Some of these researchers planned to observe the Western diseases among isolated populations, in particular, as Albert Schweitzer wrote, among “indigenous people that are increasingly adopting the lifestyle of the white people”. Some have noted that Western diseases appeared shortly after these individuals began to eat Western food, especially refined flour and sugar and other “commercial food“. They also observed a Western disease was always followed by another, often in the same order: obesity was followed by type 2 diabetes, which was followed by hypertension and heart attack, followed by heart diseases.

In the years preceding the Second World War, the medical world held heated discussions about Western diseases and about the conclusions that these lead us regarding to our more and more industrialized lifestyle. The pioneers of this vision claimed that indigenous populations were poorly adapted to certain innovations of modern food, but haven’t reached any consensus on the factors responsible for this state. Burkitt, for example, believed that the guilt is the absence of fiber in the American diet, while McCarrison, a British military doctor, focused his attention on refined carbohydrates while other researchers blamed the consumption of meat and saturated fat, or in case of Price, the appearance of processed food and industrial crops, whit a deficiency in vitamins and minerals.

But not everyone was agreeing with the conceptions that according them, the chronic illnesses were a consequence of Western lifestyles and the industrialization of  food harm our health. One of the objections to this theory was genetic: different races are exposed to different diseases, white people were predisposed to heart attack, and black people were predisposed to diseases like leprosy. Yet, as Burkitt and the other researchers have pointed out, blacks living in America suffered from the same chronic diseases as white Americans. Apparently, moved to America, immigrants belonging to nations with low rates of chronic diseases contracted the diseases.

Another objection brought to the idea of Western diseases, objection that persist even today, was a demographic one. Chronic diseases are so many in the West because of the fact that they occur at relatively late age and, because of the fact that at the beginning of the twentieth century they have become treatable infectious diseases, consequently, we live long enough to suffer from chronic diseases. From this perspective, chronic diseases are the inevitable price of longevity. But if it’s true that life expectancy has increased considerably in the twentieth century (in the U.S. reaching 49 to 77 years), this is due mainly to the fact that more people survive infancy and childhood, in 1900 the life expectancy of a person aged 65 years was only six years less than that of the contemporary age of 65 years. The age reports and the rate of chronic diseases like cancer or diabetes type 2 are higher today than in 1900. This means that, at the present, the chances that a person age 69 or 70 years to suffer from cancer or diabetes type 2 are greater than a century ago. (The situation may be similar also for a heart disease. But it is difficult to pronounce ourselves with certainty, because of the vague statistics from 1900).