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A new study has confirmed the so-called "mismatch hypothesis" that to stay healthy, you must eat the foods to which the body was adapted during evolution.
The abrupt shift from the traditional diet to the western one - rich in carbohydrates - leads to the development of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
To verify this, researchers from Princeton studied the Kenyan Turkana people.
The "mismatch hypothesis" suggests that our bodies have evolved and adapted to digest the food that our ancestors ate and that it is difficult and often impossible for it to adapt to a radically new set of foods.
“Humans evolved in a very different environment than the one we’re currently living in” said Amanda Lea of Princeton University, lead author of the article. - No one diet is universally bad. It’s about the mismatch between your evolutionary history and what you’re currently eating.”
The idea of "mismatch" came up a few years ago, but it's not easy to test.
Most of the experiments compared Westerners to hunter-gatherer tribes but did not take into account the impact of differences in genetics and lifestyle.
Lea and her team decided to investigate the Turkana people living in Kenya. In the late 1980s, drought and oil discoveries led to the transformation of the region.
Large segments of the population abandoned the nomadic lifestyle and settled in villages and cities.
Those who still adhere to the traditions of their ancestors continue to eat livestock products - they breed camels, zebu, sheep, goats, and donkeys.
Those who left for the cities switched to high-carbohydrate diets and processed foods.
Scientists decided to take this opportunity and compare different groups of the same people.
After collecting health data and interviewing 1,226 Turkan adults living in 44 localities, they identified ten health biomarkers, which were used to assess representatives of both groups.
Among those who adhered to the traditional lifestyle, all indicators of health were good. But those who moved to cities showed signs of cardiovascular disease: increased obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.
The metrics showed that the more time Turkans spent in cities, the worse their health biomarkers.
Switching to a diet rich in carbohydrates makes people sick, the researchers say, and the effect is cumulative.
Scientists plan to continue research and include in them various peoples of the Pacific Islands, who have also moved away from traditional life.
Research on the benefits of a low-carb diet was conducted by scientists from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
They proved that the process of destabilizing the neural networks of the brain can be prevented by the refusal to eat foods high in carbohydrates.