The Hadza of northern Tanzania are a good example of a hunter-gatherer society that, despite contact with Westerners, has clung to traditional methods of procuring food.19 The women dig for roots and gather edible parts of plants, while the men hunt with bows and poison-tipped arrows and gather honey from bees. The average BMI of this population? Around 20, with vigour maintained into later life, as grandparents help rear grandchildren while mothers gather and prepare food. Despite a lifestyle that appears physically demanding on the surface, the total energy expenditure of the Hadza is no different to that of modern people – not greater or less than, say, an average accountant or schoolteacher.20 Activity is parcelled a bit differently, of course, with hunter-gatherers tending to experience bursts of intense activity, followed by prolonged rest, and modern cultures gradually playing out activity throughout the day, but detailed analyses of energy expenditure among primitive people show virtually no difference. This challenges the notion that modern excess weight gain can be blamed on increasingly sedentary lifestyles.21 (Note that this is not true for all hunter-gatherer cultures; the Luo and Kamba of rural Kenya, for instance, exhibit high levels of energy expenditure. The point is that differences in weight are not solely explained by differences in energy expenditure.)
Humans are adaptable creatures, as the wide variety of diets consumed worldwide attests. Some rely almost exclusively on the flesh, organs and fat of animals, such as the traditional Inuits of the northernmost Pacific Northwest of North America. Some diets are high in starches from roots (such as yams, sweet potatoes, taro and tapioca) and fruit, as with the Kitavans of Papua New Guinea or the Yanomami of the Brazilian rain-forest.
The incorporation of foods from the mammary glands of bovines has provoked expression of a lactase-persistence gene that allows some adults to consume milk, cheese and other products that contain the sugar lactase after the first few years of life – an advantage for survival. The seminomadic Maasai people of central Africa are a notable example. Largely herders of goats, sheep and cattle, they traditionally consume plentiful raw meat and the blood of cows mixed with milk, and they’ve done so for thousands of years. This lifestyle allows them to enjoy freedom from cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes and excess weight.22
This is the recurring theme throughout primitive societies: A traditional diet, varied in composition and high in nutrient content but containing no grains or added sugars, allows people to enjoy freedom from all the chronic ‘diseases of affluence’. Even cancer is rare.23 This is not to say that people following traditional lifestyles don’t succumb to disease; of course they do. But the range of ailments is entirely different. They suffer infections such as malaria, dengue fever and nematode infestations of the gastrointestinal tract, as well as traumatic injuries from falls, battles with humans and animals, and lacerations, reflecting the hazards of living without modern tools, conveniences, central governments or modern health care.
What happens when a culture that has avoided the adoption of agriculture and grain consumption is confronted with modern breads, biscuits and crisps? This invasion by modern foods has played out countless times on a worldwide stage, with the same results each and every time: weight gain and obesity to an astounding degree, tooth decay, gingivitis and periodontitis, tooth loss, arthritis, hypertension, diabetes, and depression and other psychiatric conditions – all the modern diseases of affluence. Like a broken record, this same refrain has played over and over again in varied populations, on every continent.
It has been observed in Pima Indians of the American Southwest, where 40 to 50 per cent of adults are obese and diabetic, many toothless.24 It has been observed in native tribes of Arizona, Oklahoma and the Dakotas, resulting in 54 to 67 per cent of the population being overweight or obese.25 Peoples inhabiting circumpolar regions of Canada and Greenland have all experienced dramatic increases in obesity and diabetes.26 In Pacific Islanders, such as the Micronesian Nauru, 40 per cent of adults are obese with diabetes.27 Modernized diets have put Australian Aboriginal populations in especially desperate health straits, with 22 times the risk of complications of diabetes, 8 times higher cardiovascular mortality, and 6 times greater mortality from stroke compared with non-Aboriginal Australians.28
Until recently, the Maasai of central Africa, Samburu of Kenya and Fulani of Nigeria showed virtually no overweight or obesity, no hypertension and low total cholesterol values (125 mg/dl). When relocated to urban settings, hypertension and obesity explode, with 55 per cent overweight or obese.29 Former hunter-gatherers develop iron deficiency anaemia and folate deficiency as they transition away from hunting game and gathering wild vegetation and rely on purchased foods, especially corn.30 Dr Roberto Baruzzi, a Brazilian doctor, studied hunter-gatherers of the Xingu region of Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s and found slender people with no discernible excess body fat, no diabetes, no cardiovascular disease, no ulcers and no appendicitis. A repeat survey in 2009, following 30 years of contact with modern food, found 46 per cent of the people overweight or obese, 25 per cent of the men hypertensive, and most with abnormalities of cholesterol panels (such as low HDL cholesterol or high triglycerides) and rampant dental decay.31 Another recent assessment of Aruák natives of the Xingu region documented 66.8 per cent of men and women as overweight or obese, 52.1 per cent of women with abdominal obesity and 37.7 per cent of men with hypertension.32
All of these groups represent humans who have not developed the partial tolerances agricultural societies evolved over 10,000 years that allow them to consume the seeds of grasses. Consequently they, more so than us, show exaggerated responses to consumption of grains and sugars.
The diseases of modernization are unfortunately intertwined with the diseases of poverty, given the disrupted and marginalized lives indigenous people often endure at the heavy-handed ways of modern society. Typically, an overreliance on cheap grains and sugars characterizes the diets of these latecomers to the modern world, replacing gathered vegetation, for instance, with flours, convenience foods and sweets. And if Western aid is required due to starvation and maldistribution (which is common when former hunter-gatherers are disconnected from their traditional lifestyles), do we fly in beef, salmon, coconuts or cucumbers? Nope: we send in the grain – wheat, maize, rice – which feeds humans as well as their livestock.
Type 2 diabetes, in particular, is the defining disease acquired when hunter-gatherer populations join the modern world in dietary and health habits – so much so that anthropologists have labelled diabetes ‘the price of civilization’. And, of course, all of us modern humans, being hunter-gatherers at our genetic core, are experiencing diabetes at an unprecedented rate. This modern disease is expected to afflict a third of all adults in coming years, as well as a growing proportion of children and teenagers.33 The world of humans now obtains 50 per cent of its calories from the seeds of grasses and is increasing consumption of sucrose and fructose. Meanwhile, we’re being urged to further increase our reliance on ‘healthy whole grains’ in the developed world while we resort to cheap, accessible grains of any sort in the less-developed world. Under these circumstances, we can expect no relief from this global man-made pandemic – unless we reject the notion of consuming the seeds of grasses outright.
Dr Weston Price: Snapshots of Westernization
Dr Weston Price was a dentist practising in Cleveland, Ohio, during the early 20th century. He was troubled by the amount of tooth decay he witnessed in his patients, particularly children, and intrigued by reports that ‘savages’ (people living in primitive settings) were virtually free of tooth problems. So Dr Price did something extraordinary: he left his home and, along with his wife, Florence, began a 10-year worldwide journey to chronicle