Is Tim Noakes ahead of his time?

Low-carb, high-fat champion Tim Noakes might wear sneakers with his suits, but symbolically he has big shoes to fill.

On Friday, when Noakes was cleared of unprofessional conduct by the Health Professions Council of South Africa, he was compared to Dr Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th-century pioneer of antiseptic procedures.

Semmelweis was ostracised by his peers after proclaiming that doctors could save lives by washing their hands and instruments before operating.

Advocate Joan Adams, who chaired the independent panel that cleared Noakes, suggested he might one day win the recognition accorded to Semmelweis.

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"What is conventional the one day can be considered bad and mad the next," she said. "Something initially considered outrageous becomes standard practice."

Adams said Semmelweis was "an early pioneer of antiseptic practices". She added: "Today it is established practice to scrub and disinfect. Unconventional does not equate to unprofessional."

Noakes said after the hearing that his case was even more extraordinary than Semmelweis's because "this is the first case in history where a medical scientist has been charged for expressing a scientific opinion".

And although Semmelweis was seen as a revolutionary, a low-carb, high-fat diet was one "people were eating as recently as the 1960s, before the US government started pushing a diet high in carbs".

The other difference was how social media had opened the floodgates on opinions about anything medical. Adams said at the hearing: "Dr Google can diagnose a mild headache or say that someone is clinically dead with just a few clicks of the mouse. The law does not and cannot protect every user in cyberspace from themselves, their ignorance, or their own downright absurd behaviour."

Noakes gives the thumbs-up to the likes of full-fat yoghurt, a thumbs-down to low-fat products, and a black mark to bread, sugar and their closest relatives.

Two years ago, he advised a breastfeeding mother that a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet should be followed when a baby was weaned. A complaint was laid and the hearing followed.

The only member of the five-person panel to disagree with the finding, Alfred Liddle, broke down in tears, saying Noakes's advice was "unconventional in the extreme".

Noakes responded: "He knows me and respects me as a human being but feels conflicted because he disagrees with me, and I respect that."

Noakes said that in Cape Town alone, more than 600,000 people had joined his Banting meal-plan Facebook group in the past two years. "This is a social movement that cannot be stopped."