Athletes Perform BETTER On ZERO Carbs! | Professor Tim Noakes

there's a paper published at Journal of Applied physiology about 3 or 4 months ago I took the article and I said really it's really interesting let's see if there are any flaws in it because he concluded that you couldn't run a sub 2hour Marathon unless you're eating carbohydrates at 90 to 120 g per hour that's the finding you cannot run a sub 2-hour Marathon unless you take in 90 to 120 g of carbohydrate every hour for 2 hours so I went through very carefully his model he made two ass ions that destroy the model when you take in carbohydrates 120 g per hour he assumed that 120 g was being burnt every hour and that doesn't happen because when you take CBS it takes about 60 Minutes to 90 minutes before you reach these high rates of oxidation and so you've got this lag phase and during that lag phase the athletes couldn't burn the amount of carbohydrate he said they needed to run that race so therefore his model proves that you can't run a sub2 marathon on carbohydrates alone so in trying to prove that you carbohydrates are absolutely essential for a sub two-hour Marathon he disproved it which is fantastic he proved you can't do it on carbs welcome to the plant-free MD podcast with Dr Anthony chaffy where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both both mentally and physically hello everyone thank you very much for joining me for another episode of the plant-free MD I'm your host Dr Anthony chaffy today I have a very special guest someone who I've been looking forward to speaking to for a very long time uh Professor Tim noes who is an absolute monument in the field of sports medicine uh Professor NOS thank you so much for coming on today my pleasure thank you for having me I'm very honored to be with you and with your with your audience today thank you for having me well thank you I know that most of my listeners know who you are because I referenced you quite a lot but for those who haven't come across your work uh can you tell us a bit about yourself and and what you do sure so I got into medicine without really knowing what I wanted to do and I soon realized that I was much more interested in science and understanding why things happen and trying to correct them rather than follow the medical pathway and it turned out I just wasn't going to be very good at spending my life looking after peich patients I just that's just not me maybe I'm too selfish I don't know but I then realized that I was interested in science and so I soon as IID graduated in medicine and done my internship in the hospital that really taught me that I wasn't designed to do clinical medicine and so I went straight into research and at the time there were really only one or two options I had to do research and so I went into heart disease cuz the Prof there was a good friend we'd be become quite friendly on a number of topics and I really respected him so I started in cardiovascular physiology did my PhD in that and then at the end of the that I was appointed as the first sort of Junior lecturer in sports science and they asked me to start sports science at the University of capet toown which I did and then that led to sports medicine developing Sports Medicine in South Africa and I did that for the next 40 odd years until until 2014 when things changed a bit for me in 2010 I changed my diet before that I'd been prescribing the high carbohydrate diet I wrote the book law of running which promotes a very high carbohydrate diet and this became a very popular book and uh classically I've been seen tearing the pages out saying I don't believe this and anyway so now I'm rewriting the fifth edition but that promoted the carbohydrate diet and all that happened to me on a high carbohydrate diet was that a developed type 2 diabetes and then I was fortunate to read books on the low carbohydrate diet I adopted the diet reversed my type two diabetes and just felt magic and just lost I felt like 20 years younger so it was an amazing experience the consequence of changing my diet was I lost all my funding because the people who were funding me were interested in promoting the plant-based High carbohydrate diet and they did that obviously for financial reasons and so I lost all that funding and then the university turned on me and basically excommunicated me by saying that by promoting this diet the low CED high fat th I was killing people killing babies and so on yeah W and so they they they turned their back on me despite the fact that I'd worked there for 40 years and developed this center of excellence and I'm just going to boast now that I'm the second most cited scientist at the medical scientist at that University despite that they threw me out and uh tried to humiliate me publicly and I realized that I had a choice I could either be humiliated publicly or stand up then it turned out very fortunately that I tweeted something and I was reported to the Health Professions Council in South Africa for saying that mothers should wean their babies onto a high fat low carbohydrate Di as we've done for millions of years yeah but of course people people don't know the history so they anyway we then went to court for four years it was in court for 28 days had brilliant support team and in the end we won that and we won the appeal and so I was had been charged for misconduct Etc that I was cleared up everything they found nothing wrong I was there were 13 charges and I won all 13 points so so that left me in limbo and fortunately and we'll talk about this I think that a young South African who's now working in America he'd become interested in the low carbohydrate di he said why don't we start doing some studies wouldn't you like to help us and so I did and we've now for over the past six years we've done some magnificent work that's never been done and we reversed 100 Years of teaching in the sports Sciences the evidence is about to break it's not quite there but I mean it's about to be published but it's it's there then I can tell you a bit about it but it's been very exciting so I got a second career so here I am 10 years after retiring I'm still as busy ever and writing papers uh writing this massive review the first major review I've ever seen of all the evidence of carbohydrate ingestion during exercise and I've looked at about 500 studies and when you look at those 500 studies you can't you find finally get to understand what it's all about and I think that and then our research we could while we were doing this while I Was preparing that we were doing the research that we came to the definitive study to see if carbohydrates are important during exercise and they are but they're not the way we're taught so I'm sure we'll get to that so so that there's me medical doctor expelled from the medical profession back into science and still pushing the boundaries I hope in in nutrition and sports ons yeah well I think that's um you know not to be too um you know glowing and and and embarrass you anything but I think it takes a lot of Integrity to go against your entire body of work and go against the system you could have just retired and been top of the game your book selling fine everyone just absolutely thinks you're the best and and you just just walked off the champ and you said no that was wrong I need to I need to correct the record and and you you you caught a lot of heat for that and I think it just takes a lot of integrity and and I I just uh want to congratulate you for that and thank you for that because without your struggles you know we would be you know 10 years behind and then we would be really struggling at this point so I appreciate that thanks Anthony you know for me it was really simple because I mean I got diabetes on my own advice so here I'm giving this advice and it caused me to get diabetes how could I live with myself to let that continue knowing that this book is ranked as a great book and running so everyone who picks it up is going to say well it's got to be high carbs and the probability that they'll get diabetes in the long term is very high so I couldn't I couldn't live with that yeah in any case I mean I it changed my life so much I I just wish I'd I was originally high fat low CS because I was born to British parents in Ria in Zimbabwe and and