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Comment by srssays | Hacker News Reader

The average person eats a diet primarily of carbohydrates, particularly rice. Humans have been high carb diets for the entirety of recorded history.

It would be quite the failure of natural selection if eating a normal human diet caused type 2 diabetes.

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Ah yes, we would run across the savannahs, with our flint-tipped spears and hunt the wild HIGH_FRUCTOSE_CORN_SYRUP. At night, we would build a big cooking fire to roast they days catch of fresh MALTODEXTRIN.

I joke. But really, access to high carb, low fibre diets is pretty new. Too new for much natural selection, anyway. We've been eating rice for a long time, but brown rice. I can't find a definite source, but at least in Japan white rice only came into production in the 17th or 18th century.

> According to the New York Times, a 2010 Harvard study showed that people who consume white rice at least five times a week “are almost 20 percent more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than those who eat it less than once a month.”

http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/john-cavanagh-and-robin-bro...

In paleolithic times, the average human diet included a lot of fatty meats. When the fatty game went extinct, and protein-heavy diets failed (protein isn't a fuel source except through gluconeogenesis,) carbohydrate-heavy diets became more common. It's not clear that a carbohydrate-heavy diet is the ideal human diet, just one we're compatible with. The human body can make almost anything work, for a time.

At the same time, tribes in Papua New Guinea who eat almost exclusively carbohydrates have been shown to be virtually free of heart disease.

Zooko and Amber Wilcox-O'Hearn maintain a fascinating blog on the science of ketogenic (very low carb) diets that I can highly recommend: http://www.ketotic.org/

A high-carb diet may be appropriate for someone who perform a constant degree of physical activity.

> https://www.iifym.com/iifym-calculator/

It's alleged but unknown if the metabolism can be (cumulatively or not) damaged over the long term if the diet is unbalanced to our needs.

And in the human history no population has had a lifestyle as sedentary as we have now. The natural selection adapted to something else.

The mutation of ApoA1 in ApoA1-AS [http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/197579 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/28931573] is an example of how the body is adapting to our new diet-lifestyle.

"Recorded history" is too short for natural selection to occur. You don't get significant carbohydrates without agriculture, which is about as young. Besides, type 2 diabetes doesn't seem to have an impact on ability to pass on ones genes, so natural selection would be blind to it.

Agree up to "type 2 diabetes doesn't seem to have an impact on ability to pass on ones genes, so natural selection would be blind to it."

Individuals who have extensive family support do better than ones who do not. That's why we don't die the moment we stop being able to produce offspring. Grandparents care for grandchildren, and help pass on knowledge that is very helpful for survival.

So not blind to it. Reduced impact, yes, but not blind.

agreed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study

low carb is merely retarding the disease, you reduce your blood sugar, but this also provides energy but doesn't treat the cause.

high blood sugar is the symptom of lipids locking up the insulin receptors [1]

so unless you eat just the carbs you need an exercise, you'll just go down a downward spiral.

1. http://www.diabetesincontrol.com/insulin-resistance-a-viciou...

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