Tim Noakes: Why Modern Nutrition Is Failing Us

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. 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.

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.