there were no processed foods when I was born so we we ate real foods and my life my my mother used to feed me awful my my sister and myself we got fed awful so I was so fortunate how many people uh at least now no one gets fed aul as a child but I was fed awful and my mother used to say that meat and fish are what give you brains that's what she said yeah yeah so she was right I was very and then so then I go to do my science and I come under the influence of the cardiologists and they say no you can't eat that you got to eat margarine and lowfat and and I I never ran as well again and it was so sad because I would have I had some I had some great runs in my life and I had running I loved running but it could have been much better if I'd been high fat all the time and not beginning progressively more diabetic during those years yeah yeah well that is that is a shame and um so now that you you've come back and you've come back into the light um you've set about uh really trying to disprove this so what are some of the experiments and trials that you've put forward to really sort of dispel this or at least test the hypothesis that you don't need carbohydrates as an athlete so in Philip Prince approached me from he's from Grove City College in Pennsylvania which I see was quite a well it's a small college but it's highly rated in America and and he just happens to have an amazing laboratory and and he can do clinical trials on Runners and cyclists with great results he's they're just very good at doing that work and all he needed was a Direction so what research should we do so he asked me I said well why don't we test the the high fat High CB dot high fat dot by putting people on a high carb diet for six weeks or so and then having them do a performance trial and then reversing that and putting them on high fat diet for six weeks and of course we didn't do all of them at the same time we broke them in half Etc because we that's the only way you can do it so we do these randomized control trials and we started at 5 kilometers so I said well can you do reproducible 5K time trials on the tread m in your laboratory he said yes we get very good results so I said okay well let's do 5K time trials on these guys and so we did and we also did V2 Max tests before and on the different DS and guess what V2 Max was exactly the same and the five 5K time child B were exactly the same the performance so the performance didn't change so then I said yeah but what they're going to say is that it's because the guy still had some glycogen even though you're on a high fat diet you still got enough glycogen to run 5Ks I said let's let's put the intensity of the exercise up and then do an activity which will produce muscle glycogen depletion so we said right let's make it a one mile time trial so we put the speed up to the one mile and then they did the same experiment and there was no difference again the performance was identical so these people eating a high fat diet can run one mile just as fast whether they're eating carbs or fat and then I said okay fine let's do 6times 800 met 8 6times 800 meter intervals because everyone knows that that's going to deplete your glycogen so even if they start with some glycogen by the third or fourth they're going to have no glycogen left and they're just going to fall over and not be able to exercise so of course that didn't happen performances are dentical for the 6times 800 meter repetitions and then by chance because I didn't tell Philip to do this or suggested it he measured oxygen consumption while they were doing the intervals and then we measured the fat oxidation rates now the textbook says the following and this is the Bible that I taught for 40 years that there's a so-called crossover point that as you increase your exercise intensity there you reach a point where you can only burn carbs you can't burn fat and that's usually at 85% V2 Max and that idea was developed by a great friend of mine George Brooks who taught me so much he helped us we did when we did the studies of carbohy metabolism we used tracers and he was the expert on Tracer methodology in the world and he came to Cape Town and he showed us how to do it and we've been friends ever since so it's it's not as if I wanted to go out and disprove him at all that was never the goal we just happen to find this so what we discovered was that when they ran the eight times sorry six times 800 met intervals they were running at 86% V2 Max by chance God came along and said it's 86% V2 Max so they were they were 1% over and so they should have been burning zero fat they burnt the highest rates of fat oxidation ever recorded in humans in history 1.5 grams per minute which is it is enormous I mean that provides three4 of the energy to run us up to our marathon just by burning fat so why do you need CS so anyway that was what we found and so that really was very exciting but while we were doing that we were doing another experiment and I'm not going to give you the full results because it's not been published but then I'll tell you what what we did you see so we now had a model where we could change muscle glycogen before the start of exercise and we had found that it made no difference running at those distances so I said okay well let's now do a long prolonged exercise so that the guys get out and cycle at 70% of the veh 2 Max or whatever and they go for as long as they can and we're going to have them start with more muscle glycogen or less muscle glycogen because they followed the dos and then we're going to give them just enough glucose just enough to make sure that the blood glucose doesn't fall not enough to modify the metabolism just enough to keep their glucose normal and I had worked this out because it became apparent to me that in all these studies of carbohydrate metabolism and muscle glycogen depletion no one was worried about the blood glucose level then just ignored it and I noticed that a lot of the studies the blood glucose levels were low including in the famous Bergstrom study which is the one on which the whole thing is based they took people they put them on the high carbohydrate do had them exercise for as long as they could and they found that the more carbohydrate in the muscle the longer you could last for and they said you see therefore it's all muscle glycogen but what they ignored was that everyone became blood glucose levels dropped they just ignored it MH but the reality is up to 1939 the teaching in sports science was that hypoglycemia a falling blood glucose is what causes fatigue and that was the model and it was said it's a brain effect how do I know this because it was written in German two famous writers Christensen and Hansen but they published it in German and no one bothered to read the articles so I had the Articles translated by a friend of mine who's a German and he translated the sections and there it said what happens is when you take glucose if you're if you're tired you take glucose and your performance goes up it's just correcting your blood glucose level it's got nothing to do with metabolism in the muscles nothing at all and they presented all the evidence for that so that was the model the model was falling blood gluc because your brain Cuts in and says I can't continue to exercise or my your blood glucose is going to go low and the brain's going to be damaged so you must stop exercising and that's the logical solution so as I was working through it I noticed that there were some studies where minimum amounts of carbohydrate improved performance it wasn't you didn't have to take huge amounts yeah so that was the experiment we did and we've done this study and they're about to be submitted in which we compared what must you do must you take carbohydrate during exercise or before exercise and the key was that before exercise the people every day were taking let's say 300 or 400 grams of cared more and what effect did that have on performance that's a question and but during exercise that only took 10 grams an hour so they took 20 grams during a two-hour experiment they took 20 grams of carbohydrate now everyone will tell you oh it's the 400 gr before exercise that makes a difference and not the 20 G during exercise well let's see what the results showed yeah because might bring some