“I don’t know what God’s will is,” she told National Public Radio’s Carrie Kahn in a story that aired late that winter. “I don’t know when He was calling her home. If He did in fact do it, OK. But if man decided that, I want to know that. My family needs peace about that.” called war neuroses, which seemed unlike“normal” neuroses in many ways.68 The term“shell shock” was coined with the notion that Looking at obesity without preconceived ideas, one would assume that the main trend of research should be directed toward an examination of abnormalities of the fat metabolism, since by definition excessive accumulation of fat is the underlying abnormality. It so happens that this is the area in which the least work has been done. The thrifty gene could be the answer only if diabetes was of long duration in the species—and there is no evidence of that. The disease seems to appear only after populations have access to sugar and other refined carbohydrates. In the Pima, diabetes appeared to be “a relatively recent phenomenon,” as Neel himself later noted. When Russell and Hrdlika discussed the health of the Pima in the early 1900s, they made no mention of diabetes, even while noting the presence of such“rare” diseases as lupus, epilepsy, and elephantiasis.*71 As late as 1940, when Elliott Joslin reviewed the medical records of the hospitals and physicians in Arizona, he concluded that the prevalence of diabetes was no higher among the Pima and other local tribes than anywhere else in the United States. Only in the 1950s, in studies from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was there compelling reason to believe that diabetes had become common. When Neel tested adolescent Yanomamo for the condition known as glucose intolerance, which might indicate a predisposition to diabetes, he found none, so had no reason to believe that diabetes existed before such isolated populations began eating Western foods. The same was true of an isolated tribe of Pima, discovered living in the Sierra Madre Mountains of northern Mexico.“The high frequency of [Type 2 diabetes] in reservation Amerindians,” Neel later explained, “must predominantly reflect lifestyle changes.”