A low carbohydrate, low sugar diet seems to be the most
beneficial. Tim, why is that?
Because it's the diet that humans evolved with, you know, I
know we've, we're going to a global audience.
But yesterday I saw a lovely slide that 22,000 years ago, all
of Europe, most of Europe and most of North America was under
a kilometre of ice. So how could you grow carbs
22,000 years ago? You either ate something else or
you died. And the reality is that for the
last two million years at least, humans are being eating a high
fat, high protein diet. And that's what we evolved to
eat. And then we were doing very well
until along came the new dietary guidelines, which were driven by
the food industry. And they, there was 1977, they,
they came along 1977. And we gave, got this pyramid
with lots of grains at the bottom and meat at the top.
And that was a complete distortion because that's not
what humans were adapted to eat. So we started eating that diet.
And now currently, something like 60 to 80% of North
Americans are suffering from metabolic syndrome, which is
caused by excessive fat accumulation, particularly in
the liver and the intestine. And that's where we are now.
And fortunately, with Trump coming along and and Robert
Kennedy Junior, they are desperately trying to change the
food environment in the United States.
And that's what we have to do. We have to reverse it to where
it was when I was a child in the 1950s.
I grew up on a bacon and eggs for breakfast because that's
what my parents had eaten when they were living in in Liverpool
before they came to Africa. And that's what they were
brought up on. And they'd been brought up on
that because they came from the north of England.
And the north of England had, I suspect, been cold and covered
for ice for for many centuries. And so the people who survived
there or went back there ultimately were going to be
eating animals. Something you spoke about when
you were young. Would you mind taking me through
your journey and how you got to where you are now?
Yeah, well, I was born in Zimbabwe and then we moved to
South Africa when I was five years old.
I went to school here. Uh, I finished my schooling.
I had no idea what I wanted to study.
Absolutely none. I was fortunate to go to America
for a year on an exchange programme.
I was fortunate that Professor Christian Barnard performed the
world's first human heart transplant on the mountainside
here at the University of Cape Town at the Hospital, Kurdiscare
Hospital. And I three months after he
performed that operation, I woke up 1 morning and said I'm going
to study medicine at UCTI. Studied medicine at UCTI, very
quickly realised that my interest was more in exercise
Physiology. So when we were studying
medicine, I was studying the exercise Physiology side of it.
When we were studying medicine, I was looking at the sports
medicine side. I somehow convinced the guys I
knew enough about medicines. I passed with my got my degree.
I still, I did a year in the hospital so that now I was, I
could practise medicine. But I realised I just wasn't cut
out for this. I was not someone who's good at
managing patients. I'm really good at looking at
the literature and finding out, asking questions and working out
to what we should be doing. So in a sense what happens in
medicine is you reach a point where now your career must
divide. You've got choices and if you're
intellectual, if you're a surgeon, it's fantastic because
then you go and practise with your hands and you cure, you
really cure people or you make them better.
But if you're a physician, it all comes down to what's in your
head. And, and the more you know and
the more your brain can retain information, the better you are
as you, the better you're qualified you are as an
academic. Doesn't mean you can manage
patients. And I realised I didn't want
anything of that. And so I was fortunate I was
competing athletically at the time and I just loved it.
And I remember we had one lecture because I was actually
rowing at the time. And the the coach of the British
Olympic team just happened to be in Cape Town and he happened to
give us a lecture and he spoke about lactate causing you to get
fatigue during exercise at night.
I came out of the lecture and I said that's what I'm going to
study. And so that's what I did.
So I studied sports science. We started sports science in
South Africa. We helped drive sports medicine
and I spent 40 years researching in the in sports science and
sports medicine, both on the practical side, how do you help
athletes perform better and also on the scientific side, trying
to understand all these factors. And I think probably I'm best
known for writing a book called Law of Running and that's called
the Bible of the Sport. And as I told you before, I'm
now revising it for the 5th time.
The last time I revised it was was 20 years ago.
So what happened in the last 20 years, which sort of drove me
away from sports science, was I got interested in the low
carbohydrate diet and that's how I could help you.
But that caused me to be basically excommunicated by my
university and I was tackled by the medicine.
Sorry, the health, Health Professions Council in South
Africa and they charged me with unconventional advice and and
not evidence based medicine and so on because I tweeted and I
advised a mother to and I didn't advise a mother.
I said I gave general advice to the population that the best way
to raise a child is on a high fat, high high protein, animal
based diet. And we even wrote a book about
it raising superheroes, which which is probably the best book
I've ever seen on, on how you should raise children and what
food you should they should eat. Anyway, I was charged by the
Health Professions Council. It took four years.
I was in court for 28 days and we eventually won the case and
there were 13 charges against me.
I won 13, zero. And so that sort of during that
period, I'd obviously learned I had to learn nutrition because I
wasn't or health nutrition, I wasn't an expert on health
nutrition. I knew a little bit about sports
nutrition. So anywhere after that, a, a
great friend of mine who's who now a great friend of mine, ex
South African living in America, he said, Prof, I've got this
lab, wouldn't you like to collaborate with us?
And, and he asked what should we study?
And I said we should study low carbohydrate diets and their
effects on performance, which we did because at the time it was
said that a low carbohydrate diet destroys your performance.
And in science that's what you must look at.
You must go and disprove your theories.
So historically in law of running up to 2010, I'd said
that the high carbohydrate diet is ideal for exercise.
I then converted to a high fat diet and my exercise performance
went through the roof and because I was sick at the time
and so I got much better and that made me question the
teaching. And then, so when I then I
started writing and people then claimed, oh, you've changed your
mind. Well, you always change your
mind when you see new evidence anyway, so, so I wrote, so we
started doing research and we did fantastic research.
It's taken 7 years and essentially in the last few
months we've, we've published the paper, the definitive paper,
which disproves that you need carbohydrates for, you don't
need carbohydrates for exercise. You just need a tiny amount
during exercise. But before exercise, what you
eat makes no difference to your performance, which is completely
contrary to what I was saying and which is currently taught.
And that's because we evolved on a high fat diet and we had to
exercise on a high fat diet or else we would have died.
And our bodies are highly designed to burn fat, but what's
happened is that we, when we convert it to this high
carbohydrate diet, the we, we always got a high insulin levels
and insulin inhibits fat use by the body.
And so we all, when all the studies were done by ourselves,
including on athletes, as soon as you put an athlete eating a
high carbohydrate diet onto a treadmill or bicycle, they're
immediately burning most energies coming from
carbohydrate. But it's not because that's the
best fuel, it's actually because they're trying to get rid of it.
But that's a whole nother story. But, and so we started saying,
well, you've got to eat more carbohydrates.
And I mean, we spent 20 years trying to get people to burn
more carbohydrate. And, and what that does is they
burn lots of carbohydrate and then Hibbert fat.
And so then they say, well, then we'd say, well, that's because
they're burning carbohydrate, that they're doing well.
