Lore of Nutrition Quotes

“But biology does not readjust to accommodate the false theories of scientists …’ – James le Fanu, British physician”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“the introduction of cereal and grains into the human diet was associated with a dramatic reduction in human height and the first appearance of bone diseases and dental caries. It is diets high in cereals and grains and low in fat-soluble vitamins, especially Vitamin D, which cause osteoporosis”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ – Upton Sinclair, American writer”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“cancer was essentially unheard of in populations eating their traditional diets. Even the mid-Victorian English did not suffer greatly from cancer (Figure 16.7 on page 324). That is why cancer is considered to be a disease of ‘civilization’.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“It is now clear that the dangerous atherogenic dyslipidaemia that produces arterial disease is caused by a high-carbohydrate diet that produces NAFLD. Heart attack is therefore a disease of carbohydrate, not fat, metabolism.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“Accordingly, the authors concluded: ‘Irrespective of the possible limitations of the ecological study design, the undisputed finding of our paper is the fact that the highest CVD [cardiovascular disease] prevalence can be found in countries with the highest carbohydrate consumption whereas the lowest CVD prevalence is typical of countries with the highest intake of fat and protein.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“The US dietary guidelines were the first ever to inform the general public about what should not be eaten. Specifically, we were told to avoid fat, especially saturated fat, and to replace dietary saturated fats with carbohydrates and polyunsaturated ‘vegetable’ (actually seed) oils. Failure to do so, we were warned, would cause us all to die of heart attacks, because cholesterol, we were told, causes coronary heart disease. Instead, the advice drove us down the road to obesity and the much more severe form of arterial disease caused by T2DM. Some have described this monumental error as the greatest scam in the history of modern medicine. The fallout has produced some very big ‘winners’, specifically those pharmaceutical companies that have benefited from the sale of the largely ineffective statin drugs, and the processed-food industry, dominated by 10 companies that produce the ‘displacing foods of modern commerce”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“Only when we began to eat cereals at the start of the agricultural revolution, and most especially when our ancestral food choices were displaced by the ‘displacing foods of modern commerce’, did the ‘modern diseases of lifestyle’ begin to emerge in ever-increasing numbers.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“Johnson’s theory is that the fructose in sugar increases uric acid production, which switches susceptible humans into hibernation mode, producing hyperphagia (overeating due to increased hunger), IR, and elevated blood glucose, insulin and triglyceride concentrations, leading to fat accumulation in the liver and fat cells.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“In the course of his career as a naval surgeon travelling the world, Captain T.L. Cleave,97 together with South African physician G.D. Campbell, formulated the hypothesis that a variety of medical conditions – including dental caries and associated periodontal disease, peptic ulcers, obesity, diabetes, colonic stasis ‘and its complications of varicose veins and haemorrhoids’, heart attack (coronary thrombosis) and certain gut infections – are caused by diets high in sugar and refined carbohydrates, and should therefore be termed the ‘saccharine diseases’.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“There is good evidence that Aborigines are genetically insulin resistant,94 so that some of their metabolic traits ‘are associated with being Aboriginal (mild impairment of glucose tolerance, hyperinsulinemia and elevated total and VLDL [very low density lipoprotein] triglycerides)’.95 In such a population, replacing ancestral food choices with the ‘displacing foods of modern commerce’ must predictably lead to high rates of T2DM.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“The absence of cancer in mummies from Egypt and South America86 led one study to propose: ‘In industrialised societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. But in ancient times, it was extremely rare. There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“He showed that the incidence of acute heart attacks was seven times higher in the rice-eating Indians living in the south than among the Punjabis in the north, who ate 8 to 19 times more fat, chiefly of animal origin, and about 9 times more sugar.59”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“humans were very healthy before they began eating the modern industrial diet with its high amounts of sugar, refined grains, trans fats and vegetable oils.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“Another cost of adopting a cereal-based diet may be that human brain size has decreased progressively in the past 10 000 years. The decline began at precisely the moment when humans began to raise their children on cereals and grains and less animal produce.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“My conclusion is that humans evolved as obligate fat-eaters, and our biology is dependent on eating diets high in fat and moderate in protein, with carbohydrates providing only that balance of calories that cannot be obtained from readily available fat and protein sources.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“Human health depends above all on sound nutrition; sound nutrition means growing food and using it in accordance with nature’s laws; of all foods made “unnatural” by industrial processing the commonest are refined sugar, refined flour and certain processed vegetable oils. I know of no research that refutes this simple concept.’ – Dr Walter Yellowlees, A Doctor in the Wilderness”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“in our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.’ – David Hume, Scottish philosopher”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“There have been more than 74 RCTs, virtually all on Western populations, including at least 32 that lasted six months or longer, and three that lasted two years. (RCTs are considered the gold standard when it comes to judging whether there are any adverse side effects.) These trials have all established the efficacy of the low-carb diet for fighting obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Some official bodies are now in fact taking notice of the risks of low-fat diets,”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“The consequences for public health have been nothing short of tragic, Teicholz said. It’s quite likely, she argued, that by shifting towards a greater consumption of grains and other carbohydrates, the US guidelines have been a major contributor to the pandemics of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“1911, the year in which industry introduced the first vegetable-oil food product. Consumers in the US knew it as Crisco, a hardened form of vegetable oil that was meant to replace lard. Research going back to the 1950s documents a long list of adverse health effects from these oils, including increased rates of cancer and inflammation.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“She showed how consumption of animal fat was already dropping in the US in the 1960s when the AHA made their pronouncements. At the same time, and since the early 1900s, the consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils had dramatically increased. This rise ‘perfectly paralleled’ the rising heart-disease rates, she said.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“The low-fat diet is over,’ Teicholz declared. Not only does this diet appear to cause heart disease, but in clinical trials on more than 52 000 people, the low-fat diet was shown to be ‘ineffective in fighting any other kind of chronic disease’, she said.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“We are failing our populations if we do not look at the association between obesity and diabetes and the introduction of those dietary guidelines,’ Harcombe told the hearing. If anyone is giving unconventional, unscientific advice, she said, it is not Noakes. It is more likely those who slavishly recommend the country’s food-based dietary guidelines to people with obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other serious health issues.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“Harcombe explained in detail why CICO is an inadequate model, not least because it contradicts one of the laws of thermodynamics. Tongue-in-cheek, she quoted US science writer Gary Taubes: ‘We woke up somewhere around this point and decided to become greedy and lazy. We had managed to stay slim for three and a half million years, but suddenly 30 per cent of us became obese and almost 70 per cent of us overweight or obese.’ The reality, Harcombe said, is that since the guidelines were introduced, obesity has more than doubled and diabetes has increased sevenfold in the US. In the UK, obesity has increased almost tenfold, and diabetes four- to fivefold. Referring to South Africa’s sky-rocketing obesity rates in the wake of the official dietary guidelines, Harcombe wrote at the end of her thesis that this ‘at least deserves examination’.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“Ignorance’ is probably the best word to describe public opinion on dietary fat, Harcombe said.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“My final slide quoted the words of biologist Louis Agassiz: ‘Every scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“In fact, there is clear evidence that cooking in ‘vegetable’ oils is likely to be very bad for our health.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs

“As rates of diabetic arterial disease have increased exponentially since the 1977 low-fat, ‘heart-healthy’ dietary guidelines were introduced, we must conclude that those guidelines are not preventing this form of arterial disease. In fact, an even more likely conclusion is that the 1977 guidelines are the direct cause of the most prevalent form of arterial disease – that which is present in those with IR and T2DM.”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs