Well, hello ladies and gents, Robert Sykes, Keto, savage.com.
And today I have special guest Jane Bolin on the line and we
dive deep into her research and work at the Nokes Foundation and
the Eat Better South Africa program.
She is making waves in South Africa and beyond to just
enlighten physicians on using a carbohydrate restriction from a
therapeutic standpoint approach to their practices.
She is making a big impact in just improving the food
available to people in impoverished communities in
Africa and just enlightening people worldwide honestly as to
the benefits of a therapeutic ketogenic diet from a disease
prevention standpoint and just how to improve lifestyle and use
lifestyle intervention as opposed to pharmaceutical
intervention to truly find one's health and well-being So
thoroughly enjoy the conversation.
I've got a ton of respect for what she's accomplished within
those different organizations and what she's doing going
forward, and I've got no doubt that you will take something
from this podcast and want to just get involved and learn
more. So without further delay, sit
back, relax, enjoy the conversation with Jane
and we are live. Jane, how are you?
I'm really good. Thank you and you.
I'm doing wonderful. Well, where?
Where does the accent come from? I must know.
South African. Do you think I have an accent?
Yeah, yeah. I get that a lot too.
Mine mine's just a southern drawl.
I could never identify the city, but obviously it's North
American. But where I can't I I'm not
tuned enough in to know. Down South, for sure.
Down South, well talk to me about South African nutrition.
I know that's what that's where Noakes is, that's where a lot
has been going on in the in the space of low carbohydrate to
consumption from a therapeutic standpoint, what what brought
you to South Africa to begin with?
I'm curious. So yeah, I'm from, I'm here, my
mum's British and I am. I was born here.
So I've lived here for much of my life and kind of went and
travelled off to university, spent about a decade travelling
abroad and then came back here very much with the commitments,
my love for this African continent and kind of knowing
how much, how much help. I don't want to say help because
that sounds demeaning, but how much needs to come here, how
much knowledge we need here, how amazing how much we have to
learn from here. And then kind of getting into my
career here, it was became very, very obvious to me just how bad
nutrition, the state of healthcare and nutrition is in
this country. And I'm not going to say it's
worse than other places because I think we're, you know, all in
the same boat where we've we've seen that something has to
change. And in particular here we have a
very unique country in that 85% of our country doesn't have
private healthcare and we don't have really good sufficient
state healthcare. So that means that people don't
get the care that they need and particularly when it comes to
chronic diseases, sometimes they don't get diagnosed correctly.
And then when they are, they just have like a typical Type 2
diabetic, for example, goes once every three months and they see
an educator or a nurse and they just kind of, you know,
typically shout to that because their blood sugar and the blood
pressure's gone up a lot. And then they sent home back
with the same old guidelines diet.
So this is really where the work that I do and that we do came
in, was we realized we wanted to make a change and make things a
bit better for people that were suffering here on the ground.
And then our work became much more global in the other
projects that we work on. I love it.
Do you feel like Africa as a
whole is is like that or is South Africa kind of unique in
that regard? Look, the different countries
are different and obviously what we face and we see a lot more of
here is malnutrition in the form of stunting and underweight, but
the, you know and or obesity. So we see both.
We typically see like women in South Africa have a 61% obesity
rate, men it's a bit lower, children tend to be underweight.
So we see all the same problems as the diet, westernize and then
as we go kind of up into the continent, into more rural
areas, people are eating differently.
So it is very difficult to kind of say the whole continent
seeing the same problems. But there is the same story,
which is the story that you face in North America which is that
refined carbs and auto processed food has taken over agrarian
kind of indigent lifestyles and diets.
And people are just the. It seems to be that the poorer
you are, the worst food you have access to and the more junk you
eat purely not only because of a budgetary story but there are a
lot of aspects that play into that.
So it's about like cold chain management, access to
refrigerated healthy foods, access to fresh foods and then
kind of mass Chinese imports of things like what we have here
which is called 2 minute noodles and things like that as well as
highly over processed grains. And that's up to you know, a
typical plate in a local diet in our country is like well over
90% refined carbs. So you we're going to call it
sugars for our purposes today, and that's what people are
eating. The macros are much more off
than we'd like to see and then we typically see in other
countries. So we've got a bigger fight
because it's kind of the combination of the terrible diet
and poverty, which leads to many other complexities and factors
that play in to a person's health outlook.
I was talking to a gentleman a few weeks back and he he's been
spending quite a bit of time in some of the indigenous tribes
there in Africa. And he was like he had actually
inducted into the tribe and he had been going on these
traditional hunting trips with them and consuming a pretty much
you know, traditional diet amongst that tribe.
And and everyone was healthy, everyone was very active.
