Anopsology



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ANOPSOLOGY

FOREWORD


by Dr. Jean Seignalet, Former Intern at Montpellier Hospitals, Senior Lecturer at the University of Montpellier (France).



Guy-Claude Burger asked me to write the foreword to this presentation and I am happy to be able to comply with his request.

From the outset, I would like to point out that I am a staunch believer in traditional medicine. As a non-resident student at Montpellier teaching hospitals and later as an intern there between 1959 and 1968, I was graced with sound training as a general practitioner. Since 1968, I have been in charge of an immunogenetic laboratory which mainly focuses on the HLA system, but I have remained in close touch with clinicians. Indeed, HLA typing plays a major part in organ transplants and in the early diagnosis of a number of diseases. Moreover, the obvious connections that exist between some HLA antigens and auto-immune diseases pretty much compel me to know something about that branch of pathology.

I agreed to write this foreword because I am convinced that Burger's research is in keeping with traditional medicine. Indeed, like the latter, anopsology is based on a strictly scientific approach.

A scientific approach can be carried out in two ways. Either facts are marshalled together and later are attemptedly made cohesive through some explanatory theory, or a hypothesis is put forward and later attemptedly confirmed with attendant evidence. In either case, facts have to be firmly ascertained and the hypothesis must be logical and in line with knowledge acquired by previous researchers.

Whoever claims that - by administering a vitamin, a mineral, a trace element, or a plant essence - one can forestall or cure most diseases is laying bare on oversimplified and outrageous scheme. Obviously, a single molecule is incapable of controlling or catalysing the complex chemical reactions that occur in the body. Such scientific quacks, however, have followers who, devoid of culture and critical minds, need to believe in miracle treatments and panaceas. That is how sects are formed that bring together patients verging ever more toward fanaticism and who blindly follow the dictates of visionaries or tricksters.

One must not mistake Guy-Claude Burger for one such impostor. Of course, he propounds a diet that counters ageing, cancer, nervous breakdowns, and auto-immune diseases. But he does so through firmly grounded reasoning which remains clear in spite of its intricacy and which is in keeping with contemporary facts and scientific data. I met Guy-Claude Burger in 1983, while attending a lecture he gave in Montpellier. I was struck by his acumen, his knowledge, the soundness of his remarks, and I became very interested in the unusual theory he was expounding. For two hours, I bombarded him with questions on biochemistry, genetics, and immunology - all of which subjects I am well acquainted with. I was fully satisfied with the answers he gave and I could find no fault in what he said. Five years on, and in spite of having since carefully gone over his writings with a fine toothed comb, I still have not found the chink in his armour. I cannot say whether everything Burger says is true, but everything he puts forward makes sense.

Burger’s notions may be summed up in a few lines. Man is genetically suited to his natural environment and, more specifically, to his "initial" diet. The myriad ways is which civilisation has altered food carries in its wake increasing maladjustment in human beings, whose enzymes no longer allow for the proper breakdown of food. Certain non-initial molecules (NIM) make their way through the bowel lining and build up in the body, thus setting up various disorders and shortening an individual's lifespan. Putting this right, involves reverting to an ancestral diet : eating raw food, in an unaltered, unpolluted state, as selected by an individual's instincts. Like animals, we have those instincts inside us however degenerate they may have become ; all it takes to reactivate them is conjuring them up in adequate physiological conditions. It might now be worth considering whether the foregoing holds water from a scientific point of view. Instincts' not requiring protracted explanations, I shall leave them aside to look into six key issues.

  1. Man's genetic adaptation to his natural environment. This tenet is in keeping with Darwin's theories published in 1859 and which remain valid despite their having been partly altered or improved on by other scientists. Species are descended from one another, evolution being due to genetic alterations (mutations, deletions, insertions, replication, genetic and chromosomic reshuffling) best suited for such changes being the ones selected - individuals fittest for survival in given surroundings superseding the lesser endowed. Both man's forebears and primeval man lived like animals and were subject to that law. Thorough-going natural selection over an extended timespan turned out beings well suited to their background and especially to their diet.

  2. Alteration worked by civilisation. During the Palaeolithic area, men got by on hunting, fishing, and wild fruit-picking. Fire was also available to them, but when Homo Sapiens appeared on earth some 200,000 years ago, cooking was hardly in its heydays, since. only meat and fish were cooked,. cooking was brief and done over wood, and. recipes were as yet non-existent. Food was scarce and Europe was only peopled by small tribes that were few and far between 9,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period, cattle-raising and agriculture came into being in what is now Turkey. Larger amounts of food enabled cattle-breeding husbandmen to increase their populations from ten- to a hundred-fold. Having increased in number, those cattle-breeders gradually forayed into Europe, driving back into inhospitable regions hunter-fruitpickers, who went cattle-breeders not to wiped out. The Neolithic revolution took place over 4,000 years, affecting the whole of Europe. The switch from the Old Stone Age to the New Stone Age is aptly described in articles by Menozzi et al. (11), Ruffie, and Jean Bernard (15), and involved three major dietary upheavals.. The consumption of milk and dairy.. Eating grain, especially wheat and foods made from it.. Cooking to ever more sophisticated recipes over the centuries. In this day and age, gas and electricity enhance the appeal of systematically and protractedly cooking any number of substances. Consequently, man has altogether strayed from his natural condition, considering that no wild animal feeds on the milk of another species, after having developed to maturity nor do they eat roasted grains or cooked foods.

  3. Protein metabolism. To keep this foreword reasonably short, only protein-based Non-Initial Molecules will here be described as against sugar- or fat-based NIMs.Man's bodily tissues mainly consist of proteins that are amino acid chains. Renewing man's protein pool requires h4im to metabolise vegetable and animal dietary protein. It is therefore crucial for dietary proteins to be properly broken down into their constituent amino acids. Should some amino acids retain peptide structures of varying lengths, they may not be suitable for human protein synthesis. By way of illustration, imagine human proteins consist of English words, animal proteins of French words, and vegetable proteins of Russian words. If separate letters were taken from say, French or Russian words, it will still be possible to produce English words. However, should some sequences remain clustered, the fragments yielded will fail to be part of an English word. Thus, the French combination "qui" or the Russian "vitch" form no part of any English word.

  4. Enzymes. The human body resorts to a vast array of enzymes, some of which break down dietary proteins. Yet, those enzymes are not jacks-of-all-trades. Each one plays a specific part. They sever proteins, only at an identifying locus, specific for each enzyme. Granted that man's enzymatic endowment was intended to cope with the foods he initially ate, it is very likely ill-suited for handling various NIMs. Enzymes will have to tackle new proteins on the one hand, and complex molecules generated by cooking on the other 5,000 years is far too short a timespan for individuals to have been suitably selected for their new diet. As it happens, selective pressure is low. The ailments given rise to by modern foods only show up in later life, and further, do not hinder reproduction. Moreover, some human beings are genetically incompetent when it comes to fully synthesising such and such a protein - in that they may not be producing enough of an enzyme of lesser potency than enjoyed by the ideal one. Such lesser enzymatic strains (allo-enzymes) have now been conclusively shown to exist. To wit, a deficiency in glucose 6 phosphate dehydrogenase virtually always points to a sub-active allo-enzyme. No matter the pathological gene, it has to occur in both parents to induce enzymatic deficiency. Conversely, it is worth noting that in heterozygous individuals (only one parent abnormal gene carrier), the normal gene will compensate for the pathological one. The heritability of the ailment is, therefore, recessive. Enzymatic deficiency will consequently involve some proteins' not being fully broken down with remaining peptides consisting of a varying number of amino acids.

  5. Foul play on the bowel lining. We have not so far found any grounds for disproving Burger's reasoning. We are now up against a major obstacle, namely the conceit that the bowel lining does not let peptides into the bloodstream. It is here worth recapping some basic concepts in digestive physiology. The breakdown of dietary proteins takes place in the gut with gastric juices breaking proteins down (30 % of them into amino acids and the remaining 70 % into oligopeptides made up of 2 to 6, perhaps even 7 amino acids (6) (16). The breakdown of oligopeptides is carried on in the enterocytes which use peptidases (along the villi ridge) and in their cytoplasm. It is commonly believed that the bowel lining, at least in adults, allows only amino acids into portal blood and the lymph glands (16). In point of fact, this have never been conclusively shown. A handful of experiments involving a limited number of dipeptides or tripeptides are no guide to the possible fate of 64 million potential hexapeptides that consist of combinatory variants of 20 amino acids (20 puissance 6).Moreover, attesting the full breakdown of an oligopeptide in an individual is no clue that a like pathway obtains in every human being. That same peptide may defy hydrolysis in individuals evincing a deficiency in the requisite enzyme. Like Burger, I believe minute amounts of peptides actually make it through the bowel lining. There is quite some evidence in favour of this, else how could one explain :
    • adult intolerance to cow's milk
    • adult intolerance to gluten
    • migraines due to an intake of milk, wheat, and eggs, which migraines yield once the incriminated food is discontinued (12).
        In all such diseases, ailing health is caused by an immune reaction to an antigen's having inveigled into the body. Now, pure fats are not immunogenic. As for pure sugars (polyosides), there are only immunogenic with a molecular weight above 100,000, and, additionally, T lymphocytes are not involved in immune response to those polyosides (2). Hence, there is grounds for thinking that the antigenic culprit is a peptide.
      1. The fate of peptides. Whatever peptides successfully clear the lining of the small intestine build up in the body when intake outruns clearance ability by the emunctories (sweat glands, kidneys, and the gut). Those peptides vary in structure depending on individuals and on whether such and such an enzyme happens to be affected by the deficiency. They will typically go and fasten onto cells with relevant molecule receptors. Structural likenesses between an alien peptide or heteropeptide and a body-produced (auto) peptide commonly used by the cell may lead the latter astray. The cells will net the peptide, sealing it into a bubble that is drawn into the cytoplasm. This is known as pinocytosis. A heteropeptide that a cell fails to involve in its metabolism is stored. Consequently,
        • peptide 1 will go and settle in the neurons, thus triggering off a nervous breakdown, or possibly even (according to Dohan (8)) schizophrenia. He provides cogent evidence that schizophrenia is due to grain peptides' having an affinity for the nervous system.
        • peptide 2 is out to disrupt the activity of some cells, causing premature ageing to the organ involved.
        • peptide 3 will release or stimulate hazardous genes, oncogenes, thus incepting carcinogenesis of the cell which will ultimately mature into cancer or leukaemia. The impact of food on specific malignancies has long been surmised. Colon cancer is uncommon in Japan but widespread in the States. However, when a Japanese female emigrates to the States, her descendants are as much at risk from the tumour as Americans. This shows that the key factor is environmental rather than genetic. Inescapably, changing one's diet seems the thing to do. Many other examples could here be adduced.
        • peptide 4 will strike out to jam various joints, thus setting up bodily immune reaction in the long-term, which will find an outlet in rheumatoid arthritis.

    I would like to dwell further on rheumatoid arthritis and related diseases known as auto-immune diseases. The why and wherefore of those diseases are as yet a mystery to us. If, however, Burger's concepts are matched against recent discoveries involving HLA antigens, there comes to light a working hypothesis that fully accounts for the onset of rheumatoid arthritis as well as for other auto-immune disorders. Some HLA antigens known as HLA-DR show up connections with virtually all auto-immune diseases. Ensuingly, patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis are carriers for HLA-DR 1 and HLA-DR 4 antigens far more commonly that are control subjects (17).The biological purpose of HLA-DR molecules has been brought to light by the recent and remarkable work of Babbit et al. (1), Guillet et al (9), Buus et al. (5). Those molecules are only borne by cells actively involved in immune response (macrophages, activated T lymphocytes, and B lymphocytes). They discharge a four-fold duty :

    1. They bind with a peptide in the macrophage cytoplasm. Affinity to a given peptide differs widely depending on DR antigen types.
    2. They convey the peptide up to the surface of a macrophage.
    3. They disclose that peptide to a T lymphocyte, thereby activating it as well as immune response
    4. They regulate immune response intensity in proportion to the number of peptides disclosed and hence intensity depends on just how much affinity the DR antigen has to the peptide.

    Using computer-assisted crystallography, Bjorkman et al. (3) devised graphics for a class 1 HLA antigen. Within the antigen, there is a noticeable furrow for the housing of an 8 to 20 complex amino acid peptide. Very likely, class 2 HLA antigens and signally HLA-DR antigens are also endowed with a like furrow for fixing, conveying, and presenting peptides.

    Specialists believe rheumatoid arthritis (RA) to be a multifactorial disease dependent on both genetic and environmental factors. The latter cannot possibly involve anything besides either germs or food. As for germs, they have never actually been proved guilty. Yet, a considerable amount of research has centred on divers bacteria, divers mycoplasms, and divers viruses. No evidence was unearthed, so much so that a nonspecialist journal released in 1984 (20) came to the conclusion that research on germs in RA had failed. A similar failing also obtained in other auto-immune diseases despite extensive ground-beating, notably in the case of disseminated sclerosis and insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus.

    Food, unlike germs has warranted but sparse investigation. There are, nonetheless, unimpeachable grounds for arraigning food :

    1. RA is relieved by fasting Skoldstam et al. (18) fasted 16 patients and noted the effectiveness of the fast within 7 to 10 days.
    2. Banning certain foods may relieve RAParke and Hughes (14), Panush (13) reported several cases for which RA was relieved when dairy, meat, or cereals were reduced in or banned from patients' diets, but where resumption promptly reactivated the disease
    3. Intravenous injection of bovine albumen sets up arthritis in mice. One component protein in beef has proved liable to induce in mice arthritis of a kind severally similar to human RA.Van den Broek et al. (19) noted that the impact of bovine albumen called in on the scene LA mice antigens, which are equivalent to human HLA-DR antigens, which goes to show that bovine albumen is not acting direct, but what is, is a peptide from that protein, which couples with the LA molecule.
    4. Two auto-immune disorders exhibit known dietary causes. Coeliac disease and herpetiform dermatitis are both located on loci DR 3 and DR 7. The causative protein is gluten gliadine, such as found in meal. A gluten-free diet ensures recovery. For the sake of argument, supposing peptide X derives from the ailing catabolism of dietary protein Y and causes RA. X makes it through the gut and goes and settles preferentially on particular joint cartilage cells, namely chondrocytes where it builds up over the years. Under normal health conditions, HLA-DR antigens are only expressed on the membranes of cells commissioned for immune response, but not so in auto-immune diseases, where DR antigens target themselves to show up on the cells of the diseased organ. This much was clear for thyroid cells in Basedow's disease and in Hashimoto's thyroiditis, courtesy of Bottazz et al. (4). Such a condition is always occurring against an auto-immune disease background and is deemed due to a release of interferon by T lymphocytes activated by a virus, for instance. As it happens, Jahn et al. (10) recently witnessed that DR molecules, which chondrocytes are normally exempt from, show up on those same cells during the course of RA or in chondrocyte cultures to which interferon has been added. All this implies that DR molecules bind with peptide X which is stored in chondrocytes. It is then ferried up to cell-surface and presented to T lymphocytes DR 4 and DR 1. Both lymphocytes have a stronger affinity to X than to other DR antigens ; they appear to store larger amounts of X molecules than typically manage to activate T lymphocytes. The latter decree an immune response targeted against X, which amounts to the destruction of the chondrocytes. Basically, the first stage in RA amounts to immunization against an outer antigen and directed against a foreign peptide X but this involves destruction of cells belonging to the body. All this is part of the body's typical behaviour whose immunity accommodates the "self" but will not brook the "altered self". Consequently, cells infected by the virus are dissolved (cell lysis). Why should this not be so for cells overloaded with dietary peptides ? We here beg to differ from Bottazzo who contends that a peptide is presented to a DR + autopeptide T lymphocyte, whereas we surmise DR + heteropeptide. The difference between an antiviral response and an anti-X response is that the former is acute and short-lived, whereas the latter turns chronic. This comes as no surprise since once viruses have been killed, antigenic stimulation shuts off and immune response is stilled. In RA, however, the constant intake of protein Y from food, fuels constant storage of X in cartilage, in other words, antigenic stimulation is sustained. All in all, setting up RA would require combining the following factors :
      • . a single copy of HLA gene auspicious for DR 4 or DR 1 (dominant inheritance)
      • . a dual copy of a gene causing an enzymatic deficiency (recessive inheritance)
      • . dietary protein Y such as had only been partly broken down be the weakly active enzyme, since it was unsuitable, thus giving rise to peptide X
      • . a virus incepting a release of interferon.

      The facts might be sequenced as follows :

      1. eating Y
      2. unsatisfactory intestinal breakdown of Y, with X remaining
      3. X makes it through the bowel lining
      4. X fastens onto chondrocytes
      5. chondrocytes intercept and store X
      6. intercurrent viruses affects locus of joint
      7. lymphocytes activated with interferon released
      8. interferon induces antigens DR's being expressed on chondrocytes
      9. DR 4 or DR 1 binds with X
      10. DR + X couples conveyed over chondrocyte membranes
      11. DR + X couples identified by T lymphocytes
      12. Anti-X immune response
      13. lysis of chondrocytes displaying X on their membranes
      14. phagocytosis of dead cells by synoviocytes, granulocytes, and macrophages, all of which release various mediators, with attending inflammation and synovial cells proliferating, thus causing an acute episode of arthritis
      15. the disease turns chronic.

    What practical consequences may be drawn from the above ? We are unable to alter the genes prone to enzymatic deficiency and HLA-DR. All we can do is tackle the environmental factor ; this to say that a protein Y-free diet, which protein generates peptide X appears in order. That is what Burger suggests. Such a diet provides four advantages :

    1. it has a specific goal, that of aiming at checking the advent of disease by doing away with the heteroantigen under fire. It is worth mentioning the main drugs used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (gold salts, D penicillamine, anti-inflammatory drugs, immunedepressants, and immunostimulants) which have an impact on immunity or on inflammation, but in a non-specific way.
    2. it involves no danger whatsoever
    3. its application does not rule out a patient jointly carrying on with their normal drug treatment for rheumatoid arthritis
    4. it aims at having a bearing on the first stage of immune response, whereas the above mentioned treatments are targeted at later stages of development.

    Such a diet, therefore, may claim to have a two-fold goal. This is both curative or preventive. Such concepts, here exemplified with rheumatoid arthritis, apply as well to the other recommendations for instinctotherapy. The same foursome always crops up : that of specificity, harmlessness, possible association with other treatments, and having a curative or preventive aim. A "raw" diet is, hence, appealing.

    However, it is not easy to stick to. It requires herculean patience. It involves organisational skills in making available to oneself an adequate selection of initial foods. Moreover, one of Guy-Claude Burger's main struggles has to do with setting up such a food network. However alluring a theory, pratical results are necessary to confirm its validity. Burger discusses such results in his book. Further, his films, his brochures, and various accounts testify to the efficiency of his method.

    Although my activities as a biologist have somewhat alienated me from clinicians, I have been able to verify the efficiency of instinctotherapy in two disorders :

    . the case of a patient suffering from severe nervous breakdown who completely recovered, and without a shadow of a doubt, after having discontinued eating wheat and foods made from it.

    . four cases of persistent and long-standing colitis, the symptoms of which completely yielded after milk and wheat were banned from the diets of the people concerned.

    Those people now eat, without any unpleasant consequences, raw foods at every meal. The first case underscores the relevance of metabolic factors in nervous breakdowns. The four other cases are in line with Burger's stance that the colon is an excretory organ. Non-initial molecules (NIMs) in the blood on their way to the bowel lumen and crossing the gastrointestinal tract would be the cause of the inflammation that the intake of raw vegetables merely revive.

    Contrary to traditional medicine, what has to be put an end to in the treatment of colitis, is eating specific non initial foods rather than raw vegetables and salads. Up until now, dieticians have mainly concerned themselves with matters of amount : the minimal daily intake of vitamins, mineral salts, calories, and the balance between sugars, fats, and protein. Anopsology gives greater prominence to the structure of food, since that is the only way NIMs, which are not broken down by ill-adapted enzymes, can be prevented from building up in the body. Anopsology discards quantity for quality, the macroscopic for the microscopic, the bathroom scales for the molecular scale.

    Guy-Claude Burger is indeed an innovator and, like many of his predecessors, he has trouble making himself heard. A great many truths, which we hold to be self-evident nowadays, stirred people up when they were first aired. Galileo, after having proven in 1632 that the Earth rotated on its axis, had to recant before the Inquisition. Harvey, who, in almost the same period, made his discovery of blood circulation also underwent tremendous hardships. Darwin, in the nineteenth century, witnessed his writings slated by countless authorities, including some in his own country. It must be pointed out that his proposals flew in the face of the Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud.

    The obstacles that Burger has to face have nothing to do with religious forces, but, for all that, they are nonetheless daunting . In the first place, he has to persuade people that what he asserts is true. Now, he is aiming his blow at bread, milk, and cooking - all of which are part and parcel of civilisation, and that is the devil's own job. Imagine that Burger's ideas could be accepted. Could they actually be put into practice ? That seems quite feasible, provided only a few supporters are concerned. However, expansion to a grand scale would mean nothing less than a revolution. Farming, cattle-breeding, catering, and many other walks of life - in short, society as a whole - would have to be turned on its head. Burger, then, obviously runs the risk of not only disturbing scientists but also many of his fellow citizens. Fortunately, innovators are no longer burnt at the stake. That would be an undeserved end for someone so much against any kind of cooking.

    To sum up, I consider Guy-Claude Burger to be a brilliant, cultured, and sensible researcher who is deserving of attention and impartial judgement. It would be beneficial if medical and scientific teams would help him [Inference: let's wait some centuries...] carry out more extensive experiments that will invalidate or confirm his novel ideas. And should his theory be proved right, one can only hope that he will be given the means to continue his work under suitable conditions. That is the wish that I sincerely make for him, in concluding the foreword of this most interesting presentation.


    Dr. Jean Seignalet, Former Intern at Montpellier Hospitals, Senior Lecturer at the University of Montpellier (France).

    ANOPSOLOGY :

    INDEX

    Translated from the French "Instinctothérapie, Manger Vrai" by Guy_Claude Burger. Editions ”Du Rocher”



     

    “In instinct lies the only truth, the sole certainty that man can ever grasp in this illusionary world in which three-quarters of our ills come from our own thoughts.”

    _Anatole France



    _By the look of it, raw food is all the rage: The newspapers, radio, and televisions are all talking about instinctotherapy. They go on about that appalling guru who thinks he can cure AIDS with raw food and by following one’s instincts.

    o I love rumpuses. But I am no guru, bar the hairstyle.

    _I can’t say I’ve ever felt any particular dietary instinct, except to pounce on chocolates and cream cakes. Perhaps you could begin by telling me how you started out on instinctotherapy?

    o With a cabbage. A red cabbage, as it happened.

    _Are you serious?

    o Perfectly. I’m always serious.
    It all started when I was on my last concert tour in the United States, in 1964. It was a two-month trip, with some 40-odd concerts in all the big towns on the East Coast. At the time, I still thought I was cut out to be a concert musician. You may know that Americans are bound by law to detail all the additives that go into their food.
    Just imagine how hungry you might feel, knowing that you were purchasing daily a whole string of preservatives, flavor enhancers, coloring, emulsifiers, and fillers_all of which are well-known for their carcinogenic properties.

    _Had you been ill at that point?

    o I had indeed become very much alive to the problem. And so, rather than poison myself with dubious ingredients, I wisely decided to buy organically grown foods and do my own cooking in hotel rooms. I had taken along a burner to brew myself some tea, which soon proved hopeless, because the tap water was too chlorinated. At the time, it took me two to three cups of tea to be fighting fit for a concert. If I didn’t take a stimulant, I always felt stiff-jointed. At first I had imagined that I could at least cook myself some soup or some pasta, now and again, to supplement my pack-lunches. But the thing is, when I tried to plug into an American socket, I got the shock of my life from the current. I felt that to be a stroke of fate, so I decided to eat everything raw.

    _Weren’t you afraid of feeling a bit weak without any hot food to sustain you? The cello is said to require a lot of stamina.

    o Well, in fact, I noticed quite the reverse. Every time I had a well-cooked square meal before playing, I felt unfit, whereas when I only ate a little fruit, my playing was masterful. I usually made up for leeway on cream cakes at after-concert functions. I’d always had a sweet tooth!
    I scouted out a health food store where I stocked up on quite a variety of fruit, honey in combs, avocados, a few vegetables, tomatoes, and that red cabbage of mine. I packed the whole business right next to my tailcoat, my white shirt, and my varnished shoes.

    _I thought you were against mixing.

    o Well, anyway, that’s how I was led to eat a 100% raw diet long enough to come to a strange conclusion: When I first tasted a leaf from my red cabbage, I found it delicious. My instant reaction was: “Those organic American red cabbages are tremendous; no need for salt, oil, and vinegar!” Only, the following day, when I tasted another leaf from the same cabbage, it had a sharp, unpleasant taste. A subsequent leaf tasted even worse. My first thought was, to account for such an abrupt change, that the poor old cabbage hadn’t put up with the trip and had gone bad on the way. Days later, I ventured a bite just to see whether it tasted any worse. And lo and behold, it tasted as good as it had on the very first day! So, I was wrong, the cabbage had obviously not rejuvenated. Clearly, the change had taken place in me and not in the cabbage.
    Was my body guiding me into eating a food I needed or discarding one I didn’t; was it a kind of dietary instinct? I wrote to my wife right away, but the idea seemed far-fetched, and I forgot all about it when I returned home.

    _And yet, isn’t that what you are teaching 25 years later? Honestly, do you still think instinct is of any use to us in modern society?

    o The concept of instinct is anything but clear. The dietary instinct of animals is commonly described as a kind of hunch enabling them to decide on what foods they need and what could poison them, as well as knowing when to fast when they are unwell.
    As it happens, we have no idea what they feel that guides them through such situations. But the fact is, it works.
    In man, conversely, it is thought that instinct has been lost altogether and intelligence alone enables us to survive. This is quite wrong: Our instinct is ready for use, even our dietary instinct. All it takes is for the body to be given circumstances in which such an instinct initially originated. In modern parlance, this is known as genetic priming.

    _How would you describe such circumstances?

    o Dietary instinct enables us to sense changes in smell, in taste and flavor, and even in the texture of foods. Catnip is a case in point: seeing a cat pounce on a tuft of catnip, it looks as if the animal was prompted by some kind of prescience, by an intuition that impels her toward what can help her clear her bowels. Obviously, we can’t ask the cat what she feels. To understand what the animal feels, we have to have experienced it ourselves. In fact, when the cat needs a clearance, it must be the smell of the catnip that changes, and outweighs the other smells in the immediate surroundings, thus drawing the cat to it.
    In the cat’s brain, there are instinctive centers that cancel out the smells of food she doesn’t need and only let in the smell of the food she does need. As far as smell is concerned (and cats depend more on their sense of smell than on sight), the cat, in our example, only has a nose, so to speak, for the plant she needs. And she “tracks” it easily, with her keen sense of smell. Typically, she’ll go up to it, and if it tastes good, will eat it.
    Obviously, the cat can’t say “I’ve been constipated for two days and I need a clearance!” The grass will have to smell good and taste good; otherwise, she won’t eat it.
    And then, suddenly, she’ll stop. And not because she has read in a plant-medicine book that too much of a medicinal plant can prove toxic. No, she’ll only stop because the grass has taken on a bad taste. Watch your own cat next time she’s unwell. You’ll see that you’ll be able to account for her behavior in this way.
    Dietary instinct mainly shows up by changes in one’s perception of smell and taste. This is how all animals have always managed to maintain an optimal dietary balance in quantity and quality. In man, this still works, but only with foods that have always existed in nature.

    _So you’re saying that instincts don’t work with chocolates and cream cakes?

    o Nor with any kind of cooked food. People believe that they’ve lost any instinct they ever had; in fact, we shut it off day after day with all our cooking. All recipes do is adulterate food to make it more palatable.

    _So, cooking, then, only disrupts our senses, does it? Fire, after all, did tide man over periods of famine in pre-historic times.

    o Allow me to be skeptical; that’s what we’re told, but can we know for sure? Anyway, the problem still remains: Even if we could prove that cooking allowed man to survive in times of dearth, that doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful to our health. If you’re honest about it...

    _You’re not going to tell me that you don’t miss a good old rib of beef with morels, good Swiss cheese, claret? All that is part of our culture!

    o Without sound health, what is the point of culture?

    _Look, do you honestly believe that thwarting one’s instincts, as you call them, can have an impact on one’s health?

    o Much more so than it might seem at first. Flouting one’s instincts, for a start, prevents the digestive tract from breaking food down the way it was originally intended to. When you eat a rib of beef with morels or any prepared dish (a Mexican salad or passion fruit ice cream), the taste never changes markedly enough to warn us that we’ve had enough. We can’t tell when we’ve had enough, or whether we have eaten too much to digest properly, or even whether we needed to eat in the first place. Of course, we might feel bloated or disgusted, but that’s another matter.

    _I find it hard to believe that a change in taste could actually prevent one from eating a fruit.

    o The difference in taste between the time when somebody needs a passion fruit, for instance, and the time when they don’t is staggering_that is, when one’s body is not too disrupted by cooked molecules. In the first case, the passion fruit will smell heavenly_its fragrance will seem sweeter than that of the best wines; in the second case, the fruit will taste so sour that it will be literally impossible to swallow it. This change in taste doesn’t occur when the fruit has been denatured_for example, passion fruit ice cream will always taste good whenever you eat it. Because the juice has been expressed and blended with sugar and cream, the resulting chemical reactions trigger off alterations in the flavor that would normally have allowed our taste buds to draw the line.

    _Hearing you doesn’t make me feel you enjoy going out to restaurants very much....

    o Well, let’s say that my stomach’s not too fond of them. I’m not against restaurant owners; they ply their trade as best they can. It’s the idea of “cooking” that we have to give serious consideration to. For millions of years, man has wanted eating pleasure and has sought it without being overly concerned about what it really meant. I feel, in all fairness, that eating pleasure is at the cost of one’s health. Such a price seems a bit high to me.

    _Do we know in what period man started cooking his food?

    o I think we can safely assume that regular cooking started up when man’s life became sedentary_that is, about 10,000 years before the common era. From that time on, man began to grow cereal crops; pottery developed, then came ovens for baking bread in; metal dishes were cast; goats, and later cows, were domesticated, which made dairy available to man; all that happened some seven or eight thousand years ago.

    _And yet, looking at the most primitive and most untainted peoples on earth, they all cook at least part of their food. Some people think that culture means cooking. Are you not going very much against the grain by advocating a throwback to raw food?

    o I’ve devoted a lot of thought to it. Every animal eats raw food. Why should man process his food? How can we know whether cooking is misguided and lets one in for a lot of ill health, or, is, alternatively, part and parcel of human life? Science should have looked into this long ago. After all, the health of mankind is at stake, not to mention the health of domestic animals. I felt it is urgent to find out what the actual consequences of cooking and processing, as a whole, really are, and should these effects prove harmful, we ought to try and understand how such practices became widespread.
    It just doesn’t do to say: “That’s what we’ve been doing for ages, our bodies are bound to have adapted,” as people typically say. To gain an insight into things as they really are requires calling everything into question, even time-honored tradition.
    When I started out on my research, some 30 years ago, no one was bothered by the effects of cooking. People simply upheld that cooking made food more digestible.

    _Did this not enable man to spare his digestion better to use his mind?

    o Such a hoax is prehistoric thinking. Do you really suppose that what prevented chimpanzees from mastering mathematics was a lack of energy that could be put down to having to digest natural foods that have been their staple fare for millions of years?

    _Surely, it’s no chance that fire should have heralded the beginnings of every civilization.

    o Are you quite sure that history didn’t start wherever a story began to be told?

    _And what of cultural development? Have there not been wonderful achievements!

    o True enough: pollution, Star Wars, AIDS... We’re light-years ahead of outrang-outrangs. Quite frankly, I don’t know whether the kind of culture we’ve been fortunate enough to inherit is an asset or a liability in terms of evolution.

    _But you can’t deny that human intelligence has developed more than ever before.

    o How strange, then, that intelligence is a word we no longer equate with civil life.
    Do you really think that everything is for the best in the best possible world? That saying goes back 200 years.

    _True, a lot of things are running amok. It’s been that way for ages, but wouldn’t it be even worse if we ate like animals?

    o That reminds me of a remark I often heard when I switched over to raw food: “With such simple food, how can you expect your children to develop a civilized form of intelligence?”
    Facts talk against you. All my children did well in school without any particular prompting. The brain works much better on raw food, as does the rest of the body.

    _Nevertheless, cooking does make foods edible that could not otherwise be eaten.

    o That’s exactly what Gandhi says in his autobiography. He then goes on to wonder about something that seems highly relevant: “Perhaps it would be wisest not to eat foods that can’t do without cooking.”
    Considering what is known of the biochemical effects of heating, there’s little point in quibbling. However, scientific discoveries, especially when they challenge our assumptions, are slow in gaining acceptance.

    _What discoveries are you talking of?

    o In 1916, for instance, an American flavor-molecule chemical engineer, by the name of Maillard, decided to isolate substances that give cooked foods their distinctive flavors_such as the tastes of bread, chocolate, coffee... After having singled them out, he hoped, no doubt, to produce them artificially in order to add them to industrial foods and enhance the appeal that they could have to the consumer’s taste buds.

    _And so that was the beginning of synthetic food, was it?

    o Well, one had to determine the exact structure of such molecules before one could talk of synthesis. Now, apparently, those molecules resulted from very complex, haphazard chemical reactions between sugars and proteins, and one could produce them quite easily by heating any food even to moderate temperatures.
    Maillard tried to prove that the substances that he had singled out, which have since been termed “Maillard’s molecules,” had no adverse effect. They were fed to rats. No luck; complications involving enlarged kidneys and weak livers arose. The animals died off miserably. But, such evidence was quickly swept under the rug. Such things were too devastating for a food industry that brooked no control. Not until after World War II did a few biochemists dare broach the subject again. The research remained dormant for a long time, right up until 1982 (18 years after I had started my own work), when scientists, for the first time, acknowledged the existence of a definite number of abnormal substances that occur when cooking.

    _Why do you call them “abnormal substances?” Aren’t there all kinds of complex substances in raw food as well?

    o There are no cooking by-products in any natural food and they had no place in human diet before cooking came along.

    _Are you saying that recipes generate new substances?

    o Of course they do, but people aren’t aware of it. You can’t see with the naked eye what happens in a saucepan on the molecular level. When a chemist combines two substances in a test tube and subsequently heats the compound over a Bunsen burner, it boils, clouds, changes color or explodes accordingly. In each case, a new compound has been produced. Heat causes the molecules involved to collide, and repeated collision causes divalent bonding in order for new molecules, and hence a new substance, to form. The same goes for cooking, except that myriad molecules are brought together instead of just two.
    In an ordinary baked potato, there are already 450 by-products of every description. They have even been named “new chemical composites.”

    _ And what happens to these molecules when they enter the body?

    o Well, to begin with, around 50 such substances were studied and turned out to be either peroxidizing, antioxidizing, or toxic and possibly even mutagenic, meaning that they are liable to wreck cell nuclei and set up cancer.

    _Are potatoes especially likely to release toxic substances in cooking?

    o Put your mind at rest. What was ascertained for broiled potatoes, which involves a fairly straightforward preparation, becomes much more serious with more sophisticated cookery. Sliced potatoes baked with cheese is a case in point. Heating releases an awesome array of chemical reactions_450 substances in potatoes and probably many more in cheese which is a highly intricate biochemical complex. Not only will those unwanted molecules stack up their effects, but, moreover, they will combine among themselves in every possible way_meaning that tens of thousands of abnormal substances will spring out of a cooked dish calling for mere potatoes and cheese. Just think of elaborate recipes where one clocks up endless chains of sundry ingredients jumbled together helter-skelter.

    _What you’re saying is very worrying: I’ll have trouble facing my pans after what you’ve said. And what of the microwave oven I’ve just put in? Do put my mind at rest about that.

    o Awfully sorry, but heating of any kind damages molecules.

    _But, what if one barely cooks foods, I mean, just dipping vegetables in boiling water to make them a shade more digestible?

    o If you need a vegetable, it will be perfectly digestible if eaten raw. All you have to do is eat it as long as you feel like it; your enzymes will automatically break it down.
    As far as blanched vegetables are concerned_that is, vegetables that have been heated to temperatures of 60 to 80°C for varying periods of time_things aren’t as simple as they look. It is usually thought that the less altered a food, the less toxic it is. Now, the validity of such a proportional rule is far from being proven. The most dangerous by-products are not necessarily produced at high temperatures. If you want to make sure that you aren’t affected by those cooked substances, it might be best to char everything you cook in your oven. Pure carbon is definitely non-toxic!
    I think that, in all fairness, you must admit that if one cooks, it’s because cooking changes the taste and texture of a food. And such change in taste and texture goes hand in glove with molecular alterations.

    _So, even my microwave oven...

    o As I was saying, it isn’t known whether molecules that have been slightly damaged are more dangerous that those having undergone complete alteration. The body will identify the latter more readily, whereas the former will play surreptitious tricks with our immunity.

    _So, the only option is to eat everything raw, is that right?

    o Well, that’s the conclusion some progressive dietitians, among the officially acknowledged, have come to.
    For instance, at the Convention on Nutrition in Copenhagen in 1988, it was said that it was better to eat as much raw food as possible _even up to 100% raw, including meat.

    _Why is it that the general public is not more aware of these things?

    o I don’t believe that many researchers are seriously considering the problem at present. It all hinges on subsidies and neither the food industry, nor chemical firms, nor medicine for that matter, for obvious reasons, nor even most people, who prefer gourmandizing to good health, have any interest in financing or publicizing this kind of research.

    _Obviously not, since it calls our entire system into question! But, what I don’t understand is why absolutely nothing has budged since Maillard’s experiments three quarters of a century ago.

    o For a long time, man believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, a little like the way people today think that a saucepan lies at the heart of their very existence. Between Copernicus and Galileo, more than a century elapsed; the latter had to recant evidence in a legal procedure so as not to be burned at the stake! Popular beliefs die hard. And how much more of a taboo to indict eating pleasure today than it was to talk about the positions of planets. The digestive tract affects us in a much more immediate way than stars do.

    _Man has, nevertheless, made some progress. Wasn’t that story about broiled potatoes published in a scientific journal?

    o Yes, of course. It appeared in “les Cahiers de Nutrition et de Diététique” (Journal of Diet and Nutrition), an excellent magazine created under the auspices of professor Trémolières, a former giant in French dietetics, who died a few years ago. But things were soft-peddled. There’s great reluctance to shock people. For instance, the article_an excerpt of which is reprinted here_is entitled “Food Pyrolysis and Risks of Toxicity.”

    _”Pyrolysis”? What does that mean?

    o It’s a scientific euphemism for “cooking,” meant to appear less accusatory. Etymologically, “pyros” means fire and “lysis” dissolution. According to the dictionary, pyrolysis means specifically dissolution caused by heating.
    And it is precisely the dissolution of food molecules_or their pre-digestion if you prefer_that is achieved through cooking, and, at the same time, a great many parasitic molecules show up_especially in whatever parts of food that have borne the brunt of very high temperatures, i.e. bread crusts, charred spots on grilled or fried meat, etc. In the parts less conspicuously affected, there are fewer of these molecules, but the production of “Maillard’s molecules” (proteins + sugars), for example, is already underway at moderate temperatures, without any visible browning to the food occurring to indicate the presence of these molecules.
    Scientists must feel a bit uneasy about not having raised this important matter before now, especially since they are, supposedly, responsible for world health. Every time I’ve tried to broach the subject, I’ve had to put up with viciously aggressive reactions, that were quite irrational, from my point of view, even from scientists who were apparently open to ditching traditional diets.
    I have heard things like, for instance, “It is probable that mucus in the gut contains enzymes that can break down ‘Maillard’s molecules.’ Indicting cooked food would be an unwarranted scientific extrapolation; it’s better to stick with well-known dietary rules and cook meat and fish as required, without overdoing it.”
    That is what was printed in the Swiss Cancer Research Journal at one point.

    “Pyrolysis and risks of toxicity” by Professor R. Derache, in “Cahiers de nutrition et de diététique” (Diet and Nutrition Journal), 1982, p 39.
    “As far back as 1916, Maillard proved that the brown pigments and polymers that occur in pyrolysis (chemical breakdown by heat alone)... are yielded after prior reaction of an amino acid group with the carbonyl group of sugars.
    Though apparently simple, this reaction is, in fact, highly complex, itinerating in a spate of successive reactions and forming melanoidins, which are brown pigments that impart a typical color to whatever part of a food has endured higher temperatures.
    The number of substances generated as a result is most impressive, yielding endless chains of new molecules: ketones, esters, aldehydes, ethers, volatile alcohols, and non-volatile heterocycles, etc. These innumerable substances coalesce into a complex compound and are endowed with differing biological and chemical attributes: they are toxic, aromatic, peroxidizing, anti-oxidizing, and possibly mutagenic and carcinogenic (DNA fractures can be oncogenic), or even anti-mutagenic and anti-carcinogenic. This to say that heating causes widespread disruption in the natural order of molecules. The research work backing up this article evidenced over 50 pyrolytic substances in broiled potatoes, most of which originated from pyroseines and thiazole. However, Derache also has it that “there remain, all in all, some 400 by-products to identify.”

    Note: Man has been cooking his food for eons, but still doesn’t know what goes on in a pan!

    o Since there is no evidence of danger, well, then it doesn’t exist, and the public are glibly comforted in their habits. A truly rational attitude would rather be to wonder what are the effects of spin-off substances derived from pyrolysis when enzymes in the gut are unavailing in fully breaking them down, since that is still unattested.

    _To be fully consistent...

    o The town is about to be shelled, but the shrapnel of our anti-aircraft defense might hit enemy aircraft, so let’s play possum and not sleep too soundly!

    _Hats off all the same to the Diet and Nutrition Journal for their forthrightness in publishing a broadside against cooking.

    o I was impressed as well, but, there again, my enthusiasm was nipped in the bud. When I asked the editor permission to reprint excerpts from articles consonant with my theory, they gave me a flat denial. These honorable gentlemen were not going to have me drawing on scientific facts to come to conclusions they did not endorse. That’s not exactly what you might call scientific integrity.
    However, I’m not bothered. Sooner or later, our beloved science will have to come round. However far back cooking may trace its roots and be the supposed cornerstone of our culture, that says nothing of its harmfulness for human health.

    _Fair enough, but no one ever gave up the ghost for having eaten a bag of fries.

    o Well, that’s the worst of it: If a French fry could bump you off overnight, even the Belgians would have woken up to its harmfulness! Unfortunately, since it takes more like 24 or 48 years to kill you off with the slow relentlessness of arterial sclerosis, how could you possibly make the connection? When the curtain call comes, you’ll line up all the circumstantial factors: a shock, being overworked, ripe old age, a jinx, but never those fries of yours you’d been impenitently scoffing every Sunday for three generations.

    _It’s not easy to face that the recipes of yore were that evil.

    o Well, our grandmothers did their level best. They lovingly cooked their whole lives long and were self-appointed slaves to spudbashing and the washing-up ritual. They couldn’t help it; how could they have foreseen what scientists are even now only barely aware of!

    _Is anyone else currently coming out against cooking?

    o Charges are coming up all over. In the United States, for instance, a cancerologist by the name of Ames devised a method intended to rate the effects of dietary carcinogens.
    He managed to assess that eating ordinary cooked food leads to an intake of carcinogens tantamount to smoking 40 cigarettes a day. If the food is grilled, which some believe is healthier, one can clock up to a hundred cigarettes a day!

    _There’s no point in giving up smoking.

    o Right! You’re better off flogging cooked food. At any rate, instinctotherapy is the best way to chuck smoking.

    _Is that so?

    o Smokers who turn to raw food commonly give up smoking without further ado. As a rule, after a few days, they’re over the habit. Of course, eating such a diet makes one feel so well, you’re almost walking on air, so much so that there’s no particular reason to seek an outlet in drug-taking.

    _But, isn’t there a major risk of getting worms eating all that raw food, particularly raw meat?

    o There again, experience completely belies public belief (not to mention medical myths). A raw diet, properly balanced by one’s instincts, helps one clear parasites, even when standard drugs are ineffectual. Although raw foods contain parasite eggs, what matters is not contamination, but, rather, hosting factors.

    _You’re not going to tell me that cooking serves no purpose in killing off germs, are you?

    o Well, then, you’d have to cook everything. So much for rare steak. No more grated celery, and bye-bye salads! You’d have to do your steaks brown_which is carcinogenic!
    We can’t eat a 100% cooked diet; scurvy would be the death of us. There’s a whole set of vitamins and life-giving substances that would have to go. A life-giving diet must include a certain amount of raw foods, which inevitably harbor parasite eggs. A better tack would be to wonder why those eggs sometimes hatch and sometimes don’t. Instinctotherapy ensures that parasites never set in. In fact, die-hard parasitoses fall off within a few days.
    For instance, we once had a young man over who had been sustaining pinworms for eight months and couldn’t shake them off. Within a few days, he excreted them_piles of writhing little worms that seemed to be flushed out of the intestinal lumen when he began eating raw food. He’s been free of pinworms ever since. And the same holds for roundworms, tapeworms, amoebas, and toxoplasmosis.

    _Some people do die of amoebiasis. If it was as simple as you make it out to be...

    o I know that what I’m saying is enough to unnerve the medical establishment: As you say, it’s all too simple! Only, the simplest thing that has yet been devised is to prescribe pills.

    _Don’t you think that you’re taking things a bit far? Soon, you’re going to be telling me that raw foods are better than drugs. Why did man concoct drugs in the first place?

    o All I can say is that facts speak for themselves. I observe and try to understand. Medicine has never had occasion to observe a body functioning under the conditions I have been fortunate enough to enjoy, i.e. conditions resulting from uncooked foods.

    _Nevertheless, there are wild animals who eat raw foods and who go down with parasitosis and infectious diseases.

    o That’s true, but their diet is not necessarily balanced. Man’s presence corners them into impoverished habitats. If they lack space or if they overbreed, owing to some ecological factor_for instance the death of a predator_they overrun their environment, their food supply quickly turns unbalanced, and their defense mechanisms become blunted. That’s what happened in some wild animal reserves where lynxes and wolves were culled and where deer multiplied and played havoc with the vegetation to the point of weakening themselves and developing a septic eye condition.

    _And what about amoebic dysentery? Aren’t you afraid of eating raw fish?

    o Every time a new parasite or new pathogenic bacteria is identified, people are afraid. A scientist publishes his findings, rumors get started, everyone feels threatened, the media chime in, and all of a sudden, evil is all around where it had previously gone unsuspected. Roundworm is a parasite that has been found in some fish from the Atlantic, since industrial fishing boats started freezing fish on board without gutting them. The worms (which can be seen with the naked eye; they’re two centimeters long), thus have enough time to work their way into the muscle of the fish, and, once man has eaten the fish, the worms travel all the way into the mucus lining of man’s stomach. This is an artificial process, and certainly not the natural cycle of that parasite. Very specific conditions must be met for the worm to infest man.
    I think that worsening pollution might account for the growing number of parasites in fish, and overeating on man’s part might possibly explain that his lessened immunity doesn’t stand up to them.
    I have never heard of anyone who practiced instinctotherapy properly having developed roundworms. Among crudivorians who eat fish without heeding their instincts, the problem could undoubtedly arise. But, one mustn’t confuse crudivorism with instinctotherapy. Everything is different when one allows one’s instincts to take over. Learning how to interpret one’s instincts is another matter.

    _So, how do you account for the efficiency of instinctotherapy?

    o I’d say, rather, that cooked food is very efficient. On the one hand, cooked food alters the chemical formula of the contents of the bowel tract, thus rendering the environment more favorable for the development of parasitic worms. And for another thing, when abnormal molecules bombard the body, the immune system gives out and is no longer able to ward off undesirable parasites or slow down their development, so they proliferate.
    The same thing holds true for infection. After more than 20 years of eating raw food, I have never needed a disinfectant or an antibiotic when I cut myself. It has become a general rule: When one’s diet is right, the body can cope with infection_it rarely proves necessary to disinfect wounds.

    _I thought that it was normal for germs that had infected a wound to thrive and spread if no disinfectant was applied.

    o That’s a very simplistic way of looking at it. In fact, there is a balance between a germ and the body. The entire immune system is on hand to hunt and destroy unwanted invaders. A germ only thrives once the balance of power has been disrupted, i.e. when immunity is deficient. A healthy, balanced diet will necessarily tip the balance favorably.

    _I think that I heard you say that germs were useful?

    o That’s true, though I have reason to believe that the problem is even more complex. But, for the moment, at least, let’s hark back to the classical scenario of “host versus attacker.”

    _So, you don’t find it normal that after contamination there should be infection, is that right?

    o What do you mean by normal? If everyone you see is disrupted by the same dietary mistakes, you’ll be calling normal the obviously abnormal state they are all in. The medical profession as a whole has fallen victim to what is called in physics, a systematic mistake. Even popular wisdom has succumbed to it. If you develop a cold, people automatically tell you that “you didn’t have enough clothes on.” But, has anyone ever seen a chamois catch cold at the beginning of the cold season, start sneezing, need handkerchiefs and essential oil sprays to clear their bronchial tract?
    When you eat raw food and balance your diet instinctively, colds don’t exist. Even if you’re exposed to the cold, you’re no longer plagued with sinus trouble, phlegm, congestion, or endless sniffling. On the contrary, when one of my children eats a slice of buttered bread, sometimes it is only a matter of hours before their nose starts running. When you begin to notice things like that, a “cold” takes on quite a different meaning. That’s what I enjoy about instinctotherapy: We are in the process of redefining standards of normality. Up until now, nothing had enabled us to understand how the human body worked on an “initial diet.”

    _Developing a cold because one has eaten a hunk of bread doesn’t sound very normal to me.

    o Why not? Bread is perhaps more toxic than it tastes.

    _Well, then, why don’t I have a runny nose after every meal?

    o When a non-smoker smokes his first cigarette, he coughs, feels dizzy, sometimes he is even sick. Yet, after smoking his way through a certain number of cigarettes, he no longer feels a thing. Through habit, you can get used to any poison. But one’s health goes on being insulted in a very insidious way.

    _So, according to you, illness should no longer exist, is that right?

    o It’s considered normal to be down with the flu once a year, to start out in life with all sorts of childhood diseases, to develop acne when one’s a teenager, to contract syphilis at every street corner, to risk developing smallpox if one isn’t inoculated and to die of cancer, heart failure or senility, in the best of cases. As far as I’m concerned, well, I’m not too sure that’s normal.

    _But without hygiene, vaccinations, and drugs, there would be even more disease...

    o I’m convinced that doctors do their job splendidly and that present techniques alleviate much suffering. But, that’s not the crucial problem. What we should wonder is whether those diseases would exist at all, or in what form, if man ate a genetically adapted diet.
    In other words, the medical establishment has up until now always acted like a mechanic who regularly repairs your car, fine tunes the engine, scours out the cylinder heads, changes spare parts, advocates all kinds of super-lubricants_all the while, charging you, of course_but never bothering to ask whether you fill your tank with the grade of gasoline your car was designed for. That is, in fact, the first question that should be asked.

    _Yes, maybe, but, in real terms, it’s not always possible to find 100% organically grown foods. Not everybody can have their own vegetable garden.

    o Some people are up in arms over chemical by-products and pollution, and I think that they’re right to be against such things, whose long-term effects are still unknown. The whole ecological balance that our own survival rests on is at stake. Nervertheless, we mustn’t forget that most diseases existed long before the advent of pesticides. It would be a bit facile to hold them responsible for all the existing evils. Objectively speaking, chemical alterations account for the introduction of a whole string of novel substances in our food, the real effects of which nobody can assess. However, we must bear in mind that cooking already involves chemical reactions. Cooking and blending pave the way for the production of innumerable chemical compounds. Cooking floods the natural molecular order with a surfeit of substances whose effects are entirely unpredictable. Thermal disorder triggers off a sort of chaos that invades the food. Even if the percentage of cooked molecules that are actually dangerous remains low, there are still enough to damage human health and set in motion all kinds of disasters.

    _Chemical poisons build up as well. Traces of DDT were found even as far afield as Antarctica in the spinal cords of penguins.

    o That’s been well-documented, and I strongly urge all those who want to eat properly to avoid chemical by-products as much as they can. Pesticide residues, and their combination with substances found in food, can have all sorts of ill effects on our bodies.

    _I must admit that I have always been amazed that science didn’t come out against practices that put public health at risk.

    o What do you expect? Power is in the hands of the sorcerers’ apprentices. Out of a so-called concern to appear objective, our scientists have taken to only coming out against the contrivances that clearly have harmful effects. Unfortunately, those harmful effects don’t patently show up for a very long time, by which time the damage is obvious. The nature of things is that warnings are always sounded too late. It might have been wiser to get the public used to the idea that they would only be allowed that which had been shown to have no adverse effect on their health.

    _What about fruit and vegetables grown on artificial fertilizers? Aren’t they tasteless enough to trick one’s instincts?

    o Fortunately, one’s sense of taste improves in time, so much so that one spontaneously rejects food that has a chemical aftertaste. Such food tends to be unsatisfying and is hard to digest_which is hardly encouraging when one thinks about its possible effect on the body. I’ve seen people lose weight on industrial raw food and gain weight on changing back to organic food.

    _And how do you feel about hybridization? The plants we grow in our gardens are altogether different from those our forebears fed on.

    o True enough. Food plants are the outcome of extensive cross-breeding over the centuries, and even through the ages. Some 10,000 years ago, our Neolithic ancestors were already selecting their grain, possibly without quite knowing what they were doing. All they did was sow the seeds of bumper crops of the previous harvest. In this day and age, selection has been starkly stepped up: Mutations are induced by ionizing seeds, and new cultivars are hybridized yearly. There is an attendant danger to that, which is typically overlooked; namely, that a mutated plant is apt to start synthesizing abnormal molecules that can disrupt human metabolism.

    _Are you saying that you can’t even bite into a raw apple with your mind at rest?

    o Fortunately, induced mutations aren’t usually too drastic. A recent study has shown that crossbred millet is only 10-odd mutations away from wild millet. Hopefully, the biochemical processes that code for the synthesis of various dietary substances in our crossbred plants have remained much the same as they were in that type plant. There has been an obvious shift in the proportions of those substances: There is more starch and less protein in our grain than there initially was in the wild, but such changes in quantity may be handled by the body. What does give cause for concern are changes in the quality of molecular structures, since our enzymes are likely to be stymied when up against molecules they’re not sequenced to tackle. This is also an issue that has unaccountably been hushed up so far. There is no budging dietary habits.
    In any case, there is a definite danger, and I do think that every crossbred plant should be put through the sieve, so to speak.

    _Even grain?

    o Especially grain that has been cultivated from time immemorial, since that is the more likely candidate for mutation.

    _Well, well, cooking, cereals, there’s nothing left! How can you even allow tropical fruit to be served at your table?

    o Because our instincts often prompt us to choose it over local produce.

    _What about the idea that one ought to eat the fruit that grows in one’s own region?

    o Of course, provided you live in a country where the fruit you’re supposed to eat can actually grow.

    _Are you joking?

    o I’ve told you, I’m always in earnest. Just because our sturdy ancestors settled in these parts thousands of years back doesn’t mean that genetics are in step with the frigid climates that are now our legacy.

    _So, you ban local produce?

    o Not at all. I’m only saying that it would be a shame to pull the plug on tropical fruit, considering that if they are better suited to us, we will find them very beneficial to our health. Of course, there’s enough to get by on in these parts for an ordinary daily diet; local fruit will do fine. However, if one’s aim is curative, there’s every reason to have plenty of variety to choose from.

    _So, if I correctly interpret your meaning, a baby is more likely to fall for a banana than for an apple. The trouble is that bananas available in European and American markets are imported in banana cargoes and artificially ripened in gas chambers. Are you sure that’s perfectly healthy?

    o These are no concentration gas chambers. Bananas are not being put down with mustard gas. This is how they do it: The bananas are first stored on premises where the temperature stands at 20°C (70°F) and air moisture at 100%. This amounts to inducing ripening in circumstances similar to optimal natural conditions. As it happens, bananas naturally ripening give off ethylene, which is a fairly simple molecule (C2H4). Oddly enough, even a very low concentration of ethylene will induce ripening in as yet green bananas_meaning that, on a banana tree, the whole bunch ripens at once, provided there’s no wind.

    _Nature has seen to it all...

    o Provided man sticks only to imitating it, there’s nothing to worry about. Artificial ethylene is virtually the same as the stuff from bananas, since we’re talking about a basic molecule. The only departure from natural ripening is that one could possibly release the gas too early on in maturation or pick an underripe bunch and expect the gas to do the rest. Of course, the quality of the banana will suffer, but that won’t be any worse than eating a slightly green banana. In fact, our instincts shield us from abnormally ripened fruit. They taste bland, grating, even tart.

    _Meaning that someone who’s starting out in instinctotherapy and wolfs down two pounds of bananas, like a young child, at the prompting of their instincts, won’t be endangering their health?

    o No more than they would with any other cultivated fruit, provided their instincts were in working order.
    As a matter of fact, people are very anxious about their food_which, in fact, indicates a lack of critical logic. There are a great many hoaxes being put forth in circles that are hip on natural diets. I’ve known parents who deny their children bananas on the premise that they were indigestible.
    Or course, with the amount of fertilizers and pesticides banana plantations are swilled with, one doesn’t quite know anymore.

    _You say that our instincts are alive and kicking. But how can we know whether what they prompt us to eat is good or bad for us? The gratification of one’s taste buds is strictly personal. Some people simply love mustard, vinegar, and the like.

    o Come, come. You’re back on the beaten track of pedestrian reasoning, as when you were telling me how much you loved cream cakes! Our instincts only work with “initial” foods: There is no vinegar or mustard in the wild, any more than there is chocolate.

    _But, surely, vinegar is little else than matured wine.

    o Wine is no natural food. It’s fermented grape juice. And even grape juice is anything but natural: There are no fruit juices in a tropical forest. That would take an orange dropping to the ground in the hollow of a rock, and you happening along in the nick of time to sip the juice before it dried up. That can’t have been too common a happening in man’s dietary history.
    Essentially, we are out to draw the line between initial and artificial. Whenever a food no longer comes in the same form as our ancestors found it in the wild, there’s no reason why our instincts should operate properly. That must be why dietitians have cooked it.
    The very concept of instinct is a genetic one. To sort out the matter required first defining what could be termed man’s initial dietary bandwidth, i.e. the kind of foods that our ancestors came across in their primitive habitat in the far-removed times when our genetic background was evolved.

    _Take the case of the dandelion, for instance; it’s a plant that grows naturally in any field. If somebody tastes one, finds it bitter, but eats it because that person loves what’s bitter...

    o If he finds it good, it means that he needs something in the dandelion. Only, there’s something wrong when you say: “because he loves what’s bitter.” You’re forgetting that a plant that is supposedly bitter can sometimes produce a pleasant or unpleasant effect, depending on the state of the body_which means that you can’t decide to love it forever.

    _What about poisonous berries, for instance? Do they smell good or not?

    o One man’s meat is another man’s poison. For some people, some so-called poisonous berries can be useful, while they’ll be harmful for other people. It’s quite plausible that in some cases, the body needs a small amount of poison. That’s even a pharmaceutical principle: in small doses, poison becomes a remedy.
    In fact, we have to rethink the very idea of what a poisonous plant is: if a substance known to be toxic proves useful in small doses, we have to determine the threshold_which will be different for every individual. As our instincts tell us when we’ve had enough of a substance, we can’t really talk of poisonous plants. At best, one might call a plant poisonous if it triggers off symptoms when one forces one’s instincts to eat a bit too much of something.

    _So, if I feel a berry is toxic but tastes good, I can eat it without poisoning myself? I wouldn’t dare.

    o There are only two possibilities if a natural plant tastes good: Either one’s instincts are wrong or the plant is useful for the body. Only experience can tell.

    _And what experience do you have in the matter?

    o We had our first experience quite by chance. Three of my children, who were between the ages of eight and twelve, were out walking in the forest with two of their girlfriends, not far from the cottage where we were spending our holidays. When they came to a clearing, they spied a great quantity of deadly nightshade berries. Being quite ignorant of what the plant was, they started eating the berries as if they were blackberries. My eldest daughter ate about twelve before she thought they started tasting bad. Apparently, that’s not far from the lethal dose. My daughter, Sylvia, who was a little younger, only ate three; a gradually pervading acridness put her off eating any more. Only one of the two girls, who were less used to following their instincts, after having eaten two berries and also sensing that they tasted bad, forced herself to eat another berry, without chewing it, to be like the other children. She was the only one who complained of being slightly unwell and who showed signs of slight atropine poisoning.

    _So, one does have to chew well for instinct to work properly?

    o Anything that goes against natural laws can disrupt our instincts. Danger begins with artifice. That reminds me of an incident that was far more unpleasant and happened to a friend of mine who had been eating according to his instincts for some time, without having fully understood this danger. He was taking an introductory course on wild plants, and while on a field trip in the forest, he discovered a plant he had never seen before: It had little berries clustered into black bunches. The instructor who was in charge of the group said it was stag’s horn sumac, which was quite right, and declared that their berries weren’t poisonous, which wasn’t quite as right. My friend hurriedly bit into a few berries and, finding them prohibitively tart, spat the whole mouthful out. The following day, dutifully taking into account what he had been told the previous day, tried again, making sure he didn’t crush the berries with his teeth. He noticed that the juice he managed to express by sucking the berries between his tongue and palate, remained pleasantly sweet. He went on like that for a good half-hour, taking down half a glass worth of the fluid. That very evening, he was rushed into intensive care, critically poisoned.

    _So, you’re implying that expressing a natural fruit against one’s palate is unnatural and is enough to throw our instincts off the scent.

    o Well, obviously, no animal indulges in such practices, and consequently, there is no reason to expect one’s taste buds to manage properly under such circumstances.

    _What you’re saying is that when one eats grapes, one ought never to spit the skins out.

    o You’re right. The flesh of the grape still tastes pleasant when the skin begins to rasp on the tongue, and if one persists in eating the flesh alone, signs of overload soon show up. The skin contains tanins required by our taste buds to decide how much we need.

    _I think I understand how you feel about fruit juices.

    o It has become standard practice to juice fruit specifically because this is a way of flummoxing the threshold of instinct. The juice of a fruit still goes down nicely, whereas the whole fruit would taste aversive.
    The same thing holds for vegetable juices. There are some people who flush themselves out with vegetable juices as prescribed in some dietary practices, although the same unprocessed vegetables would never clear the back of their tongues.
    Accordingly, one gets enmeshed in a catch-22 situation: Drinking juices induces a gradual overload of the system that makes eating unaltered fruit and vegetables more and more aversive, and one turns into a juicer freak.

    _True enough. My father, who regularly juiced his apples, ended up no longer being able to bite into fruit from his own garden.

    o If juicers had existed in the Garden of Eden....

    _Adam wouldn’t have had to eat of the fruit?

    o It looks as though in those ambrosial times, fruit was eaten off the tree and, coincidentally, there was no such thing as disease.

    _And what of mushrooms?

    o My children are perfectly free to eat any mushroom they please: The concept of poisonous or edible has become meaningless. When eating supposedly edible raw mushrooms, sometimes they taste rather foul_which shows they are toxic. Conversely, if a toxic mushroom tastes good, it’s because our instincts impel us toward it and it’s useful for our body. As soon as one has eaten enough to begin to feel its toxic effects, the mushroom takes on a bad taste, or become tasteless, so that one has no reason to go on eating it. It’s crucial only to swallow it as long as it tastes appealing. An unappealing mushroom can prove to be poisonous. Animals only eat food that appeals to their sense of smell and taste. They lack that reflective dimension of ours that enables us to eat_out of curiosity or on the rebound of various emotional disappointments_any food that we can get our hands on. Man, with his gourmandizing and his need for compensation, is a bit like a bulldozer that clears away everything it comes into contact with.

    _You often compare yourself to an animal. Don’t you think that by doing so, you’re lapsing into some kind of unenlightened reductionism? Man is certainly not an animal!

    o I believe that man will truly become a “man” the day he acknowledges in himself his animal characteristics and respects them as he should. Obviously, we have inherited all of our biological functions from the animal kingdom and most of our driving instincts are part and parcel of them.
    Dietary instinct has no reason to protect us in novel situations; the mere fact of eating a food that is not appealing to one’s sense of smell or taste is nothing short of an “innovation” in the history of nutrition.
    I’m telling you this, because I have seen children, for instance, taste and eat mushrooms that they didn’t find particularly bad, and, yet, they ended up poisoning themselves.
    As soon as the “thinking center” starts imposing its will on our conscience, a human being can flout his instincts, and such a process is typically set off early in life. Don’t go and try out poisonous plants before making quite sure that you’re in touch with your instincts; and that requires a complete reappraisal of one’s education. Instincts do far more, in fact, than alert us to dangerous plants. They help us determine when and how much of these plants we can profitably eat. As I was just saying, a toxic plant can have medicinal properties if taken in the appropriate quantity. Plant therapy hinges on this problem: That is, when and how much of a medicinal plant should be administered to someone in order to achieve optimal therapeutic effect? Instincts, in this case, afford a way out of that dilemma_which is quite ground-breaking. It no longer becomes necessary to resort to the traditional method of diagnosis and prescription that, inevitably, are somewhat arbitrary. The best therapist can never quite know what’s happening inside someone’s body.

    _Do you think instincts would know better?

    o Medicine is a few hundred years old. Instincts, on the other hand, have millions of years of experience behind them_all of which has accumulated in our genetic memory.
    I even think that traditional plant therapy got a lot from instincts. Our forefathers didn’t have the backing of statistics to determine what plant achieved the best results in such-and-such a disease.
    Even with modern computers, that would take a lot of work and all to no avail. Conversely, one can easily imagine someone smelling a plant that suddenly becomes appealing, and eating a specific amount of it, based on their sense of taste, and feeling better a few minutes later. Experiences of this kind, which occurred quite naturally when man lived in close contact with nature, were compiled over generations, and were handed down to us in the form of pharmacognosy as it is taught nowadays in medical schools.

    _And, so, why not just prescribe herbal teas that would have smelled fragrant?

    o For two reasons. The right amount for a particular person’s sense of taste is no longer possible to determine once the plant has been denatured through heating and hydrolysis. The active constituents of plants are more efficient and better tolerated in their natural state. And there is a third reason: sucking a sprig of an aromatic plant is more pleasant and easier than brewing herbal tea.
    That’s what I call instinctive plant therapy; a whole array of jars, each one containing a different plant (dried at room temperature and not in a high_temperature dryer as is often the case for many herbal products); by promptly sniffing the various contents, one can readily identify the most fragrant_smelling plant or plants and chew on a little as long as it tastes good. In one of my recent experiences, shepherd’s purse tasted to me surprisingly like Hungarian goulash. I sucked on a few stems for two or three minutes and they tasted like a kind of roasted meat sauce, before taking on an unpleasant grasslike taste_meaning, that my need had been met.

