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" Further, researchers began compiling a list of diseases absent in indigenous populations, no matter where they lived on the planet, including and especially cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, psoriasis, dental cavities, and acne. Note that this list includes some of the very diseases that constitute our worst problems today. "
― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization
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" all were based in the taming and cultivation of a wild grass (yes, rice, wheat, and corn, or maize, as most of the world knows it, are grasses), and all, including the tubers, rested on plants that stored dense, durable packages of carbohydrates: starches. This is civilization. Civilization is starch, and by extension, diseases of civilization are diseases of starch, either directly or indirectly, and most of it is indeed direct: starches are complex carbohydrates, and they quickly break down, often even in a person’s mouth, into simple carbohydrates, which are sugars. Further, much of that sugar is glucose or other forms that the liver converts into glucose. The human body is perfectly capable of metabolizing glucose, which has been with us through the ages, especially in fruits and tubers. We convert it into glycogen, and any athlete will tell you that glycogen is what moves us forward. (It turns out that this is not nearly as true as we think, but for the moment, let’s let this stand.) It is not that glucose is unprecedented or even that starch is new to us; hunter-gatherers have and had both. But not in abundance, not as a sole source, not in the tidal wave of "
― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization