>> aaron: paleo runner broadcast is devotedto finding better ways to live, run, train and eat. i'm your host, aaron olson, you canfind more information by going to paleorunner.org you can also follow me on facebook.com/runpaleoor on twitter @runpaleo. email feedback to aaron@paleorunner.org i wanted to take a minute to tell you abouta product i've been using called three fuel. three fuel is a sport's drink that gives yousustained energy throughout your workout. it gives you fat,protein and carbohydrates.to get 10% off, use the coupon called 3folson go to paleorunner.org and click three fuelat the top of the page. if you're listening on the podcast app for iphone or ipad, clickthe link displayed on the app right now.
>> aaron: my guest today is tim noakes, timis a medical doctor and an exercise and sport's scientist. he is author of lore of running,waterlogged, and challenging beliefs.tim is an all around expert on running, and he hasrun over 70 marathons and ultra marathons himself. tim, this is your third time backon the show, it's great to have you on. >> tim: thanks aaron, it's good to be backwith you >> aaron: tim, it's always great talking withyou because, and in reading your stuff as well, because i see you as a very carefulthinker, and you always evaluate things very carefully before you get behind an idea. for people who are not familiar with you,which is going to be very few who listen to
this show, but can you tell me a little bitabout how you got interested in this idea of nutrition, and this idea of how a highfat diet could possibly be a healthy thing? >> tim: well aaron, it all goes back to the12th of december, 2010, and i just finished writing the book called waterlogged whichtook me 30 years of research. >> aaron: okay >> tim: and about six years of writing, butit was a real epic, and it antagonized me to many of my colleagues because i was sayingthings that were not acceptable in the profession, and certainly within the american collegeof sports nets, and i was not a very popular person because i was saying that their drinkingguidelines were wrong, and that was not very
helpful to a lot of people who spent timedrawing up the guidelines and didn't understand how it had been influenced by industry tocome to their certain conclusions. so, anyway, i finished waterlogged that eveningand i sent it off to the publishers for them to assess it and decide how they were goingto publish it,and in the middle of the night, i woke up and my brain said you will get uptomorrow morning and you will run 5 kilometers or whatever, and you will run everyday forthe rest of your life. see? obviously my brain had been thinking aboutthings while i had been writing, and not running enough. so i went out and had a terrible run,and i suddenly realized just how unfit i was, and i said somethings's got to give.
so, fortunately you know, life is about thesmall margins, i came home, i checked my emails, and there was an email advertising a bookcalled the new atkins for the new you by westman, finney and volek, and to lose 6 kilogramsin 6 weeks without hunger, and i said well this is just more garbage, we know you can'tlose weight without hunger, tried it, it doesn't work. >> aaron: right. >> tim: and then i saw their names, and ihad forgotten that in the 1980's, they had done a study on the high fat low carbohydratediet, and we had done some studies also on low carbohydrates and high fat diets, notas good as theirs, but we had done some studies,
and because of the theory, there was sucha good theoretical reason why high fat diet should be healthy, or should improve yourperformance, and we had done it, but we kind of dropped it, and lost interest in it. so i said well i know they're good scientists,so i am going to go and buy their book, so i went straight to our local bookseller, about15 minutes down the road, and came back and started reading the book, and within one houri decided that's it, i'm never eating another carbohydrate in my life. [laughter] >> tim: i can be decisive as you can gather.
