They call the diet "Banting" in South Africa, in honor of the man who first proposed the ketogenic diet more than 100 years ago. Chef Jonno Proudfoot helped to popularize not just the term but the diet itself when he swam from Mozambique to Madagascar in the same year he released a Cook Book along with the legendary Tim Noakes. That confluence of circumstances spurred a nationwide movement towards a low-carb, high-fat lifestyle.
Proudfoot narrates his story with a dash of history, a pinch of socio-political context, and a sprinkle of media influence. Jonno provides practical tips for those attempting the delicate balance of promoting a healthy lifestyle without commercializing it.
It's a conversation rich with tales from the kitchen to the coastline.
Shownotes:
Website: https://jonnoproudfoot.com/
Website: https://realmealrevolution.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonnoproudfoot/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonnoproudfoot
===========================================
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
They call the diet "Banting" in South Africa, in honor of the man who first proposed the ketogenic diet more than 100 years ago. Chef Jonno Proudfoot helped to popularize not just the term but the diet itself when he swam from Mozambique to Madagascar in the same year he released a Cook Book along with the legendary Tim Noakes. That confluence of circumstances spurred a nationwide movement towards a low-carb, high-fat lifestyle.
Proudfoot narrates his story with a dash of history, a pinch of socio-political context, and a sprinkle of media influence. Jonno provides practical tips for those attempting the delicate balance of promoting a healthy lifestyle without commercializing it.
It's a conversation rich with tales from the kitchen to the coastline.
Shownotes:
Website: https://jonnoproudfoot.com/
Website: https://realmealrevolution.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonnoproudfoot/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonnoproudfoot
===========================================
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Welcome back folks. It's the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast with Dr Phillip Ovedia. This is, I realize we release one of these every week, but Phil and I haven't actually talked to each other in well over a week. We both have taken some time off and we're back to it. Phil, I think this is a cultural first for the show. Don't think we've ever had a South African on the show before. Introduce our guest.
Speaker 2:I will do. Yeah, I do think he's our first South African, but my guess is probably won't be our last because, as we're going to learn today, there is a very robust movement underway and our guest today, john O Proudfoot, has been really at the forefront of changing the nutritional landscape in South Africa. He is the author of this phenomenal book, the Real Meal Revolution. I co-authored it with Professor Tim Nokes, who our audience will be very familiar with. John O is a bit of a renaissance man, so excited to get his whole story between chef athletic pursuits and now leading the Real Meal Revolution With that. John O, why don't you tell our audience a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks, that's quite an intro. Thank you very much Again. Just super stoked to be on the show, so thanks for having me. The highlights package that you mentioned, that makes sense. I've done a bit of adventuring. I think my favorite party trick is to tell people I swam from Mozambique to Madagascar and that was in 2014. In fact, I wasn't really a swimmer before that happened.
Speaker 3:The swim is a big part of the biggest story, because the way I got into keto or the low carb, high fat diet was because Tim Nokes had been a high carbohydrate proponent and very famous sports scientist for about 30 years in South Africa. I was only 30 at the time, so he'd been promoting carbs before I was born. I wanted to swim from Mozambique to Madagascar and Tim Nokes was being quite vocal about the low carb diet. All of a sudden, my now wife, but then girlfriend, had lost 20 kilograms following his diet. I thought, okay, this guy's a sports scientist. His diet helped my wife lose weight. Maybe it's a high performance diet.
Speaker 3:I decided I was going to eat his diet while I was swimming from Mozambique to Madagascar. The way I was going to raise money for charity was to write a cookbook on his diet. I ended up pitching it to him and he thought it was a great idea. I ended up running with it and turning it into a brand and became a full-on movement, because this book was just this outrageously different product or different type of book to what most people are used to reading from academics like Tim.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it really does a great job of bringing the low carb diet. You guys over there know is banding we hear more used to calling it low carb or keto but it really does a good job of making it accessible and making it practical between the recipes and the science that you guys brought to the book. I guess let's start with what your experience was. When you went low carb keto. You were obviously swimming from that distance over. It was like a 20-day period, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah, my low carb experience was mixed so I never really managed to get fat adapted as an athlete. I found it very difficult. I had a very short lead time From the day I started training to the day we did the swim. It was seven months and I went from zero. I had been on the road for two months and I hadn't really swum for a few years. We ramped up the training to about 30 miles a week of swimming in a very short space of time, in about five months. I was very nervous about playing with my fuel.
Speaker 3:I did go low carb because we wrote the book while I was training, but I did bomb very often because I don't think I was doing it properly. I was inexperienced and there wasn't really anyone helping me, checking my vitals or anything. But that wasn't the first time I tried it. That was the first time I tried it properly following the rules in the book that we were busy writing. Originally. I tried it, I think, two years earlier when I first started thinking about it Maybe it was a year earlier and I lost a ton of weight in my first three days.
Speaker 3:The water dropped and I think I lost four kilograms, which is about eight pounds in three or four days, which shocked me. I was literally just eating bacon and butter and I felt very good. Then I found it very difficult to stick to because I worked in a big catering company and at the time I was 28. I wasn't particularly invested in any health crusade. I used to walk past a cupcake table every day because all the cupcakes used to get batched out to all of the different clients. It wasn't until, I would say, about six months after we wrote the book that I really started taking it seriously and seeing the benefits.
Speaker 1:What is this Madagascar to? In the US, we've got the Grand Canyon rim to rim. We've got hiking the Appalachian Trail. Is this one of those? If you're a serious athlete, this is something you want to do one time in your life.
Speaker 3:Actually, it's very far from it. It's more like the only thing we could find that no one had ever done and that we thought no one else would ever be able to do. We got so lucky. Generally, marathon swimming it's not very popular in South Africa. Guys like to do cold water swimming. In Cape Town there's a very well-known. It's called the Cape Long Distance Swimmers Association. They're a group of guys who go and swim in cold water. They organize swims. I think the most famous swim that they did was across the Bering Straits between I think it's Russia. Those are the guys, those are the hardcore swimmers in South Africa. We were not hardcore swimmers at all. We just wanted to do something that had never been done and would never be done again. We got so lucky.
Speaker 3:We were in the harbor in Durban, which is in the north coast of South Africa. We were about to leave on the boat to go up to Mozambique to do the crossing. The guys in the yacht club said to us you are absolutely insane, this is cyclone season. This was after months of planning and the boat crew telling us the best month of the year is March. In fact, we finished 10 years ago to the day, on the 23rd of March. It's almost the 10-year anniversary. The reason it is the best time to swim is because the swell is the mildest, but only if you get a window between cyclones.
Speaker 3:Our original swimming time was going to be 35 days. We were going to be able to swim I can't remember the numbers, but it was a lot fewer miles per day but over a longer period of time. There was a cyclone before we were set to swim. Our start date got pushed later. Then National Geographic booked the boat that we were swimming on. They had to end the charter earlier. We went from having 35 days to do the swim to only having 25 days to do the swim. Literally, we finished the swim, we ferried home for two days. Two days later there was a massive cyclone in the channel. We had a window. That is almost impossible. There will be people fitter than us, with more money and better gear, but it's unlikely that people will get that lucky with the weather again.
Speaker 1:We hope. I realize we want to talk about metabolic health, but I got a dig into this how do you do multi-day swims? I'm thinking, okay, we swim 15 miles today and then what you tread water overnight. I know that's not how it happens. How does this work?
Speaker 3:That's a great question. We had an 80-foot motor cat as our main vessel and that was really home-based. Every night or every morning they would launch a dinghy. The dinghy, that's a normal word, it's a common word. Dinghy Okay, cool, a dinghy. I thought it might have been a South African, but it's a normal word.
Speaker 3:We launched the dinghy every morning and we had a second and a sort of skipper on the dinghy and we would look at the current and how the boat had drifted overnight and then we would realize okay, so the current's about this fast and it's going in this direction, so the boat needs to be going in a certain direction. And then we'd stick a compass to the deck of the dinghy and then the guy would ride the dinghy and make sure that the boat was always aiming in the direction of the compass. And then the swimmers would follow. We would swim next to the dinghy and that was how we knew where we were going. I only breathe on my right, so I can't breathe on my left. I'm not an ambide breather. And then my swimming buddy he can breathe on both sides.
Speaker 3:If we were swimming on the left-hand side of the boat I was fine because I could see the boat. But if we swam on the right side of the boat I had to be on the inside because Thane would be looking left at the boat and then I would be looking right at him and it often happened that I would just end up swimming and banging my head on the boat because I was busy following Thane and not seeing the boat. We would swim in the session, so we'd do a three-hour in the morning, which then became a three-and-a-half hour because we needed to make up time, and then in the middle afternoon we would do a two-hour, which became a two-and-a-half hour, and then in the evening we would do a one hour to one-and-a-half. We never really finished the evening swim, because as the sun goes down the jetty fish come to the surface and then it becomes unswimmable. You just get stung.
Speaker 1:Bill, this is crazy, fascinating, weird stuff.
Speaker 2:And then you would. So when each session would end, you'd get back on the boat, but the boat would anchor basically. So you're not, you know drifting yeah. Distance on the boat per se.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we would get on the boats. There's no anchor, obviously, because the water was about two miles deep, I think at its deepest in that channel. But we were always aware of our drift and how we the thing is. The best practice is to take a GPS marker where you get in the water and then you let go on the boat to get that marker and you drop at the right place. But obviously I don't know if you've been into the open ocean, but if you look a mile in that direction and a mile in that direction the current is going to be the same and there's no difference.
Speaker 3:But what often happened is we would drop a coordinate, we would be like there or there are boats, and then get in and swim. But what you could track very accurately was your start point and your finish point for each swim. So then we would tie them together. So you go okay, we got out here, and then on the map we would draw it out. So we said, okay, we did three miles in this direction start point, end point and then you lace it all together. Doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I get it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you know there's a in the US. Well it's. There's a relatively famous type of swim between Cuba and Florida. It fills in Florida. So this is the kind of thing that gets done. It's 90 miles and it gets done in a single session. I mean, they have somebody who the swimmers will have, will have I can't remember what they call the team that's that is in the boat alongside them to make sure you know they don't drown, but I'm just fascinated by a 20. So you're swimming basically eight hours a day for 25 days.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so 20, it was 24 days, I think. We started on the 28th of February and finished on the 23rd and we averaged. We averaged just under seven hours a day and our distance was an average of 19 kilometers, which is, which is two kilometers short of of a half marathon. A kilometer to miles, that's 1, 1.6 kilometers in a mile, so it's probably about 12 miles, 12, 12 or 12 and a half miles a day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, well, that's, that's astonishing, and I'd love to ask you more and more questions about, about how crazy that is. But let's talk. Let's talk. Metabolic health yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's pivot first kind of to your you know how you became a chef, because I think that really is relevant background to then how you started to lead this revolution in in how we eat.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the chef thing. It's weird here. I always thought I was going to be a big shot entrepreneur by the end of my first year out of high school and that didn't happen. But when I finished school, I I was kind of looking for extra work and I ended up working for one one day at my friend's catering company.
Speaker 3:It was like a friend of a friend of a friend, and in the morning I had to fry five kilograms of bacon, or, like you know, 10 pounds of bacon and a whole lot of eggs for this breakfast buffet and I hated it. And then in the afternoon I had to create this lime and coriander or cilantro butter and and stuff it under the skin of chicken legs and then I had to barbecue them and serve that for these guests at this wedding. And I'd seen Jamie Oliver do something similar and and after that I thought, okay, this is quite fun. And at the end of the day the guy gave me 200 grand, which is basically $10. And he said, yeah, well, dad, thanks for your, your hard work.
Speaker 3:And I got home and I phoned all of my friends and I said, guys, I know what I'm going to do for the rest of my life and then we went out drinking and I spent all the money on on that, on that like celebrating, because I was so happy I discovered what I wanted to do with my life and and then I went on a gap year and I worked in London for a bit and I came back and then I studied and I became a professional chef and with the, when it comes to being a chef, it's not so much where you study but where you work that really defines how you end up as a chef. I'm sure there are tons of professions like that and I worked. I got placed at a restaurant which was in the top 10 restaurants in the country in South Africa and that's the equivalent to a Michelin star restaurant and I got a really good mentor and he taught me a lot about real food and the big movement at the time we're talking, 2004, was what they call molecular gastronomy.
Speaker 2:And you had a lot of yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So a lot of chefs experimenting with it was almost like the food movement had gone full circle. So you had chefs making foods you know very well, and then they developed machines to make the foods that chefs could make. And then they developed machines to make stuff that chefs could never make. And then chefs figured out how to do the stuff the machines were doing and started doing it in their kitchens again. So guys were making gels and I mean, my most famous example was people were taking black pepper and squid ink and turning it into a gel and then dropping it into a solution that then creates a skin around the gel, so it looks like a caviar egg, and then we would serve oysters with black pepper infused caviar instead of cracking black pepper over the oysters. So it was the stuck magic trick, and I remember. And so we started experimenting at this restaurant with these two schools of thought and we were always real food all the way, and the stuff started making its way through and my mentor was experimenting and I had a friend of mine who was an Italian guy, roberto, and he and I were the chefs in the kitchen who just said this is going too far, this isn't real food anymore. And in fact he ended up leaving the restaurant business completely going to work for his dad who had a fresh produce empire. And I ended up thinking, ok, if this is where fine dining is going, I'm out. And so I left the restaurant business and I went to go and study business, actually, yeah. And then things debated from there.
Speaker 3:But as much as I tried to get out of food, I just I couldn't get out of food.
Speaker 3:I kept going back into. So I worked in wine marketing and when I was in wine marketing I had to write menu off the menu to pair the wines that we were marketing with the right foods. And then I became the financial manager of a catering company and then I became the secret weapon who they would send to special case events. So if there was a menu that was too complicated for anyone of the normal chefs to go and do because I was from a fine dining background I would go and do that dinner. And if there was a menu that needed to be written that couldn't be just the normal stuff off the catering menu, I would write that menu. And I ended up becoming a professional menu and race appeal writer because of the job that I had in this catering company, and the first cookbook I actually ended up writing was when there was a girl I was trying to impress and she was going to a party that I was invited to.
Speaker 1:It's an age old story, ladies and gentlemen. So how did? You get into this. Well, I was trying to impress a girl, yeah.
Speaker 3:And I didn't have any money. So I was going to arrive at this birthday party with no gift and this girl was going to be there. And I mean, when I met her, my heart burst out of my chest. I had to run to my bedroom and lie down because I didn't know what to say. I just lay there, I thought I was going to die. And anyway I wrote this cookbook for my friend Sarah and it was a, I think a 15 page word documents called Happy Days with the Lazy Cook or something like that. And it was my first cookbook and anyway I never ended up getting together with the girl. She wasn't impressed. But that was my and yes, that's also a fairly common story guys, yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:So, oh, so what happened after that?
Speaker 1:Well there's. You know, the way Phil set this up is you've kind of had a significant influence in health as it relates to food and food as it relates to health, and so telling us about failing to impress the girl feels like it's not quite the whole story.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, so I think that was so what happened after that? I carried on and then we got to the point where I was swimming and training for this swim and approaching Tim and the backstory, and then I'll get to what happened after I approached him. But just to finish, to just tie a knot in this part of the story, we were, in order for the swim to happen, we had to raise money for charity and basically Thane is a supermodel and if you Google him, thane Williams, and you Google Thane Williams nude, there's nothing like R-rated. But he is like a beautiful human being and the pictures of him posing on the internet. And we thought, okay, if we need to raise money, we're going to make a naked Thane calendar and we'll sell it on the internet. And I don't know what we'll do if that fails.
Speaker 3:But our only other option was to go and do public speaking and at the time neither of us were very keen on public speaking. So the cookbook was this thing where I thought, okay, what else can I do? And I realized that I could write a cookbook because I had written one before and the one I wrote for the girl, sarah, who was not the girl I was trying to impress. She said this is amazing, you should write a cookbook. And I thought, okay, someone said someone's endorsed me as the cookbook chef. I'll go and picture it.
Speaker 1:So then, I took that idea. I love this, Phil. This is just. This is a real story here. You know, this is so much better than make a set of goals and be disciplined in every single day. Oh, this is real life.
Speaker 3:Okay, Sorry, it's just I'm getting a kick out of it. Yeah, I mean, when I tell the story, that's when I realized it's crazy, because at the time I was just trying to earn a dime, you know. And so then I wrote the book and I was so nervous that Tim Noakes was going to write a book with someone else and he had been speaking for three years. So when I approached him I thought he's obviously doing a book already and I don't know. He said yes and he was in, but we, because of I was on a TV show, another reality TV show for two months. Basically we got pushed out. The start date for writing the book got pushed out and we ended up starting writing in July and we said to each other and the publishers eventually this book needs to be out by Christmas. And when we work back from Christmas to writing, that meant we only had about a month to write the whole book, and so we wrote the book in the first month. When it was finished being written, we were going to self publish. So I found try to find some sponsors. That didn't work and I went to one publisher and I said we'd like to do the book. Can you get it up before Christmas? They said we can have it up by Easter. But even that's being ridiculous. So then I went to another publisher and I said can you do it before Christmas? And they just said, yeah, totally. And literally the next week I was in their studio photographing the food and I hadn't tested any of the recipes. I basically Beethovened the whole cookbook and so we tested them on the photo shoots. While we were there, we make a recipe and it came out weird. So we think maybe we should change like this and then photograph it and then next recipe. And so the whole book went from starting like first word on page to going to print in 63 days. And yeah, absolutely mad.
Speaker 3:And then it came in and it launched on the 19th of November, which was the day after my 29th birthday in 2013. And then it went ballistic. So the publishers spent every ounce of capital they had because they were a tiny publisher. They spent every ounce of capital they had on the first print run. And then the books sold out in the first day. They sold out to the booksellers before they even landed. They just told everyone we're coming out with a Tim Nook Cookbook and all the book buyers were like, okay, we'll take all the copies Because it was Tim Nook's. Because it was Tim Nook's. And then the next batch and then everyone saw the book and they thought, oh, my goodness, this is insane. And basically for the first 60,000 copies that were on the containers coming from China, the first 60,000 copies were sold before they landed in South Africa. And that was over the first three or four months.
Speaker 3:The publishers baked, borrowed and stole money to keep funding more and more print runs and by about mid 2014, it was an absolute cult Every single restaurant in Cape Town had its own banding menu. So we called it banding. And in fact, even the way it got called banding was ridiculous, because Tim had written the whole scientific article calling it the LCHF diet or the LCHF plan. And I thought I don't know about that. I'd heard people were referring to Palio and I didn't really understand the difference at the time. And my editor, he called me up and he said dude, we need a cooler name. This LCHF sounds like a chemical. And I said yeah, I totally agree.
Speaker 3:I think we should call it banting because Prof had written, or Prof Noakes had written, this piece on William Banting, the British undertaker who was the first guy to follow a low-cobb diet in the late 1800s and he wrote the very first diet book. And in the 20s, in 1920s, people used to refer to being on a diet. They would just say I'm banting, I'm on the banting diet. So we said let's just call it banting. And so we literally ran a find and replace through the whole manuscript and changed LCHF to banting, and that caused some business problems down the line because it's someone's name and you can't trademark the name. So no one owns, no one owns banting. It's this like free thing which is, to be honest, it has its pros and its cons, I think. So that's how it poured fire, and there's some conspiracies I have about how it poured fire, but that was the beginning. That's how it started really taking off.
Speaker 2:And people may not understand, I guess that Professor Noakes was a kind of a bit of a local legend in South Africa before making this switch to low carb and that probably helped this. But why do you think it was able to take off so well? I mean, there have been lots of diet trends and all of this, and here in the US low carb still struggles to get kind of mass adoption and, like you said, now in South Africa it seems that it is very well entrenched and every restaurant has options for it. So is there something unique about South Africa, you think, or what does it take to really get these diets to take hold?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a question that I've been asking myself for the whole decade. I think that it's so many different things and I'll try to touch on a few that I think are the most important. I think there was a lot of luck involved and timing. I think it's very rare that you get such a long buildup where Tim wasn't proactive in trying to create a product or anything. He just wanted to spread the word. So there were three years of buildup where people were hearing this message and talking about it and no one and they didn't have anything to buy. I think people want to buy something that allows them to identify.
Speaker 3:I think that Tim's personal brand as a very revolutionary scientist played a huge role. I think, just to put it in perspective, he was the team doctor for the Springbox, which is our national rugby team, and our rugby team is, I don't know, like pick your most important American team, and that's what it is for us. There's nothing more important in South African culture than rugby. And he was the team doctor that they won the World Cup, and he was one of the guys who said we should rest them instead of training them before the championship, and a lot of people think it was his advice that led to us winning the World Cup. He's had several revolutions in the past, so this was his seventh. The seventh time he went up against authorities. Previously, he managed to change the rules in rugby because people were breaking their necks and everyone thought he was a heretic. How could he do this? This is the way rugby gets played, and he showed data that saved people's lives.
Speaker 3:He did the same thing with hydration and he also coined something random, by the way is when this famous swimmer called Lewis Pew he's actually the reason I thought of swimming my swim Lewis Pew swam a kilometer in the polar ice caps and Tim Noakes put a thermometer in his bum and measured that he could raise his core body temperature naturally, and Tim coined it anticipatory thermogenesis.
Speaker 3:So Tim has this vast repertoire of amazing discoveries and revolutions that he's driven in the past. And so then he comes out and he's lost 20 kilograms or what's that? 40 pounds, 42 pounds. And he is supposed to be the pillar of health in the country and he is the medical professor on the board of the biggest insurer in our country. And he comes out and he says Atkins was right and everyone's condemned Atkins. He says I've lost 42 pounds and I'm healthier than I've ever been and I'm running further than I've ever run. And when a scientist like that says that the whole country listens, that everyone goes nuts, it's like a US president having a stance on diet which is people can't ignore.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's probably. It probably has more power than that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So that was the starting point and then there was some stuff going on. That was just strange. So the Cape Town sets food trends in South Africa. Cape Town is the food hub and it started in Cape Town and I think that's why it spread.
Speaker 3:I think if it started in another city, cape Tonians and other cities would have ignored it, but it started here. And then it was a chef driven movement, so it was a cookery first movement. So I think people saw it as Tim and people didn't know that I wrote the recipes. My name was on the book but no one knew that that was me. People would tweet him and say there's a zero missing on one of your recipes, which they literally was, and he would say speak to John Proudfoot. No one knew I had anything to do with it. So it was this insane, delicious, indulgent, gourmet thing that this academic came out. So it was kind of a juxtaposition against the scientific backdrop, I think.
Speaker 3:And then there was a lot of press and I think the press really helped.
Speaker 3:So the political situation in South Africa, as complex as it is anywhere else, and the newspapers in Cape Town are owned by the opposition party, and basically they were going bankrupt because it was the national election over the period when this book was booming and the only way that this newspaper could sell copies because no one in the Western Cape, in my state or province, would buy the newspaper If it had anything negative about our ruling party the only way that they could sell newspapers was by putting Tim Noecks' face on the cover of the newspaper.
Speaker 3:And so for about six months I'm not lying, this is the truth for about six months Tim Noecks was on the front page of the Cape Times twice a week and so, and then they would placard, so the newspapers would put these big A3 posters on all of the lamp posts up and down the roads and it's like Tim Noecks eats, fat loses, gets thin, just it was like a media assault, it went mental and then everyone was talking about it. So I think it was this perfect storm and it created a media frenzy.
Speaker 1:Okay, this is like a best case scenario. And compared to the US, south Africa is a small country and I'm asking this question because I truly don't know the answer. We're 10 years down the road now, am I right? Roughly 10 years?
Speaker 2:ago.
Speaker 1:We're 10 years down the road. Has there been a measurable, observable shift in the general wellness level of South Africans in the last 10 years?
Speaker 3:Ooh, that's a very fun question. I think that, unfortunately, most of the people who were touched by Banting are in the sort of top tier, of sort of like the wealth bracket, because it's this gourmet cookbook and, unfortunately, most of South Africa is actually poor and they're reliant on. One of the staples in South Africa is really wheat, and the other staple is we have a similar thing to corn, but we call it pop or mealy, and it's this white corn porridge, basically, and that is still the major food that feeds most of the people and most of them will have that and not any protein. It's not a side, it's the main thing. So, unfortunately, I don't think it's made a difference statistically. Where I think it has made a difference is and I know I'd be wrong there, by the way I just think that that portion of the population makes a bigger impact on the data. Where I think it has made a difference is is that people who set the guidelines were unable to ignore a certain metrics.
Speaker 3:So, for example, I know it happened in America as well, and that might have been because of the work that Jeff Vollek and Steve Finney have been doing. But the American? Is it the American Heart Association or the American Dietetics Association, have changed their definition or changed the. They've lifted the limitations on cholesterol, dietary cholesterol. So and I might be confusing that with the South African one, but I have a slide of it in a talk that I give where all restrictions on cholesterol, dietary cholesterol, have been lifted because the data They've been forced to go and re-look at, the data and now the data they're saying oh, actually there isn't really a correlation between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol and it doesn't really seem to be a strong correlation between blood cholesterol and total risk. Is it total? What's it? All-cause mortality.
Speaker 2:All-cause mortality, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So that's the kind of stuff that's kind of changing a little bit every year in South Africa. Definitely, I know that the South African Heart Association keeps changing the rules and they would never change them and say, because of what Tim Noeck's did, we have decided because they were condemned and they condemned each other. But slowly but surely they're edging in certain things and the biggest insurer in the country, which is discovery and that's the insurer that Tim was the professor of in 2013 and 2014. I mean, four years before that. But then they have also changed their restrictions and limitations on cholesterol. So in the past, if you had high cholesterol, you would get penalized with your premium, and now they still have that algorithm running. But if you mail them and you say, hang on, my cholesterol is not related to all-cause mortality, blah, blah, blah, they'll say thanks for the mail and then they'll adjust. Good to know.
Speaker 1:Good to know.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I guess you know, let's kind of continue on. So the book comes out, the you know, the banting becomes kind of a, you know, well-accepted and trendy thing to do. It sounds like in South Africa. And now here we are, 10 years later, I guess you know you kind of mentioned it probably hasn't reached everyone, but it's become well-accepted at least. And part of that also, I think many in my audience are familiar with what you know Tim Noakes went through and he was put on trial twice for giving this advice and you know they tried to take his medical license and all of that, which was, from what I understand, a pretty big deal in South Africa. And so you know, what are you seeing today? You mentioned, kind of you go into the restaurants. They oftentimes have good options for banting. What's it like in the supermarkets, you know, or is it easy to do this now in South Africa?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. So a few things have changed. Just in terms of the general population. I speak to people who know what I do and every. I can't remember the last time I spoke to someone who hasn't tried banting, and usually they'll have an opinion about it. And and that drives me mad, because I was working as a chef at the time and when I wrote the book, I was told and I asked I said, can I use butter and cream? And the nutritionist I was working with she said, yeah, you can use butter and cream. And so you tell the 28-year-old chef, you can write a health book that requires butter and cream. It's going to go crazy and that's what I did. And there's a recipe in that book called Not Butter Chicken.
Speaker 3:Butter Chicken is a very famous curry. I don't know if you've heard of it, but in South Africa it's very popular, and so this dish. We culled a chicken salad while we were doing the shoot. This is a very important part of the story, by the way. So we culled a chicken salad recipe when we were shooting the book and I didn't have time to write a new recipe, and there was some chicken in the fridge and there was a bottle of cream and some mushrooms from a previous photo shoot where they photographed a cookbook the week before, and so I took all the stuff and I threw it in a tray and I pulled the cream over and I threw it in the oven and it came out and it was this chicken bubbling in butter and cream and mushrooms and garlic. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is butter chicken, but it's not butter chicken. So the recipe is called Not Butter Chicken because it's not the curry, but it is actually chicken cooked in butter. And that recipe became the sort of metaphor for the diet. And so when people spoke about banting and people interviewed Tim, that was really the recipe that people thought of. They thought this is a health book that Tim Noakes is promoting and for your health, you can eat chicken that's been braised in butter and cream. And it was a massive attention grabber and I think again, one of the reasons that it became so controversial and was such a conversation starter.
Speaker 3:But it's left a lot of people with the impression that banting is like pouring fat all over your food, and for me, what banting really is is actually a low carbohydrates, a low carb diet where you burn your fats and you fuel your body on ketones and you can actually do that with much less fat and, in fact, you better off. Well, my view is that you better off less fat because you want to be burning the fat that's stored in your body as part of at least part of the fuel that you're burning. And so nowadays when I speak to people about banting, or when someone comes to me and they say, yeah, I tried banting for a while but I just hated all that fat, I just want to say I'm so sorry about all the butter I put in the book because that's not what it's about. But then they'll say, yeah, I might prefer keto, or I still go low carb, but I just don't use the much fat because banting was too hectic for me. So everyone's still kind of doing banting, but they have a new word for it, like low carb keto. What are some of the other ones? Low carb keto banting? And then there's one called it'll come to me later. And then they throw in a lot of the extra hacks like intermittent fasting is like the cousin of keto. They go hand in hand. So everyone is still doing the things and the recipes on all of the menus or the menu items in all the restaurants will still allow for it, but now it's their own word that they'll have, like carb conscious or carb clever or carb smart. So the word banting is less prolific, but it's the same principle. Does that make sense? Sure, and then as far as supermarket, it's crazy.
Speaker 3:So there's a recipe in the book called the seed crackers and Kate and I my wife Kate and I we went to a restaurant on Tuesday night it is in the top 20 restaurants in the country and we were entertaining some friends from New York actually and we thought, okay, we're going to take them to this fancy restaurant. And Kate is, she's everything intolerant gluten intolerant, dairy intolerant, and she's keto, very strict keto, and I like to sort of lash out a little. So they said, no, we'll bring you a cracker that's safe for you to eat. And the cracker they brought was literally the exact recipe from that book. And this was in a top, top, top, top fine dining restaurant in Cape Town. And the guys who we were with they don't really believe that banting was a big deal or that I was a successful author, and so I pointed to them. I'm like that is the recipe from my cookbook and that is sitting on a plate, so it's still very popular.
Speaker 3:And the supermarkets. As far as supermarkets go, they're three major supermarkets in South Africa there's Pick and Pay, checkers and Woolworths, and all three of them have their own in-house banting range and they all have their own names for it. But Woolworths is called the Cobb Clever, pick and Pay, I think, was Cobb Smart, and then Checkers actually launched, in partnership with a colleague of mine, a range called Banting Revolution, and there's this principle in retail. In fact there's a Mexican food maker called El Old El Paso and they were the guys who pioneered it. You know El El Paso.
Speaker 3:So typically your bottles of sauce will go in one part of the supermarket and crisps and chips will be in another area and tortillas or whatever will be somewhere else. And El El Paso were the first people to invent the yellow wool, which meant all of the ingredients from their range were in one place. And so that's something that if you can get a wall of your product, you are absolutely killing it in retail. And my colleague Noel he actually managed to convince Checkers to create a red wall of Banting Revolution products and it was the first time it's happened since El El Paso in South Africa. So Checkers threw a lot of money at it and they had it on the aisle ends, which is one of the best places to merge. And last, and they were these red walls of Banting Revolution products all over Checkers nationwide for a period.
Speaker 1:Now, well, let's talk actionable steps that our listeners can take. I want to go back to something you said about the difference between your ideal of Banting, your ideal of what we would call high fat, low carb or keto. You talked about how it's more about burning your own fat rather than adding fat to our meals. I'm sitting here with my morning coffee that's got coconut oil in it, because, frankly, I like it that way. I've got my plate of bacon right here, because bacon. I think I'm fortunate in that I've seldom ever had a weight issue. You get older and it's easier to pack the pounds on, and I discovered keto early enough that I had managed to just not get heavy. But I'd like you to kind of unpack that idea of it's less about the fat in your food and more about the fat in your body and just actionable steps our listeners can take when it comes time to think about how they're preparing their food.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's so weird I should be able to simplify this and there's so much that, like, I just want to say, it depends, it depends, it depends At the highest level. When it comes to health, my view is that what we need is less. What I've found from even just being part of real meal revolution and also trying to turn it into a business is that most of the things that we can sell are not as important as the things we should be cutting out. So when it comes to people like I'll just talk about my own customers, they'll say well, what supplements do I need, what bars can I eat, what substitute breads can I have, et cetera. And my advice is just live with art bread.
Speaker 3:You don't need supplements. In fact, you would need supplements if you stayed eating the way that you're eating. If you eat like this, you're going to be getting nutrient dense foods. You might need supplements. I'm not bashing supplements. I'm just saying that the basics are often much more important than the extras. I think people misunderstand what the extras are. So my basic basics are to cut out refined food as much as you can.
Speaker 3:I think that we need to talk about budget and lifestyle. If you have a PA and lots of money, lots of money. Then you can eat organic grass-fed beef with like farm butter and kale grown on the Andes mountains. You can go all out and just eat pure and then if you have a chef to cook it for you, it'll never put you out. But I've heard Eric Westman tell people you can have McDonald's and still be keto. You can eat the bun and the pickle. Mcdonald's apparently in the US does a side salad. They don't do that here. So if you just cut out all white foods so that's breads, pastas I think if you quit gluten, you've won half the battle already. And what I find is most people who benefit from keto benefit from quitting gluten as well.
Speaker 3:And if you take all of that away, even if you're drinking diet soda instead of real soda, I think that diet soda is a good stepping stone not necessarily the best thing to have forever, but there's a debate about OK, or the sweetener is worse than the sugar on the long run.
Speaker 3:But if what you're trying to do is reduce your blood sugar and get into ketosis, I'm like have the diet soda and let's cut out as much as we can without putting you out, and once you're in fat burning mode. We can sculpt around the edges of the lifestyle changes to get you as close to your optimal best. So optimal best is when you're eating real food only and no refined carbohydrates, and you're burning your body's fuel for fat. That is the sort of the holy grail where we all aspire to be, but it's very unrealistic. Most of us will never get there. The best thing you can do is keep your carbohydrates low, and you can do that without being too hardcore with the quality of the ingredients. And once your carbohydrates are low, your in ketosis, burning fat. Then it's time to look at where else you can make changes to improve the quality that you're getting.
Speaker 1:What do you tell folks? Low means in terms of the daily carbohydrate intake.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 3:So we have a couple of programs. The strict program would say, if you're trying to reverse diabetes or you want to lose weight fast, we say under 40 grams of total cob or under 25 grams of net cobs, depending on which way you're tracking it. And then, when I'm coaching someone who's got time, I think that there's a psychology piece I just want to talk about quickly as well, and that is that someone will take 30 years to put on the weight that they have and then they'll want to lose it in six months, and I think that's what leads to your dieting. If you're going to take your time and actually put some time into practicing these lifestyle changes, instead of going in white, knuckling it, getting to goal and then thinking once you cross the finish line, you can walk, the chances are you're going to bounce back. So if someone insists I have to lose all this weight as fast as possible, then I'm like okay, go all in, go strict keto. Please listen to what I'm saying about permanent lifestyle change and understand that it's unlikely that it will stick unless you have a medical diagnosis that scares you into like lasting change. But typically that doesn't happen. Typically, people who want to lose weight will be desperate to lose weight but not scared enough or shocked enough to make a permanent change.
Speaker 3:So if you wanted to make a permanent change and you had time, say one of the things I always do is say, okay, well, let's manage your expectations. And I say how much longer do you want to live for? And people say 20, 30, 40 years. And then I say okay, and what's the longest it could possibly ever take you to lose this weight? And then they'll say, okay, maybe it's three years. And I say, okay, well, if you've got 30 years left to live and you take three years of that time to get to your weight but you actually lose it slowly and you make it stick, so it actually lasts forever, that means you've got 90% of your remaining life to live, literally at your best, your best life. That's like an A++ at school for living your best life. So what if we just take the pressure off and focus on making smaller habit changes but make sure that you actually the habits, the habit changes that you make, actually stick like let's, let's do that.
Speaker 3:And if the if I get there by and then they say, yes, okay, I'm sold, I will do that, then we start small and I have this kind of traffic light system where we have a red list and then a light red list and then and then an orange list and then a green list. And the green list is all keto foods green vegetables, meats. The orange list is starchy vegetables and fruits and some nuts, so you can't have those on keto but in limited amounts. And then the light red list is high carb foods that are gluten free and the red list is all the known as highly processed foods, gluten foods, sugar foods, etc. And then I say, okay, well, let's just quit one food on the red list, like one group. So let's let's quit, like sugar loaded sodas and and maybe let's quit white factory bread, wonder bread. And people will just do that and I will see them two weeks later and they are. They can't believe how good they feel.
Speaker 3:So sometimes small changes can make a make a huge difference. I mean, if you cut out cheap sandwich bread and sugar soda and you've been drinking I don't know half a gallon of soda a day and you know six slices of white bread, if you cut that out, you are going to feel amazing, like long before you go into keto and that's sustainable. You know you can. You can sustain that for a while, and so my view is that the weight you lose only counts if you lose it, if you keep it off, and so we should be. We should be trying to to do that. Like not how can I lose weight fast? How can I lose a little bit of weight that I never put back on again? I think that calls for a different approach.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's very insightful. I want to talk a little bit more about sort of the business aspect of this. You know, maybe touch on what you're doing, but just get your perspective on that challenge of you know, one of the reasons I think that poor health is so persistent and you can look at the food that goes into this and the farm, us pseudocals and just the health care system in general is because people are making a lot of money off of it, to be honest, and you know trying to figure out how to make money off of you know, just eat real food and being healthy and not needing all of those things that you talked about the supplements and the medications and you know all of that is a challenge. So talk about your perspective on that a little bit about what you've been doing, you know, since the book came out and you know where we go from there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so one of the first things that happened when the book came out is, as I mentioned, there was a zero missing from one of the recipes and it was actually for water. So it was supposed to be 500 milliliters of water, which is two cups, and ended up being 50 milliliters of water, which is I don't know, it's like an ounce and a half of water. So it's a significant change to the recipe. And the publishers started getting emails and I put up a website at realmealrevolutioncom, and the main purpose of the restaurant was to offer people advice who were getting it wrong.
