“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.
/p>
Prehistoric times,
(excerpts by Gabriel Camps, published by Perrin, p 160)
“It is worth mentioning the case of tribal Pygmies in the
African rainforest or Eskimos in the Arctic Circle. Without any
major digestive discomfort, those peoples can all dig into huge
helpings of meat, which would most certainly not get clearance
from the slackest among our dietitians.”
N.B.: It is no accident that both Pygmies and Eskimos eat a
virtually raw diet and don’t raise cows.
_All the same, I still don’t think I could ever chomp into a raw steak; the mere thought that it’s an animal...
o Raw minced meat, onion, and egg yolk, isn’t that raw food?
_Of course, but there’s the dressing that comes with it.
o Well, now, the perceived need for dressing “addresses” exactly what we’re talking about.
_How do you mean?
o The taste of raw meat is quite delightful when it meets a bodily need. It’s streaks ahead of the best “steak tartare” you could possibly imagine.
_Quite frankly, I don’t believe you.
o I see. One has to have first-hand experience. Provided the body needs initial foods and is in a normal state, such foods take on flavors unimaginably more delicious than cooked delicacies.
_I was surprised too at the number of bananas I saw one of your children go through.
o Needs vary greatly from person to person and from one day to the next. On average, our calorie intake stands below a cooked diet calorie intake, i.e. as much as 2,500 calories for a laborer.
_And you never have trouble digesting all that fruit? In macrobiotics, bananas are considered yin.
o When one is crammed full of grains and one never eats fruit,
eating a single banana is enough to set off a minor explosion
in the body. That accounts for the digestive distress that macrobiotic
enthusiasts haven’t yet understood. And because, they would
never dream of incriminating grains, there is only one possible
attitude, and that is to assert that bananas are harmful. That’s
a rather surprising conclusion, given that primates have always
eaten bananas!
In my view, the exact reverse occurs: The body responds favorably
to a long-lost natural food and instantly discards the abnormal
substances previously provided by cooked cereals_all of which
triggers off bowel distress in the process of elimination.
_How long does it take to be able to eat raw food without any distress whatsoever?
o In most cases, the change-over is quite quick: a day or a
week. But, some people go for a long time before managing to eat
particular foods.
Practically speaking, though, that’s not a real problem;
the underlying principle of instinctotherapy is that one only
eats a food that seems appealing. If you find it impossible to
eat a particular fruit, you shouldn’t, as a rule, force yourself
to.
That fruit could set off a reaction that is best avoided , or
perhaps you’re still under the influence of a previous overload
of cooked food.
A few world records
held by the pioneers of instinctotherapy.
The following foods were eaten raw, without bringing out any digestive
distress, direct or otherwise.
52 egg yolks at a single sitting +
151 egg yolks over two days
156 oysters at a single meal
48 bananas at a single meal
67 bananas in a single day
120 passion fruits at a single meal
210 passion fruits in a single day
7 cucumbers at a single dinner
16 melons (approximately weighing a pound apiece) at a single
meal (a twelve year-old girl)
16 cassias in a single day
1.35 kilos (approximately 3 pounds) of honey as a dessert
7 liters of water in a single day
* press-time information has it that the record for egg yolk consumption
has been topped by a young man from Toulouse, who ate 96 egg yolks
at a single meal and who wishes to remain anonymous.
Note 1: Although such achievements are uncommon, the fact that
such quantities can be digested without upset proves that instincts
are never wrong. Instincts take digestive potential into account,
or alternatively, digestive potential takes instinctive needs
into account
Note 2: Feats of this kind don’t happen every day (which
is a good thing, as far as one’s budget is concerned!). Most
of them occur in cases of serious illness and they generally herald
recovery or remarkable improvement in health.
Note 3: Only instincts can discover and fill such needs without
incurring any risk.
_What do you mean exactly when you say one finds it “impossible” to eat a particular food?”
o For instance, imagine that you’re still suffering from the effects of a tremendous overload of carbohydrates resulting from your former diet. Your instincts will prevent you from eating foods that have a high sugar content; bananas will taste bland, granular, pasty, and indigestible, until one day, things feel different.... When the overload is reabsorbed, bananas will taste so good that you’ll feel you’ve been completely released from something.
_That idea that a taste can change depending on the state of the body still bothers me. Bananas always taste like bananas, after all!
o Wrong! That’s an illusion due to the fact that every
day you eat your ration of bread, noodles, rice, or carbohydrates
in one form or another. The result is a standing glut of sugars
or starches, which prevents you from feeling a normal instinctive
longing for sweet fruit. All the same, you may experience an urgent
craving for some of the other constituents in bananas. So, your
instinct is both attracted and repelled. Consequently, your tastes
are temperate and scarcely vary from day to day_any more than
does the metabolic state which your daily diet maintains. You
conclude that bananas always taste the same, but, in fact, your
impression results from the contradictory workings of your own
instincts.
As everyone eats about the same, everyone’s taste buds pick
up the same flavor, and they all get together and decide that’s
what bananas taste like. In fact, that is a cultural delusion.
_There must be tremendous differences between people: Some being more overloaded than others must mean that their tastes are different.
o Undoubtedly. However, as you can’t know exactly what your husband, your sister, or your mother-in-law feel when they taste a fruit, you all assume you know what you’re talking about when you agree on what you think a banana tastes like. Surely, your tastes are rather different. Unfortunately, there is no standard of measurement for flavors. There seems to be no possible objective communication in this respect. Of course, cooked foods virtually always taste the same: Bread always tastes like bread. The overriding prevalence of cooked foods obviously fosters the delusion that one can ascribe a particular taste to a food once and for all.
_And what of pregnant women who have a craving for strawberries?
o That’s a good question. When a women is impregnated, her body changes, as do her needs, and, so, her instinctive urges do as well. Suddenly, she may find that bananas taste horrible, whereas she enjoyed them the previous day, or maybe strawberries will taste wonderful. As such phenomena are not generally understood, people will say: “Those are whims of pregnancy.” In fact, they reflect something quite typical for pregnant women, i.e. an awakening of instincts.
_So, should one say that every fruit can have two flavors, one good and the other bad?
o Again, what it involves is a bit more complex than that. A fruit can run the gamut of as many different flavors as there are different metabolic states. I’m thinking of someone who has multiple sclerosis whom I have had occasion to observe recently. At first, bananas put him off horribly; he thought they smelled grass-like and he absolutely refused to eat them. Then, after ten days or so, he found that the same bananas smelled delightful. He ate about 10 a meal for at least a week. Then, once again, he would make faces every time he held them up to his nose. He said they had a putrid, rubbery smell that was different from what he had sensed at the very beginning. Then, the smell recovered its appeal, and he thrived on them once again, but found the taste of them so baffling that he decided he was eating a different variety of the same fruit. And, having met his needs, he peeled through to yet another flavor, this time redolent of rank sausage, so much so that he swore to high heaven that the bananas he was being fed were abnormal, gas-blown, synthetic, overripe, etc... Yet, they hadn’t changed.
_That must lead to misunderstandings...
o Once, a nurse called who was receiving treatment for protein in her waters. She took to eating leeks at every meal, finding them mild and tasteful. Once back home, she asked her husband to share her diet to give her moral support. She urged him to taste the vegetable she found so ambrosial. Unfortunately, he found it so hot that he had to spit the very first mouthful out. His wife insisted and the scene recurred daily, gradually turning the pair sour. The hapless husband always felt that the roof of his mouth was about to sear and accused his wife of poking fun at him; she claimed he was being contrary for the fun of it. They narrowly averted divorce over a trifling matter of leeks. However, her condition soon returned to normal, and they became convinced that instinctotherapy deserved a fair hearing.
_You don’t seem to be taking yourself very seriously...
o Could there possibly be anything more boring than talking about food?
_Your ideas strike me as being rather arresting! That’s the first time I’ve ever heard diet discussed in such a way!
o In dietary and philosophical matters alike, it is still not clear that the senses of taste and smell are different from the other three. Compare taste with sight, for instance. If you need strawberries, they taste delicious and they appear red. When you’ve eaten until their flavor becomes loathsome, without either sweetness or fragrance, they still appear red. Color is an objective fact that is intrinsically linked to an object. The tastes that you have developed depend on your instinctive center, which changes in accordance with your metabolic states and are essentially subjective. The proof of what I’m saying is that one can take a picture of the color of strawberries; one can measure a red light wavelength. You can’t take a picture of a taste nor can you gauge a fragrance.
