‘We can’t go back a hundred million years’:Low-carbohydrate dieters’ responses to nutritional primitivism

摘要

Low-carbohydrate diets such as the Atkins Diet were especially popular in English-speaking developed countries in the 1990s and 2000s. The popular low-carbohydrate literature displays a strong discourse of ‘nutritional primitivism’: pursuit of supposedly simpler, more natural and authentic ways of eating, as part of a quest for health. Nutritional primitivism includes evolutionary explanations for obesity and type-2 diabetes, and arguments based on nutritional anthropology. This paper explores low-carbohydrate dieters’ responses to nutritional primitivism, based on an interview study late in the low-carbohydrate trend. Although some interviewees accepted nutritional primitivism unproblematically, most approached such ideas critically and sceptically – cause for cautious celebration given the problems of logic, evidence and (on occasion) racism in the primitivist discourse of the low-carbohydrate literature.