“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.