![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Low-carbohydrate diets were particularly popular in English-speaking Western countries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Based on a critical analysis of the bestselling low-carbohydrate diet book Protein Power (Eades and Eades 1996), this paper examines and critiques the use of anthropological and nutritional research about Indigenous people in the low-carbohydrate diet movement. I argue that Protein Power turns the popular scientific gaze onto Indigenous groups as a purported explanatory microcosm for the West, in which the negative effects of ‘civilized’ diet and lifestyle appear magnified and accelerated. However, the reduction of Indigenous foodways to the binary formation ‘urbanized Western diet’ versus ‘traditional Indigenous diet’ cannot account for the cultural and historical context in which food practices take place, nor for the social and environmental factors implicated in the development of diabetes and obesity. Rather, this binary reflects an investment in the ideology of ‘nutritional primitivism’: pursuit of a more natural and authentic, and therefore ostensibly healthier, diet.
Acknowledgements
This research was carried out as part of a PhD project jointly supported by the University of Adelaide and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). This paper was revised as Policy Research Fellow at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, University of Edinburgh, UK. The support of both CSIRO Human Nutrition and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged. I would like to express my sincere thanks to my PhD supervisors Dr Heather Kerr and Professor Carlene Wilson for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments.
Notes
1. The Atkins Diet and Philosophy (Heldke, Mommer, and Pineo Citation2005) is a collection of essays, but its primary purpose is to explain philosophical concepts for a general audience using examples from popular culture, rather than engaging in depth with low-carbohydrate dieting.
4. I briefly discuss Protein Power's representation of the Inuit in a previous essay for a general audience (Knight Citation2005, 50–2).
5. Although the term Eskimo is ‘still widely used and not considered to be pejorative’ in Alaska, outside the United States it is generally considered derogatory (Bjerregaard et al. Citation2004, 390). I follow Young and colleagues (Citation2007) in using Inuit ‘as a collective term encompassing various regional groups’ in Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland (691).
6. Inuit health was by no means perfect in the early twentieth century either. The arrival of Europeans in the Arctic heralded the spread of infectious diseases (notably tuberculosis) which had ‘devastating consequences’ for the Inuit population (Bjerregaard et al. Citation2004, 391).
7. Mowanjum residents come from three language groups: the Worora, Ngarinyin, and Wunumbul. I therefore refer to the participants in O'Dea's research collectively as Aboriginal Australians.
8. These associations do not necessarily imply a causal relationship. The idea that obesity causes type 2 diabetes ‘rather than being a symptom’, and is in itself a disease requiring treatment, has been subject to criticism (Ross Citation2005, 106).
9. Lawrence and Gibson (Citation2007) highlight the continuity between rationing and more recent governmental relationships between Aboriginal Australians and the state.
10. In fact the participants in this study were of normal weight and non-diabetic, and did not demonstrate elevated fasting insulin or glucose levels at baseline. I suspect Eades and Eades have confused this study (O'Dea and Spargo Citation1982) with the subsequent study (O'Dea Citation1984) they describe later.
11. I have already noted the same metaphor used by Langton (Citation2007), though I would not consider Protein Power's ‘reality show’ to be ‘pornographic’ to the same extent.
12. There are various inconsistencies in Protein Power and its bibliography which suggest that the Epilogue material was originally intended to be placed earlier in the book, before the discussion of O'Dea's research. In this case, readers would have been familiar with the ancient Egypt material by the time they read the commentary on Australian Aboriginal health.