So when we started working with this group in America, I said,
let's do the opposite. Let's make some burn fat and see
what happens. And we found that it made no
difference whatsoever. They could burn all the fat they
liked and they could do all the exercise they wanted.
And the, there's very good reason to believe that for the
average person, they're much better burning fat than
carbohydrates. And I, I don't really see any
role for high carbohydrate diets in athletes at all.
Although I'm, I'm on Twitter every day and I get castigated
for saying that because all the world's best athletes are taking
120 grammes of carbohydrate an hour.
Now when, when we as doctors want to see whether you've got
diabetes, we've given you, we give you 75 grammes of
carbohydrate. So these people, every hour
they're doing a glucose tolerance test, which we use to
see whether you're sick. And now they're telling me, no,
that's the way we make you a better athlete.
Just explain that to me. I I can't follow that.
One, but just to be clear, and I think you might be being a bit
modest here, but when you talk about sports science, you
effectively the the world's leading sports scientist or #2
or something to that effect, you're very, very high up.
Yeah, that's on the citation rates.
In other words, the number of times your articles are referred
to. And about two years ago I was
third and then the two guys are older than me, both died.
So I'm, yeah, I haven't seen the latest results, but I don't
think anyone would come up below me from from below up.
So I'll, I'll probably #1 or maybe #2 if someone else has
some, increase their citation. You do know what you're talking
about, but you are talking about sports.
Does this does this flow over into general life?
Yeah, yeah, I think so very much because.
So. Well, I can give you a good
explanation. So when I started in the sport
sciences, the one thing we were told was that lactic acid causes
fatigue in your muscles. That's exactly what the coach
told us when he lectured to us in in 1969.
And that's the textbook knowledge.
And I was speaking to a group of school boys the other day and
they said, yes, that's what we have to write in our
examinations. And I said, but it's all wrong.
And I said you can prove it's wrong.
All you have to do is just go and watch A10 kilometre race and
time each lap and tell me which is the fastest lap.
Now, according to your theory, the first lap must be the
fastest because you've got no lactate and the 10th must be the
slowest. And I said, what you're going to
find is the 10th lap is the fastest.
So how can it be the fastest when the lactate levels are the
highest? So therefore you've disproved
the the theory just by simple observation.
So what what happened to me was I went and looked back at some
of the literature there on which all of this was based.
And it goes back to a guy called AV Hill who was from from
Cambridge and elsewhere in the 1920s.
And he said that when you exercise vigorously, you reach a
point where there's no more oxygen getting to the muscles
and that causes you to stop exercising because the lactate
builds up. And we I'd come to the
conclusion that that was wrong and that he'd never actually
shown that. And then I was heavily
criticised for this was a major lecture I gave in America.
And it was a named lecture. And, and so when you write up
the story, not everyone writes up the lecture, which I did.
And the funniest thing was that somebody responded to it, which
never happened before. So and I was in Finland and I
was, it was with Parvo Nurmi's 100th anniversary.
And I was speaking about Pervo Nurmi because he appears in Law
running quite a lot. And that's why the Finns really
liked me because of the book includes a lot about their
greatest runner. So just as I'm getting about to
get up, my great friend who'd invited me gave me the the
journal, the scientific journal in which this criticism was was
listed. And I'm literally standing up
and says, Tim, you might want to read this before you say
anything. So so I said, now look at that
afterwards. Anyway, the, when I went back
and read what he had said, Professor AV Hill, he, he, he
made the key point that if you run out of oxygen in your
muscles, the first organ that will be damaged is the heart,
not the muscles. The heart comes at first, then
the muscles. And he realised this and he said
there was this other, there was a controller or a governor that
went from the heart to the brain to slow the hearts function
down. And I immediately knew that's
not, that couldn't happen. It has to go to the brain to
slow the muscles down for various reasons.
And then then I realised that this governor theory which we
then developed is that during exercise, the bodies that the
brain's designed to protect you from harm, it and everything
that could, that all this information is coming back to
their brain. And your brain then allows you
to run at a particular speed which won't cause harm.
So IT projects ahead. So if you're going to run 100
miles, IT projects ahead for 100 miles.
It says, OK, you can start at this rate and you'll be OK.
And if you try to go above that, then it'll slow you down,
etcetera. So that was the model and, and
we developed it and, and I was, it's been pretty much accepted
now. But it's really interesting
because now the, the premier journal in Physiology, journal
in the world says, published a new paper this week or a few
weeks ago again saying that the, the heart limits exercise
performance. But it can't because if the
heart's limiting, it's going to go into heart failure.
So you have to have another mechanism.
So, so AV Hill's theory, which we disproved in the 1920s, is
still very popular in 2025, a hundred years later.
And that's science. You know it takes a long time to
overcome these these ideas. You're speaking about the 1920s.
Just to clarify, when we talk about low carbohydrate diets,
we're not talking about a fad. No, no, absolutely not.
I mean, it was the so we've written, we've published now a,
a textbook, I don't have a copy of it, the Keto Ketogenic
textbook in which we got 60 of the top scientists in the world
who study low carbohydrate diet. And the point I'd like to make
is that all sixty of them came to the diet the same way I did.
We were doing, we were promoting high carb diets.
You know, that's great. You can run faster and you're
healthier and etcetera, etcetera.
And then we each became sick ourselves.
I like I developed type 2 diabetes, which fortunately is
in remission with, with his diet.
But so we all developed a problem, became fat and lazy and
lethargic and depressed and anxious, etcetera.
And then we discovered this diet by different chances and we all
got better on the diet and then we realised there was something
special to it. And so anyway, these 60
scientists around the world, we've put together this textbook
and it shows the low carbohydrate diet is the most
studied diet in history and it's the most successful because it
covers all these conditions. So.
So that's the evidence. Yeah, so that book you're
speaking about, if I've got the, if I'm thinking of the correct
1, Thomas Seyfried is in there, isn't he?
That's right. Yes, absolutely.
And Thomas has written extensively on cancer and and
why you you help fight cancer with low carbohydrate diets and
that is fairly established anyway.
Oh yeah, I think that that's absolutely right.
I think that if you had cancer, the first thing you do is go on
a low carb diet. But the that will slow the
growth of the cancer. It may not cure it, but you
know, as we the cancer is undergoing a huge revolution
because a lot of the RE drugs are being repurposed for
treating cancers and ivermectin is one of them.
And it's remarkable that this drug is having some incredible
successes. I was reminded of the time that,
you know, I met and I told you I was suffering from heartburn
and, and you said that the oats are linked to that.
Tim, why is there a connection between heartburn and
carbohydrates? OK, So what happens when you
change your diet is you change the microbiome and what is found
with carbohydrates is that the carbohydrate digesting bacteria
move up higher into the small intestine.
They shouldn't be there, but they, they will make their way
up. And what happens then is when
you eat carbohydrates, they break down the carbohydrates and
release methane. And because it's up in the upper
parts of your gut, then where is it going to go?