nice exciting surprises yeah very good and then so have you have you done a comparison or or seen a comparison done with I mean because obviously you looked at carbohydrate athletes and and zero carbohydrate athletes well what about that that middle ground where you have a ketogenic athlete that you just give them you know 10 20 grams of carbs does that make a difference in performance or is it still stay the same if you're keto adapted hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnival bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products there will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10% off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25% off total all right thanks guys yeah so the the benefit of Keto adaptation is that you can exercise with too much lower blood glucose level so that's that's a huge advantage and we haven't re we have answered your question and I can't answer because it's it's not been published so okay however yeah but I've always considered that it's the ultra exercise the Iron Man and so on where you'll really get the benefits because when your BL glucose starts to fall that's the one thing that you if you're keto adapted you won't notice it and you'll continue to exercise vigorously so that's the one difference and we are involved with another group in Australia and they're looking at high fat diets and more prolonged exercise including marathons and ultramarathons and I think that's where the question that's where the carb the low carbide will really be beneficial so we've we've looked at at very little exercise you know small amounts of exercise just two hours and I I can tell you at 2 hours what you eat before exercise makes no difference whatsoever none at all yeah and that that's a breakthrough but the other breakthrough is when do you need your carbs when do you need to take them and you do need them yeah and I mean if you put two and two together you'll know what I'm saying but I can't say it yet yeah that's the thing that I I noticed as well when I was um you know as I mentioned before I was uh an inadvertently a zerocarb carnivore athlete in my early 20s playing rugby I had a a very interesting professor of cancer biology who told us about how toxic plants were and how carcinogenic they were and he told us that he didn't eat plants wouldn't eat vegetables wouldn't let his kids eat vegetables and in his words this was because plants are trying to kill you and that's so I've named a lecture after that and so that would left a lasting impression to me clearly and I just stopped eating plants alt together and obviously the carbohydrates came with that and so I defaulted just into eggs and meat and felt amazing I mean I've never performed better as an athlete and never had more energy and I experienced exactly what you're talking about now I was I was doing not not I was sort of in the middle ground so I was you know each training would be you know a good solid two hours obviously there starts and stops with rugby training and games but I I would recover very quickly and I tra I played for my University team and I also played for the the senior Premiership team we played it was in Seattle but we played in the Canadian Premiership and the USA uh top divisions and I played in the Canadian or in the University division so I basically finished uh college at or my classes at 3:00 uh University CL training would start at 3:30 finish at 600 and then I go straight over to the 7 o'clock training and train until like 9:00 and then I go to the gym and I might play two three even four games a weekend and I just had Boundless Energy I just wanted to go go go go go and so I certainly noticed that um obviously I didn't do anything in the in the ultra uh sort of Realm but when I would train on my own I I remember I would I would basically run and then I would be sort of just bored and so I'd just say okay for the next because there' be mile markers in the area I would run and say okay for the next mile I'm just going to Sprint it as hard as I can go I'm just going to Sprint the whole thing and so I'd Sprint the mile and I'd feel great and i' just and then I'd just be running hard and and I'd be sort of you know juking sidest stepping in between people just to sort of get some like game sort of experience so it wasn't even just a straight shot but it was at full full pace and then I do okay I'll Sprint another Mile and another Mile and another Mile and and it basically just kept going I think the longest I went was about it was it was six miles there and back so I think I think the most that I did was 18 miles but it basically just a Just Wind Sprints just every other mile I was I was sprinting and I just eventually just got bored I just should I just stop now I I wasn't tired I wasn't I couldn't wear myself out I felt amazing and I just said like I guess I'll just stop because I what else am I going to do I just keep doing this you know and so I definitely noticed that at least for that distance I felt absolutely incredible and so it's um it it does make sense that you can have the same output but then you just have this boundless reservoir of energy that you're tapping into because I I certainly experienced that myself as an athlete so my best rugby story about a rugby player is chapal David pook who who Captain the Australian rugby team and was known for being such a a very vigorous athlete so he was born in Zimbabwe as I was and he said the one thing he wanted to do in life was play rugby for South Africa for various reasons his parents left Zimbabwe and he settled in in Australia and he said he was so upset by the move that he he got he couldn't eat properly and he became a vegan and that and then he still became Australian Captain eating a vegan and then he read my book about high low sorry about low carb diets and he converted and he came to South Africa and he said thank you because this is what I did and like exactly what you said he said I was a better player the irony is that when he wrote to me was just on after the 2011 Rugby World Cup and South Africa got knocked out in the quarterfinals when we should have perhaps won but anyway we got knocked out and it was all because of David pook yeah and what happened was that the the referee on that day was a total disaster he made 46 errors and most of the errors were made around pook so when he wrote to me I said you know David if you'd come to Cape Town two years ago I would have shot you got out of [Laughter] yeah so so but anyway he exactly as you described and and like yourself he's got this huge upper body and he's he was just so powerful yeah yeah that's funny he probably would have uh hoped that he came across your book after The World Cup so he didn't we we Al by the way we also converted half of the Australian cricket team as well during that period because my friend was the Peter Brookner was the doctor and Peter had converted to this diet because of what I had written and he his own health had improved and he was caught reading one of the great books on low carb DS and the Shane Watson brilliant cricketer said doc what you eing so he said no he's talking about low carb darts and so on and Shane said you know I've always had a problem with with weight I I've always overweight at the start of the season and I'd fost and I'd do all these things but by the end of the season that was finished he then converted and he became one of the great players in the Indian professional League one of the outand outstanding players and he he retired at 39 yeah W and he'd been on the dive for seven years and that prolonged his career for seven years yeah so many reason why I'm proud that I converted because I helped a lot of athletes yeah yeah absolutely well it's it's um it's growing it's it's really well especially with you know Peter brockner and and our friend Paul Mason here in Australia they're making big inroads with a lot of the professional teams here now as well I've I know I live in Australia at the moment now myself even though I'm I'm from America and I I've worked with a number of athletes here also and some are open about it others uh don't want to give away the secret because it you know it sort of is um it is it is an advantage that's legal and it's not unhealthy it's not like some