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 pre-game 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.