It's going to go up. So you're going to burp it up
and that is going to take acid from the stomach into this lower
parts of the oesophagus and repeatedly done that causes
irritation in the oesophagus and that causes your persistent pain
or repeated pain whenever you eat or when you when you burp.
And this acid comes back into the into the oesophagus.
And what's interesting is that the treatment which they give
you to increase the alkalinization, to alkalinize
your stomach is disastrous. It makes things worse.
So the only thing you can do is to get rid of those bacteria.
You don't want them. You've got to reprogram the
bacteria in your gut. And that's what it seems to be
that the high fat diet does particularly.
So by extension, a lot of people will argue that it's sugar that
that is doing that. Yeah, it may well be and so, but
let's say let's make it simpler, let's say it's ultra processed
foods because they're the real problem and that we need to go
back to eating real animal foods and get away from ultra
processed foods. So, but you're quite right.
You know, a lot of the ill health has happened with ultra
processed foods or sorry all of it has happened subsequent to
ultra processed foods and we tended to focus on the
carbohydrate components, but there may be all sorts of other
things in the foods that are causing the problem.
What really matters is we must just eat less processed food and
just be more balanced. Yeah, the word balanced, I mean,
I don't know what balanced is means because that's, that's the
standard dietary advice. You must see the balanced diet.
But I, I don't know what a balanced diet is it is it a
third fat, 1/3 protein, 1/3 carbohydrate?
Now the reality is, and this is what one has to learn,
particularly if you're like me, is that there's only so much
carbohydrate you can cope with. And some people can cope with
plenty of carbohydrate, but others like myself can cope with
less than 25 grammes a day. Now what is 25 grammes compared
to the normal? So most South Africans, probably
most people living in Britain and Europe are eating maybe 400
grammes of carbohydrate a day. And what what we discover is
that if you drop your carbohydrate intake from 400 to
300, it make absolutely no difference whatsoever.
So you might think, gosh, you know, I've reduced my carbs a
lot and but you have to, when you're in my state with pre
diabetes, diabetes, you got to get it down below 50 or 25
grammes, which is, well, I don't eat these things, but it's a
couple of slices of bread or banana or an apple and that's
it. And when you start, it's
difficult. I've been, I've been on the
start 15 years now. And so it's not a problem.
But initially to think that, my gosh, you got to cut from 500 or
400 grammes down to 25. It's, it's quite a leap.
But once you start it, it's you. You just feel so much better and
everything goes well. If we zoom out, what you
effectively arguing is that there is no requirement for
carbohydrates in order to have optimal health.
Correct. The there are proteins are
essential, there are certain amino acids that are essential,
there are certain fats that are essential, and if you avoid them
or don't eat them, you will die. That's simple as that.
There is no carbohydrate that is essential, none at all.
And you know people say oh you need fibre etcetera, but the
fibre is just broken down to saturated fats and absorbed as
saturated fat is not even absorbed as carbohydrate.
So the the then what the dietitians tell us is oh, but
your brain uses only carbohydrate and so therefore
you've got to eat carbohydrate. But that doesn't, didn't
understand you got a liver, you've got a liver that's there
to produce the glucose you need and the liver can produce both
glucose and ketone bodies, which will keep your brain going fine.
So the only we have shown that there is an essential
carbohydrate requirement and that's during prolonged exercise
because then for some reason the human body is not designed
optimally. And, and I'm, I'm not, I'm not
really thought of why it should be.
But if you eat a low carbohydrate diet, so you're
eating 0 carbohydrates and you exercise for a long time, you
may reach a point where the liver can't produce enough
glucose from other substrates. And then you can, your black
glucose level can fall and you'll feel a bit woozy and
you'll want to stop exercising. And that's it.
And that's because clearly the brain does have an essential
glucose requirement, but the only time you really see that is
if you're going to go and exercise for three or four or
five hours and you're going to fast and you don't eat out any
carbohydrates during exercise. And that's where you will see,
yes, there is an essential glucose need.
But what we probably proven recently is that you just need
about 20 grammes of sorry, 10 grammes of carbohydrate every
hour. And that covers that
requirement. So which is a tiny amount.
So if you were to go and run a long race, long distance race,
you weren't eating carbohydrates, you're on a high
fat diet during the race, you could benefit from ingesting 10
grammes of carbohydrate. And that's because for some
reason, the brain's glucose needs are remain high when
you're exercising, and sometimes the liver can't cope, can't
produce enough glucose to keep the brain happy.
OK, but the average person doesn't weigh his food.
So what does this mean practically?
If we go to dinner? Vegetables, I have carbohydrates
in them. Potatoes.
What do you mean when we talk about low carbohydrates?
You know, just just in standard daily, you know, living.
Yeah. So I think it's easy to to
explain. It's the easiest way to explain
is what can you eat and that not rather not what can't you eat.
So you can eat all animal produce, all chicken, fish, you
can eat dairy, you can eat some nuts, but not all the nuts and
lots of eggs and some of those green vegetables, the leafy
vegetables because they're so low in carbohydrate.
That's fine. And that's it.
So, so where do potatoes come? Where do they, they don't fit,
unfortunately, they don't fit on that, that group.
Where does, where does bread fit?
Doesn't fit? Where does carrots?
They don't fit, you know, but again, a carrot a day is not
going to cause harm because it's not going to have more than 25
grammes of carbohydrate for a, for a diabetic.
And if you're not diabetic, you can have your 50 to 100 grammes.
So I think what we what we're talking about is for the people
who are, who are whose metabolism is so damaged they
can't cope with carbohydrate and those are people with type 2
diabetes or pre diabetes. Now the problem is that what's
happened now, my mother would have eaten a high fat, high
protein diet during her pregnancy with me.
I would have been weaned onto animal produce.
I wasn't given baby puree foods. I would have been given proper
meals with animal produce. So I my insulin resistance was
entirely genetic. My, it's all through, all
throughout my family. And as long as I ate
carbohydrate, sorry, as long as I ate fats and proteins, I was
fine. And I did that for a long time
until I started marathon running and then I was the expert.
Now, I mean, I'm reading all the Physiology and the Physiology
said you must eat carbs. So I started eating carbs and
that's when I started getting sick without realising it.
And if you do that for 30 years, as I did, then ultimately you
can present with with type 2 diabetes.
The irony is my sister, who probably has very similar genes
to me, she was in London in 1965 and she picked up a book and I
think it was called The Drinking Man's Diet.
And that was the first, one of the first low carb diets.
And she went low carbs and she looks amazing and she's 80 odd.
She's close to 80 and she's still as lean as ever and
amazing, amazingly healthy. And she said she told her
eventually she admitted, she said, Tim, I've been eating this
your so called dancing diet for 40 years.
So I said, well, why didn't you tell me?
She said, no, you're the expert. I couldn't tell you so.
