Indigenous nutrition research and the low-carbohydrate diet movement: Explaining obesity and diabetes in Protein Power

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.