Still, if people from traditional societies enter the western world they tend to be afflicted even worse from civilization diseases (obesity, diabetes, strokes,

Still, if people from traditional societies enter the western world they tend to be afflicted even worse from civilization diseases (obesity, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks...). I think part of the problem is that our foods are engineered to trick the regulation of our food intake. Jared Diamond describes how New Guineans empty whole bottles of salt on their food, because they are much more "optimized" for craving salt. So the energy in/energy out thing might hold, but it is just part of the problem. The real problem is how to regulate food intake appropriately. Actually Dimaond also describes traditional people overeating to the extreme when they have meat on rare occasions (some kind of meat festival). So of course abundance of food is part of the problem - if those people had meat all the time, perhaps they would overeat immediately. But so we could still learn about sane frequencies of food intake from traditional societies.