>> aaron: yeah. >> tim: and what there was, there were 150studies showing the benefits of a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, and i said but i am a scientist,i know this is nonsense, how can there be so many studies and i don't know about them. >> tim: the reality is there were their studies,and i was just ignorant because we were not being taught that. so, anyway, within a few weeks, my energylevels improved, i lost a whole bunch of minor medical conditions, and my running went backto what it was 20 years before, it was astonishing, i couldn't believe it, and i suddenly gotthat same enthusiasm for running that i had
when i first started running, and the benefitswere huge, and then my health started to improve because i discovered ultimately that i havetype ll diabetes and now i'm treating it with a low carb diet, and medication, and my controlnow is pretty good, it's almost perfect, so it's been a very, very exciting journey, andas i went along this journey, i started reading, and at first i wasn't convinced that the sciencewere there, today, i have absolutely no doubt, and i now understand why for many people alow carbohydrate is the only way they'll be able to maximize their health. >> aaron: so i mentioned that your very careful,from the books i've read of yours, your very careful about what you say, and i was readinglore of running last night and you talked
about the high fat diet quite a bit, a lengthydiscussion in there, but then at one point, you do say, until the issue is resolved, it'sbest to keep an open mind, and the proven value of high carb diet's is that it preventsexcessive weight gain. [laughter, both aaron and tim] so, how did you reverse your opinionon that? was it personal experience, or was it the studies that you read? >> tim: oh, well it was personal experienceand that was so amazing, because i mean for the first time, for the first time that ican remember, i was never particularly heavy, but i put on a substantial amount of weight,butparticularly in the last fifteen years, if i look back, particularly in the 1990's, iwas still pretty lean, and then i put on a
substantial amount of weight and whateveri tried, it didn't work, i just got fatter and fatter and fatter, but within, actuallyi did much better, because what was really funny was i had to go to sweden and speakto a whole bunch of elite athlete's. >> aaron: okay. >> tim: so when i started on the diet, i thought,you know, if i could drop 6 kilograms in the next 8 weeks, because i had to speak to themfor 8 weeks, i would be really happy, but in fact i dropped 11 kilograms, that's 22pounds in those 8 weeks, and when i arrived in sweden, i looked like a totally differentperson, i mean, i looked like an athlete, not quite but almost like an athlete again.i mean i fooled the swedes, and i was another
10 kilograms lighter. >> aaron: that’s great. >> tim: yeah, and it's so easy to maintainweight. it's a palettte not to be hungry, and now i'm never hungry, so it's just beenamazing. >> aaron: now what do you think it is aboutthe high fat diet that has helped you because, is it something to do with the brain? i knowyou focus on the brain a lot in running and how important that is to regulating our speedand our fatigue. is there something that's going on in the brain that's regulating yourhunger better on a high fat diet? >> tim: yeah, absolutely, i think that thereis an epistat in the brain which regulates
how much you eat, and how much exercise youdo.i think it monitors both. john atkin, who was the first guy who was anti sugar in the1970's, he has a lovely paper, and i quote this all the time. he put a group on, he askedthem to eat to hunger, on a high fat or high carbohydrate diet, and on the high fat diet,the ate 700 calories a day less, and they were not hungry, and there was the key, andhe noticed and he reported that they didn't report hunger, they suddenly lost their hunger. so, although we say that it's carbohydratesand fats that reduce hunger, i think it's the carbohydrates that drive hunger and makeyou overeat. i think it's been a long time since the 1977guidelines came out we've just been, the brain
has been taken over with those addictive carbohydrates,and they make us always hungry and you want to eat, and i think in time that we'll showthat the brain does change the actual, even the cells in the epistat may well change. it was really interesting, we went on saturdaynight to a friend of mine, and she's always been more of a vegetarian type diet and nowshe read our book the real meal revolution and she wanted to cook from it, but she tookthe leanest meats, and fed us and it was fantastic food, very, very tasteful, but i came homehungry. so i think eating all those protein, and iwas still hungry and i said i have to go eat cheese, and i realize for me that it's thefat that takes away my hunger.
>> tim: and so, i think it's different foreveryone and for some people, it's the protein, but it's clearly in my case, it's the fatthat draws my hunger, and as long as i'm eating lots of fat, i'm just not hungry, >> aaron: right. you know you mentioned inlore of running towards the end of that chapter on energy, metabolism, that there are somepeople who just naturally, genetically burn fat really well, and then there's some thatburn carbohydrates a little bit better. do you think that they're, as far as runningis concerned, that there's a big difference as far as how many carbs we can take in andprocess? >> tim: you know that's a great question andi'm referring to dr. julia griddika's work
