AHS16 - Ancestral Health Symposium 2016

The benefits of low-carbohydrate diets are finally receiving appropriate attention, however it must be borne in mind that some well-studied pre-industrial populations ate high-carbohydrate ancestral diets, yet still enjoyed exemplary metabolic health. This is a presentation of the hypothesis that altered host-bacterial interactions may be a key step in the initiation of obesity and diabetes, and are brought about by replacing life-derived ancestral foods that retain evolved structural properties with dense, processed alternatives. Such microbial-initiated inflammatory changes to the neuroregulation of appetite and metabolism would be directly analogous to the aberrant host responses that produce periodontitis, and may be triggered by the same foods – flours, grains and refined sugars. Dietary fats may play a role conveying microbial changes to the immune surveillance of the small intestine. The hypothesis would explain both the benefits of diets that displace processed foods and the correlation between oral and systemic health.