sort of supplement that just hasn't been banned yet it's it's just a you know just a nutritional s choice and but people are having massive massive improvements are you are you seeing that as well in in your work or people coming to you trying to convert to that again I think it's the same story that that people don't want to talk too much about it but when I look at the the springb rugby team you know I definitely think that they've changed they're much more muscular than they were they don't have that blood that padding of fat yeah that they tend to have high carb athletes whereas if I watch tennis and particular women's tennis you'll see they've all got this padding so although they're very strong women they they on high cared eyes you can see and I can't see that that's would be of any advantage to them so so before the 2019 Rugby World Cup there was a picture of the South African team just in their shorts and someone said that's the team that's going to win because they looked fantastic and and I can't think that they look like that on high carbohydrate darts but they keep quiet about it and so it's the same in the tour to France you know the tour to France they eat enormous amounts of carbohydrate because it's it's the cult and if there are cyclists who are eating high fat DTS they're not going to say it because it would be against the cult and they would be excommunicated in fact the South African who I helped and he is has turned professional recently on a high fat diet he said I can't talk about the high fat diet because they said you will eat a high carbohydrate Dart if you're on this team yeah yeah yeah I um I spoken to um a couple people who who again worked with cyclist and exactly right because they they get sponsorships by a lot of these uh companies that are that are pushing the carb gels and all those sorts of things and so they they just can't talk about it or they'll lose their sponsorship and they'll and they'll lose their their uh funding and their livelihood and things like that um there was uh for a while there there was a number of the All Blacks rugby players that were going low carb keto and uh and then they uh but then wheat biix was their major sponsor and they're like that's enough can't you can't talk about this low carb stuff anymore so all right but I've actually had um a few of the people that I think it was around was around 2015 or so that they they started making that switch um yeah and uh I actually had had one of those players um I won't won't say his name because they have you know have an ass him but he uh is has been an all black for a number of years probably a decade or so and he has been low carb really zero carb and basically carnivore full carnivore like on the offseason he only eats meat and then he might add in a little bit of stuff during the season uh but for the last eight years he's been he's been doing that but just doesn't just doesn't talk about it you just have to sort of keep it under wraps I guess it's for sponsorships but also because you know if you're if everybody knows the secret well then it's not really secret anymore and you're you're just on an even playing field yeah well I know one of the front row forwards was a CrossFit proponent of the All Blacks and I can mention his name the Franks brothers and they were definitely low I don't know if they but but it's also interesting how that was came came about because the the the Oakland University Oakland University of Technology Dr Professor Grant scoffield great friend of mine as well and he one of my students from South Africa went to New Zealand and she was a dietician who we trained and we trained on the high cors you know so she goes to Oakland and one day in about 2014 2015 maybe a bit early than that Grant says to her you know I'm hearing about this high fat story what do you think you know I'm sure it's wrong but what do you think so she went away for a month and research and she came back she said you know Grant we've been wrong all this time we have to change and Orland University of Technology is one of the centers for studying low carbed arts in the world it's done brilliant work and that was because Grant with the professor who was also an elite ultra distance athlete he also decided change and found that helped him and they then Incorporated that and they started working with the Oakland or blacks and I think that's where it sort of started as well yeah very good yeah it's um it's interesting because I I know actually clinicians in New Zealand that are doing research into cancer in particular and and neurodegenerative diseases uh such as Huntington and Parkinson Alzheimer's uh with the with the low carb zero carb approach as well and so that's interesting that that um it's just more you know conducive to doing that sort of research is there's less uh push back maybe exactly yeah well it's nice that more people are doing it as well yeah um so as far as um the athletes you you've worked with and um and well and um maybe before we get into that um we were mentioning off off camera sort of some some of the work that you were doing and there was uh there was an argument about um how you had to have carbohydrates to run a sub two-hour Marathon because just just have to you're just not going to produce that much energy but you made a very very good point when you're actually looking into this that that wasn't that wasn't quite true can you can you talk a little bit about that yeah so there's a paper published the Journal of Applied physiology about three or four months ago and the I I have difficulty pronouncing the guy's name I think it's Luke kovich something like that and he did a really good model but models are not science they they are a projection they're not an experiment they just you base it on all your assumption so I took the article and I said really it's really interesting let's see if there are any flaws in it because he concluded that you couldn't run a sub toour Marathon unless you're eating carbohydrates at 90 to 120 gram per per hour that's the finding you cannot run a sub 2hour Marathon unless you take in 90 to 120 gram of carbohydrate every hour for two hours so I went through very carefully his model and there were there were two errors originally but they were minor because they blocked they they the one made it worse and the one made it better but when you took both of them out it canceled each other out so his model was valid it's valid but he made two assumptions that destroy the model otherwise in other words on the models he the assumptions he made fine but there were two assumptions that unfortunately undermined this the study the first one is that you don't burn any fat when you're running a 2-hour Marathon because you're running at 90% V2 Max and that's contentious because we've shown you can burn a lot of fat when you're exercising vigorously but that but that wasn't but but he could still say no but I'm right athletes can't burn when they're exercising that vigorously fine okay that's your point go and study it but until you've studied it we we'll accept that but the the one major error was that when you take in carbohydrates 120 grams per hour he assumed that 120 grams was being burnt every hour from the from 0.1 and that doesn't happen because when you take OBS they take time it takes about 60 Minutes to 90 minutes before you reach these high rates of oxidation and so you've got this lag phase and during that lag phase there's he couldn't athletes couldn't burn the amount of carbohydrate he said they needed to run that race so therefore his model proves that you can't run a sub2 marathon on carbohydrates alone so then when you ree rwe the model it turns out that if they burn a little bit of fat and like 7.7 gram a minute which is not much you're fine you can run you can take a little bit of carbs during the race and you'll be fine so in trying to prove that you carbohydrates are absolutely essential for a sub two-hour Marathon he disproved it which is fantastic he proved you can't do it on carbs therefore you have to do it adapted to to a higher fat diet and then it's simple the the the the sums work out very easily so anyone who tells you you know the only reason why the T front cyclists are doing so well is because they taking 120 grams of carbs an