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Rather than trying to ascertain the causes of modern diseases only by looking through a microscope, it can often be extremely enlightening to back up and look at the big picture through the lens of history.

When one considers that the earliest hominid (prehistoric human) fossils found appear to be between 3.8 and 4 million years old, and it is believed that we were nomadic until the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, it becomes obvious that in the scheme of things, growing food is a relatively new idea. When we were nomadic, we probably followed the meat in order to survive, supplementing with plant foods that were available wherever the meat was. Can you imagine taking a handful of whole oat kernels or wheat berries, throwing them in your mouth and chewing them as part of your meal? There isn't much evidence that nomadic cultures carted around pots to cook grains with, and in fact, there isn't much evidence that we cooked our food at all until relatively recently. I think it is fairly safe to assume that humans ate very little or no grain for the vast majority of our existence.

It is said that it takes 100,000 years to change our genes one tenth of one percent through the evolutionary process, so therefore as of today, one can argue that our bodies have not yet adapted well to eating whole grain, let alone grain that has been ground into flour (which makes it act like sugar in the body), or grain that has been genetically modified (who knows what that is doing to us).

In many previous tips I have discussed the research of Dr. Weston A. Price who travelled the world in the 1930s comparing the health of traditional cultures that had not yet come in contact with “white man’s food” to those that had, and consistently found that when cultures replaced their native diet with white flour, white sugar, and canned food, their health deteriorated. Dr. Price was by no means alone in making this connection. The British, in their colonization of India noticed that the incidence of obesity and diabetes varied depending on the sect or caste examined, and that generally diabetes and obesity were diseases that struck the rich who ate European diets and were more sedentary, and was pretty much nonexistent in those that ate their traditional diet. Similar patterns were noticed in Thailand, China, Sri Lanka, and Tunisia. The correlation between the increase in sugar and white flour consumption and the incidence of diabetes was forgotten after the 1930s in the US, even though similar findings were being noted in other parts of the world, such as the studies of Dr. Cohen who compared the Yemenite Jews who had lived in Israel since the early '30s, and those that arrived after 1949, and found that those that had lived in Israel longer had a diet much higher in sugar, and also had far higher incidence of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, hypertension and gout. Similar findings were found in the Maoris of New Zealand by Dr. Ian Prior, and in South Africa by Dr. George Campbell, who was the first person to propose an "incubation period" between the onset of sugar consumption and the diseases of civilization that follow.

In 1966, British Royal Navy Surgeon Dr. T.L. Cleave published a book called Diabetes, coronary thrombosis, and the saccharine disease, suggesting that all the modern diseases had a common cause – the consumption of refined flour, refined rice and sugar. "Saccharine" refers to sugar, as opposed to the artificial sweetener. He noted that disease was absent in both meat eaters like the Inuit or the Masai as well as plant-based cultures like the Hunza or the Kikuyu, until the time that these cultures began to add nutritionally depleted, "high saccharine" foods (refined carbohydrates) to their diet. He was unable to successfully convince the medical establishment that his theory had merit, even though it was generally acknowledged that those with diabetes were far more prone to heart disease and obesity.

In the US, at the McGovern Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in April '73, the scientific community debated whether it was a high fat diet or a high processed carbohydrate diet that was disease causing. Cohen, Campbell, Peter Bennett who discussed the obesity/diabetic plight of the Pima Indians, Walter Mertz, T.L. Cleave, Carol Berdanier and John Yudkin all demonized sugar, yet Ancel Keys' cholesterol-heart disease hypothesis won out, despite the fact that there was far more evidence implicating refined carbohydrates. The McGovern Committee sided with the saturated fat hypothesis, and in 1977 put out their Dietary Goals to lower saturated fat intake, and the public was led to believe that there was overwhelming consensus on the evils of fat, when in fact the scientific community was very much divided. In 1980, once the debate entered the political arena and the USDA published their Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the scientific debate around saturated fat vs. refined carbohydrate was pretty much silenced in favour of the wrong hypothesis, in my opinion. And unsurprisingly since that time, despite the decline in consumption of saturated fats, obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease rates have continued to rise along with the continued increase in consumption of processed sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and products made of flour.

Today, obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease are more common in the poor. Unfortunately, the least expensive foods available are those that are highly processed, and frequently contain refined flour and sugar. The poor often find it difficult to afford quality meat and vegetables, and frequently rely on packaged food and fast food outlets for cheap, nutritionally deplete food that satisfies hunger. But the poor are not the only ones that partake in breads, pastries, pastas, and sugar-laden desserts, and they are certainly not the only ones to suffer from overfatness, heart disease, hypertension, gout, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis and cancer, all which have been linked to refined carbohydrates and sugar consumption.

My apologies in the delay in discussing the metabolic cause of obesity – what happens in the body when one consumes sugar, flour products and other refined grains that leads to fat accumulation. It's coming …

I HIGHLY recommend the recent book by Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories if you are interested in the topics of diets, obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Related tips
Obesity – a behavioural or a metabolic problem?
Insulin, our storage hormone
Sugar, the disease generator
Another “healthy heart guide” that got it wrong
Saturated fat, the misunderstood nutrient
Cortisol, our stress hormone

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