Dr. Timothy Noakes has dedicated his life to uncovering the truth about health and exercise advice. At TEDxCapeTown, he explained how many of the popular recommendations and guidelines for how to be healthy — from diet advice to instructions for proper hydration — aren’t supported by even basic scientific research.
From his talk:
The [question] that I really got involved with in the 1980s was: Should we drinking more or less during exercise?
…In the 1960s, it was held that if you drank that actually if you drank during exercise, that wasn’t a very good idea. And Abebe Bikila, who was the first African runner to win two Olympic gold medals in the 1960 and the 1964 Olympic marathons, he ran both races without drinking anything.That was what runners did those days.
Then, all of a sudden, in the 1960s and 1970s, things changed and we were told that if you didn’t drink enough, you were going to die during exercise.
…In 1981, on the first of June, 1981, an athlete started the Comrades Marathon in Bourbon and she reached 70 km and her husband withdrew her from the race because she didn’t recognize him…within two hours, she was unconscious having epileptic seizures and she had to be taken to a hospital in Bourbon. And when she was admitted to hospital, she became the first case of this condition: [exercise-associated hyponatremic encephalopathy (EAHE)]… Her chest X-ray [showed] that [she had] fluid in her lungs and it took five days later before the fluid had gone out of her lungs.
…Over the next four or five years, we picked up a couple more cases and worked out that they had probably overdrunk and that — in other words — they’d [drank] too much during exercise … So the more you overdrink, the lower your sodium, and the sicker you were. And we published that in 1991, and thought, “That’s the end of the problem. We cured the problem. We know what causes it: it’s overdrinking.”
And we thought the problem would go away. But, unfortunately, at the same time that we were doing that, industry had come along and said, “No, actually, the more you drink, the better.”
…And we predicted what would happen. We predicted this would happen: The accumulative incidence of this condition, which had never existed before 1981, never existed — there were a total of 1,600 cases in the medical literature…and, tragically, 12 deaths. All completely avoidable.
And so what happened was that the sports drink industry came along and then they influenced the official drinking guidelines drawn up by official bodies. And those promoted overdrinking.
Then a lady died in the Boston Marathon in 2002, and in 2003 I was invited by two organizations to produce alternate drinking guidelines, which promoted drinking to thirst, and that finally has now been accepted that that is the way we should be drinking.
…The “science of hydration” is utterly bogus. There is no science to it. It was dreamed up by marketers to sell a product.
For more of Dr. Noakes’s research into health and exercise claims, watch his entire talk “Challenging the myths of good health” below:
Young people are more curious about the outside world, they are looking for meaning, they are looking for purpose in life and TEDx gives them so much rich content. The ideas focus on social problems right now and philosophy questions we don’t really mention in our schools, and we think that young people really like it because they can learn something and it’s quick.
Why is Super Mario Bros. so popular? Like a lot of video games, the reason for its popularity is that it really plays off of a sense of adventure and curiosity.
If you hit on that question mark, a gold coin emerges. If you know where to look in that cloud, there’s a special reward, and if you have the guts and the curiosity to think about what’s in that green pipe, a whole new exciting world emerges.
…Similarly, New York City, where I live, is a city that has quite a few distractions, and excitement, and things to explore at street-level. And many New Yorkers really think about their streetscape as the city, and they think about the underground as a dark, nasty, smelly place that you go to — maybe — to go on the subway. But it’s not really a space of any value. There’s not really anything to explore.
…There’s actually 13 acres of unused spaces underneath New York City…[and the Lowline] is an effort to build the first underground park [underneath the city].
—From Dan Barasch’s TEDxEastHampton talk, “Imagining the Lowline,” about his and his partner’s plan to transform a long-abandoned trolley station beneath Delancey Street in Manhattan into a dreamy retreat from the noise, litter, and clamor of the city above. Watch Dan’s entire talk here »
(Photos, clockwise from top: Flickr user Jack Siah; Flickr user jcoterhals; Flickr user MichaelTapp; Flickr user clevercupcakes)
Epilepsy is a really, really common problem… [There are] 60 million people worldwide with epilepsy… [and only] about two-thirds are adequately treated with currently available medication…
The medications carry their own special problems. We’ve got to ingest these medications that soak your whole body and brain — and your body doesn’t like them. They cause bad side effects, most particularly, side effects in the central nervous system. They slow your mind; they affect your ability to perform; and as well they have lots of other effects: tension on the liver, bones, and other tissue. So, they’re not good drugs.
…A lot of the problem with epilepsy relates to its unpredictability … we have to soak people in medications to prevent seizures that might be occurring only for a few minutes a year, but in those few minutes, disrupts their entire life. Prevents them from driving. Stops them working. Threatens their safety. Costs their life sometimes. So the unpredictability is a major part of the disability …it necessitates chronic drug administration for an intermittent problem…
So we’ve been working with a group based in the United States around seizure prediction and this has brought some really unique insights: [A person has a box implanted] — which sits underneath their clavicle, their collarbone — which records information that is drawn from these electrodes that we’ve placed over their brain through a hole that we’ve made in their skull…It transmits information to a small pager-sized device that they hold and that has a series of lights on it: a blue light to indicate a very low risk of seizures, a white light for a moderate risk, and a red light for a very high risk for seizures…And this, if effective, would remove a lot of the disability for people. It might let them get to work, play sports — conceivably — even drive. It might be that you can provide therapies when their status changes on the recording…Suddenly, this changes everything.…Conceivably we could construct polymer implants, which could not only release [an anticonvulsant] drug, but detect the seizure, and use the energy in the seizure itself to release the therapy. And this would be remarkable.
Mark Cook, chair of medicine and director of neurosciences at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, speaks at TEDxUWollongong on his research on developing new treatments for epilepsy. Watch his whole talk here »
