The Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) has confirmed that Professor Tim Noakes, who maintains that a diet high in fat is actually far healthier than we’ve all been led to believe, will be facing a two-day hearing. HPCSA communications manager Priscilla Sekhonyana said in a Health24 report that the complaint relates to unprofessional conduct. "A hearing will be taking place on 4 and 5 June 2015."
Noakes, whose book, The Real Meal Revolution, is rooted in the concept of "Banting" – low carbohydrate high fat (LCHF) – said that the complaint was lodged by the Association for Dietetics in South Africa's (ADSA) president Claire Julsing-Strydom.
He said that he advised a mother on Twitter that she should wean her child onto LCHF foods, which he described as real foods. "By implication I was saying that the child should not be weaned onto the traditional high sugar, high carbohydrate processed cereals."
He said when he appears before the HPCSA they will decide whether or not he is guilty of "disgraceful conduct on social media", however Noakes is quite positive. "I think it could be a turning point in the debate about what our infants, and in turn adults, should be eating," he said. "If the representatives of HPCSA are prepared to listen to the science, they will realise that there is something very seriously wrong with the teaching of nutrition in South Africa, as it is in the rest of the world."
Julsing-Strydom said: "ADSA has been advised by the HPCSA to not provide any comments on this matter as the inquiry is subjudice."
The SA Medical Journal, meanwhile, reports in its March edition that ‘with a conviction to match his harshest critics’, Prof. Tim Noakes took to the scientific trenches in Cape Town in February, fusing the firepower of 15 of the world’s top experts on the low-carbohydrate, high-fat (LCHF) diet at a heavily subscribed R3 million, 4-day ‘health convention’.
Nutritionists, cardiologists, surgeons, family physicians and researchers, many of them best-selling authors, rallied to his side, presenting findings, analyses, arguments on causation, and alarming, undisputed obesity and type 2 diabetes prevalence studies to counter last year’s unprecedented local wave of scientific antipathy towards Noakes – much of it from his own colleagues at the University of Cape Town (UCT)’s Faculty of Health Sciences.
[link url="http://www.health24.com/Diet-and-nutrition/Healthy-foods/Tim-Noakes-to-face-inquiry-over-Banting-tweet-20150421"]Full Health24 report[/link]
[link url="http://www.samj.org.za/index.php/samj/article/view/9554/6667"]SAMJ full article: Turning Nutrition on its Head – Noakes gets his day[/link]
[link url="http://www.samj.org.za/index.php/samj/article/view/6663/4849"]See Also SAMJ (2013): Inconvenient truth or public health threat?[/link]