    _I thought that with instinctotherapy one was never ill...

    o Instincts allow us to treat ourselves long before we’re actually ill.

    _I have a friend who loves mushrooms, and this is what he does: He tastes every mushroom he picks. If he thinks that one tastes bad, he throws it down. If he thinks it tastes good, he puts it in his basket and takes all the mushrooms home and fries them all up with garlic. According to you, is he running any risk?

    oYou haven’t understood me: With such a method, he’s liable to get poisoned.

    _How contradictory!

    o When he samples a tiny bit off a mushroom, his taste buds register that the mushroom tastes good and, so, still falls within the realm of what is beneficial to him. But, if he cooks a kilo of them, he could be getting a lethal dose. The problem is that your friend doesn’t know that those mushrooms, eaten raw, might have tasted different after having eaten 20 grams, 50 grams, or 300 grams, depending on his nutritional status. By preparing them, he was giving them direct access to his digestive tract without allowing his instincts to come into play. Instinctive impulses are ill-adapted to mushrooms in sauce. Many accidents happen that way, and only because some people haven’t understood how dietary instincts operate.

    _So, you would serve a “death cap” on your dinner table without turning a hair?

    o After some period of rethinking, yes. That might sound surprising. That anxiety and mistrust one feels when confronted with nature precisely follows from a loss of instinct_or, rather, its having fallen into disuse. (Even I am lapsing into traditional platitudes.) That reminds me of a journalist who didn’t want to give my ideas a fair hearing. One day, she brought me a whole assortment of mushrooms from a mycologic exhibition, blindfolded me, and asked me how my nose reacted to the stimuli. In the lot, unknown to me, there was a death cap. I smelled it; it didn’t smell too strong, but was slightly off-putting_or noxious, as mycologists might say. If I had been an animal, I would have never tried it. Since I was a man, out of curiosity, I put the quarter of the cap in my mouth and I chewed it for a while to see what would happen. As I chewed on, the flavor turned increasingly musty. Though the taste was not particularly revolting, it was nonetheless bland, and somewhat sickly. I would have never swallowed it. I didn’t take things any further.

    _If you had, instinctotherapy wouldn’t have come into being. After all, the experiment was risky. I can hardly credit instincts with being that reliable.

    o Obviously, animals in nature have to be attracted to useful foods and repelled by harmful ones; or, better still, they have to stop short of being overloaded with beneficial food. If this wasn’t so, they would be poisoning and imbalancing themselves, and would even be weakening themselves. Natural selection ensures that weaker individuals and their descendants are killed off to the benefit of the better endowed ones, in order for the species always to be perfecting itself. Like every other vital function, instincts cannot but have improved as far back as one can go_which accounts for their unfailing reliability.

    _I was once told that horses munch yew branches and die of it, though apparently, some exceptions to the rule have been noted.

    o Maybe. I haven’t yet had occasion to try out yew branches on a horse. But, I’m only waiting for the opportunity to turn up. Of course, the instincts of domestic animals can sometimes be thwarted by imbalanced silage. That’s the case with cows, for example, that have been kept inside on dry fodder all winter long, who make a bee-line for wet grass when they come out in spring, and, so, suffer from tympanitis. Moreover, yew trees may not have been part of horses’ natural habitat where they evolved their genetic background_which would account for the disruption_unless it is simply a chink in nature’s armour.

    _Green peas, kidney beans, green beans, olives, sweet chestnuts, lentils, and Brussels sprouts had no place either in man’s initial habitat. Can’t man’s instincts be led astray by those foods as the horse’s were by the yew?

    o That’s a good question. Fortunately, there’s no cause for concern: With selected fruits and vegetables, one’s instincts can still strike an excellent balance, given minimal training. Very strict criteria vouch for that.

    _Does that mean I can eat as many raw peas as I please, without incurring indigestion, provided they taste good?

    o Absolutely, on condition that you slightly readjust your sense of taste, and that you wrench yourself away from the influence of cooked food.
    This is yet another stumbling block for the interpretation of facts: A useful food sometimes incites a reaction, suggesting that the body is making the most of more relevant incoming substances to clear previously accumulated abnormal, toxic substances.
    Usually, people don’t understand that to be a healthy reaction. They think they’ve been poisoned or that their instincts are ineffectual or even non-existent, whereas, in fact, they’re experiencing the backlash of previously stored cooked molecules.

    _What do you mean by “previously stored cooked molecules”?

    o Some abnormal molecules taken up from ordinary food, like “Maillard’s molecules” and other molecules our bodies are not genetically equipped to handle, can clearly build up in the body_as has been amply shown in all kinds of experiments_but, we’ll come back to that.

    _I’m quite willing to believe you, but how can you prove that nausea brought about by eating a raw food is merely a backlash, and not the direct consequence of having eaten a food difficult to digest? Sounds rather ambiguous to me.

    o Such discomforts only occur when one starts out on instinctotherapy, and, gradually, fade away as the effects of denatured foods wear off_eating raw food, then, cannot be incriminated in digestive distress.
    Admittedly, one does in time manage to realize when one’s having a clean-out from the telltale symptoms.

    _Is that why crudivorism has a reputation for being rather risky?

    o When one eats bowl after bowl of grated carrots or fresh spinach with oil and vinegar dressing, it doesn’t make dietary sense.
    Eating raw foods sets in motion various cleansing processes within the body, which, in themselves, are healthy, but eating too much can cause things to get out of hand_hence, the sometimes distressing symptoms that occur when one hasn’t fully mastered the situation. With instinctotherapy, proper intake takes care of itself if one applies the therapy properly.

    _And so, is one protected from contamined shellfish?

    o People are often poisoned by shellfish.
    I think that, in a great many cases, the effect of a germ toxin, supposedly present in shellfish that has gone bad, is confused with the clean-out process that is triggered when one eats the shellfish.

    _You mean, the clean-out is triggered when one absorbs the toxin?

    o The shellfish, rather, triggers it, since the same reactions following absorption occur with shellfish, fish, or other animal protein that is perfectly fresh. The same thing has even occurred after the absorption of vegetable protein. The presence of germs in a food only serves to stimulate the reaction. I would even go so far as to say that the body possibly uses the germ to help carry out the cleansing process.

    _Listening to you could make one think that the body is a font of knowledge. Predicating that the body can turn germs to its own advantage is somewhat far-fetched, wouldn’t you say?

    o At this very moment, here, in front of me, you’re using hundreds of millions of bacteria in your intestines to digest your food_that is, more bacteria than cells; otherwise, the intestines would take up all the room.
    Since we’re talking about figures, I may as well tell you that each of our cells can contain within themselves much more information that the most learned brain.

    _And, pray tell, how do you figure out their IQ?

    o I’m being quite serious. The nucleus of each and every one of our cells has a sort of computer memory bank_a molecule 1.74 meters (5 feet 8 inches) long, which is roughly the height of a man!
    This molecule, which is among the longest in existence, appears in the form of a long double strand, or rather a double helix, whose links are bonded by a pentose sugar, deoxyribose_hence, the name you have most certainly heard of: deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.

    _So, those giant molecules are contained within a cell nucleus, are they?

    o The strand is extremely fine and completely coiled up on itself. But, it’s true, that on our scale, that means two kilometres of thread in an ant’s egg!

    _I was under the impression that there were, in fact, chromosomes in the nuclei.

    o You’re right. In cell division, DNA winds up into little skeins that separate more easily from two sister cells than would a single, tangled-up strand.
    Those little skeins are what man first saw under ordinary microscopes and which have been given the scientific name of “chromosomes.” Now, with the advent of electron microscopes, one can clearly see this long string that floats in the nucleus and fills it completely when it is not replicating.
    On that strand, data are stored that code for our entire heredity, all the necessary data that goes into the making of our body, and its various metabolic pathways.
    All this information is encoded, so to speak, in a sort of molecular language consisting of four basic elements, or basic molecules, that come together and join up two links from parallel chains, a bit like the rungs on a rope ladder.

    _I fail to see how, with a mere four elements, one can record all the data required to code every bodily function.

    o Many of those elements, or molecules, succeed one another. On the strand, there are about 5 million of them, and they occur in infinitely varying orders. It’s interesting to figure out the number of ordinary words that would be needed to communicate the same amount of information. That would entail an impressive number of books_approximately the equivalent of a library that housed 1,000 large volumes of 3,000 pages each, with 5,000 letters per page, or 50 hefty encyclopedias, that is, 50 times as much as all of Western culture.

    _So, you’re saying that each one of our cells is more intelligent than our brain?

    o They have enough room in their memory banks to store information that far exceeds that of our brain. No wonder there is so much that seemingly works as though by magic in our genetic sequencing. It’s hard to imagine ever fully compassing our cellular intelligence! Under such conditions, it’s hardly surprising that our intestines should know how to domesticate the 120 or so kinds of germs that make up bowel bacteria.

    _Right, but we were talking about germs that develop in shellfish. Aren’t they pathogenic bacteria?

    o But perhaps our bodies know more about what they have to do than we do, even with so-called pathogenic bacteria.

    _If they are pathogenic, that implies the body has trouble coping.

    o What you say sounds logical, but let’s consider what happens to the body when one eats proper food.

    _I persist in thinking that if I eat rotting shellfish, I’m going to poison myself_even if every day I get my ration of raw carrots.

    o I’m fully aware of how deep-rooted such an idea is. As soon as we think about germs, a sort of ancestral anxiety grips us and biases our reasoning.
    First of all, one shouldn’t mistake bacterial infection in shellfish for mercuric pollution, pesticides, or any number of other poisons. Such polluted food could indeed poison you, but you would need such a mega-dose to bring out a visible reaction after a single meal that the shellfish would be dead long before you were.
    Chemical pollution becomes toxic through its gradual build-up_that is, permitted chemical waste let out in the environment is building up all the time. One can only hope that things aren’t going to get much worse!
    Another possible explanation for a violent reaction you might have after eating a rotting oyster could be related to the toxins secreted by the germs that thrived at the expense of the oyster. If you practice instinctotherapy, you will automatically be protected from this kind of poisoning: You’ll find that the oyster smelled revolting or that it tasted pungent; you would really have to force yourself to eat it. Out of the hundreds of millions of shellfish my followers have eaten in the last 20 years, I have never seen a single accident of this kind.

    _And what happens if I add the traditional drop of lemon juice?

    o I couldn’t tell you. You’d be running the risk of covering up any danger sign and taking yourself beyond the safety threshold. I think that these first two kinds of accidents described above occur much less often than is commonly thought. From what I have been able to observe, the so-called poisonings that fuel this kind of anxiety are most often cleansing reactions that haven’t been taken as such. I have noted, for instance, that former milk and cheese lovers feel queasy when they get the slightest whiff of raw fish and often they have bouts of vomiting after eating it.

    _And what about the Japanese who feed on raw fish?

    o It so happens that they don’t have cows! If they had been stuffed with dairy, they wouldn’t have been able to stomach their “sushis” any better than Swiss mountain-dwellers.

    _Your way of reasoning is a bit disquieting.

    o The facts themselves are disquieting, so much so that I had to give up explaining them in a traditional way. For instance, I noted that cats, that had previously been fed cow’s milk, vomited the first time they were given “initial” food_i.e. raw meat, raw fish, and even after eating field mice, which are, after all, their favorite dish. Now, cats that have always been given “initial” foods_raw meat, mice, avocados, etc_never vomit the first time they’re given raw fish. How else can one explain the discrepancy than to assume that a kind of poisoning is triggered by dairy products, which, in fact, cannot be called “initial” food.

    _Don’t you think you’re jumping to conclusions?

    o I only came to that conclusion after having observed what I’ve just said very many times. In medical terminology, such a phenomenon is known as intolerance or anaphylactic shock.
    That reminds me of an unfortunate event from my salad days. My instinct initiates, who numbered but a few in those days, and myself had divided up among us a roebuck we had purchased from a hunter. This wild venison tasted heavenly to most of us, in spite of ever so slight a feeling of revulsion. The following day, my phone rang incessantly: Some of the roebuck enthusiasts had brought up their dinner during the night. My first thought was that the meat must have been contaminated and that their digestive systems had been ridding them of the toxins through vomiting. Another conjecture was that eating such a wild “initial” food set off reactions that were intricately bound up with previous poisoning resulting from cooking_the most logical interpretation being that the body was undergoing some rather unpleasant upheaval in order to cleanse itself.

    _If, with your methods, beginners always start out vomiting...

    o Don’t panic; those are rare cases, or, at least, somewhat so, as compared with the total number of people involved. The overwhelming majority of such reactions never get beyond a feeling of slight nausea_meaning that something is happening deep within the body, even if there are no other clearly perceived ill effects. Obviously, such reactions are responsible for the disgust people generally feel when they start eating raw food_especially for raw meat and raw fish. It would be highly instructive to know why the body reacts, in such a way, to foods which, by the looks of them, are not toxic.
    I was forgetting to mention something very important: Vomiting is not unpleasant when you practice instinctotherapy. The vomit has none of the traditional acidness of cooked vomit.

    _Surely, you’re not saying that the taste of vomit is quite palatable.

    o And yet, it is. The food comes out having practically the same taste as when it went in.

    _And how do you explain that?

    o Raw food reacts properly to the breakdown by digestive enzymes, so much so that the stomach only secretes a minimal amount of gastric juice and the acidity of the partly digested food remains slight. Cooked foods, on the contrary, contain refractory molecules that normally have no place in the digestive tract; the gastric mucus has to secrete an inordinate amount of gastric juices to handle the situation, and the stomach produces so much acid that acid belching results_otherwise, the stomach would turn against itself.

    _Is that how stomach ulcers orginate?

    o That is one of the causes; others include circulatory, psychosomatic, hereditary, and drug-taking factors that are usually held responsible for ulcers. Hyperacidity is very likely the leading cause of ulcer, since ulcers typically heal after a few months of instinctotherapy.
    But, let’s go back to our roebuck. To interpret those reactions that occurred the first time a raw food was eaten, there was only one possible explanation: The reaction was a clean-out. The cells, receiving for the first time the “initial” molecules that suited them, promptly cast off the old unserviceable molecules that they had been saddled with on traditional food; all these unwanted substances, released into the bloodstream, induced a kind of self-poisoning, with the same symptoms as extraneous poisoning_which state is typified by a feeling of nausea. More scientifically, I ought to be saying that the uptake of new molecules lowers the body’s threshold of tolerance and it begins to flush out unwanted molecules it had put up with before.

    _Do you really believe a cell can manage such an exchange of molecules? Doesn’t that imply surprising selective potential?

    o Our cells are clever enough to engineer that. Each one of them is an immensely complex biochemical factory notwithstanding its microscopic size. White blood cells, for instance, can produce antibodies specific for millions of different proteins that can thus be neutralized. A cell can identify a particular molecule, take it up or discard it, depending on its usefulness or lack of it. In borderline cases, if, for instance, a molecule has been partly broken down, the cell will be in a bind in that it will let the molecule in by mistaking it for a normal molecule and, subsequently, prove unable to metabolize it, owing to a flaw that hadn’t been initially identified. Then, the cell may either discard the molecule or keep it under surveillance much as one would lay in stores when one feared pending famine. Remember World War II: When goods were back in plenty, people got rid of rancid fats, noodles, and age-old tins that had cluttered their pantries.

    _I imagined cell behavior to be somewhat more mechanical.

    o A living complex is necessarily subservient to laws of balance, selection, rejection, preference, and exchange. The need to survive at the expense of the outside world requires an economic scenario, even on the level of microscopic entities. It is, therefore, hardly surprising, that the very same laws of economy apply whether one is dealing with a country, an individual, or a simple cell.

    _If I understand you correctly, it isn’t because the idea of eating raw meat is revolting per se, that one throws up or feels nauseated?

    o It only tastes bad when one is in a toxemic state due to altered foods, like milk or cheese.

    _And what if you don’t need protein?

    o Then, things are quite different: In that case, the smell is unappealing and the taste is bland, bitter, papery or whatever, but not nauseating.

    Prehistoric times, (excerpts by Gabriel Camps, published by Perrin, p 160)
    “It is worth mentioning the case of tribal Pygmies in the African rainforest or Eskimos in the Arctic Circle. Without any major digestive discomfort, those peoples can all dig into huge helpings of meat, which would most certainly not get clearance from the slackest among our dietitians.”
    N.B.: It is no accident that both Pygmies and Eskimos eat a virtually raw diet and don’t raise cows.

    _All the same, I still don’t think I could ever chomp into a raw steak; the mere thought that it’s an animal...

    o Raw minced meat, onion, and egg yolk, isn’t that raw food?

    _Of course, but there’s the dressing that comes with it.

    o Well, now, the perceived need for dressing “addresses” exactly what we’re talking about.

    _How do you mean?

    o The taste of raw meat is quite delightful when it meets a bodily need. It’s streaks ahead of the best “steak tartare” you could possibly imagine.

    _Quite frankly, I don’t believe you.

    o I see. One has to have first-hand experience. Provided the body needs initial foods and is in a normal state, such foods take on flavors unimaginably more delicious than cooked delicacies.

    _I was surprised too at the number of bananas I saw one of your children go through.

    o Needs vary greatly from person to person and from one day to the next. On average, our calorie intake stands below a cooked diet calorie intake, i.e. as much as 2,500 calories for a laborer.

    _And you never have trouble digesting all that fruit? In macrobiotics, bananas are considered yin.

    o When one is crammed full of grains and one never eats fruit, eating a single banana is enough to set off a minor explosion in the body. That accounts for the digestive distress that macrobiotic enthusiasts haven’t yet understood. And because, they would never dream of incriminating grains, there is only one possible attitude, and that is to assert that bananas are harmful. That’s a rather surprising conclusion, given that primates have always eaten bananas!
    In my view, the exact reverse occurs: The body responds favorably to a long-lost natural food and instantly discards the abnormal substances previously provided by cooked cereals_all of which triggers off bowel distress in the process of elimination.

    _How long does it take to be able to eat raw food without any distress whatsoever?

    o In most cases, the change-over is quite quick: a day or a week. But, some people go for a long time before managing to eat particular foods.
    Practically speaking, though, that’s not a real problem; the underlying principle of instinctotherapy is that one only eats a food that seems appealing. If you find it impossible to eat a particular fruit, you shouldn’t, as a rule, force yourself to.
    That fruit could set off a reaction that is best avoided , or perhaps you’re still under the influence of a previous overload of cooked food.

    A few world records held by the pioneers of instinctotherapy.
    The following foods were eaten raw, without bringing out any digestive distress, direct or otherwise.
    52 egg yolks at a single sitting +
    151 egg yolks over two days
    156 oysters at a single meal
    48 bananas at a single meal
    67 bananas in a single day
    120 passion fruits at a single meal
    210 passion fruits in a single day
    7 cucumbers at a single dinner
    16 melons (approximately weighing a pound apiece) at a single meal (a twelve year-old girl)
    16 cassias in a single day
    1.35 kilos (approximately 3 pounds) of honey as a dessert
    7 liters of water in a single day

    * press-time information has it that the record for egg yolk consumption has been topped by a young man from Toulouse, who ate 96 egg yolks at a single meal and who wishes to remain anonymous.

    Note 1: Although such achievements are uncommon, the fact that such quantities can be digested without upset proves that instincts are never wrong. Instincts take digestive potential into account, or alternatively, digestive potential takes instinctive needs into account

    Note 2: Feats of this kind don’t happen every day (which is a good thing, as far as one’s budget is concerned!). Most of them occur in cases of serious illness and they generally herald recovery or remarkable improvement in health.

    Note 3: Only instincts can discover and fill such needs without incurring any risk.

    _What do you mean exactly when you say one finds it “impossible” to eat a particular food?”

    o For instance, imagine that you’re still suffering from the effects of a tremendous overload of carbohydrates resulting from your former diet. Your instincts will prevent you from eating foods that have a high sugar content; bananas will taste bland, granular, pasty, and indigestible, until one day, things feel different.... When the overload is reabsorbed, bananas will taste so good that you’ll feel you’ve been completely released from something.

    _That idea that a taste can change depending on the state of the body still bothers me. Bananas always taste like bananas, after all!

    o Wrong! That’s an illusion due to the fact that every day you eat your ration of bread, noodles, rice, or carbohydrates in one form or another. The result is a standing glut of sugars or starches, which prevents you from feeling a normal instinctive longing for sweet fruit. All the same, you may experience an urgent craving for some of the other constituents in bananas. So, your instinct is both attracted and repelled. Consequently, your tastes are temperate and scarcely vary from day to day_any more than does the metabolic state which your daily diet maintains. You conclude that bananas always taste the same, but, in fact, your impression results from the contradictory workings of your own instincts.
    As everyone eats about the same, everyone’s taste buds pick up the same flavor, and they all get together and decide that’s what bananas taste like. In fact, that is a cultural delusion.

    _There must be tremendous differences between people: Some being more overloaded than others must mean that their tastes are different.

    o Undoubtedly. However, as you can’t know exactly what your husband, your sister, or your mother-in-law feel when they taste a fruit, you all assume you know what you’re talking about when you agree on what you think a banana tastes like. Surely, your tastes are rather different. Unfortunately, there is no standard of measurement for flavors. There seems to be no possible objective communication in this respect. Of course, cooked foods virtually always taste the same: Bread always tastes like bread. The overriding prevalence of cooked foods obviously fosters the delusion that one can ascribe a particular taste to a food once and for all.

    _And what of pregnant women who have a craving for strawberries?

    o That’s a good question. When a women is impregnated, her body changes, as do her needs, and, so, her instinctive urges do as well. Suddenly, she may find that bananas taste horrible, whereas she enjoyed them the previous day, or maybe strawberries will taste wonderful. As such phenomena are not generally understood, people will say: “Those are whims of pregnancy.” In fact, they reflect something quite typical for pregnant women, i.e. an awakening of instincts.

    _So, should one say that every fruit can have two flavors, one good and the other bad?

    o Again, what it involves is a bit more complex than that. A fruit can run the gamut of as many different flavors as there are different metabolic states. I’m thinking of someone who has multiple sclerosis whom I have had occasion to observe recently. At first, bananas put him off horribly; he thought they smelled grass-like and he absolutely refused to eat them. Then, after ten days or so, he found that the same bananas smelled delightful. He ate about 10 a meal for at least a week. Then, once again, he would make faces every time he held them up to his nose. He said they had a putrid, rubbery smell that was different from what he had sensed at the very beginning. Then, the smell recovered its appeal, and he thrived on them once again, but found the taste of them so baffling that he decided he was eating a different variety of the same fruit. And, having met his needs, he peeled through to yet another flavor, this time redolent of rank sausage, so much so that he swore to high heaven that the bananas he was being fed were abnormal, gas-blown, synthetic, overripe, etc... Yet, they hadn’t changed.

    _That must lead to misunderstandings...

    o Once, a nurse called who was receiving treatment for protein in her waters. She took to eating leeks at every meal, finding them mild and tasteful. Once back home, she asked her husband to share her diet to give her moral support. She urged him to taste the vegetable she found so ambrosial. Unfortunately, he found it so hot that he had to spit the very first mouthful out. His wife insisted and the scene recurred daily, gradually turning the pair sour. The hapless husband always felt that the roof of his mouth was about to sear and accused his wife of poking fun at him; she claimed he was being contrary for the fun of it. They narrowly averted divorce over a trifling matter of leeks. However, her condition soon returned to normal, and they became convinced that instinctotherapy deserved a fair hearing.

    _You don’t seem to be taking yourself very seriously...

    o Could there possibly be anything more boring than talking about food?

    _Your ideas strike me as being rather arresting! That’s the first time I’ve ever heard diet discussed in such a way!

    o In dietary and philosophical matters alike, it is still not clear that the senses of taste and smell are different from the other three. Compare taste with sight, for instance. If you need strawberries, they taste delicious and they appear red. When you’ve eaten until their flavor becomes loathsome, without either sweetness or fragrance, they still appear red. Color is an objective fact that is intrinsically linked to an object. The tastes that you have developed depend on your instinctive center, which changes in accordance with your metabolic states and are essentially subjective. The proof of what I’m saying is that one can take a picture of the color of strawberries; one can measure a red light wavelength. You can’t take a picture of a taste nor can you gauge a fragrance.

    _That’s a philosophical loose end. I thought our five senses worked in unison.

    o That’s what every schoolboy learns, but it’s wrong. Taste and smell, in some ways, channel the manner in which dietary instinct is expressed. If your olfactory tract senses the presence of molecules released from a fruit, it puts out a signal that is conveyed to your conscious perception center only when you need to eat the fruit.
    If your body doesn’t need it, the signal is cut off and you no longer smell anything or, at least, anything that smells good.

    _No, I disagree! A good apple always tastes good!

    o Sorry to contradict you, but to convince you, I must tell you another anecdote relating to the first time I observed something that made me realize how completely relative the sense of smell is. We were storing a huge supply of overwintering apples in our cellar to eke out the winter. They smelled fragrant. One day, my wife asked me to go and fetch a basket of them for a meal. I still remember that extraordinary waft that filled my lungs when I opened the cellar door. After dinner, I brought the basket back empty, looking forward to re-experiencing that sublime fragrance that conjured up, in my mind, a kind of wonderful garden of Eden. When I reached the foot of the stairs, I opened the door again; but, I couldn’t smell apples anywhere! All I smelled was the humid earth of the cellar floor. At first, I wondered whether someone had carted off the apple crates and aired the premises. I would have never thought that my sense of smell could have changed so drastically.

    _How is it, then, that you smelled earth which, surely, must have smelled less strong than fruit?

    o That was what was certainly most disturbing. I had to admit that my sense of smell had lost its sensitivity to apples but not to other smells.

    _Had you eaten apples before returning to the cellar?

    o I don’t remember_I didn’t think of it at the time_but I must have and that would explain why I no longer smelled them. My body didn’t need apples any more, and, so, there was no reason why my sense of smell should draw me to the fruit.

    line drawing here:
    _Olfactory perception area
    _Hypothalamus
    _Olfactory bulb
    _Olfactory tract
    _Pituitary gland

    _So, even if a smell is in the air, one may not smell it at all. And yet, the olfactory tract is always on the go.

    o Since the begining of the century, it has been known that in the brain of a rat, for instance, synaptic nodes readily account for this. Nerve fibers connect with the olfactory tract all the way from the nasal mucus membrane to the olfactory bulb, other nerve fibers criss-cross from the olfactory bulb to conscious perception areas in the brain. However, there is a third bundle of fibers that, strangely enough, connect the hypothalamus to the olfactory bulb. That network of nerves was long elusive of its purpose, though.

    _The hypothalamus, you mean?

    o The hypothalamus is a part of the brain located right next to the pituitary gland which controls the neuro-vegetative system and all metabolic activity. In 1974, hands-on microelectrode recordings showed that the hypothalamus transmits a signal to the olfactory tract that can alter the pathway of the nerve impulse when it crosses the olfactory bulb. The bulb, in some ways, plays the role of transistor; it opens and closes the pathway to olfactory tract nerve impulses subject to hypothalamic regulation, which is mediated by the body as a whole. The only smells that come through meet a need. For instance, a rat was made to sniff a food before a meal; and there were signs of a powerful nerve impulse reaching the olfactory bulb; and after the meal, virtually nothing more could be detected, although the same food was still put before it.

    _Why was it not clear from the outset that smell and flavors change depending on one’s needs?

    o That was understood... in the case of rats! But, since this is not a typical occurrence, to say the least, in the realm of cooked food, people still dwell on the idea that man has lost his instinct.

    Impact of meals on the pleasantness of dietary and non-dietary smell.
    Physiology and Behavior, vol. 10, pp 1029-1033. Brain Research Publications, Inc. 1973. Duclaux, Feisthauer and Michel Cabanac, UER, (Medical College, Lyons)
    “The experiment involved bringing fasted individuals into contact with the same stimuli in the two hours following the end of the meal. After submitting to each stimulus, the subject expressed their pleasure or displeasure on the following scale: + 2 highly pleasant; + 1 pleasant; 0 neutral; -1 unpleasant; -2 highly unpleasant (...)
    The fragrances were selected from three separate groups: 1) foods with typical smells (meat, fish, and honey); 2) substances not normally encountered during mealtimes (lavender, hypochlorite, ink); and 3) empty-calorie creature comforts that, nervertheless, often come with meals (tobacco, wine, coffee).”

    graph here:
    The first dot in every curve indicates the olfactory test carried out before the meal. The second dot refers to the first test after the meal. The following ones indicate tests that were reiterated at 20-minute intervals thereafter.

    Note: Olfactory mechanisms worked with natural foods but not with non-foods or denatured foods. These results confirm our theories:
    1) The sense of smell relates to food instincts;
    2) These instincts are genetically based on “initial” foods.

    _Nobody before you ever thought of doing experiments on such changes of perception connected to natural foods?

    o Apparently not. It’s not immediately obvious that sense impressions are dependent on the state of the body, and, even less so that the mechanisms guiding our perception can be thrown off by ordinary foods.
    Promethean man’s pride is a bit responsible for this: We believe in our ability to have dominion over nature. We find it very hard to face that our contrivances land us in a weakened state.
    It’s easier to think that dietary instinct was lost due to the effect of some divine curse rather than blame ourselves_especially when it involves our unimpeachable gourmandizing.
    Researchers themselves are conditioned by their culture, and, even more, by their own perception of reality. As they don’t sense any clear-cut variations in taste from usual foods and since everything connected to diet is based on one’s inability to perceive those variations, nothing, not even science, can induce one to shake out of this vicious cycle.
    In my view, this can be explained by the fact that our psychic structures are built up from unnatural experiences and that they crystallize in us the conviction that a particular food will always have the same taste. In this way, we feel our sense of smell depends entirely on the object, exactly as if it were sight.

    _And what about diet instinct of babies?

    o I believe dietary instincts are crucial in the sensory experience of babies. The intensity of taste bud gratification and frustration is maybe more important than sexual pleasure or the lack of it_even in terms of frequency and duration of the latter. Imagine a baby eating pineapple: The first slice tastes great, and the second stings his tongue, whereas, with cookies, the second one is as good as the first, and likewise for the third and the fourth, and his enjoyment always remains the same. He will reinforce himself in the belief that every one of his predictions must come true and the outside world must somehow cater for his yearning. Learning with raw food, on the other hand, might bear in on him that reality is hard to foretell and that any impression of taste is basically built-in, and, also, like any kind of flavor, any kind of knowledge is always temporary.

    _Do you really credit that a normal personality can develop on such shaky foundations?

    o I rather think that what is, in our kind of culture, styled “normal personality” is anything but normal. How very many of our difficulties are due to the inflexibility of our pronouncements and our ambitions, our delusions in scientifically-upheld knowledge, feeling stuck in the rut of certainties, dogmas, laws, codes of values, and superstitions we wall ourselves into. Unfortunately, the pride we derive from thinking we can harness nature is leading us to a head-on destruction of the environment our survival depends on...

    Now, babies are force-fed with horrible bottles of cooked and sweetened milk that squirts through a rubbery smelling mouthpiece that has no relation whatsoever to the contents of the bottle. Babies are left to suck plastic dolls scented with vanilla. If they clamour for fruit because the smell appeals to them, they are roundly denied it, or the fruit is blended with a sickening starchy glue branded “baby food.”

    _I quite agree that nothing is done to educate children’s sense of smell.

    o Neither is anything at all done to develop their sensitivity. Brain connections have to click during childhood; for that to happen, a modicum of stimulation is necessary. If not, the nerve fibers don’t develop normally and brain potential is stunted. If the only smells a child experiences are those of his home environment and those sealed into his baby food jars, it’s hardly surprising that his sense of smell should remain embryonic.

    _According to you, then, from the very outset, one should give babies fruit and raw vegetables so they can cut teeth and smell their food?

    o Of course, whereas, as a rule, babies are subjected to the very opposite of what should be done. Imagine a mother peeling and eating a banana while her baby is asleep in his cradle. Imagine she exhales sweet-smelling breath that is detected by the baby’s nose, and that her baby, feeling an urgent craving for fruit, starts bawling. What will the mother do? She won’t think of the baby’s sense of smell. She’ll put the banana down on a table, wonder why her baby’s crying, take him out of bed, change his diaper, dress him up again, and, since he never stopped crying, will tickle him under his chin_which will make him even more frantic_put a rubber dummy in his mouth, throw a fit if the child refuses to suck it, shake him up, get upset, give him a spanking, put him back to bed, and, finally, go back to eating her banana with ear plugs in her ears.
    Ignorance of instinct prevents one from seeing things from a baby’s point of view. The crucial role of the sense of smell has been completely overlooked, and its ever-increasing absence from childhood experiences prevents children from developing it normally.
    That is no doubt why our sense of smell requires thorough rehabilitation, even down to sheer sensitivity which is lacking. Animals pick up smells over great distances; it only takes a few molecules wafting up to their nostrils. To determine which foods we need, we, hapless humans, have to put them right under our noses, carve them up, squash them, and cut them up.

    _How long does it take to recover normal sensitivity to smells?

    o That depends on what you mean by normal; let’s say, what’s tolerable. It might take a few months. It all depends on the energy expended. I sometimes witness people, who had almost completely lost their sense of smell, recover it within a few days. The probable explanation for that is that hypothalamic inhibition of the olfactory bulb ceases once nutritional balance has been restored. It is as though, under the influence of daily dietary overload, those people had defeated the efficiency of their sense of smell. As far as determining what exactly is a “normal” sense of smell, that’s another matter. Apparently, Bushmen have a sense of smell that is as developed as that of animals.

