European diet and aboriginal health are intimately related. The impact of the inordinate amount of carbohydrates and alcohol brought to Australia by English companies took a heavy toll on the health of the Australian aborigines. Therefore, the change of diet was extremely harmful, not beneficial, having a lasting deleterious effect on the local population, who were considered savages by the British explorers and colonists.
The newcomers brought to Australia the Western civilization diet and customs, which were imposed on the them. This foreign diet contained two injurious elements; carbohydrates and alcohol, which would alter the aborigines' metabolism as they are the main causes of today's well-known metabolic diseases, such as diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer. The British took also their cultural prejudices to the new continent, regarding the local population as pagans and barbarians.
When James Cook explored the coasts of Eastern Australia in 1770, the aborigines had been living there for thousands of years. With their main source of calories being animal fat and meat, they were in a permanent state of ketosis (burning fat as fuel instead of glucose). Like the Inuits of Northern Canada and all the tribes of Siberia and Mongolia, their diet was based almost entirely on animal products, for they were highly specialized hunters. Using spears and boomerangs as their main utensils of survival, they hunted kangaroos, emus, and bats as they ate their meat, fat and entrails (liver and heart), and drank their blood in special ceremonies. Since they had not developed agriculture, they did not drink any alcoholic beverages of any kind.
Just like what William Stefansson noticed studying the Inuits' customs and diet, the British doctors would later observe that the aborigines' children did not suffer from neurological conditions such as epilepsy and metal retardation. Heart conditions also seemed to be absent among the indigenous population of Australia. To be a primitive hunter, you had to be completely fit and intelligent.
Below, an old photograph of an Australian hunter, taken in the 1920s, before they switched to the carbs-based European diet. You can see how physically fit they were: extremely thin but wiry. 90% of their diet consisted of meat and 10% plant fibers. Unfortunately, their physique would change over the years, acquiring metabolic medical conditions, such as diabetes.