hour I can tell you that's just the way to diabetes that's where they're going in the long term yeah and and some of these um studies where they did have the the high carb arm and the low carb arm some of the high carb arm they actually were giving these people showing up that they were getting into like pre-diabetic ranges weren't they that's right yeah that's right that you're quite right there's a lovely there was Ultra Mar I think the Iron Man winner two or three years ago he said he showed his blood glucose curves because he had a monitor on and they were all in the diabetic range for the whole race he said I'm not going to get hyper glycemia I know you're not because you're gonna get diabetes that's let me tell you what what I've learned in in this study this is that there are these two pools of glucose in the body the one is the liver and the blood glucose and the other is the muscle glycogen and they serve totally different functions no one tells you that you know just take the carbs you need the carbs no no no there are two different control mechanisms and the first mechanism which is the important one is that the body regulates the blood glucose concentration so anytime you take in glucose and particularly even during exercise the body's first response is get rid of the glucose out of the bloodstream burn it or store it that's the rule it's nothing it's nothing to do with oh it's unneeded for the fuel in my muscles that's not what's going on the body says this is a catastrophe you've got to keep the blood glucose normal and it's my my impression and belief now having read so much that the reason why you have muscle glycogen is simply to store the excess glucose so you dump the glucose so when you're eating a high carbohydrate diet because remember we were carnivores for millions of years we don't have the capacity to store much glycogen we have to glucose or and to to keep the blood glucose normal we just got to dump that glucose out of there and into the muscles and then what happens is the moment you start exercising you're going to burn that stuff because the body says I've got to get rid of that rubbish that's in the muscles get rid of it because this guy I know in an hour six hours time he's going to have another carbohydrate meal I want to store that carbohydrate so that's how I see muscle glycogen I see it as a simply as a reservoir for the excess glucose in the bloodstream it it serves no other particular function whereas the glucose in the bloodstream has a vital role because if your blood glucose Falls you you can damage your brain so that's got to be that becomes the priority in meta in human metabolism the number one priority is keep the blood glucose flat that's the number one priority yeah and and so it's very clear that when you take glucose the body wants to get it out of the bloodstream as soon as it possibly can and when you've got lots of muscle glycogen the body wants to get rid of that now what's really interesting when you go one step further the muscle glycogen controls its own metabolism which is really the rate at which it's being metabolized and it does that through insulin so if you're if you start exercise with a high muscle glycogen the insulin is high and that inhibits fat oxidation and as a consequence you have to burn the glycogen and that's the body's design you're going to burn that glycogen first if on the other hand you start it with little muscle glycogen your insulin is low and your fat oxidation is much increased and so you burn fat and that's how the system works with but so again I'm emphasizing that there are two pools of glucose and they're totally differently regulated and people think well that you just take glucose and it goes and it's distributed equally throughout the body and that's simply not the case but but the key point that that I emphasize is muscle glycogen regulates its own use now why would that be why would that be and why would muscle glycogen not break down to glucose which then gets into the bloodstream you think you're storing all this glycogen and you where you need you need the glucose in the bloodstream that's what you want to protect why doesn't the muscle release glucose it's designed not because that would interfere with your blood glucose regulation so the blood glucose regulation is fixed on the liver that's the controls and the muscle Glock and there's a completely different control mechanism and what I've given you is a is a very simple observation of how it goes but but no one has ever said that that's what's happening in in at least in in the physiology science in the sport Sciences it's all about take as much carbohydrate so you can fill your muscle glycogen actually you're filling it it's trying you're try not to kill yourself the body's saying don't kill me with all this glucose yeah yeah that's that was what I I thought as well you know the high high blood sugar I mean this is what kills diabetics you every everybody knows that certainly every doctor should know that and then so your body recognizes this as um uh you know this again mutual friend of ours Gary Dr Gary FEI said um that that above certain level of glucose in in the blood it's toxic it's a toxic dose to the body and your body responds to it as a toxin by trying to detoxify it and raising insulin to force this out and that's what it does it gets shoved in by you know into glycogen in your muscles in your uh liver uh turns into fat and also intramuscular fat so myosteatosis which we when we look at MRIs we we see this as pathological we see especially in in spinal surgery this is something we've seen strong correlations with back pain and poor outcomes with spinal surgery is motto steatosis in the paraspinal muscles that's something that we've actually long seen that this is the that you have someone with um monocytosis in those muscles would be like they're probably going to have a bad outcome even if you fix the defect and the uh and the compression so this is something that's pathological we're putting ourselves into a pathological State and yet we're thinking that this somehow gives us super magic powers when it comes to Athletics and that no not only does it give us a better outcome it's the only way we can get an outcome it's the only way you can perform as an athlete even though we've been high performance athletes as carnivores hunting mammoths and and being endurance hunters and chasing down uh animals until they just get too tired and lay down and you just go up to them and and take them out they still do that here in Australia I have a friend of mine who just got sick of uh working in the in the normal normal life and just said yep I'm going out and you just started living out in the bush and um very interesting guy um Adam Kavanagh I interviewed him and he you know lives with these um rural Aboriginal native Australians that's how they hunt they just chase down a kangaroo or something and just keep running them down he says they only make it about a kilometer and then they're just so just so yeah hot and overheated and and that's it um so we've been high performance athletes for a long time there was a um fossil record in clay it was a sort of clay beds there was still wet at the time and they found these Footprints they're I don't know something like 20 30,000 years old of native Australians and they were obviously chasing something and they were sprinting and they looked at the at the stride length and some of these guys were were going you know faster than Hussein bolt you know it was just absolutely flying and so and these were just normal guys they weren't training for you know the the Olympics or anything like that they were just hunting and so how is it possible that we've been such high performance athletes who were able to take down animals that that outclassed Us by every physical metric we talk about the meapa and things like that that's you know that takes some serious doing to take something like that down and we were doing it for millions of years so how how are we not anything accept these amazing athletes on a zero carb diet how are we not designed for that it doesn't make sense to me so Weston Price who obviously you know all about when he traveled around the world and looked at the original diets of the these people who hadn't