Tim Noakes

Timothy David Noakes (born 1949) is a South African scientist and an emeritus professor in the Division of Exercise Science and Sports Medicine at the University of Cape Town. He has run more than 70 marathons and ultramarathons and is the author of several books on exercise and diet. He is known for his work in sports science and for his support of a low-carbohydrate, high-fat (LCHF, Banting) diet, as set out in his books The Real Meal Revolution and Lore of Nutrition: Challenging Conventional Dietary Beliefs.

Noakes was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (today Harare, Zimbabwe), in 1949 and moved to South Africa at the age of five. His father had arrived in what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1946, establishing a successful tobacco exporting company that he sold in 1954. As a young boy, his main sporting interest was cricket. Noakes attended boarding school at Monterey Preparatory School in Constantia, Cape Town.

One year was spent as a foreign exchange student at Huntington Park High School in Huntington Park, California. Diocesan College followed prep school. He has earned an MBChB (1974), MD (1981), and DSc (Med) (2002). In 1980 Noakes was tasked to start a sports science course at the University of Cape Town. Noakes went on to head the Medical Research Council-funded Bioenergetics of Exercise Research Unit, which was later changed to the MRC/UCT Research Unit for Exercise Science and Sports Medicine.

In the early 1990s, Noakes co-founded the Sports Science Institute of South Africa with former South African rugby player Morne du Plessis. He is a leading researcher on the condition now known as exercise-associated hyponatremia (EAH). He first recognized this condition in a female runner during the 1984 Comrades Marathon and published his findings in 1985 in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. Noakes hosted the 1st International Exercise-Associated Hyponatremia Consensus Development Conference in Cape Town in May 2005.

In 1996 Noakes published his theory of the "central governor." The theory proposed that fatigue is a "protective emotion" rather than a physiological state. In 2005 he undertook a series of experiments in the Arctic and Antarctic on South African (British-born) swimmer Lewis Gordon Pugh to understand the human capability in extreme cold. He discovered that Pugh had the ability to raise his core body temperature before entering the water in anticipation of the cold and coined the phrase 'anticipatory thermogenesis to describe it. In 2007, Noakes was the expedition doctor for Pugh's one-kilometer swim at the Geographic North Pole.