Professor Tim Noakes has made a career and habit of proving people wrong. Not too long ago the world’s top scientists ‘knew’ that it was the cells in our muscles which determine the point at which we get fatigued in running races. It was Professor Noakes and his team that first postulated a model showing that it is in fact the brain and not the muscles which determine this. In other words, the point at which you feel exhausted has a lot to do with your perception of how far you still have to go. Amongst other things, this principle sheds some light on why when you’re desperate to get to the toilet, the closer you get the more desperately desperate you become! It’s also an important factor in explaining how we manage to create huge energy in working towards a deadline, only to suddenly collapse once we’ve made it.
The point is, our perceptions and beliefs have a huge influence on what we do, and how we do it. This is not a new concept. Epictetus supposedly said that ‘we are disturbed not by things, but by the view we take of them’. We also know that these psychological processes can impact even on the physiological level. Yet it strikes me that in scientific enquiry, exploring the impact of perceptions on things is almost a ‘higher-order’ type of research, in that it generally features much later in scientific debates. People typically start off disagreeing about the more tangible stuff, and then once that starts settling in agreement, someone else comes along and turns things upside down by starting to explore the influence of the (less-than-tangible) mind.
Never has Professor Noakes had quite as much media attention for one of his theses as he is currently experiencing with his LCHF diet. (There I used the acronym for the first time – though I had to think carefully about getting the letters in the right order). He has stimulated enormous debate around which of two ways of eating is better for us, and this debate is presumably (?) fuelling a current wave of research. But it’s the later wave that I am most looking forward to – the one that starts including the inevitable influence of psychological factors.
Imagine the following piece of research: Two groups of people eat a whole pack of bacon (fried in butter) for breakfast, one group consisting of LCHF devotees, and the other of people who haven’t yet heard of it and are scared of eating fat. Will it affect them differently on a physical level? That’s what I’m waiting to hear.
Of course I hope they are already catering for this variable in the current research, as we seem to be rapidly running out of people who haven’t heard about the Real Meal Revolution…
Written by Clinton Gahwiler
