National Breastfeeding Month is a good excuse to ask a bigger question than “breast or bottle.” What actually happens in those first months and years that sets the course for a child’s health decades later? To mark the week, Azza Motara, Scientific Education Specialist and Clinical Dietitian at Nutrition Network sat down with Prof Tim Noakes, one of the most influential voices in sports science and metabolic health, for a live conversation about early infant nutrition, why weaning onto animal foods was the historical norm rather than the exception and what the science of sugar addiction means for the way we feed our children today.
The Original Weaning Diet
Prof Noakes opened with a question he likes to pose to audiences: how do you think children were raised for most of human history? Not on grains and cereals, he argues, but on animal produce and whatever the mother could provide. It’s a claim he’s paid a professional price for. His own clinical trial and the subsequent misconduct charges against him centred on exactly this idea, that infants should be weaned onto meat, fat and other animal foods rather than starches. He points out that no evidence was ever produced showing this advice was wrong and that it lines up with South Africa’s own paediatric guidelines.
The historical case, he says, comes from dentist and researcher Weston Price, who in the 1930s noticed that children’s faces and teeth were changing shape and that dental decay was rising. Price travelled the world seeking out populations still eating their traditional diets and found they were taller, stronger, had fewer chronic diseases and had well developed facial structure. Populations raised on grain-heavy diets, Noakes argues, tend to be shorter and less healthy over the long term.
It Starts Before Birth
The conversation moved quickly from weaning to what happens even earlier. Prof Noakes was clear that a mother’s diet during pregnancy shapes her child’s metabolic future well before breast is offered. Insulin doesn’t cross the placenta, but glucose and ketones do, so a mother eating a high refined carbohydrate diet exposes her baby in utero to elevated glucose and insulin signalling. That exposure is linked to a higher lifelong risk of obesity, type-two diabetes and insulin resistance in later life. The message is that metabolic health doesn’t begin at birth. It begins at conception, continues through pregnancy and extends through breastfeeding, when the infant continues to pick up flavour cues and metabolic signals from what the mother eats.
Manufacturing Sugar Addiction
Ask Prof Noakes what has fundamentally changed across generations and he doesn’t hesitate: sugar consumption. Children today, he argues, are made sugar addicted from a very young age, walking into shops lined with ultra-processed food and sugar before they can read. Weaning foods based on grains are bland on their own, so they get made palatable with sugar and from there children move on to sweet snacks that get treated as harmless treats.
“It’s not a treat. It’s a drug,” he said, describing his own history as a former sugar addict and the months of hard work it took him to break the habit. He contrasted this with his own childhood, when sweets were a once a week event and sugary drinks were reserved for special occasions rather than offered every few minutes. His conclusion is blunt: get the grains and the sugar out of a young child’s diet, because the industry supplying those products has no incentive to help anyone stop eating them or an interest in the health of that child now and for the future.
Can You Breastfeed on a Low Carb Diet?
The practicalities on whether it is considered safe for a breastfeeding mother to follow a strict ketogenic diet was addressed and it was advised that a whole food low carb approach is preferable and there’s no need to chase very high ketone levels deliberately. If a mother is eating this way, her body will produce ketones as a natural result. The goal, in his words, is to be reasonable rather than extreme.
Food Insecurity Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Be Healthy
We also touched on a tension that comes up often in clinical practice: the coexistence of food insecurity and obesity. Cheap, energy dense, micronutrient poor foods can leave families both under-nourished and overweight at the same time. Prof Noakes pointed to the Eat Better South Africa campaign, which works with families in poorer communities to show that a low carbohydrate approach doesn’t have to cost more. He described one participant whose blood glucose dropped from the twenties into the normal range within about three weeks, eventually reversing his diabetes and coming off metformin entirely. Noakes noted anecdotally that some African populations appear to respond to carbohydrate restriction especially quickly, reversing insulin resistance faster than he has been able to manage with his own type two diabetes.
Practical Takeaways for Practitioners and Parents
A few points worth carrying into clinical practice or your own family’s kitchen from this conversation:
- Treat the preconception and pregnancy period as part of infant nutrition, not separate from it. A mother’s glucose and insulin exposure shapes her baby’s metabolic starting point.
- When weaning begins, prioritise whole animal foods such as meat, eggs and dairy over grain based, sugar sweetened weaning foods.
- Don’t panic about ketosis in breastfed infants – it supports brain development.
- Reversing metabolic dysfunction doesn’t require an expensive diet. Simple, consistent removal of refined carbohydrates can produce meaningful results within weeks, even in food insecure communities.
What the Next Generation Could Look Like
Asked what he thinks healthier children might look like twenty years from now if practitioners and parents embraced this approach, Prof Noakes described populations he has studied who ate traditional animal based diets: taller stature, well developed facial structure and dental arches, fewer chronic diseases and, he believes, less need for future medical intervention. He pointed to Weston Price’s observations of isolated communities untouched by processed food, as well as to today’s Norwegian endurance athletes, several of whom have credited largely carnivorous or low carbohydrate diets with their recent success on the world stage.
Whether or not every claim in that vision holds up to further research, the throughline of our conversation was consistent: what a mother eats before and during pregnancy and what a child is weaned onto matters more than most parents are told. Breastfeeding is part of that story, but it’s the surrounding food environment, starting well before birth and afterward, that Prof Noakes wants practitioners and families paying closer attention to.
You can hear more from Prof Noakes and the rest of our expert faculty on our upcoming training, The Next Generation: Child and Family Health, launching at the end of August, with presale pricing available now.