"It took me six or seven years to feel comfortable in front of the camera," says Evans. Credit:James Brickwood Evans realises he is a controversial figure, with few supporters in the medical and scientific establishment. The way he sees it, a certain amount of opprobrium is the price he has to pay for daring to flout conventional wisdom. Even so, he gets tired of the snarkiness. "What's next for Pete Evans? Denying the moon landing?" asked an editorial in Sydney's Sunday Telegraph in August. The level of animosity directed at him suggests to Evans that hidden forces are at work. "Once you start to pull back the rug on a lot of this," he says, as we motor slowly through inner-city traffic, "it opens up so much more than you can probably put into a profile piece." He looks at me meaningfully and lowers his voice. "What we're promoting here basically renders so many industries obsolete." Which industries, I ask, speaking quietly, too, though I'm not sure why. Is the car bugged? The processed food industry, for a start, he says. The way of the Tribe is to avoid eating anything that comes in a packet. "And you could look at the grains and legumes industry, for instance. Or the dairy industry. They would not want paleo to be promoted to the mainstream. Why?" He lets the question hang in the air, then answers it himself. "It all comes down to dollars at the end of the day. Everything comes down to dollars." Lights and cameras are pointed at Evans, who stands behind a kitchen bench in a white-walled Melbourne studio. He is making a video to be shown in stores that sell Pete Evans cookware and kitchen implements. Unfortunately, he seems to have nicked his finger with one of the Pete Evans knives. He declines the offer of a BandAid. What he would like is a more stable surface on which to work. "This chopping board is shit," he says. It is an observation, more than a complaint. Brad Lyons, the Seven Network's director of production, has told me that Evans is beloved by the My Kitchen Rules crew because he is such a hard worker, and so low-maintenance: "He jumps in and does the job with minimum fuss." Here, too, he is the consummate professional. Within minutes of the accident, filming has resumed and Evans is slicing an onion at impressive speed. "This blade is perfect for gliding through vegetables," he says, beaming at one of the cameras. "It's not too heavy in the hand, either, so it's really easy to use." He picks up the biggest knife in the set ("I just love cleavers!") and efficiently takes apart a pumpkin. Only then does he notice that he is still bleeding. "I will grab a Band-Aid," he says.

Pete Evans has been ribbed on social media about his diet of activated almonds, which are soaked in water to force germination. Credit:Nic Walker The paleo diet is based on the theory that we should eat like our Paleolithic ancestors because our bodies haven't evolved to digest modern meals. The idea is to steer clear of the kinds of foods that only became available at the start of the Neolithic Age about 12,000 years ago, when humans began raising crops and keeping livestock. So, grains are out, which means no bread, pasta or rice. Sugar is off the menu, too, as are milk, cheese, butter and yoghurt. Evans, like the hunter-gatherers of yore, survives largely on meat, fish and plants. Though in a very 21st century way. In 2012, soon after he embarked on the paleo diet (or as the Tribe would say, "went paleo"), he wrote in the "My Day on a Plate" column published in Fairfax Media's Sunday Life magazine that he started his mornings with "a smoothie of blended alkalised water, organic spirulina, activated almonds, maca, blueberries, stevia, coconut kefir and two organic, free-range eggs". Of all those ingredients, it was the activated almonds – which he also listed as his afternoon snack – that captured the public imagination. Soon #activatedalmonds was a trending topic on Twitter. "Stand down everyone. The almonds are activated. Repeat, the almonds are activated," someone tweeted. Another said: "Went to eat a snack but my almonds were just sitting there, lifeless. What to do now?"' Pete Evans captures his active lifestyle on Instagram. Credit:Instagram Evans doesn't mind this kind of ribbing, though he still can't quite see the reason for the hilarity. Activating nuts – soaking them in water to force germination, with the aim of increasing their nutritional value – is, in his view, entirely sensible. In any case, he can report that he feels much healthier and happier since adopting his present eating habits. "I used to flare up with skin issues and digestive issues," he says. He also had "sinus issues". (Evans is one of those upbeat people who do not have ailments or problems, only "issues". If he went blind, it would be an "eyesight issue".)

