Now Noakes discovered he’d been pushing something that was even more addictive and shopped even more shamelessly, especially to children. If he’d been more careful, if he’d been more skeptical about the mass production and marketing of processed carbs, he could have saved so many people—starting with his own brother and father. He wished he’d been aware of these four key pieces of evidence:
HUMAN HISTORY
It’s an inconvenient truth, but a truth nevertheless: animal fat made us who we are. When our ancestors first strayed from the African savanna, they weren’t following the harvest. They were following the herds. They went in search of meat, and wherever they found it, no matter how harsh the environment, they stayed. For over two million years, we lived on the meats and chewy roots we could hunt and gather. Eggs, fatty flesh, and cheeses were prized because they were rich in energy, easy to preserve, and such a steadily burning nutrient that a few ounces could sustain someone all day. When the ancient Greeks offered the fattiest cut of meat to the gods, it was a sacrifice; they gave up what they wanted most. Only very recently did we switch to farm-raised grains, and since then we’ve seen a decrease in average human height and a spike in obesity and nutrition-deficiency diseases. The worst explosion began in the 1980s, after the United States embarked on a disastrous experiment. From 1960 to 1980, obesity remained constant. But in 1977, the United States separated itself from every other government in history by vilifying meat and pushing grains, which were traditionally used to fatten cattle. Soon after, America’s obesity rate shot up and hasn’t stopped.
PLUMBING THEORY
America’s shift from proteins to grains was sparked by Ancel Keys, a biochemist from the University of Minnesota who made his name during World War II by inventing K-rations, the ready-to-eat meal for combat troops. Later, Keys was reading his local newspaper’s obituary column when he noticed an unusual number of rich Minnesotans were dropping dead of heart disease. One thing America had after the war that other nations lacked was plenty of red meat, so Keys developed a plausible-sounding theory: If you pour bacon grease down your sink, it will thicken inside your pipes and eventually clog them. Our arteries must work the same way, Keys assumed.
“Keys hypothesized that heart disease was mostly a nutritional disorder linked directly to the amount of fat in the diet,” one journalist explained. “High-fat foods raised cholesterol levels in the blood, which, in turn, increased the risk of clogged arteries and heart disease.” That also sounded right to Senator George McGovern, who’d experimented with the low-fat Pritikin Diet. McGovern very quickly gave up on low-fat himself, but just because he didn’t want to eat that way didn’t mean other people shouldn’t. McGovern would go on to become an extraordinarily influential voice in nutrition, serving as the United Nations’ first global envoy on world hunger and teaming with Senator Bob Dole to create a worldwide school lunch program.
So largely on the whim of one powerful senator, the fat-is-fatal theory was rammed through U.S. health agencies in 1977 and propelled along by governmental “food faddists who hold the public in thrall,” as Science magazine put it. Later, journalist Gary Taubes would reveal that Ancel Keys had built his argument on his “Seven Countries Study,” ignoring data from three times as many other countries that weakened his theory. Dead people were also a problem; if Keys was right, the new U.S. dietary recommendations should have caused heart disease to plummet. Instead it’s skyrocketed: in the twenty years after the fat warnings went into effect, medical procedures for heart disease quintupled from 1.2 million to 5.4 million a year.
INSULIN IS OZ
Whether you become fatter or skinnier, stronger or weaker, more alert or lethargic is largely influenced by insulin, the hormone that acts as your body’s warehouse foreman. When sugars and carbohydrates are converted to glucose and enter your bloodstream, your pancreas deploys insulin to figure out where to store it. Glucose is great when your body needs it; it fuels brain and muscle cells, and is converted into fat for future use. It also acts as tinder so your body can burn fat as fuel.
But here’s the catch: insulin evolved to handle complex carbs created by nature, like leafy greens, not simple carbs created by us, like cereal and bread. Simple carbs are absorbed too fast; your cells get their fill and the rest is turned into fat before your insulin has a chance to dissipate. The still-active insulin in your bloodstream goes looking for more sugar, which makes you feel hungry. So you chow another donut, starting the whole process all over again. Enough years of this abuse and your cells can become insulin resistant; they’re tired of being asked to absorb all this glucose, so they just stop responding. What then happens to all that glucose? It goes straight to fat.
