by Eddie Sat Feb 13 2016, 13:49
Re, the last few days of the riveting Noakes hearing. Well it is for me anyway.
University of Cape Town deputy vice chancellor and law professor Danie Visser calls emeritus professor Tim Noakes a “force in the world”. The Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) is more likely to call Noakes a tsunami. When the HPCSA resumed its hearing this week against Noakes on a charge of unprofessional conduct for giving unconventional advice to a breastfeeding mother on Twitter, he deluged its legal team with research to show he had been neither unprofessional nor was the advice he gave not evidence-based. If the HPCSA hoped the new addition to its legal team, advocate Ajay Bhoopchand who is also a medical doctor, would stem Noakes’ defensive tide, it was wrong. Bhoopchand tried hard to stop Noakes presenting evidence on the influence of food and soft drink industries on dietary guidelines and nutrition advice, saying it was ‘irrelevant’, he was ‘lecturing’ and giving ‘too much minutiae and detail’. Noakes’ own medical doctor advocate Ravin ‘Rocky’ Ramdass explained the relevance in minute detail to Bhoopchand. Chair of the HPCSA panel hearing the charge against Noakes, Pretoria advocate Joan Adams, overruled Bhoopchand, saying it was not in the interests of fairness or justice for the HPCSA to charge Noakes with giving advice that was not evidence-based, then stop him presenting evidence to show his advice was evidence-based.
Bhoopchand was powerless to stop Noakes in full sail as he waded into these vested interests worldwide, showing how they are embedded in academia, have bought off top scientists and academics, sponsor dietitians’ associations – including the Association for Dietetics in SA (ADSA), whose former president, Claire Julsing Strydom, laid the complaint that led to the charge against him – to spin their products, and influence dietary guidelines, nutrition advice and our ideas about obesity and weight loss. He showed how food and soft-drinks industries have made low-fat, high-carb foods the dominant ‘conventional’ dietary paradigm without any science to back it up, contributing to global epidemics of obesity, heart disease, diabetes to name but a few. Noakes took special aim at the sugar industry, but had many other targets, including his own profession, saying doctors were telling patients diabetes was incurable when they had the means to reverse it: ’We are practising medicine of failure. I don’t want to practice that kind of medicine.’ He also explained – in minute detail – why heart disease in future will be treated not by cardiologists, but by hepatologists (liver specialists). In this fourth part of a series, science and business writer Rob Worthington-Smith looks at Noakes’ views on how and why obesity and heart disease began in the cradle of civilisation. – Marika Sboros
Professor Noakes is presenting 1600 pages of evidence backing his defence and the case for low carb. Can't say the man has not got both barrels loaded for bear.
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