Over at Paleo Style, Miki Ben-Dor (a Ph.D candidate who is researching the connection between human evolution and nutrition) shares his take on Ian Spreadbury’s hypothesis that carb density and its effect on our gut may be the key to obesity:
Spreadbury’s idea that our microbiota is acting as a sensatory organ is brilliant in my opinion. Adapting it to a more general hypothesis like the one presented here says that ingesting unrecognized types or non-normal quantities of suboptimal food cause change in the microbiota and consequently in signals that result in the accumulation of fat. …
Quite boringly all this lead to the same old conclusion – eat ancestral! However if obesity is the issue ancestral really means going back just 50-60 years ago – bring back animal fat, ditch PUFA, sodium azide’s gluten and too much sugar and cut the industrialized “strange” substances that sell for food nowadays.
So no, you don’t need to eat like Grok … just eat like your grandma (or great-grandma)!
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health, & food policy. And cats! 
My grandma had diabetes, gout, high blood pressure, every disease that you get from diet and lifestyle. As did 3 out of 4 of my grandparents. No thanks Miki and Michael Pollan, not good advice for me.
I think that’s fair. You can go back hundreds of years and find diet-related obesity, though it’s really only been in the modern era that you find it in people who aren’t wealthy.
I think the point is that it’s less about trying to eat like someone 50,000 years ago (or more) and more about avoiding industrial processed food.
Interesting that you assume obese - the only obese one was the smoker, who died of emphysema - non-diet related. The heart disease/diabetes/gout grandma wasn’t even overweight.
I wasn’t referring to your family. I was saying that it’s fair to point out that eating like your grandparents may not be sufficient, as the fact that obesity existed hundreds of years ago means that it’s not just about modern foodstuffs.