That’s what killed Noakes’s father and brother: their system needed fuel it wasn’t getting, while storing fat it didn’t need.
FAT AS FUEL
But there’s a way out, Noakes discovered. Once you kick the carbohydrate habit, you can convert your body back into a fat burner. “If you’re fat-adapted,” Noakes posited, “then theoretically you should be able to source all your energy from fat metabolism, especially during very prolonged exercise, when the intensity of the activity is somewhat lower, so that there should not be any need to burn carbohydrates.”
Bruce Fordyce, the legendary South African ultramarathon champ, put it to the test. Like Noakes, Fordyce had packed on the pounds since his glory days. But once he stopped eating grains and sugars and adopted a high-fat, low-carb diet, Fordyce underwent a running renaissance. At age fifty-six, he beat his best-ever Comrades time by two hours and chopped five minutes off his 5K, improving from 7:20 a mile to 5:40—a tremendous achievement for any experienced athlete, let alone one pushing sixty.
Still, Fordyce’s self-experimentation is decades away from catching up with Dr. Fred Kummerow, a University of Illinois scientist who, since the 1950s, has taken the position that hardening of the arteries isn’t caused by LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol found in eggs, red meat, and cheese. If LDL were deadly, Kummerow asks, then how come half of all heart disease patients have normal or low LDL levels? Something else must have killed them, and Kummerow believes it’s exactly the food pushed by the U.S. government—polyunsaturated vegetable oils like soybean, corn, and sunflower.
“Cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, except if it’s oxidized,” Dr. Kummerow told the New York Times. And because soybean and corn oils are inherently unstable, they’re quick to oxidize under the high heat of frying or even normal digestion. Kummerow put his own body on the firing line; he eats LDL food daily, including red meat, eggs scrambled in butter, and a glass of whole milk every day. He’s one hundred years old, takes no meds, and runs his own university lab. Yes, you read that age correctly: one hundred.
—
When I met up with Noakes in D.C., he’d flown all the way from Cape Town for a one-day conference on “Innovations in Diabetes.” That morning, he’d tucked away a farmhand’s breakfast of eggs, sausage, and bacon. A meal like that will leave him satisfied all day, often longer. “I just don’t get hungry anymore,” he shrugged. “Sometimes I’ll feel my energy waning and realize I haven’t eaten in forty-eight hours.”
“So basically, we’re talking about Paleo?” I ask. The Paleo Diet is based on the premise that humans are healthiest when they follow the example of our Stone Age ancestors and eat grass-fed meats, wild-caught fish, vegetables, nuts, and seeds and stay away from rice, bread, pasta, and other grain-based foods from the agricultural age.
“Basically, yes,” Noakes replies, although for the sake of precision, he’d replace “Paleo” with “Banting”: Noakes can’t be scientifically certain about what early humans ate, but he knows exactly what was on the menu of an overweight London embalmer named William Banting. Back in the 1860s, Banting was England’s undertaker to the stars and so sought after that he was given the honor of building the coffin for the Duke of Wellington, one of Britain’s most beloved heroes. Banting’s success, however, was pushing
him toward his own grave; he attended so many lavish funeral dinners that by age sixty-six he was “nearly spherical.” He was only five foot five, yet weighed over two hundred pounds and was so belly heavy he had to walk downstairs backwards and couldn’t tie his own shoes. Banting’s doctors prescribed every known treatment for obesity—diets, Turkish baths, heavy exercise, spa retreats, even systematic vomiting—but every pound he took off boomeranged right back on again. Oddly, Banting made a breakthrough only when he began going deaf. He went to see a hearing specialist named William Harvey, who decided Banting’s problem wasn’t his ears, but his waistline. Poor circulation was damaging his auditory canal, so in August, Banting began following Dr. Harvey’s eating instructions:
BREAKFAST: Five or six ounces of beef, mutton, kidneys, broiled fish, bacon, or cold meat of any kind, except pork. One small biscuit or one ounce of dry toast. A large cup of tea without milk or sugar.