There wasn't any obesity. But then he was talking about
how in some of the neighboring tribes there's been just this
massive influx of, you know, foods brought in from other
countries, subsidies brought in all of the, you know, packaged,
processed foods. And then like you see a very
significant decline in their health amongst these indigenous
groups as they've consumed more and more of that food, which is
just a a sad reality. And I feel like here in the
States, you know, the the majority is is, you know,
obesity. I forget what the current trends
and demographic are, but it's like every single state is.
Terrible. I mean, like Arkansas where I'm
at is one of the worst from an obesity standpoint and it's the
the trajectory seems to be going in the wrong way for sure.
Absolutely. And I think that is the tragedy
is that what we see is people that come out of straight out of
a much more traditional lifestyle into the West or the
toxic diet have an A much worse reaction.
So like in South Africa, for example, the Koisan people,
which are the original bushmen from this land, they live very
indigenously and they live off the land, but of course they are
pushed into cities and they tend to have an astronomically high
type one diabetic ratio and just terrible poor health problems
associated with that immediate shock.
It's almost like, you know, their bodies are so much
healthier to some extent and historically they haven't been
exposed slowly to the atrocities of the Western diet.
But what's good and what we do see on our programs is that
people that are kind of naive to the ketogenic diet have this
unbelievably positive response as well.
So like, we see women on our programs really fully reverse a
lot of their conditions, you know, within a couple of weeks.
Whereas someone like myself who's been like trundling along,
trying different things for decades, the results are more
difficult, more complex, more subtle.
I have to work harder for my health.
So there's there's pros and cons to it, but I mean we just, we
know, you know, that the diet that people are being given and
told to eat is not sustainable. It's not suitable for human
consumption a lot of the time and we have to do something
about that. So that's a lot of the work that
I do and that we do within our foundation side of our work.
And it's kind of where the nutrition network came from
because we wanted to train doctors to work with these
programs that we run in underserved communities and we
didn't have doctors and medical professionals that understood
the work and that supported it. So we kind of eventually gave up
trying to explain this to them and created a training approach
that would allow for the implementation of better
ketogenic practice, you know, through medical with medical
support, rather than people having to kind of do it on their
own as riddles. Yeah, no, I I love that.
I feel like in in the States it's there's like a dichotomy
because there seems to be this massive growing demographic of
you know, obesity and type 2 diabetes and and unhealthiness.
But it also seems that the popularity of the ketogenic diet
and you know this select group that that has dove deeper into
nutrition that is in the know so to speak, like that also seems
to be a growing demographic. Not at the rate the obesity
demographic is growing, but it seems like there is certainly a
growing population of people in America especially that are well
versed in keto and understand its benefits and you know, live
by its principles. Is that the case in Africa and
South Africa specifically or is the the concept of hedging that
lesser known? I think it's similar to the
states, but you know, the states is just bigger and it's where
things happen and when. When, when people catch on to
things in the States, like you've run with it, You guys are
so amazing at kind of taking what's good and working it into
your system in a very quick and proactive democratic way.
So like for example, our business that we started the
nutrition network, we really created it, as I said, for the
South Africa. We wanted to train South African
doctors and we had a goal of training 33 physicians in year
one. And what happened happened was
we trained 1 1/2 thousand mostly American doctors in year one.
So it was, which was great. I mean, it was a wonderful
problem to have in terms of growing so quickly and kind of
taking on, you know, new learnings.
But yeah, the States is still the kind of perhaps leader in
the consciousness around Quito, which is amazing because it
means that we're going to get somewhere quicker.
You know, the world watches what's happening in the health
and fitness category in the States and we need everyone on
board here. We've got to change things fast.
I would, I would like my son and his children in the next
generation not to have to go through this kind of journey.
We've all been through of figuring this out for ourselves.
The science is out. The consensus is out.
We know what's right. It's just a question of kind of
moving through the system change process now and the the kind of
scientific complexity of agreeing on the science.
And that's a big job in itself, of course.
Totally. Have there been a lot of
physicians in Africa that have proactively seek you out because
they recognize there is a you know growing population of their
patient pool that is getting sicker and sicker?
Like are they just looking for alternatives and finding you or
how's that work? No.
And that's what we kind of would like to do with our work is, is
take it more actively into Africa.
We've got there were a couple of pockets that are really
excellent. So we've got an amazing Kenyan
clinic that really you know there are a couple of stand out
individuals who have found this work and we've got a couple of
amazing Ethiopian physicians that do bring keto into their
practice. But beyond that, it's very, very
scattered and seems to be not a priority.
So a couple of months ago, I was at an endocrinology, medical
endocrinology conference. It's the first time we've ever
been invited, which was fantastic to be invited.
But of course, also just like going into a foreign world
because it is so pharmaceutically LED
endocrinology. And there was an amazing,
amazing professor from Kenya who gave an interesting talk.
He's an endocrinologist and he talked about, you know, how
they're working so hard to get insulin into rural areas.
And of course, I went to him afterwards and I said come.
I took him a copy of our textbook as a gift.