But that's an interesting point that you're making.
So I, for example, I'm not overweight.
I could eat a carrot a day, for example, and it won't really
affect me. But you have a there are a lot
of fat people around us and what what you speaking to?
What you speaking more to them? Yeah, absolutely.
So, so you know, if you've got this beer punch that's called
visceral obesity and you are pre diabetic or diabetic, I, I don't
care what your glucose test shows.
And that's unfortunately the glucose test isn't adequate.
And I've just written the foreword for a very famous book
by a guy called Doctor Kraft, who who did some amazing work in
the 1970s. And his son has had the book
republished. I'm sorry, it's not quite at
hand here. And what Doctor Kraft did was
when the insulin, acid insulin assay was discovered where you
could measure insulin levels, his hospital was doing all these
glucose tolerance tests in which you only measure glucose.
He said, well, why don't we measure insulin on which all of
these tests? And so they measured 15,000
tests where they had the insulin and the glucose.
And he found essentially that the a normal glucose tolerance
test, which we as doctors would say, oh, you're perfect.
You haven't got pre diabetes. It's a no, no, no, no, no.
Let's look at your insulin response.
And if the insulin response was abnormal, you were were going to
develop diabetes. And so that was the test.
And unfortunately that test is not done.
We still don't do it. We still just measure glucose.
So we completely underestimate the extent of diabetes in the
population. We know it's an epidemic, A
pandemic. We know it's the single most
important disease because it causes all the sorts of
complications. And yet we still don't diagnose
it early enough and we don't prescribe the proper treatment.
So that's, that's the story with, with diabetes.
And now if we were to take everyone who's got a pot belly
and now that's normal, that's accepted.
So even the models now you can have a fat tummy, but that is
visceral obesity and that is killing you.
The, the fat cells in the, in the, in, in the gut are
releasing inflammatory agents and they're causing you to
become insulin resistant. And then that causes all the
complications of this disease. So that's that's the reality.
And we just, we just, we just ignore it.
So just to be clear, running and running and more running is not
really going to make you lose weight.
It'll do the opposite because you're told to eat
carbohydrates. So that, that's my real
frustration is if you go, and when I started marathon running,
if you didn't finish in three hours, there was no, no one was
there to meet to greet you at the finish.
You had three hours to run the marathon and then they closed
it. Now you can take 810 hours to
run the marathon and you, of course, you're not running,
you're walking most of the time. And So what?
And, and it, it's clear that the performances in the marathon
are, are getting worse. The best runners are running
faster, but the average time is getting slower and slower and
slower and slower by decade. And so what's happening is
people are thinking they're becoming marathon runners.
They're not training. And then they go out and then
they're told, well, if you want to finish the marathon, you
better eat lots of carbs and they're insulin resistant and
it's just making it worse. So if you go to the finish of
the London Marathon, the boss, not the Boston because it's got
a an entry time, but the New York City Marathon and all the
other big city marathons. After about four hours, you see
these pot bellied humans coming in and they think they're
healthy, but they aren't because you can't outrun their diet.
The bad diet is because you're insulin resistant and because
you've got a high circulating insulin all the time that's
causing all the damage that is possible.
So that's the message we have to get out.
You know you you can train all you like, you can run all you
like, but if you're insulin resistant and eating the wrong
diet, it's not going to make any difference at.
All so so weight loss starts in the kitchen.
Absolutely. And, and you know, I didn't know
this even though I wrote these books, but, but one of the
studies we did was about 30 people wrote to me and said
they'd reverse their diabetes, their type 2 diabetes diagnosed
by the doctor, they'd reverse their type 2 diabetes on this
diet. And so that was great because I
knew it was happening. There's a guy called David
Unwind in Britain who is now in a general, he's in a general
practise, He's had 150 patients reverse their diabetes just on
diet, nothing else, just diet alone.
So we knew it was happening. So we thought, well, let's just
check up to make sure that these people is true.
So we asked them all, we examined them and did everything
you need to do. And we found that some actually
hadn't reversed their diabetes and they hadn't lost as much
weight as perhaps they claimed they had.
And when we looked at it, the one factor that determined
whether you reversed your diabetes was whether you stopped
your cravings and you controlled what you're eating.
If you didn't control your cravings, you didn't reverse the
diabetes. So it wasn't about controlling
glucose, it was controlling your cravings.
So that then we realised, OK, we've got an addictive process.
And not that we were the first to think that that the foods,
the ultra processed foods with lots of sugar are highly
addictive and they're designed to addict you.
And they're designed because the people selling you that food
were once the tobacco manufacturers and now they're
the food manufacturers and they know how to develop addictive
foods. And so that's what they've done.
So if you want to lose weight and control your diabetes, you
have to control the addiction. And it, it's across the board.
And I know when I advise people on the diet, first ask them, you
know, do you drink wine? Oh, I never give up my wine.
Then I know it's not going to work or I'm not going to give up
my beer because that's, we'll just keep, that's the addiction
that's continued. And you have to get rid of the
addictive eating. Is what you're talking about
specific to genetics or culture? Let me give you an example.
I was in China last year and they they don't seem like fat
people. I saw very, very few fat people.
Well, the answer is are you Chinese or Indian?
Simple. If you're not, you go to
different genes and different. OK, so so there is a there is a
genetic thing. Yeah, but now let's look at
that. Let's let's unpack that.
The Indian community is incredibly unhealthy because
they eat mainly a vegetarian diet and they have too little
meat and they are extremely unhealthy.
And diabetes, right rates are very high.
The Chinese are the most obese. And now I know you, you, I quite
agree with you. They're thin, but when you look
at the total population, there's much obesity and much diabetes.
And this is a recent phenomenon too, because before that Chinese
people were were they weren't starving, but they were eating
lower calories and they were eating below 2000 calories a
day. Now that's shot up to 3500.
And so that's causing the obesity.
But I agree, it's, it's not everywhere.
And I mean, I've spoken to people from the Mid East, from
Middle East, from Iran and so on, where the carbohydrates were
really first introduced and they remain lean and they eat lots of
carbohydrate. So I think they've over 18,000
years, that's when the since they've been eating carbs, they
have adapted in a way and they've been, and it's maybe
because the ones eating the carbs who couldn't cope with the
diet off and didn't recreate and procreate and so on.
So I do agree that that that is right.
There are populations, but you just have to look in your own
population. Yes.
You can't go and say what are the Chinese eating and what are
the Indians eating? Just go and look in my country
or the OR our country. Just go down to the mall and see
what people look like. And do they look like they're
thin and healthy? And the answer is no.
And then see what they're eating.
It is actually a problem. I mean, I saw photographs from
when my folks were kids on the beach and everybody looked
fairly thin. They were today.
Everybody today is fat. Exactly right.
And that it's simple. It's the food addiction and the
ultra processed foods, which, as we've said, are highly addictive
and you always and you just have to eat a few extra calories a
day and then you'll accumulate that over time.
