Anopsology
| Created Monday: April 01, 2002 | Last Updated: January 21, 2006 7:46 PM |
“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 oppos