Why didn’t ancient humans develop diabetes from eating excess fruit?

Why didn’t ancient humans develop diabetes from eating excess fruit?

The same reason modern humans don't today. It's not an easy thing to do. Especially on fruit. Type 2 Diabetes does not developed overnight and cannot be traced to any one single source. The fast answer is sugar, but if you look up sugar in any source besides a simple dictionary, you will find that sugar is not one thing. Sugar is a catchall word for most natural sweeteners.

The sugar in fruit and other unprocessed foods has far less adverse effects on your body than processed sweeteners and is infinitely better than artificial sweeteners. Beware, however, because over the years, especially the last 100 to 50 years, food science has been drastically adapted to sales far above earlier concerns, such as availability.

Many foods, even naturally occurring foods, have been genetically altered to be larger, tastier, and yes, sweeter. The more you like the food, the more it's going to sell and, the best way to get people to like food is by altering the way it affects your senses.

Salty, sweet, bitter, umami (savory), sour, and fat. Each of these has been scientifically altered in almost every modern food source. Sweet fruits are sweeter than ever before, Sour fruits are more sour, etc…. But still, the fruit alone is not the source of Diabetes. We eat many items, even vegans and vegetarians and flexitarians are eating in greater quantity due to greater percieved quality.

The ancients would have a similar rate of diabetes if they had similar quantities of sweetened foods. Alas, for them, food was not available in quantity. They had to work the fields to get it, hunt for it, scavenge for it, etc…. What they did get, was not altered by the village priest or shaman or wiseman. It wasn't neatly wrapped in a pretty container. It didn't arrive in family-sized portions and didn't cost more if they wanted just a single serving.

Food science today is targeted at you wanting more, paying for more, and eating more.This excess is what causes Diabetes. Granted a specific excess, that of glucose (blood sugar), but it doesn't just come from one source. Just as salt does not, and fat does not. These foods all contribute to the amount of sugar in your blood, granted some more than others, but they all contribute. This list is nowhere near exhaustive:

Bread
Cereal
Vegetables
Sugar
Candy
Dairy
Poultry
Melons
Berries
Nuts
Tree fruits
Sauces
Gravies
Spices
The list is almost all-inclusive of all foods. Most have some form or amount of sugar. But wait, there's more! Much more - and its “added".

Read your groceries’ nutrition labels. It's easy to understand that fruit juice would be sweet, right? Why then, do they need to include “added sugars"? “Added sugars" are exactly what they sound like… sugar added to a recipe to make it sweeter. In fruit juice, this amount can be as much or more than the natural sugars already present. The more water they use to make your “100% fruit juice”, the more sugar they add to compensate for the washed out flavor. All that “100% fruit juice" on the label means is that the 2% fruit juice that they include, is actually 100% fruit juice, as opposed to fruit juice from concentrate, or fruit flavoring. Added sugars are what gets you back into the store and back to their brand. If you like it, or your kids like it, you buy it.

Ancient man grabbed what was available and added nothing but teethmarks in their foods. So Ancient man had no Diabetes epidemics. Ancient man did not have greedy, unscrupulous, scientists and distributors.

Although modern medicine suggests an intake of no more than 60 grams of carbs (sugars) per meal or 180 grams per day, eating 75 or 100 grams at a time is not going to produce diabetes in humans with a healthy pancreas. Eating 200 grams per meal, every meal, twice as much at snack time, and especially just before bed… these things are a recipe for Diabetes. These things ancient man did not or, regularly could not do.

These days, it is up to us, as individuals, to take the time to actually learn about and discover exactly what, and how much, we put into our bodies when we eat or drink.