And the idea that you should only eat once a day is is
foreign to those people. And that's that's what we try to
teach that once you've got your, you've got your controls back
again, you can fast as to the day.
You just don't need to keep eating all the time.
But what's interesting is if I have a big plate of food in the
morning, bacon, eggs, sausage, coffee with cream in it, I'm not
hungry for most of the day. Yeah, that's what we tell
people. You know, if someone comes to me
and says, you know, prove to me that your diet works, I'd say,
well, we're first going to do this experiment.
And it's astonishing. They all come back and say
exactly what you said and they can't believe it.
And So what I try to tell people is you should eat only at home
because then you don't going to eat snacks on all these other
ultra processed things. And if you and you should eat as
much as you possibly can for breakfast, if you're a working
person away from home and then you go to whatever you do and
hopefully you're not going to be hungry till 5:00 at night.
And if you are hungry, you eat nuts and biltong, which is.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, Tim, I've got to.
I've got to drop this one in. Yes, but Tim, you're funded by
the meat industry. You're promoting meat.
I wish I was the only thing I ever got from the meat industry
was a unfortunate it's not here, it's at another place was a
lovely statue of this bowl and it was from the meat board and
that was it. But.
I mean. They all, they all said they're
going to put up a museum, a monument somewhere in the Carew
for because I was like the most laughed.
It reminds me of of Elon Musk saying, you know, he's the
biggest taxpayer in, in North America.
He pays $20 billion a year in tax.
He said he'd really like it if the IRS one day would come and
give him a little placard saying is it?
I've never done that. But let's just let's just talk
about that for a second. I have friends who are
vegetarian and it's always a heated discussion, always when
it when you're talking about meat.
OK, so let's let's just quickly break apart this this narrative.
If your position is ethical, you don't like the idea of animals
being killed, OK, that's fine. I can't argue with you on that.
That's a personal thing. But if your argument is that
avoiding meat is healthier, that is simply not true.
Yeah, absolutely. They, they, I think you've,
you've absolutely made the, the, the, the divide.
And if people want to eat it for ethical reasons, the vegetarian
that that's fine, but they're going to suffer.
Their health's going to suffer. But also the reality is very
few, there are very few vegetarians.
Most of them cheat. When you look at it, they still,
they do eat meat and then so no, but I had some chicken or I had
an egg, but that's I'm still vegetarian because I'm not
eating meat. No, no, no.
So, so that's the first point. There's that there are truly
very few vegetarians. The second thing is that there's
always about point. I think it's half a percent of
the population are vegetarian or, or maybe maybe that's vegan,
maybe it's 2 or 3% vegetarian and it never changes.
So if this movement was real, they would if it if the biology
was real and that you would do better as a vegetarian, they
they would have the numbers would have increased
dramatically and it hasn't. It's always stayed the same over
the last 20-30 forty years. It basically is a religion,
which is fine, but it's not not the healthiest because animal,
you need animal produce to get all the nutrients in the right
sort of balance. And once you take just eating
plants and you, you've got a problem.
And the other thing is that once you're not eating animal
produce, you you think it's OK to have a Coca Cola and to eat
chips and to eat other things like chocolates.
Oh, because it's, it's vegetarian, it's vegan, but it's
highly unhealthy. And that's the problem.
And when you look at the diets of those people who aren't, who
don't really understand it and analyse it and go to it, go
through in great detail what they should be eating and it
takes a lot of effort. And it's probably a bit
expensive too that they can find.
They're fine. But the average vegetarian
doesn't eat very well. And it's the same in in sport
when the athletes are promoting high carb diets, they think it's
fine to take their Coca Colas and their, their chips,
etcetera. Oh, because it's carbs and it's
going to make me exercise faster.
But it's not giving you the nutrients that you need.
And that's that's the problem. It's a nutrient deficient diet.
Could you live quite healthily or purely meat?
Yes, I could. Yeah, you can.
I mean, you can, and I certainly could, and in fact I do mostly.
But no, but I mean is can you, can you get everything you need,
all the vitamins you don't need any supplementation if you just
eat meat. No, but you do have to eat
organs. You have to need, you have to
need, you have to eat livers and pancreas and a few other things
and bone marrow. So that, but you can, I mean,
that's you go and look at the, the populations that do like,
like the Inuit, They're, they're doing very well.
They just eat. They're just animals, fish and
animals, seals and so on. There was that guy who lived
with the Inuits like 100 years ago or something.
I forget his name now. I'll get it too, because you
jumped was. He he was Finnish or Swedish or
something. He, he was living in Harvard in,
in Britain, sorry, in, in North America.
And he was an anthropologist. And then he went to, he went on
a trip to the Arctic and he decided either be got lost or he
wanted to stay there with them. And he then lived with them for
four or five years. And when he came back to New
York, he said, well, I've lived on animal produce for five
years. They said, no, you, you, you'll
have scurvy. And he said, well, I haven't got
scurvy. So he said, well, prove it to us
that you shouldn't get scurvy. So they put him in hospital for
three months and they fed him the diet that he claimed he was
eating and he was fine. They then let him out, but he
was he he promised it for the next nine months, he wouldn't
eat any other projects other than animals.
And at the end of the year he was fine and the paper was
published. And, and then that diet
stimulated a guy called Pennington to produce that diet
and give it to patients in New York who were obese.
And that became the Pennington diet.
And ultimately, that became the Atkins diet, also from New York.
So that was the way that the low carb diet invaded North America.
Yeah. And I'm just have to think of
the guy's name. I'm sorry, it escapes me for a
moment. No, that's fine.
It escapes me too. But then where does this whole
cholesterol thing come from? That comes from a guy called
Atkins. Now, what happened in the
second? Sorry.
Ansel Keys. Sorry.
Yes, that's right.
So I've got very confused. Atkins is the opposite.
This is Ansel Keys. Sorry.
Yeah. Ansel Keys.
In the Second World War, he did a famous study in which he put
religious objectors on a starvation diet for, I think it
was about 6 months, and he monitored what happened to them
and it was disastrous. The psychological effects of
eating, I think it was 1500 calories.
It was absolutely atrocious. Anyway, he became very famous
because that was the famous starvation studies.
So now he he, he does the study. It's the end of the Second World
War, and what happens is that President Roosevelt dies of a
stroke. And because he's had a stroke
and he's an American, suddenly the next President Truman says,
but why can't we sort out this stroke issue?
And he forms the National Institute of Health, which is
now going to fund research. And the main focus of research
is to understand why do you get cardiovascular disease and
stroke? Because that had killed the
former, the previous president. And so a lot of money became
available for doing research. And there was a guy called John
Goffman, who in the Second World War, he had been looked at
plutonium and uranium and how you separate them and say he was
a world authority on the way you detected chemicals.