in alabarti, she did a phd, and then did subsequentlylots of other work. in her phd, she showed that we took a group of quite good cyclists,and at rest, some of them were burning fat completely, and some were burning carbohydratesalmost completely, and when we exercised them, they still stayed the same, in other words,if you’re predominantly a carbohydrate burner, at rest, you just increased the amount ofcarbohydrates you burned during exercise, and if you were predominantly a fat burner,you still remained predominantly a fat burner, although you burn a little more carbohydratesas you exercise, and we concluded that it was genetic, but i'm not sure. if we really look carefully enough at nutrition,and what we are looking at now is all the
people who naturally burn lots of fat, isthey naturally should have gravitated to eating a high fat diet, because they discovered thatit was more acceptable for them, or whatever.. so although we said it was genetic, i'm surethere is a genetic component, but i also don't think that we completely excluded the possibilitythat there are dietary differences. >> aaron: okay. and a lot of times we're toldto override our natural tendencies to eat more fat because we think it's healthier toeat more whole grains. so, i think a big part of it is just kindof getting out of your own way and listening to your body, at least for me that was thecase. >> tim: you’re absolutely right, and i waspart of that group think, and as you correctly
described, you know we were just telling everyoneto do what the us government was telling us to do and we just paused on that group thinkmentality, and now i've learned that grains is not the thing you want to eat. >> aaron: you know tim i recently spoke withmatt fitzgerald on the show and he says that a lot of this talk around different typesof diets has to do with the placebo effects, and that people can do just as well on a highcarb diet or a low fat diet or whatever kind of diet they choose. you obviously disagreewith that, can you elaborate on that? >> tim: well matt fitzgerald is not a scientistworking with athletes day to day and he's not a doctor working with patients, becausethat is utter nonsense, and you know we have
seen remarkable responses, for example, brucefordyce who won 9 comrade marathons and is probably the greatest ultra marathon runnerof all time in south africa, a personal friend, and i got him on the high carbohydrate dietin 1979, 1980, and we produced the world's first group in 1982 or 83, and we commercializedthem and it was called fra. fordyce, rose and noakes, and they still have product around,frn. he won 9 races in i think 10 years, he missedone year, and he got progressively heavier, but of course we didn't realize he was about2 kilograms heavier, and then during his life, he's run 200 marathons or ultra marathons,but yet, he still put on 14 kilograms, and his running went terribly.
he was hating running and was really struggling,and then before i went on the diet, he actually went on the diet because another great comradesrunner, also put on weight, put on 16 kilograms, in other words, 34 pounds or more, and brucesaw him and saw that he was lean and said what have you done sean? and sean said i'vejust been on a diet. and bruce said well that's not very helpful. all of a sudden,he came back and bruce fordycenow runs, he was running 23 minutes, for 5k. he is now running 17 minutes for 5k's, altitudeat the age of 56. now matt fitzgerald might say it's placebo, it is not, bruce fordycecould not run under 23 minutes on the high carbohydrate diet because it has some detrimentaleffect. another guy that i helped dropped
his time in a 56k race by 3 hours. >> aaron: wow. >> tim: because when he lost the weight andstarted eating this proper foods, he could start training. he would then train 120 kilometers a week,but roughly about 60 or 70 miles a week. before he would run 40 miles a week and idoubled his training almost, and of course he benefited, but he had never, ever beenable to train more. >> tim: so, matt, forcibly, his new book iswrong, it is just absolutely wrong. >> aaron: have you had a chance to look atit yet?
>> tim: no, i've only just seen the reviews,unfortunately and i'm being a little unfair because i'm not giving him the benefit ofactually having read the book but the point is that there are some people, and i'm oneof them, who are carbohydrate intolerant and we just do not do well on carbohydrates, anduntil all athletes understand this, this is conditioning in existence, we will not beable to help a majority of the people. so, i mean, ode to a marathon, and probablynot the boston, because that's not a good one because there is a select cutoff time,but the average marathon in south africa and the people, there are a lot of fat runners.why are they fat, is because they are insulin resistant and they are eating a high carbohydratediet, and they will never lose weight, they
can double their training, they will not loseweight. they have to fix up their nutrition, and the key is to cut the carbohydrates. >> tim: so this is a real phenomenon, thisinsulin resistance is a real phenomenon, and we can't will it away and say it doesn't exist,because it is absolutely real. >> aaron: tim, i would also like to talk about,as far as the energy depletion motto of performance and whether a high fat diet will help improveperformance, but you said it did for some runners that you know, such as bruce fordyce,and actually as i was reading last night, you mentioned alaskan huskie dogs who do theididarun, that when they go on a high carb diet they perform worse, so maybe there isquite a bit of individual difference there.