Pre-paleo, the 185-centimetre Evans weighed about 90 kilograms. "I had a couple of chins," he says, though I can't see them in pictures taken when My Kitchen Rules started in 2010. Chubbier cheeks, yes. He has since dropped to 75 kilograms and says his body is "the best it's ever been". Surfing is Evans' main form of exercise. He lives in the coastal Sydney suburb of Malabar and spends as much time as he can at nearby beaches. Even when he's nowhere near an ocean, he somehow looks like he just bounded out of the water and dropped his board on the sand. Pete Evans with wife Nicola Robinson at their farm in Northern NSW. Credit:Instagram Perhaps it's the tan. Evans revealed to the Tribe earlier this year that he rarely wore sunscreens because they were laden with toxic chemicals that he did not care to rub into his skin. Cancer Council Australia labelled his comments ill-informed and irresponsible but Evans is unrepentant. "I never burn," he says, telling me he spends at least 20 minutes soaking up the sun's rays each day. When he is filming My Kitchen Rules, that means taking off his suit, putting on a pair of shorts and sitting outside the studio. The crew makes fun of him, he says. "But that's cool." Evans was a vegan for part of his time as a chef. When he had to taste meat dishes, he would chew and spit. But in his judging role on My Kitchen Rules, he cannot let his paleo principles get in the way. He swallows everything – proteins, fats and carbohydrates – that the contestants serve up. To Seven's production director, Brad Lyons, this is an indication of Evans' dedication to the show. "That's what we love about him, his passion," Lyons says. Outdoor bathing for the Equinox, 2015. Credit:Instagram

The auditorium erupts in cheers and wild applause as Evans strides toward the microphone. This is a gathering of managers and sales staff from two leading homewares chains that stock Pete Evans products. "Are you pumped?" he asks. "I'm pumped." He starts by talking about the Pete Evans Healthy Everyday Super Spiraliser, a device that cuts vegetables into linguine-like strands that can be used as a substitute for pasta. "Pumpkin noodles are sensational," he says. So tasty. And light. "After dinner you don't feel like you've got a load of cement in your guts." While I consider the likelihood of my making noodles out of pumpkin or any other vegetable at the end of a long day, Evans tells the crowd that the demand for his books is confirmation of booming interest in paleo cooking. With a sparkly grin, he apologises for the negative publicity his unorthodox views sometimes attract. "But I'm sure it's driving sales as well." Evans tells me later that about 40,000 people have signed up for The Paleo Way, a 10-week online program he launched last year. Participants pay $149 to be emailed recipes, an exercise plan, motivational messages and articles on everything from the nutritional benefits of coconut oil (he is launching his own brand) to the importance of eating fermented vegetables (the Pete Evans home fermentation kit is $165 including postage.) Who is he recruiting to the program? "They're generally people between the ages of 40 to 80 who have multiple health issues that haven't been resolved through conventional treatment," he says. "They are at the end of their rope." Evans is pleased to have the chance to help them. "There is a simple preventative measure for so many of our illnesses, and that is to eat beautiful food," he says. The important thing now is to spread the word. At the front of his book Family Food: 130 Delicious Paleo Recipes for Every Day, he tells his readers: "There is a health revolution dawning and you are on the front lines of the battlefield." Sydney doctor and media commentator Brad McKay is sceptical about all this. "People are following his advice but they're not realising that he's selling a product at the same time," McKay says. Evans' friends and colleagues have no doubt of his sincerity. "He's not doing this to get rich, I promise you," says Robert Tate, producer of Evans' American PBS series, Moveable Feast. "He's incredibly dedicated to this particular way of eating." Of course Evans is interested in making money along the way, Tate adds, but "I don't see that remotely as his main goal". Fellow TV cook Lyndey Milan believes Evans is fired by evangelical zeal: "I think he feels his life is transformed and he wants everyone else to benefit as well."

