Victorious Noakes takes aim at scientists he blames for 'years of suffering'

27 April 2017 - 11:57 By Dave Chambers
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Tim Noakes
Tim Noakes
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After winning his misconduct case‚ low-carbohydrate high-fat advocate Tim Noakes is putting the boot in to academics whose work was used against him.

In the latest salvo in a war of words raging in the pages of the SA Medical Journal‚ Noakes said the scientists who wrote a 2014 article had refused to address a string of errors.

The Cape Town sports scientist and British co-author Zoë Harcombe say in the May edition of the journal: “Given that only one error has been addressed and accepted‚ we may never receive an answer to our research question: was this mistake or mischief?

  • Noakes hearing threw fat into fire‚ says dietitians' leaderThe organisation that tried to get Tim Noakes struck off as a medical practitioner says his misconduct hearing was “divisive”. 

“We may also never know if Prof Noakes would have suffered for years in the way he has‚ had this article not made competence or conspiratorial errors.”

The 2014 article‚ published in the journal PLoS ONE‚ said low-carb diets were no better at producing weight loss than “isoenergetic balanced diets”.

  • WATCH: 'This is big' - Tim Noakes delighted after he is cleared of misconductSmothered in hugs and almost in tears‚ Professor Tim Noakes received the news of having his name cleared with huge smile on his face. 

Noakes and Harcombe say the “ostensibly innocuous” article was given “disproportionate consideration” during Noakes’s misconduct hearing in front of a Health Professions Council of South Africa disciplinary panel‚ which ended with a not guilty verdict last Friday.

The article‚ by scientists at Stellenbosch University and UCT‚ was mentioned 19 times by prosecution witnesses‚ they say.

However‚ “material errors have remained unanswered since October 2016 and unless addressed‚ they render the article worthless other than of retraction”.

- TMG Digital/TimesLIVE

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