_That’s a philosophical loose end. I thought our five senses worked in unison.
o That’s what every schoolboy learns, but it’s wrong.
Taste and smell, in some ways, channel the manner in which dietary
instinct is expressed. If your olfactory tract senses the presence
of molecules released from a fruit, it puts out a signal that
is conveyed to your conscious perception center only when you
need to eat the fruit.
If your body doesn’t need it, the signal is cut off and you
no longer smell anything or, at least, anything that smells good.
_No, I disagree! A good apple always tastes good!
o Sorry to contradict you, but to convince you, I must tell you another anecdote relating to the first time I observed something that made me realize how completely relative the sense of smell is. We were storing a huge supply of overwintering apples in our cellar to eke out the winter. They smelled fragrant. One day, my wife asked me to go and fetch a basket of them for a meal. I still remember that extraordinary waft that filled my lungs when I opened the cellar door. After dinner, I brought the basket back empty, looking forward to re-experiencing that sublime fragrance that conjured up, in my mind, a kind of wonderful garden of Eden. When I reached the foot of the stairs, I opened the door again; but, I couldn’t smell apples anywhere! All I smelled was the humid earth of the cellar floor. At first, I wondered whether someone had carted off the apple crates and aired the premises. I would have never thought that my sense of smell could have changed so drastically.
_How is it, then, that you smelled earth which, surely, must have smelled less strong than fruit?
o That was what was certainly most disturbing. I had to admit that my sense of smell had lost its sensitivity to apples but not to other smells.
_Had you eaten apples before returning to the cellar?
o I don’t remember_I didn’t think of it at the time_but I must have and that would explain why I no longer smelled them. My body didn’t need apples any more, and, so, there was no reason why my sense of smell should draw me to the fruit.
line drawing here:
_Olfactory perception area
_Hypothalamus
_Olfactory bulb
_Olfactory tract
_Pituitary gland
_So, even if a smell is in the air, one may not smell it at all. And yet, the olfactory tract is always on the go.
o Since the begining of the century, it has been known that in the brain of a rat, for instance, synaptic nodes readily account for this. Nerve fibers connect with the olfactory tract all the way from the nasal mucus membrane to the olfactory bulb, other nerve fibers criss-cross from the olfactory bulb to conscious perception areas in the brain. However, there is a third bundle of fibers that, strangely enough, connect the hypothalamus to the olfactory bulb. That network of nerves was long elusive of its purpose, though.
_The hypothalamus, you mean?
o The hypothalamus is a part of the brain located right next to the pituitary gland which controls the neuro-vegetative system and all metabolic activity. In 1974, hands-on microelectrode recordings showed that the hypothalamus transmits a signal to the olfactory tract that can alter the pathway of the nerve impulse when it crosses the olfactory bulb. The bulb, in some ways, plays the role of transistor; it opens and closes the pathway to olfactory tract nerve impulses subject to hypothalamic regulation, which is mediated by the body as a whole. The only smells that come through meet a need. For instance, a rat was made to sniff a food before a meal; and there were signs of a powerful nerve impulse reaching the olfactory bulb; and after the meal, virtually nothing more could be detected, although the same food was still put before it.
_Why was it not clear from the outset that smell and flavors change depending on one’s needs?
o That was understood... in the case of rats! But, since this is not a typical occurrence, to say the least, in the realm of cooked food, people still dwell on the idea that man has lost his instinct.
Impact of meals on
the pleasantness of dietary and non-dietary smell.
Physiology and Behavior, vol. 10, pp 1029-1033. Brain Research
Publications, Inc. 1973. Duclaux, Feisthauer and Michel Cabanac,
UER, (Medical College, Lyons)
“The experiment involved bringing fasted individuals into
contact with the same stimuli in the two hours following the end
of the meal. After submitting to each stimulus, the subject expressed
their pleasure or displeasure on the following scale: + 2 highly
pleasant; + 1 pleasant; 0 neutral; -1 unpleasant; -2 highly unpleasant
(...)
The fragrances were selected from three separate groups: 1) foods
with typical smells (meat, fish, and honey); 2) substances not
normally encountered during mealtimes (lavender, hypochlorite,
ink); and 3) empty-calorie creature comforts that, nervertheless,
often come with meals (tobacco, wine, coffee).”
graph here:
The first dot in every curve indicates the olfactory test carried
out before the meal. The second dot refers to the first test after
the meal. The following ones indicate tests that were reiterated
at 20-minute intervals thereafter.
Note: Olfactory mechanisms worked with natural foods but not
with non-foods or denatured foods. These results confirm our theories:
1) The sense of smell relates to food instincts;
2) These instincts are genetically based on “initial”
foods.
_Nobody before you ever thought of doing experiments on such changes of perception connected to natural foods?
o Apparently not. It’s not immediately obvious that sense
impressions are dependent on the state of the body, and, even
less so that the mechanisms guiding our perception can be thrown
off by ordinary foods.
Promethean man’s pride is a bit responsible for this: We
believe in our ability to have dominion over nature. We find it
very hard to face that our contrivances land us in a weakened
state.
It’s easier to think that dietary instinct was lost due to
the effect of some divine curse rather than blame ourselves_especially
when it involves our unimpeachable gourmandizing.
Researchers themselves are conditioned by their culture, and,
even more, by their own perception of reality. As they don’t
sense any clear-cut variations in taste from usual foods and since
everything connected to diet is based on one’s inability
to perceive those variations, nothing, not even science, can induce
one to shake out of this vicious cycle.
In my view, this can be explained by the fact that our psychic
structures are built up from unnatural experiences and that they
crystallize in us the conviction that a particular food will always
have the same taste. In this way, we feel our sense of smell depends
entirely on the object, exactly as if it were sight.
_And what about diet instinct of babies?
o I believe dietary instincts are crucial in the sensory experience of babies. The intensity of taste bud gratification and frustration is maybe more important than sexual pleasure or the lack of it_even in terms of frequency and duration of the latter. Imagine a baby eating pineapple: The first slice tastes great, and the second stings his tongue, whereas, with cookies, the second one is as good as the first, and likewise for the third and the fourth, and his enjoyment always remains the same. He will reinforce himself in the belief that every one of his predictions must come true and the outside world must somehow cater for his yearning. Learning with raw food, on the other hand, might bear in on him that reality is hard to foretell and that any impression of taste is basically built-in, and, also, like any kind of flavor, any kind of knowledge is always temporary.
_Do you really credit that a normal personality can develop on such shaky foundations?
o I rather think that what is, in our kind of culture, styled “normal personality” is anything but normal. How very many of our difficulties are due to the inflexibility of our pronouncements and our ambitions, our delusions in scientifically-upheld knowledge, feeling stuck in the rut of certainties, dogmas, laws, codes of values, and superstitions we wall ourselves into. Unfortunately, the pride we derive from thinking we can harness nature is leading us to a head-on destruction of the environment our survival depends on...
Now, babies are force-fed with horrible bottles of cooked and sweetened milk that squirts through a rubbery smelling mouthpiece that has no relation whatsoever to the contents of the bottle. Babies are left to suck plastic dolls scented with vanilla. If they clamour for fruit because the smell appeals to them, they are roundly denied it, or the fruit is blended with a sickening starchy glue branded “baby food.”
_I quite agree that nothing is done to educate children’s sense of smell.
o Neither is anything at all done to develop their sensitivity. Brain connections have to click during childhood; for that to happen, a modicum of stimulation is necessary. If not, the nerve fibers don’t develop normally and brain potential is stunted. If the only smells a child experiences are those of his home environment and those sealed into his baby food jars, it’s hardly surprising that his sense of smell should remain embryonic.
_According to you, then, from the very outset, one should give babies fruit and raw vegetables so they can cut teeth and smell their food?
o Of course, whereas, as a rule, babies are subjected to the
very opposite of what should be done. Imagine a mother peeling
and eating a banana while her baby is asleep in his cradle. Imagine
she exhales sweet-smelling breath that is detected by the baby’s
nose, and that her baby, feeling an urgent craving for fruit,
starts bawling. What will the mother do? She won’t think
of the baby’s sense of smell. She’ll put the banana
down on a table, wonder why her baby’s crying, take him out
of bed, change his diaper, dress him up again, and, since he never
stopped crying, will tickle him under his chin_which will make
him even more frantic_put a rubber dummy in his mouth, throw a
fit if the child refuses to suck it, shake him up, get upset,
give him a spanking, put him back to bed, and, finally, go back
to eating her banana with ear plugs in her ears.
Ignorance of instinct prevents one from seeing things from a baby’s
point of view. The crucial role of the sense of smell has been
completely overlooked, and its ever-increasing absence from childhood
experiences prevents children from developing it normally.
That is no doubt why our sense of smell requires thorough rehabilitation,
even down to sheer sensitivity which is lacking. Animals pick
up smells over great distances; it only takes a few molecules
wafting up to their nostrils. To determine which foods we need,
we, hapless humans, have to put them right under our noses, carve
them up, squash them, and cut them up.
_How long does it take to recover normal sensitivity to smells?
o That depends on what you mean by normal; let’s say, what’s tolerable. It might take a few months. It all depends on the energy expended. I sometimes witness people, who had almost completely lost their sense of smell, recover it within a few days. The probable explanation for that is that hypothalamic inhibition of the olfactory bulb ceases once nutritional balance has been restored. It is as though, under the influence of daily dietary overload, those people had defeated the efficiency of their sense of smell. As far as determining what exactly is a “normal” sense of smell, that’s another matter. Apparently, Bushmen have a sense of smell that is as developed as that of animals.
_So, the impairment of men’s sense of smell isn’t genetic?
o It can be partly accounted for, at least, through the effect of an overload of cooked molecules. Accounting for it genetically is a bit too easy.
_And what do people do when they are completely out of touch with their sense of smell?
o After an operation that had severed the olfactory nerve completely, for instance, it would still be possible to rely on one’s sense of taste. One could taste all available foods, without swallowing them, in order not to disrupt digestion. Smelling is obviously quicker; with a bit of practice, in under a few seconds, one can find the fruit one most needs.
_And what if you only bite into a fruit you feel like eating?
o Unfortunately, cravings don’t always match needs; cravings are all in the mind; only sense organs reflect real needs.
_Isn’t it a breach of individual freedom not to be able to eat what one wants?
o Of course not. The food most appealing to one’s sense of smell will best meet the needs of the body, and it will also be the food that tastes best. As far as freedom in the realm of eating pleasure is concerned, it is nothing more than a right to enjoyment. Obeying one’s instincts is, thus, synonymous with freedom!
_You do have a contorted way of reasoning.
o I’m not unaware of what pleasure is. I don’t believe that any dietary system can afford as much gratification as is possible with instinctotherapy. In fact, instinctotherapy is not a system; but, rather, disables any kind of system.
_You’ve come up with a new kind of epicurism, have you?
o You could say that, I suppose. I prefer to think that I recovered “initial” eating pleasure, i.e. the pleasure that fulfils us because we’re in keeping with nature. In the art of cookery, pleasure through cunning is sought after_so much so that food is increasingly altered in ever more sophisticated ways.
_Doesn’t the “nouvelle cuisine” already take a step in your direction?
o More or less. Everyone feels the need to go back to something more natural, even the most expert cook. It is a “battle of the raw,” I suppose....
_If I’ve understood you correctly, you hand yourself over completely to pleasure, without any restriction whatsoever. Isn’t that some kind of gluttony?
o What do you mean by gluttony? We allow instincts to draw the line; such an attitude is a way of releasing the body from the bondage of culinary delusion. Things being what they are, an instinctive diet affords one maximal pleasure and I don’t think one could call that gluttony.
_What would your definition be, then?
o Once one understands how dietary instincts work, the definition becomes self-evident. All one has to do is to premise that the concept of gluttony brings two ideas together; i.e. pleasure and harm, as you were just saying. I’ll try and make it clear how two such things can join up.
_I suppose that is has something to do with cooking?
o Imagine that you think fresh strawberries taste delicious;
if you enjoy eating them because, instinctively, you feel you
should, they can only be good for you. Consequently, you’ll
experience enjoyment without any discomfort.
Alternatively, imagine you were to eat strawberries, all the while
thinking that they tasted bad. This time, though, since you instinctively
feel you shouldn’t be eating the strawberries, they won’t
be good for you; there will be discomfort. Moreover, since you
don’t think they taste good, you won’t even enjoy them.
The inevitable conclusion must be that with “initial”
food, gluttony doesn’t exist. You can’t experience pleasure
and pain at once and that is due to the very nature of instincts.
_According to you, then, gluttony hasn’t always existed?
o One must necessarily resort to contrivances to pervert instincts.
If strawberries taste bad to you, for instance, you add sugar
and a blob of whipped cream. In that way, you can immediately
eat them, and enjoy them, without actually needing them. Your
palate is titillated by the mixture, while you overload your digestion
and imbalance your metabolism. With contrivance, you have managed
to bring pleasure and harm together; this time, you have truly
gourmandized.
It’s crucial, I think, from a philosophical standpoint, to
note that gluttony doesn’t exist in nature. Gluttony results
from a faulty connection, as it were, between intelligence and
instinct_i.e. human malice that thwarts natural laws.
_It’s a kind of original sin?
o Not long ago, it was considered a cardinal sin. With the need for progress, it has been promoted to the rank of endearing sin...
_But if you force yourself to eat strawberries after the taste changes, won’t you, at some point in time_if you systematically do that_get yourself used to thinking they taste good even though you don’t need them?
o In the realm of raw foods, habit doesn’t exist. It’s
impossible to get used to a food left in its “initial”
state. As soon as one’s needs have been met through the required
amount, the instinctual appeal of the food switches off. And the
stronger the psychological tendency towards habit is, the more
violent the aversion threshold will seem, since one will want
to go against the grain even more. It’s altogether different
with cooked food. One can get used to eating boiled potatoes_their
taste won’t ever change_because they are not adapted to instincts.
In that case, the psychological factor can outweigh physiology.
It’s impossible to believe that changes in taste occur if
one hasn’t tried an “initial” diet on oneself.
Sometimes, when the body needs amounts of food that are larger
than one can imagine, one stops eating before reaching the aversion
threshold, and that gives one the feeling that one could go on
forever. Try eating raw strawberries, for once, without stopping;
they will sooner or later taste unpleasant and then they’ll
become unbearably acrid and, if you carry on anyway, they’ll
sting your mouth so much that you’ll have to stop eating.
_Is that so?
o It will hurt as much as if you had flayed your tongue.
_Instinctotherapy doesn’t sound very enticing....
o Since, with instinctotherapy, the point of the exercise is to avoid making pleasure lapse into pain, there is no real problem. On the contrary, I can assure you that intensity of pleasure is commensurate to the violence of the aversion threshold I was just describing.
_As far as I’m concerned, I’m sure I’ll never enjoy eating raw apples as much as a nice crusty oven-baked pie.
o You’re always falling prey to the same misconception: You forget that you’re under the influence of cooked overload and that the taste of raw foods inevitably puts you off. Raw apple doesn’t yet taste like raw apple for you.
_Do you really believe that that can change?
o As your body gets used to eating raw foods, your physical overload and your psychological hang-ups will recede; you’ll begin to sense nuances in flavor that you couldn’t possibly have imagined before. You’ll be increasingly intrigued by your perceptions, so much so that recipes will soon seem bland and humdrum.
_What a shame. I liked my little culinary pleasures....
o What have you to lose if you experience more genuine pleasure that, in the long run, turns out to be more intense? Once you’ve understood that artificial pleasures merely delude the senses, well...
_All the same, a heaped platter of noodles with butter is quite filling and it soothes the parts it can reach.
o That reminds me of an anecdote that goes back to just before
I switched to raw foods. My wife and I were already wondering
about the nutritional value of the food we ate. We speculated
that seasoning was likely to induce us to overeat by making the
food more appealing. In line with our thinking, we decided overnight
to eat our staple wholemeal noodles simply boiled and add neither
salt nor butter.
Surely, they were whole enough as it was, incorporating the complete
range of rich and well-balanced nutrients that occur in the husks
of wheat. I can still see in my mind’s eye our steaming plates
pending the first prod of the fork and our mutual grins as we
attempted swallowing. A watery, irony, and nauseating taste put
us off right away and we called it off. We decided immediately
in favor of the traditions of good old die-hard cooking: a pinch
of salt and a pat of butter was enough to turn our plain noodles
into a feast. And yet we were still eating the same old noodles.
