Eat Better South Africa! was born out of community and collaboration. It wasn’t what we first imagined those months ago when Prof Noakes introduced us, and soon after Hassina Kajee, Euodia Samson and I sat around a table at Knead dreaming up our visions for the community.
Other than each having changed our lives as Banters, we all had one other critical common vision: to find a way to help those most affected by bad diets and lack of dietary education in our country. We all wanted to help the poorest. We all knew that the poorest need dietary help and education fast. We each had our own areas of focus. I wanted The Noakes Foundation to really make a difference to those needing the most help with the least access to proper healthcare and community advice. I also knew that our research we funded needed to start looking at the realities of our unique country in a more holistic way.
By holistic, I mean in a real and pragmatic way. Clinical trials are necessary and imperative. However, these research studies take a long time to conduct and also requires a huge amount of money. An example of this is our Diabetes Reversal trial we will commence in January 2016. It will take three years and cost in excess of R10million.
This trial is critical work needing to be done and will be conducted by a team of expert scientists, doctors and dieticians. It has grounds for the medical community to change the larger scale future of food and eating. Our concern was for those that couldn’t wait three years. Like many of us suffering from insulin resistance, high blood pressure and diabetes, three years is simply too far into the future to wait to change our destinies and health.
We needed to change, now, and did it ourselves to save ourselves.
South Africa needs change, now, and needs to do it for themselves to save oursevles. We simply cannot wait ten years for the Department of Health to realise their errors with dietary guidance and we can’t rely on big buisness to start selling us what is healthy at the cost of massive profits.
Hassina’s interests as a clinician in the heart of Groote Schuur are and were around patient care, including research. She is building a body of evidence around the LCHF lifestyle as prescriptive for her own patients. Hassina is catalysing change through an incredible team of doctors and nurses who too know the problems patients are facing due to poor diets.
Euodia’s passion is for communities. She knows the life so many lead, sees it daily and is the most incredible role model. Euodia lights up a room with her Banting stories and her practical ways of talking to people about diet.
The dream team was born and Ocean View said yes so quickly; they were committed and jumped on board so quickly and changed the state of their health so quickly. It was like it happened without us needing to even facilitate the programme. Soon after we realised we couldn’t call this initiative Project Ocean View forever nor Ground Zero, which we knew it was for dietary education in South Africa.
We decided that the message and learning from our pilot was simple: EAT BETTER SOUTH AFRICA!
Since Ocean View, we have carried on by nearly completing programmes in Delft, Lavender Hill and Villiersdorp. The results have been dramatic and better than we imagined; the country and world have noticed this incredible work. We are inundated with people coming to us asking us to go to their communities, companies and even countries to support them to change the way they eat.
Eat Better South Africa! is here to stay. We are passionate and committed to taking this programme to at least one community per province, but ideally we would like to have more over the course of next year. To do this, we need one simple thing:
R100 or more from every person whose life has been affected or improved by Banting.
We know there are far more than 15,000 of you out there so we are sure to exceed our target, further and wider than we ever imagined. If you know one person whose life Banting and the Real Meal Revolution has helped, and are able to give back; now is your opportunity to do this.
You simply need to go to the below Back-A-Buddy link and donate your R100. When you do this, please comment in the field on which community (or province if you don’t have specific community in mind) that you wish to give your donation to so that we can track and decide where to go first.
http://www.backabuddy.co.za/champion/project/eat-better-south-africa
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