>> tim: yeah that's a lovely story becauseyou know i went to the 1976 conference on the marathon in new york, it's the most famousconference that's probably ever been held and it was the first time we had all theseworld authorities, and of course that was just the time that we were all saying carbs,carbs, carbs. because it was just becoming the sort of gospel,it had obviously started before 1969, but by 1976, it was the gospel. >> tim: i remember a guy getting up in themiddle of this conference and saying guys, i train dogs, and if you give dogs carbohydrates,they can't run, they just stop, and we all said, that's nonsense because you haven'tdone x,y and z.
we thought, you know, these are the experts,you don't tell an expert that he was wrong when you don't know nothing about it but thatis what we did. and of course we know that dogs are the ultimatecarnivores, so why would they want carbohydrates anyway? >> aaron: right. in your book you talk aboutthe energy depletion motto of exercise and what i'm wondering is the energy depletionmotto is wrong and, and maybe you can explain this better, but basically it says that atabout 20 miles you hit the wall because you run out of glycogen stores. is that motto correct and if your fat adapted,will you not hit the wall?
>> tim: well you shouldn't you see, so youknow jeff fallick, he is the world authority and i've just written an article with him,and there he talks about the fact that a well classed ultra distance runner, and they havemeasured in the laboratory, and they can burn fat up to 1.7 grams per minute. >> tim: that provides enough energy to runa 2 hour 20 marathon. so, theoretically, if your pretty fat adaptedyou should be able to run at the speed required to run a 220 marathon, easily for 2 hoursand 20 minutes, probably for longer, much longer because you have so much fat in yourbody. so, according to the energy depletion motto,if your probably fat adapted and you are an
elite athlete, there's no problem, you couldrun any race at any distance, purely on fat without needing mass carbohydrates. so we wrote an editorial, there were the twomottos, the carbohydrate motto and what we observed from our runners in south africais that if they are carbohydrate adapted, the longer the race, the more the carbohydratesthey have to stuff into their bodies near the end. so you have people like the gatorade sport'sscience institute telling us we have to eat 100 grams of carbohydrates every hour, whenwe run a couple of hours, and that's ludicrous because when you run for 4 hours, you arerunning slowly, relatively slow, and by jeff
voleks calculations that should be providedby fat. if you are carbohydrate adapted, you simplyare not used to burning fat, and so theoretically, you would run into trouble. then you just have to stuff in these carbohydrates,100 grams an hour which is astonishingly hard work and pretty damaging for your health. the motto we propose is why bother? adaptyourself to fat and you can run any distance on fat and you won't ever need to take anycarbohydrates. so from advising runners in south africa,it's clear to me that there are at least two types, and the one type, he's like bruce fordyce,he now can run 56k's, kilometers, that's 35
miles, without breakfast, a big fatty mealthe night before no breakfast and _____ the whole way. the first time he did it, he came to me afterwardsand he said tim, i wonder how good a runner i would have been if i had eaten this wayand raced this way in the 1970's and the 1980's and his meaning was i think i could have doneeven better, and he set world records in those days. >> aaron: yes. >> tim: he recognized it himself, he's gotthis huge capacity to burn fat, but he was always short circuiting because i put himon a high carbohydrate diet.
>> aaron: what i'm wondering is won't youstill get tired though? i mean your still going to get tired at some point, right? becauseyour central governor is going to tell you to stop. so, how does that play a role withthe high fat diet? >> tim: well then you know, we don't knowall the inputs into the brain that are slowing you down and make you a particular speed. bruce specifically said that he tested himselfon that race, and up the hills and near the end he went as hard as he could and he saidhe had plenty of energy left. but, the other group of patients, so you getpeople like bruce fordyce, who will never take carbohydrates again in the races thathe runs.
there's another group who tell me that theyhave to have about 200 grams of carbohydrates the day before the race, and they do needto take some carbohydrate during the race, but not 100 grams an hour, maybe 10 to 15to 20 grams an hour near the end of the race which is completely contrary to what we usedto say, we used to say they eat 600 grams for 3 days, the last 3 days before the marathonand then eat 50 grams per hour minimum during the race. so this is a complete departure from that.ijust tell people cut the carbs, become fat adapted and then see, and if you can't makethe marathon without taking carbohydrates, well then take some, and then experiment andsee how much you need to take, and if they
are like me and they are insulin resistant,and they put on weight and now they lose weight and they start running better, they will needvery little carbohydrates either before or during these races. >> aaron: and is that carbohydrate mainlyto just replace liver glycogen and to prevent hypoglycemia? or is it actually going to themuscles as well? >> tim: that's a great question because wenow currently are researching that very question, and reading the literature, it does turn outthat someone has done this experiment before, in 2002, and i forget the guys name, but theyhad fed adapted athletes and then they gave them carbohydrates and they found that theyresponded differently to people who are carbohydrate
adapted. if your carbohydrate adapted, and you takein carbs, you burn it, you burn it as part of your fuel because your muscles are alreadyfull. if your muscles are glycogen depleted, butyour fat adapted, the carbohydrate goes straight into the muscle and you continue to burn fat.you don't switch off fat metabolism if your fat adapted, whereas if your carbohydrateadapted, you switch off fat metabolism, you switch off that metabolism immediately. so then what happens is if you are fat adaptedand you're taking 200 grams of carbohydrates, it goes straight to the muscle, it doesn'tget burned.
