The Australian Government’s recommended “Aboriginal diet” includes rice, wheat, oats, dairy products, and vegetable oils alongside a bit of kangaroo and goanna for cultural authenticity.
It’s a performance of dietary expertise, complete with colourful pie charts and institutional authority.
Only there’s a catch.
Aboriginal Australians arrived in Australia around 65,000 years ago. They developed complex societies, survived ice ages, droughts, and continent-wide changes in vegetation.
When Europeans reached eastern Australia in 1788, Aboriginal communities had existed for tens of thousands of generations, spoke 450 languages, and knew how to find food, water, and shelter across one of the planet’s most challenging continents.
None of it involved wheat.
Core Idea
Aboriginal peoples have occupied Australia for a very long time.
European foods have been available for roughly 240 years, roughly 0.4% of Aboriginal history on the continent. Put differently, for 99.6% of their time in Australia, Aboriginal people thrived without any of the foods now deemed essential for their health.
The government’s “Eat for Health” recommendations essentially argue that the most successful dietary tradition in human history needs to be fixed with foods that didn’t exist when that success was established.
It’s like recommending that fish learn to breathe air because gills are inefficient.
What Aboriginal people actually ate was bush tucker. Kangaroo, emu, wallaby, crocodile, and fish. Fruits, nuts, seeds, and vegetables gathered, and most likely cultivated, seasonally from the landscape.
No grains, no legumes, no dairy products, no refined sugar, no vegetable oils.
They controlled fire, used elaborate tools, constructed complex fish traps, and survived in conditions that would challenge modern survival experts.
But according to current guidelines, they were nutritionally deficient.
The Health Paradox Exposed
The arithmetic gets more uncomfortable when you examine health outcomes of what the indigenous people eat today.
Type 2 diabetes is 3 to 5 times more prevalent among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities than in the rest of the Australian population. Before colonisation, there’s no evidence that Aboriginal people suffered from diabetes, heart disease, stroke, or high blood pressure.
In 1982, researcher Kerin O’Dea conducted a study where diabetic Aboriginal Australians returned to a traditional lifestyle and diet. The results were striking. As O’Dea noted, “the major metabolic abnormalities of type II diabetes were either greatly improved or completely normalized in this group of Aborigines by a relatively short reversal of the urbanization process.”
So people who followed traditional Aboriginal diets for 7 weeks experienced dramatic improvements in metabolic health.
Yet the official dietary guidelines recommend that Aboriginal people eat the very foods associated with their current health crisis.
It’s scepticism-defying logic.
Counterpoint
The standard defence is that modern Aboriginal people live in contemporary Australia, with access to supermarkets, processed foods, and sedentary lifestyles.
They need dietary advice that fits their current circumstances, not romanticised notions of pre-colonial life. Nutritional science has identified essential nutrients, optimal macro-nutrient ratios, and evidence-based dietary patterns. These guidelines represent the best available knowledge about human nutrition, adapted for Aboriginal cultural preferences.
But this misses the deeper question.
If Aboriginal people maintained health and vitality for 65,000 years on traditional foods, why do the foods now recommended for their health correlate with their health decline? The guidelines don’t explain this paradox. They simply assert that Western dietary science knows better than 650 centuries of successful adaptation.
The uncomfortable truth is that dietary guidelines reflect agricultural abundance rather than human nutrition.
We grow wheat, corn, and soy efficiently. We process them into shelf-stable products. We build food systems around these commodities and then construct dietary advice to match the supply chain.
Traditional Aboriginal foods don’t scale to industrial production, so they become cultural garnish on a foundation of agricultural staples.
Thought Challenge
Timeline analysis... Research one traditional food culture, Japanese, Mediterranean, or Inuit. Calculate how long their traditional dietary pattern evolved versus how long modern dietary guidelines have existed. Ask which represents more evolutionary testing?
