Diseases of Civilization - A Few Important Names

The observation that western diseases appeared shortly after sugar and refined carbohydrates became part of a diet, is quite common. If it was an isolated case, I would say "OK, there must be something else going on". But it seems to be true all around the world.

The dogma of saturated fat causing obesity and heart disease is not supported by observations. There were populations living exclusively on food of animal origin and they did not develop these diseases.

So, no matter what was the original diet (more or less animal food), and no matter how much vitamins and minerals it contained. Once sugar and refined carbohydrates appeared, the diseases came along...

Here are a few examples:

Stanislas Tanchou, physician and surgeon, who campaigned with Napoleon Bonaparte, presented a paper to the Paris Science Society in 1843, which was a complex statistical examination of malignancy, offering evidence of increased malignancy with increased civilization. One of the prime indicators of a civilizing trend was a diet which included cereal grains. The greater the consumption of these foods, the greater the incidence of malignancy. Tanchou, in his lecture claimed that he could predict the exact incidence of cancer in all the major European cities over the next fifty years, and it was all dependent on the percentage of grain in their diets.

"Cancer like insanity, seems to increase with the progress of civilization."

Samuel Hutton, physician looking after the Inuit of Labrador for 11 years (1902-1913) noticed that there were two categories among them: those consuming the "settler's dietary" consisting of tea, bread, biscuits, molasses, salt fish or pork, and those who were still on their traditional diet mainly of animal origin. 

"The Eskimos living among these settlers have to a large extent adopted the ‘settler’ dietary… and not only does scurvy occur among them in its typical form, but their physique is less robust than is that of their northern brethren. They have lost the… sleek outlines to the Eskimo face and figure; the nose is more prominent and the jaw less square. They endure fatigue less easily, and their children are puny and feeble."
(from  'Health Conditions and Disease Incidence Among the Eskimos of Labrador')

Albert Schweitzer, you can read about this wonderful man in my post about Africa.

W. Roger Williams traveled around the world and noted in The Natural History of Cancer -1908 (online for free)

"The reputed rarity of cancer among uncivilized people is fully borne out by the reports of the medical officers, missionaries, and other officials who have resided among such populations in various parts of the world, as recorded in official and other reports [...]."

For instance, in 1900, on Fiji island he found only two recorded deaths from cancer among the local population of 120,000.

Frederick Hoffman, German statistician at the Prudential Insurance Company in the United States, reported:

"Among some 63,000 Indians of all tribes, there occurred only 2 deaths from cancer as medically observed during the year 1914."

Robert McCarrison (you can read about him in my post about India) spent 30 years recording the nutritional habits and prevalence of diseases among the different ethnic groups of India, where he founded the National Institute of Nutrition. He suggested that modern chronic diseases were a result of "extensive use of vitamin-poor white flour and [...] the inordinate use of vitamin-less sugar".

No one, today, considers sugar to be part of a healthy diet.