The ten men who walked back into the bush had all been born there, and none of them had lived there in years. They came from a settlement in a remote part of northern Australia, where the diet now ran on white flour, sugar, sweetened tea and tinned meat, and where their bodies had begun to fail in the particular modern way: rising blood sugar, thickening blood, the slow arithmetic of type 2 diabetes. Then a scientist asked them to leave all of it behind and go home to the land their ancestors had hunted for tens of thousands of years. What happened over the next seven weeks is still cited today, four decades on, because it broke a rule that medicine treats as close to unbreakable.
Fifty thousand years without the disease
For a span of time almost impossible to picture, Aboriginal Australians ate what the continent gave them. Kangaroo and emu, freshwater fish and turtle, goanna, witchetty grubs, wild yams, figs, seeds, honey from bush bees. It was lean, wildly varied, fibrous, and nearly free of sugar. On that food, type 2 diabetes was effectively unknown. The people who ate it were, by every account of the early observers, metabolically robust.
Then, over a few generations, the food changed and the bodies followed. As communities were drawn into missions and towns, the bush diet gave way to the cheapest calories a store could stock: refined flour, sugar, sweet drinks, canned goods. The genome that had carried people across an ice age did not have time to adapt. Some Aboriginal communities now carry among the highest diabetes rates ever measured. The genes had not turned on them. The pantry had.
The experiment nobody thought would work
In the early 1980s, a nutrition researcher named Kerin O'Dea decided to test the idea directly. She recruited a small group of middle-aged Aboriginal men, roughly ten of them, all diabetic, all long settled into a Westernized town life. Her proposal was simple and radical at once: return to your traditional country and, for about seven weeks, eat only what you can hunt and gather.
So they did. They tracked and speared kangaroo. They caught fish and birds and freshwater turtle. They dug wild yams and gathered figs and bush honey. There was no bread, no sugar, no soft drink for hundreds of kilometers. The food was lean and hard-won, and there was less of it than the men were used to. They walked and hunted for their meals the way their grandfathers had.
Seven weeks, measured
When O'Dea drew their blood at the end, the numbers had moved in ways that make clinicians sit up. Fasting blood sugar had fallen substantially. The men's response to glucose had improved. Their insulin was working better against the resistance that defines the disease, and their triglycerides, the fats that surge on a refined-carbohydrate diet, had dropped sharply. Some of them had lost weight along the way, which mattered. But the shift was larger and faster than weight loss alone comfortably explained.
This is the part worth stating carefully, because it is easy to oversell. Seven weeks in the bush did not permanently cure anyone. The men had to return to town, and the pressures that made them sick were waiting. What the study showed is narrower and, in a way, more startling: the metabolic markers of a disease described as chronic and progressive can reverse direction, quickly, when the diet that drives them is removed. The condition looked far less like a one-way door than the textbooks implied.
Why it still matters
O'Dea's men were an extreme, clean version of an experiment the rest of us are living more slowly. The exact foods differ, but the arc does not. Wherever a traditional diet of whole animals, fish, tubers and plants gives way to refined flour and added sugar, the same diseases arrive on roughly the same schedule. The Pima of Arizona. The islanders of Tokelau. Kitchens in London and Toronto and Sydney. The mechanism is not mysterious and it is not about willpower. It is about what is on the plate.
Which means it reached your family too. The bread aisle, the drive-through, the sweetened everything: this is the same substitution that made ten healthy hunters sick, run through a few more decades and a supermarket. That is the hard news. The hopeful news is the other half of O'Dea's finding. Bodies are not as trapped as we fear. Take away the industrial sugar and refined starch, put back whole protein and real fat and fiber, and the metabolism often begins, quietly, to correct itself. None of this replaces a doctor, and diabetes is serious. But the direction the body wants to move, given the right food, is toward health.
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Sources & further reading
The studies and historical records behind this piece:
- O’Dea K. “Marked improvement in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism in diabetic Australian Aborigines after temporary reversion to traditional lifestyle.” Diabetes, 1984;33(6):596–603.