Health correlation tracking... Choose one population that shifted from traditional to Western diets in your lifetime. Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, or rural populations moving to cities. Track health outcomes before and after dietary transition. What pattern emerges between traditional food abandonment and modern disease prevalence?
Both exercises develop the sceptical reflex to ask, who benefits from this dietary advice? Sometimes the answer is human health. Sometimes it’s agricultural industries, government budgets, or institutional convenience.
Closing Reflection
Being a mindful sceptic about diet means questioning not just what we’re told to eat, but who’s doing the telling and why.
Aboriginal Australians represent one of history’s most successful dietary experiments, 65,000 years of evolutionary testing in real conditions. Yet modern expertise confidently dismisses this accumulated wisdom in favour of guidelines designed around agricultural commodities and processing industries.
The lesson isn’t that everyone should eat kangaroo and bush tucker. It’s that successful dietary patterns deserve respect, and dramatic departures from evolutionary norms deserve extraordinary evidence.
When 99.6% of a population’s dietary history is ignored in favour of 0.4% worth of “improvements,” the mindful sceptic asks the obvious question.
Who exactly needed saving here?
Evidence Support
O’Dea, K., White, N. G., & Sinclair, A. J. (1988). An investigation of nutrition-related risk factors in an isolated Aboriginal community in northern Australia: advantages of a traditionally-orientated life-style. Medical Journal of Australia, 148(4), 177-180.
TL;DR… significantly lower rates of type-2 diabetes and healthier metabolic profiles in Australian Aborigines living a traditional lifestyle, compared to urbanised Aborigines. The traditional diet, rich in lean meat and low in fat, was associated with low fasting glucose and cholesterol but higher levels of insulin resistance, suggesting increased risk if the diet becomes Westernised.
Relevance to insight… direct evidence that the shift from traditional to Western diets undermines metabolic health among Aboriginal Australians, highlighting the dangers of dietary recommendations that sideline traditional eating patterns in favor of Western food staples.
Lee, A. J. (2018). Review of nutrition among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin.
TL;DR… Aboriginal people traditionally consumed a highly varied diet rich in wild plant foods and lean animal meats, with minimal nutrient loss due to food preparation methods. These diets were high in fibre, slow-digesting carbohydrates, and bioactive phytochemicals, and the most prized foods were fat- and nutrient-dense animal products.
Relevance to insight… establishes traditional Aboriginal diets as nutritionally superior to those promoted by Western dietary guidelines, emphasising the consequences of replacing these diverse foods with processed Western foods and validating the need for policy to support traditional eating.
Bussey, C. (2013). Food security and traditional foods in remote Aboriginal communities: A review of the literature. Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin.
TL;DR… Traditional Aboriginal diets were nutrient-dense, safe, and accessible, and the shift to energy-dense, nutrient-poor Western foods is accelerating diet-related diseases such as obesity and diabetes. The review documents the rapid health decline following the introduction of high-sugar, high-fat, low-nutrient foods into Aboriginal communities.
Relevance to insight… connects the historical dietary transition due to colonisation and policy to the present crisis of chronic disease, showing that government dietary recommendations poorly reflect Aboriginal experience and historical health.
McDermott, R., et al. (2020). Resetting the Narrative in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nutrition. Frontiers in Nutrition, 7, 533.
TL;DR… colonisation denied Aboriginal peoples access to traditional foods and forcibly replaced their diets with rations high in refined carbohydrates and saturated fats, leading to loss of nutritional autonomy and increased diet-related diseases. The legacy of rationing and exclusion from traditional foods continues to negatively impact Aboriginal health today.
Relevance to insight… links historical nutritional colonisation to modern dietary guidelines, demonstrating the mismatch and its generational effects—affirming the insight that government recommendations frequently ignore Aboriginal food traditions and their health benefits.
These papers collectively demonstrate the mismatch between government dietary guidelines and the lived health experience of Aboriginal Australians, substantiate the harm caused by colonial dietary transitions, and powerfully argue for policies grounded in traditional food practices rather than Western models.