For the past six years, the American web-based publisher US News & World Report has invited a panel of experts to assess the effectiveness of a range of diets. The first year, 2011, the paleo diet came in dead last – 20th out of 20. This year, in a field of 38 diets, it rated poorly in every category: easiest diets to follow (No. 32), best diets for healthy eating (No. 34), best diabetes diets (No. 36), best heart-healthy diets (No. 38), best weightloss diets (No. 38). Overall, it ranked 36th. When I email Evans to ask what he makes of this, his response is incredulity. "Please, show me the evidence that paleo is not working!" he says. At high school, Evans dreamed of becoming an accountant, but he failed to gain admission to university. English was the subject that let him down, he says. Until he was 19, the only books he had read were by Dr Seuss. Then, in a barber's shop, he picked up a copy of self-help guru Anthony Robbins' Unlimited Power. "It opened the door to what is possible in one lifetime. You can be anyone you want to be in this world." Born in Melbourne in 1973, Evans was only three when his parents split up, and seven when he and his mother moved to the Gold Coast. His older siblings stayed behind with their father. He says he suffered from crippling shyness as a kid, and that when he had to choose a trade, the allure of working behind the scenes was one of the reasons he decided to train as a chef: "I loved being in the kitchen because I felt protected." By 2001, when he got a call inviting him to try out for a cooking spot on a new show, Home, on Foxtel's Lifestyle Channel, he was executive chef and part-owner with his brother, David, of two smart Sydney restaurants – Hugos Bondi and Hugos Lounge at Kings Cross – as well as Pantry, in the affluent Melbourne beachside suburb of Brighton. The then 28-year-old knew exactly what to say to the Home people: " 'No. That doesn't interest me at all.' I couldn't think of anything fuckin' worse than being on TV." They phoned again, and eventually he was persuaded not only to audition but to accept the job, though he says he came close to quitting almost immediately, when the show's producers asked if he could try to be more like Jamie Oliver. Building his TV career involved spending a lot of money on therapists as he struggled to overcome his natural aversion to the spotlight. "It took me six or seven years to finally feel comfortable in front of the camera," he says. Meanwhile, the restaurant group was expanding. Hugos Bar Pizza opened at Kings Cross in 2004, winning a "world's best pizza" title the following year. Hugos Manly opened in 2008.

When Evans started on the paleo diet about three years later, it was part of a complete shake-up of his life. He broke up with his long-term partner, Astrid Edlinger, who is the mother of his two children – Chilli, now 11, and Indii, 10. And he walked away from the restaurants. In Going Paleo, he wrote: "I made the decision to not only examine my diet and lifestyle but also to step away from every negative personal and business relationship." To me, he denies reports that his departure from Hugos Group was the result of a bitter bust-up with his brother. "It was a relationship issue," he concedes, but "it wasn't a falling-out, as such". Either way, he and David are back on good terms. As Evans set out on what he calls his "paleo journey", he was accompanied by Nicola Robinson, a former bikini model and ex-wife of Eric Watson, the wealthy businessman who owns the New Zealand Warriors rugby league team. In a TV interview in 2006, Robinson cheerfully volunteered that she'd had three breast augmentation operations. Now she is a paleo crusader, like Evans. "We make a wonderful team," he tells me, explaining that Robinson spends most of her time at the couple's farm in northern NSW, where they keep chickens and grow fruit and vegetables. Evans gave up alcohol when he went paleo, but allowed himself a drink at their wedding in April. "We had some tequila mixed with kombucha, which is a probiotic drink," he says. "I had one and that was enough." I have to ask: how does a natural-living proponent rationalise breast implants? Evans says Robinson deeply regrets the surgery and is looking forward to getting the implants removed in the near future. At Bistro Guillaume in Melbourne, some delicious-looking bread sits untouched on a plate between Evans and me. "I don't see it as food any more," Evans says. I certainly do, but I can't bring myself to eat it in his presence. Instead, I listen to him talk about fluoride, which he assures me is "a toxic ingredient that alters brain chemistry and messes with the microbiome and the guts". When I look doubtful, he says: "Put it this way, I won't drink the tap water in Sydney or Melbourne." The following day he sends me a long article asserting that, far from being a safe and successful way to reduce tooth decay (in fact one of the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), water fluoridation is the pernicious result of a vast conspiracy involving "big agribusiness, the multinational food industry, pharmaceutical interests, dietetic policy and the petroleum interests."