Our pleasure in eating was hardly in tune with the actual dietary
value of the food.
Saint Augustine’s
Confessions; translated by P. de Labriolle, “Les Belles Lettres,”
1937, book 10, n°44
(The writer appeals to God)
“Thou taughtest me only to consider food as medicine. But
as I go from painful hunger to blissful satedness, the pitfall
of gluttony is darkly lurking.
For my very progress is pleasure, and there is none other on the
way to where I have to go. If we eat or drink, it is to sustain
life, but perverse pleasure takes hold of us and quite often spurs
us on to do its bidding, so that we are frustrated in having to
stop eating.
However, the scales differ depending on whether we eat for health
or for pleasure.
One might well wonder whether pleasure had actually become a physical
need that demanded further gratification or whether it was sensual
covetousness that hypocritically wanted ministering to. Our hapless
soul delights in that uncertainty, in that it is glad to dream
up a tutelary excuse in finding it difficult to ascertain what
is right for our health. Under cover of hygiene, indulgence unobtrusively
relieves itself. I endeavour to withstand such temptation daily
and so, I beseech thy support. My bewilderment I confide in thee,
not being quite clear in these ideas.”
Note: Prayer was obviously of little service in coming to grips
with the matter.
_So, what about the early explorers and the spice trade, not to mention Gandhi’s salt march?
o All that has made us aware of the fact that prepared food causes a disparity between pleasure and need. Basically, cooking involves making foods delicious that are unpalatable in the natural state. However, going by the laws of instinct, no food that is not naturally appealing should be eaten, meaning that cooking encourages eating what ought not to be eaten.
_How can you say such things in the birthplace of French cuisine?
o Well, if you can fault my reasoning...
_Is cooking actually a basic mistake?
o Put it this way. It is an art. The art of feeding on delusions.
_You’re merciless. All the same, I feel something of a pang at the thought of giving up for good all those tasty dishes that have been lavished on me ever since I was a child. I’d feel I was parting with part of myself, cutting off an emotional string.
o Shouldn’t you try and look into psychoanalysis? According
to Freud, the greatest trauma in one’s life occur in childhood,
when a child has to choke down their early sexual impulses toward
their parents. Typically, when a child is expecting love, he is
fed soup or potatoes. That doesn’t find its way to his heart
but to his stomach, which is only a little further down.
The foods a child is given subsequently register as tokens of
parental love. Later on, if he has trouble coping, feels depressed,
or suffers grief, he will cling to foods that will, as it were,
subconsciously be equated with the comforting mother.
_Is cooked food a token of love?
o Both a token of and a substitute for love. It’s a token
since it reminds us of a loved one or a specific event. It’s
a substitute because it fills a need very much akin to love. And
it is very pratical since one can preserve it and keep it so as
to give it whenever we please.
It is no accident if people say that the way to a man’s heart
is through his stomach. What fills the heart soothes away emotional
dereliction and, conversely, what fulfils the heart helps one
forget that one wants to eat.
_It is well known that overeating can be used as compensation for other things. Yet, with instinctotherapy, one can give in to unbridled enjoyment. Isn’t there any danger of gaining weight?
o That would amount to denying the actual meaning of instinct. On the contrary, eating instinctual food is the best possible reducing diet. I have known incurably obese patients lose two pounds a day, without so much as gritting their teeth.
_Instincts presumably impel them to put up with small helpings, to compel them to start burning up their fat stores?
o Not at all. Eating a lot is what makes one lose weight most quickly.
_You cultivate paradoxes!
o Usually the body is depicted, as if it were, a kind of bag with a hole in it and food put into it escapes through a hole. If too much food is crammed into it, the bag bulges. If food intake is reduced, it deflates. That’s a rather simplistic description, mind you, that does indeed hold for cooked food. The more you stuff feed into a goose, the fatter he gets, and his liver ends up gorged with fatty little white lumps_a clear sign that they couldn’t break their food down any more. Then, the stuff is minced into liver pâté for people to feast on.
_Well, it tastes simply great.
o That’s cooking magic for you: A diseased organ, well prepared, is enough to afford eating delight.
_What are those little fat globules made of?
o Food overload that the liver can’t manage to metabolize and, undoubtedly, all kinds of toxins present in cooked food.
_You’re going to ruin my appetite...
o What do you mean by “appetite”?
_And what if geese were stuffed with raw food?
o I know a few old-style farmers who used to fatten their geese
with raw maize, but they gave up that tradition long ago. Ever
greater demands on productivity finishes off tradition of any
kind. Our grandfather’s liver pâté was, no doubt,
less toxic than the stuff sold today.
It’s true that animals can’t easily be fattened up with
raw, unmixed foods. Such force-feeding could even produce the
somewhat opposite effect of triggering clean-outs and, ultimately,
weight loss.
_Isn’t there a risk of losing too much weight? What if, within a short time, I turn into a bag of bones?
o Of course you wouldn’t. If you do things properly, instincts will stand you in good stead. All you have to do is be sensitive to your bodily needs. As soon as you are deficient or in danger of becoming so, your senses of smell and taste will be sharpened and automatically adjust your ration to ensure an ideal balance. Feelings of revulsion also play a major part in this readjustment and one has to learn how to take them into acccount.
_This is getting too complicated for me.
o Whatever is instinctual is never really tricky. Some people know exactly when they are full and sated, and stop, bang, at the right moment without giving it another thought. I’ve often witnessed such behavior in healthy, old people. They wouldn’t overeat by a single mouthful, without the taste of the food actually having changed. And some people even manage that on cooked foods.
_Does that mean that instincts can also work for cooked foods?
o One’s sense of taste can be perverted since it is genetically
unsuited to foods that are new in man’s dietary history.
Revulsion is largely a matter of learning. Should a food accidentally
induce digestive distress or poisoning, that will go down in your
subconscious mind as disgust, subsequently to keep you out of
harm’s way.
_So, what’s the point of getting back to unprocessed foods if our instincts can make do with what cooking turns out?
o Let me make this quite clear: Revulsion is set off owing to internal discomfort due to indigestion or poisoning being encoded in the mind. Those reflexes act as buffers, which are quite irrelevant to metabolic regulation as discharged by smell and taste.
_And what of satedness? One can feel satisfied without being disgusted.
o Well, obviously. Satedness doesn’t belong with disgust. It is also part of dietary instincts. It would be most unwise to overlook it. You’ll see that in practice, all those sense data come together to lead you on to the quickest way to health. Of course, it will take some rehabilitating. Our senses of smell and taste remain far and away the most accurate ones in regulating just how much food we need. In that sense, food is truly curative.
_So, now, if I understand you correctly, a food can taste unpleasant without it being repulsive or without one being sated?
o Precisely. And conversely, a food may cause disgust or nausea long before the taste of it turns unpleasant.
_I don’t quite follow: If disgust should be less specific, by rights a change in taste will occur first.
o You’re quite right. That’s what usually happens. Once somebody has eaten raw food for awhile, they no longer feel sick unless the food they’re eating has gone bad to such an extent as to be toxic. In the early days, things are different; revulsion or satedness occurs every time a food causes detoxification that could go too far and bring about excess weight loss.
_So, cutting back on rations prevents slimming? You certainly go in for contradictions.
o What I dislike is simple-minded reasoning. Standard medical
practice takes no notice of abnormal diet-based molecules in the
body and so cannot see things in the light of detoxification.
As far as I’ve been able to tell, weight loss can be due
either to undernutrition or a healthy clearance. However, you
don’t want to rush things. When people start losing a few
pounds, they often get cold feet and overeat beyond aversion and
satedness, seeking to gain weight by eating more. But for all
their effort, they step up the clearing process, losing even more
weight; it’s a catch-22.
Subconsciously, there is a fear of weight loss, possibly due to
some idea that losing weight without changing one’s diet
points to illness. Of course, if one loses weight eating a traditional
diet, that shows up some latent dysfunction that warrants concern.
However, it would be surprising for the body not to flush out
burdensome excess when it is fed the food it was genetically intended
to get. Typically, two stages occur: 1) the first one involving
weight loss from discarded flab, jowls, brown fat, and pelvic
girdles or spare tires; 2) subsequently, muscles develop properly,
which markedly improves one’s looks.
_I do believe that if I lost weight I’d have trouble fully trusting my instincts.
o With cooked food, you had to learn to be wary since it went wrong as a matter of course. But don’t worry, you don’t have much flab to fight.
