That's a fairly insightful observation in that in the old days in the agricultural high carb west we balanced the obesity causing nature of extremely high carb

That's a fairly insightful observation in that in the old days in the agricultural high carb west we balanced the obesity causing nature of extremely high carb diets against malnourishment, internal parasites, and periodic regular famines. We eliminated all three in the last century while keeping the ultra high carb diet, in fact boosting the carb intake to levels never seen before, and unsurprisingly the obesity level exploded. For example five minutes with google searching for "khmer malnurishment" will find that about a third of the kids have some kind of malnutrition problem. Admittedly those stats come from people who's salaries depend on the problem existing and are therefore untrustworthy, but I'm sure real world rates none the less exceed a quarter. Kinda the whole point of the obesity epidemic in the post-green revolution west is we don't have 1/3 of the population dying of scurvy regardless of how much carb they eat, and by definition we never ever fast or have any carb intake limit at all. Its entirely possible that an ultra high carb diet as experienced in the west until the 1970s is perfectly stable as long as you have repetitive unintentional fasts (aka famines) and massive infestation of tapeworms and other intestinal parasites combined with universal vitamin deficiency such that everyone's a little sick all the time. Its interesting to think about intestinal parasite eradication in terms similar to current discussion of probiotics and antibiotics in food. Tapeworms are gross, but so is dying 20 years earlier due to obesity... Its not a huge step in the probiotic marketing sense from unicellular parasites to multicellular parasites.