Great example! This came about when very light-skinned Irish and Scotts entered Australia, a country with a lot of sun, and the skin cancer rates skyrocketed. In that situation it is sensible to avoid the sun. But then the UK, which rarely gets enough sun to worry about skin cancer, started on the same regime, and people got too little sun! Some scientists think that part of the increase of autism-like symptoms came about by the same sun avoidance leading to vitamin D deficiency.

I am a geneticist studying genetic and environmental effects on behavior and its the same thing - tweaking on one end can bring about another. Back to diet, lifestyle, obesity and diabetes.

Increasing certain fats may lead to depression in susceptible people. Atkins diet in some on this forum made cholesterol shoot up, in others it stayed fine or went down.

So, the bottom line is, we are all different, both from the start and how we react to diet, sun, or exercise, and there is not one lifestyle that fits all. It is futile to fight low fat dieters - they may be the way to go for some people,
and Atkins and low carb may not be good for some people. Evolution has kept a certain diversity within us humans, because if we were all perfectly adapted to the life style and environment of lets say10,000 BCE, we would have been killed as a species. Instead, because environment can change faster than genes, we have a mix of predispositions, not good or bad genes, but the Yin and Yang brings them out as positive or negatively interacting with diet and other environmental factors. Pima Indians, not unlike the cats you talk about, were slim and healthy on their native, starvation-like diet, but on a Western diet nearly all get type 2 diabetes. This i s probably because those in the population who had other genes were killed due to starvation, selection did its job too well!

Until someone can figure out not only what all the genetic makeup that affects diabetes are, but also how they react to diet, exercise, and environment, we have to experiment with our bodies ourselves and watch what happens, at least in the moderately short term (of course, we can't do that for 20 year in cancer risks). One of the leaders of the Human Genome project is just writing a book about personalized medicine - it is coming. What we need to realize is that we need to personalize our diets and experiment with what works for us - what works for 80% of people in this forum may not work for some. The same diet may be fine for one, lead to diabetes in a second and to obesity without diabetes in third person.

Monika - nice post. I suspect the majority of folks on this site will find this agreeable. I hope you post some of the things you are seeing or researching from time to time. Rob

We are still as we were 10,000 years ago because the diseases that we suffer from don't kill us right away. In other words, the symptoms of carbohydrate poisoning take time to kill each of us. We don't all die from the same symptoms, we don't all die at the same time but we nevertheless all die from the same substance abuse. We can reproduce before we die of carbohydrate poisoning therefore the natural selection argument is refuted.

We are all humans. Carbohydrate is poisonous to all humans. All humans suffer from the same diseases of civilization. But like height and the color of our eyes and hair, we don't all react exactly the same way. For most of us, the difference is only in the amplitude. For instance, one needs 20 units of insulin and the other needs 50 units of insulin. But both suffer from diabetes and both need insulin injections. And both are suffering as a direct result of the same substance abuse: Carbohydrate poisoning.

When we say we are all different, we really mean there is a multitude of symptoms of carbohydrate poisoning. And not all of us get them at the same time or in the same combination but we all get one or more of them in time. Case in point, we all grow fat as we grow older but we don't all grow equally fat at the same age. Unless of course we suffer from diabetes type 1 then we can't grow fat unless we inject insulin. But then that just tells us that as humans diabetes always has the same outcome. This brings us back to saying we are all the same.

The Pima were agriculturalists and they lived in abundance. They did not starve.

Actually the natural selection argument favors your position, so you may not want to dismiss it so quickly - - as generations are continuing along, we're seeing more and more children affected by insulin resistance and diabetes, thus lending to the arguement of natural selection at work since both insulin resistance and diabetes make it more difficult for a woman to become pregnant and sustain a pregnancy, making it more difficult for her to reproduce. With hundreds of thousands of kids now insulin resistant, being fed the same crappy-carb diet that's low-fat because that's what they and their parents are told to feed them to stave off obesity, do you think that's going to enhance their ability to reproduce before they die or hinder it? I think it's likely to hinder it since it's wrecking havoc on their endocrine system. One doesn't have to be fat to be insulin resistant or have metabolic derrangement in their endocrine system.....eating the standard american diet though is probably the fastest way to infertility.

Not only that, but add in any illnesses or syndromes that make women overweight, which can lead to insulin resistance and eventually diabetic and infertile.

One thing that is helping me a lot with weight and blood sugar control is getting off of coffee and caffeine....the carbs seem to be much less a factor in my case.... I think this is one aspect of diet lost on many... if you look at the calorie restriction studies taubes cites these people were ravenously hungry on moderately restricted caloric diets... some were driven to psychosis... they were also drinking a lot of coffee in addition to a lower calorie carb heavy diet...same with the indians on the reservations...large amounts of coffee.... caffeine does raise insulin levels and stress hormone levels (and can cause carb cravings to replace the sugar released in the blood stream - kind of like a false exercise)

Weston Price found very healthy high cereal carb consumers in Africa... in fact they were the healthiest of all people he found... they ate low/moderate amounts of animal products..they ate plenty of starchy grains...these people were not sitting around drinking highly addictive coffee or drinking caffeinated soda pop....like most people in the world do now

It's always a treat when there's a new article up at Whole Health Source.

This one looks at The Tokelau Island Migrant Study: Background and Overview which documents all the health issues that began to plague these people after they started eating a Western diet.

Snippet