A Historical Perspective

I'm a big fan of simplicity.  Occam's Razor and all that.  Maybe that comes from being a programmer, or maybe I'm a programmer because I appreciate simplicity.  And maybe that's why I was so receptive to the low-carb ideas.  The more I listened to dietary recommendations from the government, the American Heart Association and so on, the more I wondered how the human species lasted long enough to even invent these ideas, if our dietary requirements are so complicated and counterintuitive.

Not that long ago, we hadn't even invented agriculture.  We lived on whatever we could get wherever we lived, and that was mostly meat anywhere you care to look.  Eskimos ate huge amounts of seal meat, so their diet was unbelievably fatty.  They ate almost no plant matter.  Aboriginal Australians ate mostly lean kangaroo meat and were similarly healthy (nutritionists love this one).  Early humans are thought to have subsisted almost entirely on large game.  That such a diet was successful enough for the species to survive and even flourish is often explained away by the assumption that their lives were "nasty, brutish and short" and so chronic disease was not a factor.  People who make this claim are nutritionists - not anthropologists, who know better.

Thousands of studies have observed the sharp decline in the health and life expectancies of traditional hunter-gatherer populations when they either migrate to "civilization" or are encroached upon by it.  Most of them offer tortured explanations, are amazed by "paradoxes" or, more honestly, suggest that we need to take a closer look at our own assumptions.

There is a long list of so-called "diseases of civilization", which are unknown or very rare among hunter-gatherer populations.  These appear to include heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, obesity and high blood pressure, as well as lesser problems such as acne, early onset puberty, nearsightedness, skin tags, acanthosis nigricans, polycystic ovary syndrome and male pattern baldness.  All of these are potentially caused (as explained in the linked paper) by insulin resistance or hyperinsulinemia, and I suspect that's just the beginning of the list.  And if this is your first time here, that means they're caused by high-carbohydrate diets.