I made this chart to illustrate the relationship between neolithic foods and the incidence of diseases of civilization like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. I often find myself explaining my paleo diet, and most people don’t know how new most of these foods really are, or how new many of these diseases are. Hopefully this will give them some much needed historical perspective.
Click the chart to embiggen.
The dates I chose for the introduction of the various foods are fairly accurate. In each case, I chose the time when the popularity of the food seemed to explode, even if it was available in some form before. The disease trend line is just an educated guess based on my reading of Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Why would I make a chart based upon a guess? Well, the purpose of the chart is to illustrate what I and other paleo eaters actually think about the relationships among food, disease, and history. The rate of disease as shown in my chart is a depiction of what we think has actually occurred. There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence to back it up. If anyone can point me to a source of better numbers for the per capita rates of diseases of civilization, I will gladly substitute it for my guess. I suspect it won’t look much different.
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9 Comments
The paleo theory is of interest to me, and sounds plausible in the context of evolution. But what’s your response to the objection that these diseases are only “new” because people previously didn’t live long enough to get them – i.e. life expectancies were much less, and they typically died of other things, before these diseases could become prominent?
I don’t have an “axe” on the issue of paleo food one way or the other, but I do have a question regarding this chart. All of the cited diseases correlate with age, and this period was when human lifespans rapidly increased. So, one would expect to see cancer, a disease which appears more frequently with age, increasing as people lived longer.
Have you accounted for this fact? To more effectively make your point, you would look at the rates of disease for people at the same ages, and see how that changed over the years.
For example, what was the rate of cancer for a 40 year old man or woman in 1000 A.D., 1500, 1700, 1800, 1900, today?
To summarize, the diseases cited correlate with age, and people began to live longer during this period, so the aggregate rate of disease went up. To overcome this correlation, one should look at disease rates for people of the same age in each of these periods.
I have some fascinating papers that argue that prior to the advent of agriculture, lifespan wasn’t all that short like we assume. I have to study and think about all of this, but consider the chart a work in progress that is subject to revision.
Mark,
See my response to Anonymous. Thanks for your comment.
Hi Diane,
Thank you for putting thought into the issue. I have always argued against the proliferating statements that there is more diseases than there used to be with
a) Modern diagnostic tools have only become available recently. How could people prior to the 20th (certainly to the 19th) century diagnose, for instance, cancer? Stuff just hurt as they got older, and they eventually died.
b) Diseases seem to crop up and go away in the grand scheme of history. We have cured much of what was plaguing humanity for thousands of years – and new things sprouted up (plague & tuberculosis replaced by AIDS and diabetes).
c) People did not reproduce with bad genetic predispositions. If women predisposed to diabetes developed gestational diabetes, they often died in pregnancy. Now we can keep high risk pregnancies with that and other problems reasonably safe and deliver healthy babies that will come to develop health problems (or pass the genes on). Children with asthma/diabetes/heart defect did not normally survive puberty. I am a proponent of just that for me and my offspring (I’d rather they live with diabetes than purify the gene pool by dying) but I understand the cost of more disease in the population broadly.
What are your thoughts?
Oh, sorry. Just realized, this was Tod’s post. Forgive my greeting above!
I have to agree with Kate Yoak. This chart is foolish. You didn’t think about this for long did you Tod?
In response to your points:
a) Read Good Calories, Bad Calories to find out about the missionary doctors. Back around 1900 or so, they treated patients in lands where indigenous populations were still eating their native, animal fat laden diets, and the white settlers imported lots of what they liked — wheat and sugar. The doctors always found far, far more cancer and diabetes in the populations eating modern foods. Diseases of western civilization were just astonishingly low in the indigenous populations. What counts is not the sophistication of the method of disease detection, but that the same method was applied to both groups.
b) That’s not a helpful observation. Why do these diseases come up? Are we supposed to say, diabetes is just a new thing, and it’ll go away like plague, somehow, someday.
c) The vast majority of cases of Type II diabetes are not present at birth and only develop later in life, which is a strong indication that environment and choices are the causes. This has nothing to do with genetics dealing certain people a bad hand.
I thought about it for a long time. See my response to Kate Yoak.