For what it's worth, here's Taubes from "Why We Get Fat" discussing the
relationship between Civilization (as "The Western Diet") and obesity,
diabetes, heart disease and cancer:

This association of chronic diseases with modern diets and lifestyle was
first noted in the mid-nineteenth century, when a French physician named
Stanislas Tanchou pointed out that “cancer, like insanity, seems to increase
with the progress of civilization.” Now, as Michael Pollan points out, it’s
one of the indisputable facts of diet and health. Eat Western diets, get
Western diseases—notably obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.* This
is one of the primary reasons why public-health experts believe that there
are dietary and lifestyle causes for all these diseases, even cancer—that
they’re not just the result of bad luck or bad genes.

To get a feel for the kind of modern evidence supporting this idea, consider
breast cancer. In Japan, this disease is relatively rare, certainly not the
scourge it is for American women. But when Japanese women emigrate to the
United States, it takes only two generations for their descendants to
experience the same breast-cancer rates as any other local ethnic group.
This tells us that something about the American lifestyle or diet is causing
breast cancer. The question is what. We could say that something about the
Japanese diet or lifestyle protects against breast cancer, but similar
trends have been seen among the Inuits, in whom breast cancer was virtually
nonexistent until the 1960s; the Pima; and a host of other populations as
well. In all these populations, the frequency of breast cancer is low to
very low on traditional diets, and it goes up significantly, if not
dramatically, when they become Westernized.

There’s little controversy about this. It appears again and again in
virtually all the studies of Western diseases. Colon cancer is ten times
more common in rural Connecticut than in Nigeria. Alzheimer’s disease is far
more common among Japanese Americans than among Japanese living in Japan;
it’s twice as common among African Americans as among rural Africans. Pick a
disease from the list of Western diseases, and a pair of locations—one
urban, say, and one rural, or one Westernized and one not—compare people in
the same age groups, and the disease will be more common in the urban and
Westernized locations and less common outside them.

Mainstream nutritionists and public-health authorities have responded to
these observations by indicting all aspects of what they believe is the
prevailing modern Western diet and lifestyle. They define the Western diet
as copious meat, processed food, sugar, and total calories, with few
vegetables, fruits, or whole grains. They define the Western lifestyle as
sedentary. If we stay away from meat, they tell us, avoid processed foods
and sugars, eat less or at least not too much, eat mostly plants and more
fruit, and exercise, we’ll prevent these diseases and live longer.

The problem with this approach is the basic assumption that everything about
the Western diet is bad, and so they can incriminate all of it and feel
they’ve done their job. (This approach reminds me of the story of the
thirteenth-century Inquisitors who set out to sack a city of
heretics—Béziers, in southwestern France—only to realize that they couldn’t
tell the heretics from the good Catholics. “Kill them all,” they were
instructed, “and let God sort them out,” and so they did.) What if only some
aspects of the Western diet are deleterious to our health and the rest are
perfectly benign or even beneficial? After all, lung cancer is also a
Western disease, but we don’t blame that on the Western diet and sedentary
lives, only on cigarettes. And the reason we know cigarettes are responsible
is that we know that nonsmokers are relatively free from lung cancer whereas
smokers get it frequently.

It’s useful (as it is when any crime is committed) to narrow down the list
of suspects. First of all, among the non-Westernized populations that have
been well studied, quite a few that were exclusively meat eaters, or meat
and fish eaters, and so ate no fruits and vegetables at all—the Inuits,
again, are an example, as are the Maasai—suffered little or no cancer (or
heart disease, diabetes, or obesity). This suggests that meat eating is not
a cause of these diseases, and it suggests that copious fruits and
vegetables are not necessary to prevent them. In fact, when the disparity in
cancer rates between Western and non-Westernized societies was first
actively studied a century ago, the idea that meat eating caused cancer, and
that isolated populations were protected against it by eating mostly plants,
was raised. It was dismissed for the same reason it should be dismissed now:
it failed to explain why cancer was prevalent among vegetarian societies—the
Hindus in India, for instance, “to whom the fleshpot is an abomination,” as
one British physician described it in 1899—and rare to absent among the
Inuits, Maasai, Native Americans of the Great Plains, and other decidedly
carnivorous populations.*

Clearly, as Pollan points out, humans can adapt to a wide range of
non-Western diets, from those exclusively animal-based to those mostly, if
not exclusively, vegetarian. If all of those populations were relatively
free from Western diseases, as they apparently were, the more logical
question to ask is what is it that distinguishes Western diets from the
diets of all these populations, not just some of them (the ones that eat
copious vegetables and fruits, for instance, and little meat). The answer,
it turns out, is the same foods that were absent entirely among the
hunter-gatherer populations (in which Western diseases were also mostly
absent): “cereal grains, dairy products, beverages, vegetable oils and
dressings, and sugar and candy.”

Researchers who studied this evidence in the 1950s and 1960s—Thomas “Peter”
Cleave and George Campbell, coauthors of Diabetes, Coronary Thrombosis and
the Saccharine Disease (1966), deserve the most credit—made the point that
when isolated populations start eating Western foods, sugar and white flour
are invariably the first, because these foods could be transported around
the world as items of trade without spoiling or being devoured on the way by
rodents or insects. The Inuits, for example, living on seals, caribou, and
whale meat, begin eating sugar and flour (crackers and bread). Western
diseases follow. The agrarian Kikuyu, living in Kenya, start eating sugar
and flour, and these diseases appear. South Pacific islanders living on
pigs, coconuts, and fish start eating sugar and white flour, and these
diseases appear. The Maasai add sugar and flour to their diet or move into
the cities and begin eating these foods, and the diseases appear. Even the
vegetarian Hindus in India, to whom the fleshpot was an abomination, ate
sugar and flour. Doesn’t it seem a good idea to consider sugar and flour
likely causes of these diseases?

This seems perfectly reasonable to me (and to you, I hope). But it was
rejected for the same reason the fattening carbohydrate and
carbohydrate-restricted diets were rejected: it clashed with the idea that
dietary fat causes heart disease, which had become the preferred hypothesis
of nutritionists in the United States. And these nutritionists were simply
unaware of the historical and geographical depth of the evidence implicating
sugar and flour.