    _So, the impairment of men’s sense of smell isn’t genetic?

    o It can be partly accounted for, at least, through the effect of an overload of cooked molecules. Accounting for it genetically is a bit too easy.

    _And what do people do when they are completely out of touch with their sense of smell?

    o After an operation that had severed the olfactory nerve completely, for instance, it would still be possible to rely on one’s sense of taste. One could taste all available foods, without swallowing them, in order not to disrupt digestion. Smelling is obviously quicker; with a bit of practice, in under a few seconds, one can find the fruit one most needs.

    _And what if you only bite into a fruit you feel like eating?

    o Unfortunately, cravings don’t always match needs; cravings are all in the mind; only sense organs reflect real needs.

    _Isn’t it a breach of individual freedom not to be able to eat what one wants?

    o Of course not. The food most appealing to one’s sense of smell will best meet the needs of the body, and it will also be the food that tastes best. As far as freedom in the realm of eating pleasure is concerned, it is nothing more than a right to enjoyment. Obeying one’s instincts is, thus, synonymous with freedom!

    _You do have a contorted way of reasoning.

    o I’m not unaware of what pleasure is. I don’t believe that any dietary system can afford as much gratification as is possible with instinctotherapy. In fact, instinctotherapy is not a system; but, rather, disables any kind of system.

    _You’ve come up with a new kind of epicurism, have you?

    o You could say that, I suppose. I prefer to think that I recovered “initial” eating pleasure, i.e. the pleasure that fulfils us because we’re in keeping with nature. In the art of cookery, pleasure through cunning is sought after_so much so that food is increasingly altered in ever more sophisticated ways.

    _Doesn’t the “nouvelle cuisine” already take a step in your direction?

    o More or less. Everyone feels the need to go back to something more natural, even the most expert cook. It is a “battle of the raw,” I suppose....

    _If I’ve understood you correctly, you hand yourself over completely to pleasure, without any restriction whatsoever. Isn’t that some kind of gluttony?

    o What do you mean by gluttony? We allow instincts to draw the line; such an attitude is a way of releasing the body from the bondage of culinary delusion. Things being what they are, an instinctive diet affords one maximal pleasure and I don’t think one could call that gluttony.

    _What would your definition be, then?

    o Once one understands how dietary instincts work, the definition becomes self-evident. All one has to do is to premise that the concept of gluttony brings two ideas together; i.e. pleasure and harm, as you were just saying. I’ll try and make it clear how two such things can join up.

    _I suppose that is has something to do with cooking?

    o Imagine that you think fresh strawberries taste delicious; if you enjoy eating them because, instinctively, you feel you should, they can only be good for you. Consequently, you’ll experience enjoyment without any discomfort.
    Alternatively, imagine you were to eat strawberries, all the while thinking that they tasted bad. This time, though, since you instinctively feel you shouldn’t be eating the strawberries, they won’t be good for you; there will be discomfort. Moreover, since you don’t think they taste good, you won’t even enjoy them.
    The inevitable conclusion must be that with “initial” food, gluttony doesn’t exist. You can’t experience pleasure and pain at once and that is due to the very nature of instincts.

    _According to you, then, gluttony hasn’t always existed?

    o One must necessarily resort to contrivances to pervert instincts. If strawberries taste bad to you, for instance, you add sugar and a blob of whipped cream. In that way, you can immediately eat them, and enjoy them, without actually needing them. Your palate is titillated by the mixture, while you overload your digestion and imbalance your metabolism. With contrivance, you have managed to bring pleasure and harm together; this time, you have truly gourmandized.
    It’s crucial, I think, from a philosophical standpoint, to note that gluttony doesn’t exist in nature. Gluttony results from a faulty connection, as it were, between intelligence and instinct_i.e. human malice that thwarts natural laws.

    _It’s a kind of original sin?

    o Not long ago, it was considered a cardinal sin. With the need for progress, it has been promoted to the rank of endearing sin...

    _But if you force yourself to eat strawberries after the taste changes, won’t you, at some point in time_if you systematically do that_get yourself used to thinking they taste good even though you don’t need them?

    o In the realm of raw foods, habit doesn’t exist. It’s impossible to get used to a food left in its “initial” state. As soon as one’s needs have been met through the required amount, the instinctual appeal of the food switches off. And the stronger the psychological tendency towards habit is, the more violent the aversion threshold will seem, since one will want to go against the grain even more. It’s altogether different with cooked food. One can get used to eating boiled potatoes_their taste won’t ever change_because they are not adapted to instincts. In that case, the psychological factor can outweigh physiology.
    It’s impossible to believe that changes in taste occur if one hasn’t tried an “initial” diet on oneself. Sometimes, when the body needs amounts of food that are larger than one can imagine, one stops eating before reaching the aversion threshold, and that gives one the feeling that one could go on forever. Try eating raw strawberries, for once, without stopping; they will sooner or later taste unpleasant and then they’ll become unbearably acrid and, if you carry on anyway, they’ll sting your mouth so much that you’ll have to stop eating.

    _Is that so?

    o It will hurt as much as if you had flayed your tongue.

    _Instinctotherapy doesn’t sound very enticing....

    o Since, with instinctotherapy, the point of the exercise is to avoid making pleasure lapse into pain, there is no real problem. On the contrary, I can assure you that intensity of pleasure is commensurate to the violence of the aversion threshold I was just describing.

    _As far as I’m concerned, I’m sure I’ll never enjoy eating raw apples as much as a nice crusty oven-baked pie.

    o You’re always falling prey to the same misconception: You forget that you’re under the influence of cooked overload and that the taste of raw foods inevitably puts you off. Raw apple doesn’t yet taste like raw apple for you.

    _Do you really believe that that can change?

    o As your body gets used to eating raw foods, your physical overload and your psychological hang-ups will recede; you’ll begin to sense nuances in flavor that you couldn’t possibly have imagined before. You’ll be increasingly intrigued by your perceptions, so much so that recipes will soon seem bland and humdrum.

    _What a shame. I liked my little culinary pleasures....

    o What have you to lose if you experience more genuine pleasure that, in the long run, turns out to be more intense? Once you’ve understood that artificial pleasures merely delude the senses, well...

    _All the same, a heaped platter of noodles with butter is quite filling and it soothes the parts it can reach.

    o That reminds me of an anecdote that goes back to just before I switched to raw foods. My wife and I were already wondering about the nutritional value of the food we ate. We speculated that seasoning was likely to induce us to overeat by making the food more appealing. In line with our thinking, we decided overnight to eat our staple wholemeal noodles simply boiled and add neither salt nor butter.
    Surely, they were whole enough as it was, incorporating the complete range of rich and well-balanced nutrients that occur in the husks of wheat. I can still see in my mind’s eye our steaming plates pending the first prod of the fork and our mutual grins as we attempted swallowing. A watery, irony, and nauseating taste put us off right away and we called it off. We decided immediately in favor of the traditions of good old die-hard cooking: a pinch of salt and a pat of butter was enough to turn our plain noodles into a feast. And yet we were still eating the same old noodles. Our pleasure in eating was hardly in tune with the actual dietary value of the food.

    Saint Augustine’s Confessions; translated by P. de Labriolle, “Les Belles Lettres,” 1937, book 10, n°44
    (The writer appeals to God)
    “Thou taughtest me only to consider food as medicine. But as I go from painful hunger to blissful satedness, the pitfall of gluttony is darkly lurking.
    For my very progress is pleasure, and there is none other on the way to where I have to go. If we eat or drink, it is to sustain life, but perverse pleasure takes hold of us and quite often spurs us on to do its bidding, so that we are frustrated in having to stop eating.
    However, the scales differ depending on whether we eat for health or for pleasure.
    One might well wonder whether pleasure had actually become a physical need that demanded further gratification or whether it was sensual covetousness that hypocritically wanted ministering to. Our hapless soul delights in that uncertainty, in that it is glad to dream up a tutelary excuse in finding it difficult to ascertain what is right for our health. Under cover of hygiene, indulgence unobtrusively relieves itself. I endeavour to withstand such temptation daily and so, I beseech thy support. My bewilderment I confide in thee, not being quite clear in these ideas.”

    Note: Prayer was obviously of little service in coming to grips with the matter.

    _So, what about the early explorers and the spice trade, not to mention Gandhi’s salt march?

    o All that has made us aware of the fact that prepared food causes a disparity between pleasure and need. Basically, cooking involves making foods delicious that are unpalatable in the natural state. However, going by the laws of instinct, no food that is not naturally appealing should be eaten, meaning that cooking encourages eating what ought not to be eaten.

    _How can you say such things in the birthplace of French cuisine?

    o Well, if you can fault my reasoning...

    _Is cooking actually a basic mistake?

    o Put it this way. It is an art. The art of feeding on delusions.

    _You’re merciless. All the same, I feel something of a pang at the thought of giving up for good all those tasty dishes that have been lavished on me ever since I was a child. I’d feel I was parting with part of myself, cutting off an emotional string.

    o Shouldn’t you try and look into psychoanalysis? According to Freud, the greatest trauma in one’s life occur in childhood, when a child has to choke down their early sexual impulses toward their parents. Typically, when a child is expecting love, he is fed soup or potatoes. That doesn’t find its way to his heart but to his stomach, which is only a little further down.
    The foods a child is given subsequently register as tokens of parental love. Later on, if he has trouble coping, feels depressed, or suffers grief, he will cling to foods that will, as it were, subconsciously be equated with the comforting mother.

    _Is cooked food a token of love?

    o Both a token of and a substitute for love. It’s a token since it reminds us of a loved one or a specific event. It’s a substitute because it fills a need very much akin to love. And it is very pratical since one can preserve it and keep it so as to give it whenever we please.
    It is no accident if people say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. What fills the heart soothes away emotional dereliction and, conversely, what fulfils the heart helps one forget that one wants to eat.

    _It is well known that overeating can be used as compensation for other things. Yet, with instinctotherapy, one can give in to unbridled enjoyment. Isn’t there any danger of gaining weight?

    o That would amount to denying the actual meaning of instinct. On the contrary, eating instinctual food is the best possible reducing diet. I have known incurably obese patients lose two pounds a day, without so much as gritting their teeth.

    _Instincts presumably impel them to put up with small helpings, to compel them to start burning up their fat stores?

    o Not at all. Eating a lot is what makes one lose weight most quickly.

    _You cultivate paradoxes!

    o Usually the body is depicted, as if it were, a kind of bag with a hole in it and food put into it escapes through a hole. If too much food is crammed into it, the bag bulges. If food intake is reduced, it deflates. That’s a rather simplistic description, mind you, that does indeed hold for cooked food. The more you stuff feed into a goose, the fatter he gets, and his liver ends up gorged with fatty little white lumps_a clear sign that they couldn’t break their food down any more. Then, the stuff is minced into liver pâté for people to feast on.

    _Well, it tastes simply great.

    o That’s cooking magic for you: A diseased organ, well prepared, is enough to afford eating delight.

    _What are those little fat globules made of?

    o Food overload that the liver can’t manage to metabolize and, undoubtedly, all kinds of toxins present in cooked food.

    _You’re going to ruin my appetite...

    o What do you mean by “appetite”?

    _And what if geese were stuffed with raw food?

    o I know a few old-style farmers who used to fatten their geese with raw maize, but they gave up that tradition long ago. Ever greater demands on productivity finishes off tradition of any kind. Our grandfather’s liver pâté was, no doubt, less toxic than the stuff sold today.
    It’s true that animals can’t easily be fattened up with raw, unmixed foods. Such force-feeding could even produce the somewhat opposite effect of triggering clean-outs and, ultimately, weight loss.

    _Isn’t there a risk of losing too much weight? What if, within a short time, I turn into a bag of bones?

    o Of course you wouldn’t. If you do things properly, instincts will stand you in good stead. All you have to do is be sensitive to your bodily needs. As soon as you are deficient or in danger of becoming so, your senses of smell and taste will be sharpened and automatically adjust your ration to ensure an ideal balance. Feelings of revulsion also play a major part in this readjustment and one has to learn how to take them into acccount.

    _This is getting too complicated for me.

    o Whatever is instinctual is never really tricky. Some people know exactly when they are full and sated, and stop, bang, at the right moment without giving it another thought. I’ve often witnessed such behavior in healthy, old people. They wouldn’t overeat by a single mouthful, without the taste of the food actually having changed. And some people even manage that on cooked foods.

    _Does that mean that instincts can also work for cooked foods?

    o One’s sense of taste can be perverted since it is genetically unsuited to foods that are new in man’s dietary history.
    Revulsion is largely a matter of learning. Should a food accidentally induce digestive distress or poisoning, that will go down in your subconscious mind as disgust, subsequently to keep you out of harm’s way.

    _So, what’s the point of getting back to unprocessed foods if our instincts can make do with what cooking turns out?

    o Let me make this quite clear: Revulsion is set off owing to internal discomfort due to indigestion or poisoning being encoded in the mind. Those reflexes act as buffers, which are quite irrelevant to metabolic regulation as discharged by smell and taste.

    _And what of satedness? One can feel satisfied without being disgusted.

    o Well, obviously. Satedness doesn’t belong with disgust. It is also part of dietary instincts. It would be most unwise to overlook it. You’ll see that in practice, all those sense data come together to lead you on to the quickest way to health. Of course, it will take some rehabilitating. Our senses of smell and taste remain far and away the most accurate ones in regulating just how much food we need. In that sense, food is truly curative.

    _So, now, if I understand you correctly, a food can taste unpleasant without it being repulsive or without one being sated?

    o Precisely. And conversely, a food may cause disgust or nausea long before the taste of it turns unpleasant.

    _I don’t quite follow: If disgust should be less specific, by rights a change in taste will occur first.

    o You’re quite right. That’s what usually happens. Once somebody has eaten raw food for awhile, they no longer feel sick unless the food they’re eating has gone bad to such an extent as to be toxic. In the early days, things are different; revulsion or satedness occurs every time a food causes detoxification that could go too far and bring about excess weight loss.

    _So, cutting back on rations prevents slimming? You certainly go in for contradictions.

    o What I dislike is simple-minded reasoning. Standard medical practice takes no notice of abnormal diet-based molecules in the body and so cannot see things in the light of detoxification.
    As far as I’ve been able to tell, weight loss can be due either to undernutrition or a healthy clearance. However, you don’t want to rush things. When people start losing a few pounds, they often get cold feet and overeat beyond aversion and satedness, seeking to gain weight by eating more. But for all their effort, they step up the clearing process, losing even more weight; it’s a catch-22.
    Subconsciously, there is a fear of weight loss, possibly due to some idea that losing weight without changing one’s diet points to illness. Of course, if one loses weight eating a traditional diet, that shows up some latent dysfunction that warrants concern.
    However, it would be surprising for the body not to flush out burdensome excess when it is fed the food it was genetically intended to get. Typically, two stages occur: 1) the first one involving weight loss from discarded flab, jowls, brown fat, and pelvic girdles or spare tires; 2) subsequently, muscles develop properly, which markedly improves one’s looks.

    _I do believe that if I lost weight I’d have trouble fully trusting my instincts.

    o With cooked food, you had to learn to be wary since it went wrong as a matter of course. But don’t worry, you don’t have much flab to fight.

    _So, instinctotherapy is the ideal answer for anyone concerned about their figure? Stuffing oneself and losing weight fast, all the while becoming more attractive.

    o That is the usual thing, bar a few exceptions. I have known 300-pounders who had given up on everything_diets, fasting, and drugs, all to no effect_lose up to 110 pounds within 3 months.

    _Are you saying that fasting isn’t as useful for slimming? That’s unexpected.

    o Well, instinctotherapy helps the body find substances that will release metabolic deadlock. Obesity is very seldom irreversible. It is stoked up day after day by disruption from cooked foods. It is as if the body was biding its time to recover its normal shape.
    Consider wild animals. Every individual shares the same plumpness in a given species_even hippopotami.

    Primates, by Christian Zuber, published by Flammarion, p 296.
    “Gorillas are the heaviest of primates. In the wild, males can weigh between 280 and 370 pounds. In captivity, they can weigh up to 640 pounds.”

    Notes: The same amplitude in weight and stature can be attested to in the 5 billion humans currently held captive.

    _What if somebody is already too skinny to begin with?

    o Well, then, they put on weight after a slight weight loss in the first few days. I have often known former vegetarians who were turning into scarecrows shortly recover full cheeks and stout chests.

    _Still, isn’t it rather strange that the same diet can make some people fat and cause others to lose weight?

    o That’s just it, instinctotherapy is no diet. Instincts help every individual vary his food depending on his real bodily needs. The adjustment that follows means that the body can restore itself to its ideal weight as expediently as possible, as well as be aesthetically pleasing. Aesthetics also falls within the realm of instinct.

    _Obviously, in your system, things are very different from what they are on traditional diets.

    o Instinctotherapy is the acme of anti-dietetics, since it is based on pleasure rather than on applying more or less frustrating rules. It is at loggerheads with slimming diets or fasts, which always involve punishing oneself somewhat.

    _But, you do have to give up all that cooked food.

    o True, but you get a better deal. The total daily intake of pleasure in a raw eater’s day far overshoots anything you could hope to get from the share of tasty morsels that your liver can barely put up with. And besides, you get good health on top of that.
    Imagine balancing in one pan of a scales “illusory pleasure + sickness” against “real pleasure + health” in the other, and that, besides, the natural pleasure is more complete and intense than the artificial one.

    _I would still feel a prisoner to a system.

    o On the contrary, cooking foods constitutes a system. Only, since you were born into that system and the whole world is up to its neck in it, you don’t notice that you’re a prisoner to it. The proof of what I’m saying is that it is so difficult to get out of, and takes nothing less than conscious effort, to say the least.

    _And what about you? Aren’t you attached to your raw food?

    o It’s not the same. I’m attached to it because experience has shown me that it is the proper way of eating and, also, because the theory behind it holds water. If I gave it up, I’d feel as if I was going against the most elementary logic.

    _Aren’t you attached to it, for pleasure’s sake, as a gourmet is to good cooking? You do say that there is great pleasure to be had in eating initial foods.

    o Undoubtedly, but the pleasure doesn’t make one into a hostage. Between what’s raw and what’s cooked, nothing is proportionate in the shift from one to the other. For instance, if one is used to eating initial foods and happens to eat a little cooked food, then soon one is completely taken over by cooking. Cooked foods jam instincts, overload the body and make initial foods quickly lose their appeal; one compensates by adding more cooked foods, and it soon turns into a vicious cycle. All you have to do is give in once; you’ll lapse into it after a few days.
    When one gives up traditional foods, on the contrary, one has to abstain from any denatured food for a rather long time before experiencing normal pleasure associated with initial foods. If one doesn’t discipline oneself, one’s always wanting to go back to cooked food. One has the impression of having to struggle to get out of a rut, but as the rut only leads to illness...

    _If the pleasure one experiences with initial foods is greater than that with cooked foods, that should, on the contrary, draw one to raw food.

    o The pleasure is more intense and more complete, but not at first. One has trouble feeling it as long as the body is disrupted by denatured foods. To begin with, one has to fight off temptation for some time, depending on individual background.

    _Still, I find it surprising that instincts can’t prevent us from lapsing.

    o Unfortunately, they don’t. That’s the heart of the matter; our instinctual centers function with initial foods. There’s no reason why our genetic encoding, which makes for specific automatic responses, should protect us against foods straight out of frying pans and ovens, or, more generally, out of that hapless pan sizzling with surprises, better known as the brainpan.

    _Cooking, in your view, is very much a trap then?

    o I’m sure you believe in astrology. Haven’t you ever wondered why everyone on earth is born under the sign of cooking?

    _I would have never thought that one could live on raw food alone.

    o The question was worth asking, obviously. Someone had to be sacrificed to find out. Now that we have clocked up 25 years on it and are still alive and that our children have grown up healthily, without developing the slightest ailment...

    _If things are as rosy as you say, I don’t understand what inspired early man to cook his food in the first place. If he found his raw vegetables as tasty as cooked dishes, or even more so, according to what you say... He wasn’t a masochist, after all.

    o Let me suggest a possible incident that will account for what might have happened after our ancestors discovered fire. Imagine a tribal people that had always eaten raw food before and who, one day, started cooking_even just one food_either out of curiosity, accident, or possibly because a forest fire had cooked their sweet potatoes to a turn.

    _Sweet potatoes? But, one can’t even eat them raw.

    o Why not? They taste delicious when the body needs them; they’re crunchy, juicy, a bit like pears, sweet-tasting and fragrant. Like all raw food eaters, those tribal people most certainly ate their sweet potatoes raw with relish as long as they needed them and, once the aversion threshold had been reached, felt their texture turned tough and that they tasted of aftershave. Those signs warn a raw food eater that he can’t go on eating sweet potato, as you yourself will perhaps experience one day.

    _I’ve already experienced it. I’ve never found that sweet potatoes had any other texture or taste than something quite repulsive!

    o Very true. I should have said that perhaps you’ll discover one day how good they can taste.
    Let’s go back to those tribal people who ate their sweet potatoes cooked for the first time. Try to conjure up the scene in your mind’s eye.

    _If I understand you aright, they presumably didn’t, at any point, feel that they couldn’t go on eating.

    o Without the slightest doubt. They probably ate an amount that far exceeded their need for glucose, starch, or any other nutrient present in those tubers. What do you think happened, the following day, when, as usual, they tried to eat their fine sweet potatoes raw?

    _They found they tasted bad.

    o Precisely. Their instincts prevented them from increasing the overload resulting from the revelries of the previous day. They found their raw sweet potatoes tough and inedible.

    _They must have been utterly baffled.

    o There were two possible reactions. Either they thought that their raw sweet potatoes had suddenly become distasteful because of some divine curse and that, to exorcise the sweet potatoes, they had to go on cooking them; that was the advent of fire as a cathartic agent.
    Or, alternatively, the tribal dietitian concluded that “the raw sweet potatoes tasted bad today because, when we ate them cooked yesterday, we disregarded our instincts and overloaded our metabolism and that today our taste buds, which work properly with raw food, prevented us from increasing the overload not yet cleared.”

    _I don’t believe that a tribal people could have reasoned in such a way.

    o Neither do I, especially since 20th century dietitians are as yet unable to.

    _You’re merciless on dietetics.

    o You should say that dietetics had no mercy on me. I developed cancer after having been on a strict diet for four years. I’ll tell you about that sometime.
    Our unhappy tribe, then, must have gone back to cooking their tubers the following day, increased their overload, and then carried on, day after day, getting further and further away from a state that would have enabled them to recapture the former taste. Finally, after a few generations, they completely forgot that their ancestors ate sweet potatoes raw and they taught their children, as if it was a statement of the obvious, “Sweet potatoes have to be cooked!”
    When I was six or seven years old, I remember asking my mother, who was bustling around in front of her stove, “Mommy, why do you cook potatoes?” She answered me curtly: “What do you mean? You can only eat them cooked!” It took me 20 years to get over that.

    _I always thought it made sense to cook potatoes. They’re inedible raw.

    o That’s to say that we’re no better than those tribal people; we believe that raw potato tastes like raw potato.

    _You don’t mean to say that it can take on a taste that’s as good as fruit, do you?

    o Why do you think young children sometimes grab a raw potato while their mother is busy peeling them for some preparation? The mother will automatically say: “Don’t eat that; it’s not good.” She thinks that the child tastes what she herself would taste if she ate it.
    Not long ago, we had a little boy with leukemia here. Put before a table lavished with the most enticing fruit_mangos, dates, passion fruit, etc._he preferred eating raw potatoes. He loved them so much that he would beg for them in mid-afternoon.

    _Doesn’t potato contain a dangerous poison that only cooking can lessen the effects of?

    o Yes, they do contain solanine, mostly in the peel and the buds. But, instincts afford protection from natural poisons.

    _I was forgetting, with your instincts, you can perform any sleight of the hand. So, you think that one could feed on raw potatoes?

    o On average, people would eat far fewer of them than is, at present, the case. Fewer people would be overweight and there would be correspondingly fewer diabetics. Potatoes would act as a drug. Sweet potatoes from warm climes are more edible than potatoes from these parts.

    _It’s worrying to think that if one eats, even once, a food cooked, one already has trouble finding it good in its raw state. You make the act of cooking sound like a sort of unforgiveable sin.

    o In actual fact, it’s much worse. All it takes is eating a single type of cooked food to trigger off a general overload in several nutrients whose amounts instincts weren’t able to gauge properly. The following day, any raw food will taste less appealing. That’s why instinctotherapy isn’t easy to carry through unless one eats everything raw.

    _You mean to say that those tribal people, the day after they ate cooked sweet potatoes, couldn’t even bring themselves to eat fruit?

    o At least not as enthusiastically as usual.
    The excess sugar taken up the day before inevitably made their instincts less attracted to all other foods high in sugar.
    Maybe they didn’t find fruit so insipid as to refrain from having it altogether, but its fragrance must have seemed less appealing. They found it impossible to put away their usual amount.
    At the end of the day, they felt so frustrated they had to compensate for it. So, how did they cope?

    _They boiled up more sweet potatoes.

    o Possibly, but that wouldn’t quite meet the need for greater pleasure, at least palate-wise. Filling up just for filling up’s sake is hardly enjoyable.

    _I get it; they came up with the first recipe!

    o How else could they have got their pleasure’s worth, besides trying out cooking artfully? Unfortunately, there’s no way back; it’s a descending spiral. Every recipe makes one eat more and results in an ever-increasing overload that dulls one’s instincts and further reduces pleasure, thus leading to ever more elaborate recipes ad infinitum. Sophistication in cooking can be accounted for in this way. All it took was cheating against instincts once to lead mankind into an endless quest of gluttony that has stranded us, to this day, in a state of perpetual frustration.

    _All the same, I feel perfectly satisfied after a good meal.

    o Didn’t Rockefeller advise leaving the table still feeling slightly hungry? If eating pleasure damages our health, it must mean that there is no sating without overloading! Obviously, one will derive enjoyment from a good blow-out, i.e. a meal of soup, starters, meat and starchy vegetables, cheese, a sweet, coffee, and digestive cookies.
    You can be sure that you will have heavily stunned your unfortunate taste buds, lured by chemical fare they were not intended for. Clearly, artfulness in cooking can dazzle our palate with cream cakes or liquor-filled chocolates and whatnot. That is the design of pastry cook and cook alike, but it amounts to nothing besides a flash in the pan.
    Initial foods reach much deeper. Eating them feels like being permeated by a thorough well-being that far outlasts oven-ready pleasure. The experience is something of a love affair with nature.

    _Cooked food too affords one enjoyment galore!

    o Well, cooking had to bring back a natural satisfaction, else it would have been shelved long ago. But I can assure you that it doesn’t hold a candle to nature. There are aftertastes and textures that don’t match flavor, and the food, when it “repeats” on one and makes one’s gorge rise, mars one’s first impression of pleasure. Once one discovers what true eating is all about, one feels keenly that cooking can only afford empty, skin-deep pleasure. Denatured food titillates one’s palate and calms one’s stomach, without providing true ecstasy.

    _You’re comparing cooking pleasure to masturbation, are you?

    o A kind of masturbation, so to speak.

    _I can’t believe that one can ever really feel full on raw food.

    o Wait until you’ve tried it. Satedness on cooked food, rather, is what brings in its wake deep dissatisfaction. That frustration makes itself felt in a need to nibble that recurs all throughout the day, in the craving to go and have something to drink, in the careful selection of the best restaurants, in the craze for exotic cooking, in the rush to get the latest recipes, and in the cultivation of strong pleasures, such as tobacco or alcohol.
    Once one has rediscovered one’s normal balance, one not only procures for oneself an increasingly gratifying share of pleasure with every meal (without any digestive distress!) but, even more appreciably, perfect satisfaction in between meals. Such well-being is unheard of on cooked foods.

    _True enough. One’s always thinking about grazing on the hoof, nibbling on a sweet, or a sandwich, or sipping a cup of coffee, etc...

    o And, one thing leading to another, things get worse. As time goes on, you are off your oats more and more. A kind of impotence sets in with age.

    _Do you feel unaffected by that, thanks to instinctotherapy?

    o I remember, for instance, how yogurt tasted to me when I was 12 years old, when it was first sold, right after the war. I thought it tasted really scrumptious. Then, over the years, it lost some of its allure; aftertastes overshadowed the initial flavor. When I was about 25 years old, I became convinced that they had started making it differently, the aftertaste of cardboard had become so overwhelming. And when I was 26, I had cancer.

    _Do you see a causal link in all that?

    o I was compelled to see one a few years later.

    _How is it, though, that the taste of yogurt changed, if instincts are only adapted to initial foods? By rights, they shouldn’t have worked for dairy.

    o You’re quite right; they certainly didn’t work. They ought to have warned me off long before the onset of the disease. They didn’t stop me in the midst of a meal either. During military service, I remember inmates going out on a drinking binge, while in the mess hall I ate my way through equally worthy piles of yogurt. The empty tubs piled up into a huge toppling pillar, while I still felt hungry.
    Such is the way with all adulterated foods; the aversion threshold is defeated, laying us open to overeating. I do believe that in terms of functionally useful helpings for the body, cooking has made mankind greedier than all the other predators put together.

    _How strange, though, that mankind as a whole should have taken to cooking.

    o Cooking is a terminal disease; once it starts, it never stops. I could even show you that it is a contagious disease.

    _That does rather damn our great chefs!

    o Can you imagine what presumably happened when our previously mentioned tribesmen invited the envoys of a neighboring tribe to their tables, following the advent of cooking? Those gentlemen doubtless got red napkin treatment. With pomp and circumstance, they were treated to the latest dish concocted by the local chefs; namely, a heaping helping of boiled sweet potatoes. They must have filled up on the fare without their instincts taking them to task.
    After a week’s non-stop overload, they probably went home. Their wives, not being abreast of the latest news, must have served up their usual raw sweet potatoes. The worthy husbands, put off by an unwonted ligneous texture, must have complained: “The women in the neighboring tribe serve cooked sweet potatoes that are far more palatable.”
    The moral: Women were fated to learn to cook to keep their husbands.

    _Things haven’t changed.

    o No offense meant to feminists.

    _Why shouldn’t men be the ones to concoct tasty delicacies to keep their wives?

    o Things do actually seem headed that way. But back in those days, feeding bottles hadn’t yet seen the light of day, and women had to stay home to breastfeed their children. Nowadays, however, husbands are sharing all the way down the line (except delivery, but for how long?). Soon enough the sex most dependent on the other will have to take to its pans to keep home their beloved.

    _So you think it will turn out to be men?

    o I fear so.

    _...? ...

    o That’s another matter.

    _Pertaining to instincts?

    o A rather unforseen consequence of diet.

    _Relating to intercourse?

    o Nutrition affects the body as a whole. Why not sex?

    _You’re a bit of a dark horse, aren’t you!

    o True enough. Instinctotherapy has lifted the veil on much in that field. That’ll be for some other time. For the time being, let’s take stock: We have proved that, mathematically speaking, cooking was gradually to spread to the entire planet. All it took was the process being sparked off, subsequent to which it could not but spread like a huge oil slick.

    _But, surely, it had to start somewhere.

    o Think of the billions of men who have handled fire ever since it became widespread, that is, over the last 400,000 years, according to the latest figures. Very likely, any food, somehow or other, was likely to end up being cooked before going down into one’s stomach.
    When all a practice can do is spread and it is impelled by random events, the surprising thing would be for it not to catch on.

    _Is there not a single tribe that gets by without any cooking?

    o No known tribe, and with reason, too. Supposing a tribe came into contact with another tribe that had as yet never cooked, the latter would be infected instantly. Explorers have so far not been alive to the issue and, consequently, were never very careful. All it took was a lump of sugar, a pan, and some recipe, for the tribesmen to make an irretrievable entry into cooking.
    Ever since ethnologists brought the Tasadays a recipe for boiled hearts of palm, that small tribe who still lived in the dressed stone age and in perfect harmony with their environment, have taken to ravaging their forests.

    _In short, mankind had to start cooking some day.

    o That seems to me as predictable as clockwork. Intelligence was bound to doublecross instinct with the advent of man using his mind. As it is, monkeys are virtually able to cook, provided they’re shown how to soak potatoes in sea water, for instance, they can renew the experiment and teach their fellow beings, so that the whole group wants to prepare the dish.

    Influencing behavior. Research n° 155, 1984, p. 705
    “A colony of macaques kept track of in a follow-up way, in the wild, was provided with a regular supply of sweet potatoes. In 1953, an 18-month-old female was sighted washing a sweet potato for the first time in fresh water, wiping residual sand off it with one hand.
    In 1962, three monkeys out of four, among the under-twos, washed their potatoes in that way. By and by, brine was substituted for fresh water, which ushered in a custom that consisted in adding salt to potatoes as they were being eaten by dipping them in sea water after each mouthful.”

    Note: It wouldn’t have taken much for macaques to discover cooking before us.

    _This time, let me hit the ball back into your court. Switching to cooking was, as you have said, a foregone conclusion in the history of mankind, since it had to happen at the very time when human intelligence had developed far enough. Conclusively, then, man was genetically encoded to cook his food.

    o That would imply that our genetics were pre-encoded to foresee the consequences of cooking in order to ward off the drawbacks ahead of time. But our genetics developed in a fire-free environment.

    _Well, if man acquired intelligence, why shouldn’t he have had the right to improve on his food?

    o That all depend-s on what you mean by “right.” Let’s reason along similar lines. Man acquired intelligence, which enabled him to invent syringes and process heroin. Consequently, he has the right to take drugs.

    _That’s quite a different matter.

    o I beg your pardon. Drug-taking is an enjoyment that becomes possible through artfulness, precisely the way table pleasures do.

    _And what if man had the right to take drugs?

    o Why shouldn’t he? Only, he has to pick up the pieces afterwards, and the same holds for cooking.
    No, after what biology has taught us, I simply can’t believe that our genetics could have been encoded, in advance, for cooked food. How could genetics have taken factors into account that were non-existent in the environment, and that didn’t come into play as far as natural selection was concerned_unless there’s a superior being, capable of predicting the future, that directed our evolution.

    _Do you rule out such an idea?

    o Not necessarily, but I think that a superior being of such a nature might have accurately foretold the bad effects of cooking and structured our metabolism accordingly. Experience shows, however, that we aren’t protected from those bad effects.

    _Maybe man had to go through illness and suffering....

    o That would mean that God was rather Machiavellian in leading us down the path of sin. Living through one’s mistakes and their consequences enriches one’s consciousness, obviously. All that has perhaps not been futile.
    But who is going to tell you that the detour of cooking shouldn’t come to an end one day?

    _You and your redemptive instinctotherapy, isn’t that right?

    o My approach is merely a reflection of a general trend. The raw vs. cooked struggle has been on for a long time. In the 19th century, it was noted that cooking destroyed certain vitamins, and many dietary schools began advocating raw vegetables. Statistics subsequently showed that adulterated fats were the cause of heart disease and that diet played a crucial role in the frequency and occurrence of cancer. “Maillard’s molecules,” discovered at the beginning of the century, are coming back into the public eye; their toxicity and carcinogenic effects are now well-known.
    More and more people advocate eating a raw diet. But people don’t know how to eat raw food. The key of instinct is still lacking.

    _No one, besides yourself, has unearthed that key, which is, after all, essential.

    o A number of researchers have studied the problem of eating instincts as related to animals. An American professor by the name of Richter has shown, for instance, that rats are able not only to regulate their calorie intake, but also to achieve a perfect balance as far as vitamins, mineral salts, and trace elements are concerned_not to mention, of course, adequate distribution of sugars, fats, and protein.

    _So, then, is science on the right track?

    o It has even been shown that instinctual cravings reflect bodily needs on an hourly basis. A chicken who lays her daily egg changes her diet depending on her needs. She feels like high-protein foods while producing the egg white, is then attracted to water to help the egg build up its moisture, and later to ground oyster powder high in calcium when she makes the shell. From one minute to the next, she knows how to make up for her metabolic deficiencies, without even having studied dietetics.

    _That bears out your theories wonderfully.

    o Unfortunately, when it comes to man, everything collapses dismally. It is thought to be obvious that man’s instincts don’t exist any more since supposedly nothing can keep a drunkard away from drink nor an overweight person from overeating starchy foods.

    _But those foods are, of course, not initial foods.

    o You’re a quick learner. There, indeed, is the rub. Researchers, strangely enough, have never considered the possibility that instincts had no reason to work properly with foods that didn’t exist in the early environment where our genetics evolved.

    _That seems obvious enough to me, after having listened to you, although I’m no authority on biology.

    o Some writers argue, for instance, that man is victimized by all kinds of cultural conditioning and mental activities liable to jeopardize the effective use of instincts. In fact, it is the food that one puts on the table that is “conditioned,” so to speak, to mislead instincts!

    Food Cravings
    “Marching orders straight from the organs,” Science et Vie (Science and Life) n° 729, June 1978 (excerpts).
    “When an animal eats, it acts like a computer; that is, the most sophisticated kind of computer, that could choose the best quality foods in the right amounts, better than an expert dietitian ever could. Conversely, man is like a broken-down computer, which compels him to eat anything, anyhow, and which sometimes leads him to obesity or alcoholism (flaws that never occur with animals in a natural condition)....
    “Food, according to its chemical composition, is broken down into fats (glycerides), sugars (saccharides), and proteins (nitrogenous food such as eggs, grains, meat, and fish)....
    “When it makes its choice, an animal is able to pick the foods it needs to balance input against output accurately from the relevant nutrients. An American, Professor Richter, was the first to demonstrate that rats were remarkably able when it came to selecting from a range of foods the appropriate amounts of protein, vitamins, and mineral salts necessary for their continued health. Even better, rats can change their minds, when their internal balance is experimentally tampered with. In this way, rats automatically increase their salt intake after removal of their adrenal glands; they will eat fats over sugars once they have been turned into diabetics; they select whatever vitamin they happen to be deficient in....
    “This is most striking in chickens.... Chickens pick the amount and kind of food they require solely on the basis of the needs of the egg they lay daily....
    “When producing egg white, the chicken only eats whole, high-protein food. When the egg is taking up water, the hen drinks plentifully. Finally, when the shell is forming, the hen goes for calcium. One might imagine that that was due to circadian rhythm. Not so at all, since when chickens are raised from birth in constant light_that is, when they don’t experience nighttime_their eating cycles remain unchanged. Further proof would be contributed from chickens that do not or no longer lay, or even from roosters. In the foregoing, there is no staggered intake of protein, calcium, or water.
    What’s more, given that fowl can make up for the loss (incurred through laying its eggs, a case in point) by relevantly adjusting the quality of their food, they can also balance their diet_which man can’t do.”

    Note: How would man manage if he had to lay eggs?

    _How odd that, in French, “to condition” should mean both “to package” and “to brainwash.”

    o The chink was being sought in man’s armor, whereas it ought to have been sought in the food_which is a little harder to take. It is easier to accept a scourge than an error, as long as one lays off the Gluttony God.
    That reminds me of an interview I had with a leading researcher in animal dietary instinct. He had just been awarded a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, and devoted an hour to me_which was no small concession. For one thing, he didn’t at all go along with the idea that instincts are only adapted to foods available in the initial surroundings our genetics evolved in. Nevertheless, having heard me out for 15 minutes, he said, “Well, what you’re saying actually seems to make sense.” He took an increasing interest in my theories, especially relating to the metabolic impact of genetic irrelevance to dietary constituents deteriorated by cooking. He suggested I put it all down in writing and committed himself to “translate” it for me into ethological lingo (nowadays, every field has its very own watertight dialect to keep out collateral researchers, which doesn’t exactly help join forces!). Everything seemed well under way, when, all of a sudden, at the end of our talk, his features hardened. Having considered the matter, he reneged and said, “Blast it all, you can’t lay into cooking like that... The art of cooking is a cultural endowment.” I cleverly retorted that “Shouldn’t science perhaps keep well clear of such prejucides?” Remaining in his funk, he simply nodded. Back home, I set to work at once, writing up 40 pages to summarize my thesis. I’m still waiting for an answer.

    _Even scientists are infected by dietary brainwashing.

    o Cooking holds us by the short and curlies. Calling it into question means possibly forgoing pleasures of the palate. Loss of pleasure runs counter to our most basic instincts. Enjoyment is the very spice of life, and crowns the achievements of instinctual behavior. Denying that is as good as denying life.
    Unfortunately, though, adulteration causes instincts to work against their own end, dipping like the needle of a compass that randomly draws up to the mirages of our senses and towards our own undoing. But for all that, it never relaxes its grips on our guts.

    _Don’t you think the fear of challenging everything is what holds scientists back?

    o No doubt, pride comes into it. Admitting that an obvious fact completely escaped oneself is always unpalatable for a self-important researcher_and especially so when world health is in the balance! Not to have reckoned with the culinary issue must be an oversight that heavily burdens the consciences of the alleged culprits.

    _Given that there is a genuine connection between cooking and disease...

    o Heart disease claims a recorded death toll of 47% and cancer and leukemia 28%: that is, some 75% of deaths caused by diseases known to be closely bound up with diet. Should our advanced dietary landscape spread to the entire planet, around 3.5 billion people could be predicted to be the next victims of the cooking arts_to wit, 50 times as many losses of lives as occurred in World War II_not to mention other diseases besides coronary heart disease and cancer. Western Science has on its hands, as it were, the blood of a huge, unwitting genocide.

    _We all have to die someday.

    o I, for one, would rather die a natural death, for instance, after living out a normal lifespan.

    _Some people make it to 90, eating like everybody else. Do cooked foods happen to be better suited to them?

    o Their genetic background may have partly adapted and be protecting them. However, that makes no difference to the fact that you can’t pick and choose at birth, when it comes to being among the better adapted.

    _Naturally, but some people remaining in sound health that long on traditional food shows that it’s not bad for everyone.

    o When a hurricane lays a forest waste, only sparing a very few trees, can one say that the hurricane was blameless?

    _And what of Caucasian centenarians? Isn’t their longevity put down to curdled milk, in spite of your indictment of dairy?

    o True enough. It has been noted that those stately senior citizens reach 100 eating curdled milk. Hence, the dictate of our dietitians: “Let’s eat twice as much of the stuff as they do and we’ll hit 200!” This, of course, is an ideal outlet for overproducing dairy farmers. One could just as well have inferred that their lifespan didn’t overshoot a hundred, and therefore, we should do away with dairy altogether and gain life everlasting.”
    The extended lifespan of those mountain dwellers may be connected with genetic idiosyncracies, erratic birth registrations, local customs that would pass them off as older than they really are, or, quite simply, because they are abstemious. Perhaps they are long-lived not because they eat curdled milk, but rather because they only eat very little of it!

    _The fact remains that you can nudge 90 or over without sweeping all the pleasure off the table. It’s all a matter of being reasonable.

    o If you consider that normal lifespan is 77, you will find it breathtaking that some of the elect make it to 90 and you will assume that traditional fare isn’t particularly toxic.
    Supposing now, that man’s normal lifespan was 150, you might say that even in optimal circumstances, the sturdiest individuals barely scrape through to 90 and you will conclude that that same food is undeniably toxic. It is all a matter of standards.

    _You have a way of turning things upside down.

    o The entire conceptual diet-disease framework is fraught with dubious stereotypes and sweeping statements contrived to spare our eating addictions. Might as well turn them upside down.

    _You’re saying, in effect, that man should live to 150?

    o I just said that off the top of my head. Some people say that every species lives out 7 times the timespan of its growth period, which still falls very far short of Methuselah’s 960 years.

    _Do you actually believe the figures stated in Genesis?

    o Who knows? On first showing, I should think they are fanciful. But, the Bible isn’t necessarily lying.

    _Was it not simply a change in the calendar?

    o I long held that view. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold water! The figures decrease steadily starting from the Flood: Shem lived 600 years, Abraham 175, Moses 120, and David 70. I fail to see where one could slip in, say, a shift from a lunar calendar to a solar one.

    _How disturbing.

    o Other people uphold that the figures are symbolic. But if that is so, the logic of the system begs the question.
    For instance, it is in keeping with the laws of addition. Noah was 600 when the Flood occurred. Further on, he is said to have lived 350 years after the Flood, and his age at death does tally up to 950 years. How could arithmetic go hand in hand with symbolic numerology?
    What is still more remarkable is that only a single Patriarch before the Flood died much younger than the others: Enoch was only 365. But the verse has it that he “was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). All the others almost achieved a millenium; Adam made it to 930, Methuselah to 969, and Noah to 950. Neither regularity nor accuracy in figures nor the mention of an untimely death would be consistent with mere symbolism. The very fact that the narrator should feel compelled to account for Enoch’s comparatively short life implies that the long lives of the others were felt to be quite typical and that they were reckoned in real, rather than mythical, time.
    Another disturbing detail is that it looks as though a gradual deterioration set in after the Flood. First of all, the Almighty allowed meats to be eaten: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you” (Genesis 9:2). Then, gradually, health troubles take a turn for the worse: Job’s ulcers, and the plague that smites David’s people during the wheat harvest. Even David was stricken with early senility before handing over the throne to his son Solomon. The old king clearly had trouble keeping warm. Scripture records conspicuously that “now king David was old, and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat.” (I Kings I: I).
    Being old at 70 wasn’t the usual thing. Then he was brought the fairest damsel in the country to warm him up; “She cherished the king and ministered to him, but knew him not.” (I Kings, 1:4). This was also the first case of impotence recorded in the story.

    _Do you honestly think that all that boiled down to food?

    o Well, we’re lost in conjecture, but, if the Flood ever did occur, I expect, it brought with it far-reaching changes in the dietary habits of the day. The matter of wine which Noah invented at that very time also comes in for consideration.

    The ages apparently reached by antediluvian and postdiluvian patriarchs, according to Old Testament figures.

    1. ADAM 930 years
    2. SETH 912 years
    3. ENOSH 905 years
    4. QUENAN 910 years
    5. MAHALALEEL 892 years
    6. JARED 962 years
    7. ENOCH 365 years
    8. METHUSELAH 969 years
    9. LAMECH 777 years
    10. NOAH 950 years
    11. SHEM 600 years
    12. ARPAKSHAD 403 years
    13. SHELAH 433 years
    14. EBER 464 years
    15. PELEG 239 years
    16. REU 239 years
    17. SERUG 230 years
    18. NAHOR 148 years
    19. TERAH 205 years
    21. ISAAC 180 years
    22. ISHMAEL 137 years
    23. JACOB 147 years
    24. JOSEPH 110 years
    25. MOSES 120 years
    26. JOSHUAH 110 years
    27. DAVID 70 years

    Two stages clearly stand out. The first one, lasting up until the Flood, during which time lifespan was publicly well-established as around 900 years, Enoch being the only exception. Scripture says that “he was not; for God took him;” which, rather, points to an accident. In the second stage, attested length of life decreases quite regularly and exponentially, starting from the time of the Flood. No change in calendar may be premised, since this would show up in the form of a sudden break in the series of dotted lines (see diagram above).

    Inference: Either the Bible is being fanciful, but then, what would be the point of such a regular decrease, or else, the figures are genuine, in which case, they have to be accounted for.

    N.B.: This is no scientific reference, but merely Biblical memorabilia.

    _He stayed the course well, you must admit!

    o I don’t hold Lunchtime O’Booze responsible for all our ills. Some experiments on rats have reportedly shown that a small daily ration of alcohol extends their lifespan by 50%.
    Although alcohol is known to damage the gut and let harmful molecules into the body, the combination of meat, a source of alien molecules, and immunity-weakening wine might possibly explain away the sudden dip in the curve right after the Flood. After that, lifespan contracts quite regularly. I would gladly account for such a slow-burning demise by incriminating cooking, since that can only progress in time_the impact of cooking on health and longevity are bound to have been magnified. But this is mere conjecture.

    _And with a return to non-cooking, to what age do you expect to live?

    o Well, perhaps you’ll have to wait till I’m dead before you have a reliable figure!

    _I see. If I want to be around to see the day, I’d better shelve black coffee and hot buns once and for all.

    o I hear the gong. Let’s go to dinner. It’ll get cold, if you don’t get a move on!


    Anopsology

    Part Two



    _I remember your pineapple: Not only did it sting my tongue and become more and more horribly sharp from one minute to the next, but everything I tasted afterwards pricked my tongue!

    o I had told you that you couldn’t force yourself to eat beyond the aversion threshold. If you’d carried on, your tongue would have actually started bleeding.

    _And all the while, you were onto your tenth slice of the same pineapple.

    o I expect you must have got carried away by my example. Everybody’s rations are different.

    _You wouldn’t have wanted me to leave half of my slice on my plate though!

    o Oh, that’s where you’re wrong! You should never finish what’s on your plate.

    _Don’t you think it’s a shame to waste food like that?

    o When a fruit takes the roof off your mouth, that means that your instincts are warning you of an impending danger of overload; if you eat it, you do harm to your body. If you throw it away, you don’t do the bin any harm.

    _But what about one’s budget? Such behavior involves terrible waste!

    o It’s better to waste food than to throw one’s health away.
    On the whole, the loss is minor, possibly 5 or 10%, which is less than what is lost in the cooking process. See what’s left of a roast when you take it out of the oven; it has very likely shrivelled up by more than 10%, especially if the animal was raised on hormones!

    _Leaving something on one’s plate is an insult to all those precepts that have been drummed into us since the cradle.

    o I’m going to school you afresh in bad manners of all kinds: sniffing, declining, spitting out, licking the platter clean, leaving remains on the side of your plate. All good manners were devised in respect of cooked food. Never could people have been prevailed on to finish up a slice of raw pineapple, as you yourself now know.

    _I’ll grant you that.

    o As it happens, table manners lock us into dainty eating. They apply such psychological pressure as to prevent us from gaining the necessary hindsight to challenge our practices, and that is, perhaps, their prime aim. Anyone going to the trouble of preparing a tasty morsel for his guests would find it something of a raw deal if they were flatly denied.

    _Rather like a drunkard who feels it incumbent on him to buy another round of drinks to gloss over his revelry.

    o Quite. He is trying to draw other people into drink to ease his conscience. I believe that pioneer cooks must have felt a twinge of concern when they started playing at being sorcerer’s apprentices. Likewise, one feels a subconscious pang of guilt whenever one is playing tricks on the laws of nature. I expect early cooks must have perceived the reluctance of their guests as an indictment; a reluctance to become an accessory to gluttony, as it were. It is, therefore, binding on us to accept what we are served as a token of our unconditional surrender to the rules of hospitality.

    _I would now like to know why the pineapple suddenly turned prohibitively abrasive.

    o Pineapple contains an enzyme, bromelaine, that dissolves protein and corrodes mucus membranes in the mouth.

    _But how is it that you weren’t feeling anything unpleasant?

    o You didn’t either, until after a few mouthfuls. The body will only take pineapple so long as it can produce enzymes that neutralize bromelaine. After that, when the body draws the line, which you may realize when the taste of the fruit turns sharp_there are no buffer enzymes left in your saliva so that pineapple starts digesting your mouth.

    _Well I’m glad I stopped!

    o Now, you know what I mean when I speak of aversion threshold. The same thing holds true for a great many fruits, and especially with wild fruits which are virtually impossible to overeat.

    _Obviously, if it takes the roof off your mouth every time.

    o Not to worry, you must have taken things too far without realizing it, because you were still eating with your mind. Either you were trying to clean your plate or compete with me.

    _Should I have stopped when the taste turned sharp? I do like a certain degree of sharpness.

    o You should have stopped when the sharpness turned unpleasant.

    _But, isn’t that idea of what’s unpleasant purely subjective?

    o Not in the least: The very wordings of instinct operate through the feelings of what’s pleasant and what isn’t. Unfortunately, we place those feelings within the realm of willpower.

    _Isn’t that arbitrary? You’re saying that instinct may be equated with displeasure. In the case of pineapple, hasn’t the body simply reached the end of its tether? That would explain equally satisfactorily what happened. You have a much larger store of enzymes than I have since you’re more used to eating fruits.

    o What we are trying to prove is that we are talking about instinct proper and not merely a sore mouth. Taking a look at facts, for one and the same person, the amount of a food they can eat before it turns aversive varies greatly from one day to the next.

    _Perhaps what varies is their tolerance, depending on how tired they are.

    o In that case, it would be surprising to strain to eat a fruit at lunchtime and manage to eat large amounts of it in the evening. Very often, one witnesses very decrepit people eating heaps of passion fruits with unflagging relish that other guests, who are in far better health, find dreadfully tart.
    The way things have turned out shows that it isn’t a matter of tolerance, but instincts regulated by a very cleverly devised encoding. If salivary glands dried up from exhaustion, such differences in intake wouldn’t occur overnight. On the first day, the first mouthful of pineapple would sting. The day after, one would be able to eat about two pounds of it quite easily, with the aversion threshold only being reached with the last mouthful. Then at the following meal, the sharpness would kick in as one was eating the second slice.
    Another proof that one’s enjoyment can turn sour occurs with foods that don’t corrode mucus membranes. For instance, egg yolk takes on a straw-like taste verging on that of chicken droppings_which is absolutely unbearable. There is a distinct change that takes place in one’s perception of the taste, somewhat as if one suddenly turned on a light switch.
    Still another proof that aversion threshold does function is that the unpleasantness in taste crops up right at the moment when the amount of food taken up provides the best possible balance.

    _In my view, that’s difficult to pro-ve.

    o There are all kinds of criteria that account for balance_for instance, digestive well-being. It only takes going slightly beyond aversion threshold, in terms of taste and feeling full, for digestive potential to be lessened. If one forces oneself to eat two or three spoonfuls of egg yolk too many or if one mashes a banana because it’s easier to eat that way, well, then, one rediscovers very quickly that one has a stomach.

    _Do you forget about your stomach the rest of the time?

    o Given appropriate conditions, your internal organs remain silent. One shouldn’t feel any heaviness, queasiness, rumbling, or drowsiness during digestion.

    _Never any liver attacks?

    o Not even on Thanksgiving_which is rather rare at traditional Thanksgiving dinners.

    _Why is that? Do you give raw holiday dinners? I can’t imagine what special food you could serve on holidays.

    o One could treat oneself to rare, tropical fruit that are out of season and that one doesn’t eat daily_or possibly top quality meat, a wide range of shellfish, lobsters, crayfish, and any exceptional natural food that one can find for special occasions. One can always dream up splendid menus all the while respecting the rules of instinctotherapy.

    _No wine, though?

    o There are better things than that. Fermented coconut milk, for instance; it’s light, sweet, pungent, and pleasantly alcoholic. It tastes better than champagne when instincts feel like it.

    _Doesn’t that expose you to traditional drunkenness?

    o Instincts protect one from natural alcohols. Alcoholism wouldn’t exist if people drank wine in the form of fermented grapes.
    They’re delicious and one stops spontaneously when one’s on the verge of euphoria.

    _By the way, don’t you miss wine?

    o Don’t you think it’s worth wondering, on the contrary, what one is going after when one drinks wine so as to hook oneself on it? Is it an escape into drunkenness, or the need to forget? I, for one, have always loathed being drunk and seeing others drunk.

    _Not every drinker is a boozer. Moderation does exist; a little wine gladdens the heart; I see no harm in that.

    o Of course, a ray of sunshine gladdens your heart. Language conveniently comfort us in our delusions.
    As far as I’m concerned, I see the matter in a different light. If we go after some kind of contentment, it’s because we need it. And if we need it, it’s possibly because euphoria is part of a normal state.

    _Are you saying that in his initial state, man’s eyesight was constantly blurred?

    o Maybe that’s how bigamy came about. Most of the patriarchs had two wives.
    When one eats initial foods_even without fermented grapes_one is in a constant state of well-being. One can very well describe it as a form of euphoria, ecstatic joy that constantly wells up within. With wine, one can experience a similar state, and I think that is what is unconsciously sought after. But the experience leads to a feeling of emptiness. The moments of fulfilment brought about through artfulness are paid for in the form of depression. In the end, there’s nothing to be gained, except dependence. Every time one feels down, one goes back to the stimulant. The heavenly ascent dips anew, and it starts up again, with cirrhosis of the liver, organic brain damage, cancer, and all the rest in the offing.
    There are more alcoholics than you might suspect, what with intellectuals, movie stars, you name it, they’re out there...

    _Maybe alcoholism helps them create, to sublimate their energy...

    o I don’t believe that Bacchic pleasures amount to much. The inspiration or transcendental awareness that alcohol or drugs supposedly afford one seems bogus to me. Just think of people who smoke hashish and who, as long as their trip lasts, believe they’re great musical geniuses: They keep trotting out their pathetic, hackneyed tunes that they are confident no Bach or Beethoven or anyone else in the history of music could hold a candle to. But when they listen to their own recordings, perhaps they hear something else.
    Brain stimulants delude one into thinking that one has created something, but that impression is merely a delusion. There are other means of finding real, creative inspiration; all that’s needed is to provide the brain with the conditions that allow it to work properly.

    _So, as far as you’re concerned, what’s psychedelic is fake?

    o For a very long time, mankind has sought happiness and release in artificial delights.
    Already in Ulysses’ day, there were lotus-eaters.
    Drugs may be somewhat disinhibitory, but, at the same time, they dull any sensitivity to the subtler aspects of things.
    From what I can see, if somebody consciously seeks to lose their inhibitions, it means, purely and simply, that that person is suffering from inhibition! It’s up to the person involved to try and understand what’s causing it. And that people should have been turning to drugs for centuries as a way to enlightenment would suggest that enlightenment is part of a normal, though long-lost, state.

    _Aren’t you losing sight of the fact that wine also delights the palate?

    o That is a very tepid delight. It is merely compensating for the lack of fruit. Traditional fare only incorporates minute amounts of it; hence, the fascination for flavorings in sweets, ice cream, and chewing gum.

    _So, why don’t people go for the real thing?

    o Because fruit sets an upper limit. Having endured cooked overloads, we can no longer eat a normal amount of fruit nor derive acceptable pleasure from it. Wine knows no such limits since our taste buds aren’t equipped to process it. We simply get the flavor of grapes minus the aversion threshold, which is none other than a way of making up for the dearth of fruit.

    _But that leaves the love of liquor like vodka or whisky unaccounted for.

    o Have you ever heard of an experiment involving a rat having an electrode plugged into its brain and connected up with a pedal that allows it to pulse mild electric shock into its pleasure centers? The unfortunate rodent ends up being unable to do anything besides moving the pedal. With drink, one stimulates one’s pleasure centers and one can’t take one’s mind off handling corkscrews any more. That is a kind of Pavlovian taste reflex. The feeling associated with euphoria eventually turns pleasant, which explains why one can develop an acquired taste.

    _Is that a case of instincts working in reverse?

    o The same thing holds good for the flavor and smell of cigarettes. At first, one is turned off by the acridness, and then smoking becomes appealing owing to the euphoric effect of nicotine. Once smokers have been weaned, they are surprised at having been able to stomach substances that are revolting to them in a normal state.

    _Can’t one break through to a liking for initially aversive natural foods?

    o Cola nuts, for instance, taste dreadfully bitter to any normal person. If one is bent on eating them anyway, one achieves a fairly enjoyable arousal of one’s nervous system, and the initial bitterness ends up dropping off. The natives who fire themselves up on it when on long treks through the jungle assured me they found it quite toothsome.

    _Did you actually taste it?

    o I spat it out in a hurry.

    _Is there no natural drug that tastes pleasant which one might be induced to eat instinctively?

    o So far, every so-called hallucinogenic plant has turned out highly repulsive to raw instinct eaters’ palates. Nature protects us from drugs. Without “intelligent” resourcefulness, one couldn’t get hooked on narcotics.
    Mind you, I’m not casting the first stone at drug addicts. I happen to think that they’re trying to put something right, possibly something vital_namely, they are trying to make it through to a state of enlightenment and inner peace that was lost for any number of reasons.
    Unfortunately, drug-taking means dead-ending.

    _And it also takes its toll of one’s health.

    o Instead of ostracizing young people who venture out into that kind of pursuit, we ought to be taking a long, hard look at ourselves. Whatever life prospects we dangle out to children are a disappointment to them. Who’s at fault? Children or society at large? The current craze for drugs is perhaps an indicment of the mistakes we adults can’t seem to straighten out.

    _Have you ever tried out natural drugs?

    o Not personally. Several of my colleagues had a go at raw Indian hemp (cannabis). One of them chanced to end up at a Spaniard’s place whose garden was overrun with it. He tried a few leaves and finding them tasty, he went on eating, as he would have eaten lamb’s lettuce. The owner of the garden went from mild concern to downright panic, because my friend had eaten far beyond the lethal dose. Finally, the owner of the garden ran off his herbivorous predator_not so much for fear of what was happening to his garden, as that this strange visitor would kick the bucket from an overdose. However, nothing happened. No hallucination, no arousal, no laughing fits, nor any of the symptoms common on marijuana.

    _And what if he’d had a similar intake in tokes or brownies?

    o In that case, I expect he would have been in for trouble. Once a molecule has been damaged by heat, it doesn’t produce the same impact on the body. The latter reacts against a natural plant either because our instincts place a limit on the amount we can eat or because the enzymes in our body are able to break down toxic molecules in their initial state. The alteration caused by heating screws up both defense mechanisms.

    _In short, without ingenious processing, there would be no drugs in nature?

    o Indeed, there wouldn’t. You either have to insult instinct or alter the plant.
    Another field worker experimented with the Mexican bare head fungus, psilocybe mexicana, well-known for its hallucinogenic properties. He ate some until the taste turned unpleasant, but nothing happened.
    Mexicans eat it sun-dried, which is quite enough to get an overdose without straining one’s taste buds.

    _And what of opium?

    o Try poppy seeds; they taste prohibitively bitter. Without smoking them or without heroin processing techniques, no one would have gone and driven themselves loopy with the calyxes of those hapless flowers that can’t have been intended to wreck human lives.

    _Didn’t you tell me that you ate poppy seeds?

    o That reminds me of a mishap that two of my friends from abroad experienced when they came to see me once. I had given them different bags of seeds, among which hemp and poppy. When they crossed the border, they quite innocently declared their goods. The customs officer, seeing the labels, immediately called in his superintendent who refused to heed any further explanations from the dangerous drug-dealers. The hapless men ended up spending the night on benches in the customs office, and were only released when an expert in the matter was called in and cleared them of any suspicion. In fact, poppy seeds are not hallucinogenic any more than hemp seeds are.
    But, be careful, don’t go and eat anything you happen to stumble on to. What I’m saying is only true for foods that are still in their initial state and are eaten only as long as instincts find them palatable.

    _Which implies that one has to know how to follow one’s instincts!

    o Absolutely. Before launching out on any experiment of that kind, one must first learn how to appraise one’s sense of smell and taste accurately. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a wave of overdoses among readers...

    _Let’s go back to the subject of wine. What do you do at a function if somebody proffers you a glass of wine or champagne? Surely, you don’t ask for a glass of milk instead?

    o With all due respect to the spirit of Mendès, France, I’d choose wine a thousand times over! It’s much closer to something natural. A simple toxic substance like alcohol seems less dangerous to me, in small doses, than the mysterious molecules of an animal’s milk that has nothing to do with my genealogical background.

    _And yet, milk is natural!

    o Wrong: Cow’s milk is natural for calves, not for man!

    _How is it, then, that you’re not against eggs? Eggs are laid to turn into chicks.

    o Intelligence isn’t necessary to find eggs in nature. All sorts of animals include eggs in their diet, i.e. field mice, squirrels, monkeys, etc. Our genetic code has had millions of years to adapt to them; whereas, to get milk, one has had to devise no end of contrivances. Nobody has ever seen a gorilla milk a buffalo in a primeval forest.

    _It has been said, however, that some snakes will drink from a cow’s udder.

    o There, I smell some “snaky” reasoning. And whether the story is fiction or fact, the fact remains that we aren’t reptiles. We have to know what foods human genetics are adapted for.

    _Also, Roman mythology has it that Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf.

    o That’s just it, Romulus later killed his brother; that doesn’t say much for such methods. They did, at least, manage to survive on milk, which isn’t necessarily good for one’s health or for one’s mind. In Vietnam, for instance, it is thought that cow’s milk makes children nasty. As for the she-wolf who suckled the twin brothers, there is a slight problem of translation. In Latin, “lupa” means either she-wolf or prostitute. The second possibility seems more likely to me_especially in that, in those days, prostitutes weren’t necessarily looked down on.

    _One certainly can’t snag you on anything....

    o It’s more relevant to wonder where all those beliefs come from. Whenever food is involved, reason seems to go right out of the window. The guilt arising from cheating with nature means that one hangs onto any system that justifies trickery.
    In light of experiments I have carried out, it seems to me that milk and dairy products have a major effect on the development of untold illness: infections, cancers, auto-immune diseases, etc.

    _What do doctors who listen to you say to that?

    o Of course, they find it shocking. Milk is the same color as innocence. We erect it into a symbol of motherly love. Even the Bible has its finger in the pie, with the land of Canaan_the land of milk and honey. We forget that we are the first mammals who have ever put milk from another animal down our digestive tract.

    _So, you feel there’s an unbridgeable gap between mother’s milk and cow’s milk, do you?

    o Almost as much of a chasm as between a cow and a woman. The proteins synthesized by different animal species are lined up on specific models that are as different on a molecular scale as physical traits are on an ordinary scale.

    _Aren’t proteins hacked up during digestion? They should all be the same once they have filtered through the gut.

    o That’s true for the bulk of protein, and that’s why one can sustain oneself on milk. But that’s not the case for all proteins. Unfortunately, it only takes a minute amount of abnormal proteins to damage our health.

    _Are you saying that a definite percentage of protein in cow’s milk cannot be properly broken down?

    o It’s only a very small percentage , no doubt, but enough to wreak havoc. A lot of babies can’t digest cow’s milk, which proves that some molecules in cow’s milk enter their bloodstream without being broken down_otherwise, those molecules wouldn’t cause such reactions.

    _It has been asserted, though, that the lining of the bowel protects us from nefarious substances.

    o If that was true for all nefarious substances, poison would be unheard of; no substance could have potential to do us harm. It’s obvious that one can’t expect to be fully protected, especially when alien molecules are involved. Further, the bowel lining can be damaged by, say, drink.

    _Do you think that allergies to milk have a lot to do with the imbalanced feed cows are fed?

    o Naturally, silage, expellers, bio-stimulating hormones and antibiotics are unmistakably harmful. That is why I ran a string of experiments with unblended, organic milk we collected from a wholly trustworthy farmer’s animals. In the end, we even bought two goats. My wife learned how to milk them, and so we had milk warm from the udder, hand-milked and unadulterated.
    When drinking the goat’s milk, I seemed to detect slightly sharper changes in taste than with cow’s milk: The former took on an unsavoury taste under particular circumstances, and as I still was quite taken by the idea of vegetarianism, I decreed that it could be deemed a semi-initial food. Unfortunately, we soon had to face facts, and very hard ones too. Members of the family alternated monthly periods of milk drinking to avoid confusing possible causes of ailment. Every single time, the milk drinkers were plagued with faintness, wanness, sunken eyes, the runs, bad breath, coated tongues, greasy hair, moodiness, and, more than anything else, minor cuts invariably turned septic.

