Why can't anyone agree on a healthy diet?: Ancestral health

The physician who was the patient

In 2016, I was board-certified in internal medicine with a BMI of 34 and an A1C one-tenth below diabetic. I ate according to the guidelines. Whole grains, lean protein, low-fat dairy. I exercised. I gained two pounds a year for fifteen years.

Then I ate the way my great-grandparents ate. Meat, eggs, butter, vegetables, bone broth, fermented foods. No seed oils. No grains. Nothing requiring an industrial process to become edible. Fourteen months: fifty-two pounds lost. A1C from 6.3 to 5.1. Every medication stopped. I did not discover a diet. I abandoned an experiment.

The Standard American Diet is seventy years old. Seed oil consumption up 250 percent since 1960. Obesity from 13 to 42 percent in the same period. The evidence-based camp says ancestral populations died too young. Half-truth functioning as a whole lie. Paleolithic adults who survived childhood routinely lived to seventy with bone density and cardiovascular markers modern Americans cannot achieve pharmaceutically. The Tsimane of Bolivia have the lowest coronary artery disease ever measured. They eat fish, plantains, wild game, fruit. No seed oils. No refined sugar.

The intuitive camp says listen to your body. We sympathize. But your signals were calibrated for an environment that no longer exists. Listening to your body in a modern food environment engineered to exploit those signals is like listening to your GPS in a city where someone moved all the street signs. The industrial critics are our natural allies. They see the system. We see the blood work.

Where we concede ground: There is no single ancestral diet. Inuit ate no plants. Okinawans ate sweet potatoes. The principle is broad enough to contradict itself.

What would change our mind: A metabolic ward study showing USDA meals matching ancestral meals on fasting insulin, inflammation, and liver enzymes.

Read the full synthesis: Why can’t anyone agree on a healthy diet?