But if you look at runners who had plenty to drink, that’s a different story. That’s where the bodies turn up. In the United States, three marathoners died on days that weren’t extraordinarily warm. In the UK, a fitness instructor in excellent shape and known for advising his own clients about hydration was dead soon after running the London Marathon. In the same race, a sports scientist with expertise in endurance conditioning became so delusional that she kept running in place while lying on a stretcher. Eight trekkers dropped into comas and never recovered while hiking the Kokoda Trail, a popular route for Australians on Papua New Guinea. For all of them, fluids weren’t just available—they were unavoidable, just as they were at the Houston Marathon in 2000 when dozens were rushed to the medical tent, even though drinks were handed out every single mile.
None of these people were fleeing for their lives. None of them were pursuing food across the savanna. So if they were slowly dying of thirst, why on earth didn’t they just pick up a cup? How could they be so blind to their own doom? Shipwreck victims survive on life rafts for weeks; how did these athletes die within a few hours?
Noakes was baffled. And then it hit him: they were drowning. Instead of too little to drink, they were dying from too much. They’d gulped so much fluid, they’d diluted their blood sodium concentration and caused their brains to swell. Water poisoning! Suddenly it all made sense. The Sports Drink Giants had been fantastically successful at tricking people into believing that, unlike every other creature on Earth, humans were too stupid to know when to drink. Cows and puppies and infants have it covered, but not you—no, you need to be told. The terrible irony was that by inventing a fake health scare, the Drink Giants had created a real one. They’d scared people into believing they were drinking too little, and fooled them into drinking too much. It was death by marketing.
Noakes found twelve confirmed deaths by water poisoning in sports events and thousands of close calls. “The ‘Science of Hydration’ is propaganda conceived by marketers who wished to turn a collection of kitchen chemicals into a multi-billion dollar industry,” Noakes declared. “To their credit, they succeeded. To their unending shame, they cost the lives of some of those they were pretending to protect.”
The scam was so outrageous, Noakes was sure it would explode as soon as it was revealed. Instead, he found himself battling the “Mafia of Science,” as he calls it: doctors and researchers funded by corporate war chests. The more Noakes insisted the Drink Giants were a lethal menace, the more the Drink Giants and their paid Ph.D.’s blasted the message that humans were frail creatures who couldn’t trust their own bodies. “Drink before you’re thirsty or you’ll just be playing catch-up,” the Gatorade camp insisted. “Drink before, during and after exercise.” When Asker Jeukendrup published a study that showed sports drinks are basically placebos—you can swish and spit and get the same benefit as if you’d swallowed—Gatorade knew just what to do: it hired him. As for Noakes—well, the Mafia of Science regretted that such a respected scientist was now just a mouthy crank. True, Noakes was possibly the world’s top authority on distance-running physiology, but his warnings about excess hydration were just “one man’s opinion,” as the director of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute sniffed, and “not representative of the comprehensive research that is available on the topic of hydration during exercise.”
Noakes persisted, gathering evidence from around the world for Waterlogged, his four-hundred-plus-page indictment of the sports-drink industry. On the night he wrote the last sentence, in December 2010, he went to bed thinking, Tomorrow, you’ve got to start running again. He’d been absorbed in work for too long. He hadn’t run a marathon in four years. He’d put on thirty pounds. And he was about to wake up to a sickening discovery:
His own advice about carbs was killing him.
. . .
It was that first run that opened his eyes. Noakes got up as planned and huffed out a few miles, hating every step. He felt fat and slow, as if he’d never run a step before. His father and brother had both died from diabetes, and Noakes knew from his thickening waist and increasing sluggishness that he was heading in the same direction. He’d always persuaded himself that running would keep his weight under control, but now the misery of starting all over again made him face the truth: it wasn’t going to work. It had never worked.
“In forty-one years of running I have learnt that the numerous benefits of exercise do not include any sustained effects on weight loss,” Noakes realized. Even during his peak of nearly twenty miles a day, back in the seventies, he’d lost only a few pounds and yo-yoed them right back on again. His medical training told him that exercise and calorie control should do the trick, but after four decades as a conscientious eater and athlete, he was living proof that his medical training was wrong. With his book out of the way and his genetic time bomb ticking, Noakes set out to find out what was going on.
He began digging into nutrition science with the same intensity with which he’d gone after drinks, examining the primary research behind the dietary guidelines. What he found made Noakes angry, then heart-sick. He’d been duped. Even worse: the whole time he’d been so self-righteous during his holy war with the Drink Giants, he’d been the instrument of something even deadlier. The food industry had pulled the same trick as the Drink Giants, and Noakes hadn’t only missed it; he’d endorsed it. For decades, he’d advocated a carbohydrate-rich diet. He was so influential, he’d been dubbed the High Priest of Carbo-Loading—and processed carbs, he now understood, were toxic.
“Skillful marketing has made carbohydrate consumption a religion among athletes,” he’d fume. “They believe that you cannot get energy from anywhere but carbs.” The same foods Noakes had assured people would make them stronger and faster were a slow-acting poison making them fatter, weaker, and more prone to heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and dementia.
Privately, Noakes was anguished for another reason. It wasn’t well known, but Noakes’s father had made his fortune as a tobacco broker. In medical school autopsies, Noakes had seen firsthand the kind of horror his father’s profession wreaked on human bodies. He’d been troubled by Big Tobacco’s stealth efforts to increase addiction and market to minors, and it gnawed at him that every time his father cut a check to pay his school fees, it was at the cost of “the ill-health of those who smoked cigarettes containing the tobacco he exported.” In the end, Noakes’s father begged him to make amends. “Tim, I did not help enough people in my life,” his father told him. “You had better do so.”
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.