we did???
when was this???
The staple diet for most people in the west for the last god knows how long has been cereals. In medieval times in Europe the staple for the vast majority of people was bread. This was supplemented with weak beer (the only safe way to drink water), vegetables - peas & beans. Before the potato the ancestor of the parsnip was the main starchy root staple. Many people also had access to cheese. Meat was a rare and valuable commodity, and only occasionally eaten by ordinary people.
Bread has remained ever since the main staple in the west. I fail to understand how this could be construed as a low carb diet.
And correct me if I am wrong but a significant proportion of the US population comes from European descent - people who historically farmed and ate cereals.
The notion that stone age peoples (e.g. the american indian peoples) ate a diet predominantly of meat and little vegetable matter is false. The fact is that there was a wide variation in diets, and some indian peoples farmed and processed cereals.
Grindstones dating back 10,000 years have been shown to have been used to process cereals. Humans have been eating diets high in cereals for a rather long time.
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We didn't have a wide-spread obesity problem and had low incidents of diabetes.
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The issues around obesity are rather complex and it is not as simple as we're fat because we eat too much and don't do enough exercise. Depending on how you measure calorie intake, you can either show that it has risen, or that calorie intakes are virtually unchanged for the last 25 years. If you measure calorie intake based on the amount of foodstuffs add a fiddle factor which estimates nonhuman consumption as well as non food uses, then calorie consumption has risen by loads. If you give people a questionaire and get them to fill in what they have eaten (done by NHANES) then you find people are eating within recommended guidelines, and it's broadly unchanged.
On exercise if you get people to fill in a questionaire and only count leisure time exercise as activity and exclude work based activities (I kid you not some surveys have done this), then you find that we are all lazy toads sitting on our sofas watching TV all day. If you gather a sample of people and measure actual energy expenditure (which you has been done) then you find that overall energy expenditure has remained unchanged for the last 25 years, and that for our size it is inline with other mammals.
Type 2 epidemic??? - again this depends on how you measure it. Has there been a recorded increase in type 2 diabetes? Yes most definitely. About 4% between each NHANES survey.
However almost everywhere will quote the raw figures. But what you need to know is that the section of the population that is most at risk of type 2 has been growing faster than any other section. Nobody bothers to correct for this - I did a rough back of the postcard calculation (so not that accurate) and estimated that the aging US population accounts for around 50% of the increase.
what about the other 50% - Correct me if I am wrong but type 2 was not even recognised as a separate disease until 1954 (I think it was 1954??). In that time diagnostic criteria has changed dramatically, better tests have been developed to diagnose it, and most importantly there is greater awareness than ever of the risk of people developing type 2 diabetes. How much of the remaining 50% is accounted for simply by this factor?