    _Haven’t you experimented with yogurt or cottage cheese? They are said to be far more digestible than milk.

    o If animal milk is unsuitable for our genetic background, it might be hazardous to make it more digestible_even should that be of some advantage to our digestion. It is best to keep alien proteins out.

    _And yet, the processing of cheese is natural. The rennet used in cheese-making is extracted from the abomasa of cows. Those are natural enzymes that give rise to digestion.

    o Possibly, but that amounts to getting around protection devices the body could mount against unconformable nutrients. Consequently, since the stuff is partly digested, digestion isn’t thrown off. And that being so, people are mistakenly happy and fail to see that their bodily defenses may have been put to sleep. This will, of course, not spare them more serious damage to the body further into the breakdown process.

    _Apparently, you really believe that milk is laden with toxic substances. It is, however, used as an antidote, which is contradictory.

    o Awfully sorry to have to tell you that milk can be harmful in the event of poisoning since it enhances the uptake of fat-soluble toxic molecules. What is more, you have fallen a victim to faulty reasoning: An antidote is not necessary non-toxic.

    _What you’re saying is that we’ve been led astray. But it is a scientific fact that milk is very high in calcium. Children need calcium for growth.

    o There is three times as much calcium in cow’s milk as in human milk. Should that not give cause for concern?

    _Surely, you don’t mean that?

    o I do. Milk-drinking also gluts the body with phosphate, which prevents enteric absorption of calcium_which may, contradictorily, bring down blood calcium, a well-documented fact. It’s hardly surprising that children whose thirst is slaked with feeding bottles should suffer from rickets.
    Such a calcium overload is, however, just what a calf needs_since it has to build up a huge amount of bone in record time. It’ll have to have sturdy legs to kick predators away in its flight with the herd. Human babies, though, are on a different trip. There is no hurry skeleton-wise. The prime concern is brain development. It just so happens that there is twice as much lactose in human milk as in cow’s milk. Lactose is what it takes to produce the myelin sheaths that encase nerve fibers in the process of growth.
    It’s quite simple, really. A human offspring needs to produce a lot of brain substance and a modest amount of bone, whereas a calf has to produce a lot of bone and not so much brain. Therefore, what happens if you feed a human baby with cow’s milk? The Japanese have shot up ever since American dairy was first imported. I have been advised of cases of children whose diets were based too much on cow’s milk and who were experiencing severe mental backwardness.

    “What milk to feed a newborn baby?” by Professor J. Lestradet, in Journal of Nutrition and Diet (Cahiers de nutrition et de diététique), March 1982.

    “Any kind of milk other than mother’s milk, used in an unaltered state, will cause major disruptions. Differences between types of milk are fundamental.”

    As a matter of fact, there is twice as much lactose in human milk as in cow’s milk, and it is known that lactose is vital for brain growth, which is twice as quick in a baby as in a calf. The writer notes that Romulus and Remus couldn’t possibly have been suckled by a she-wolf since there is nine times as much protein in its milk as in human milk. Such a high intake of protein would quickly have proved lethal, since the liver and kidneys, which excrete uric acid, would have been grossly overworked. Such an overload is already at work with cow’s milk in which there is three times as much protein as in human milk. It is to be noted that the liver and kidneys of a bottle-fed child are 30% larger than the very same organs in a breast-fed child.
    Cow’s milk doesn’t address calcium absorption better than human milk, although it contains three times as much calcium. Cow’s milk contains five times as much phosphate as human milk, and this causes two-thirds of the calcium to be retained in the gut_the result being that a bottle-fed child tends to have low blood calcium. Further, cow’s milk, whether formulated or not, contains iron and this enhances the growth of pathogenic bacteria (which accounts for excretory smells in the feeding bottle). Using partly skimmed spray-dried milk, one is going the other way and setting up an iron deficiency in the newborn, which is, additionally, worsened since cow’s milk protein irritates the digestive tract and causes microscopic bleeding.
    As for salt, which cow’s milk is three times as high in, it is known to cause water retention and high blood pressure. There are grounds for thinking that starting a child out on too much salt could well account for some cases of adult high blood pressure.

    Note 1: No need to make a mountain out of a molehill. A human genome is clearly unsuited for animal milk.
    Note 2: Understandably, the journal that released the foregoing article banned its publication in a lay book like this one. Everybody needs subsidies from the milk industry.
    One is foremost bound by medical secrecy and, in the wake of that, scientific secrecy....

    _I quite agree with you that mother’s milk is best. But what to do if a mother doesn’t have enough milk?

    o With instinctotherapy, mothers always have milk. Even old mothers! My wife breastfed for over 11 years all told, and you can see with your own eyes that she still has lovely breasts. By the way, do you know the definition for “initial” breasts?

    _From an aesthetic point of view?

    o Rather from the point of view of texture.

    _They can’t be in bad taste?

    o No: Breasts can be considered in their “initial” state if they’re not carried by any “intelligent” contrivance.

    _That’s sound logical. But honestly speaking, can women who eat your raw instinctive diet throw their bras away?

    o Wasn’t it Francis Blanche who said: “Madame, don’t wait for your breasts to droop, let them down.” I think it wiser to say: “Eat raw food!” That will most assuredly firm up your muscles.

    _One often sees, with African women, drooping breasts get so distended that they could be flung over the women’s shoulders. I thought that was due to overextended breastfeeding.

    o I’ve seen white women whose breasts had stretched down as far as their belly button, spring back to normal size in a few months. In other cases, I observed breasts swollen with fat, shrink to normal size, without stretch marks. A raw, instinctive diet ensures that a woman eats the right amount of protein and stimulates the clearance of encroaching fat. Muscles regenerate and restore normal body shape as expeditiously as possible. Breastfeeding even enhances this process.
    When I was but a young lad, I always thought it strange that nature had rigged a female body with obvious advantages... that were, in fact, drawbacks. When a woman runs away from danger, with such a bulky mass swinging back and forth, it seems so contradictory to the laws of natural selection!
    In fact, it’s merely a matter of food disorder. Mammary glands absorb all kinds of substances that are taken up from the bloodstream in order to incorporate them into the milk. If the blood is laden with abnormal substances, the ducts get blocked up, the milk flow drops off and the breasts fill up with fat deposits more or less spectacular depending on the case. While I think of it, I must tell you about something I observed that was rather unexpected. My wife suddenly decided to stop breastfeeding our fourth baby, when it was eight months old, to see how her breasts would react to the weaning. Everything went well; there was no painful swelling or mastitis. Three weeks later, however, the baby seemed to be experiencing emotional problems. My wife resumed breastfeeding, although the milk flow seemed to have completely dropped off. However, after only a few minutes of suckling, my wife had the impression that the milk was flowing freely again. Just to see, she squeezed the remaining nipple, and we saw, much to our surprise, a triple spray of fluid spurt 1-1/2 feet in front of of her.

    _It has been reported that Hounza grandmothers breastfeed their grandchildren.

    o It’s as normal for a mother to have milk as it is to have saliva. Milk is equally necessary for the survival of the species.

    _How long did your wife breastfeed each of her babies?

    o As long as they demanded it_that is, two or three years for the latter born.

    _So you have six children?

    o Yes, three cooked ones and three raw ones! The first three we had before we started out on instinctotherapy. My wife was pregnant with our oldest daughter when they found I had cancer. I found it most unfair to have to give up my daughter by reason of oncoming death. No doubt that impelled me to do my best to pull through.

    _It must have taken a shock for you to turn everything upside down to the extent you did.

    o Childbirth also set me thinking. It took 16 hours of torture to get the first child out, eighteen hours for the second, not to mention fearing the child would choke to death on the way out and my poor wife flake out. Talk about nature! At the time, I hardly imagined it could all boil down to food.

    _What with 11 years of breastfeeding, your wife could have worn herself out and incurred severe decalcification.

    o Don’t you remember the chicken producing its egg? I have yet to see deficiencies set in on instinctotherapy. Conversely, I have seen very many deficiencies made good in next to no time. That does, of course, require having wide enough an assortment of foods for instincts to operate and for foods to be eaten unprocessed, to spare metabolism being disrupted.

    _I’ll take your word for it. But if you do without dairy, how do you make up for calcium?

    o Make up for calcium? I would prefer to ask what milk ever replaced in the human diet in the first place! Up until domesticated cows were bred, neither milk, nor yogurt, nor cheese were available to our forebears. In spite of that serious deficiency, they appear to have evolved normal skeletons. Clearly, their food provided them with the necessary calcium.

    _The fact is your children have fine builds.

    o Those who were reared off any kind of cow’s milk or dairy showed no symptoms of rickets, whereas with the first three, who had been given bovine calcium, slight symptoms showed up.

    _And how do you account for that?

    o This was possibly due either to low blood calcium being caused by excess phosphate or to gut contents turning alkaline or, further, because cow’s milk calcium cannot be taken up by molecules adapted to the human body. It isn’t merely a matter of providing umpteen milligrams of a mineral, it also takes that mineral coming in organic form. Chalk contains calcium, so why not advise children to eat stones to grow nice teeth?

    _Chickens peck sand.

    o ... to produce a shell, not to grow nice teeth, so far as I know. Dietary reasoning is typically simplistic. Actually, reality is unfortunately far more complex. I don’t know why pride always eggs us on to believe we know it all.
    I recall a painful instance of just such simple-minded reasoning, with my mother falling a victim to it. She suffered a slipped disc, and the doctor diagnosed decalcification of the spine. She was, at once, prescribed a course of soluble calcium shots in the form of calcium gluconate, which is supposedly a form of calcium best handled by the body. Her backbone condition unfortunately failed to improve the slightest bit. Three months later, because she had turned virtually deaf, she had her eardrums looked at. They had turned white with a crust of calcium! The calcium had got lost in the mail. My mother remained deaf until she died.

    Diseases at the dawn of Western civilization, by Mirko D. Grmek, published by Payot (excerpts, pp. 129-130).

    “No signs of rickets may be detected on High Period Greek and Egyptian bones.
    “Doctors, in the days of Hippocrates, never reported any cases of narrow pelvises. This was only described in the days of Soranos. Bone archaeology confirms that pelvic abnormalities were a rare occurrence and that Greek women were endowed with fairly large pelvises.
    The corpus of available bone archeology data currently available shows that rickets only became a fairly common condition under the new scenario in Europe after the Middle Ages.”

    Note: The increase of rickets was in step with the rise of animal farming. Could calcium possibly not be the boon it is cracked up to be?

    _And so, as far as you’re concerned, milk wouldn’t have been more beneficial to her than those injections?

    o She never gave up milk or dairy_quite the reverse. But that never staved off her decalcification. The body has to be fed every element in a form to which it is genetically suited, that is, incorporated into natural foods.

    _Do you really think that 7,000 years wasn’t enough to spark off any evolution? Caucasians are said to be endowed with an enzyme that can break down lactose, whereas blacks aren’t.

    o Lactase to break down lactose_yet another timely rumor to cheer up cheese lovers. But, as it happens, researchers are in disagreement over the matter. It is now believed that lactase is secreted roughly up until the age of five to break down lactose from mother’s milk, and that lactase secretion falls off with age.

    picture sidebar
    Let’s look at a microscopically polarized bone cross-section of a Neanderthal man’s finger joint: As compared with modern man, the distribution of calcium is entirely different. In the first case, bone structure is dense and haphazard, which makes for flexibility and resilience, whereas, in modern man, calcium has precipitated so much that bone structure has expanded, making the bone hard and brittle.

    Note: Wild animals and Neanderthal man share the same bone structure, since neither feeds on milk of another species.

    _So, all that means that milk is not for adults?

    o In nature, milk is only ever for the offspring. You’ve put your finger on the second objection one could raise; namely, isn’t milk toxic for adults? It contains growth factors that, in the long run, could have unforeseeable effects_i.e. hormones could possibly get through the bowel lining and upset specific growth patterns.

    _To the extent of touching off cancers?

    o That would be a shade simplistic, but the matter is worth looking into. The calling of scientists should be to reassure us that our dietary habits entail no risk to our health. Genetic suitability to cow’s milk, for instance, should have been confirmed. So far, no serious attempt has been made to that effect; the question hasn’t even arisen.

    _Except in the case of lactose.

    o It would be more accurate to say that nutritionists have seized on the discovery of lactase to justify keeping dairy in our daily diet! Now, that is apparently a misguided interpretation. Whether babies are white, black, or yellow, the dilemma is the same: They all have to secrete lactase to break down the lactose in their mother’s milk. That has nothing to do with animal milk.
    In any case, there is yet another flaw in such reasoning: Even if one could believe that the presence of lactase reflected an adaptation to cow’s milk, that would only settle the problem related to lactose. It would be unrealistic to assume that our genetic code had the potential to encode the necessary enzymes to neutralize the other substances present in cow’s milk that are not to be found in mother’s milk. A single kind of molecule that becomes enmeshed in our enzymatic system can entail terrible disruption.

    _Maybe such fears are unjustified in light of the fact that it has never been shown that such discrepancies in structure existed.

    o It has been known, for a long time, that it’s dangerous to give unaltered cow’s milk to newborns. Cow’s milk contains a high proportion of casein not found in mother’s milk. Babies can’t digest that protein and the swallowed mass can, therefore, form a ball that prevents digestion, to the extent of causing death. That’s a blatant example of “unadaptedness”!
    Instead of drawing a lesson from that and concluding that there were perhaps other problems lurking behind it, pediatricians simply decreed that one merely had to add water and flour to milk. In that way, milk became digestible. But, what happens, further down the line, as far as metabolism is concerned? That question hasn’t prompted much interest.

    _And what about formula? Isn’t it better suited to babies’ needs?

    o That’s another glib con. In French, between “formula” (known as “maternisé,” i.e. “motherized”) and “mother’s milk” (“maternel”), the honest housewife intuits no difference. In actual fact, all industrial milk manufacture does is fiddle with the proportions of casein, calcium, lactose, and a few of the constituents in cow’s milk, without due regard for differences in molecular structures. Food is a complex thing. It contains masses of intricate substances about which we can only have a very rough idea. For instance, because the proteins in cow’s milk have been subdivided into twenty different groups, people think they know what they’re talking about. It’s thought that by simply removing the b-lactaglobulines not found in mother’s milk, that everything is all right. That group of proteins is even suspected of causing sudden death in newborns_which distresses pediatricians not a little. Attempts at comforting parents are made in earnest. The pharmaceutical industry marketed formula that contained a lesser proportion of b-lactaglobulines. But, in actual fact, not much is known about the exact nature of the different proteins that belong to each of the 19 remaining categories.
    Up until quite recently, it was completely unknown that a whole range of sugars found in mother’s milk didn’t occur in cow’s milk_i.e. gynolactoses, that were discovered in the ’70s and are thought to play an important role, which is still little understood, in the growth of babies.

    _From all that, can one conclude that stopping the milk flow with injections and bottlefeeding babies was a serious mistake?

    o Breastfeeding is coming back in slow stages. As for assessing the extent of the damage, it’s still too early to tell. The overwhelming majority of adults today didn’t experience much of the joys of suckling. What future consequences will that have for their bodies? I still remember the doctor saying to my wife after her first delivery: “Why bother breastfeeding your baby? They make such great powdered milks now!” According to some statistics, children who have been bottle-fed are more likely to develop cancer. The baby’s defenses must most certainly undergo indelible shock if, during the first weeks of its life, it is subjected daily to a flood of alien proteins_bovine proteins, to be precise.

    _How is it that pregnant women often feel like eating cheese? You were telling me not long ago that such whims reflected dietary instinct?

    o Such cravings are most probably projections of a real need for protein onto cheese, the taste of which reminds one of the flavors of high game that was such a delicacy for our forebears. Or, quite simply, they are influenced by all that talk about the need for calcium and the dangers of becoming decalcified.

    _Presumably, you’d more likely advise them to dig into a fine raw minced steak with raw egg yolk and chopped onions, wouldn’t you?

    o I would advise a slice of raw undressed meat. That would be safer minus the blended egg yolk and relish.

    _That bamboozles your instincts. I get the message. But how can you uphold that meat was one of man’s initial foods? Primates are declaredly vegetarians.

    o Here we go again, back to vegetarian doctrine. Monkeys were long believed to scorn flesh since they feed on fruit and wild plants. They had never been caught in the act of meat-eating. Accordingly, they weren’t assumed to be meat-eaters: That would have required conjuring them up eating raw meat given that they didn’t come up with cooking. Whichever way you look at it, raw meat is taboo as I was privileged to find out when I included it in raw-instinct eating.

    “Chimpanzees’ dietary protein requirements in their natural forestlife.” An excerpt from the Paris Academy of Sciences, 1974, by C. Hladik and G. Viroben.

    “We have noted that chimpanzees’ dietary animal food intake was comparatively low; it amounts to 5% in weight of total intake. Although this is high in protein, it only provides a minor share of either the animal’s growth or sustenance requirement. Tests conducted suggest that chimpanzees’ animal food intake was merely additional to their nitrogen intake.
    Quite the other way, some plant samples turned out protein storehouses. This holds true for baphia Leptobotrys (drooping pea-cluster), a widespread stubby little tree chimpanzees feed on all throughout the year. The bulk of foliage and green stems make up some 28% of the basic weight of natural foods the animals feed on. That aggregate therefore supplies them with their protein staple as it does all the other large-size primates that were surveyed. Fruit amounts to 68% of dietary intake and does contribute 5% of protein (worked out on overall dry matter), namely a third of the overall protein intake.”

    Note: Chimpanzees don’t qualify as vegetarians. But in the final count they probably eat less meat than vegetarians on average, when they stretch a point.

    _Had you initially banned eating meat?

    o Almost every diet-conscious person comes within the undertow of vegetarianism. I was no exception at first. True enough, eating meat and flesh generally warrants due caution. Nourishing a body with alien proteins is quite dangerous. I believe that vegetarianism reflects some truth. It is an experience man had a very long time ago_that is, when he started eating meat without keeping to the laws of instinct. Nourishing the body with a food that the body wants and will be able to metabolize properly is quite different from nourishing the body with the same food when the body doesn’t want it. In the second instance, all kinds of molecules could slip though the grinding mill of dietary enzymes and trigger off devastation, the extent of which no one can as yet accurately assess.
    One thing is for sure: It’s not by viewing the issue ideologically or hot-headedly that we’ll understand anything.
    Getting back to our monkeys, I think we have to stick to the facts. The English ethnologist, Jane van Lawick Goodall, who lived with chimpanzees for twenty years, witnessed, apparently, a whole troop of them dismember a young wild boar. The best hunters in the troop knew how to catch it without having learnt archery. Primates have the instinct to hunt and eat their prey; it can be assumed, therefore, that animal protein is part or their natural diet. And as our genetic code is still very close...

    _Apparently, monkeys eat very little meat.

    o Their eating little of it doesn’t preclude its being useful and possibly even vital for their health. Nor is it necessarily bad for ours.
    As I was saying, vegetarians are right to take up the cudgels against the usual ways of eating meat. It’s eaten cooked, which is toxic. And people overeat it, unheedful of instincts.
    In a great many cases, I have noted that cooked meat disrupts people’s nervous systems, by generally arousing excitability, which has a ripple effect on one’s aggressiveness, anxiety and sex drive, as well as one’s entire mental make-up. I can well understand that some wise pundits centered on their inner states may have condemned it as throttling the spirit. Presumably, they didn’t consider trying raw meat as well, or else they would have realized that cooking was the culprit.
    Clearly, raw meat stirs up no arousal, unless an animal is already poisoned with cooked food_in which case, the molecules that have built up in its tissues will touch off excitability in the meat eater, and he will incriminate the meat rather than the toxins.

    _Is it not the actual killing of an animal that was proscribed by different religions?

    o True enough, there’s something shocking about killing anything. It jars with our concepts of spirituality.
    Mind you, Hitler and his henchmen were card-carrying vegetarians. But they didn’t shrink from mass murder. Perhaps one day neurophysiological disorders will be meaningfully correlated with adulterated foods and the rise of major political trends.

    _Eating meat means eating death. I thought you were in favor of eating only live foods...

    o That’s one of the battle cries of vegetarianism. One is rightly told that one is eating “carrion.” What better way to get you off your T-bone once and for all, as if you had a cube of human flesh on the tines of your fork. In actual fact, meat only looks dead; it’s teeming with life. Think of all the live yeasts thriving on it.
    A cooked vegetable, by contrast, is stone dead. All that’s left of it is a scrawny corpse splayed out on your plate; isn’t that a carcass?

    _A friend of mine always termed every meat-eater a scavenger. Barely has the animal been killed when all kinds of toxins reportedly start work on it.

    o Well, you can tell him that nobody is compelled to eat meat when it has reached the stage of carrion. Rotting meat does, obviously, turn toxic after a while; it contains proteins, but instincts prevent us from eating it. The smell is repulsive; the tongue feels as though seared by the meat. It’s a good job we’re protected against a natural toxin. Carrion has been around in nature for a long time. And that the smell should repel us proves that man is by no means a scavenger.
    Man isn’t a carnivorous animal either. Instincts clearly don’t allow us to eat fresh meat; an animal that’s been recently slain gives off an extremely disgusting smell.

    _Carnivorous animals are said, in fact, to live less long than herbivorous ones.

    o When a tiger catches a zebu, he savors the guts filled with partly digested grass. In reality, tigers are great vegetarians! And cows that graze swallow a large number of insects with their ration of grass. They are more carnivorous than one might think. According to some farming traditions, it was, moreover, common practice to give calves, during their growth spurts, a good two dozen eggs yolks to ensure future sound health.
    I’m not in favor of meat; the less one eats of it, the better one feels in every way_I mean as far as respecting life, farm productivity, the economy, etc. is concerned. But I think that it’s wrong to be dead-set against meat from the outset. In some cases, meat can prove extremely useful therapeutically. What one has to know is when and how much of it one can eat, and we have the answer to that one_that is, we can trust to our instincts, which, to my mind, are more reliable than any theoretical, ethical, or other consideration.

    _And what if our instincts led us astray? It seems quite plausible that meat could pervert our taste buds.

    o Of course, taste alone isn’t enough to prove that meat is beneficial to us. We have to try and see the long-term effects of meat on human health. Whether it is easily digestible or not, whether one sleeps well on it, its effects on physical and mental health, whether it helps one put on weight, whether it helps cure diseases, etc. With hindsight, I have the feeling that results, on the whole, have been quite encouraging_provided one respects instinctive “cues” and that one avoids eating meat too frequently with other foods.

    _Do you hold with Shelton’s theories?

    o There’s always some truth in any theory. Some combinations of proteins and sugars are obviously indigestible and probably harmful if they are repeatedly brought together. I admire the clearsightedness that his books patently convey. It’s anything but easy to make heads or tails of the prevalent dietary morass, especially when one knows that behind cooking lurk manifold dangers. But one can’t apply the rules established for cooked food to “initial eating.” In that case, as in every different case, to be objective, one has to start from scratch.
    I was thinking a while ago about a rather spectacular case of meat eating; a nine-year-old little boy, suffering from nearsightedness, was undergoing a course of treatment with us. His muscles had been wasting for quite some years, so much so that he could barely set one foot in front of the other without being held up. When he sat down in an armchair, he couldn’t get up unassisted. Because medicine had given up on him, his parents had decided to give instinctotherapy a try. Truth be told, during his three-week stay, that child virtually ate a straight diet of meat, and he found meat so delicious that he clamoured for it at every meal (normally, we don’t serve meat at lunch). He only varied to have a few egg yolks and a little fish.

    _Isn’t overdoing it on protein like that imbalancing?

    o Dietary balance, in my view, doesn’t mean balancing the menus, but balancing one’s body_namely, providing it with what it needs.

    _And to hell with dietary theories!

    o One has to assume that all that sustained meat-eating reflected a real need that until then had remained hidden amidst all that habitual cooking. When I returned from a trip, I caught sight of three of my children (the ones brought up on raw food from birth) who were playing a very strenuous round of table-tennis against a fourth player. The game involved running round the table so as to change players with every service. I thought that they had recruited a new little friend among the newly arrived children whom I didn’t know. Drawing closer, I realized that it was that little near-sighted boy who was running about with them.

    _I can imagine what you felt.

    o When one thinks of all the children whose lives are wrecked by that illness, without medicine being able to provide them with a way out.
    Given results like that, I can hardly cast aspersions on meat as do some vegetarians, and as I myself did at one time. Overly strict prohibitions that have no basis in science, are always suspicious; and one should guard against giving in to them or any other form of crankiness.
    With our method, we’ve been afforded further insight_that is, instincts sometimes make meat appealing, especially meat left out in the open for a while, exactly as instincts do with any natural food. It would be surprising if instincts went wrong, and considering the results are good...

    _According to you, then, meat left in the open was part of man’s intitial diet?

    o According to archaeologists who have studied old bones whose flesh our ancestors ate, meat was eaten in substantial amounts some five million years ago.

    _Why did you mention meat left out in the open?

    o There are two schools of thought: one, involving the theory connected to hunting, and two, the theory relating to scavengers. If our forbears were hunters, they possibly ate meat fresh. If they gathered the remains of carcasses left over by predators, they had to eat them when they were in the process of going bad. In fact, one can tell apart several groups of animals. First of all, the fresh meat-eaters_i.e. carnivorous animals who instinctively catch their prey and eat it live. Most of the time, they only eat part of it, beginning with the guts; they then leave the body that begins predigesting itself through the effect of its own enzymes and yeasts that develop subsequently. When it becomes rather stale, it gives off another smell, that is felt to be appealing to a second group of animals including wart hogs, rodents, monkeys, etc. Finally, the body, if anything is left of it, turns into carrion. Then, scavengers step into the picture_i.e. jackals, vultures, etc. who find the smell of carcass_which we find repugnant_most certainly very pleasant, otherwise they wouldn’t go near it. The only thing left after that is the final clean-up performed by maggots, cockroaches, and other forms of life that disgust us, because they very much conjure up a feeling of danger associated with rotting meat, which is toxic for us, or our own death, which is another form of rot.
    By comparing rib steak to carrion, as a matter of course, as your friend does, he’s jumping the gun as far as the natural process of things is concerned and is forcing disgust in where there is none. Raw meat seems wonderfully enjoyable and fragrant if one needs it, when it has matured just enough. Man probably belongs to the intermediary category of carnivorous animals, somewhere between carnivorous animals and scavengers. It’s not by chance if butchers allow meat to stand for a few weeks before selling it.

    _And what of purines? That same vegetarian friend is always going on about the danger of purines.

    o Open a book on biochemistry: You’ll read that purines are bases that consist of adenine and guanine, two of the four building blocks in DNA. Those molecules are at the core of life; they are part of all living cells in plants as well as animals. They are broken down in our metabolism into uric acid, which, if there’s too much of it in blood can be harmful, as can be any surfeit. But we can clear uric acid perfectly well; it passes into the waters in the form of urates. Our metabolism adapted to that condition long ago, since purines can be found in all living organisms_and hence, in all “initial” foods as well.
    I never understood what vegetarian schools had against those hapless purines. Why not point an equally accusing finger at pyrimidines that make up the nucleus of cytosine and thymine which are the two other bases of DNA? Is it because pyrimidine sounds like “pyramid,” and that ancient Egypt conjures up a vivid spiritual past?
    I can believe that once a great naturalist must have opened a book on metabolism to the chapter on uric acid. He must have noticed that “purine” sounded like “purim.” Not understanding any of those kabalistic formulas before his eyes, and as natural fertilizers have something of a bad reputation in those environments, he went off warring, like Don Quixote against windmills (of meat).

    _If I understand your point, in nature, man doesn’t necessarily have to kill to eat meat.

    o The same thing applies to chicken coops: The stone marten does it for the farmer. If the latter forgets to close the door for even one night, he has as much free meat gushing with blood as he likes. I do admit, however, that, in practice, carnivorous animals have been superseded by butchers.
    In the beginning, I had hoped that we could live on milk and not have to kill, but the facts made me change my mind.

    _What is your answer to people who oppose that to what is said in the Bible? One of the Ten Commandments unequivocally enjoins: “Thou shalt not kill!”

    o That’s a slight mistranslation. The exact wording of the Hebrew text runs: “Thou shalt not murder,”or “Lo tirtzach” (Exodus, 20, 13) (“murder” in Hebrew “ratzach” implies violent killing with deliberate intent as opposed to slaughtering animals “shachat”)_which, as far as eating is concerned, stigmatizes, if anything, cannibalism. In the passages following the first giving of the Ten Commandments, Moses, on the contrary, prescribes offering up regular sacrifices. They sometimes had to slaughter an ox or sometimes a lamb (as many as two a day) on the altar, to find favor in the eyes of the Lord of Hosts. As hanging, drawing, and quartering weren’t wholly up to scratch in those days, I think it’s reasonable to suspect that the Everlasting had to make do with burnt aromas and the priests divided up the remains. In such a way, the Bible cleverly solved the problem of protein deficiency, well before the advent of dietetics.

    _All kinds of meats were considered impure, all the same. The meat one could eat was very strictly limited.

    o In Deuteronomy 14:4-5, it is decreed: “These are the beasts which ye shall eat: the ox, the sheep, and the goat, the hart, and the roebuck, and the fallow deer, and the wild goat, and the pygarg, and the wild ox, and the chamois.” I’d be happy if I had such a range to choose from. Nowadays, game is becoming rare.

    _Would you have the guts to kill the animals you eat? I know I couldn’t.

    o The ancients always killed animals according to sacrificial rites. Even here in Europe, a few centuries ago, bears were hunted, and afterwards, the hunters prayed that the bear would forgive them for having killed him. His remains were even piously put back together and returned to the forest.
    I think that what’s most important is the frame of mind one’s in when one kills an animal and that that’s what accounts for so much harm. Sacrificing an animal because one knows that its flesh will enable our children to build up their bodies in accordance with natural laws_that hardly seems criminal to me. Indeed Gurdjieff, a very wise man who came from the Caucasus, said that animals should be grateful knowing that their flesh was going to rise to a higher level once it was eaten by a superior being.

    _And would you think as much if you saw a tiger charging at you?

    o Man is most assuredly not suited to being the prey of tigers, since he appeared on the scene much later than felines in the continuum of evolution. Tigers are clearly not encoded genetically to eat homo sapiens; undoubtedly, that explains why the idea of a tiger eating men seems so shocking, so unnatural to us. Tigers don’t normally attack people. They have to have already eaten a human being once. After that, they do it again and again unrelentingly and become known as man-eating tigers. But that can be easily accounted for: That flesh is undoubtedly the most highly seasoned meat that a tiger can ever hope to eat! The tiger himself gets entangled in the fine web of cooking; just think of all those remnants of tasty sauces and spicy dishes that must make the normal human being’s muscles reek_not to mention their guts! After that, gazelles must taste horribly bland. I think one has to consider things a bit more dispassionately. Creation is so made that all living beings live off one another. It’s like a huge ecological pyramid that was built up over great stretches of time. Humus absorbs minerals, plants draw on humus, animals eat plants, and some animals that are newly evolved live at the expense of the flesh of older animals. All in all, it seems to me that by prohibiting animal protein, one is going against the laws of nature.

    _Still, I don’t find it very natural for a man to kill an animal. To do that, he needs a bow and arrow, a gun, or a knife. Those weapons are intelligent contrivances as well that weren’t part of the “initial” background.

    o Be careful, you’re lapsing into philosophy. It’s not because I need some contrivance to capture or kill an animal that its meat won’t constitute an “initial” food as far as my metabolism is concerned. If a man is handicapped and can no longer go and get his own food, isn’t it better to make sure he is brought his daily ration, or should one explain to him that, given his condition, he should be able to get by on not eating? Do we know anything about the running techniques of our pre-intelligent ancestors, or what their strength was based on, if not the fact that they used stones, sticks, and tricks as some predators do? We have no training in the matter, our bodies have been built up on the basis of degenerate food; we can’t take ourselves as a reference. Maybe our physical strength has declined because our intelligence has taken over: skulduggery has overtaken strength.
    To reiterate what I’ve said before, our genetic code is what matters: Are we equipped with the teeth, the digestive organs and, above all, the enzymes and the necessary means of clearance to break down meat without causing harm to ourselves?

    _Vegetarians point out, on that count, that our canine teeth are too small and that our intestines, being ten meters long, are too long to digest meat_which accounts for fermentation in the bowels that one can diagnose through smelly feces.

    o They can rest easy. Human canines have what it takes, and to spare, to bite into a whole leg of lamb or into a chicken drumstick.

    _Yuck! Can you eat chicken raw?

    o When the body needs it, even fowl_surprising as it may seem_takes on a very good taste. Why should there be any difference between one meat and another? It appears that we are even more suited for the flesh of fowl than that of mammals_possibly because it’s easier to find injured birds in nature. Flying has always been a dangerous sport. Think of François Truffaut’s celebrated savage child (“l’enfant sauvage”) from the Aveyron, who could catch and pluck birds with surprising skill.