_So, instinctotherapy is the ideal answer for anyone concerned about their figure? Stuffing oneself and losing weight fast, all the while becoming more attractive.
o That is the usual thing, bar a few exceptions. I have known 300-pounders who had given up on everything_diets, fasting, and drugs, all to no effect_lose up to 110 pounds within 3 months.
_Are you saying that fasting isn’t as useful for slimming? That’s unexpected.
o Well, instinctotherapy helps the body find substances that
will release metabolic deadlock. Obesity is very seldom irreversible.
It is stoked up day after day by disruption from cooked foods.
It is as if the body was biding its time to recover its normal
shape.
Consider wild animals. Every individual shares the same plumpness
in a given species_even hippopotami.
Primates, by Christian
Zuber, published by Flammarion, p 296.
“Gorillas are the heaviest of primates. In the wild, males
can weigh between 280 and 370 pounds. In captivity, they can weigh
up to 640 pounds.”
Notes: The same amplitude in weight and stature can be attested
to in the 5 billion humans currently held captive.
_What if somebody is already too skinny to begin with?
o Well, then, they put on weight after a slight weight loss in the first few days. I have often known former vegetarians who were turning into scarecrows shortly recover full cheeks and stout chests.
_Still, isn’t it rather strange that the same diet can make some people fat and cause others to lose weight?
o That’s just it, instinctotherapy is no diet. Instincts help every individual vary his food depending on his real bodily needs. The adjustment that follows means that the body can restore itself to its ideal weight as expediently as possible, as well as be aesthetically pleasing. Aesthetics also falls within the realm of instinct.
_Obviously, in your system, things are very different from what they are on traditional diets.
o Instinctotherapy is the acme of anti-dietetics, since it is based on pleasure rather than on applying more or less frustrating rules. It is at loggerheads with slimming diets or fasts, which always involve punishing oneself somewhat.
_But, you do have to give up all that cooked food.
o True, but you get a better deal. The total daily intake of
pleasure in a raw eater’s day far overshoots anything you
could hope to get from the share of tasty morsels that your liver
can barely put up with. And besides, you get good health on top
of that.
Imagine balancing in one pan of a scales “illusory pleasure
+ sickness” against “real pleasure + health” in
the other, and that, besides, the natural pleasure is more complete
and intense than the artificial one.
_I would still feel a prisoner to a system.
o On the contrary, cooking foods constitutes a system. Only, since you were born into that system and the whole world is up to its neck in it, you don’t notice that you’re a prisoner to it. The proof of what I’m saying is that it is so difficult to get out of, and takes nothing less than conscious effort, to say the least.
_And what about you? Aren’t you attached to your raw food?
o It’s not the same. I’m attached to it because experience has shown me that it is the proper way of eating and, also, because the theory behind it holds water. If I gave it up, I’d feel as if I was going against the most elementary logic.
_Aren’t you attached to it, for pleasure’s sake, as a gourmet is to good cooking? You do say that there is great pleasure to be had in eating initial foods.
o Undoubtedly, but the pleasure doesn’t make one into
a hostage. Between what’s raw and what’s cooked, nothing
is proportionate in the shift from one to the other. For instance,
if one is used to eating initial foods and happens to eat a little
cooked food, then soon one is completely taken over by cooking.
Cooked foods jam instincts, overload the body and make initial
foods quickly lose their appeal; one compensates by adding more
cooked foods, and it soon turns into a vicious cycle. All you
have to do is give in once; you’ll lapse into it after a
few days.
When one gives up traditional foods, on the contrary, one has
to abstain from any denatured food for a rather long time before
experiencing normal pleasure associated with initial foods. If
one doesn’t discipline oneself, one’s always wanting
to go back to cooked food. One has the impression of having to
struggle to get out of a rut, but as the rut only leads to illness...
_If the pleasure one experiences with initial foods is greater than that with cooked foods, that should, on the contrary, draw one to raw food.
o The pleasure is more intense and more complete, but not at first. One has trouble feeling it as long as the body is disrupted by denatured foods. To begin with, one has to fight off temptation for some time, depending on individual background.
_Still, I find it surprising that instincts can’t prevent us from lapsing.
o Unfortunately, they don’t. That’s the heart of the matter; our instinctual centers function with initial foods. There’s no reason why our genetic encoding, which makes for specific automatic responses, should protect us against foods straight out of frying pans and ovens, or, more generally, out of that hapless pan sizzling with surprises, better known as the brainpan.
_Cooking, in your view, is very much a trap then?
o I’m sure you believe in astrology. Haven’t you ever wondered why everyone on earth is born under the sign of cooking?
_I would have never thought that one could live on raw food alone.
o The question was worth asking, obviously. Someone had to be sacrificed to find out. Now that we have clocked up 25 years on it and are still alive and that our children have grown up healthily, without developing the slightest ailment...
_If things are as rosy as you say, I don’t understand what inspired early man to cook his food in the first place. If he found his raw vegetables as tasty as cooked dishes, or even more so, according to what you say... He wasn’t a masochist, after all.
o Let me suggest a possible incident that will account for what might have happened after our ancestors discovered fire. Imagine a tribal people that had always eaten raw food before and who, one day, started cooking_even just one food_either out of curiosity, accident, or possibly because a forest fire had cooked their sweet potatoes to a turn.
_Sweet potatoes? But, one can’t even eat them raw.
o Why not? They taste delicious when the body needs them; they’re crunchy, juicy, a bit like pears, sweet-tasting and fragrant. Like all raw food eaters, those tribal people most certainly ate their sweet potatoes raw with relish as long as they needed them and, once the aversion threshold had been reached, felt their texture turned tough and that they tasted of aftershave. Those signs warn a raw food eater that he can’t go on eating sweet potato, as you yourself will perhaps experience one day.
_I’ve already experienced it. I’ve never found that sweet potatoes had any other texture or taste than something quite repulsive!
o Very true. I should have said that perhaps you’ll discover
one day how good they can taste.
Let’s go back to those tribal people who ate their sweet
potatoes cooked for the first time. Try to conjure up the scene
in your mind’s eye.
_If I understand you aright, they presumably didn’t, at any point, feel that they couldn’t go on eating.
o Without the slightest doubt. They probably ate an amount that far exceeded their need for glucose, starch, or any other nutrient present in those tubers. What do you think happened, the following day, when, as usual, they tried to eat their fine sweet potatoes raw?
_They found they tasted bad.
o Precisely. Their instincts prevented them from increasing the overload resulting from the revelries of the previous day. They found their raw sweet potatoes tough and inedible.
_They must have been utterly baffled.
o There were two possible reactions. Either they thought that
their raw sweet potatoes had suddenly become distasteful because
of some divine curse and that, to exorcise the sweet potatoes,
they had to go on cooking them; that was the advent of fire as
a cathartic agent.
Or, alternatively, the tribal dietitian concluded that “the
raw sweet potatoes tasted bad today because, when we ate them
cooked yesterday, we disregarded our instincts and overloaded
our metabolism and that today our taste buds, which work properly
with raw food, prevented us from increasing the overload not yet
cleared.”
_I don’t believe that a tribal people could have reasoned in such a way.
o Neither do I, especially since 20th century dietitians are as yet unable to.
_You’re merciless on dietetics.
o You should say that dietetics had no mercy on me. I developed
cancer after having been on a strict diet for four years. I’ll
tell you about that sometime.
Our unhappy tribe, then, must have gone back to cooking their
tubers the following day, increased their overload, and then carried
on, day after day, getting further and further away from a state
that would have enabled them to recapture the former taste. Finally,
after a few generations, they completely forgot that their ancestors
ate sweet potatoes raw and they taught their children, as if it
was a statement of the obvious, “Sweet potatoes have to be
cooked!”
When I was six or seven years old, I remember asking my mother,
who was bustling around in front of her stove, “Mommy, why
do you cook potatoes?” She answered me curtly: “What
do you mean? You can only eat them cooked!” It took me 20
years to get over that.
_I always thought it made sense to cook potatoes. They’re inedible raw.
o That’s to say that we’re no better than those tribal people; we believe that raw potato tastes like raw potato.
_You don’t mean to say that it can take on a taste that’s as good as fruit, do you?
o Why do you think young children sometimes grab a raw potato
while their mother is busy peeling them for some preparation?