LUNCH: Five or six ounces of any fish except salmon, any meat except pork, and any vegetable except potato. Any kind of poultry or game. One ounce of dry toast. Two or three classes of good claret, sherry, or Madeira.
DINNER: Three or four ounces of meat or fish, as for lunch. A glass of claret or two. Nightcap, if required.
So morning, noon, and night, Banting was feasting on roasts and fatty steaks with sides of buttery broccoli and washing it down with tasty wines, plus a snort of gin before bed. He was packing in the calories, too; Banting’s meals amounted to nearly three thousand calories a day, triple what most weight-loss diets allow. Yet even in his midsixties, when weight loss is most difficult, Banting trimmed off twenty pounds in the first five months. Within a year he’d reduced his weight by fifty pounds and his waist by twelve inches, and he remained trim the rest of his life.
“The Banting plan was the foundation of the Atkins diet in the 1970s,” Noakes explains. “We keep rediscovering these same fundamental principals of nutrition, then we forget them and start all over again.”
In 2012, the Los Angeles Lakers began following in Banting’s footsteps after a nutritionist consulting for the team became concerned about Dwight Howard, the superstar center nicknamed Superman for his Adonis abs and cannonball biceps. Howard was only twenty-seven years old and looked fantastic, with only 6 percent body fat, but there was something a little off about his hands. “It looked like he was wearing oven mitts,” the nutritionist would recall. “It reminded me of patients who have pre-diabetes and neurological problems because of how sugar impacts the nervous system.” A blood screening revealed Howard’s glucose level was “through the roof,” and a nutritional assessment found he was basically living on sugar: between candy, soda, and starches, he was downing the equivalent of twenty-four chocolate bars a day.
So the entire Lakers squad, including franchise player Kobe Bryant and seasoned veteran Steve Nash, joined Howard in a Banting-style meal makeover. “Not only are the Lakers unafraid of healthy fats, they practically freebase them,” one journalist noted. “The pregame beverage of choice is something the players call ‘bullet-proof coffee’—coffee seasoned with two teaspoons of pastured butter and heavy, grass-fed cream.”
“I’ve seen great results from it from when I started doing it last year—watching your sugar intake, making sure you’re eating healthy fats,” Kobe Bryant was quoted. “You’ve got to find a balance in that system. It’s worked well for me.” Lakers forward Shawne Williams showed up twenty pounds overweight for training camp; by doubling his fat intake and cutting out sugar, he took off twenty-five. Now most Lakers meals are built around grass-fed beef, humanely raised pork, raw nuts, squeezepacks of hazelnut butter, kale chips, and grass-fed beef jerky. Dwight Howard even remained faithful after he was traded; when he arrived in Houston, Howard persuaded Rockets management to start Banting. “We had to make that change,” Rockets general manager Daryl Morey told a reporter, “and I should’ve pushed harder earlier.”
—
For Dr. Noakes, it’s been a three-year journey of scientific awakening and personal transformation. He’s back down to 175 pounds—same as he was in his twenties—and feels like an athlete again. Eight weeks after he stopped eating sugar and processed carbs, Noakes was in Stockholm for a conference. It was dark when he arrived and twenty-five degrees below freezing, but Noakes went on a five-mile run anyway. He slept a few hours, then got up and ran ten more. “A few weeks earlier, I could barely finish 5K,” he recalls. “I thought it was aging. But it was really carbohydrate intolerance. In two months, I lost eleven kilos. I turned it all around.”
We’ve been brainwashed into being repulsed by the mention of the word fat, Noakes says, but the real heart danger is sugar. It’s a corrosive that damages arterial walls, creating grooves that allow plaque to adhere. Which means the only real solution for cardiovascular disease and global obesity, Noakes feels, is pure scorched earth. “Ten companies produce 80 percent of processed foods in the world, and they’re creating billions and billions of dollars in profits by poisoning people,” he says. “I’d tax them out of existence. If you don’t take addictive foods out of the environment, you’ll never cure the addiction.” Some of Noakes’s fellow scientists think he’s going too far. The Heart Association was quick to urge caution; the same day Noakes began advocating saturated fats, the Heart Association issued a warning that “the ‘Noakes Diet’ is dangerous.” It was an impressive performance, Noakes felt; cramming three mistakes into four words in one day isn’t easy. It’s not his, he argues, since it’s been the basis of human nutrition for more than two million years. It’s not a diet, because there are no portion or calorie restrictions. And how can it possibly be dangerous when humans have thrived on those very foods for most of our existence? If it were dangerous, we’d be extinct.