    _In that case, I’m not yet mature enough to switch over to your diet.

    o Except you’re forgetting the most important thing: With instinctotherapy, you only eat what’s good! If any food seems bad to you, you don’t eat it. The day raw turkey grabs you, or duck, left out in the open for a while, appeals to you more than the best prepared duck in orange sauce, you’ll see all your preconceptions disappear into thin air. People always assume that one has to polish off everything on the table. Instincts, on the contrary, restore the freedom of pleasure.
    Moreover, I insist on reassuring you as regards the length of your intestines. They are exactly 6.15 meters long (15.52 feet) and have everything it takes to digest what your palate control allows to get in. Its functioning was fine-tuned over a period of millions of years. All that squabbling over length is nonsens: Every living species is suited to the length of its intestines and vice versa! Food doesn’t freely ferment as it haphazardly makes its way through the bowel; intestinal flora is remarkably stable, contrary to what was once thought. The replication of germs is strictly kept down by regulatory factors that themselves had been genetically encoded.

    _They were encoded with information for “initial” foods, if I think along your lines_which still leaves us in a quagmire over meat, if meat in fact doesn’t belong with “initial” foods.

    o Ultimately, only experience can decide. Cooked meat causes no end of problems. Not so with raw meat, so long as the animal has been properly fed. It’s clear that the wrench in the works is due to adulteration and not to the meat itself.
    In point of fact, the issue of meat-eating would have never arisen, had it not been for cooking. Short-circuiting our instincts leaves us in utter darkness. No longer can we tell good from bad. We are reduced to endless dietary conjecture that is either dubious or contradictory and, in any case, so involved as to defy being put into practice. Babies can see the light better than we can. Many’s the time we’ve seen a suckling drop the breast when its mother bit into a fruit. The fragrance thus released wafts up to the child’s nostrils, his instincts make the milk taste aversive, and he won’t let up crying until his request for fruit is fulfilled.
    As it happens, a baby a few weeks old will react the same to his mother biting into some meat. He cries blue murder for it and settles down directly the coveted morsel lands in his mouth. He then sucks and chews it protractedly and drops off like an angel, in spite of the strip of carrion locked between his murderous jaws.
    Quite frankly, I think it best to drop prejudices and stick to facts. I am bound to say we have recorded the most arresting recoveries ever since we shelved dairy and reinstated animal protein. We are talking about recoveries from leukemia, cancer, disseminated lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, and so on.

    _You surprise me. It is known fact that the incidence of cancer is higher in countries where people eat more protein. So, how can you talk about curing cancer on a diet loaded with all kinds of protein like meat, poultry, eggs, all sorts of fish, mollusks_and why not insects while you’re at it?

    o Quite right. Some locusts release a most delightful chocolaty flavor even John the Baptist didn’t look down his nose at. If, like our fellow primates, we went in for insects a little more, we might be able to dispense with meat. After all, we must be better adapted to eating insects than elephant meat.

    _Could that be the answer to vegetarianism? Do you honestly believe diet holds the key to curing terminal diseases?

    o Facts speak for themselves, but I make no explicit claims. Wouldn’t want to risk lining up for indictment as a miracle-curer. Nevertheless, statistics are currently advertising the close link between cancer and diet. Statistically, overeating protein seems a contributory factor, but I would guard against sweeping statements. I have known patients recover from cancer with terminal prognosis, instinctively clamoring for large amount of raw meat. We had one such person here, an architect with terminal cancer three years after initial surgery on the bowel. His left lung was full, subsequent to a discharge due to pleural cancer. He had two secondaries in his right lung and some kind of melanoma on one of his fingers. In his very first week on instinctotherapy, he took to eating almost 1 1/2 pounds of raw beef daily and carried on for several months. Within weeks, his left lung had deflated and the gradual subsidence of his pleural tumor showed up on x-rays. The secondaries in his right lung also went down, as did the growth on his finger, with the skin resuming a healthy appearance. We actually witnessed little white spots bespeckling the brown tumor and joining up as they would in gel-cultured cells, with normal cells having apparently developed from a few healthy cells. After seven months, the man’s condition had improved enough for him to go back to work.
    To point out an interesting detail, during that period, the grey hair, that grizzled that 50 year-old man’s temples, had turned dark again, so that when I saw him come back, I mistook him for his younger brother.

    _So, raw meat should be recommended for all cancer patients, should it?

    o Certainly not. Instinct should be recommended to them. By being in tune with their bodies, they can daily discover their food-drug, which is always unforeseeable. Every general statement deflects us from the reality of our present needs, that are always varying and different from one minute to the next. Even if a particular cancer patient is cured after eating a diet of raw meat, that same diet could prove dangerous for another patient. And conversely, even if eating meat is apparently statistically linked to the development of cancer, one cannot conclude that it is useful to prevent a particular cancer patient from getting it. The problem is the same every time it’s a matter of advising a food or prescribing a drug.

    _Are you attacking, then, the very principle behind prescription?

    o Diet and medicine are, by nature, founded on generalities.

    _And does instinct provide the answer?

    o It’s the only thing than can. Yet, many other mistakes are made in statistical reasonings. For instance, in most studies conducted on the connection between food and cancer, meat protein and milk protein are lumped together haphazardly. Ensuingly, the conclusions come to are generally blurred.
    Imagine for a moment that milk causes cancer and that meat is necessary to be cured. The rate of cancer would thus record an increase in areas where people ate a lot of protein due to the fact that, on average, they eat a lot of dairy. However, by indiscriminately indicting all the different sources of protein, statistics encourage patients to give up meat.
    One thing has to be made clear: Statistics can only confirm or refute pre-existing theories. As milk and meat have never been told apart from the point of view of genetic adaptation, overall statistics concerning amount of protein intake can only add to the confusion that cancer research specialists are miring in. From the outset, the viewpoint of instinctotherapy keeps us well above this kind of problem; there’s no longer any question of advocating or prohibiting any food but simply of restoring to everyone the exercise of the freedom of instinct. The body has the right to get what it needs, whether that be meat or any other natural food.

    _Have you witnessed any other recoveries connected with copious meat eating?

    o That can happen, with cases of leukemia, epilepsy, depression, allergy, myasthenia gravis, multiple sclerosis, etc.
    But, mind you, it doesn’t just take eating meat to cure those diseases! In a general way, one would be deluding oneself if one thought that a particular food correlated with a given disease and that all one had to do was eat it to cure the disease. Things aren’t that simple. Depending on whether one is deficient or toxemic, a whole range of food in a given order will be needed, each food eaten the right amount of, and at the right moment, in order to restore health. As soon as conditions come right, recovery will be under way. But there can be no prior marching orders. Every individual practice will necessarily be different. Nature is complex and especially so when out of synch. There is no linear cause yielding a constant effect in two different people. A single shift in someone’s health background may determine a variety of diseases, and likewise deteriorations of various kinds may cause a single disease. Basically, there can be no mathematically predictable dietary prescription based on diagnosis.

    _I’m trying to understand.

    o Instinctotherapy goes against the grain of the principle underlying every medical and dietary practice, in the diagnosis-prescription twosome. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? There can be no urging: here, take this, it works wonders for...

    _Makes one feel as if the rug had been swept from under one’s feet.

    o And so it should. We all unconsciously seek certainties. Beetroot works wonders against cancer. That’s how people delude themselves into thinking themselves safe. So that when we are stricken by disease, we ‘ll know what to push for. Beetroot will make up for our mistakes. We’ll have the redeemer within reach. The truth, however, is far more complex. Try flicking through a textbook on metabolism and you’ll get the picture.

    _You mean I won’t see a thing in it. Chemistry is Greek to me.

    o Well, at least you’ll figure out why doctors don’t grasp a thing about the question of health! The human machine is far too complicated, every situation is individual, with far too many unknown quantities. One is reduced to guesstimates, and forever thinking one has hit on a miracle cure. Unfortunately, fine theories never keep any promises.

    _Are you poised to make your system into yet another miracle-cure?

    o I don’t believe that instinctotherapy could fall victim to such a trap, since instinctotherapy is based on querying. Its premise is to dispute that “non-initial” food is truly adapted to us genetically. Beyond our stark challenge, experience has to provide the answers, and why not start with personal experience? Everyone can discover for themselves exactly how dietary instincts operate, and later, reflect on the improvements in health they have felt, and whether they are dealing with minor complaints or major diseases.

    _You do claim, however, not in so many words, of course, that instinctotherapy can cure anything.

    o I think that a diet that is in keeping with natural laws of nutrition can only help restore the soundness of one’s diathesis and, hence, improve prognosis for most diseases.
    It is always assumed that disease merely results from extraneous pathogenic factors. And yet, it is clear that the shift toward cure or deterioration, depends on the balance struck between the body’s immune potential and destructive outer forces. Therefore, no stone should be left unturned, not only in an attempt to curb destructive outer forces, but also to improve one’s diathesis. It’s typically not feasible to change much in pathological factors (at least without impairing the body’s integrity_just think of antibiotics, antivirals, antimitotics, fungicides, anthelmintics, etc). It’s in our interest to improve our diathesis as much as possible. Now, one’s diathesis, in turn, depends largely on two factors: 1) genetics and 2) nutrition. As regards genetics, there’s little to be done about that at this point in time. So, ultimately, dietary factors will be decisive! The problem involves affording the body the necessary nutrients that will restore health. And this, I believe, instinctotherapy can do more quickly and unfailingly than any conventional prescription.

    Diet and cancer. L. Cohen “In favor of Science,” Jan. 1988, p. 20.

    “The right kind of diet might help reduce the number of dietary cancers. Such nutritional advice is backed up by epidemiological surveys and, as yet, limited though promising experiments on animals.”
    Within the evolutionary timespan, human diet has very recently altered and very fast at that. Anthropological investigations of human diet in twentieth century hunter-fruit pickers like the Kalahari Desert Bushmen in South Africa, distill a clear picture of evolution in human diet and the possible impact of dietary changes. On the basis of collated data, Boyd Eaton and Malvin Konner of Emory University infer that prehistoric men living under temperate climes ate 20% of their intake in fats. This amounts to approximately half the amount Americans eat. Moreover, prehistoric men ate proportionately more unsaturated fats than we do. They ate around 45 grams of fiber a day (as against Americans who eat 15 grams or less) and four times as much vitamin C.
    If modern man (Homo sapiens) well and truly appeared on Earth some 30-50,000 years ago, for upwards of 90% of his history, the human race have eaten a vitamin C, calcium-, fiber-rich diet, which was also a low-fat one. In other words, modern man is now eating out of step metabolically and digestively as compared to the way he used to eat. The fruit-picking hunters’ diet still endured (incorporating only minor changes when agriculture came in on the scene about 10,000 years ago) up until 250 years ago. At the time, the Industrial Revolution worked a thorough change into human dietary patterns. People started eating more fat, less roughage, more refined sugar and fewer starchy carbohydrates. We are saying that modern man’s diet is abnormal. His prehistoric physiology has to make do with a grossly unsuitable diet. It is suspected that dietary changes connected to a sedentary lifestyle have given a fillip to the size of the human frame, but have also nudged up obesity, speedy maturation in young people and chronic diseases like coronary thrombosis and cancer. Those diseases occurred less commonly even in the elderly in Western culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and are still almost unheard of in present-day fruit-picking hunters.

    Note 1: It is especially worth noting the stop-the-presses wording of the opening lines: “The right kind of diet might help reduce the number of dietary cancers.” That is not unlike a statement of the obvious!

    Note 2: Scientific advances each year bring more grist to the mill of basic raw instinct nutritional principles. One’s best bet is, therefore, to stand by those principles for the time being, biding our time until science even further confirms them.

    o It’s impossible, from the outside, to know exactly what is happening within a body. The complexity of vital processes goes far beyond our ken. For nutrition alone, there are more than two thousand different enzymes at work. And those fermenting agents are not merely the simple substances they were once thought to be! Every day, on a microscopic level, far more complex processes, unexpected attributes, and what look like innumerable sleights of hand, are brought to light. The most highly educated doctor would be up the creek.
    As for instincts, they are intimately in step with what goes on inside the body. Instinct has had millions of years to learn how to recognize all the useful data and monitor _like a huge computer _the daily intake of fuel, lubricants, building materials, tools, mending equipment, and anything that will make for the best and quickest restoration. Instinct never errs in diagnosis. Instinct steps in before diseases breaks out. Instinct keeps up with changes the body undergoes from one minute to the next. It takes care of everything: from calorie intake, balancing sugars, fats, and protein, intake of water, vitamins, mineral salts, minerals, medicinal substances_not to mention everything medicine hasn’t yet discovered. I don’t believe there’s a better doctor than instinct.
    And, instinct is a doctor that doesn’t land you with a bill, but rather added pleasure.

    _What appeals to me in your approach is that I’m allowed to find within myself the doctor that I have always looked for without.

    o I think that’s the most crucial point: learning how to stop relying on outside help, to stop being tied to medicine’s apron strings, to recognize that nature has foreseen everything, that nature has encoded within us everything necessary to maintain proper health, that one doesn’t have to go on racking one’s brains for answers_with all the attending risk of error_but that those answers are given to us through bodily contentment.

    _In short, instinctotherapy is no therapy, strictly speaking.

    o Of course not, therapy involves administering treatment, tacking on some kind of outside contrivance. Instinctotherapy entails doing away with every contrivance that might lead the body astray, in order to enable the body to find the highway to good health all on its own. That means giving freedom of health back to the body.

    _In other words, it’s the art of compelling spontaneous cures.

    o That’s putting it paradoxically.

    _Isn’t all that too rosy to be true? Curing through pleasure_that’s unheard of....

    o Why should that come as a surprise? Pleasure is what makes the world go round. It should quite naturally be expected for pleasure to lead to sound health.

    _A therapy that isn’t a therapy, but cures all diseases, more quickly and effectively than any therapy. That’s reason enough to close down all the hospitals.

    o Be careful. Don’t mistake my meaning. Medicine remains invaluable every time nature alone can no longer set things right. Beyond certain limits, outside help remains necessary. Imagine you broke your shinbone; you’re not going to wait for your bone to heal by virtue of your raw diet! The surgeon in the emergency room will undoubtedly do a better job.
    Conversely, however, to recalcify the fracture, nothing holds a candle to nature.

    _So, ultimately, you’re not against doctors?

    o On the contrary. I only think that it’s high time doctors took dietary factors into account and looked into the consequences of genetic unsuitability of traditional diets. My aim, setting aside any ambition, is to provide traditional medicine with a missing link. That’s not what I would call being against medicine.

    _Medicine, however, hardly belongs to what you’d call “initial.” It’s a kitbag of “intelligent contrivances,” to use your lingo.

    o I’m not against contrivances, so long as they are genuinely ingenious. The only trouble is that human intelligence still seems a dash too close to that of chimpanzees. We only stop and think once suffering takes hold of us and makes us aware of our carelessness. We lack the foresight necessary to imagine beforehand the consequences of what we do.
    Intelligence, undoubtedly, enables us to blunder more than all the animals in the world. Intelligence doesn’t fall within the rules of adaptation, it allows one to improvise all kinds of behavior, based on random figments of our imagination that have only the remotest connection with reality. Just think of agrochemistry: Poisons are devised to kill predators with a sole view to immediate crop yield, and when one realizes that the ecological balance _what our very existence depends on _is being destroyed, one can’t help but think that those things should have been worked out beforehand.
    The same holds for cooking. At first, one only thinks of one’s pleasure and, when one witnesses the damage, one no longer has the strength to shake out of it.
    No, I’m not criticizing intelligence or resourcefulness. Those are the only superior traits we have over animals. I don’t really see what would be left to us if we had to give them up. Only, I think it’s high time we admitted that such intelligence is not very far-reaching when it comes to the mysteries of life, and that our artfulness is always dangerous. We inevitably skip over some natural processes and, because of that, break down rules of harmony that were built up over millions of years of evolution. Cooking, in my view, is the most telling instance of just such an aberration: The skill that supposedly gives us pleasure corners us into frustration and dooms us to disease.

    _And yet, you used your intelligence to get out of that situation.

    o Only intelligence can help us overcome the mistakes of intelligence. Instinct was not designed to solve the problems we later created with our intelligence, as the latter constitutes a more recent factor in the history of evolution. Once cooking takes over, for instance, instinct only gets us in deeper. One has to become aware of the problem to nip the process in the bud. The same problem crops up all over. Agrochemistry has committed us to such an economic system that only becoming aware of the danger threatening the environment and a concerted effort can prevent disaster in the long run. The planet also pays for our mistakes through disease.

    _And what does medicine have to do with all that?

    o As you pointed out, medicine is an intelligent contrivance. It has all the advantages and all the drawbacks. It often gives good immediate results. But, in the long run, the artfulness that it indulges in leads out into the unknown. Medicine makes do with treating symptoms, without worrying enough about the actual outcome of what it does. Medicine hardly takes into account the side effects of drugs. To really know what one is doing when one treats a disease, one first has to understand the real meaning of that disease. It might simply mean understanding a process whose nature we fail to grasp_man is far from understanding everything. Take poliomyelitis, for instance. The first symptoms are identical to those of the flu. As there is fear of running a temperature, doctors freely prescribe antithermics; now, the virus of that disease replicates ten times faster when body temperature is lowered by half a degree. Later, it’s considered surprising that paralysis sets in due to lesions in the spinal cord.

    _Does what you say hold for alternative medicine as well?

    o Every time outside help is called in_whether it be in the form of chemical or natural medication_one conjures up, from the outset, a diseased state. One imagines pathogenic factors that have to be defeated, some disruption or other that one quite reasonably wants to put an end to, and one considers that the sooner the disease is cured, the better it is for one’s health. One aims for cures without due concern for the turn things will ultimately take.
    However, it seems possible that disease is necessary in order to restore health in the long run. Old-style medicine advised letting the flu develop in a full-blown way; that perhaps wasn’t such bad advice, after all.

    _So, if you go down with typhoid, are you going to let nature have her way?

    o I’d begin by trying to understand what was happening inside my body. That wouldn’t be too easy either, since that disease stupefies you. Better think of all that before getting oneself contaminated!

    _It’s well known that typhoid develops from a germ that replicates in the bowel so much so that it ends up invading the lining and permeating the blood.

    o That is salmonella, which is also known as Eberth’s bacillus, and is passed on quite easily.

    _Without antibiotics, isn’t that an infection that often proves lethal?

    o About 6% of cases issue in death_that is, if the patient is on traditional food. The mistake one makes is to turn against that hapless germ as if it was the devil’s henchman, instead of wondering why it replicated in the body in the first place, or, better still, why the body let it go ahead. I’d go so far as to ask: What was the purpose of such a thing?

    _Personally, I derive comfort from thinking that there are ways of reining in such a disease.

    o You’ll feel less at ease when I tell you that the antibiotic that was typically administered against it, up until quite recently, was chloramphenicol_which proved liable to set up aplastic anemia. Between typhoid and leukemia, I don’t know which I’d choose.
    New antibiotics have now been spored, whose unforeseeable effects will, in 30 years’ time, come to light.

    _But surely, medicine has well and truly lengthened life expectancy! In the nineteenth century, people lived to be 45 years old on average; nowadays, people live to 77.

    o We’d live even longer perhaps if the chink in the armor had been closed. I, for one, am very mistrustful of statistics. First of all, infant mortality has been drastically reduced, due mostly to better hygiene, which significantly lengthens average lifespan. That means nothing in terms of longevity, which one obtains by counting the number of people over the age of five, for instance. Moreover, one mustn’t forget that people, having lived to a ripe old age and who lengthen our statistics, were born over 77 years ago. Such results should hardly make us feel that we can in any way predict the lifespan of our children, who are stuffed with baby food and antibiotics that weren’t around in those days! It’s undeniable that medicine snatches us out of the clutches of death in respect of all kinds of disease that, in the past, went awry. It remains to be seen whether any benefit really accrues from that. Life expectancy has been lengthened; that’s all well and good. But, one never hears disease-ridden long life extolled; don’t senility, paralysis, strokes, or even cancer threaten to mar those very years we gain from other quarters? People would typically rather not think of that.
    And yet, that’s the clincher. Between dying at 60 of a bout of fever that takes one over the top for good and all, and lingering institutionalized death after years of senility, boredom, and merciless therapy, I still would make the first choice. Another interesting point: Since the beginning of the century, tremendous strides have been made in the treatment of infective diseases. This progress has been extolled as having extended life span; but as though by magic, the fact that, in the same time, people have started eating much more raw food, has been overlooked.

    _Are you asserting that medical advances were won thanks to raw eating endeavours?

    o It all adds up. I’m not in a position to say exactly what present-day lifespan owes to medical progress and what to greater dietary consciousness, but, obviously, the two can come together. Statistics, for one, don’t tell them apart. There is some likelihood, therefore, that pharmacological progress has been given credit for positive results that are, in fact, due to the increase in the percentage of raw food in one’s daily diet. One shouldn’t forget that before vitamins were discovered and they were found to be destroyed by heat, people didn’t know that a 100% cooked diet was lethal.

    _It doesn’t look as if you set great store by drugs. But if one day you hurt yourself and your cut turns septic and perhaps even painful, won’t you be happy that disinfectants and painkillers were invented?

    o When the “wild child” from the Aveyron_whom Truffaut made into the hero of his well-known film_was found, he had 26 scars from various bites. He had most probably not cared a fig about disinfecting his wounds. And yet, they had scarred quite nicely. On some human Neolithic skulls, there are round holes that some archaeologists have identified as being the result of trephination. The edges of the bone sometimes appear to have reduced, which certainly wouldn’t have developed had infection occurred.
    The existence of trephinations in prehistoric times had caught my fancy years before we started on instinctotherapy; how could our ancestors embark on such operations without disinfectants? I have always been told that asepsis declaredly gave formal impetus to surgery getting off the ground.
    All that becomes much more coherent in our experience, which is, in fact, an attempt at reconstructing an original background; in a body not exposed to cooking, infection most certainly never developed. For over 20 years, we have never used any disinfectant whatever, meaning neither myself nor my next of kin. And yet, we have had occasion to hurt ourselves in extremely contaminating conditions; that is, while restoring old houses, raising cattle, pigs, and horses, bringing down our heels on nails clogged with manure, rusty barbed wire, you name it.

    _You never got any tetanus shots? Horse dung is said to be dangerous.

    o Serum against tetanus can set off anaphylactic shock. As far as I’m concerned, I prefer facing immediate shock with the germ. I fully understand, moreover, the doctor’s point of view; if an accident happened and he had prescribed the shot, he’d not be running any risk. However, if he doesn’t prescribe anything, he’s letting himself in for all sorts of trouble. If I were in his shoes, I’d give a shot for every single scratch, especially in that on ordinary food, you can’t count on normal immune potential.

    _And didn’t your children ever experience such problems?

    o Only once. My daughter Sylvia slipped and fell on ice and was bitten by a dog in the head. Confident that a body fed on “initial” food would recover, we didn’t worry about possible after-effects until one day she complained of a pain in her head. Her scalp had developed a welt as large as the palm of my hand. You can imagine my disappointment. I immediately drove her to the doctor’s who burst the abscess, inserted a drain, disinfected everything he could and gave me a good dressing-down for not having acted more quickly. The discussion even turned threatening when I refused antibiotic shots. I was sure that scarring would occur spontaneously, and I was proved right.
    That mishap troubled me for a very long time. I wondered why that infection had developed, whereas the more serious cuts I had seen had never worsened in any other case. Why hadn’t infection recurred? And yet, a few germs must have remained concealed under the skin. I had to wait a few years before getting to the bottom of that episode. Before the doctor intervened, my daughter had got into the habit of bingeing on sandwiches and yogurt at school. Then, she had decided to stop, having seen the results and felt the pain.

    _Can’t be easy for you to admit what you’re telling me. Not everybody becomes infected from every cut. That depends on the germ that enters the wound, the body’s staying power, etc.

    o Of course. I’m not saying that if you eat cooked food, every scratch of yours will become infected.
    It is still, nonetheless, surprising that for all the cuts, including deep ones, that we have examined among people eating initial diets, we have never seen anyone become even remotely infected or require the slightest treatment _and we have never taken any precautionary measures to achieve asepsis. However, if one goes against the rules of instinctotherapy, a wound in the process of scarring can actually become reinfected for no apparent reason.

    _So, disinfectants, antibiotics, and penicillin, all that has to be chucked?

    o I only once, in all the cases I’ve had, resorted to antibiotics and even then it was for psychological comfort. We had been asked to take on board a woman who was quite out of sorts. She was suffering from depression, she had psoriasis for many years, she was generally faint, had fleeting pains, and had neurovegetative disorders. The doctors diagnosed her as “dwindling.” When she started out on instinctotherapy, she had just been granted status as a totally disabled person. She remained unable to get up for several weeks; I was rather worried about her. Every time she ate a mouthful of sweet fruit, she went blue in the face with cyanosis of the lips and extremities. Gradually, she moved up from a quarter of a pear to a half a pear, then a whole pear _each time, experiencing the same reaction. Soon, she was able to stand up. She was eating over two pounds of pears a meal when the beginning of an abscess in her foot showed up. However, there wasn’t the slightest sign of a cut; the infection had obviously developed from within.

    _From within? A lesion that is hardly visible is enough to let a germ in.

    o This had begun with a diffuse swelling that had gradually contracted to a little red ring that was sensitive to pressure. As I wasn’t willing to take any risks and she was still very distressed, I sent for the doctor who ritually prescribed her some antibiotic or other. After a week of treatment, the abscess had completely cleared up.

    _So medicine can sometimes do things well.

    o A month later, the exact same red spot reappeared on her forearm, narrowed little by little until it formed a nice, little abscess similar to the first one, so that, this time, she chose to let it follow its natural course. Pus flowed for several days, and then it dried up spontaneously, without any need for antibiotics. And this time, the red spot went away for good. The patient recovered splendidly, went back to work, and became my secretary for a good ten years _all the while keeping her disabled person’s insurance benefit. Failing official subsidies...

    _According to your description, one might conclude that her body wanted to form that abscess, at all costs, as if it wanted to clear toxic waste. Isn’t that a somewhat simplistic view that could lead other people to refuse treatment?

    o I’m sorry to say that the traditional medical view is even more simplistic.
    Medicine manages wonderful things. Techniques for treatment are as suitable as they can be for bodies subjected to ordinary eating conditions. Those techniques enable to get round all sorts of drawbacks resulting from cooking toxemia, to ward off all kinds of hazards that don’t exist in a natural dietary setup. Sadly, medicine has fallen fundamentally short of its aim: It doesn’t take into account the root cause of the ailments it claims to provide treatment for. It would , of course, be nonsensical to advise someone to refuse treatment on the grounds that the general premises were wrong!
    On the other hand, I consider it my duty to draw people’s attention to the fact that these theories are not error-proof, and that the therapeutic principles that are inferred from them, though efficient in the short term, might potentially involve serious long-term dangers which no one can as yet gauge. Chance had it that I was led to observations that no one had ever made, given that no one had, until now, acquired a range of experience similiar to mine. I am, therefore, in spite of myself, faced with this problem of conscience; I feel I must inform people, even at the risk of some people misusing the information.
    Naturally, whatever conclusions I can draw from my experiments remain subject to the burden of proof, as does any theory. I do very much hope that more “favored” researchers than myself will further investigate the issue.

    _Has no one, so far, considered your research seriously?

    o Well, I’ve tried to publicize my approach, and I have come up against sheer and utter benighted prejudice_not the least of which springs from medical quarters. The private sector and the media have, however, proved more open-minded. We are now a household word with a broader section of the public. Ever since I’ve been in France, various official bodies have taken an interest in my theories. Moreover, former researchers who turned a deaf ear to them, ten or fifteen years ago, have bowed out to younger and more open minds. In Montpellier, ongoing research has been carried out on autoimmune diseases, along lines that accomodate my contention that man is genetically unsuited for “non-initial” food. In Paris, as well, the College de France Neurobiological Laboratories have encouraged me to undertake, under their aegis, a set of experiments intended to evince the inborn nature of dietary aversion or preference in rats. Meanwhile, some university professors are beginning to give my theories a hearing in their lectures, most notably in Germany. On my side of the contract, I have set up a minor laboratory at the National Instinctotherapy Center with a wide-ranging research curriculum in an attempt to come up with figures and statistics likely to catch the eye of scientists in all the relevant fields.

    _You have plenty on your plate and it’s piping hot, if you’ll pardon the joke.

    o Work’s not lacking. Money is the only snag. For who could possibly want to subsidize our kind of research? Certainly not doctors, nor chemists, nor, indeed, pharmaceutical giants, nor food industry fat cats, nor researchers either, who are already starved for money for their own research_not to mention restaurant-goers.

    _And what about greengrocers?

    o Who knows? Our endeavour is bound to bear fruit someday.

    _Surely, you intend to wage war on cooked food sometime, don’t you?

    o That would be very green. Social tidal waves are never set in motion by private individuals. Nor can even prominent statesmen spark off a war against the better judgement of a crowd. At the very best, they can channel existing trends and act as catalysts in firming up as yet unmustered forces.
    Perhaps, such could be my contribution: To define more plainly thoughts that are somewhat confusedly trying to see the light of day. Subconsciously, don’t we all know that there’s a rub somewhere in the cooking tradition? Even a philosopher like Saint Augustine bemoaned not being able to shake his gluttony. All the cultural furbelows that gastronomy has to shroud itself in, do, willy-nilly, advertise definite unease. Step by step, and against the tide of resistance, science is inching forward and deciphering the causal effects of dietary habits in the maze of pathology. Dietary theory, whether medical or alternative, has already reclaimed some ground by reinstating raw salads. I’m merely throwing in a useful tool; to wit, defining dietary instinct and stating the premise of initial foods’ relevance to our genetic background. In this way, reason can make its voice plain and base nutritional science on a sound scientific footing.

    _There’s another war in progress, i.e. alternative medecine versus so-called official medicine.

    o Not so very long ago, it was guerilla warfare. Alternative medicine had taken to the bush. Their advocates felt few and far between. In the main, members of the public considered them weirdos and remained faithful to ruling medicine. At this point in time, though, the old queen is drooping under the burden of her bunglings. A growing swarm of renegades are beginning to rebel against her czarist diktas. Her love potions arouse suspicion. Her lethal concoctions are coming under fire, and her placebo strategies are gibed at.
    For over a century, she has drummed on about her pending victory over cancer. But truth to tell, she still hasn’t delivered the goods. The glaring failure of chemotherapy and its side-effects, that so often drown out their initial purpose, has caused bitter disenchantment. Even antibiotics land us in a quandary. Germs have the brazenness to adapt, becoming the more dangerous. And to cap it all, most diseases are proving to be “auto-immune,” meaning that our immune system, credited with upholding law and order inside the body, is consorting for our cell-by-cell destruction. The high court of health, upon which rests the very basis of any recovery, is proving guilty of high treason. What a comeuppance! And science stands there like a dunce stuck in front of his blackboard too brainless to solve his set of equations. The further science moves into the field, the more befuddled and entangled that data become, so much so that the whole class has begun to think that there is no answer.
    I happen to think that something must urgently be done. When there is no resolving a problem, one’s best bet is to go back to square one_as one would in mathematics or physics. In this particular instance, I don’t believe there is any way out, short of changing one’s reference point. When calculations become involved, all it takes is changing the axes of coordinates for everything to come right as though by magic. The same obtains when adding up fractions. What a waste of time if one doesn’t, from the outset, reduce denominators to the smallest common multiple_that causes every schoolboy’s forehead to break out in a cold sweat.

    _Do close the subject, would you! I’ve always hated math....

    o Yes, but one feels so much better when answers come up thick and fast! The fear of failure vanishes into thin air breathing comes easier; a weight has been lifted.

    _Sounds more like a madman banging his head against the wall to me.

    o That’s exactly how I feel. Medicine has been banging its head, for eons, against walls of its own making. It has locked itself into a set of constructions that have made health a mathematical impossibility. And why should that be? Simply because there has been no taking into account the common denominator of all the beings in Creation; namely, genetic relevance to our primary environment. In actual fact, medicine has obfuscated the most basic evidence.

    _Hearing you increasingly convinces me that this is a major oversight.

    o A disastrous one, indeed, given the consequences. And yet, Hippocrates had set it all up. “Find the cause of causes,” he once said, 2,400 years back! I do believe that if the initial cause of diseases had been sought, the dietary factor would have very quickly come up for consideration. And everything would have become a far sight simpler.
    Having chosen as one’s starting point the concept of genetic suitability to our original environment, the thread of theory unwinds like a skein unimpeded in its motion. One strikes the shortest path through every nook and cranny of experimentation and logical sequences unfurl effortlessly. Failing that, there is no possible taxonomy of facts garnered from random analysis, reasoning gets bogged down and every possible contradiction and everything is forever all tangled up, as if one had started from the wrong end of the bobbin.
    Just think how much people agonize over a diet. All the effort that goes into ingredient charts for foods, solving the riddles of metabolism, and we’re not through with it yet! One of my biologist friends is currently exercising his wits on a topic that could appear childishly simple. He is endeavouring to assay the calorie content of fructose, a widespread sugar akin to glucose, whose metabolic properties remain unexplained. All his trials require highly sophisticated calorimeters of which there are only two or three in the world. That explains why the work has been in the doldrums, right up until now. He has already worked, for several years, locking volunteers up in this equipment.
    The public has no idea of the effort required to master a single nugget of information; in this case, describing a single molecule. And our physiology is bulging out of jillions of parameters! Knowledge branches out into subdivisions whose numbers are always increasing and ever more specialized. Researchers themselves don’t get to communicate; they no longer have the time to read the countless journals that come out daily on topics that are, in fact, closely related. Nobody can have an overall picture that is penetrating enough to drill through to the processes that lie hidden within our bodies and within our cells. After a century of painstaking labour, dietitians, when asked what one should eat to be healthy, always come up with the same old story: a balanced diet.

