Eventually, even the largest, most ambitious and most cited study on nutrition and health like Nurses’ Health Study, Women’s Health Initiative and almost all the other, leave the main features of Western food unaffected: many food products and processed meats, many added sugars and fats, except fruit, vegetables and whole grains. According to the nutritionist paradigm and the limits of reductionist science, most researchers are playing with various nutrients individually analyzed, but the subjects with whom they are working are ordinary Americans which are behaving like any ordinary American:          tries to eat smaller amounts of X nutrient and greater quantities of the Y nutrient according to the latest points of view from the nutrition field. But the global nourishment pattern is regarded as a “but” more or less invariable. Therefore probably it should not surprise us the fact that the results of these researches are so modest, equivocal and confuse.

But what about the obvious truth which nobody wants to talk about and what is the food model called Western diet? In the middle of all the nutritional confusion which is getting bigger and bigger, maybe it would be useful to take one step back and fix our eyes on this model, to review all that we know about the Western nutrition and its effects on health. We know that populations that eat like us, Westerners, register much higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity than those whit a traditionally diet. We also know that those who come to the Occident and behave and adopt our behavior food are quickly affected by these diseases and very often these diseases occur in an extremely virulent form, as happens in case of aboriginal and other indigenous peoples.

The story so-called Western diseases and their links with Western diet starts in the first decades of the twentieth century. At that time, some brave doctors, Europeans and Americans, working with various indigenous populations around the world have started to notice the virtual absence of chronic disease among these individuals, diseases that in fact had become current in the West. Albert Schweitzer in Africa and Denis P. Burkitt, Robert McCarrison in India, Samuel Hutton among Eskimos of Labrador, anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka among Native Americans and dentist Weston A Price in the middle of 12 different groups from all around the world (among the Peruvian Indians, aborigines from Australia and highlander from Switzerland) are drawn, all similar reports.

Researchers have developed lists, most published in medical journals, whit diseases which haven’t  been discovered on  indigenous populations that have been treated or studied: very few cases or no cases of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, hypertension or heart attack: no case of appendicitis , diverticulitis, deformed dental arches or tooth decay, no case of varicose veins, ulcers or hemorrhoids.

Suddenly, the researchers began to look all these conditions in a new light, just as it is shown by the name of “Western diseases” proposed for the affections by the British doctor Denis Burkitt, who worked in Africa during the Second World War. The formula suggested that these different diseases were somehow related and that probably had a common cause.