so you store all those 200 grams. whereasif you are carbohydrate adapted, and you take 600 grams, you don't store all of that 600,you have to burn a lot of it. which is very interesting, and another point we've foundfrom our studies is that if your fat adapted, you burn some carbohydrates during exercisebut you burn very little carbohydrate through the rest of the day. so you save your carbohydrate for use duringexercise, but if your carbohydrate adapted, you actually burn most of the carbohydrateduring the rest of the day. you don't even burn it during exercise. so your eating thisexcess of carbohydrates, which you have to burn off during the rest of the day, and soit's clear that most people on high carbohydrate
diets are eating way more carbohydrates thanthey actually need, and they could restrict their carbohydrates dramatically and stillhave enough carbohydrates for their exercise needs. >> aaron: okay, and someone listening to thismight be thinking well what does it matter if i burn carbs or burn fat, does it makea difference? let's say they are already at a healthy weight. is there an advantage toburning mostly fats during the day? >> tim: yeah, i think there is. particularlyduring races and you just don't have to worry about taking carbs with you. the people really tell us that is really ahuge advantage, so if you're going out to
do an adventure race over 3 days, you don'thave to worry about packing in the carbs, and the same if you’re running a marathon,if you don't need the carbs, it doesn't matter if the people don't provide it during a race,you don't need it, and it's a massive advantage, i think and you don't have to spend all thetime eating so i think there are advantages. biologically, i worry about all the carbohydrates,it affects your teeth and as we've indicated, if your insulin resistant every time you takecarbohydrates, you spike insulin and it's damaging your health. so i must add this proviso,you know that there is this study out from one of the us universities recently showingmarathon runners with bad coronary artery disease, even though they've run all thesemarathons, and their risk factors were no
worse than the 70 group, but their arterieswere much worse. we have to start thinking about that. ironically,at the 1976 new york city marathon conference, we represented data of marathon and heartdisease, and of course, _____. so, i've been in this debate for a long time,but it really worries me when you have healthy marathon runners with no risk factors andthey've got bad coronary arteries, and you really have to wonder if this high carbohydratediet and eating more carbohydrates than anyone else, is not perhaps the cause of our arterialdamage in these athletes who really thought should be healthy and the answer is they mightnot be healthy because of eating too much carbohydrates, and in association with lotsof exercise, that might be unhealthy.
>> aaron: yeah, that's very interesting andyou know another thing i found interesting that seems to be a bit of paradox is thatyou wrote in your book people like mark allen, and paula newby-fraser and arthur newton,they all followed a high, like arthur newton you said used to eat a high fat breakfastbefore an ultra marathon, which would seem to be a paradox, but even people like markallen said he consumed only about 40 percent carb diet even up to iron man triathalon. so, obviously it's been working for quiteawhile for the athlete's at least. >> tim: absolutely, if you look back you'llsee before 1969 all athlete's were eating a normal diet, whatever the normal populationwas eating in their area, they were eating
that and in britain, and in south africa itwas a high meat diet, and all the comrades runners, before bruce fordyce, all the winners,were a high fat, high protein eaters, and i was responsible for changing bruce. i cut out carbohydrates and so when he wonand we were producing this carbohydrate drink and frn gurus and so on, that changed everything. let's get back to paula newby-fraser. shewas a great friend of mine and in 1983 she went to america and became an american citizenand then became the most famous iron man triathlete of all time. she won the iron man in hawaii 8 times, andshe told me a few months ago, she said tim,
the most important advice i ever got in mywhole career was you told me to eat a high fat diet. this is 1983, and i thought paula did i actuallyever tell you that? that came out just when jeff volek was doingthose experiments, and we were doing our own studies, and what i told her was eat morefat. i didn't tell her to cut the carbs, but she interpreted as that, and she was alwaysa high fat eater, in races she didn't take carbs, or much carbs, she went for the fats,and oils and the nuts. i asked her why and she said well i am from zimbabwe, as i amto, and she said we were brought up in zimbabwe eating lots of meats, we used to eat thisdried meat, the jerky, which we called in
south africa, bull tongue, and she said iwas always eating bull tongue, and i used to eat bull tongue in the iron man. >> tim: i saw her a few months ago, and shelooks fantastic, she's 50, she's as athletic and lean as she was when she was winning theiron man, and her weight has been absolutely stable since she left school. she only put on weight, she did put on weight,when she was at the university. it was then she started eating the high fat diet and lostthe weight and started the triathlons, and mark allen, i think he ate much more proteinand fat that he'll admit to. >> tim: because he was coached by phil maffetone,and phil, was way ahead of me in everything,