And at the end of the Second World War, he went back to his
university in Southern California, and he started using
the same techniques. And he said, you know, why don't
I use this on blood? So he took blood samples and he
analysed them and then he said, my gosh, there's all these ways
that fat is carried in the blood.
And he then classified these as lipoproteins.
And one of them was the cholesterol bearing like a
lipoprotein. So now he could measure these
things. And he noticed in heart disease
patients, there were two different types of heart disease
patients. The one had a very high
cholesterol and the others had a very high triglycerides.
But they're both those are both forms in which fat is carried in
the bloodstream. And he noticed those who eat who
had high triglycerides were the ones who had high carbohydrate
diets and those who had the high cholesterol had high fat diets.
So what he did next was he put people on the low carb diet and
low fat diet and he clearly showed that on the low
carbohydrate diet the triglyceride levels came
shooting down and on the low fat diet the cholesterol came down a
little bit. And he concluded be careful of
putting people with high cholesterols and a high
carbohydrate diet because you might shoot the triglycerides up
and cause problems. So he was the person who should
have led the drive on preventing heart disease.
But Ansel Keys came along and Ansel Keys had no future.
And he picked up a magazine, literally, which had a World
Health Organisation figure. And in the figure it had 26
countries and it showed what their fat intake was.
The saturated fat intake was sorry, it was a yeah, it was a
saturated fat intake. And he looked at their coronary
heart disease rates. This is what the graph showed.
And there was sort of a, there was a big cluster of their
values, but generally they sort of went up a little bit.
So the more fat in the diet, the more heart disease in the
country. And what he did was he selected
out six, which showed a lot a linear relationship.
So from the 26, which were all over the place, he chose 6 which
were lovely straight line. And so I said, there you are.
We now know what causes heart disease.
It's fat intake, dietary fat intake in the dietary fat
intake. And that became the gospel
truth. And the the point is that a
relationship like that, you can't prove.
That's not causation, that's association.
An association doesn't prove causation.
But the whole world was captured.
The whole world was captured, and they still are.
Because if you ask your cardiologist, how do you know
cholesterol causes hearts? Oh, well.
And so Keys proved it. And I look at this, that graph,
and that's where they begin with.
So that's where the cholesterol story begins.
And unfortunately what next happened was that in about the
1980s, they discovered that there's people with very high
cholesterol and they found a way to lower it with the with the
statin drugs. And they said, well, you see,
it's obvious when you've got a very high cholesterol, you die
young. And therefore, if we can take
statins, these people are not going to die as young, etcetera,
we can prevent heart disease. And I can tell you that's to
this very day, there's no one clear bit of evidence that
statins can prevent or reverse heart disease.
They have a tiny effect and the effect may be some other way,
but they, their benefit is trivial.
But yet they've generated trillions of dollars of income
for for industry. And so industry makes sure that
the story continues to be kept going.
The problem is that all the research that is done on statins
is done by people who have a conflict of interest.
The funding comes from the industry and it's paid to the
cardiologists who have a conflict of interest because
they want to show that the statins work.
And there's almost no independent studies because they
cost too much to to run. And that's sorry.
And then let me just finish that up.
The National Institute of Health has helped because they have not
funded any alternative explanations for what causes
heart disease. So if today you have coronary
artery disease and you ask what's the cause?
Old cholesterol, what's the cure?
Old statins. So then you go and look at the
science and you say, but actually statins don't prevent
it. They don't reverse it.
So what else can I do? No, just take more statins.
So that's and that big. It's stopped research for about
40 years and and no one's had the courage until very recently
to go and try and explain what's causing arterial disease.
You know what a major thread here is, Tim is science really
does seems to be very broken. And totally broken and you know,
Robert Kennedy is trying to address it now in the United
States and he's doing amazing work and he could reverse
everything in the next two to four years, but it is absolutely
broken. And I know I'm sure you've
you've had people on vaccines and so on.
And that is that science is so poor as well because it
generates so much income and that.
So are you, are you suggesting, Tim, that when we hear about
good and bad cholesterol, it doesn't really matter?
We shouldn't really worry about cholesterol because if we eat a
low carbohydrate diet, whether cholesterol is low or high, it
doesn't really matter because we are going to be healthy
nonetheless. Yeah, you so.
Well, that's really interesting because there's a study
currently going on and it's caused a huge furor and because
we still don't know the full story, but there's a guy called
David Feldman in in North America, and he began
experimenting on himself and he could change his cholesterol
from being very bad to very high to being very low in one day.
Yes, I saw that one day. Yeah, just by fasting or eating
more carbs. And so he said, Well, they're
clearly, this is the, your cholesterol's got something to
do with energy transfer in the body.
And so they need to identify the group of people who are very
lean, who eat the 0 carbohydrate diets and who have
astronomically high cholesterol levels.
And it's very clear what's happening is that the the body
transport fat around the body and it uses the cholesterol
containing lipoprotein, LDL cholesterol and sorry, the VLDL
cholesterol. That's the bigger protein,
sorry, the bigger lipoprotein and that travels around the body
and it delivers fat to where it's needed and then it gets
turned into the LDL cholesterol. So what happens is that that
this is what's being measured, LDL cholesterol, but it comes
from the bigger molecule. And what happens it seems in
people who eat high fat diets is that they produce more of this
and then it travels around and so they get left with more of
the LDL cholesterol. And so that's but it's all to do
with transport of energy around the body and it's fat energy.
And if you to put those people on a high carbohydrader with
their cholesterol drops dramatically.
In fact the funniest study was done by chap called Nick Norvitz
who is an ex South African or his.
Father. And I taught his father at UCT.
And he ate 24 eggs a day. Yeah, but this was even a
funnier studies he because he's one of these groups who gets his
high cholesterol and he ate 12 Oreos, which are those little
biscuits and his cholesterol came rocketing down as predicted
by the model. So then he went back on his high
fat diet and then he took a statin.
No, it's going to really work. He hardly changed his
cholesterol. So he said, see Oreos are better
than statins. Oreos are better than statins
for lowering your cholesterol. So.
So anyway, the controversy is the following, that when they
did the first study of these people and looked at their
arteries to see how much plaque there was, they found that was
no different from other people, other populations.
So that was very encouraging because they had a group who'd
been eating without the carnivore diet for four or five
years and their arteries look just the same as everyone else.
They weren't worse and they weren't better, but you know,
because there's so many other factors that was looking good.
Unfortunately, they've now studied 100 people and it looks
like for whatever reason, in the in the year that's gone, though,
their plaque increased more than in some other people.
So now they're saying actually so so they published this paper
and all the the antagonists to the low carb.
I said, see your arterial damage is occurring more quickly on the
low carb diet or the the carnivore diet.
And now within a week someone had taken those original paper
and reproduced it and said massively rapid increase in
atherosclerosis as a result of the carnivore diet.
But they weren't even the researchers as I understand it.
So it's, it's very much open at the moment, but the, the reality
is that even if it was more rapid, it was quite slow.