And I said come on, you know, like, surely you guys have just
like knowing how difficult it is just to have refrigeration in
these areas. I mean, having travelled in
Kenya and understood the healthcare sector there, it's
very, very difficult to find a place that has a good quality,
stable fridge, you know, that, you know, is going to be able to
look after this insulin and the way it needs.
And he said, well yeah, I reversed my Tab 2 diabetes and
lost 40 kilograms on the keto diet.
But unfortunately I'm funded by healthcare, so I can't teach it
and do research on it. That has got to be so.
Frustrating. Yeah.
It's like he actually himself eats that way, but he has not
found a way himself. And I think that's the tragedy
of our times is that we're seeing so many doctors and
physicians and and incredible people that are stuck in the
healthcare system and are quite trapped.
And they tend to come to us at a point of desperation, either
from their own health process or a family member or as well as
when patients have kind of throw an egg on their faces and have
reversed the diabetes and gone against their advice and they've
had to change. But it's not easy.
It's a difficult journey to take at the moment as a physician or
as when you're bound by the ethics, which ties you into the
obligation to recommend the dietary guidelines of the
country that you live in when those guidelines are wrong.
So, So what was your, what was your back story?
Were you in the traditional system in the beginning and then
broke free of that or what was your catalyst for?
Yeah. So I'm a patient and a
researcher and I I came from a marketing background and I just
really, I worked in kind of, I started my career working in
pharmaceutical marketing and I used to travel through Africa
doing research for our largest pharmaceutical company into how
to take drugs into new markets. So I spent a lot of time in
hospitals and pharmacies around Africa talking to people and
understanding what's going on on the ground in different
countries. And from there I moved into lots
of other different brand places and research.
And when I came into the kind of non profit sector, I really was
just a desperate to find a way to bring meaning to the work
that I did and the knowledge that I'd got from around the
world. But also my health was an all
time low and my metabolic disease had kind of escalated
over decades, over 2 decades. So I was 21 when I was first had
first the signs of you know, I was had PCOS and all the typical
story. I just struggled and started
gaining weight and kept going further and further into what's
the sort of inverted commas health diet.
I became vegan. I I followed the Low GI diet to
the book for a decade and did more and more exercise and got
probably sicker and sicker along the journey.
So for me, it was a personal and a kind of commitment to really
find a way to work in bringing commercial knowledge into the
nonprofit and biological science or research category.
And then that came with a huge shock because I I kind of sat
down at my first in my first week in the job and was like
going through the budget thinking they've got to be a
couple of zeros missing off these numbers.
You know, where's the money? Why is there not a lot more
money, a lot more funding, a lot more sample sizing, You know, a
lot. Why are we not grossing out
sample sizes much bigger? All the typical questions that
people ask, you know, how is it possible that we can spend
millions on beer bottle advertising and consumer testing
for product lines, which is ultimately for packaging
enhancement in the corporate world?
And then we come into like the most important possible thing we
could ever do for humanity, which is understanding what we
should eat. And they're these tiny little
budgets, if any. So that's really been my
commitment and my kind of work over the last 10 years.
And then the foundation I work in is to try and bring budgets
and to fund researchers that are independent.
I love it. I think that is like you got to
kind of go the independent, right, it seems because if
you're going from the traditional, you know, top down
approach like there's so many, so much bureaucratic red tape,
you have to wait through that no progress has ever really made.
Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, obviously the
brightest researchers get offered the best jobs on the
best budgets and the best projects, and those are the
biggest ones or the most funding.
And those tend to be through big pharma and big, big business,
big brand. So what we wanted to do, and
what we try to do as a foundation is to find ways to
support people that are independent thinkers and that
are questioning the science in new ways.
You know, challenges, which is what Professor Noakes is to to
find a career path for themselves where they can
actually do the work they want to do rather than just doing
corporate work. Totally.
And it's a big job, you know, it's not easy.
It's not easy to get those to land those grants, to fund those
researchers. And they do, especially the good
ones. Of course, they want to earn
well. They want to be on big growing
projects. And how do we do that when
there's kind of there's so much resistance?
And that was basically the catalyst for nutrition network
as an entity because that's basically lowering the barrier
to entry for getting this knowledge in front of people
that are on the front lines and making a difference.
Right, absolutely. And we kind of we actually
created it's because we wanted to fund the research.
So it's majority owned by our non profit the Knox Foundation.
And you know it was partially my my own burnout of fundraising
for many years trying to get these funds.
I eventually went to our very very open minded and awesome
board at the Knox Foundation and we we built this stand alone
kind of social enterprise with the view to fund the work that
we do but through you know 'cause related for profit.
So the nutrition network sells courses and it charges money for
them and it's it's a growing entity that employs people that
at least you know the majority shares go to something that we
believe is doing the good work. So we we believe we found a
sweet spot and we we so grateful actually that we it's had so
much support and the kind of positive encouragement through
globally we're in over 100 countries now.