The mother will automatically say: “Don’t eat that;
it’s not good.” She thinks that the child tastes what
she herself would taste if she ate it.
Not long ago, we had a little boy with leukemia here. Put before
a table lavished with the most enticing fruit_mangos, dates, passion
fruit, etc._he preferred eating raw potatoes. He loved them so
much that he would beg for them in mid-afternoon.
_Doesn’t potato contain a dangerous poison that only cooking can lessen the effects of?
o Yes, they do contain solanine, mostly in the peel and the buds. But, instincts afford protection from natural poisons.
_I was forgetting, with your instincts, you can perform any sleight of the hand. So, you think that one could feed on raw potatoes?
o On average, people would eat far fewer of them than is, at present, the case. Fewer people would be overweight and there would be correspondingly fewer diabetics. Potatoes would act as a drug. Sweet potatoes from warm climes are more edible than potatoes from these parts.
_It’s worrying to think that if one eats, even once, a food cooked, one already has trouble finding it good in its raw state. You make the act of cooking sound like a sort of unforgiveable sin.
o In actual fact, it’s much worse. All it takes is eating a single type of cooked food to trigger off a general overload in several nutrients whose amounts instincts weren’t able to gauge properly. The following day, any raw food will taste less appealing. That’s why instinctotherapy isn’t easy to carry through unless one eats everything raw.
_You mean to say that those tribal people, the day after they ate cooked sweet potatoes, couldn’t even bring themselves to eat fruit?
o At least not as enthusiastically as usual.
The excess sugar taken up the day before inevitably made their
instincts less attracted to all other foods high in sugar.
Maybe they didn’t find fruit so insipid as to refrain from
having it altogether, but its fragrance must have seemed less
appealing. They found it impossible to put away their usual amount.
At the end of the day, they felt so frustrated they had to compensate
for it. So, how did they cope?
_They boiled up more sweet potatoes.
o Possibly, but that wouldn’t quite meet the need for greater pleasure, at least palate-wise. Filling up just for filling up’s sake is hardly enjoyable.
_I get it; they came up with the first recipe!
o How else could they have got their pleasure’s worth, besides trying out cooking artfully? Unfortunately, there’s no way back; it’s a descending spiral. Every recipe makes one eat more and results in an ever-increasing overload that dulls one’s instincts and further reduces pleasure, thus leading to ever more elaborate recipes ad infinitum. Sophistication in cooking can be accounted for in this way. All it took was cheating against instincts once to lead mankind into an endless quest of gluttony that has stranded us, to this day, in a state of perpetual frustration.
_All the same, I feel perfectly satisfied after a good meal.
o Didn’t Rockefeller advise leaving the table still feeling
slightly hungry? If eating pleasure damages our health, it must
mean that there is no sating without overloading! Obviously, one
will derive enjoyment from a good blow-out, i.e. a meal of soup,
starters, meat and starchy vegetables, cheese, a sweet, coffee,
and digestive cookies.
You can be sure that you will have heavily stunned your unfortunate
taste buds, lured by chemical fare they were not intended for.
Clearly, artfulness in cooking can dazzle our palate with cream
cakes or liquor-filled chocolates and whatnot. That is the design
of pastry cook and cook alike, but it amounts to nothing besides
a flash in the pan.
Initial foods reach much deeper. Eating them feels like being
permeated by a thorough well-being that far outlasts oven-ready
pleasure. The experience is something of a love affair with nature.
_Cooked food too affords one enjoyment galore!
o Well, cooking had to bring back a natural satisfaction, else it would have been shelved long ago. But I can assure you that it doesn’t hold a candle to nature. There are aftertastes and textures that don’t match flavor, and the food, when it “repeats” on one and makes one’s gorge rise, mars one’s first impression of pleasure. Once one discovers what true eating is all about, one feels keenly that cooking can only afford empty, skin-deep pleasure. Denatured food titillates one’s palate and calms one’s stomach, without providing true ecstasy.
_You’re comparing cooking pleasure to masturbation, are you?
o A kind of masturbation, so to speak.
_I can’t believe that one can ever really feel full on raw food.
o Wait until you’ve tried it. Satedness on cooked food,
rather, is what brings in its wake deep dissatisfaction. That
frustration makes itself felt in a need to nibble that recurs
all throughout the day, in the craving to go and have something
to drink, in the careful selection of the best restaurants, in
the craze for exotic cooking, in the rush to get the latest recipes,
and in the cultivation of strong pleasures, such as tobacco or
alcohol.
Once one has rediscovered one’s normal balance, one not only
procures for oneself an increasingly gratifying share of pleasure
with every meal (without any digestive distress!) but, even more
appreciably, perfect satisfaction in between meals. Such well-being
is unheard of on cooked foods.
_True enough. One’s always thinking about grazing on the hoof, nibbling on a sweet, or a sandwich, or sipping a cup of coffee, etc...
o And, one thing leading to another, things get worse. As time goes on, you are off your oats more and more. A kind of impotence sets in with age.
_Do you feel unaffected by that, thanks to instinctotherapy?
o I remember, for instance, how yogurt tasted to me when I was 12 years old, when it was first sold, right after the war. I thought it tasted really scrumptious. Then, over the years, it lost some of its allure; aftertastes overshadowed the initial flavor. When I was about 25 years old, I became convinced that they had started making it differently, the aftertaste of cardboard had become so overwhelming. And when I was 26, I had cancer.
_Do you see a causal link in all that?
o I was compelled to see one a few years later.
_How is it, though, that the taste of yogurt changed, if instincts are only adapted to initial foods? By rights, they shouldn’t have worked for dairy.
o You’re quite right; they certainly didn’t work.
They ought to have warned me off long before the onset of the
disease. They didn’t stop me in the midst of a meal either.
During military service, I remember inmates going out on a drinking
binge, while in the mess hall I ate my way through equally worthy
piles of yogurt. The empty tubs piled up into a huge toppling
pillar, while I still felt hungry.
Such is the way with all adulterated foods; the aversion threshold
is defeated, laying us open to overeating. I do believe that in
terms of functionally useful helpings for the body, cooking has
made mankind greedier than all the other predators put together.
_How strange, though, that mankind as a whole should have taken to cooking.
o Cooking is a terminal disease; once it starts, it never stops. I could even show you that it is a contagious disease.
_That does rather damn our great chefs!
o Can you imagine what presumably happened when our previously
mentioned tribesmen invited the envoys of a neighboring tribe
to their tables, following the advent of cooking? Those gentlemen
doubtless got red napkin treatment. With pomp and circumstance,
they were treated to the latest dish concocted by the local chefs;
namely, a heaping helping of boiled sweet potatoes. They must
have filled up on the fare without their instincts taking them
to task.
After a week’s non-stop overload, they probably went home.
Their wives, not being abreast of the latest news, must have served
up their usual raw sweet potatoes. The worthy husbands, put off
by an unwonted ligneous texture, must have complained: “The
women in the neighboring tribe serve cooked sweet potatoes that
are far more palatable.”
The moral: Women were fated to learn to cook to keep their husbands.
_Things haven’t changed.
o No offense meant to feminists.
_Why shouldn’t men be the ones to concoct tasty delicacies to keep their wives?
o Things do actually seem headed that way. But back in those days, feeding bottles hadn’t yet seen the light of day, and women had to stay home to breastfeed their children. Nowadays, however, husbands are sharing all the way down the line (except delivery, but for how long?). Soon enough the sex most dependent on the other will have to take to its pans to keep home their beloved.
_So you think it will turn out to be men?
o I fear so.
_...? ...
o That’s another matter.
_Pertaining to instincts?
o A rather unforseen consequence of diet.
_Relating to intercourse?
o Nutrition affects the body as a whole. Why not sex?
_You’re a bit of a dark horse, aren’t you!
o True enough. Instinctotherapy has lifted the veil on much in that field. That’ll be for some other time. For the time being, let’s take stock: We have proved that, mathematically speaking, cooking was gradually to spread to the entire planet. All it took was the process being sparked off, subsequent to which it could not but spread like a huge oil slick.
_But, surely, it had to start somewhere.
o Think of the billions of men who have handled fire ever since
it became widespread, that is, over the last 400,000 years, according
to the latest figures. Very likely, any food, somehow or other,
was likely to end up being cooked before going down into one’s
stomach.
