Insulin resistance is bad. It doesn't just cause heart disease. Peter Attia, author of Outlive, the Science and Art of Longevity, makes a convincing[1] case that insulin resistance increases the risk of cancer and Alzheimer's disease, too. Causally-speaking, the number of deaths downstream of insulin resistance is ginormous and massively underestimated.
This implies one of the following must be true:
- The science is wrong. Metabolic dysfunction isn't ruining our health.
- Insulin resistance is an extremely difficult problem to solve.
- Civilization is FUBAR.
We know that civilization is FUBAR along many dimensions. Soviet agricultural policy was FUBAR. Maoist agricultural policy was FUBAR. American urban planning is FUBAR. Public education is FUBAR. Dualistic consciousness is FUBAR. I have heard that the Windows Operating System contains advertisements. It is entirely believable that the American metabolism is FUBAR too.
Visiting Japan made this fact impossible for me to ignore. By Japanese standards, Americans are fat. But that under-estimates the scope of the problem, because you can have an unhealthy metabolism without being visibly obese. But when everybody is unhealthy, how do you define "unhealthy"? The obvious reference class to use is hunter-gatherers. I'm not talking about our paleolithic ancestors. There's real-live hunter-gatherers living today. They've got very low rates of obesity, hypertension, and type-2 diabetes. I bet that the handful of obese hunter-gatherers got that way through interacting with civilization.
I don't want to paint too rosy of a picture of hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers have high rates of child mortality and infectious disease. Before the rise of civilization, they fought wars with per capita death tolls worse than the trench warfare of WWI[2]. They used to starve to death a lot too. But none of these are the reasons hunter-gathers have such great metabolic health. Hunter-gatherers have great metabolic health because that great metabolic health is normal for human beings. Modern civilization is the anomaly. Americans (plus, increasingly, everyone else) are metabolically unhealthy because civilization is doing things horribly wrong, especially in the domains of nutrition and exercise.
Modern stress patterns play a role too. So does electric lights disrupting our circadian rhythms. But common sense suggests those are relatively small effects compared to exercise and nutrition. I believe the reason they may appear large is a statistical artifact.
The exercise problem is pretty straightforward. Large volumes of low-intensity exercise are optimal for metabolic health. I used to think that the gold standard was elite endurance athletes who do 15-30 hours of deliberate exercise per week, mostly cardio. And while that's phenomenal compared to Americans, hunter-gatherers have even better biomarkers, and they get there by being physically active for roughly 30–50 hours per week (mostly walking, carrying, and other low-intensity movement).
Except that's only half the story. The other half is nutrition. Elite endurance athletes have incredibly high-energy demands, which requires an unnatural diet to fuel. Whereas hunter-gatherers have an extremely natural diet.
What constitutes a "natural" diet is very confusing, due to nationalism.
Nationalism
When I was a child, my health-conscious mother prepared me homemade lunches. My Taiwanese-American mother called the food "sushi", which is Japanese. Actually, I was eating kimbop, which is Korean. In this way, "since time immemorial" can be as short as two generations, a mere 40-50 years.
It is common knowledge that traditional diets are healthier than modern diets. It is true that my mother's kimbop was healthier than a more modern diet of potato chips and soda. But kimbop is mostly polished white rice. Prior to the 1900s, regular Koreans couldn't afford to get most of their calories from polished white rice like I did. Japanese peasants getting most of their calories from polished white rice nationwide goes back only to the late 1800s.
I know this may sound unbelievable. Rice cultivation is thousands of years old, and eating lots of rice is part of the Korean/Japanese/Chinese national identity. But national identities are artificial constructs. I don't mean this in the sense that all culture is a human imagining. I mean that the modern concept of "national identity" was deliberately created by governments starting around the French Revolution of 1789-1799.
I promise this is relevant to understanding why Americans are so fat.
Out of all these countries, I think the best one for understanding the relationship between nationalism and metabolic dysfunction is Japan. Japan is metabolically healthy compared to the USA, but Japan is metabolically unhealthy compared to hunter-gatherers. More importantly, Japan has history especially conducive to understanding how nationalism transforms a country's idea of what constitutes a traditional diet. For our purpose here, the most important events in Japanese history are the Meiji Period of 1868-1912 and the American occupation of 1945-1952. Both of them transformed the Japanese diet.
