Friday, 29 March, 2024
HomeWeekly RoundupNoakes continues war of words against sceptical academics

Noakes continues war of words against sceptical academics

After winning his misconduct case‚ low-carbohydrate high-fat advocate Professor Tim Noakes is putting in the boot to academics whose work was used against him., writes The Times.

It reports that in the latest salvo in a war of words raging in the pages of the SA Medical Journal‚ Noakes said the scientists who wrote a 2014 article had refused to address a string of errors.

The Cape Town sports scientist and British co-author Zoë Harcombe say in the May edition of the journal: “Given that only one error has been addressed and accepted‚ we may never receive an answer to our research question: was this mistake or mischief? We may also never know if Prof Noakes would have suffered for years in the way he has‚ had this article not made competence or conspiratorial errors.”

The report says the 2014 article‚ published in the journal PLoS ONE‚ said low-carb diets were no better at producing weight loss than “isoenergetic balanced diets”.

Noakes and Harcombe are quoted in the report as saying that the “ostensibly innocuous” article was given “disproportionate consideration” during Noakes’s misconduct hearing in front of a Health Professions Council of South Africa disciplinary panel‚ which ended with a not guilty verdict. The article‚ by scientists at Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town‚ was mentioned 19 times by prosecution witnesses‚ they say.

They said: “It is understandable that the authors chose rather to raise new issues (ITT, standard mean difference and significance) and to ignore the numerous errors that we identified in our critique, presumably because they have no cogent answers. As a result, those material errors have remained unanswered since October 2016 and unless addressed, they render the article worthless, other than of retraction. Given that only one error has been addressed and accepted (the duplication), we may never receive an answer to our research question: was this mistake or mischief? We may also never know if Prof Noakes would have suffered for years in the way he has, had this article not made competence or conspiratorial errors.”

[link url="http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2017/04/27/Victorious-Noakes-takes-aim-at-scientists-he-blames-for-years-of-suffering"]The Times report[/link]
[link url="http://www.samj.org.za/index.php/samj/article/view/11900"]SAMJ article[/link]

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