When all a practice can do is spread and it is impelled by random
events, the surprising thing would be for it not to catch on.
_Is there not a single tribe that gets by without any cooking?
o No known tribe, and with reason, too. Supposing a tribe came
into contact with another tribe that had as yet never cooked,
the latter would be infected instantly. Explorers have so far
not been alive to the issue and, consequently, were never very
careful. All it took was a lump of sugar, a pan, and some recipe,
for the tribesmen to make an irretrievable entry into cooking.
Ever since ethnologists brought the Tasadays a recipe for boiled
hearts of palm, that small tribe who still lived in the dressed
stone age and in perfect harmony with their environment, have
taken to ravaging their forests.
_In short, mankind had to start cooking some day.
o That seems to me as predictable as clockwork. Intelligence was bound to doublecross instinct with the advent of man using his mind. As it is, monkeys are virtually able to cook, provided they’re shown how to soak potatoes in sea water, for instance, they can renew the experiment and teach their fellow beings, so that the whole group wants to prepare the dish.
Influencing behavior.
Research n° 155, 1984, p. 705
“A colony of macaques kept track of in a follow-up way, in
the wild, was provided with a regular supply of sweet potatoes.
In 1953, an 18-month-old female was sighted washing a sweet potato
for the first time in fresh water, wiping residual sand off it
with one hand.
In 1962, three monkeys out of four, among the under-twos, washed
their potatoes in that way. By and by, brine was substituted for
fresh water, which ushered in a custom that consisted in adding
salt to potatoes as they were being eaten by dipping them in sea
water after each mouthful.”
Note: It wouldn’t have taken much for macaques to discover
cooking before us.
_This time, let me hit the ball back into your court. Switching to cooking was, as you have said, a foregone conclusion in the history of mankind, since it had to happen at the very time when human intelligence had developed far enough. Conclusively, then, man was genetically encoded to cook his food.
o That would imply that our genetics were pre-encoded to foresee the consequences of cooking in order to ward off the drawbacks ahead of time. But our genetics developed in a fire-free environment.
_Well, if man acquired intelligence, why shouldn’t he have had the right to improve on his food?
o That all depend-s on what you mean by “right.” Let’s reason along similar lines. Man acquired intelligence, which enabled him to invent syringes and process heroin. Consequently, he has the right to take drugs.
_That’s quite a different matter.
o I beg your pardon. Drug-taking is an enjoyment that becomes possible through artfulness, precisely the way table pleasures do.
_And what if man had the right to take drugs?
o Why shouldn’t he? Only, he has to pick up the pieces
afterwards, and the same holds for cooking.
No, after what biology has taught us, I simply can’t believe
that our genetics could have been encoded, in advance, for cooked
food. How could genetics have taken factors into account that
were non-existent in the environment, and that didn’t come
into play as far as natural selection was concerned_unless there’s
a superior being, capable of predicting the future, that directed
our evolution.
_Do you rule out such an idea?
o Not necessarily, but I think that a superior being of such a nature might have accurately foretold the bad effects of cooking and structured our metabolism accordingly. Experience shows, however, that we aren’t protected from those bad effects.
_Maybe man had to go through illness and suffering....
o That would mean that God was rather Machiavellian in leading
us down the path of sin. Living through one’s mistakes and
their consequences enriches one’s consciousness, obviously.
All that has perhaps not been futile.
But who is going to tell you that the detour of cooking shouldn’t
come to an end one day?
_You and your redemptive instinctotherapy, isn’t that right?
o My approach is merely a reflection of a general trend. The
raw vs. cooked struggle has been on for a long time. In the 19th
century, it was noted that cooking destroyed certain vitamins,
and many dietary schools began advocating raw vegetables. Statistics
subsequently showed that adulterated fats were the cause of heart
disease and that diet played a crucial role in the frequency and
occurrence of cancer. “Maillard’s molecules,” discovered
at the beginning of the century, are coming back into the public
eye; their toxicity and carcinogenic effects are now well-known.
More and more people advocate eating a raw diet. But people don’t
know how to eat raw food. The key of instinct is still lacking.
_No one, besides yourself, has unearthed that key, which is, after all, essential.
o A number of researchers have studied the problem of eating instincts as related to animals. An American professor by the name of Richter has shown, for instance, that rats are able not only to regulate their calorie intake, but also to achieve a perfect balance as far as vitamins, mineral salts, and trace elements are concerned_not to mention, of course, adequate distribution of sugars, fats, and protein.
_So, then, is science on the right track?
o It has even been shown that instinctual cravings reflect bodily needs on an hourly basis. A chicken who lays her daily egg changes her diet depending on her needs. She feels like high-protein foods while producing the egg white, is then attracted to water to help the egg build up its moisture, and later to ground oyster powder high in calcium when she makes the shell. From one minute to the next, she knows how to make up for her metabolic deficiencies, without even having studied dietetics.
_That bears out your theories wonderfully.
o Unfortunately, when it comes to man, everything collapses dismally. It is thought to be obvious that man’s instincts don’t exist any more since supposedly nothing can keep a drunkard away from drink nor an overweight person from overeating starchy foods.
_But those foods are, of course, not initial foods.
o You’re a quick learner. There, indeed, is the rub. Researchers, strangely enough, have never considered the possibility that instincts had no reason to work properly with foods that didn’t exist in the early environment where our genetics evolved.
_That seems obvious enough to me, after having listened to you, although I’m no authority on biology.
o Some writers argue, for instance, that man is victimized by all kinds of cultural conditioning and mental activities liable to jeopardize the effective use of instincts. In fact, it is the food that one puts on the table that is “conditioned,” so to speak, to mislead instincts!
Food Cravings
“Marching orders straight from the organs,” Science
et Vie (Science and Life) n° 729, June 1978 (excerpts).
“When an animal eats, it acts like a computer; that is, the
most sophisticated kind of computer, that could choose the best
quality foods in the right amounts, better than an expert dietitian
ever could. Conversely, man is like a broken-down computer, which
compels him to eat anything, anyhow, and which sometimes leads
him to obesity or alcoholism (flaws that never occur with animals
in a natural condition)....
“Food, according to its chemical composition, is broken down
into fats (glycerides), sugars (saccharides), and proteins (nitrogenous
food such as eggs, grains, meat, and fish)....
“When it makes its choice, an animal is able to pick the
foods it needs to balance input against output accurately from
the relevant nutrients. An American, Professor Richter, was the
first to demonstrate that rats were remarkably able when it came
to selecting from a range of foods the appropriate amounts of
protein, vitamins, and mineral salts necessary for their continued
health. Even better, rats can change their minds, when their internal
balance is experimentally tampered with. In this way, rats automatically
increase their salt intake after removal of their adrenal glands;
they will eat fats over sugars once they have been turned into
diabetics; they select whatever vitamin they happen to be deficient
in....
“This is most striking in chickens.... Chickens pick the
amount and kind of food they require solely on the basis of the
needs of the egg they lay daily....
“When producing egg white, the chicken only eats whole, high-protein
food. When the egg is taking up water, the hen drinks plentifully.
Finally, when the shell is forming, the hen goes for calcium.
One might imagine that that was due to circadian rhythm. Not so
at all, since when chickens are raised from birth in constant
light_that is, when they don’t experience nighttime_their
eating cycles remain unchanged. Further proof would be contributed
from chickens that do not or no longer lay, or even from roosters.
In the foregoing, there is no staggered intake of protein, calcium,
or water.
What’s more, given that fowl can make up for the loss (incurred
through laying its eggs, a case in point) by relevantly adjusting
the quality of their food, they can also balance their diet_which
man can’t do.”
Note: How would man manage if he had to lay eggs?
_How odd that, in French, “to condition” should mean both “to package” and “to brainwash.”
o The chink was being sought in man’s armor, whereas it
ought to have been sought in the food_which is a little harder
to take. It is easier to accept a scourge than an error, as long
as one lays off the Gluttony God.
