Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

by Tim Noakes

The key finding from Reaven’s work is that these conditions are not separate – they are different expressions of the same underlying condition. So patients should not be labelled as having high blood pressure or heart disease or diabetes or NAFLD. Instead, they should be diagnosed with the underlying condition – IR – with the understanding that the high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, NAFLD, heart attack, stroke, perhaps even cancer or dementia, are simply markers, symptoms if you will, of the basic condition. And that basic condition is IR, which, simply put, is the inability of the body to tolerate more than an absolute minimum amount of carbohydrates each day (without developing hyperinsulinaemia). We now know that for patients with more severe IR, a daily carbohydrate intake of 25–50 grams is the maximum that can be tolerated. But when Reaven began his work, this was not known.