Real Food On Trial: How the diet dictators tried to destroy a top scientist

You couldn’t make it up. Real Food On Trial, How Diet Dictators Tried To Destroy A Top Scientist, has been called the ‘John Grisham of the non-fiction world’, a ‘blockbuster, jaw-dropping page-turner’. Another reviewer calls it a book that “should be fiction … yet it isn’t’. It is a revised and an updated edition of the groundbreaking original, Lore Of Nutrition, Challenging Conventional Dietary Beliefs, first published in South Africa in November 2017 and now for the international market.It continues the true and shocking story of a world-first: the unprecedented prosecution and persecution of Professor Tim Noakes, a distinguished scientist and medical doctor, in a multimillion rand case that stretched over more than four years. All for a single tweet giving his opinion on nutrition.Noakes and investigative journalist Marika Sboros have added up-to-date, robust scientific evidence in support of his views that launched the case against him. They have added a new chapter on the appeal hearing – a last-gasp attempt by establishment forces to overturn a comprehensive not-guilty verdict on all 10 aspects of the trumped-up charge of unprofessional conduct for the tweet.It also contains a new foreword by internationally renowned endurance swimmer and UN Patron of the Oceans, Lewis Pugh. Noakes helped Pugh be the first to swim successfully across some of the coldest oceans on the planet. A maritime lawyer by profession, Pugh writes of the passion he shares with Noakes: “for the pursuit of truth and justice and a natural antipathy towards bullies and liars”.That points a major theme of Real Food On Trial: a penetrating deep dive into the global scourge of academic bullying, or academic mobbing, as it is popularly known. The authors show how academic mobbing infects all of South Africa’s top universities at the highest levels. They probe the soft underbelly of the powerful vested interests in food and drug industries and the medical, dietetic and scientific mobsters that front them. They lay bare the heavy price that Professor Noakes has paid, professionally, emotionally and financially, for going against orthodoxy. And for daring to challenge the medical and dietary dogma that keeps people fat and sick across the globe.Pugh writes that, from the outset, he saw the trial as a freedom of speech issue. He was “troubled” when the country’s medical regulatory body, the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA), went to war with Noakes on the basis of his scientific opinion on nutrition. “After all, it’s one thing to deny the Holocaust or to say something that incites racial, religious hatred or violence. It’s quite another to say that you think meat, fish, chicken, eggs and dairy are good first foods for infants,” Pugh says.This book shines light into the heart of darkness of a uniquely strange scientific saga. It’s not over yet. Watch this space!