Historical diet: Mayan, Aztecs and other populations ate a starchbased diet, not a 'paleo diet'

DR. JOHN MCDOUGALL: Yes. The diet that I recommend is the diet that most people that have ever walked this earth have consumed. It's the diet of all successful populations throughout all of recordable history. There are no exceptions. And unfortunately science or historians or the general population has a hard time recalling history. If they did for a moment they'd figure out what the human diet really is. In recordable history - I'm talking about times where we really have adequate information about how people ate, and that dates back to 13,000 years ago, maybe 24,000 years ago. We really have good records from camp sites and writings and all kinds of things as to what people ate. And if you just stop for a minute you realize that people are starch eaters. All successful populations of people have lived on starch. For example, the Mayans and the Aztecs. They were known as ‘People of the Corn'. So was the American Indian, native American. They lived on corn and squash and beans. That was their diet. As a matter of fact there's a new dollar out called the "Three Sisters" which represents those crops. If you think about Asians for at least 5,000 years their primary calorie intake has been rice. But it's been other things. It's been sojourn and buckwheat and sweet potatoes, but rice is classically the diet of most Asian populations. In the Middle East, five, eight, 10,000 years ago it was millet and wheat. If you look at South America and you look at the people of the Andes. They live on potatoes, still do today, potato based diets. And there are populations that lived on sweet potatoes like those in New Guinea and those in the Caribbean. So wherever you look the primary source of calories for human beings has been starch and when they've consumed those calories, they've had no type 1 or type 2 diabetes. They've had no multiple sclerosis, heart disease as far as we know. Well we have examples of these people living on starch based diets up until recently, and in fact there are a few isolated populations that haven't been touched by the American diet and we can still see that they don't have type 2 diabetes. They don't have coronary artery disease. They don't have multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, etc.