The, the progression was relatively slow.
But why is the study important? Because not everyone showed the
same response. That's the key.
So now they've got a population where they've got, some are
progressing a bit quicker than others.
And what's the, the question they need to ask now is, OK, why
are those people progressing rapidly and why this group not
progressing at all? That becomes a key question and
that's the Nobel Prize winning prize question, which no one has
ever addressed. It's always oh, well, your
cholesterol's elevated. You're going to get rapid growth
of but but that we know that's not true because your
cholesterol value is a very pro predictor of of how your disease
progresses. So this is really exciting work
and at the moment it's being used by the people anti low
carbs to say you better get off that low carb dot.
But let me just come back for the final point that we spoke
about Kraft and his way of diagnosing diabetes, which was
now detects everyone, detects everyone.
If you have diabetes or pre diabetes, he will detect it.
And he said they did autopsies on everyone that they did if
they had people died and they'd got their testing.
And he said not one of them didn't have diabetes.
So not one of them with arterial disease did not have diabetes
and said, and that's the traditional teaching is that
diabetes is the cause of arterial disease, but medicine
has never accepted it because the treatment of diabetes is
dietary, it's not statins. And that's.
That guy you mentioned, Nick Norris or whatever, I think, I
think he's a Harvard Medical student.
That's right. And he, he, he, he ate something
like 730 eggs or 24 eggs per day or 730 in a month or whatever it
was. And then he checked his
cholesterol and it dropped by something like 20%, which which
is interesting because when I was growing up there was this
fear of eating too many eggs. Well, Ansel Keys actually
published evidence showing a key that, sorry, that egg intake
made no difference. So we've actually known that,
but it's, it doesn't fit the model because there's a bit more
cholesterol in eggs. And of course, you know, an egg
is, is, is a living, would be a living being.
It's got all the nutrients you need.
And cholesterol is one of the key nutrients you need in your
body. But I don't, I don't understand
the biology. So forgive me for what might be
a stupid question, but if you're consuming, let's say, eggs and
it has cholesterol in it and your body produces its own
cholesterol, it does it actually absorb that cholesterol or does
it just get rid of it? No, it does absorb it, but what
it does is just produces your own production of cholesterol so
that the total coming into the body will be the same.
It's just replaced by what you're taking in.
So it's, it doesn't add on and it doesn't increase above that.
Amount. I see what you're saying and and
but but I mean cholesterol is critical.
Absolutely. Your brain is mainly cholesterol
and that's what people won't tell you that if the the
dementia starts after the statins get start getting used.
So there's been this incredible increase in in dementia in the
last 30 years and it's exactly starts when they start
prescribing statins and statins absolutely destroy cholesterol
metabolism and in the cells and in the brain.
They will do it and no one really worries about that.
But that's one of the reasons why you shouldn't be taking part
in the fact that they're not effective I'm.
Going to throw two more questions at you before we come
in for a landing. I've I've kept these these two
I've kept these two for lost. I'm up for it, OK?
This one gets every feather ruffled, and that is fruit.
Yes. We were always told that fruit
is healthy. We must eat lots of fruit.
Well that is absolute nonsense. You know, because humans Co
evolved with with fruits that were were not what they are
today. They were small and bitter and
so if you ate them you might eat a few bites but you wouldn't eat
what you eat today. So all the fruits have been
genetically engineered to be full of fructose and sweetness
and fructose is a real problem because it's metabolised
differently from glucose and it's converted into fat in the
liver. And so there are some people who
will over produce liver fat from fructose and then they got get
the condition called non alcoholic fatty liver disease,
which is a precursor to diabetes and chronic disease.
And fructose is one of the key drivers of that condition.
So to tell people to eat more fruit and eat more fructose is
is simply nonsensical. OK, so then by extension, if you
go into a store and the fruit looks beautiful, that's probably
a bad sign. Absolutely a bad sign, yeah.
Because the you're getting a massive carbohydrate load and
you're getting a large fructose load.
And, and you just, you can do that for a few, few years,
couple of decays, but eventually the system wears out because
every time you do that, you spike your glucose and you spike
your insulin. So the pancreas has to secrete
more insulin. And guess what?
The insulin has effects throughout the body.
And the more you secrete the insulin, the more the cells
become resistant to it. So you need more and more
insulin to get the same effect. And that's what we call insulin
resistance because ultimately the cells no longer respond or
they respond poorly to insulin. And then the problem is that the
insulin's acting on all these cells.
And sometimes it's a good effect, but sometimes it's a bad
effect. Some tissues it's a bad effect.
And that's that's what resistance is.
Tim, would you agree then that a general rule of thumb is if it's
sweet, avoid it? Absolutely.
Because it's attacking your
brain and it's giving you pleasure, and it's going to be
very difficult to stop that. So you're going to overeat
calories. You're going to put on weight,
by and large. I mean, not everyone does, but
most people will. And then you're going to want to
stop it, and it's difficult. So if you do want to eat fruit,
you know, go for like a gooseberry, which tends to be a
lot more sour, for example, than say a strawberry.
Yeah, absolutely. Blueberries are probably the
ones that are most prescribed on this on the Banting diet.
But no fruit is. It's an absolute no no for most
people. OK, so keep keep fruit to a
minimum. And then my final question, Tim,
this is a tricky one. I have a love hate relationship
with this with this one supplements.
I don't take any supplements, but I know that some people do.
What What are your views on this?
I think that supplements are useful and, and, and the reason
I say that is because it's an under researched area because
supplements are not part of the Pharmaceutical industry.
But I was influenced by a study of stat where, where the control
group, which was the statin using group and the control
group were given a multivitamin. And they, as I recall, they did
as well, or if not better than the statin group.
And so that surprised me. And, and there are some other
studies of multivitamins seem to, to be beneficial.
But if you simply take it, if most people today have low
vitamin D levels, and this was certainly brought out in COVID,
that if you had a high vitamin D, your survival was 100%.
But if you had low vitamin D, there was a significant
mortality and that's something that you can correct.
So vitamin D to me is something that could be beneficial.
Vitamin K2 usually goes with vitamin D and that can give you
a bone strength and maintain bone strength.
So those are two vitamins. I think that you could make a
case, a scientific case, that they would be beneficial.
If you're a surfer and you live in the sun all day, then you
don't need vitamin D. But for most of us, we spend too
much time inside and we don't get enough sunlight.
And the other one, I think which is, is really is interesting
and, and I come to it sort of indirectly that a lot of people
say the cholesterol molecule that's important or the lipid
molecule is apo B. And what APO B does is it's one
of the firemen that tried to sort out problems in the
arteries if there's a puncture or whatever, or there's
inflammation. And APB is A, is a substitute
for vitamin C. And humans don't produce vitamin
C, whereas many other mammals do.
We lost the capacity to produce vitamin C.
And so I'm just wondering if maybe a chronic vitamin C
deficiency, not enough to cause scurvy could also be behind some
of the arterial damage that we see.
And so that's the third one that that one could take.
I, I personally take Natokinase, which is a kind of a
naturopathic statin. And that's got some good
evidence that it's, if you're going to take a statin, as many
people would like to take a statin that actually this is a
more effective drug and it doesn't have the complications,
the side effects. So what what I'm trying to say
is that there are some some supplements that are maybe
helpful and one of the general practitioners who I'm very
friendly with who is practise naturopathic medicine, he takes
about 25 supplements a day and he's doing well in his 80s.
He's looking fantastic. So that's.
So would you say then that if you are able to source grass fed
meat and you you spend time in the sun and you generally avoid
carbohydrates and sugar, you probably don't need supplements?
Yeah, that's definitely what what I would say.
And I was, I was saying if your whole lifestyle is not perfect
and the food is not perfect and you're not out there in the sun,
those are vitamin D seems to be a really critical hormone in the
body and and the the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency is very
high. So that seems to me that you one
could make a good case for that. And I just mentioned vitamin C
because it's interesting that humans don't synthesise it and
then I've told you don't eat fruit and that's where you're
going to get the vitamin C from. So that was probably the other
reason why I would say vitamin C might be beneficial.
I said that was my last question, but I lied.
I have one more good and and the reason why this is the reason
why this one's coming up is because this is probably a vice
coffee. What do you know about coffee,
Tim? OK, well, I have never seen a
single study showing that coffee might be harmful.
And that's the only difference is caffeinism.
And if you do, if you, some people get overstimulated, get
anxious with caffeine, but otherwise every study suggests.
But again, these are associational studies.
In other words, people that take more coffee look like they're a
little bit healthier, but that could be because of other
reasons. Maybe coffee is expensive and
they live in a particular culture and population that is
healthy already, and they do lots of exercise and they don't
eat processed foods and so on. But on that basis, there's no
evidence to suggest that that caffeine is bad for you.
We know that in cycling, for example, they considered coffee
as a contraband. I don't think that's entirely
correct. What they do say is that
caffeine above a certain dose is acting as a stimulant, which it
does. I mean, it does act as a
stimulant, but but they couldn't stop caffeine.
And I think Coca Cola can tell or I understand that Coke Once
Upon a time included caffeine and Coke is one of the big
sponsors of the Olympic Games. So there's no way they were ever
going to say you can't have any caffeine.
So I think there may well be that a little bit that if you
really dozed up on caffeine. But like all things, it's, it's
not likely that you're going to get better and better and better
the more caffeine you take. But to answer your question,
there's there's no evidence for a bad health effect.
It does improve physical performance, that's true.
But there's probably a limit to to how much you need to improve
your performance. It's so confusing to me because
coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world
and it seems to be a bit mysterious.
Mysterious in what way? Well, in the sense that they
don't really. Well, from what you're saying,
they don't really know if it has negative or positive effects on
on on your body. Well, it's definitely a
stimulant, which you could say is a positive and wakes you up
and keeps you active and alert during the day.
So I I think it's probably is highly studied and maybe the
what the answer is that no one's come up and said it's bad.
That's if that come up and said it was bad.
OK, Tim, if if I were to ask you for a nugget of wisdom, what
would you say? Well, that's great.
I think your lifestyle is very important in in your long term
health and the the food is more important than the exercise, but
both. But exercise improves your your
functioning and is terribly important as well.
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm just preparing a talk for a
schoolboy audience and, and you know, I don't know quite where
I'll take this, but what, what's interesting is that what you
don't know in life is how people influence your life at a
distance. And so it turns out that a lot
of people influence my life, but at a huge distance.
And, and I never met these people.
And and the one person who I only now realised because I was
reading another article is the guy who started Nike running
shoe business, Phil Knight. Now why was that?
So what Phil Knight did was that in the 1960s he realised that
the German cameras were getting surpassed by the Japanese
cameras. And the only shoes of any value
in America were German shoes because you couldn't get
Japanese shoes. But he saw that there was a
Japanese shoe which was pretty good.
And so he went, he said, will the Japanese running shoes do
for running shoes what the Japanese cameras had done for
Japanese camera for world camera sales?
So he went to America, to Japan by chance, and he met these guys
who were making these shoes. And he said, oh, well, we've got
this big business called the Blue Ribbon Sports, which he did
not have. It was a completely complete
fake and we'd like to import your shoes and say that the
Japanese said fine, so they imported the shoes.
It took a year to come and anyway, eventually they started
making better shoes. And what did that do?
You see, they didn't just make shoes, they suddenly realised
it's no good having shoes which you haven't got to market, so
you had to make the running market.
And what he did was he professionalised running by for
sponsoring their athletes and they before that all competitors
were amateurs. So the Olympic Games is
completely amateur and the first sort of other sport outside of
tennis and and cricket. Cricket was professional then or
did have professional components.
But the only sport in the Olympics that now was becoming
professionalised was running. And so eventually the Olympics
had to accept professional athletes.
Now, what this did was this stimulated sports science.
So because now there were athletes who wanted to be
trained and they wanted to know how to train better.
The East Germans were becoming very successful.
And the Americans said we can't allow the East Germans to be
successful, we must invest in sports science.
And that became my profession. At the very moment that he was
developing the Nike business, I was out there starting sports
science. So he had a massive impact on
me. So.
So the point of the story is that an individual makes a huge
difference. Individuals do everything, they
make the difference. So that was the first point.
And the other points which I've realised is you have to tell the
truth and that's all that's important.
And what we've done is expose these untruths.
And so when I attacked or showed these untruths through the
scientific method, that made me suspicious of all the stuff that
we're being told today. And I realised that 90% is
propaganda and it's got nothing to do with truth.
That's the second message. That's that's important.
And the third thing is to obviously have self belief.
That's one of the things we showed was that the brain is the
mind's in control and you achieve what you think you can
achieve. And that's terribly important as
well. Tim, how can I follow you?
OK, so I'm active on Twitter or X and it's Prof Tim Noakes or at
Prof Tim Noakes. And I also have another one
which is more sports related at Law of Running.
And the reason was because I was expelled from Twitter for making
the point that a French politician had said none of the
other French politicians were vaccinated, but he was charged
with something. He got injured.
That's right. He was injured.
He got vaccinated, he got injured.
And he said, but all these other creeps are telling me to get
vaccinated and they didn't get vaccinated themselves.
So I was thrown off with retweeting that story.
And it took about, it took about six months to get back on again.
And it was only after Musk had had bought re, bought X or
bought Twitter that, that I was allowed back on again.
So that's the one. Otherwise, the Knox Foundation
and the Nutrition Network, those are the two things that I'm more
active in today, having retired 12 years ago or so.
Well, on that note, Tim Knox, thank you for joining me in the
trenches. Fantastic Jim, always a
pleasure, loved enjoying it, loved chatting to you and best
wishes to your audience.