but in diet, he was way ahead, and he waspromoting this high fat diet already in the 1980's, so i think mark allen, i think hehad some sponsorships from the carbohydrate makers, and in fact, i was actually lookingthrough it and he said, my diet was so different than everyone else's that i was to embarrassedto tell them what i was actually eating. >> aaron: yeah, i've actually had phil maffetoneon the show and he claims that mark allen was following basically a paleo style diet,eating those healthy fats and things like that. you recently came out with an sa with jeffvolek and steve finney in the british journal of sport's medicine and i saw this articleby amby burfoot today on runner's world, and
he talks about how you guys say that there'snot enough research that's been done on a low carb diet, and that there is more thatneeds to be uncovered. what kind of research needs to be done yetto figure out really what the best way to go about fueling for a marathon is on a lowcarb diet? >> tim: yeah aaron the problem is that theindustry promotes high carbs, so if you want to do research, you'll get funding for highcarbs, you won't get funding for doing low carb diets and that's what jeff volek’sproblem has been he's one of the best scientists in exile sciencesin america. he's done unbelievable research, i had to review his research a few years agofor a position he had applied for, and i say
this man deserves a nobel prize because hehas done the work on the benefits of a low carbohydrate diet on health, and he set itup, he has shown just exactly why you should be eating a high fat diet, but he obviouslywon't even get it because his work is not published in the new england journal becauseit's to controversial, but it's not controversial, it's beautiful work and the conclusions arevery clear. so, he has done fabulous work, and what hewas saying is that you can burn so much fat when your exercising that you really don'tneed to do anything else, if it's a long enough exercise and the intensity is low enough,but we realized in the review, which was my contribution, i looked at all the papers thathad been done, and in fact, i think that we
had done 4 or 5 of the papers, there wereonly 12 papers on low carbohydrate diets and exercise performance. i think 5 of them come from our land,and therest are burlic and one or two other people, so, twelve studies, i mean how can you everthink you know anything if you've only done twelve studies? and all of these studies areon endurance performance in athlete's who've only adapted for a week or two. no one has studied a six month or a year adaptation,and i can tell you from my own experience that you really need six months to reallyget to know this way of eating. >> tim: that's the first point, the secondpoint is we have't done on other activities,
and so i know you asked the question aboutendurance performance, but we haven't done what is it like if your doing an intermittentactivity? so, for example we converted the australiancricket team, and cricket is a relatively low intensity activity, but you have to concentrateincredibly hard, and we converted one player whose now the best in the world in his battingand he told me he has to sprint every time he hits the ball, he has to sprint like abaseball player. he said [inaudible] there, i never get tiredanymore. so he has a [inaudible] activity and the guy says he doesn't get tired anymore,and he is the best in the world at the moment at his position and that's the point, thatwe've been so focused on endurance performance
trials in _____ lasting 10 kilometers or 20kilometers, we haven't a clue what happens elsewhere. we are the only people in the world who'vedone a 200k time trial, psyche and time trial, and fed them for one week, and there weredifferences but unfortunately we had two small numbers, and we also showed that if you wereinsulin resistant, and you were on this diet, you seemed to do much better on the high fatdiet, whereas if you were a high carb eater and you are not insulin resistant, it didn'tseem to do that much effect. so that's what we have to tease out, we haveto a. adapt people for six months and then b. we have to say okay your insulin resistant,or your not insulin resistant, and we got
to tease that out as well. so we haven't scratchedthe surface, but yet, what do scientist's say? they say there's no evidence, but as_____ would say, of the twelve studies, only two produced a negative outcome. >> tim: the other ten either were in favorof the high fat diet or there was no difference. >> tim: so the idea that [inaudible] peerperformance is not really brought up by the data, except for the one study which we didand it clearly showed a negative effect, _____, but again, they had only adapted for a week,and then the point that jeff volek makes is that there are so many [inaudible] that occurin your body when you go into ketosis, that might allow you to train harder and recoverbetter, and i get reports back all the time
of athlete's saying you know i ran this race,i didn't train as hard, and i've done better than i've ever done, even though i hadn'ttrained as hard. so there is something there which we alsoneed to tease out. so as jeff said you know we just haven't scratched the surface on thelow carb, high fat diets and exercise performance. we really haven't a clue. >> aaron: and i'm curious, does jeff voleksubscribe to the central governor motto of fatigue? >> tim: we've never rally discussed it actually.we're so focused on the carb story and trying to get people with insulin resistance to eatthis diet, so that has been our focus.
