I can't really say that I've tried eating like these people, quite. Low fat, sure. But with a very different set of staples, lots of wheat, a fairly refined diet, totally different lifestyle. Personally I did do pretty well when I did it, but it ripped much of the pleasure out of eating for me, so it never lasted long enough to see whether it would have done me any permanent harm. Certainly carbohydrate in the forms I was actually willing to eat on a regular basis did me no good.

I believe they were saying that the carb, at least, was not processed?

For a whole variety of reasons I don't think there is anything much you can generalize from the population being studied to our modern society. There is both too much wrong with all aspects of the "design" of the study and also too many differences between the population studied and our "modern" society that there really isn't anything much you can conclude. That's the primary take away I get from Zoe Harcombe's article.

Jean

Zoe says "Heart disease is a disease of civilization". Without context, we could easily fall into the trap of concluding that civilization causes heart disease, then look for specific factors which make a civilization and blame that in part, i.e. smoking, industrial chemicals, "stress" (whatever that means), etc. The proper context is "diseases of civilization", always with comparison to traditional populations as in Weston Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, because it's not just one disease, it's a whole bunch of them and they always come together, and because it's not some factor or other out of many depending on the specific disease, it's the same factor for all diseases.

This factor is sugar and wheat.

For example, smoking. Do we have to be reminded that civilization is not where smoking tobacco came from? Granted, smoking may be a contributor for a particular disease or two, but we can still suffer all the same diseases of civilization to the same degree even if we never inhaled a single smoke particle, so long as we ate enough sugar and wheat for long enough. Which means, for our purpose with the Tsimane, if we remove or significantly reduce sugar and wheat at the population level, smoking to any degree is going to have almost zero impact on outcomes for its related disease of civilization, i.e. heart disease, because smoking ain't it.

I could also argue that hammers are the primary cause of thumb injuries, and we would certainly see a strong correlation between the total number of hammers and thumb injury incidence, but what if we also looked at time-to-heal (which means infection incidence and so forth because wound stays open and allows nasties to go deeper) and found that somehow it wasn't so cut and dry? Well, we can't blame hammers for that, but we could blame sugar and wheat for example, through a simple direct causality sequence where growth hormone is essential to healing, hyperglycemia inhibits growth hormone, sugar and wheat cause hyperglycemia.

Zoe says "The level of physical activity is significant."

But completely, utterly, and absolutely inconsequential. Health leads to physical activity, not the other way around.

For the rest of her post, maybe, I only skimmed it for the obvious.

I don't think you can outrun smoking, or the SAD. Maybe you can outrun the Tsimane diet.

Stress does push animals towards metabolic syndrome.

One thing about the Tsimane activity levels--the benefit of exercise is obvious to the Tsimane. Grind away on the treadmill, what do you get? To do it again tomorrow. Go hunting, or go out tend your crops/gather wild foods, what do you get? The food. The less abstract the reward for work is, I find the easier it is to stay motivated. To the extent that exercise is protective, maybe it's also important that it be rewarding.

But the Tsimane are not "grinding away on the treadmill." They are simply staying active. Repetitive, but not straining or exertional, it sounded like.

One takeaway from Zoe I did totally agree with: no one is going to choose that lifestyle for its heart benefits.

I do agree with Zoe to in a sort of macro-sense, it's just some nitty details I'm not sure about.