I forward the document to Michael Foley, spokesperson for the Australian Dental Association. "It is delusional," Foley says. "This stuff from Pete is just lunacy." I am to hear a similar tone in the voice of Claire Hewat, chief executive of the Dietitians Association of Australia, when she recalls Evans' warning to the person with osteoporosis that eating dairy food would remove calcium from her bones. "Utter rubbish," Hewat says with a weary laugh. For Brisbane obstetrician Brad Robinson, it was the last straw when Evans told one of his followers that anti-cholesterol tablets were dangerous. "I presume you have forgotten (silly you!) so please allow me to remind you," Robinson wrote in an open letter to Evans. "You are a chef, not a doctor … Your astounding advice about osteoporosis would be amusing if it wasn't so potentially damaging to anyone at risk who actually believed you. Even worse, your advice to the user of an anti-cholesterol medication to cease its use is – through an increased risk of stroke and heart attack if your advice were followed – potentially deadly. Can we make a deal? You don't give medical advice and I won't tell you how to shuck oysters." But if you go to Evans' Facebook page, you will find lots of people clamouring for his guidance and expressing doubts that the health authorities know what they're talking about. When I first met Evans, he said: "I believe we have the wrong information taught to us." Taught to us by whom? "The people in charge." I now know he was referring to peak health and nutrition bodies such as the Dietitians Association of Australia and The Heart Foundation, which he alleges are in the pocket of Big Food. The Heart Foundation's chief medical adviser, Garry Jennings, says: "You've only got to look at what's happened in the US to see that there is a distrust of all authority among large sections of the community. And this is part of that." To the members of the Tribe, Evans is the person bravely telling them the way they should really be eating. "Just wanted to say thank you for being the voice of truth for so many…" writes one of his followers. "You should actually run for government as this country needs someone like you to take on the corruption." One of the reasons there is such unanimity on Evans' page is that anyone who questions or corrects his claims is kicked off it. Two years ago, a group of health and science professionals who had been stymied in this way created their own Facebook page, called Blocked by Pete Evans. It now has more than 11,000 followers. Evans is a warm and affable guy – the kind of person who touches you on the arm every now and then while he's speaking to you. But he does not take kindly to having his beliefs held up to scrutiny. Earlier this year, Melbourne University researcher Sof Andrikopoulos published the results of an experiment in which he put one group of overweight mice on a paleo-style (low-carbohydrate, high-fat) diet, while another group of overweight mice remained on their normal food. In eight weeks, the mice on the paleo diet increased in size by 15 per cent, raising the possibility that the same could happen to overweight humans. Evans lashed out, suggesting the study was rigged. "Does this university or the professor have any ties with pharmaceutical or multinational funding?" he asked. (Andrikopoulos's work was funded by the federal government's National Health and Medical Research Council.)

To me, Evans makes clear that he is a tiny bit fed up with doctors and scientists pulling rank. "You don't need to go to a university to learn anything these days," he says. "You can learn anything anywhere." He himself is a qualified "health coach", having completed an online course with the US-based Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Helen Padarin, who collaborated with him on the withdrawn Bubba Yum Yum and has co-authored his latest work, The Complete Gut Health Cookbook, has a degree in naturopathy from the University of New England in northern NSW. But the letters "ND, DN" after Padarin's name represent diplomas in nutrition and naturopathy from Sydney's Nature Care College, an institution which also offers courses in astrology and tarot card reading. Recently, Evans recommended to the Tribe a book called Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever? Prominent US bunkum-buster Steven Novella, of Yale University Medical School, says earthing is "one of many pseudo-sciences that fits into the 'just make shit up' category". But Evans is an enthusiastic convert to the notion that we benefit from staying physically connected to the Earth's electronically charged surface, and that we can do this via "earthing mats". "When you're sitting at your computer, you put your feet onto a little mat and it sort of, potentially, negates any of the Wi-Fi issues, you know, and reconnects you to the Earth," he says. "So that to me sounds like, wow, that's a positive thing." Gullibility seems to media doctor Brad McKay to be a problem for Evans. "That filter mechanism isn't there to question the ideas that are put in front of him," McKay says. "I'd love it if he were thinking a little bit more critically." In her book Paleofantasy, US evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk argues that the whole premise of the paleo diet is flawed. We have never been perfectly in sync with our environment, Zuk says. The point about evolution is that we, and our digestive systems, are constantly adapting to changing circumstances. To Michael Gannon, president of the Australian Medical Association, one certainty is that the paleo diet, like all fad diets, is headed for extinction. In five or 10 years' time, Gannon says, "it will have passed into history". Evans has the opposite view. "I believe we're still in our infancy," he says. The Tribe is growing all the time. "There are activated almonds in supermarkets now."