That reminds me of an interview I had with a leading researcher
in animal dietary instinct. He had just been awarded a doctorate
honoris causa from the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland,
and devoted an hour to me_which was no small concession. For one
thing, he didn’t at all go along with the idea that instincts
are only adapted to foods available in the initial surroundings
our genetics evolved in. Nevertheless, having heard me out for
15 minutes, he said, “Well, what you’re saying actually
seems to make sense.” He took an increasing interest in my
theories, especially relating to the metabolic impact of genetic
irrelevance to dietary constituents deteriorated by cooking. He
suggested I put it all down in writing and committed himself to
“translate” it for me into ethological lingo (nowadays,
every field has its very own watertight dialect to keep out collateral
researchers, which doesn’t exactly help join forces!). Everything
seemed well under way, when, all of a sudden, at the end of our
talk, his features hardened. Having considered the matter, he
reneged and said, “Blast it all, you can’t lay into
cooking like that... The art of cooking is a cultural endowment.”
I cleverly retorted that “Shouldn’t science perhaps
keep well clear of such prejucides?” Remaining in his funk,
he simply nodded. Back home, I set to work at once, writing up
40 pages to summarize my thesis. I’m still waiting for an
answer.
_Even scientists are infected by dietary brainwashing.
o Cooking holds us by the short and curlies. Calling it into
question means possibly forgoing pleasures of the palate. Loss
of pleasure runs counter to our most basic instincts. Enjoyment
is the very spice of life, and crowns the achievements of instinctual
behavior. Denying that is as good as denying life.
Unfortunately, though, adulteration causes instincts to work against
their own end, dipping like the needle of a compass that randomly
draws up to the mirages of our senses and towards our own undoing.
But for all that, it never relaxes its grips on our guts.
_Don’t you think the fear of challenging everything is what holds scientists back?
o No doubt, pride comes into it. Admitting that an obvious fact completely escaped oneself is always unpalatable for a self-important researcher_and especially so when world health is in the balance! Not to have reckoned with the culinary issue must be an oversight that heavily burdens the consciences of the alleged culprits.
_Given that there is a genuine connection between cooking and disease...
o Heart disease claims a recorded death toll of 47% and cancer and leukemia 28%: that is, some 75% of deaths caused by diseases known to be closely bound up with diet. Should our advanced dietary landscape spread to the entire planet, around 3.5 billion people could be predicted to be the next victims of the cooking arts_to wit, 50 times as many losses of lives as occurred in World War II_not to mention other diseases besides coronary heart disease and cancer. Western Science has on its hands, as it were, the blood of a huge, unwitting genocide.
_We all have to die someday.
o I, for one, would rather die a natural death, for instance, after living out a normal lifespan.
_Some people make it to 90, eating like everybody else. Do cooked foods happen to be better suited to them?
o Their genetic background may have partly adapted and be protecting them. However, that makes no difference to the fact that you can’t pick and choose at birth, when it comes to being among the better adapted.
_Naturally, but some people remaining in sound health that long on traditional food shows that it’s not bad for everyone.
o When a hurricane lays a forest waste, only sparing a very few trees, can one say that the hurricane was blameless?
_And what of Caucasian centenarians? Isn’t their longevity put down to curdled milk, in spite of your indictment of dairy?
o True enough. It has been noted that those stately senior
citizens reach 100 eating curdled milk. Hence, the dictate of
our dietitians: “Let’s eat twice as much of the stuff
as they do and we’ll hit 200!” This, of course, is an
ideal outlet for overproducing dairy farmers. One could just as
well have inferred that their lifespan didn’t overshoot a
hundred, and therefore, we should do away with dairy altogether
and gain life everlasting.”
The extended lifespan of those mountain dwellers may be connected
with genetic idiosyncracies, erratic birth registrations, local
customs that would pass them off as older than they really are,
or, quite simply, because they are abstemious. Perhaps they are
long-lived not because they eat curdled milk, but rather because
they only eat very little of it!
_The fact remains that you can nudge 90 or over without sweeping all the pleasure off the table. It’s all a matter of being reasonable.
o If you consider that normal lifespan is 77, you will find
it breathtaking that some of the elect make it to 90 and you will
assume that traditional fare isn’t particularly toxic.
Supposing now, that man’s normal lifespan was 150, you might
say that even in optimal circumstances, the sturdiest individuals
barely scrape through to 90 and you will conclude that that same
food is undeniably toxic. It is all a matter of standards.
_You have a way of turning things upside down.
o The entire conceptual diet-disease framework is fraught with dubious stereotypes and sweeping statements contrived to spare our eating addictions. Might as well turn them upside down.
_You’re saying, in effect, that man should live to 150?
o I just said that off the top of my head. Some people say that every species lives out 7 times the timespan of its growth period, which still falls very far short of Methuselah’s 960 years.
_Do you actually believe the figures stated in Genesis?
o Who knows? On first showing, I should think they are fanciful. But, the Bible isn’t necessarily lying.
_Was it not simply a change in the calendar?
o I long held that view. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold water! The figures decrease steadily starting from the Flood: Shem lived 600 years, Abraham 175, Moses 120, and David 70. I fail to see where one could slip in, say, a shift from a lunar calendar to a solar one.
_How disturbing.
o Other people uphold that the figures are symbolic. But if
that is so, the logic of the system begs the question.
For instance, it is in keeping with the laws of addition. Noah
was 600 when the Flood occurred. Further on, he is said to have
lived 350 years after the Flood, and his age at death does tally
up to 950 years. How could arithmetic go hand in hand with symbolic
numerology?
What is still more remarkable is that only a single Patriarch
before the Flood died much younger than the others: Enoch was
only 365. But the verse has it that he “was not; for God
took him” (Genesis 5:24). All the others almost achieved
a millenium; Adam made it to 930, Methuselah to 969, and Noah
to 950. Neither regularity nor accuracy in figures nor the mention
of an untimely death would be consistent with mere symbolism.
The very fact that the narrator should feel compelled to account
for Enoch’s comparatively short life implies that the long
lives of the others were felt to be quite typical and that they
were reckoned in real, rather than mythical, time.
Another disturbing detail is that it looks as though a gradual
deterioration set in after the Flood. First of all, the Almighty
allowed meats to be eaten: “Every moving thing that liveth
shall be meat for you” (Genesis 9:2). Then, gradually, health
troubles take a turn for the worse: Job’s ulcers, and the
plague that smites David’s people during the wheat harvest.
Even David was stricken with early senility before handing over
the throne to his son Solomon. The old king clearly had trouble
keeping warm. Scripture records conspicuously that “now king
David was old, and stricken in years; and they covered him with
clothes, but he gat no heat.” (I Kings I: I).
Being old at 70 wasn’t the usual thing. Then he was brought
the fairest damsel in the country to warm him up; “She cherished
the king and ministered to him, but knew him not.” (I Kings,
1:4). This was also the first case of impotence recorded in the
story.
_Do you honestly think that all that boiled down to food?
o Well, we’re lost in conjecture, but, if the Flood ever did occur, I expect, it brought with it far-reaching changes in the dietary habits of the day. The matter of wine which Noah invented at that very time also comes in for consideration.
The ages apparently
reached by antediluvian and postdiluvian patriarchs, according
to Old Testament figures.
Two stages clearly stand out. The first one, lasting
up until the Flood, during which time lifespan was publicly well-established
as around 900 years, Enoch being the only exception. Scripture
says that “he was not; for God took him;” which, rather,
points to an accident. In the second stage, attested length of
life decreases quite regularly and exponentially, starting from
the time of the Flood. No change in calendar may be premised,
since this would show up in the form of a sudden break in the
series of dotted lines (see diagram above).
Inference: Either the Bible is being fanciful, but then, what
would be the point of such a regular decrease, or else, the figures
are genuine, in which case, they have to be accounted for.
N.B.: This is no scientific reference, but merely Biblical memorabilia.
_He stayed the course well, you must admit!
o I don’t hold Lunchtime O’Booze responsible for
all our ills. Some experiments on rats have reportedly shown that
a small daily ration of alcohol extends their lifespan by 50%.
Although alcohol is known to damage the gut and let harmful molecules
into the body, the combination of meat, a source of alien molecules,
and immunity-weakening wine might possibly explain away the sudden
dip in the curve right after the Flood. After that, lifespan contracts
quite regularly. I would gladly account for such a slow-burning
demise by incriminating cooking, since that can only progress
in time_the impact of cooking on health and longevity are bound
to have been magnified. But this is mere conjecture.
_And with a return to non-cooking, to what age do you expect to live?
o Well, perhaps you’ll have to wait till I’m dead before you have a reliable figure!
_I see. If I want to be around to see the day, I’d better shelve black coffee and hot buns once and for all.
o I hear the gong. Let’s go to dinner. It’ll get cold, if you don’t get a move on!