The Meiji Restoration began with a civil war. Prior to the Meiji Restoration, Japan was a feudal society. Politically, Japan was structured like Middle Ages Europe, except knights were called samurai, lords were called daimyo, and instead of a king they had an unnecessarily convoluted pretense of power delegation. This was a distributed system. The daimyo lords were almost independent, and had private armies with which they could rebel. Feudalism was often a stable equilibrium prior to the industrial revolution. But by the late 1800s, Western powers were expanding into East Asia. Feudal Japan lacked the state capacity to resist invasion by an industrialized nation-state.
The USA was one of these industrialized nation-states. A USA expeditionary force demanded Japan integrate itself into the modern global economy (on terms unfavorable to Japan, of course). This precipitated a civil war between the incumbent feudalists and the new nationalists. The Meiji Restoration wasn't a people vs government conflict like the French Revolution. This was a civil war between daimyo. The victorious nationalists immediately built a modern nation-state.
The nationalists centralized power in Tokyo, modernized the military, converted the daimyo into state-dependent aristocrats, abolished the samurai (and the rest of the caste system), introduced universal conscription, established a money economy (to replace the grain-based economy), reformed taxes, established a unified police and judiciary (instead of relying on daimyo), implemented compulsory state education (public school), built an industrial economy, and connected everything together with railways and telegraphs. They even adopted Western clothing. The nationalists copied everything they could from the Western powers except democracy.
They also invented "Japan" [nation] and "Japanese" [national identity]. Previously, this referred to a location and state. Now it referred to a nation, with a homogeneous national culture. To populate this revisionist history, the nationalists appropriated their own real history, but with a twist. Now that the samurai were abolished, everyone could adopt neo-samurai values! Japanese people are loyal and always have been. (Imagine how these memes would be useful to fascist expansionist empire.) We are at war with Ingsoc. We have always been at war with Ingsoc.
Every nation needs its own national cuisine too. At this time, rice was the largest source of calories in the Japanese diet. But it was roughly half of the total, and it wasn't all polished white rice. The Japanese ate a lot of millet and barley too. This isn't because the Japanese liked millet, barley, and unpolished rice. It's just that polished white rice was expensive relative to income. Polished white rice was something rich people ate.
An accurate history of Japanese cuisine would go like this: Japanese people were mostly too poor to eat polished rice all the time because that tasty stuff is expensive.
So what did the government memetic engineers pick to base their new pretend-historical diet around? Rice. For the following reasons:
- Rice was eaten by high-status people and everyone wants to be high-status. This would make the meme more palatable.
- Rice tastes good.
- To a feudal economy, polished rice is expensive. But to an industrial economy, polished rice is cheap. "Japanese cuisine" would have to be something the poorest Japanese could afford.
- Especially since history is mostly written about rich people, who ate more rice than the typical Japanese. Rice is overrepresented in the historical record, which is an advantage when writing propaganda.
The Japanese government enamored itself so thoroughly with polished white rice that their soldiers, sailors, factory workers, students, and so on got beriberi thiamine deficiency. This got so bad that in the Russo-Japanese War, beriberi killed Japanese soldiers at a rate comparable to combat with the Russians. The Japanese created an agricultural policy that ruined the health of the nation—especially their troops—because of memetic engineering because of nationalism because of the need to build a strong military.
Fortunately, Japan quickly learned its lesson and switched to ramen noodles, instead.
Just kidding! First of all, if you visit a kombini today, it'll be full of polished white rice, not millet and barley. Secondly, the reason Japan eats lots of ramen today has nothing to do with beriberi and everything to do with war.
In 1945, WWII ended. The United States had liberated Japan's imperial conquests and bombed the country to ashes. Japanese people were starving. Fortunately, the United States had a wheat surplus. Unfortunately, Japan had just spend >100 years conditioning its population into believing that all they ate was rice. By that time, everyone who remembered the truth had died of old age. So the United States created a new propaganda campaign getting the Japanese population to eat wheat.
To do this they popularized a niche food made out of wheat called ramen noodles. "Ramen" is the Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese word "lamien". Ramen noodles were a Chinese food that poor Chinese immigrants sold to Japanese people. Ramen's rebranding into a Japanese food happened before 1945, but its mass adoption in the post-occupation food shortage turned it into a staple.
Now, in 2025, if you asked a random Japanese person or LLM "what is traditional Japanese food", they'd answer "[polished] white rice". Millet, barley and unpolished rice won't even be on the list. In this way, historical food has been completely disconnected from what is memetically classified as "traditional" food. This is the direct consequence of nationalist memetic engineering, and an indirect consequence of a Molochian political/geopolitical competition that transforms every civilization into nation-states.