>> aaron: okay. so tim, it's evening in southafrica right now, what have you had to eat so far today? >> tim: that's a great question. i went outwith my wife this morning and i had eggs hollandaise, so with the hollandaise sauce on a bed ofmushrooms and aubergine, and i had a double serving of bacon, and i had a cappuccino.i had a cup of tea at lunchtime and i haven't eaten again, and it's 5:00 and i have absolutelyno hunger. >> tim: so that was my breakfast, and i'vehad no hunger, and this evening my wife will prepare something, it'll be probably fish,probably salmon and lots of vegetables and that's what i eat today and it's just amazinghow lovely it is that i haven't, i haven't
even had a snack today. i've been pretty busy, so the first time ithought about food was when you asked me. >> aaron: have you been able to convince yourwife and kids to try this diet? >> tim: absolutely, my father died of typell diabetes, he had all the complications, it was tragic to watch him die. [inaudible] i didn't know to call the doctor, i didn'tknow the treatment he was getting, in other words he was told to eat a high carbohydratediet and that killed him, and had i known the knowledge that i have now, i probablycould have spared him those complications.
>> so it turns out that he actually ate [transcripthere] because he was brought up on lots of meats, [inaudible] but yet he didn't eat muchcarbohydrates. he didn't eat processed fruits. >> tim: and he didn't eat sweets, yet he gotdiabetes at an older age than i did. which is astonishing because here i was runningall these marathons, and what i realized was that we had the worst genes possible for diabetes,and he got the worst form of diabetes, but it took him longer to get it because he waseating a high protein, high fat diet. i did all the running which he never did andi got the disease at a young age because in my view, i ate so much carbohydrates. [inaudible]and my daughter particularly has benefited from this diet because she said i've got acarbohydrate intolerance and [inaudible] and
she said i'll cut sugar and i'll cut [inaudible]i don't eat sugar and i don't eat carbs and her health has improved immensely. so shehas benefited and my son has benefited as well. >> aaron: that's great. >> tim: and my wife is _____ insulin sensitivebecause she comes from different genes, no diabetes, but she has also benefited fromeating this, although she is not as strict as the rest of us. >> aaron: okay, so she could have the sweetpotato here and there? >> tim: absolutely, so she [inaudible] occasionally.
>> aaron: okay, okay, if people are interestedin trying this, do they have to go all in at once or can they just gradually make theirway to it? >> tim: i think it depends on how sick youare, and how obese you are, and how bad your sugar addiction is. if you have a sugar addiction, you tend tobe heavier and even morbidly obese, and sugar has to go, it has to go completely, utterly,and there may be different ways but you have to cut all the _____ because they are justfull of sugar, and slowly wean yourself off of adding the sugar to your drinks. then you have to wean yourself slowly of thesugary drinks, and that took me 14 months.
for me to finish and run and drink water ittook me 14 months. not to look for the gatorade or the coca cola or whatever they had, ittook me a long time to get rid of that addiction. i think that if you're really sick and you'vegot to go, i think you have to go cold turkey and go right down to 50 grams a day and gothrough the withdrawal symptoms. if your a marathon runner and let's say your 2 or 3kilograms overweight, your never going to have to go down to 25 grams a day, go downto 250, go to 200, go down to 150 and see how you feel. >> tim: if you had runners who've gone allthe way down to 50 grams and have said it's a disaster and can't run on that but they'veshifted up to 175, 150 grams a day and they're
flying, and they've said i've got all thebenefits. >> tim: so i think you have to find whereyou lye and the more unhealthy you are, the less carbohydrates you have to eat, and themore strict you have to be. but if your not insulin resistant, you've not got a weightproblem and you're not always hungry, you can have 200 grams a day, that's fine. >> aaron: okay, tim, you've got a new bookout called the real meals revolution and i haven't been able to get it on amazon yet,is that going to come over to the us soon? >> tim: you know aaron that book was producedlocally and we thought it would sell 3,000 copies luckily and maybe 10,000 and the 10,000went in the first week.
