From the CBC: West Coast aboriginal community tests low-carb diet.

A remote community off the north coast of Vancouver Island is the unlikely venue for an experiment that uses diet to try to improve the health of native communities.

Dr. Jay Wortman, a Métis, is working with aboriginal Canadians in Alert Bay on B.C.’s Cormorant Island in a bid to show a low-carbohydrate diet can mitigate health problems such as diabetes and obesity, which tend to be rampant in North American native communities.

Working for the University of B.C. faculty of medicine, Wortman is examining the theory that high-calorie Western foods are the root cause of those health problems. A CBC documentary on his study will be shown on Newsworld Tuesday evening at 10:00 p.m. (ET and PT).

Wortman, a diabetic himself, thinks the low-carb diet, dubbed "My Big Fat Diet," may benefit native people because they don’t metabolize carbohydrates well.

He set up a year-long study of the diet in Alert Bay, where 60 people agreed to live on a more traditional aboriginal diet of meat, seafood and non-starch vegetables such as cauliflower.[continue]