changed their diet he said the Australian Aborigines and the Plains Indians were the most beautiful people he'd ever seen and they were the most healthy people but as soon as they started eating the industrial diet of course their health went went much worse yeah there was um there was a paper in 200 2001 that came out and they talked about like there there was some some work that was done by some anthropologists in late 1800s with the PLS Indians in America and they found that they were you know different tribes were sort of different heights but they found that these were on average the tallest human beings on Earth and I believe it was the Cheyenne the adult male height was about 5 foot 10 that was on average and it was much higher taller than the rest of the world the very interesting thing about this some people look at that like well you know that's sure that's tall for an average but it's not like crazy tall compared to today's figures the interesting thing was this was after they were put on the reservations and had didn't have access to their traditional diet they had already started to become westernized and they had already started their diet corrupted and so in in their work and in his work they even said um that they're that speaking to them they say we were normally much taller we're shorter now and so he was saying wow you guys are so tall and he's saying you you have no idea we're normally much taller than this uh we've actually we've actually gone down and it was theorized that if they checked this 100 years earlier probably would have been much higher some of the paintings from the late 1700s uh and the scale that they found they found that these the a lot of these people from the Great Plains were were probably pushing s feet tall you're very very tall um Thomas Jefferson when he was president some of them came out to see him and and to to meet him as Del as diplomats and he was 62 2 and a half so he's not a short guy especially for the time and he said that they were absolute Giants that these guys are powered over him that they were absolutely huge and um you know they're just living living a normal life there's um there's a book about the the native Australians in the 1800s I think it's called Kings and grass houses and they talk about how actually they were actually very tall they talk about a number of these people who were just basically Giants are extremely tall and there was an assassination in the 1800s some you know British uh you know official got killed and they they really took it out on the on the rural communities Unfortunately they killed a lot of people and U unfortunately this gentle giant in the in the story got killed and when they people came after and looked at the you know the bones that were just sort of strewn about and they're sort of uncovered by the the Sands they found found that that some of these skeletons were just on just a different scale and that the some of these the forearms just the Ona and the radius were longer than the entire outstretched arms of the British soldiers they were that big just absolute Giants and now they are not now they are much shorter and and and much less healthy and that's the main thing of course um obviously the average height of a population Den notes the average health of a population and now the health of the population the native Australians is much is much eroded when I first came to Australia I was told day one that when you see uh a native Australian patient whatever it says on their chart add 20 years to their age because they just age so much more quickly and they degenerate so much more quickly and so you have someone in their 30s you have to consider them in as a geriatric in the geriatric population because they just get these diseases so much more quickly it's actually quite sad very much so yeah that's very interesting thank you for that information yeah most interesting yeah yeah no I love that sort of thing that you know the the the connections with anthropology and um and our you know and our living biology and how much this affects us as athletes and also as as patients and as doctors and what what can we do to help our patients uh the most and um and also be be ath I think it's all ties together you know if if it it something thing that that should make you a to the best athlete you can be should also make you as healthy as you can be you shouldn't have to sacrifice one for the other obviously know people take steroids and things like that that's another matter but when you're doing something naturally when you're just eating real food you should the the one should help the other something that makes you healthier should make you a better athlete at the same time as well and so you shouldn't have to sacrifice your health or athletic performance I think yeah I think you're absolutely right and that's what worries me about the high carb darts because I think they caused inflammation that the body is continuously inflamed and their performance is going to go down you know it's easy in laboratory you test people for one day and then you see other the performance went up but what about a season and the next season and the third season that's what's really important I cannot see people surviving on high carbohydrate diets and Performing year in and year out one of the other people I influenced with Dave Scott who was the really person who started the Iron Man the Great iconic Iron Man athlete and he was a he was vegan vegetarian initially for the first five years and then he slowly changed and started introducing salmon particularly liked fish and he came back at 40 after converting to a more more fat-based diet at age of 40 and he came second he said no he would never advise anyone to train for the Iron Man on a high carbohydrate di he said it's the most inflammatory type of di just you can't survive on that oh that's amazing so in that in that uh vein so if you're having a young athlete or maybe even a professional athlete who wants to try out the low carb zero carb sort of approach to their their training um is there any special way that you transition them how long does it take for them to become fully adapted you know can someone do this midseason or should they wait until there's a break in their in their season or performance before they give it a try yeah I definitely think you should wait till the end of the season U because your performance will go off for the first four weeks or five weeks as you adapt and one of the problems is sugar addiction you know we can't hide that I think a lot of the symptoms as you change and I took me a year to get rid of the sugar addiction but my performance went up very quickly but I was diabetic at the time so I think you should transition slowly and start at the end of the season definitely and then your performance you can you know you don't have to train hard and you can be resting and so on and I think it takes a minimum minimum of eight weeks before you start to really feel the benefits and an elite athlete might take longer I know one athlete I worked with took him about six months and then he suddenly came right I can't explain why that is but in our experiments four weeks is enough to do the changes in recreational athletes so four to six weeks is fine but for an international glass athlete I wouldn't think that that's enough I think you need longer than that hey everyone really happy to announce a new sponsor for the show for everybody down in Australia Stockman Stakes who are delivering highquality grass-fed and finished pasture raised beef and other meats flash frozen and vacuum sealed tood door something I've been enjoying a lot of myself recently as well they also have a great range of specialty items such as high fat keto mints and carnivore beef and organs mints with li kidneys and beef heart as well so use code chaffy today for free order of beef mints or another specialty gift along with your order at Stockman stakes. comom and I'll see you over there thanks guys okay that's good to know so that sort of begs a question have you have you looked at um people that didn't just you know spend six weeks eight weeks uh converting have you tested athletes that have been in ketosis 5 years six years I'm seven years now um a volunteer if you want to do run