It’s not the carbs. It’s everything around the carbs that disappeared.

Think about it. Your grandmother probably ate rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ghee was not measured in teaspoons — it was poured. Sweets showed up at every festival, every Sunday, every “just because.” And yet — no fatty liver, no insulin resistance, no PCOS epidemic, no mid-30s prediabetes diagnosis.

Meanwhile we count our carbs, do our 10,000 steps, drink our green tea — and still our HbA1c won’t budge.

So what’s actually different?

They moved. All day. Without calling it “exercise.”

Walking to the well, grinding masala by hand, washing clothes by hand, climbing stairs without a second thought, farming, sweeping, fetching — none of it was a “workout.” It was just their Tuesday. Their NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis – calories burnt doing chores) was through the roof. Ours? We sit in a car, sit at a desk, sit on the couch, and then feel proud of a 20-minute walk. What have we really evolved into?!

Their food was real. Ours is engineered.

The rice they ate wasn’t ultra-processed, sitting in a packet for six months. The ghee was homemade, not adulterated. There was no sugar hiding in their pickle, their bread, their “healthy” granola bar. Carbs were carbs. Today, even our “diet” foods are quietly loaded with refined sugar and seed oils that mess with insulin sensitivity far more than rice ever could.

And stress — real stress, chronic stress — simply wasn’t a 24/7 companion.

Yes, life was hard. But there was no WhatsApp at 11 PM, no inbox that never sleeps, no scrolling that keeps your cortisol elevated long after the day is technically “over.” Their stress had an end point. Ours doesn’t.

Now, here’s the part we conveniently forget.

People back then didn’t live as long either. Infections, childbirth complications, untreated infections — things we now fix with one course of antibiotics used to be fatal. Lower life expectancy meant fewer years for lifestyle diseases to even show up. We have the medical science to catch diabetes early, treat it, manage it — and yet we’re falling sick more, not less. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a lifestyle problem we’ve engineered for ourselves.

So what is the takeaway here?

Bring back the context your ancestors lived in. Move more — not more in the gym, just more in life. Eat real food in form of home cooked meals as often as you can. Give your evenings an actual end point. The carbs were never really the enemy. The lifestyle around them was the difference — and that’s the part we can rebuild, one habit at a time.