Tim Noakes > Quotes

“Your body will argue that there is no justifiable reason to continue. Your only recourse is to call on your spirit, which fortunately functions independently of logic.”
― Timothy Noakes, Lore of Running

“The marathon is less a physical event than a spiritual encounter. In infinite wisdom, God built into us a 32-km racing limit, a limit imposed by inadequate sources of the marathoner's prime racing fuel - carbohydrates. But we, in our human wisdom, decreed that the standard marathon be raced over 42 km.

So it is in that physical no-man's-land, which begins after the 32-km mark, that the irresistible appeal of the marathon lies. It is at that stage, as the limits to human running endurance are approached, that the marathon ceases to be a physical event. It is there that you, the runner, discover the basis for the ancient proverb: "When you have gone so far that you cannot manage one more step, then you have gone just half the distance that you are capable of." It is there that you learn something about yourself and your view of life." Marathon runners have termed it the wall. (Chapter 10)”
― Tim Noakes, Lore of Running

“Insulin creates insulin resistance. But insulin resistance also causes high insulin – a classic vicious, or self-reinforcing, cycle. Insulin drives up insulin resistance. This, in turn drives up insulin levels. The cycle keeps going around and around, one element reinforcing the other, until insulin is driven up to extremes.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“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

“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

“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

“This is precisely why T2DM, unlike virtually any other disease, affects every single part of the body. Every organ suffers the long-term effects of the excessive sugar load. Your eyes rot – and you go blind. Your kidneys rot – and you need dialysis. You heart rots – and you get heart attacks and heart failure. Your brain rots – and you get Alzheimer’s disease. Your liver rots – and you get fatty liver disease and cirrhosis. Your legs rot – and you get diabetic foot ulcers. Your nerves rot – and you get diabetic neuropathy. No part of your body is spared.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“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

“Why do we advise people with diabetes to eat mostly carbohydrate foods, the very nutrient that they can’t easily tolerate?”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“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

“Medications and insulin do nothing to slow down the progression of this organ damage, because they do not eliminate the toxic sugar load. We’ve known this rather inconvenient fact since 2008.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“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

“Fatigue should no longer be considered a physical event but rather a sensation or emotion.”
― Tim Noakes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 86 million people were at risk in the United States in 2014.2 That’s an astounding one in three people.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Over a period of years, you move from pre-diabetes, to diabetes taking a single medication, then two then three and then finally large doses of insulin. Here’s the thing. If you are taking more and more medications to keep your blood sugars at the same level, your diabetes is getting worse!”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

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

“The writers in this book share the common belief that diabetes does not need to be chronic and progressive. We also share the common belief as to how. We know that the macronutrient that diabetics (both types) are least able to handle is carbohydrate. We therefore cannot understand that dietary advice for diabetics is to eat the majority of one’s diet in the form of carbohydrate – the very substance that cannot be handled. (This is the same advice for non-diabetics, which is why we continue to make more people diabetic daily).”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“According to glycemic index principles, it would be fine for an alcoholic to drink beer, but not whisky since beer raises your blood alcohol level more slowly, making beer healthy, but whisky not. If abstinence is curative, what value is there in the science of less? Asking a diabetic to count their carbohydrates is no different than asking an alcoholic to count their drinks.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“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

“Obesity is associated with, but does not cause T2DM. Both diseases are the consequence of prolonged over-consumption of the same drug – carbohydrates. T2DM manifests as damage to end-organs that result from a series of progressive microvascular injuries due to the toxic effects of chronically elevated blood sugar.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“In order to set remission as a goal for our diabetic patients, we need to partner with them in the treatment process. Practitioner and patient should each clearly understand their roles. Effective treatment to the point of remission of any carbohydrate-induced CNCDs including T2DM requires a bimodal approach. Treat the cause and treat the disease.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Carbohydrates are as powerfully psychoactive as nicotine, alcohol and opioids, and are as rapidly addictive. Unless you are a performance athlete, most Type 2 diabetics are simply people who over time have transitioned away from eating for the nutritional value of food toward eating primarily for the endorphin release and emotional management effect of a powerful psychoactive drug called sugar.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Diabetes is a global health epidemic. In a 2014 study, one of the biggest studies of its kind, scientists from Imperial College London reported that 422 million people worldwide were living with diabetes.1 That’s four times as many as in 1980, when 108 million people were living with the disease. That bears reiteration – the number of diabetics has quadrupled across the globe in just over 35 years.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Remission requires application of physiologic as well as addiction principles. Physiologically, reducing the frequency and quantity of total carbohydrate consumption below the threshold of maximum insulin production allows the hepato-pancreatic glucagon-insulin feedback pathway to recover its control of carbohydrate metabolism thus preventing T2DM and putting it into remission where the blood glucose level is not causing harm. If we were rats in a cage and our access to carbohydrates was tightly controlled, such reduction in carbohydrate consumption could work.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating