Real food on trial: sit back, listen to the full story

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By Marika Sboros

Real Food On Trial is now available on audio from US-based Tantor Media. The sub-title speaks volumes: How The Diet Dictators Tried To Destroy A Distinguished Scientist

I am co-author with South African scientist Prof Tim Noakes. Real Food On Trial (Columbus 2018) is an update of the original, Lore Of Nutrition, Challenging Conventional Dietary Beliefs (Penguin 2017) with new content.

That includes the resolution of a remarkable journey: One man’s victory over powerful, entrenched, vested interests in medical and dietetic establishments and food and drug industries. It is the multi-million trial and academic mobbing in South Africa of Noakes, a University of Cape Town (UCT) emeritus professor and medical doctor.

All over his promotion of robust science for low-carbohydrate, high-healthy-fat therapies (LCHF).

Both versions of our book are long, dense reads with extensive scientific evidence, references and indexing.

The audio version allows you to sit back and listen to the outstanding, international voice actors narrate Noakes’s trial journey and what precipitated it.

Click here to read: Academic mobbing at UCT: a shocking, neverending story?

 

Dennis Kleinman narrates Tim Noakes

Tantor’s choice of US voice actor Dennis Kleinman to read Noakes’s chapters is inspired on many levels. Nature endowed him with a rich, resonant voice, full of depth and substance.

Dennis Kleinman

Kleinman was born in Cape Town where Noakes lives and works. Like Noakes, he is a UCT graduate, as were his parents and an uncle who was a medical doctor.

And like Noakes, Kleinman has a natural antipathy towards injustice, prejudice, bigotry, bullying and discrimination.

He is the son of Jewish-South African artist Ilse Kleinman. She emigrated to South Africa with her parents from Germany in 1933, aged eight. They were among the lucky ones who escaped the Holocaust.

However, they lost extended family members to Hitler’s genocidal “final solution” for Jews.

Against that horrifying background, Kleinman grew up in a liberal family in South Africa actively opposed to the apartheid regime. They were staunch supporters of the then Progressive Party, now the country’s main opposition Democratic Party.

Kleinman counts himself lucky to have grown up without TV – that only arrived in SA in 1976. Until then, radio was the only available form of public broadcast entertainment. Radio developed his fertile imagination, he says. It translated into natural talents for acting, creating “skits” and using his voice to mimic accents and dialects to delight and entertain family and friends.

Gravitating naturally towards voice acting

From a young age, Kleinman wanted to be in entertainment. His parents were always supportive – and concerned about his prospects.

He chose to do a BA in psychology, sociology and social anthropology at UCT. Kleinman considered becoming a clinical psychologist courtesy of an “intuitive nature” that draws him to working with people.

He also had no intention of serving in South Africa’s apartheid army. After university, therefore, he emigrated to the US in 1980.

Click here to read: Noakes trial: Who REALLY dishes up dangerous advice?

 

Kleinman worked initially in sales and the construction industry before “gravitating naturally towards” voice acting.  He recalled a comment someone once made that he had a “marvellous voice and should consider voice acting”.

He considered acting on camera but found voice acting more challenging. It is arguably “more difficult” than on-camera acting because of the range of demands, he says.

It also doesn’t come easily. You need the talent, and of course a “good voice”, Kleinman says.

What Real Food On Trial taught Kleinman

But it’s one thing to have a good voice and another to be a good voice actor. That requires knowing how to “use your voice”, to listen, emote, understand and know intuitively what a client wants. And how to take direction and turn all that into delivery that attracts listeners.

When Tantor offered Kleinman the commission to narrate Real Food On Trial, he accepted without hesitation.

“I learn from non-fiction books but being a Capetonian and a UCT graduate, I was particularly excited.”

Kleinman found it “fascinating to read how we evolved as humans to eat meat. And that a high-fat diet is actually a perfectly natural aspect of our lives – or should be.”

He also recalls a growing sense of shock at so many prominent UCT academics involved in mobbing Noakes.

“I could hardly believe what I was reading,” Kleinman says.

“My family has a long history with UCT. I remember as a child, driving along the motorway, looking up and seeing the majesty of the campus. As a UCT student, I had a sense of the importance and gravitas of the institution.

“Real Food On Trial shattered all my illusions.”

Why did UCT allow the mobbing of Noakes?

Just as disturbing for him was to realise that academic mobbing is not restricted to UCT, once the jewel in South Africa’s research crown. Real Food On Trial has opened up a “Pandora’s box” for scientific and medical fraternities worldwide, Kleinman says.

It highlights the poisonous influence of Big Pharma on academia. And it shows that academic mobbing is likely to infect universities globally, including Ivy League US institutions.

“It was clear to me that Professor Noakes was looking at the medical and scientific facts on nutrition. He was debating unemotionally as a scientist. The vitriol that UCT and other doctors and scientists aimed at him was unprofessional, personal and emotional.

“I found it deeply disappointing that UCT allowed the mobbing. UCT did nothing to stop it – and still does nothing.”

Corrie James reads Marika Sboros in Real Food On Trial

Tantor’s choice of British-born Corrie James to narrate my chapters in Real Food On Trial is similarly inspired.

Corrie James

James grew up mostly in the northeast of England, in Newcastle on Tyne, and has always loved theatre.

Television “didn’t happen” in her house – until someone gave them “a tiny set on which to watch the coronation of Elizabeth II (in 1953)”.

Radio plays, quiz shows, discussions, music request programmes were part of her daily soundscape. That status quo remains and whenever James is in the UK, the radio is on.

And yes, it’s on Radio4, which she says probably makes her a “luvvie”. In the US, James listens to BBC programmes on Tune In.

From teaching to narrating

James trained as a teacher specializing in drama and, not surprisingly, worked in radio in the UK. After marrying US ophthalmologist Dr Alden James and moving to Detroit, she had a brief spell as a DJ on an AM radio station.

The couple moved to Maryland and started a family. James began recording audiobooks for the Library of Congress Program for the Blind at a studio in Bethesda. Later, she later installed a studio at home and began recording books in different genres.

James accepted the commission to read Real Food On Trial because the subject immediately interested her. Her daughter Clementine lives in Johannesburg. And when James told her that the next book she was narrating was on LCHF, Clementine replied: “Oh yes, Banting!” (LCHF is popularly known as Banting in South Africa).

James says that Real Food On Trial promotes “very different dietary advice” from the advice a paediatrician gave when her children were little. The paediatrician also told her to feed her children 2% (low-fat) milk. And no more than one egg a week.

Upending the US ‘Food Pyramid’

And when all three of her children competed in regattas, their coaches urged them to fill up on “friendly carbs”. That was to “give them energy”.

James has always considered her family’s diet as “pretty healthy. They have always eaten chicken, fish, not much red meat, veggies, and not too much sugar”.

Narrating Real Food On Trial made her look at the official US Food Pyramid dietary guidelines in “a very different light”. Noakes gives “compelling scientific reasons for doubting the Pyramid’s construction”, she says.

James is now “consciously reducing wheat” in the family’s diet. She and her husband also now eat more steak. He was “delighted” when she bought full-fat milk “instead of the 2% that he complained about for years”.

On Noakes’s trial, James declares herself “appalled at the hounding of this man by his academic peers”. She describes my chapters on the HPCSA hearings as “a detailed and compelling account of this tale of injustice and the arduous journey to clear Professor Noakes name and give credit to his research and findings”.

James hopes that her and Kleinman’s voices will “make this story more easily accessible to those who quail at the number of pages”.

 

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3 Comments

  1. Hi Marika – could you tell me whether this update of the Lore of Nutrition differs much with regard to Part 3 – i.e. Chapters 16 & 17?

    Although the whole book was very interesting to read, my takeaways all come from the final part of the book – The Science

    Algy

    • Hi Algy, Real Food On Trial does have new content. That includes a chapter on the final appeal hearing that exonerated Prof Noakes completely – and showed that LCHF is not a fad or dangerous for adults or babies! There is also much more new evidence to the chapters on science (now Chapters 17 and 18, after the added appeal chapter). And there is a new foreword by extreme swimmer and UN Patron of the Oceans. And I have added info to the final chapter that pulls all the book’s threads together. Thank you for your support!

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