Any discussion about the "primitive" diet without talking about exposure to the elements and the caloric cost of gathering calories is useless. There is no question in my mind that man began farming about 12,000 years ago and began the downward spiral that has been accelerated in the last 60 years. There is a difference between the "simple" and "complex" carbs. Complex carbs are released slowly because the molecule chain takes time to break down. Simple sugar would be much more rare in the form of honey and over-ripe fruit. Eating a potato is not the same as drinking a soda-pop on blood sugar. There is also no question that the food industry has used our natural fondness for sweet to corrupt our diets. A decent diet must be accompanied by a significant amount of physical activity. Keep in mind that all this 100,000 year old activity was conducted in a group. A group would also keep you from eating too much. Eating in front of a TV set even masks our feeling of being full by the distraction and just because we eat more quickly than our body can register the feeling of being full.
I would be happy to answer any questions as an armchair student of EvPsych.

Whole wheat bread is still a processed carb - flour of any kind is processed wheat. A woman I read uses the term "intact" grains rather than whole grains - things like barley, brown rice, farro, quinoa. There isn't much difference, health-wise, between whole grain pasta and regular pasta. There is a difference between brown rice and white rice. (This doesn't matter much to you, Amy, because you are satisfied and healthy with your current lifestyle. However, people have different tastes. I looked at that woman's pictures of her food - slabs of meat - and I got nauseous. I cannot eat like that, but I am still living healthfully.)

Dan, what you say is very true, and this is a problem with current food... it is so DENSE in calorie, because of refinement, that it doesn't match the life we lead. This makes the problems that the Eades mention all the more... Perhaps carcs aren't so bad, but how many can you have? 1/4 of a potato? 5 peices of macaroni?

IF our ancestral diest were relatively free of sugar spikes that required insulin, it made our lifestyles fairly simple. Once you change that wave of sugar spikes to jagged, than all sorts of bad things happen.

And I would submit that the reason this has only recently come to light... is that we used to not live long enough for it to be seen. It is only within the last several hundred years that we started to live past 50 in general. The slow build of this issue since agriculture really took hold thousands of years ago wasn't apparent because not only did people do a lot of physical work, but they didn't live long enough to show the problems so well...

Thanks for posting this, Amy! I'm not a low-carber (I needed to gain some weight for my pregnancy, but I try not to load up on refined sugars), but I followed some links in the Girl Gone Primal post and found an interesting piece by a dietary blogger in Missouri about school lunches. I was really surprised to find that school lunches contain so many processed foods and just plain junk. I know it's unrealistic to expect school staff to actually cook for these kids, but I would be willing to pay a higher price for a school lunch if I knew at least some of the pre-prepared foods they served were made of things like real chicken and ground beef instead of fillers. My son's school doesn't even send home a menu so I can see what he would be eating. Thankfully, I do actually cook just about every night and he is kind of spoiled to that, so he packs a lunch more often than not. I have discovered if that kind of crap is not in the house and healthier stuff is, kids will adapt and actually think of carrots and celery sticks as snacks instead of whining that there are no twinkies to be found. I think the most sugary thing my kids like is yogurt. Thanks again, Amy, this post was very informative for me.

Thanks @SwissArmyD. Amy, while I can read all the low-carb lists on the Web, I would appreciate knowing what you DO eat to keep yourself in such good shape. Give me a good excuse to eat bacon and I'll be in Hog Heaven. (That doesn't sound good, does it?)