Hey Amanda!
Thanks for posting that very pertinent info!!

Amanda, you may be right, you may be wrong. I'm suspect, but that's just me. From all the reading I've done (and I did post-graduate work in human paleontology), our early ancestors ate primarily meat and fat, at first scavanged and then hunted.

You quoted:

This is merely a reporting of what they do TODAY, obviously, as I seriously doubt our early ancestors (even Kitavans of the same period) smoked like chimneys.

Also, the author's statement that "This is essentially a carbohydrate-heavy version of what our paleolithic ancestors ate" is merely this person's opinion. Unless there is scientific proof in the fossil record of ancient Kitavans (and by ancient I mean from hundreds of thousands of years ago, as there is for other ancient populations), this reflects an opinion only.

I do not know precisely what it is called, I'm not even sure if it has a clinical name, but I have read that there is a certain percentage of the population who have NO problems whatsoever with FRUCTOSE, because it never breaks down in their body, they don't digest the fructose molecule at all, it leaves their bodies fully intake, precisesly the same as when they ingested it.

I suspect that that subset of humans, who are incapable of breaking down fructose, and thus have NO problems whatsoever with fructose, happen to screw up all manner of epidemiological studies -- because such persons are not identified and screened out beforehand.

I've lost 66 lb so far eating vegetables, a ton of fruit and starchy tubers daily. Carbs in general weren't responsible for my poor health, just the bad ones like sugar and HFCS and flour, along with vegetable oils, trans fat and all sorts of chemicals. There are plenty of unhealthy fats and unhealthy proteins that we should be avoiding, not just unhealthy carbs.

See? And if I ate those things every day, I'd probably be 80 pounds heavier than I am now. I was talked into doing the Schwarzbein program by a doctor once, and she insisted I had 90 grams of carbs a day. I gained 20 pounds in 2 months.

I've lost 30 pounds this summer eating french fries or potato chips every day. It's amazing how different folks can be - and I lost nothing this winter eating very strict very low carb.

I'm going to go on the French fry diet. To quote Homer Simpson, "Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter."

In all seriousness, I wonder if you can handle the fries because you're running.

Well at the moment it seems to be the carb count alone, regardless of where the carbs come from. Maybe you don't count the carbs in any of the above, but my body sure seems to.

For instance, for breakfast this morning I had a cup of black coffee, 2 strips of bacon and one egg, with a vegetable stir-fry (sauteed in coconut oil) consisting of a tiny chopped up yellow squash, about a tbsp of chopped onion, about 3 tbsp chopped green pepper, 2 diced garlic cloves, a little fresh dill, the last bit of cabbage shredded. All *low* carb veggies. Yet one hour PP after eating that my blood sugar reading was 157! Similar meal minus the carbs (that is eggs, bacon, cup of coffee, a little cheese) gives a 1 hour PP reading more like 136.

I agree entirely with Stephen's post. It fits the evidence as we know it. Too many carbs is not the issue. If that was the case, Kitavans and other populations who eats similar diets to them nor or in the past would have been sick and fat. There are elements in our modern diet, toxic elements, which damage our metabolism, and that damage starts in the womb and might also be multi-generational. I think we have found a couple of strong suspects, wheat, sugar, HFCS and omega-6/industrial oil. There are probably other elements as well, we have yet to identify or link to this case.

Once the damage is done however, low-carb seems to be the best way to restore lose weight and restore health. (that we have found so far).

We're not all the same. Personally I think we're seeing natural selection at play. Some people seem to do ok with the current standard American diet. Others, like me, find it toxic.

People like me, who are suffering in the current food environment, do have fertility and reproductive problems. I have a son, born in 1985 when I was 23. I tend to think that I lucked out in that the changes in our food happened when I was in my late teens and early 20's. I wonder if I would have been very fat as a child if I'd been born 20 years later. (I weighed 116 in high school, at 5'6".) And I wonder if I would have had fertility issues. I never tried to conceive again after my son was born, but my cycle became totally screwed up about the time I started gaining weight.

My son, at 25 yo, is totally disabled with a psychotic illness, dx'd as either paranoid schizophrenia or bipolar with psychosis. Schizophrenia is sometimes called diabetes of the brain, and I do believe he was the unlucky recipient of my genetic inability to handle the SAD. (Alas, I can't convince him to modify his diet.) Anyway he's unlikely to have children of his own due to his extreme distrust of other people and his tendency to get into physical confrontations without whomever he gets close to.

So I guess I'm an evolutionary dead end, at least through my direct descent.

Maybe if we continue to live in constant artificial light and eat faux "food," people like me will die off, and the people who can survive and reproduce in this environment will be the genetic winners.

I lose a lot of weight on lowcarb, but it's way too hard and I end up falling off the wagon and binge eating. When I add fruit and tubers back, I get much, much better at resisting temptations.

oh goodness...
i am so sorry to read of your son's misfortune, but i have to say that you are too harsh on yourself. you have so much to contribute and you are so frank and honest..

please keep on posting.
i hope to learn more from you.

Maybe not. It takes decades to kill, long enough to have a lot of children.

It's like when humans first switched to eating grains, they found a lot of issues with growth, bone strength and such. It didn't kill humans off immediately and being sedentary (i.e. not-nomadic) meant humans could have more children.

So individually health got worse, but people could have a lot more children, the population grew. Natural selection would have to take effect before you reproduce your faulty genes.

Potatoes?

Potatoes, excepting those modified to be high fructose in content, are STARCH foods. Starch carbs are different from sugar carbs.

More importantly, POTATOES may be a DIET FOOD, because there is a specific protein in the potato which suppresses the appetite, which makes one feel satiated. There are supplements available containing that protein.

But the SAD is much more toxic to native Americans/Australians/etc than it is to Europeans and their descendants, so some natural selection must have occurred. We are all poorly adapted to the SAD here, but most of us are still much healthier than the average Pima Indian.