Lore of Nutrition: Using Science Power to Beat Diet Dictators – A Book Challenging Conventional Dietary Belief
Noakes devotes much of the book to the growing body of compelling science for benefits of low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diets.
In it, they also reveal the “Diet Dictators”. These are the many top doctors, dietitians and academics who have tried to suppress or distort the science for LCHF. It’s probably no coincidence that most have industry links. The book documents how the Diet Dictators and assorted hangers-on also tried and failed to destroy Noakes’s career, character and reputation. They show how and why eminence-based medicine is giving way to evidence-based medicine.
Lore of Nutrition documents how conflicted doctors, dietitians and academics made gratuitous and often slanderous, unscientific attacks on Noakes. And how they ultimately laid the groundwork for the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) hearing against him. The HPCSA charged Noakes with unprofessional conduct for a single tweet in February 2014. That was for saying that good first foods for infants are LCHF. The public soon dubbed the hearing The Nutrition Trial of the 21st Century. And a multi-million-rand trial it became as the HPCSA stretched hearings over more than three years.
As showed in the book, when the HPCSA saw that their case was weak, they refused to acknowledge it. Instead, they simply engaged an expensive team of external lawyers to prop it up. Lore of Nutrition covers the hearings in full, day in and day out. They also show how those lawyers might have won the day. However, they came up against Noakes’s powerhouse, energetic team of lawyers.
HPCSA hearings are also “not the appropriate mechanism to resolve such major and complex academic debates”. Thus, Noakes’s message to readers in Lore of Nutrition becomes an even important one: “All people are entitled to their own opinions. But not to their own set of facts. So do not believe what you want to believe. Believe what the facts tell you is the truth.”