We've trained over 8000 physicians and we're growing.
We're hoping to really 8000 sounds like a lot and it is a
lot when you look at kind of the potential ripple effect of that.
But we're looking at kind of, you know, there are so many
physicians in North America alone that have never been
exposed to this work really. And it's kind of we, we don't
want to preach to the converted. It's like how do we actually get
a doctor that's just sitting kind of getting through the day,
giving, you know, people more and more diabetes and habitats
of drugs and putting everyone on to statins to start to see
things from a different perspective in a way that
doesn't threaten their careers? And that's of course asking a
lot. You know, it's it's a big
journey to transforming your practice.
And it's a bit like Pandora's box.
Once you start on the journey, it's very hard to stay in your
kind of original career trajectory because you start to
question everything and start to bring in things that are
controversial and difficult. And what we see is a lot of our
physicians have come to us. And so our community come
because they're feeling very lonely, like they're kind of
alone in a hospital in say, the Philippines where no one else
does the work they do, understands it and it's like
there's no one there for them to kind of bounce ideas off.
So we've got to grow quickly. We've got to get medicine to
really include the knowledge of therapeutic carbohydrates
restriction. It doesn't mean we necessarily
want to replace. Medicines, although that you
know personally, I would love it if we could to some extent.
But we do need to be included in the mix so that at least when a
patient comes to a physician and they are diagnosed as let's say
type 2 diabetic or hypertensive, they're not just given
allopathic drugs like at least they should be just, you know,
given with informed consent and knowledge.
They should be given the choice to make and try a lifestyle and
ketogenic approach first. Well, I'm not sure what it's.
Like, you know, in the setting there in Africa, but here in the
states, like they don't even discuss nutrition.
Typically when you go into a doctor's, you know, visit like
for a primary care physician annual checkup or you know,
people that are diabetic and going in for treatment there,
like the topic of the nutrition or lifestyle intervention is
rarely ever even broached. It's mostly just, you know,
pharmaceutical interventions. And I mean, how tragic is that?
Because what we know now is that it doesn't really work.
You know, those drugs don't work over the long term and the side
effects are so massive. So it's like the question is
why? And then you have to start to
look at the ethics of why not and like whether it is actually
ethical to have a diabetic sitting in front of you and not
to tell them and give them the option, you know to do something
different and to try alongside what they want.
You know what the drugs are an alternative approach and and we
start to, I mean we don't want to get angry.
You know, like when I first kind of opened up this and discovered
that I'd been on the wrong diet for 20 years doing my best and
being like a really good girl with it.
I was quite angry and was like thinking back of all of these
many, many physicians and doctors and specialists and
dietitians that I'd been to over the decades.
And I felt angry, like I felt like they had let me down
because I'd listened to them and taken their advice very
seriously, and it had made me sicker.
It hadn't made me better. And that liability is quite
complicated. You know, when we start to look
at the brutal effects that our modern diseases are, you know,
attributed to attributable to diet, we start to look at like
the top ten causes of death almost.
You know, we now understand that things like cancers and
autoimmune diseases are to some extent metabolic diseases.
You know, things like Alzheimer's and dementias are
connected to the metabolism of the brain.
We're looking at, you know, the medical caused deaths which are
often connected to procedures and or medications that are
related to chronic diseases. It's actually like almost this
context of mass genocide relating and connected to a
diet. And that's really scary as I
would imagine if I was a physician, I would be really
worried about the impact that I'd had on all the individuals
and their families over the years.
But then like what that means for me in terms of liability,
knowing what I know. Yeah.
And I feel like, you know, there's there when all of
they're given is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so
to speak. And a lot of them just lack the
education around nutrition. They're they're not really given
much nutritional education going through Med school, at least
here. And there's certainly a lot of
doctors that want to do right. And I think just simply opening
the the doorway for them to to learn more about these lifestyle
interventions is the key. So a lot of these physicians,
you you mentioned that a lot of them in the first year were from
the states. Are they finding your resources
online, the nutrition network, and just diving into those
courses and then just learning through that medium?
Yeah. So we've had quite a number of
people who have gone on and done like all of our trainings and
then we've done what was it kind of our diploma training, a
certification program where they're considered experts and
practitioners in this area. And then there's some people
that really just drop in and and do you know, one diabetes
reversal training or one obesity reversal training and then take
it back to their practice. And we don't necessarily hear
from them again. And that's wonderful because
they've taken on this knowledge. They're probably bringing it in
in a creative way and we move forward forward with just
opening small doors for people to find a different way.
So there's many kind of routes that people take through this.
The the work that we do and then obviously what we did more
recently, which was published last year, was we spent four
years really building this textbook that's called Ketogenic
that was launched in the States in the middle of last year,
which is an actual medical textbook with thousands of
references, 68 contributing authors, 11 editors.
