Yesterday’s column was heavily cribbed, with attribution, from a 2016
post by Dr. Tim Noakes on South
African Marika Sboros’s excellent blog FOODMED.NET. Today I’m going to continue with an almost
verbatim extract. It is so well written, and so profound in its implications, I
don’t want to botch it with “editing”! Props, Dr. Tim!
We left off with Dr. Noakes explaining how endocrinologist and Stanford
professor Dr. Gerald Reaven presented at the 1988 ADA annual Banting lecture a “unified
hypothesis of chronic disease,” called Syndrome X by Reaven but which
thereafter became known as Reaven’s Syndrome. These days it is called “Metabolic
Syndrome.”
Noakes continues, “To determine whether
nutritional factors contribute to the development of the metabolic syndrome,
beginning in the 1980s, Reaven completed a number of RCTs of the effects of
low-carbohydrate diets in patients with this condition. Without exception his
studies showed that removing carbohydrates from the diet uniformly improved all
measures of health in those with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.”
“So besides establishing the fundamental role of insulin
resistance in these chronic diseases, Reaven also discovered the optimum treatment – carbohydrate
restriction. By any measures, Reaven should be a shoe-in for the Nobel
Prize in Medicine. But perhaps not. For he failed subsequently to emphasize
the curative effects of low-carbohydrate diets in insulin resistance.”
“Why [did Reaven fail to emphasize the curative
effects of low-carb diets in insulin resistance],” Noakes asks?
“I suspect that during his daily work at Stanford Medical
School, Reaven was in close contact with some of the more important
cardiologists in the USA and perhaps in the world. They would not have taken
kindly to their colleague’s suggestion that, to prevent heart attacks, cardiologists should be prescribing high
fat diets instead of the low fat diet dictated, then as now, by the
American Heart Association.” (emphases added by me)
“Had he chosen that route, Reaven’s colleagues would have
excommunicated him, his research funding would have dried up, and his career
would have been over, exactly as happened to Dr John Yudkin in England for his
(correct) suggestion in the 1970s that sugar, not saturated fat, causes heart
disease.”
“So, it seems to me that Reaven kept quiet, choosing rather to
continue researching insulin resistance without paying much attention to how a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet might
– simply, effectively and at low cost – prevent and reverse all the medical
disguises through which insulin resistance reveals itself.”
Thus, Reaven’s unified
hypothesis of chronic disease: “One disease, one cause, many symptoms:”
“Reaven’s problem is not unlike that faced by Darwin and Galileo
whose findings estranged each from religious orthodoxy. For Reaven’s
unifying hypothesis of chronic disease must offend not just his colleagues in
cardiology. For his hypothesis strikes at the very heart (pun intended) of the
pharmacological model that we practice in modern medicine.”
(Statins, do ya think?)
“For if obesity, diabetes, heart disease, NAFLD and high blood
pressure (and perhaps also cancer and dementia) are in fact all
symptoms of the same underlying condition, insulin resistance, then
our current model of medical management must be wrong, requiring
as it does, specific but different pharmacological treatments for each separate
condition, overseen by different hierarchies of medical specialists.”
“BUT WHAT IF THE CORNERSTONE FOR THE TREATMENT OF ALL THESE
CONDITIONS IS A LOW-CARBOHYDRATE DIET – the very diet that has now been
vilified by my profession for the past 50 years? That must be an
extremely frightening thought for very, very many. How does one come to
terms with the possibility that, by following medical orthodoxy, one may have
harmed very many patients?”
Thank you, Dr. Tim Noakes, for the courage to speak out. Note: Dr.
Gerald Reaven died in 2019, but Dr. Tim Noakes and Marika Sboros (FOODMED.COM)
still speak out. Check out Dr. Noakes’s “Part 4” just published.
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