy and this is the lady corns in who's now on New Zealand she was a UCT graduate in Dietetics who I had trained and of course she said you taught me to prescribe carbohydrates and so so the funny stories she goes to New Zealand and she goes to the Auckland University of Technology and grant Schofield is her professor and about five or six years ago he comes to and he says Karen you know there's a story about this low-carb high-fat diet I mean I know it's a fare I know it's rubbish but I have to lecture the students weren't you just going to look into it to see and tell me what I should say so Karen goes and looks in if she comes back a week later says I'm sorry to tell you that they right and you're wrong I said well like I will change them and now they both written some great books what the feds and and for those you interested in rugby they converted the all-black rugby team to a higher fat not a completely low carbohydrate heart and a few other things so that was the team and they they presented that that they information for three days they were cross-examined for a day and they didn't bulge we didn't lose any points at all on that so I seem as said Gandhi's his hero Martin Luther King was one of mine our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter and and why I said that this is such an important conference because this matters there's nothing limits and it matters more than what we're discussing here nothing yeah absolutely nothing all the rest is is talking to the wall and this is the elephant in the room and in time it will be realized but we just got to keep fighting and I always finish all finished but another story would so it's for Peter and for all of us from Liverpool and all of those three men thank you so much [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] they're good [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Public Health Collaboration

Views: 54,036

Rating: 4.8771782 out of 5

Keywords: diabetes, diet, nutrition, health, public health, low carb, obesity

Id: 0Es9G2qSna8

Length: 57min 8sec (3428 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 12 2018