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For my wife and me, taking our five-year-old twin sons to the supermarket means traversing a minefield of dietary dangers. Among breakfast foods, my kids are tempted by the choice between Apple Cinnamon Cheerios and Froot Loops, respectively 85 percent and 89 percent carbohydrate according to their manufacturers, with about half of that carbohydrate in the form of sugar. Boxes picturing the famous turtles with Ninja powers seduce children to ask for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Cheese Pasta Dinner, 81 percent carbohydrate. Snack choices include Fruit Bears (93 percent carbohydrate, no protein) and Teddy Graham's Bearwich chocolate cookies with vanilla cream (71 percent carbohydrate); both list corn syrup, as well as sugar, among their ingredients. All of these foods contain little or no fiber. Compared with the diet to which our evolutionary history adapted us, they differ in their much higher content of sugars and other carbohydrates (71 to 95 percent instead of about 15 to 55 percent), much lower protein and fiber content, and in other respects. I mention these particular brands, not because they are unusual, but precisely because their content is typical of what is available.
With foods like these so popular, it is no wonder that most Natural History readers will die of diet-and life-style-related diseases, including diabetes, the commonest disease of carbohydrate metabolism. Granted, diabetes isn't infectious or rapidly fatal, so it doesn't command press headlines, as does AIDS. Nevertheless, the world epidemic of diabetes today eclipses the AIDS epidemic in its toll of death and suffering. Diabetes disables its victims slowly and reduces their quality of life. Among its secondary consequences, it is the leading cause of adult blindness in the United States, the second leading cause of nontraumatic foot amputations, and the cause of one-third of our cases of kidney failure. The estimated number of diabetics in the United States ranges from 4 to 12 million people; worldwide, the number is probably more than 100 million people.
The most prevalent form of diabetes arises from the collision of our old hunter-gatherer genes with our new twentieth-century life style. It thereby serves as a model for other noncommunicable diseases, such as heart attack, stroke, and cancer, that have similarly catapulted in frequency to become the leading causes of...