some studies or something like that have you looked at something like that that's a great question um there have been two studies publ studies uh in which they looked Jeff Ock did the one which they looked at ultramarathon Runners who had adapted to the died for some time I'm not sure how many years it was and they were just the same as the other athletes there was their met metabolism was certainly different but they certainly weren't worse or better they they're pretty much the same but it wasn't a randomized control trial so no we don't know what happens after five or six years but there's no reports back that people are suddenly getting sick or performan is dropping off so yeah and you wouldn't expect it the no the problem with those long-term trials is that they're impossible to do no one's around here for seven years to do the studies yeah yeah I I'd be interested to see you know if someone's you know adapted you know adapted they've been doing this for a number of years you know would they maybe even have uh more Advantage you know would they would they be able to perform at a higher level when their mitochondria are completely turned over when they're completely fat adapted things like that because we see in the in the shorter term studies we're at least not losing anything by going penic and I wonder if we'd gain something in the well you know when you you're quite right because when you're talking seven to 10 years you got to fall off anyway you know most athletes careers are about 10 years they perform and then they start to fall off again and who knows maybe and this is what I predict is that you don't get that falloff in performance with age yeah that's what I would think so yes you would definitely see an improvement if you're on the D for that long yeah yeah I I agree I I noticed that as well I mean I was 38 when I came back to this and actually within two weeks I felt amazing again and I actually went back and started playing high level rugby so my team in Seattle had just gone fully professionally it was the mlr the major league rugby um League just started that year and I was like right I'm going back G to play and and I felt great and I was out there midseason I was completely out of shape hadn't played a full season in three years I just come back from doing humanitarian work in Bangladesh very out of shape but I felt great and I was I was able to just keep up with everybody who was in mid-season shape and in fact two weeks later we did the modified bleep test as a fitness test came in top five out of 92 athletes all diet I mean I had only had four training sessions there wasn't there couldn't be anything else um so even just that just um because I was in in a different state now the caveat to that is I had stopped eating carbs a few weeks before that uh simply because I I've noticed that anytime I had anything with carbohydrates my back hurt more so I was like okay I'm not going to eat that so I think I probably had a good six weeks uh of Keto at that point four weeks of carnivore by the time we did that fitness test and so you know a decent amount of time to adapt and I I felt absolutely incredible and I felt felt amazing so and um and we're seeing now too there's a few rugby players in Australia um that are like sort of uh Marty taow um he was sort of cresting his uh his career and then he converted into zero carb carnivore with with Paul Mason and um and they spoke publicly about this so I'm not giving anything away um and it completely revitalized his career I think his the um you I don't know how long he could he transitioned but the first game he he played anyway uh his performance actually went down they track everything they have these sensors and everything and he he didn't wasn't up to Snuff and so his team is like look if you you have a performance like that again you're going to get benched and he said look give me one more chance I actually feel really good we'll see how this goes the next week he had the best performance of his career they they had the best output so it was just huge output and so that that completely revitalized his career and I think you're right you know this is something that is going to allow people to to play much much longer and much better health I mean like the Frank Brothers you were talking about I think one of them is 38 or 39 and just got signed to another three-year contract with the Crusaders so obviously putting out uh some some good uh still playing some very good rugby even and and you think about it I mean now this guy's got 20 years of professional rugby experience and his body still works so I mean he's just going to be devastating on the field if you can still athletically physically keep up and your knowledge and your game skills are are so much more advanced than everybody else you're just an absolute weapon and so it's it's got to be exciting how's this how's this that listening to your experience that lack of Fitness is purely dietry induced damage so you're on the high carve diet you have to train to get a reasonable Fitness but if you're on the high fat D you've always got it it's always there I can yeah well I could keep going now I could get in better shape and I got I could get faster you know but obviously but you know I asked myself I said okay well should I should I ease into this and you I haven't played in a few years I said no no when I was 22 I could just go as hard as I could and couldn't wear myself out let's see if I could do it now sure enough first practice back I was just a dead Sprint yeah it felt great and uh yeah and then yeah and I and then yeah and then the the fitness test it was fine it was and you know the thing is too is I didn't even try to kill myself on it I kind of you know I I'm I sort of I'm a little embarrassed to say but I I I as soon as I everybody else dropped off and it was just sort of me and like five other people I'm like that's good enough I proved my point just dropped off so it was a bit it was a bit lazy on my part but um I just wanted to I just wanted to just wanted to show something and um and I so I didn't even kill myself and I and that's when I I ran out of gas oh I just can't keep up it was like I actually just just walked off you know so it was um it's uh it's absolutely amazing so it's um yeah I I'm very excited for more and more athletes to to get on this anyway and see exactly how how much of an advantage it is yeah yeah great well um Professor noes I um I'm I'm conscious of the time I don't want to keep you too long I really appreciate you taking the time out to speak with us and share your knowledge with us it's been an absolute pleasure and I'm sure everybody listening uh thinks the same um can you tell us a bit about uh how we find you support your work and about uh your foundation the noes Foundation which I'm actually a an ambassador for I try to get the word out there and get more awareness for your work but please do tell us about that how people can support it so when when we wrote the book The Real Meal Revolution which was about Banting low carb diet it really took off and we made a lot of money so so I invested my share of that money into the noes Foundation it started the foundation and that was 10 years ago now we've been going 10 years and I got goal is to look to promote this diet and the science behind it but not just that also to look at the Distortion of science that they you can't say what's the truth anymore and how do people know that this science is is valid so that's our two Focus first eye is challenging the science how do you know that the science is correct and because that's what I've always done and the disproof and the difference between belief and what is science and science is not a body of knowledge it's a technique it's a method of research and so we talked about the method where we took the high fat High carbohydrate diets and compared them and we specifically wanted to disprove that the high fat diet was beneficial and we couldn't disprove that it turned out to be just as good so that's the the the work of the noes Foundation we also have an eat better South Africa campaign where we look at the poorest communities in the country and see can't they eat better can't they eat can they afford to eat better Foods because I'm convinced that