The it's a body of like a solid piece of evidence over 500 pages
of it that can really sit on a doctor's desk and largely
replace something like the Merck Manual.
So if they get a patient that comes in with a neurological
problem, they can look up, you know, multiple sclerosis and
just read the like basic summary of how to treat a patient, how
to discuss it, how to consider TCR as an approach, what the
science is saying at the moment. So a textbook is felt important
because that's what people have on their desks and that's what
they kind of refer to in medicine and students actually
study from it. So we're hoping that Med schools
will consider a little bit more of an inclusive approach to
therapeutic dietary treatment. You know, I totally understand.
And the physicians here really worked very closely with
dietitians, particularly in hospital settings.
They feel like they don't have the access or permission to have
the conversation about diet. But if it's a medically
recognized disease, you know, like epilepsy is obviously the
one where the jury's out. It's it's understood that the
diet works as well as the medication and that's, you know,
a low hanging fruit. It's like you would expect your
doctor to have the conversation with you, but what about all the
other diseases that come along? And we know that diet and
lifestyle play a significant role, if not are the
contributing factor. We can't not discuss it.
It has to be talked about, it has to be brought in and it's we
have to have the hard conversations with patients
because they deserve it ultimately.
Totally, completely agree. Are you?
Are you also getting a lot of participants through the courses
that are are not physicians, but just people that are trying to
improve their own health personally?
Yes. In the beginning we actually
declined that and we only accepted positions.
But then we kind of had a list that grew and grew and grew and
grew and we kept that list. And after two years, we launched
a coach training which is called the advisor training which is a
kind of very basic introduction to this work for people that
want to advocate a lot of things like trainers and other
complementary to help care people do it.
We've had vets do our trainings. We've had, we've actually got
fascinatingly enough on our certificate coach certification
that's going at the moment very small group.
We've got one ontologist and one pediatrician.
So we're seeing actually that the oncologist decided to leave
oncology and medicine so that she could become a coach so that
she can actually help patients and guide them in a different
direction. So we're seeing the cross
threads, so important, you know and that's what we've learned
from it. And by bringing, I'm going to
call them lay people, but I know I'm not sure if you're a
physician, I'm not, but I don't see myself as a lay person.
I I see myself as a very knowledgeable patient and I can
have informed conversations with doctors and I can help and coach
people in a new way. So we're seeing it like crossing
over and coaches working so incredibly well towards the the
success with patients. And I mean that's what further
health has shown us. We did a very, very interesting
study on a group, quite a large group of type 2 diabetics that
had continuous glucose monitors last year.
And the one sample had just physician support and their CGM
and the other had the coach and physician support and the CGM.
And the results are absolutely astounding just in terms of how
much more successful diabetes reversal is and outlook is, if
there's a continuous glucose monitor or a good diagnostic
tool plus a doctor plus a coach, which is the golden formula,
isn't it? It's to have all of the support
that you can to give this person the best possible chance of a
normal life, which is what most diabetics deserve.
You know, they they were told only a couple of years ago and
still are in many places in the world that they have a terminal
condition. And it's like we know now that
that's kind of, I'm going to say rubbish.
You know, it's like the the we see every day people that
reverse the diabetes fully and live normal lives where they
have a perfect outlook. You know, if they went into a
doctor that was naive and wasn't told about their history, they
would believe that they are perfectly healthy and how
amazing that we're at that point.
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think, you know with with
the Internet especially, people are becoming much more of a
stronger advocate for their own health.
And you know that they're, they're placing an emphasis on
what their doctor says still for sure.
But I think they're also taking many of the matters into their
own hands or doing their own self research.
So to be able to provide an outlet for them to to work with
a coach that is not a registered physician, but to also do the
research on their own partake in these courses, you know, access
this textbook and just simply dive deeper on their own accord,
I think is incredibly empowering as well.
That's amazing. And it's, I don't know if you
know Doctor Andrew Aswari, he is he's based in New Jersey, but
he's an amazing example of such a humble, incredible human
being. He had Type 2 diabetes.
He was overweight and he treated patients who were giving, you
know, he was giving them the, the sad standard American diets
at that point and one of his patients lost 40 killers and
versus diabetes. So he felt like he had to learn
and he came to us and he did all of our trainings and he'd lost
40 kilos and he reversed his diabetes and he did.
He's certified and he now practices, that's what he's
done. He's converted his practice into
a local practice. So how amazing that there's so
many incredible people in healthcare that are just kind of
transforming it for themselves and their patients and that the
patients are teaching them and showing them the way how
wonderful. You know it's like it's things
have changed. It's not this top down approach
anymore to healthcare which we all know.
We we we we're responsible for our own health ultimately and we
hopefully find the right physicians along the way and the
right support that we need. 100%, I mean, you have to put
some emphasis in anecdotal data. And when you have so many
patients coming up to you that are doing their own research and
they're reversing their type 2 diabetes, they're losing weight,
they're improving their, the metabolic function.
Like you can't turn a blind eye to that for too long without
just humbling yourself and wanting to dive deeper and learn
more and implement those practices.
Absolutely. Aren't we lucky that we we're in
the kind of in the generation that's turning this tired?
And I mean that's really ultimately my hope is that our,
our, our children or the sort of next generation on this earth
won't go through this problem that we've had where we do
things that make no sense and we were told we have diseases that
have no, no hope. Meanwhile, we just kind of
there's like a couple of very obvious things that we can
change that will give us a much, much better life.
Absolutely. What a tragedy that we've had to
go through this and learn it the hard way.
And what what wonderful news that there's hope and that
things are changing, we just need to do quick.
Definitely hope. Speaking of children, you also
have a background in marketing towards children's nutrition,
right? Yes.
What can you elaborate that a little bit?
Yeah, I mean, I wrote my thesis. I did an MBA in the UK and I
wrote my thesis for a charity that kind of looks at children's
rights. And my, it was very much focused
on, you know, the rules that need to be put in place to
protect children. And that was in I graduated and
wrote it up in 2004. And you know, these these laws
haven't really changed. I mean that's 20 years ago, like
20 years ago, it was very clear where things were heading in the
UK in terms of Children's Health, their exposure,
unnecessary, overwhelming exposure to processed foods.
And at that point children around the world recognised
Ronald McDonald over Father Christmas and even Jesus as an
icon. So we were seeing like Ronald
McDonald was kind of the main thing that children recognised
when they were in an in an environment where they were
interviewed and asked questions. What kind of future is that for
children? So I mean very strongly in my
own belief system is that we're not protecting our children and
it's definitely no ones faults directly.
Parents are doing their very, very best.
And I think that, you know, marketeers are doing their best
in their own ways to kind of grow their brands.
You know, it's not like some massive conspiracy.
But what's happened is that the children have become the victims
of marketing to a large extent and children are making the
retail decisions instead of their parents, you know, so that
mums are buying things that children like and categories
have been imploded because of it.
So things like Pop Tarts and our breakfast and supplements are
now part of meals and gummies are, you know, like health food.
And it's very, very confusing for an adult.
And children's brains and bodies have just been hijacked by this.
So we have to find ways to better protect children from
addiction ultimately, but also just marketing and such direct
access. And there's many measures that
you know, need to be put into place.
That Sugar's the most low hanging fruits, which is, you
know, how do we protect our children from just such heavy
sugar in their diets? And then that kind of addictive
property being brought through into all of the things that
they're exposed to in their lives.
And it's a huge piece. And when it comes to to trying
to bridge the gap between health and nutrition and quality food
choices and the financial component of it all, like so
many, I mean sugar is obviously a very cheap commodity relative
to, you know, quality beef for instance.
How does one go about, especially in Africa, how does
one go about the, you know, navigating those waters?
Like how do you provide nutrition to the the demographic
people that are impoverished and do so with quality food choices
that often times cost more? Like how does how does one go
about that? So it's it's a different
approach that we've kind of piloted over the last 10 years.
We we created something called Eat Better South Africa for
this. And it's separate to the Nokes
Foundation because what we figured out was, and I know I've
actually listened to one of your great talks about being on a
strict killer diet and how useful that is.
What we figured out was that we couldn't go to people that earn,
and I'm not going to say earn, but typically a budget for some
people that live in our communities is around a dollar a
day for food. And that means very, very poor
quality bulk cheap food, which as you said is largely
digestible to sugar. And we have a product called
mini pap PAP in South Africa, which is it's a maize based,
white, highly processed and refined white maize product.
Only South Africa and Mexico use this particular maize for for
humans. In all other countries in the
world it's only used for animal feeding, so it's really not
considered something that is suitable for human consumption.
But in South Africa people eat that in bulk, so it's like seen
as a traditional food and it's a very emotional food.
People absolutely love it. It is very tasty and I can see
why it's addictive. So what we took the approach of
doing was to say, OK, we're going to try and get people to
eat better and not to get them to eat perfectly.
Like, to eat perfectly, you need to have quite a bit of money.
You need to have certain things in your life like a refrigerator
and ideally a stove and, you know, things that make it easy
for you to get nice food and then cook it.
So if better. South Africa was created as a
way to bring balance into the macro nutrient plates of people
that live in local communities that don't have access to good,
fresh quality food and to show them.
And what we've shown with US intervention so far and our
studies around them is that it's actually very successful.
So a person living on a very, very low budget in a quite a an
area that doesn't have like a good easy to get to retail
outlets or shops can change their diet.
They can reverse their diabetes and they can take on the
knowledge very, very cleverly and very well.
And that means things like eggs that are cheap.
