"Meanwhile, the Native Americas of the Southwest were observed between 1898 and 1905 by the physician-turned-anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička, who wrote up his observations in a 460-page report for the Smithsonian Institute. The elders among the Native Americans he visited would likely have been raised on a diet of predominantly meat, mainly from buffalo, until losing their traditional way of life, yet, as Hrdlička observed, they seemed to be spectacularly healthy and lived to a ripe old age. The incidence of centenarians among these Native Americans was, according to the 1900 US Census, 224 per million men and 254 per million women, compared to only 3 and 6 per million among men and women in the white population. Although Hrdlička noted that these numbers were probably not wholly accurate, he worte that "no error could account for the extreme disproportion of centenarians observed." Among the elderly he met of age nintey and up, "not one of these was either much demented or helpless."

Hrdlička was further struck by the complete absence of chronic disease among the entire Indian population he saw. "Malignant diseases", he wrote, "if they exist at all--that they do would be difficult to doubt--must be extremely rare." He was told of "tumors" and saw several cases of the fibroid variety, but never came across a clear case of any other kind of tumor, nor any cancer. Hrdlička wrote that he saw only three cases of heart disease among more than two thousand Native Americans examined, and "not one pronounced instance" of atherosclerosis (buildup of plaque in the arteries). Varicose veins were rare. Nor did he observe cases of appendicitis, peritonitis, ulcer of the stomach, nor any "grave disease" of the liver. Although we cannot assume that meat eating was responsible for their good health and long life, it would be logical to conclued that dependence on meat in no way impaired good health."

- Nina Teicholz - The Big Fat Surprise - Page 14-15

At the place known as Head-Smashed-In in southwestern Alberta, Aboriginal people practiced a form of group hunting for nearly 6,000 years before European contact. The large communal bison traps of the Plains were the single greatest food-getting method ever developed in human history. Hunters, working with their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour, drove their quarry over a cliff and into wooden corrals. The rest of the group butchered the kill in the camp below. Author Jack Brink, who devoted 25 years of his career to “The Jump,” has chronicled the cunning, danger, and triumph in the mass buffalo hunts and the culture they supported. He also recounts the excavation of the site and the development of the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre, which has hosted 2 million visitors since it opened in 1987. Brink’s masterful blend of scholarship and public appeal is rare in any discipline, but especially in North American pre-contact archaeology.

"Nevertheless, it was the simple observation of Willis that gave the disease its new name “diabetes mellitus,” but it was more than a century later that his argument was substantiated by the demonstration of sugar in the blood and urine of diabetics by Robert Wyatt in 1774 and subsequently by the more thorough studies of Matthew Dobson (1732–1784), who had a fairly good of knowledge of chemistry. In 1776, Dobson showed that the sweetness of urine is caused by sugar, which he quantified and showed to be subject to alcohol and acetate fermentation, and that its appearance in the urine is preceded and accompanied by a similar sweetness and sugar in the blood, albeit not as much as that detected in the urine. Diabetes now came to be viewed as a disorder of nutrition in which sugar accumulates in the blood and is excreted in the urine. This was to launch a whole new approach for the dietary treatment of diabetics and with it a shift to the digestive organs as the site of the disease and more specifically to the absorption of “saccharine matter” in the stomach."