When Civilization Sickened Us: What Indigenous Diets Reveal About Modern Disease

Credit: Gary Larson

There’s a quiet tragedy in watching health slip away not through war, famine, or plague—but through abundance.

In the early 20th century, Dr. Albert Schweitzer set up his medical practice in the lush equatorial forests of Gabon. Among the many diseases he treated, cancer was curiously absent. “On my arrival in Gabon,” he wrote, “I was astonished to encounter no cases of cancer.” It wasn’t until years later, when local diets and lifestyles began to resemble those of the colonizers, that cancer arrived like an uninvited guest to the table.

What Schweitzer observed was not unique. From the Arctic to the Andes, from Pacific atolls to African highlands, a remarkable pattern emerged again and again: where people ate traditional, unprocessed diets, chronic diseases were rare—virtually unknown. And when those same people adopted 'Western foodways', chronic illnesses followed as predictably as shadow follows sun.

We call these the diseases of civilization: heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, some cancers, and neurodegenerative disorders. But this term—tidy as it sounds—belies the complexity of their rise. These are not just diseases of aging or genetics or misfortune. They are, to a striking degree, diseases of context.

And in that context, diet sits squarely at the center.

Before and After: A Global Pattern Emerges

In the snowy reaches of Labrador, missionary physician Dr. Samuel Hutton served the native Inuit people who lived almost entirely on seal, fish, and whale. He noted no signs of obesity, diabetes, or tooth decay. But when they began relying on Western staples—flour, sugar, canned meats—their health swiftly deteriorated. Diabetes appeared. Teeth rotted. Waistlines grew.

Dr. Robert McCarrison, posted in northern India in the 1920s, found similar health among the Hunza and other Himalayan peoples. Living on lentils, whole grains, vegetables, fermented dairy, and minimal meat, they enjoyed robust health and sharp minds well into old age. But in the south, where polished rice, white flour, and sugar had taken root, malnutrition and disease were rampant.

On the Pacific island of Tokelau, a natural experiment played out when part of the population migrated to New Zealand. Those who stayed retained their traditional diet—coconut, fish, root vegetables—and remained lean and largely disease-free. Their relatives in New Zealand, now eating supermarket fare, developed obesity, diabetes, and heart disease at rates mirroring Western nations.

These stories echo across the globe—variations on a theme that’s easy to miss in a world that confuses medical complexity with dietary confusion. When traditional peoples replaced whole foods with refined ones, their health suffered. And it happened quickly—often within a generation.

Which begs the question: what if we’ve been asking the wrong questions about modern disease? What if, instead of chasing more pills, more scans, and more surgical fixes, we asked what changed in the first place?

After all, hypertension is not caused by a deficit in antihypertensives.

What Changed, Exactly?

The shift from ancestral to industrial diets didn’t happen overnight, nor was it born of malice. It was, like most things in modern life, a product of convenience dressed up as progress. Refined flour shipped better than whole grain. Sugar made food last and taste “better.” Canned meat outlasted fresh. Margarine was cheaper than butter.

And slowly, the diet that had kept humans healthy for millennia was nudged off stage by a parade of brightly packaged foods with no ancestral equivalent.

Today, ultra-processed foods—designed more for shelf life and shareholder value than human health—make up more than half of the typical Western diet. And with them come the diseases that were once rare: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, fatty liver, and even certain cancers.

It's not that traditional diets were perfect. But they were coherent. They made biological sense. They were foods our bodies recognized, metabolized, and regulated. And as these foods disappeared, the need for pharmaceutical correction grew in inverse proportion to our metabolic stability.

We began treating dietary diseases with drugstore solutions.

The Perils of Going (Too) Primal

Of course, where there’s loss, there’s longing. And with the rise of modern illness came a countercultural chorus: go back. Return to nature. Eat like your ancestors. Live in the sun. Lift rocks. Take liver shots.

Enter the so-called primal movement—part protest, part performance art. At its best, this movement has helped reawaken curiosity about how humans are meant to live. At its worst, it has spawned caricatures of ancestral wisdom.

One such caricature was Brian Johnson, better known as the Liver King—a bare-chested influencer who built a multimillion-dollar brand on raw liver, simulated ancestral hardship, and the claim that his body was 100% “natty." Until, of course, it wasn’t. When it was revealed he was spending five figures a month on performance-enhancing drugs, the primal movement’s credibility took a hit it hasn’t quite recovered from.

This isn't just a story of one man’s deception—it’s a cautionary tale. In a world hungry for simplicity, “go primal” can sound like a magic spell. But humans don’t live in the Paleolithic anymore. We live in neighborhoods, not tribes. We’ve signed a social contract that asks us to balance personal autonomy with communal responsibility. Going fully feral is not a viable public health strategy—nor is it particularly honest.

What we need isn’t regression but integration. The primal movement has valuable insights—about food quality, sun exposure, movement, sleep, and community—but these need to be folded into a modern context with humility, not posturing.

Because while your ancestors didn’t have statins or seed oils, they also didn’t have antibiotics or seatbelts.

What Now? Learning Without LARPing

If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that our biology is stubborn—and smarter than we give it credit for. It thrives under conditions that mirror the environments we evolved in: real food, natural movement, deep sleep, purpose, and connection. And it flounders when fed a steady diet of corn syrup, fluorescent lighting, and doomscrolling.

But returning to ancestral health doesn’t mean retreating into caves or cosplay. It means looking back to move forward more wisely.

This isn't about purity or nostalgia—it’s about pattern recognition. When dozens of cultures across time and geography thrive on traditional diets, and those same cultures develop the same diseases once they adopt Western foods, it’s worth paying attention.

Modernity offers us extraordinary tools: antibiotics, clean water, emergency care, and knowledge at our fingertips. But it also tempts us with shortcuts that cost more than we realize. We now treat blood pressure with pills, blood sugar with injections, and inflammation with suppressants—often without asking what caused the fire in the first place.

To suggest that “hypertension is not caused by a deficit in antihypertensives” isn’t to dismiss medicine—it’s to reframe the conversation. The root of the problem may not be pharmacological. It may be lifestyle.

So no, you don’t need to eat raw liver or sleep on a bed of pine needles. But perhaps you do need to question what counts as normal. Because if the “normal” diet makes us sick, it might be time to stop accepting normal.

References:

• Taubes, Gary. Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health. Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

• Schweitzer, A. (1957). The path of life. New York: Henry Holt and Company. [Note: This is Schweitzer’s autobiography; his observations about cancer in Gabon are also cited in secondary literature.]

• Hutton, S. (1912). Health conditions and the Inuit of Labrador. [Original texts may not be widely accessible; summary and citations available via secondary sources such as The Science of Nutrition blog.]

• McCarrison, R. (1921). Studies in Deficiency Disease. London: Oxford Medical Publications. [Key source detailing dietary observations among northern Indian populations.]

• Prior, I. A., Davidson, F., Salmond, C. E., & Czochanska, Z. (1974). Cholesterol, coconuts, and diet on Polynesian atolls: a natural experiment: the Pukapuka and Tokelau island studies. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 27(10), 1120–1128. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/27.10.1120

• Kirkland, J. (2024, March 19). Netflix’s ‘Untold: The Liver King’ revisits a bodybuilding scandal. TIME. https://time.com/7284988/untold-the-liver-king-true-story-netflix/