the the basis for chronic disease is diet and if and who's most effective it's the people in the poorest communities yeah and no one cares about them and so we work closely with those communities and we've had some spectacular individual responses people reversing their diabetes who who've not been told that it's simple it's simple to reverse your diabetes you just got to be careful about what you eat so that's our goal our goal is to improve the science behind the low carb diet and to encourage people to think about science and how it works and what is the truth and what is what is propaganda which is so much of science today is just propaganda and I think that you know the what's happening we can say this as doctors you you're accepted as a doctor because you got a good memory that's all and you can memorize all this r and then but that's not what you should be taught once you once you leave High School you've got to be taught how to think and people are not taught how to think and that's that's what we what I've kind of dedicated my life to try to get people to to question and to think so that's another big feature of the no Foundation yeah great now just it's funny you say that my my sister um you know who who went in to do her her PhD um in biostatistics she said that um one them and I was planning to go to my MD and she and she said and but some of her professors said as well MD that just stands for memorization degree just that's a it's fairly accurate you know and but um you know it's funny but I'll end up with this story because I think it's kind of Epal but uh the people who I admired when I started medicine and medical science were two people who had worked at Oxford with hunts Krebs MH and the story comes back to South Africa that they were the two brightest people that ever worked with hun now where did that story arise from you see you know you have to question that and I worked with both of them and I realized that they had no creativity whatsoever they couldn't see the problem and so they had careers but when you look back on their careers they didn't contribute any of great circumstance to the rest of the world so here they were the two greatest scientists who'd worked with Nobel Prize winner H Krebs and but they didn't Advance the science in any way they were good teachers they were brilliant teachers and I thank them for that but they weren't creative in their thinking and eventually they both turned on me which was quite interesting so so that's what I learned yeah that's unfortunate of course when they came out of their their grade 12 school schooling they were the C top in the country and so they won Road scholarships and so on oh I see but that's but you don't find amongst the road Scholars you don't find the great creative thinkers yeah yeah that's interesting and yeah I think they've probably yeah my my grandfather's actually a road scholar as well but he was on the um English Lit side of things he was a poet and so he he went there and studied uh English and end up doing his PhD Al in or or defil in uh in English so and then and same thing ended up becoming a teacher and a professor and uh you know wrote several books of poetry but um yeah he um he had he had well he had some very interesting stories about Oxford but that was a very different different time because he was there yeah in the 1930s and he was actually in uh the black forest in Germany when World War II broke out out and so he actually had to flee across Europe to to get away from all the closing borders and the marching armies and things like that so he uh yeah had very very interesting um story there but you know it is true that you know you sometime when you get these degrees and and you take these tests it's it's regurgitating information you know there's no there's no standardized test that asks you to to think and create something new it's just okay can you can you repeat and you know people stud it's is for the mcats and the and for the US mes going to practice in America you'll see all these people and they're like how you know all the people say that how they got the the top scores is uh they they you know just memorize every single word of these specific books and then they wrote them out and then read them over and then wrote them out again and read them over wrote them is it's just a memorization degree can you regurgitate this information and that does not help you even be a clinician maybe teach it but not be a clinici you have to apply these things you have to have this information be able to utilize it in a real world setting and that's a and that's a skill that is not translated through these standardized tests which is which is why I actually f um just as an aside found a study um back in 2010 or 11 where they said there wasn't actually a good matchup between people with top board scores from top universities um and doing well in top residency programs it actually didn't translate very well and and uh what they found was that um success previous success in High Level Sports was a far better marker of success in in a Residency program and as a doctor which makes a lot of sense because you know no one's going to get there unless you've memorized what you need to memorize at least to a certain degree but then and you work with a team are you coachable you know do you know how to work together towards an aim and really bust your ass you know these are skills that that that Sports and team sports really do teach you which is a you know which is you know we we've sort of gotten kids away from doing um doing sports but it's so important for life skills it's not just turning them into you know big mean jocks that that tease people you know like no this is these are life skills that are very important it's that that ancient Greek philosophy of of being the scholar athlete um as as THD said if you separate your thinkers from your Fighters you'll have your done by cowards and your fighting done by idiots you know and it's like yeah don't do that yeah so a little story so after i' been thrown out by my University eventually they asked me to come and you know say what I thought and so I wrote them a long letter saying that that the low carb diet would revolutionize the management of all your patients in this hospital because something like 30% of the bed space is taken up by patients with diabetes that's in the or hospital here in cap and then I said and and what you need is you need a guy like ygen klopp of course this the coach of Liverpool who's just retired to teach you about how teams work because you haven't a clue yeah there you go you hav a clue and they they never they never responded that's that's too complex too complex thinking yeah so what do you think about this actually you know what we don't care yeah yeah yeah well that's that's unfortunately typical of some some bureaucracies but at the same time it's only going to hurt them in the end and so hopefully they they smarten up sooner rather than later before it's too late and hurts people that's good yeah all right um Professor no thank you so much absolute pleasure uh speaking with you and and meeting you finally it's uh it's it's something I've been looking forward to for a long time so thank you very much no it's my pleasure thank you it was a super interview I really appreciate it and best wishes to your audience hope that they've learned something from this and are realizing that the carbohydrate story is finally coming to an end I hope yeah definitely and um thank you all for watching please do leave a comment let us know what you think and please do go over uh to uh the no Foundation I'll leave uh uh links down in the the description below please do go there and check out Professor no's work and and do support if you can and and thank you so much and we'll see you next time hey guys thank you very much for taking the time out to listen to what I had to say if you like it then please like And subscribe to my YouTube channel and podcast and if you're on YouTube then please hit that little bell and subscribe and that'll let you know anytime I have a new video out which should be every week if not more and if you could share this with your friends that would help me get the word out and let me know that you like what I'm doing thanks again guys