>> aaron: oh wow, okay. >> tim: we have been struggling to keep updemand and it's now sold 100,000 copies, and as a writer yourself you'll know that's quitean achievement in a small country. so in africa, we planned only 250,000 readersor books, so we've already covered nearly half of the reading population in south africa. so it's been an astonishing success and naturallypeople say well it's [transcript here] [inaudible] and we're starting to find publishers overseas but we will get there. in time, we'll get the book overseas. [transcript here]
we would like to find a publisher whose goingto work with us to produce another really good product and have the same sort of reachthat the book has had in south africa, it has literally started an eating revolutionin this country. >> aaron: fantastic. >> tim: obviously you don't follow what'shappening in south africa but the only two topics that anyone talks about, the one isthe real meal revolution and the other is the tragic oscar pistorius trial. those arethe two topics in our conversations throughout south africa and that's been the case forthe last 12 weeks. so sad. >> aaron: okay, okay. i also noticed thatyou started a podcast, that's great, it's
fun to hear you answer some of those questions,i encourage people to check that out on itunes. have you ever thought about starting a blogso that we could read some more of you're writing? >> tim: you know aaron, i would love to, wedo have an original eating website which i'm so bombarded at the moment, literally thisbook has such an impact in south africa, that i'm receiving 40 emails a day or 50 emailsa day which i have to respond to. i've got to catch up and find a way of addressingthat, once i can do that, i will start blogging much more. >> tim: in the future i'm due to retire frommy current work at the end of the year, and
then i'm completely revitalizing or rechargingmy structure in my life and i will do much more blogging because that's what will bea priority, but at the moment, i'm just really struggling to cope with all the demands onmy time. >> aaron: okay. so when you retire, are youno longer going to be doing any scientific studies? >> tim: no, absolutely i'm going to be doingeven more scientific studies, but i'm just going to be focusing on insulin resistancebecause that's the condition that is the most important condition in _____. it's much moreimportant than any other condition because it's the root cause of hypertension, diabetes,obesity, gout and abnormal cholesterol's that
cause heart disease. they are all linked directlyinto insulin resistance and unfortunately, the message which really comes from stanfordand _____. it's his work and again, here is another man who deserves the nobel prize. that's an area that i want to look into, insulinresistance, and the other area which we won't get into because there are other people, guysat harvard, alessio fasano, another guy who should get the nobel prize, dr. fasano fromharvard for describing the leaky guy syndrome, i mean it's actually genius work, and thoseare the two conditions, insulin resistance and the leaky gut, that is the future of _____. so, we'll be looking to do insulin resistancebecause i understand it the disease, i have
it myself and i'm going to be putting my effortinto starting an institute to research that, and building that up in the next few years. >> aaron: great, well tim it's been a pleasurespeaking with you again and i'm so glad to have you back on the show. is there anywhereyou would direct people to go to find your work? >> tim: well you could try the originaleating.orgthat's kind of my story about how i got into this nutrition story and there is quite afew blogs, not blogs but there are quite a few you tube documentaries that i've put out. if you want my views on nutrition, they arevery well covered there. the rest of my work,
people ask how do you find it, that's difficult,i don't really have a repository for all that stuff. >> aaron: okay, okay. well you know lore ofrunning is still a great book, i was reading it this week and there is quite a bit in thereabout the high fat diets and you mention in there that you've got to try and see whatworks for you. tim, it was great talking with you, thanksfor being on the show. >> tim: thank you very much indeed aaron. if you like podcasts, then your also goingto like audible.com there's over 100,000 titles to choose fromfor your iphone,
kindle, android or mp3 player. go to paleorunner,org and click audible atthe top of the page to get your free download. if you're listening to this on the podcastapp for iphone or ipad, click the link displayed on the app right now.
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