You know organ meat which is very, very cheap in South
Africa, fats rendered that are sold in balk and that's cheap
bulk buying creative things and different meal plans.
Like we we look at what a community's actually eating.
We get a dietitian into a community before we start and
they look at what the, you know, the the participants eat over a
week and then they say, OK, we're going to pull out the pop
that maize that I was talking about and we're going to put in,
you know, something that's similar.
So like a porridge that's got flaxseed and that's affordable.
It's not perfect and that way we can bring people onto a
healthier lower club diet that will have good impact and does
seem to work. So we're seeing amazing results
particularly with hypertensive patients with weight loss with
yeah, a lot of things. We're in one state clinic now
which is a type 2 diabetic clinic and we're piloting it on
patients that have that are HIV positive.
And to see you know if the diet works with the drug, many drugs
and kind of complex situations going on because HIV comes with
quite a lot of other Co morbidities and side effects as
does diabetes. So really interesting work
that's being done just in bringing.
So we brought this down to under a dollar a day about 80 US cents
and we've had success and the success is quite brilliant like
it's, it's similar to the results that you see in the
Verta Health study actually in terms of efficacy.
But you wouldn't expect, you wouldn't expect to take, you
know, to go to a group of people that's eating on such a limited
budget and that have limited means and that it would work as
well as it does. So amazing results, amazing
data, incredible work is it just shows that it's possible for
anyone to do this as long as there's support.
And that's the most important thing, is like the actual
morale, support and guidance around how to get the diet
right. And then when people feel
better, they just automatically move in that direction, you
know, So they it's hard for the first couple of weeks and then
they suddenly are, you know, feeling alive again and their
glucose is down and their blood pressure's down, even normal.
And then they want more of it and they want to impact other
people. So we see one person in our
programs typically affects the diet of about 11 people in their
communities positively. So as an example, what would
like a typical day of eating with that $0.88 USD budget look
like? What was like the caloric intake
and macronutrient profile of that on average?
So if I haven't got the meal plans here and we have them
online, they're all freely available, but it would be
typically things like a number of eggs.
You know we can get really affordable eggs in local
communities in South Africa, things like peanut butter is in
there, fats like ghee and we have different kinds of fats
here that are palm based which are very, very cheap and they're
quite highly saturated. So we're getting people onto
things like that. And then organ meats, chicken
feet is a very popular thing in some of our communities in South
Africa as is intestines and organ meats, rendered fats,
cabbage and affordable vegetables that people find in
street markets and local communities.
And then a variety of other things.
You know it's it's really varies depending on the area and the
group of people that we're working with.
So we develop that. And try to develop what they're
eating and that's something similar to what they're eating
as a way through it. And that's never perfect to
start with. I mean, we have, I met a lady
who drinks 8 liters of normal Coca-Cola in one of these
communities and you know, we couldn't take her off her
Coca-Cola straight away. It's it's very much like, OK,
well can we do like 4 litres a day and four litres of Coke
Zero. And then next month we're going
to do 2 litres and and a couple of bottles of, you know, 4
litres of Coke, 02 litres of Coke sugar and then two litres
of sparkling water. And then we head in a direction
that is going to move towards a much better outlook.
And that sometimes means like 50% better, not 100%.
So we're not putting people onto grass fed, you know, steaks and
organic free range eggs. That's never going to be really
the reality that they face in their lives.
But it's about absolutely adding and we do find a lot of school
feeding programs because children, you know, as is in the
in the States, it's everywhere. Children get the worst diets and
they have to be helped with cognitive development.
And that means that, like the average school meal, certainly
in South Africa, is not going to take a child into life and
adulthood with the brain. That is what has what it needs
to actually have a good outlook. You know, it's like the brain
needs quite a lot over those first 15 years of life to
develop well and to go through education.
And if you're feeling it just absolute crap and sugar all day
long, it's not going to get there.
So we're seeing very positive results and you know, getting
very positive feedback from teachers and from parents around
things like concentration and actual school marks, as well as
just the ability to sit through the day and to interact with
peers and to focus, which of course we know is affected by
science and lifestyle. Totally.
Have you had any issues with like companies and individuals
and just charitable donations in general?
Like, I know in the States whenever there's like a food
bank or people are trying to you know, feed the hungry, the
donations they give are almost exclusively highly processed
cheap foods. And like they mean whether they
they're donating their their, their food, but it's all like
the terrible worst things that you would want to consume or
have anybody consume. It's like, are you getting a lot
of donations into Africa in foods that are that form and
like, how do you kind of sidestep using those?
It's very, very difficult and it's one of the reasons why it's
been the hardest group to get, you know, improved diets off is
exactly because of that in South Africa the retailers have quite
high expectations in terms of donating to charities, but what
they tend to do is that they they donate near, sell, buy food
to the market, value into these food feeding programmes.
So that means literally like 2 day old bread rolls bread that's
off you know, or that's not fresh any longer.