Speaker 3:So you know, we made a few of the staple foods badly. So one of the staples was double thick yogurt and a lot of women battle with dairy. A lot of people were eating too much yogurt, they weren't using weight, and so we put up this blog post which I wrote called the 10 Commandments of Beginner Banting, and then we actually put that in into the later print runs of the book because we realized the advice we put into the book wasn't actually sufficient to help people. And then there was this errata on the book and I was following some web guy and basically put a blocker, or I think it's called a pop up or a blocker on the web page and it just said lose weight and transform your health. You know, fill in your details below and then. And then the one button said yes, sign me up, and the other button said no, thanks, I don't need to lose any weight and I'm in root health on the button.
Speaker 1:So the persuasion technique there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and that was the only button you could push to like close the blocker, and then and then. So about about a couple months later I was trying to monetize the thing and I earned all the trademarks and I was thinking, okay, well, how can we do this turn into a business? And I went to some friends of mine who had an IT company and I said, look guys, let's, let's talk. And they said, well, do you have Google Analytics? And I didn't even know if I had it and they opened it up and I was getting about 30,000 unique users a month on the website, which quite good in South Africa, and then they looked at my yeah yeah, it was, I was, I couldn't, I didn't.
Speaker 3:He looked at him and he was going like this, like looking at the screen, and I said to him is that good or bad? I don't know what's going on. He said no, dude, this is ridiculous.
Speaker 1:And then he looked at my emails and I had collected 12,000 email addresses and I didn't even know that I had them, and so they said okay, there's there's a million internet entrepreneurs who are listening to this, who are pulling their hair out because they followed all the rules and all the stories and and they know all of this stuff and they've had four people sign up over the last 15 years and what are you like? And so this is just fun. I'm sorry, keep going.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we had. So we had these 12,000 or 11,000 email addresses and and we decided we're going to put together an online course. And and in fact I have a mentor who had a business selling online courses, who he actually sold his company to a NASDAQ listed company for over $100 million and he was mentoring me at the time and he said I was going to, I was going to sell advertising on my website. And he said, dude, just sell an actual thing, sell a course. You know you'll wait for events to make money advertising, sell something. So, okay, I sold this course. And then we put together this course. These guys, the tech company, they built a whole platform with meal tracking tools and it was a really, really good system. And and then they, they had this goal. They said we want to reach capacity, which was 200 people for the course, but we don't want to spend any money on advertising. And so all they did was they sent out two newsletters to this database and before we'd spent, before we'd even paid the invoice to film all the video footage for the course we had brought in. What was it At that time?
Speaker 3:It was like $60,000 in the first, in the first month, of that first mail blast. So it was a kind of overnight success. That business, and that's been the business since then. Suddenly enough, it didn't ever get much bigger than that. It kind of just stayed at that because that was kind of peak that launched late. What was that? Late 2014. So I think the first course we ran October 2014. And then it's and that's been running ever since and that's been the main business and and what's interesting is I mean I can tell you so much about the nature of customers who pay different amounts and invest different amounts and have different levels of support. In fact, I'll talk about that just now if you want.
Speaker 3:But but the monetizing, the movement when the when the movement's really about not buying stuff has been incredibly difficult and I found my, my can I say that my integrity being tested a lot because on the one side, I want to say you don't need to buy all this stuff, but on the other, I want to say, well, if you are going to buy it from me rather, instead of buying it from from other people, and I'll tell you like the good thing to buy, and I could just never get my header on it. So I have. I have launched my online store three or four times and we've listed products like collagen supplements, and every time I've launched it I've had the stock in the warehouse and I've had the items on the store and I've just really battled to kind of pick up my phone and video myself holding the product and said, guys, you've got to do this. I don't know why. I just I really really battle to do that. So I think I probably get in my own way in that in that regard, because I could help someone else sell this up easily. I just really battle there. So I think in that regard, the business could be much bigger, much, much bigger, if I had gone that route and done branded products and that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:We also one of them. I don't know if it was a mistake, but one of the things that we said in the book was that the gold standard I was talking about earlier, the everything should be grass-fed and organic and everything. And to launch a profitable, successful range in South Africa when there's such a tiny percentage of the people who can afford food like that is high risk and also the likelihood of it being affordable even for the wealthy is low, because the packaging would have to be in alignment with everything we've said as well. And we've said you know, no plastic, all this stuff's bad. So we almost, like, preached ourselves out of the market in a way and maybe that's me getting in my own way again. We could have just come out and said, well, this is the best we can do, let someone else sell the plastic.
Speaker 1:You got to realize. You're on a podcast with a guy who makes his money cutting people's chests open. The podcast is specifically about how to not become one of his customers. Yeah, so that's, you know, a demonstration of integrity. Yeah, I'd make money if you would ignore me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're in good company then.
Speaker 2:So you get it, yeah it's definitely a struggle that I understand well and you know I just think about on the big scale thing. You know how we're really going to because you know ultimately it is follow the money and the money is very much behind, keeping people unhealthy, unfortunately. And I think I like to think that integrity like you're talking about can can conquer that, and that's sort of the mission that we're all on together.
Speaker 3:Totally Like my last piece on lifestyle change. Maybe it's not my last, but what I've found is when people so firstly the economics in general people want as little pain and discomfort over as little time as possible with as much impact as possible. So if they can get a huge impact with little pain and little and over a short amount of time, they will pay a ton of money for it. In fact, I pitched a woman in San Francisco and she's had a tormented relationship with food for a very long time, and I pitched her a coaching program and at the time it was a $2,000 program. I said to her you know, work with me, I'll work with you on a relationship with food, and that's the psychology stuff, not just teaching you how to do keto. And she said well, I'm really hard at the moment, I'm really worried about cash.
Speaker 3:And I said, okay, that's cool, we can pick it up later, but I'm glad we had the conversation and I spoke to her a week later and she said I've decided I'm going to have a tummy tuck and a boob job, which, as far as I understand, is like $10,000. And so that, for me, was the perfect example of human behavior. It's like well, you know that's John, like working with John and it sounds like work that's going to take forever. I'm just going to go for surgery. That sounds much easier and it's worth the money. So what I have fun is that when people spend a lot of money like a lot of money on a personal development product, they take it very seriously and it's all and I've said that, when I've been in sales calls with people and I've said, okay, this is.
Speaker 3:I do some executive coaching for CEOs and stuff as well, and I say to them this is the price. And they say, do you take a payment plan or something? And I said no, it's upfront. And they said that's quite steep. And I say yeah, it's supposed to hurt, because if it hurts you're going to be invested. It's also quite a good sales pitch. But but you say oh, it's going to.
Speaker 1:I'd like to, I'd like to put a pin in it right there. If it hurts, you're going to be invested, and that's from a psychological standpoint, and I'm talking into all of us now. We all really want to make changes, except if it actually requires any pain or effort, and just you know we can get, get that into your head. It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt. In fact, if it doesn't hurt, it's pro. Feel when you lost 100 pounds how much fun was it? Was it super easy and effortless and just were you just having the time of your life completely changing how you ate?
Speaker 2:Of course not, but it was actually easier because you know this approach. Comparing it to you know, other times it hurt a lot more. When I was trying to do it by calorie counting and you know a low fat diet, you know, when. One of the advantages I think we have with this approach is, you know, I tell people, well, you can pretty much eat all the steak and eggs you want, you know, and the bacon, like you said. You know your bacon and your coconut oil coffee doesn't really hurt that bad and it turns out to be better for your health. But yeah, my experience with working with people is exactly that. You know they just want to remain in their comfort zone, and their comfort zone is, you know, being unhealthy and just eating what's easy all around them. You know, because it's not easy to avoid the other stuff, I guess is really where the pain comes from, so because it's so ubiquitous around us. So that's, that's, you know, what people need to understand. You know what I tell people is. You know this is simple. It's just not easy.
Speaker 2:There you go, it's kind of the way I look at it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, johnno, we're, you know we've got, we've got a worldwide audience, but it's primarily in America. Well, folks, how they can find out more about Johnno Proudfoot's real meal revolution, and folks are going to want to, are going to want to dig into this, and you've said a lot of things that are that are going to appeal to a pretty wide segment of our audience.
Speaker 3:Sure, thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great. I kind of feel like I want to ask a whole lot of questions to you guys as well, and so my you can reach me on JohnnoProudfootcom. If you want to reach out, there's a form there and just pop me an email. You can follow me on Instagram, which is at JohnnoProudfoot, and, and then if for coaching, I'm quite active on LinkedIn as well Same name. And then if you want to get onto the Qto diet and check out my program and my books, you can go to realmealrevolutioncom and you can download our free the lists that I was talking about, the traffic light system. You can download that for free, and then we send a few emails with some great advice on adapting to Qto. So that's realmealrevolutioncom.
Speaker 1:Well, that stuff will all appear in the show notes, so folks can just click on it and get there. Phil, you want to take any questions from Johnno?
Speaker 2:I think we're going to have Johnno back for round two to flip the tables maybe. But I do want to just kind of put another plug in, I guess, for the book, because, you know, I mean, I've, at this point, read a lot of books on low carb keto and I do think that this book was somewhat unique. You know the combination of the science and the history that Tim Nook's bought to it, combined with, you know, your great recipes, and so I do encourage people to check it out. You know, because maybe the book's 10 years old now. It may have gotten a little bit, you know, lost, but it's worth checking out for people. Even if you are, you know, like me, experienced in this and think you know at all. There's always more to learn and a different perspective on it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I really appreciate that, Thanks, thanks, phil.
Speaker 1:All right, so we have. We've at least semi-officially agreed we're going to have him back. I was, my wife and I were talking about a special dinner coming up here in a couple of weeks, and I was. I wanted to. I wanted to have a special dessert, but something that I'll I'll feel good after I eat it rather than just thinking about eating it. So I know that limits my, my choices. I'm assuming there's really awesome desserts that I could make in there, right, Right, no.
Speaker 3:That's. A lot of people asked us about the. Have you got time for like a quick, like three minute story? Sure, sure. So when the book came out, that was one of the questions we got. So they said where are the, where are the desserts? And there are two recipes in the book for that. Use these keto flowers.
Speaker 3:So we used I made a blueberry, what do you call pancakes? So we call them flapjacks or crumpets, but pancakes, so the blueberry pancake, and then, I think, a strawberry one as well. And they use coconut and almond flour. But coconut and almond flour didn't appear on the traffic light lists in the first book and there were no desserts. So there was no guidance around desserts. But we had also said you could use erythritol, xylitol, and and stevia, which I'm not a huge fan of. But that's what happened on the book.
Speaker 3:And then everybody started trying to figure out well, okay, these flowers are not on the list, but they're in the book and you can use these sweeteners. And there was just an absolute like uprising of these keto desserts, keto cheesecakes, keto cakes made with almond flour and and, and we call it xylitol, and and all these berries and stuff. And someone even wrote a banding. It's actually called the banding baker, I think, which is like a keto dessert book. And my publisher said oh, we're launching this banding dessert book. And Tim and I just said well, there are no desserts in banding. We've never written a dessert recipe ever, so, so that's like an oxymoron. You know, a banding dessert. So that's that's our stance.
Speaker 1:That said so, if I dipped a, if I dipped a frozen stick of butter into some melted chocolate, am I going to be close? Yeah, so that that's.
Speaker 3:That is a huge conversation, but what I will say is no, no, so that. So here's the thing. Here's the thing, okay, for me it's it's not so much about sticking to the rules, it's about the outcome. If the outcome you want is to manage your waste and be healthy, then do what you can within the rules. Well then, make, then set the rules according to that outcome. And, and so I.
Speaker 3:Actually, before I came on, I'm wearing a glucose monitor at the moment, and before I came on, I ate a marshmallow Easter egg and I wanted to see what it did to my blood glucose because I've been fasting all day. So let's have a go and let's have a look, see what it says. Because, yeah, it says my blood sugar is fine. I have an 84 metabolic score, and I don't know if you can see on the screen here, but it's gone out of range. So that for me was that. Like for me, in my metabolism, that's, that's out of range. But and we'll see how fast it comes down but that means I can probably eat one of those every now and then and not die, and and so it's up to you, you know, jack, like if you want to have a dessert and you know you won't die, then I think you should have one.
Speaker 1:OK, All right. Well, I guess that's as good as we're going to do today. This has been terrific. Thanks so much, John Phil it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Let's get this guy back on and after he's come up with a way to make all the desserts that I want to have and still get away with no, all right, john has got a great, got a great perspective on getting healthy, all right. Well, for Dr Philip Ovedia and John O Proudfoot, this has been the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast. We look forward to talking to John next time and we will see you all later. Thanks so much. Bye, guys.