“We Can’t Go Back a Hundred Million Years”

Abstract

Low-carbohydrate diets such as the Atkins Diet were especially popular in English-speaking developed countries in the 1990s and 2000s. The popular low-carbohydrate literature displays a strong discourse of “nutritional primitivism”: that is, pursuit of supposedly simpler, more natural and authentic ways of eating, as part of a quest for health. Nutritional primitivism includes evolutionary explanations for obesity and type 2 diabetes and arguments based on nutritional anthropology. This paper explores low-carbohydrate dieters’ responses to nutritional primitivism, based on an interview study late in the low-carbohydrate trend. Although some interviewees accepted nutritional primitivism unproblematically, most approached such ideas critically and skeptically—cause for cautious celebration given the problems of logic, evidence and (on occasion) racism in the primitivist discourse of the low-carbohydrate literature.

Keywords:

• low-carbohydrate diet
• high-protein diet
• Paleo diet
• diet books
• evolution
• genetics
• obesity
• primitivism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Carlene Wilson and Dr Heather Kerr, who advised on research design, analysis and writing up; Dr Gill Haddow, Dr Isabel Fletcher and Dr Marisa Wilson, who provided feedback on this manuscript; and the three anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions greatly strengthened the paper. I also gratefully acknowledge the contribution of my research participants.

Notes

1. For an exploration of gender in primitivist discourse, see Torgovnick (1997).

2. The subheading is a longer version of the same quotation.

3. The thrifty gene theory suggests that “feast-or-famine” cycles during key periods of human evolution naturally selected for those who stored excess energy as body fat, to be drawn on when food was scarce. When food is constantly abundant, as for most people in the developed world today, those with the “thrifty gene” are supposedly predisposed to obesity and type 2 diabetes.

4. Phil did not cite any sources of dieting information apart from diet books.

5. John had read and followed Protein Power (Eades and Eades 1996), as well as The X Factor Diet (Kenton 2002), which has a chapter called “Protein Power” (60–5).

6. As with dieting duration and commitment, I found no evidence that interviewees’ motivations for dieting related to their responses to nutritional primitivism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Knight

Christine Knight is Senior Research Fellow in Science, Technology & Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her main research interest is contemporary food history and culture, focusing on nutrition and dietary advice. She currently holds a Wellcome Trust Medical History & Humanities Research Fellowship to investigate negative stereotyping of the Scottish diet. Science, Technology & Innovation Studies, University of Edinburgh, Chisholm House, High School Yards, Edinburgh EH1 1LZ, United Kingdom ([email protected]).