I think that we have to consider that
all carbs aren't created equal.
What is missing in the Kitavan diet is
wheat!!!
Stephan Guyenet (Whole Health Source Blog), who has also looked into the Kitavans and their health, argues elsewhere on his blog that wheat seems to cause hyperphagia (technospeak for over-eating). The more wheat is eaten by a particular population, the more calories they consume.
What's more, today's bread products are a far cry from those we used to eat. In the "olden days" most products made with wheat, from pancakes to bread, were made using some kind of fermentation process, which is not the case today. So, not only are we eating more wheat, the kind of wheat we are eating (present company excepted, of course
) is also completely different from a few generations ago.
There are other cultures and populations that have rice as their main carbohydrate staple and who also don't get fat until modern wheat products, and pasteurized milk, are introduced into their diet (cf. Japan, China).
A few other things missing in the Kitavan diet are omega 6s in over-abundance, which is present in the SAD due to all the vegetable oils we are supposed to eat because they are so healthy (doh), as well as over-processed fructose beverages and other products containing HCFS.
The Kitavans eat their fruit whole and fresh, I assume, with most of the original enzymes intact; they don't drink "Smoothies" and eat fructose-laden yoghurts.
What is also missing from the Kitavan diet is milk. I don't see any mention of dairy products on the above list at all.
And again, milk by itself, and milk products, are much more processed and denatured than they were a few generations ago before refrigeration and pasteurization. In the "olden days" milk would have been raw milk, and it would have been made into all sorts of foods, all of which would have been teeming with "good" bacteria, unlike the milk we get today.
Like with so many other things, technological 'progress' is a double-edged sword: whilst I would never deny that it has brought many improvements in our quality of life, at the same time, Big Food, with its over-processed cheap products, have contributed to a drastic decrease in the quality of the food eaten by many in the rich world.
My two cents.
amanda