It really does tend to be like the worst cheapest food and then
that ends up in a soup kitchen that just gets turned into like.
I mean I've watched it, I've been to so many of these, it's
like a couple of vegetables that are also like past sell by and
then like bread baked boiled up together into a slop.
So it is really, really difficult and it's very
difficult to get the food funded in the right ways.
But we've had some really creative and incredible programs
that have actually funded low carbohydrate porridges and food
subsidies. So we can kind of subsidise to
run some of these pilots and and we've got one at the moment
that's about to start an amazing study.
It's it's a city that's very rural and they're using all of
their own home grown foods and chickens.
So it's actually not going to have any processed or western
food brought in, which is so exciting because it's a really
clean study we're going to be able to do on these kids.
That's awesome. We can't wait results.
Yeah. How How does how does one get
involved? Like I I'm hearing you talk.
I just want to help. I want to get involved.
I want to spread the message. Like how does one dive deeper
and and make a difference? Thank you for asking and
obviously being able to talk and share the story like this is, is
such an important way as to just for people to hear what the work
we're doing. A lot of the as I said earlier,
the work that we do at nutrition networks.
So if you buy one of our trainings, I think it's about
60% of the proceeds go towards the NOx Foundation which funds a
lot of these studies and the research.
So that's one way is to put your your purse power in action and
other ways is of course to just donate to these programs.
You can also do we we have a training within nutrition
network that funds what's I've been talking about, which is
called Eat Better South Africa and it's actually a group
coaching training. So where we've kind of taught we
teach our methodology with the idea that it can be applied to
anywhere in the world around taking a group that's from a
local community with limited resources through this program
in a way that works and how to run it, how to manage it.
So that's really nice. It's called the group Eat Better
Group Coaching Training and yeah, but I guess those are the
ways for now. I love it.
I'm not to just come to.
South Africa and see all this in person because I I just, I don't
know I I want to I want to see people make a difference and I
want I mean I feel like once you've like you said you were a
patient you know I I used to suffer from all kinds of you
know, disordered eating tendencies and just poor health
as a result of a standard American diet too.
And I feel like once you see the other side and you fear you feel
and experience all the benefits that it has to offer you can't
help but want to get that message out.
So I think this would be a great outlook to to pour into for
sure. Yeah, we and we we we're
actually celebrating our ten years on Thursday, the day after
tomorrow. It's a it's a very exciting week
for us because of course we didn't know if we'd last 10
years. I mean most non profits don't
and so many died or you know kind of close themselves down
during COVID. And so it feels like a really
important moment just we've worked so hard, you know, we all
have in the keto community and we feel sometimes likely on this
kind of hamster wheel that's not going anywhere.
And it's important to just AB together because we haven't all
for many years. There've been so many reasons
why things have been postponed since the pandemic, but it's
come back together in a room. And then also to just look at
all the work that we have done and all the successes that we
have made. So we did a little, a very,
very, very cursory. My team's not happy with the
data, but analysis of kind of our impact and we believe that
the work has impacted over 74 million people around the world
just in terms of exposure and impact and or training.
So the number of doctors and physicians that are treating
patients and those patients who are taking the work out, the
ripple effect and we can believe that like our impact is small,
but actually you know that we keep going in this direction as
a big community globally. You know the work you're doing,
the work all of the incredible people in the States are doing,
we are getting there. It doesn't feel actually yet and
system change takes 20 to 30 years.
So we have to we are part of the kind of army that's changing the
system for the better for the next generation.
But we we've got to keep going and we have to expand our
voices. So thank you for the opportunity
to share mine tonight and to share our story.
It's a lovely. My pleasure, My pleasure.
And you'll host a a conference there as well, right?
No, we don't have a conference coming up anytime soon.
We've had the world's nutrition summit a couple of times, but
it's parked at the moment because it was hot.
It was an online event. We we booked, I thought we
booked our biggest conference venue in February 2020 and then
of course we all know what happened in March.
So it ended up becoming what was an online conference for a
number of years and then yeah, so we're looking at ways to
bring some people to Africa again.
Hopefully we'll have an actual in person one soon.
Well, I would love to attend that.
When that when that time comes for sure.
Well, awesome. Where do people go to?
Just dive deeper I guess. Nutrition networkisit.com.
So it's nutrition-network.org, OK.
And then it's the Locust foundation.org and you can kind
of find all of our work through any of those places.
Awesome. And then all social media
channels and everywhere else as well.
Beautiful. Well, I will definitely link out
to all those. Make it easier for people to
find you. I really appreciate the work
you're doing. I have no doubt that you're
making a meaningful impact in ways that y'all will never even
realize, like you're having that ripple effect on a compounding
scale. So I I appreciate what you're
doing, and if there's ever anything I can do to help, by
all means please let me know. Thank you so much likewise.
Thank you, Jane. Till next time, take care.
Cheers, bye.