I'm using Japan because it's an easy-to-understand example, but the same principles apply to all contemporary nation-states. Our memetic environment is so corrupted by nationalist narratives, that even if you give up modern food (potato chips, soda) and replace it with seemingly traditional food (polished white rice, bread, pasta), you'll still be eating sugar by the standards of hunter-gatherers. I mean that literally.
The USA government recommendation in particular is pure nonsense. They use dairy as a food group that everyone should eat. The majority of adult human beings are lactose intolerant!
How long until the USA changes it again? Or just abolishes it altogether.
Peasant Diets
Colloquially, we use the word "sugar" to refer to highly refined sugars like high-fructose corn syrup. But chemically-speaking, the complex carbohydrates in rice, pasta and bread are chains of sugars too. Modern packagings of carbohydrates do take longer to digest, which makes them not as bad as simple carbohydrates, but that doesn't make them good.
But didn't European peasants eat a diet of mostly bread? Technically yes, but that's just as misleading as claiming that Japanese peasants historically ate rice. White wheaten bread was something elites ate. Peasants ate bread made out of rye, barley, and oats. (Potatoes were introduced after the Colombian Exchange.) Some peasants ate wheat too, but the resultant bread was nothing like modern white and wheat breads. It was dark, bitter, and high in fiber. In times of famine, they ate legumes. Think "survival food". How was the metabolic health of European peasants? Fine. Their diet caused non-metabolic problems like protein malnutrition, niacin deficiency, scurvy, rickets, and chronic childhood malnutrition. But obesity and diabetes were extremely rare. Those were diseases of the minority urban rich.
Food used to be precious. Historical people ate the tastiest food they could acquire. In this way, there is no "historical human diet". There are a variety of historical diets. On one extreme are the Inuit who ate a diet of almost entirely meat. At the other extreme are Eurasian peasants who ate a diet of mostly coarse grain. Pastoral nomads could get half of their calories from milk. Hunter-gatherers supplemented hunting with foraging for nuts and tubers. Many of these diets caused problems. The New Guinean cannibals got prion disease from eating each others' brains. But there are two commonalities between normal (read: poor) people in every historical society that we know of.
- They didn't eat fiberless blobs of carbohydrates like wheat-based bread/pasta and polished white rice.
- Obesity or diabetes were extremely rare.
Which means that our reference class isn't just hunter-gatherers. It's "every society on Earth before 1800". Why am I obsessing over refined carbohydrates? Why not seed oils and olive oils? Because the diet I grew up on was based on rice and pasta. The oil I use for cooking is a small fraction of my total caloric intake. I have heard of people chugging olive oil for the calories, but I don't know any IRL.
Once I put all of these pieces together, I realized that my "traditional" rice-and-noodle-based diet is already damaging my health. I immediately made it a priority to overhaul my diet.
The simplest way to do this would probably be to just go with the "paleo" diet (by which I mean the modern diet marketed as "paleo"). Unfortunately, the "paleo" diet is based around eating meat. I don't have a problem with eating meat in theory, but I consider factory farming unethical, and modern animal products tend to come from factory farms by default. Fortunately, I have found some local milk producers that seem to treat the cows tolerably well.
But even that's not quite enough protein. Nuts provide a bit of protein, but the best source is legumes: beans, peas, lentils. Over the last couple weeks, I've mostly eliminated rice/pasta/bread from my diet and have instead based my diet around beans (supplemented with coarse bulgur) instead.
My favorite thing to make over and over again is the following bean dish.
Ingredients
- dried black beans, soaked overnight
- 1 onion
- garlic
- ginger
- spices, ground
- 1 carrot
- 2 celery sticks
- vegetable soup broth
Instructions
- Sauté the onions, garlic and ginger.
- Add the carrots and celery.
- Add everything else. Simmer until beans are good texture. (About 1.5 hours.)
Is this a historical diet? No, but the Pareto Principle is at work here and this is way closer to a historical diet than anything else I've ever eaten. The most interesting thing is digestive speed. Beans take a long time to digest—and not just because they have lots of fiber. Previously, with my more normative diet, I'd get a sugar crash after every meal. Now my energy level is much more stable, which is a sign that what I'm eating is better for my metabolic health.