Rather than going too far, Noakes is furious with himself for starting so late. Back when he first began to suspect he’d been wrong about carbs, Noakes dug into the data on Ironman legend Mark Allen. Allen’s eating habits were well-documented. Noakes could find almost no starches or processed carbs in the mix. So how could Allen possibly scorch out a marathon in two hours and forty minutes, immediately after swimming nearly two and a half miles and biking one hundred and twelve? There was only one explanation. “I knew that he had to start the race without any sugar or glycogen in his muscles,” Noakes would say. “So he must’ve just been burning fat.”
“Phil Maffetone knew this years ago,” Noakes concluded. “Fat as fuel. It’s exactly what he was saying all the way back in the eighties. Imagine the difference if we’d just listened to him.”
Or knew where he was.
CHAPTER 34
Then they cut slices from the thighs, wrapped them in layers of fat, and laid raw meat on top…while the young men stood by, five-pronged forks in their hands.
—HOMER, the Iliad
FOR A MAN who’d spent years on the speed dial of athletes and rock stars, Phil Maffetone knows how to make himself scarce. The only online presence for a person by that name when I went looking for him was a bare-bones Web page, a placeholder for some singer-songwriter that provided no contact info or any mention of medical or athletic work. But in an old paperback, long out of print, I came across a lead.
Back in the eighties, Maffetone published a slim manual called In Fitness and in Health. Inside, I spotted a name I recognized: Hal Walter, a pro burro racer I’d met in Colorado during an annual ultramarathon in which athletes run up and down a mountain alongside a pack burro. Prize money on the burro-racing circuit is pretty lean, so in the off-season Hal was a freelance editor and outdoors writer. That’s how he met Phil Maffetone; in exchange for edits, Hal got fat-as-fuel training. Whatever tips Maffetone gave him must have been gold: Hal won his seventh world championship in fifteen years, at age fifty-three, and could still average seven minutes per mile for thirty miles, at thirteen thousand feet. During races that can last five or more hours, he only sips water.
I contacted Hal, who agreed to pass my message along to Maffetone. A wee
k or so later, I received an e-mail from “pm.” No name, just the two lowercase letters. If I was interested in talking, pm said, I should come to Oracle, Arizona.
Our home isn’t that easy to find. Call when you get close and I’ll talk you in. If your cell phone works. Don’t count on it.
So I was off to Oracle, a lonely desert outpost best known for UFO sightings and the occasional underground meth lab. Not far away is Biosphere 2, a self-contained environmental experiment constructed there deliberately to avoid being noticed by, basically, anyone. Edward Abbey had the same idea: decades ago, the irascible writer and eco-warrior began using Oracle as his mailing address so no one would know where he was. Geographically and psychologically, Oracle is out there.
I followed pm’s directions, crossing an old railroad track and rumbling down a dusty, red-dirt road until I pulled up at a pleasant little cottage ringed by an artful garden of desert plants. Chickens scratched in the side yard, then scattered behind the cacti when the door opened and a lean, handsome man with a snow-white ponytail stepped out.
“Was I really that hard to find?” Maffetone asked.
“You mean the drive? Not so bad. But the rest—”
Maffetone shrugged and led me inside to meet his wife, Dr. Coralee Thompson, a physician who for fifteen years was medical director at Philadelphia’s Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. “People seem to think I just went up in smoke like a genie.”
In Maffetone’s eyes, his sudden transformation from Dr. Ironman into InvisiPhil was a logical step. Fat-as-fuel was an intellectual challenge, and once he’d solved it—neatly, effectively, solid as a mathematical proof—it was on to the next endeavor. “I’ve had original music in my head since I was three years old,” he says. “It was time to do something about it.” So he shuttered his practice, referred his clients, rented his New York home, and rambled across the country until he found a place where he wouldn’t be disturbed or tempted back into endurance sports.
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