This response is not the ringing put-down it might seem at first. The last paragraph makes it obvious that Mason Ngawhika knows enough about LCHF diets for diabetes to accept the evidence for their effectiveness, and diabetic and pre-diabetic are descriptions that include a larger proportion of Maori than of Pakeha. For example, here Maori have many times the rate of diabetes complications compared to non-Maori.
Population rates of renal failure with concurrent diabetes (aged 15+) were over eight-and-a-half times higher in Māori compared with non-Māori (RR 8.78, CI 7.88–9.79). Because the self-reported prevalence of diabetes is similar for Māori and non-Māori, the significantly higher rate of renal failure with concurrent diabetes would suggest that, among people with diabetes, Māori may be up to 8.8 times more likely than non-Māori to go on to develop renal failure (one of the complications of diabetes).
Research into, and evidence for LCHF is accruing all the time; more importantly, its acceptance is no longer automatically blocked or ignored, the public increasingly expects it to be addressed properly, like the results of any valid science about the important subject of health.
The objections made by Mason Ngawika to Ancestral-type LCHF diets for Maori can also be seen as reasoned, and deserving of response.
The cost of any new diet is an issue for low-income earners, and adherence to dietary changes - especially those made by people acting for themselves - as well as perceptions of "strangeness" may be significant barriers in the context of Maori family life, where the generous sharing of kai (food) is tikanga (custom).
The concern about mixed messages around what are perceived fatty foods is also valid; we don't want to be giving deep-fried food the OK, and some people will always hear what they would like to hear from any message. Then, you just try changing their minds - you'll be accused of changing yours.
So there are significant obstacles against getting the right message across.
Here is a presentation which NZ Paleo nutritionist Julianne Taylor made to a Maori organisation last year on the benefits of ancestral diets.
We can run into a problem prescribing LCHF to Maori as ancestral; New Zealand had no native land mammals, so Maori, as Maori, cannot have eaten relatives of pig, sheep, cows, goats or deer. Coconuts, olives, avocadoes and other fatty fruits did not grow here.
Seal are protected and Moa are extinct; so should a modern equivalent of an ancestral Maori diet be based on chicken, fish and shellfish?
I'm not an expert in Maoritanga or in the foods of South-East Asia, but it seems to me that expanding our concept of Maori ancestral diet in this way will make it a lot easier to construct an affordable ancestral diet for modern urban Maori. I mean, that's something that's already being done, no need for my input there, but this expanded ancestral concept may make it easier to explain what's being done and is working already to uninformed skeptics of the Paleo method.
Starches in the form of kumara, and some sugars from berries and cabbage tree (a slightly nauseating, earthy-tasting, but satisfyingly sweet concoction) were definitely important to Maori, and one would restrict them, not because they are not ancestral, they plainly are, but because carbohydrate restriction is a medical solution for problems that ail Maori. Where these problems do not exist, or have been successfully resolved by carbohydrate restriction, traditional types of starches should not be a problem.
What ancestral Maori couldn't have eaten - grains. Interestingly in The Native Diet TV series on Maori TV, which experimented with Paleo diet and Crossfit training for urban Maori families (Julianne Taylor was a consultant for this enjoyable show), paraora (bread) was the food that participants found the hardest to go without - not alcohol, not sugar. This should give food for thought to dietary reformers of all stripes.