    _All that is a bit of a letdown.

    o More like a splashdown! As needs vary from one day to the next, a balanced diet is, perforce, unbalancing.

    _You make me feel desperate! I bend over backwards to balance my meals!

    oWhen I asked my cancer specialist, after my radiation treatment, what I should eat to enhance my likelihood of survival, he shrugged his shoulders and answered: “Whatever you enjoy.” Then, seeing that I wasn’t satisfied, he pulled out from a drawer, a little red box of 24 pink synthetic vitamin pills. I still remember how they rattled in my pocket as I wended my way home. I was unable to repress my rage, so great was my feeling of helplessness; that pathetic talisman landed up in a pile of rubble before I reached home.
    Dietetics has been unable to provide us with the answers we had hoped for, quite simply because dietetics has always stolidly flown in the face of basic laws of biology, whereas what was at stake was getting off the horns of the nutritional dilemma, our main dilemma in life. And yet, they didn’t have far to look; “bio” means life.
    When we talk about biology, we are really talking about genetics. All we had to do was to wonder whether our instincts were genetically adapted to cooked food, and things would have come full circle.

    _As a matter of fact, medicine should have done the same thing centuries ago in respect to pathology.

    o Before inventing viper powder and iron fillings, before launching into endless subjecture on the effects of masturbation_eighteenth century doctors held that inexplicable activity responsible for most diseases particular to Homo erectus_before waging war against germs and other microscopic animals hidden under the microscope and before accusing them of every evil, before attacking defenseless bodies with X-rays or cobalt bombs, before manufacturing an overflow of poisons_better known as medication_and sell them at sky-high prices, before building huge hospitals where patients pass away hygienically and anonymously, before writing the first line in the first medical dictionary, it should have all begun with basic biology: namely, taking into account that all our biological functions are necesssarily dependent on conditions that existed prior to our cooked way of life.
    All our metabolic processes, the structures of our filtering organs, the reactions of our endocrine glands, not to mention our immune system with its full range of antibodies and various reactions, and even the workings of our nervous system_all that was encoded in our genetic background first and foremost due to the conditions existing in our initial natural environment.

    Dietary Dogma Disproved
    (excerpts) by G. Kolata, in Science, 1983, vol 220, p. 487
    “We have always been told that a simple sugar was a simple sugar. But, it so happens that simple sugars have been shown to be as different as potatoes and rice.
    The biochemistry of digestion and breakdown is so little understood that the effect of every food should be analysed on its own. What happens when we eat a particular food is far more complex than anyone could possibly have imagined.
    I hope, at least, that we shall someday manage to pull nutrition out of an age of utter darkness.”
    Note: It might be wiser to start nourishing oneself properly without waiting around any longer for that dream to come true.

    o Well, when the human machine breaks down, fluctuates wildly, or wears out, rather than shatter it into an ever increasing number of spare parts to such an extent that the mind no longer has the foggiest notion as to what reality actually is, it seems to me that man could, at least once in the history of science, have tried to see how that machine operated on initial fuel!

    _And was that never done?

    o No. Apparently, the preposterous idea to eat like an animal never came to anyone’s mind. There’s nothing like that in the whole of the scientific archives. And yet, every child asks the question at least once in his life: Why don’t we eat food the way nature gives it to us, whereas all the animals in Creation do and always have? Why can’t we eat without cooking? What would the effect of that be on health?

    _I heard that traces of cancer have been spotted on very old skeletons that date back to a period when man most certainly ate very natural food.

    o There are a lot of rumors being put out on prehistoric man.
    They have been depicted as unhappy brutes, crippled with rheumatism due to their damp caves, struggling to death against miserly nature in order to scrape together enough to survive on, living in absolute fear of wild animals that could only be kept at a distance by fire, armed with clubs bristling with spikes and anxious to go and plunder their neighbor’s property, dragging their wives by the hair to rape them in their dens, living barely long enough to reproduce, suffering from thousands of diseases that medicine had not yet learned how to protect them from.

    _If they had had plenty to eat and had been happy, why should they have begun ploughing fields and builiding houses?

    o That’s a very contentious issue you’re raising there. For a long time, it was thought that our Neolithic ancestors, about 10,000 years ago, had had to take up husbandry because they weren’t able to find everything they needed to live on in nature. The advent of a sedentary lifestyle was explained away as the need to protect oneself from the supposed dangers of all kinds associated with unbridled nature, i.e. wild cats, snakes, plundering, looting, sex crimes, and so on. Just think of drawings that are supposedly faithful representations whose purpose is to depict the mugs of those hairy creatures; they were portrayed as craven, stupid, and malicious.
    That is all make-believe. Any slightly more recent book on archaeology will attest that our pre-agricultural forebears lived in plenty, that violence and war were alien to them and that they could virtually dispense with work.

    _Well, now, that’s news! I have to slave away twelve hours a day to make ends meet.

    o Investigating present-day tribal people who still survive on hunting and fruit-picking, like the Bushmen, for instance, evidenced that they worked a mere two hours and nine minutes daily! Most of their time is devoted to taking naps, conversing, dancing, and love-making.

    _Our unions are lagging behind with their 35-hour week.

    o It took depicting primitive man in the deepest dye of hapless violence, in the nineteenth century, to enhance the benefits of modern society. What better way to get the masses to endorse the need for progress achieved at the cost of factory work and urban squalor. Still now, our minds are cluttered with all the stuff and nonsense we were taught at school. Cave men never did exist!

    Prehistoric times
    Gabriel Camps, published by Perrin, (excerpts p. 276)
    “How did man switch from mere fruit-picking to full-blown agriculture?”
    Archaeologists have b

    Instinctotherapy :
    Part Three



    _Yes, they did. This time I was much more careful; I stopped every time I sensed the flavor of the food changed. One thing really surprised me. Normally, I can't stick pulses, lentils, beans, etc... How is it that sprouted lentils tasted so good? I ate two small dishes of them with great enjoyment.

    _A fragrance of flower, very clearly. I would have thought they were sweet peas. It's true that with your system, one becomes very sensitive to smells.

    _I'm beginning to see what you're talking about.

    _Is that so?

    _And yet, it's quite usual for them to smell bad so that there's no risk of them being reabsorbed.

    _When you step in dog shit...

    _Would domestic animals fed "initial" food have inoffensive excrement?

    _Well, then, man must be dismally out of sorts.

    _From the word go?

    _That's like the story of the black woman who left her caravan to have her baby in the bushes... and rushed out to catch it on its way down, is that it?

    _It can be dangerous to compel mothers to take themselves too far in the days following delivery.

    _There are mothers who deliver quite easily. It's a matter of pelvic girth as well.

    _And you put that down to food?

    _Is that to say instincto babies are born with cauls on their heads?

    _Is that equally normal for women?

    _You're on the way to reforming obstetrics. Normally, the amniotic sac is burst with the idea of easing delivery.

    _That's encouraging for future mothers... And what did you do to your baby?

    _Was she able to digest such a large quantity of banana at her age?

    _And what happened subsequently? Didn't she vomit? Didn't she have diarrhea? If I'd had been in your shoes, I wouldn't have slept a wink that night!

    _And odorless did you say?

    _As long as they have nothing else besides mother's milk.

    _And how was it for Marielle?

    _Aren't you somewhat overstating things for the purpose at hand?

    _That's unbelievable!

    _I don't know if your ideas would have interested him. He is said to be very much inclined towards table pleasures.

    _Because is it possible to use your system as a kind of cure?

    _That will never take the place of a rest cure.

    _Doesn't going back to traditional food involve some danger?

    _So, somebody who gives up instinctotherapy, then, rarely ever goes back to it?

    _I find it easier to put up with austerity when you know it's not going to last too long.

    _It all rests on self-control.

    _How do you feel about the idea, for instance, of going on an instincto cure for three weeks a year?

    _But what about shopping? If such a wide selection of food as I saw on your table is a must...

    _And meat from the butcher's?

    _But then, that's not very simple if everyone has to rear their own sheep or their own cattle!

    _Is the produce sold in shops really very different from what you distribute?

    _There is a consumer protection agency, all kinds of upper limits on permitted levels of pesticides...

    _You're not going to tell me that you're an anti-chemical zealot?



    _So, how do you manage to balance your budget?

    _That's more difficult to figure out.

    _So, what is there left to eat?

    _Doesn't one develop greater sensitivity to those toxic substances when using your method?

    _How unfortunate we always reason against our better judgement. But surely, such high-quality foods are more expensive than cooked stuff.

    _What's convenient in your system is doing away with cooking.

    _So, what you're getting at is that a housewife's calling is the art of killing for the sake of love or out of a sense of duty.

    _That's women's lib to the power two.

    _I can see you coming a mile away.

    _So, in foul-smelling excrement, there are abnormal residues from the digestion of adulterated food, is that so?

    _So, you raise pigs?

    _But aren't you afraid of tapeworms?

    _That's a blameless record! But, what do you think, then, of the prohibition in the old testament. I always thought it was justified on the grounds of the danger of parasites.

    _Doesn't raw pork have a very pungent animal taste?

    _And so man shouldn't give off a bodily odor either?

    _You're going to put scent manufacturers out of business.

    _Could that result from food alone?

    _So, would our nose, then, be in charge of alerting us to the molecules that have nothing to do with our metabolism?

    _Are you saying that little by little I would recognize the cooking smells that had smelled so good at one time?

    _Do you think that she would have piled up molecules that carried that smell to such an extent as to pass them on to the fetus?

    _And that smell came out years later, in an unaltered form and pure enough for one to smell it... I have great difficulty following you.

    _Do you believe that abnormal molecules go through the placenta and build up in the fetus?

    _Isn't it worrying that a substance as simple as a combination of two molecules should be that harmful?

    _Well, then, what happens when one cooks food?

    _I better understand why genetic adaptation to cooking strikes you as implausible.

    _You're going to end up convincing me. But what's the point of changing one' s diet after putting in the wrong stuff for 35 years?

    _Are you saying that death comes once the body has clocked up its load of abnormal molecules?

    _That's another way of saying that one digs one's grave with one's teeth.

    _Isn't such a model a tad simplistic? After all, we aren't dustbins gradually filling with waste!

    _And how many abnormal substances does there have to be in the body to bring about death?

    _So, it is lethal?

    _And how does it show up?

    _You're doing your best to frighten me.

    _I trust that not all adulterated molecules are that toxic....

    _So, all it takes is a minute proportion of abnormal molecules to touch off mayhem.

    _So in fact, when I nibble at my crust of bread, I'm nibbling a hunk of serviceable molecules, that enable dietitians to work out its nutritional value with, to boot, a small percentage of damaged molecules that can have a toxic add-on effect, though they go unnoticed by the sharpest analysts.

    _Perhaps you could clear up one thing for me. When you say that offensive-smelling feces are due to molecules previously stored up in the body, aren't you suggesting bowels work in a backwash?

    _How very cruel.

    _What a huge entrance.

    _Now, that sounds interesting. Does that mean that your system gets the better of constipation?

    _When the bowel is in good shape, everything's fine.

    _Don't you eat breakfast?

    _And yet, dietitians advise having a good meal in the morning to get off to a good start and the make the most of your day. It's tough enough as it is having to cope with you taking my coffee and buns away; couldn't I at least replace them with a fruit?

    _And what about having what it takes in the way of glucose?

    _All the same, every morning, I feel ravenous, and it gets worse if I don't eat breakfast.

    _It's true that fasters don't feel hungry, even after several days of fasting.

    _If I understand correctly, cooking lands us in catch-22. Cooking induces intoxication that sets off a feeling of bogus hunger, that impels us to eat even more. By eating more, one poisons oneself more, and so on?

    _When people say that cooking has enabled man to survive...

    _Well, what of the problem of famine in the third world?

    _Would that be a real Garden of Eden?

    _But output would never be enough to feed the whole of humanity.

    _That would spell upheaval for all present-day agro-economic structures.

    _Do you think that changing diet is enough to reverse the situation?

    _I thought I understood you to have said a while ago that human manure could pollute the soil.

    _With water filtering systems, nowadays, most of the organic waste is reprocessed

    _Do you think that molecules adulterated by cooking are harmful for the topsoil? Aren't the germs in the soil better adapted than our molecules that have been adulterated by heat? The sun has always cast its rays on the ground.

    _Well now, if the effects of cooking pollution on soils also have to be taken into reckoning, that really is the limit!

    _Indeed, days when the sky is blue seem to be getting rarer and rarer.

    _That problem of the thermal pollution of soils bothers me. Is it true that no one has pointed out the danger?

    _So, the cooking problem has already been set out?

    _That's exactly what you needed!

    _What are you waiting for, then, to redo the experiment?

    _And what of Pottenger's results?

    _In that case, why hasn't the public been alerted to the problem?

    _How is it that scientists didn't feel it incumbent on them to expose such momentous findings? They could at least have confirmed the results; that was a matter of professional responsibility, if not a downright crime against mankind.

    _He was far ahead of his time! I wish you better luck.

    _By dint of polluting the earth, then, there's a risk of a boomerang effect: Will the plants poison us, in turn, even if we decide to eat our food raw?

    _You've got the blues tonight!

    _They are a particularly easy vegetable to eat raw.

    _That's hard to believe. For my tastes, everything is too bland or too strong: lettuce, fennel, cabbage, leeks, chicory, etc... You're not saying that raw chicory can take on a particularly good taste! I have never eaten anything more insipid.

    _I've always loved braised chicory, wrapped in thin slices of lard.

    _I accept that vegetables may become edible, but, all the same, they can never be as delightful as fruit.

    _Ultimately, instinctotherapy has a very simple theoretical basis, but putting it into practice is another matter.

    _How long do you consider retraining to have to last?

    _And what if one starts all on one's own as you did?

    _Do you organize training periods?

    _I see. One has to undergo very serious training. At first sight, one would think it was so obvious_eat everything raw and obey one's sense of pleasure.

    _What might happen, then, if you don't do things as you should?

    _But, supposing I'm in good health?

    _I love creamed cod with garlic.

    _And yet, that's what one expects from a natural diet.

    _So, what about people who eat raw foods without taking instinct into account? Aren't they simply bad instinctos?

    _Did you say "the peak of health"?

    _Do you have in mind the viral diseases we were talking about this afternoon?

    _Can a reaction getting out of hand turn dangerous?

    _This is the second time you've mentioned pain. Does one really fell pain less?

    _Come on, stop pulling my leg. Don't tell me that if you break your shin, it 's painless?

    _It is nonetheless normal that swelling should be associated with some degree of pain.

    _So, you never feel pain, your tissues are never congested, you never feel your blood throbbing?

    _I prefer not trying it.

    _If that's all it is, I very often have migraine at bedtime.

    _It's true that tonight I haven't so far felt anything. But how is medicine to explain that changing one's diet can make pain disappear?

    _How does medicine explain, then, that inflammation is associated with pain?

    _You don't deny psychological influences, all the same?

    _I've heard it said that what makes man impure is not what goes in but what comes out of his mouth?

    _And yet in every religion, a not inconsiderable number of hygienic, dietary precepts are urged on their faithful: Lent for Christians, Ramadan for Moslems, etc...

    _What would you have done in their place? Isn't it better to eat cooked food than starve to death?

    _So, it's not worth being plump.

    _What do you think of people who claim to be able to eat anything without it doing any harm to their body, provided that their spirit is sufficiently advanced?

    _Suffering can be beneficial for spiritual progress.

    _That's enough to make one lose one's faith in anything that spirituality or religion can bring one.

    _Haven't you asserted, on the contrary, that intelligence made us lapse into the cooking error?

    _Do you trust science more than religion?

    _Isn't the current trend an attempt at providing, rather, a link between body and mind?

    _It can always be claimed that spirit prevails over such disorder.

    _Do you believe in the miracles at Lourdes?

    _The fact still remains that Christ ordered his disciples to receive communion with bread and wine.

    _Not too long ago, I read a little pamphlet entitled "The gospel of peace according to Saint John." Apparently, Christ gave advice that was very close to what you teach.

    _Didn't you derive your inspiration from that gospel?

    _That's surprising. The origin of the text still begs the question.

    _If it's not too nosy to ask, are you a believer?

    _You're right. We were talking about inflammatory pain. How does medicine account for inflammation?

    _Can white blood cells exit from the normal channels of blood circulation?

    _White blood cells are somewhat like firemen who rush to the scene of a disaster by emergency routes, are they?

    _That still doesn't make it clear why there's pain when one eats a cooked diet and there isn't on raw food.

    _You sound like a math teacher I once had.

    _And so why should such a thing occur on one diet and not another?

    _They're really going to start acting up.

    _Are you saying that traditional food stirs my white corpuscules to a frenzy?

    _So then, my white blood cells would actually set about vaporizing my own cells?

    _Yet, inflammation always remains well circumscribed, doesn't it?

    _That's cold comfort. To think that soldiers upon whom one has pinned hopes that they would defend your territory set about slaughtering rightful citizens...

    _I used to think that death was cranked up by some genetic timeswitch.

    _Meaning that lifespan is, arguably, in inverse proportion to the speed of poisoning?

    _And what of other auto-immune diseases?

    _I thought it was due to high blood cholesterol?

    _Have you ever treated people with that kind of complaint?

    _That's as good as saying: no more animal fat.

    _Isn't merely overeating fat what is being indicted?

    _That can't be too pleasant.

    _I still haven't understood exactly how arteriosclerosis is an auto-immune disease.

    _If I had to die of something, I'd still prefer dying of a heart attack.

    _Can the brain shrivel up?

    _And with instinctotherapy, do you think that arteriosclerosis can diminish?

    _Is breathing at all improved with your diet?

    _Just like for sportsmen, then?

    _You're not going to tell me you're against sport?

    _What about varicose veins? Can one account for them in a similar way?

    _How do you feel about vein-stripping surgery?

    _All the same, one can't hope to get rid of varicose veins with diet, can one?

    _More scientific lingo! Dare I ask you to translate for mere mortals like myself?

    _Like as in cellulitis?

    _And that can, undoubtedly, be put right with instinctotherapy?

    _In the final analysis, cellulitis is a as difficult to cure as vascularitis?

    _It is sheer nonsense to kill white blood cells, since their function is specifically to protect the body!

    _And how did he feel about all that, from a medical point of view?

    _Have you witnessed other case of recovery as spectacular as the one you've just mentioned?

    _It's hard to believe that slightly bending the rules can play such a crucial role!

    _So, am I to understand that it's rather dangerous to use your system to cure oneself if one doesn't apply it exactly right?

    _People come to you, no doubt, only after everything else has failed, is that right?

    _Have you thought of the number of people that would put out of a job?

    _All things considered, why not teach instinctotherapy at school?

    _And what about tooth decay?

    _I always thought that tooth decay was due to the onslaught of germs.

    _So, those bacteria zero in on our enamel, do they?

    _I don't believe that you don't have some idea.

    _Goodness, you've got your teeth into Pasteur!

    _Sounds as clear as dishwater.

    _What then, is tooth decay due to?

    _I understand your idea. The bacteria from dental plaque could then attack the molecules deposited in the tooth, and mistake them for the molecules to be cleared that originate from the outside.

    _I always thought that our immune system aimed at destroying germs, but it sounds as though you are saying that it uses them.

    _You were telling me that you no longer observed any infection under your dietary conditions.

    _It gives me some comfort to think that you're a human being like the rest of us.

    _You have to know to be able to see it.

    _Admitting milk contains abnormal molecules....

    _From your point of view, then, infection is an outlet?

    _What purpose do germs serve then? Why doesn't the body quite simply clear those parasitic molecules in a flow of serum, for instance?

    _In infectious diseases like typhoid and tuberculosis, aren't there specific organs that are nonetheless affected more than others?

    _Isn't the immune system's calling to destroy germs? You seem to think that it copes with their presence. Isn't that contradictory?

    _Is that how you account for additional infection as commonly occurs in the course of viral diseases? I find your reasoning slightly anemic, considering that such an outcome can sometimes possibly be lethal for the patient.

    _Nature could have come up with a safety valve to cancel out such possible hazards.

    _Well, now, you're saying that our immune system isn't simply around to eliminate germs. Give me time to get used to that.

    _Doesn't that call into question the whole concept of virulence?

    _Infection as an auto-immune disease... That's rather unexpected!

    _You're asking people to turn their usual way of reasoning on its head. Do you think that doctors will go along with you?

    _So, when one has the impression that one has stood up to a germinal infection, it may, in fact, mean that one is unable to use a germ to struggle against molecular intoxication, is that it?

    _If I follow your reasoning, one has to be ill often to be in good health?

    _In the final analysis, everything is a useful process. According to you, then, the concept of disease doesn't exist?

    _Obviously, blocked up arteries aren't going to be flushed clean as soon as one takes to raw carrots.

    _And how did doctors react to that?

    _How do you account for the phenomenon?

    _If I am clear about what you're saying, "impossible" is not part of instincto vocabulary.

    _That sounds logical to me. But, can't it happen that a cleansing process goes awry?

    _You're going against very many preconceptions, there.

    _You haven't yet told me much about cancer; that was, after all, what spurred on your investigation. Are you sure that you had cancer?

    _And were you cured with instinctotherapy?

    _That set you thinking.

    _He should have looked into the case, so that other patients could have benefited by it.

    _I find it revolting that patients shouldn't be told the truth, because that crushes to powder their chances of recovery by means other than those of official medicine.

    _Ah! What a pleasing syllogism.

    _And what happened to your cancer patient?

    _The patients who are indebted to you for their lives are, undoubtedly, eternally grateful. In the long run aren't you afraid of turning into a latter-day Christ, or a kind of health guru?

    _Do you think that a taste for proselytism is instinctive?

    _One could have answered that there was no proof either that food didn't have an impact on that disease!

    _Science ends up restoring justice.

    _Is it now known why food has an influence on cancer?

    _I think I can guess what you're going to say: The molecular morass brought by adulterated food prevents it from being able to function.

    _Therefore, mere overload already sets off an abnormal situation.

    _No, I still understand very well what you're on about. Those foreign proteins, then, should trigger off immunological reactions, should they?

    _Is that what you have already explained to me about non-initial dietary molecules?

    _Doesn't the bowel wall screen out large molecules?

    _And yet, medicine hasn't alerted us to any particular abnormality in the way most bodies function.

    _There's that problem of initial reference point again.

    _Does the same go for the powdered milk that supposedly killed so many newborns in developing countries?

    _Do you have any experience of that?

    _If it can't, does the immune system self-destroy?

    _So you have rent the veil...

    _If conclusive results have been obtained in a medical school, I don't understand why they aren't better known.

    _Shouldn't they have been interested in it, on the contrary? Just think of the responsibility for all those patients given up for dead with that dreadful disease.

    _You have touched on the point you weren't supposed to touch on.

    _So, nineteen improvements, had they carried on with their medical treatments or not?

    _In five cases, however, things didn't get any better.

    _I'd even say that it's quite extraordinary. Shouldn't have all patients doomed by that disease been contacted or, at least, their family doctors?

    _Yes, but in the meantime, patients die.

    _Apparently, you're not yet over your troubles with the law.

    _That's an open breach of individual freedom of expression.

    _That sounds like a terrific breach of habeas corpus. You'd think this was the middle ages. But, what did they hold against you?

    _Didn't you, all the same, take undue risks? I heard Professor Marcel-Francis Kahn say that you almost killed off a Mrs W. who sought out his services in a terrible state.

    _That drug, then, was to decrease immune potential, in order to slow down the auto-immune process.

    _Pathetic. But I'm still puzzling out why you have the law so hard on your heels? Don't you have other things to worry about?

    _All the same, you have to live on something, don't you?

    _After all those years, he couldn't have been running much of a risk.

    _How come he didn't have time to resume instinctotherapy?

    _Do you honestly believe there was a causal link between resuming a traditional diet and his relapse?

    _Quite frankly, don't you find it worrying that relapse is still possible after several years on a natural diet?

    _Come, come. It is becoming common knowledge that there's a strong link between diet and cancer. Science is gradually coming over to your views.

    _So, what you're saying is that the side effects to your theory are all positive. But, how, in your view, does ordinary food have a bearing on the likelihood of developing cancer?

    _Identificatory antigens, did you say?

    _I see. If such proteins fail to be identified on account of immunological tolerance being induced by dietary antigens, the cancer cell won't be destroyed!

    _At this point in time, I'd rather take you on trust. My memory molecules turn scarce after midnight.

    _That would be enough to inhibit the whole of our immune system; that's rather worrying!

    _Have you talked to cancer specialists about that?

    _So, for over a century of cancer research, man has searched high and low, and everything could have been so simple. To think that no one ever even thought of diet.

    _Don't rub salt into the wound!

    _When you said that you had declared war on cooked food...

    _firewars, so to speak.

    _Do you have hard facts to confirm your theory about cancer?

    _Do you think that wheat too is carcinogenic?

    _So, then, does medical progress fuel the rise of serious diseases?

    _It used to be said that having had one's childhood diseases was a must.

    _It's the inquisition all over again!

    _Does one's sexual response change?

    _Well, well. Instinctotherapy always has something new in store for you!

    _So, it's also a matter of diet?

    ANOPSOLOGY

    SYNOPSIS



    There are five main subdivisions of food based on various technical skills that have enabled man to process his food.
    1) Mechanical adulteration: blending, seasoning, layering, expressing, grinding, crushing, kneading, etc...
    2) Thermal adulteration: various forms of cooking, oven-drying, refrigerating, freezing, ionizing, sterilizing soils, heating fertilizers, etc...
    3) Cross-breeding, and some techniques in husbandry and breeding.
    4) The consumption of animal milk and dairy products.
    5) The use of chemicals in fertilizers, pepticides, additives, synthetic products, drugs, etc...

    A food is said to be “initial” for a given species if it is part of the range of foods available to him in nature and if it has not undergone any of the above mentioned kinds of processing technology. Through natural selection, every animal species adapts to the scenario afforded to it in its habitat and, therefore, to foods that it can eat there in their initial state. A change in nature, the appearance or chemical structures of food available might require a new adaptive process.

    Now, genetic inheritance varies very slowly in the course of time (a mutation rate of 1% is observed in periods of time ranging from one million to one thousand million years). In respect of human food, the first basic notions pertaining to cooking go back some two millions years (when the first tools came into being), the use of fire goes back 400,000 years and maybe as far back as a million years, and cooking proper, coupled with the use and production of cereal grains and animal milk, goes back tens of millions of years. There is every reason to wonder, therefore, for every type of cooking legerdemain:
    _whether genetic adaptation is or had been necessary;
    _whether such adaptation was feasible;
    _whether enough time had elapsed for it to have occurred.

    When one goes back to eating a diet solely consisting of initial foods, one very definitely feels that an extremely specific kind of dietary instinct is being restored to one’s perceptions, and that this instinct mainly feeds through in that one’s senses of smell and taste are startlingly sharpened.

    Experience, has, therefore, enabled us to define the law of dietary instinct: that is, any initial food that appeals to one’s sense of smell or taste is beneficial to one’s body.

    This law can be directly inferred from the laws of evolution:
    namely, an animal which is impelled by his instincts to eat poisonous plants or balance his diet poorly will be weakening itself and will be driven to extinction through natural selection. There must, therefore, exist in animals, processes that modify their perception of smell and taste in relation to metabolic deficiencies. These processes, referring to “satedness,” which operate in man as well, must have sharpened up over biological time, in the same way as any other function will. They make up the bulk of dietary instincts and are genetically encoded like any instinct.

    One must, however, bear in mind that evolution has mostly taken place on initial foods. By doing so, it should come as no surprise that instinctive processes go haywire on adulterated food (non-initial), since our genetics have not had time to adapt to them. The existence of an innate dietary instinct encoding is confirmed, for instance, with newborns, who are immediately able to select appropriately and eat the right amount of food without prior learning. A useful food can become unnecessary or even downright harmful when it is being eaten, once the bodily needs have been catered to. Flavor abruptly changes and unpleasant cues make it aversive (tartness, acridness, astringency, sharpness, one mouth’s on fire, bitterness; the texture feels granular, dry, tacky, etc...).
    Nudging the limits of pleasurable palatability is what we call reaching one’s aversion threshold.

    The senses of smell and taste are vastly different from the other senses. They are the mouthpiece of dietary instinct, witness brain structures like the olfactory bulb and the hypothalamus that monitor cortex-bound nerve impulse in accordance with metabolic data.

    With the body gradually clearing out overload and recovering from conventional diet-induced metabolic disruptions, instinctive drives come over louder and clearer.
    Your palate becomes alive to the initial flavors of natural foods, so much richer and fulfilling are they than cooked foods.

    Anthropologically, cooking preparation fuses the connection between mind and instinct, the former devising all kinds of processing devices for natural foods to yield unbridled pleasure, which amounts to wringing the neck of instinct. Pleasure derived through artifice catches our nervous system’s genetic coding off its guard, thus bewitching the senses. The body is, consequently, led to gradual overload and the intensity of pleasure drops off, which is at cross_purposes with the desired effect. As a result, initial foods (those that our tastebuds properly respond to) become signally unpalatable, which deflects us exclusively on to cooked foods: cooking may, accordingly, be viewed as a trap mankind fell into subsequent to the advent of a conceptual intelligence.

    In nature initially, whatever is right for one’s tastebuds is right for one’s body, and what is bad for one’s body is bad for one’s tastebuds. All it takes is giving in to one’s natural bent, since pleasure does not make you err. Such is the law of pleasure, a direct consequence of the workingsof instinct, the latter issuing from the laws of evolution.

    With cooking, one can make something taste good to one’s tastebuds that is, in fact, bad for one’s body: Pleasure leads you astray. Rules, therefore, have to be laid down, and acts of will curtail imbalances. This is obvious in conventional dietary disorders (obesity, heart disease, and so on) and what of the energy expended on health foods, dieting, fasting, and so on.
    It is worth noting that no gluttony is involved when eating initial foods. Pleasure does not side with disruption (a good food is useful; a disruptive food tastes unpleasant).

    Reckoning with dietary instinct decisively resolves the dietary issue. Instead of assessing bodily needs extraneously (which approach comes up against the complexity of nutritional processes and changeability of needs), you need only satisfy smelling and tasting pleasure, expressing as they do instinctual processes that straightforwardly betoken the body’s actual needs and their unforeseeable variation, that can be striking in amounts required. Incidentally, instinctotherapy is no “diet”; it neither compells nor bans. The aim is simply to do away with an artifice likely to play instinctive mechanisms foul or set up metabolic puzzles. Non-initial foods usher into the body molecules non-existent in initial foods which our genetically coded enzymes have no reason to be adapted to. Those “non-initial molecules” may result from chemical reactions inherent in cooked food, or contributed by foods that were not initially part of man’s dietary range (animal milk, for instance). Some such molecules will fail to be adequately metabolized, and will build up in the body, gradually setting up poisoning by cooked food. They will either occur in body fluids (blood, lymph) or stockpile in cell vacuoles, or turn into amyloid, deposit in fats, or weave into cell and tissue structures (membranes, collagen, dentin, and so on).

    Current research into metabolism is still looking down its nose at abnormal molecules, the alterations of which engineer nothing less than a genetically illicit contrary metabolism, or parabolism. Yet, it is worrying that such food “intoxication” should be apt to cause functional disorders that fully or partly account for very many diseases. Such is our definition of a dietary “molecular pathology.”

    Minute amounts of non-conformable substances are enough to induce serious symptoms. Detecting whatever non-initial molecules are involved in all our vital processes may be quite a thorny question. In view of the unlighted darkness in the field, the lack of analytical procedures has been made up for by empirical observation including smelling. Experience has, indeed, shown that any substance that leaves the body and gives off a stench arose out of a pathological process.

    The whole of medicine has been erected without taking into account the presence of parasitic substances arising from cooking that lodge themselves in the body. Diseases as a whole should, therefore, be reconsidered in the light of our premise which accounts for specific changes in an individual’s background.

    Homeostasy (a body’s ability to restore its integrity and balance unaided) would appear to militate for the existence of processes intended to clear part of the whole of non-initial molecules. Such processes are heralded by various signs that medicine in its ignorance of alien cooked molecules being harbored in the body mistakes for as many morbid symptoms. Consequently, among the various kinds of disease, some may be labelled as “useful,” that is detoxifying (or, better still, orthopathic), in that they are intended to restore health.

    Experientially, most infectious diseases are, in themselves, orthopathic, which makes light of the classic conception of viruses and bacteria, that may, accordingly, no longer be taken for granted to be pathogenic agents. A virus contributes a strand of DNA or RNA that appears to come in on the scene as an addition to genetic coding to the cell that enables it to flush out various classes of non-initial molecules. Bacteria appear to be harnessed by the body (which fully controls their spread under adequate dietary conditions) so as to have available once removed enzymes that may break down particular non-initial molecules or their metabolites which the body’s own enzymes are theoretically unable to handle.

    There is every reason to re-appraise the conventional view of various phenomena the significance of which more clearly appears to follow from the theory of the presence of alien substances in the body, most notably:
    _phlegm from mucus membranes which helps clear abnormal substances through the discharge of mucus.
    _intestinal catarrh or diarrhea, that makes full use of the huge surface of intestinal membranes.
    _sundry rashes, clearing various substances in liquid or solid form.
    _inflammation, one of whose effects is to enable white blood cells to percolate through the dilated walls of capillaries in a drive to clean out bodily tissues (diapedesis).

    The body is endowed with a defense system, whose job is to identify and destroy cells and alien molecules, known as the immune system, whose main agents are white blood cells. The immune system, a prerequisite for body integrity, is also genetically adapted to unfamiliar molecules that occured in in