 Thus, one possible remedy for these diseases is changing diet and exercise activity to more closely reflect that of the ancestral environment.The thrifty genotype hypothesis has been used to explain high, and rapidly escalating, levels of obesity and diabetes among groups newly introduced to western diets and environments, from South Pacific Islanders, to Sub Saharan Africans, to Native Americans in the Southwestern United States, to Inuit.The original "thrifty gene" hypothesis argued that famines were common and severe enough to select for thrifty gene in the 2.5 million years of human paleolithic history.