Anopsology

Part Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_I’ll grant you that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Well I’m glad I stopped!

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

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

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

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

o You should have stopped when the sharpness turned unpleasant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Never any liver attacks?

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

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

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

_No wine, though?

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

_Doesn’t that expose you to traditional drunkenness?

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

_By the way, don’t you miss wine?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Is that a case of instincts working in reverse?

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

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

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

_Did you actually taste it?

o I spat it out in a hurry.

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

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

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

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

_Have you ever tried out natural drugs?

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

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

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

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

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

_And what of opium?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_And yet, milk is natural!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_What do doctors who listen to you say to that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Surely, you don’t mean that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_From an aesthetic point of view?

o Rather from the point of view of texture.

_They can’t be in bad taste?

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

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

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

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

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

_It has been reported that Hounza grandmothers breastfeed their grandchildren.

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

_How long did your wife breastfeed each of her babies?

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

_So you have six children?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_The fact is your children have fine builds.

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

_And how do you account for that?

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

_Chickens peck sand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_To the extent of touching off cancers?

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

_Except in the case of lactose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Had you initially banned eating meat?

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

_Apparently, monkeys eat very little meat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Do you hold with Shelton’s theories?

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

_Isn’t overdoing it on protein like that imbalancing?

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

_And to hell with dietary theories!

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

_I can imagine what you felt.

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

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

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

_Why did you mention meat left out in the open?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Yuck! Can you eat chicken raw?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_And does instinct provide the answer?

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

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

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

_I’m trying to understand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_In short, instinctotherapy is no therapy, strictly speaking.

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

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

o That’s putting it paradoxically.

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

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

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

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

_So, ultimately, you’re not against doctors?

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

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

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

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

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

_And what does medicine have to do with all that?

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

_Does what you say hold for alternative medicine as well?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_And didn’t your children ever experience such problems?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_So medicine can sometimes do things well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_And what about greengrocers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_All that is a bit of a letdown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_And was that never done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Our unions are lagging behind with their 35-hour week.

o It took depicting primitive man in the deepest dye of hapless violence, in the nineteenth century, to enhance the benefits of modern society. What better way to get the masses to endorse the need for progress achieved at the cost of factory work and urban squalor. Still now, our minds are cluttered with all the stuff and nonsense we were taught at school. Cave men never did exist!

Prehistoric times
Gabriel Camps, published by Perrin, (excerpts p. 276)
“How did man switch from mere fruit-picking to full-blown agriculture?”
Archaeologists have been quite content with merely taking stock of the fact or accounting for it in reverse in that they explain away sedentary life as a consequence of man’s graduation to farming. In fact, it’s far from certain that mounting pressure to produce food was the only possible factor to account for its coming into being.
Admittedly, groups break up when they reach a critical threshold of inner tension beyond which life becomes unliveable.
Presumably, then, things must have changed, since, starting from the Neolithic period and for the very first time, no break occurred. Human groups as a whole appeared to have found an answer to lurking threats to their cohesion and that might have fostered social relationships of a new kind. Husbandry was, arguablyy, more a sign of human society having adapted to itself than having adapted to its surroundings.”
Note: What a shame archaeologists are unaware of the effects of cooked food on the mind. An increase in obsessional neuroses will easily account for why a given group elected to settle in a place and the consequent impossibility of feeding large settlements on hunting and fruit-picking.
op. cit., p. 305
“We ought to reassess our mistaken conceit that conjures up pre-Neolithic men to have been poor devils eking out a miserable existence, devoting all their time and effort to finding scarce food.
Ethnologists have belatedly realized that for present-day tribesmen, the search for food was by no means as urgent as well-meaning souls would have us believe, and that free time, putting one’s feet up, and playing games was far more widespread than a leisure minister in a social democracy would ever fain conceive. A Dobe Bushman’s working week lasts approximately 15 hours, with the average working day standing at two hours and nine minutes. The Bushmen devote far more time off work, call paying, and puttering about than hunting or picking their high-protein mongo nuts.
Other tribesmen, the Hadzas, who are fortunate enough to live in an area well-stocked in plant and animal foods, devote their time to social games and conversation. Only a small group among the tribesmen actually go out and hunt big game. Over the whole year, they presumably spend under two hours a day getting food. Farming, on the other hand, has fated modern man to working harder. Paradoxically, as they were destroying a former state of being, modern men constantly bemoaned the golden age they were condemning by their actions.
Ensnared in his culture and in the spiraling development of his technology, man has consigned himself to a life of forced labor.”

Note: Things don’t seem to be looking up!

_So, all in all, paradise lost isn’t as phony as has been said?

o So much so that archaeologists are at loss to account for the switch to sedentary life.
Why did men willingly become ploughshare, corn-cropping slaves and cow-keepers, considering a cow needs milking twice a day and watching over the rest of the time.

_I see what you’re driving at; that is what you call getting caught up in cooking.

o Having started baking their bread and simmering their millet porridge, our hapless apprenticed cooks found they could no longer stomach picked fruit and high game. Raw meat lost its lure and wild fruit grated on their tongues.

_And yet, the Bushmen eat mainly fruit and raw roots.

o True, but they, as it happens, haven’t lapsed into grain; even now, they cook very little. One ought not to consider a gradual lapse into cooking as a sudden toppling over, but, rather as a kind of slipping away, a gradual loss of enjoyment in natural foods that impels one to go after ever more sophisticated recipes.

_Even after 10,000 years of cooking and grain-eating, man still eats fruit.

o Try eating a wild fruit; I’m sure you’ll find it hard to get down. We can basically only stomach cross-bred fruit.

_I find wild bilberries, for instance, scrumptious!

o How do you eat them?

_True enough, with cream and sugar. When I was a child, I enjoyed eating them plain, but now I find they taste acrid and not very sweet. I thought that was due to pollution, acid rain, etc...

o That problem cropped up well before the advent of chemistry. An old farmer, whose place I often used to spend my holidays at when I was a child, maintained that the Morello cherries in his orchard had turned sharp because his trees were old. He couldn’t eat them any more, whereas I found them pleasantly tart.
As I got older, I found them more and more acid as well. I could no longer eat them except in jam. I had to start eating raw, initial foods for me to recapture their delicious taste I had remembered from childhood.

_So, your diet acts also as an elixir of life, does it?

o Why not? After being on instinctotherapy for a year, a fifty-year old often looks ten years younger. The skin clears up, the rings and bags under one’s eyes disappear, the cheeks firm up, the complexion becomes rosy, the joints become limber, heart beat slows down as it does for sportsmen, who enjoy stamina, breathing, suntans, etc.

_I must admit that you don’t look your age.

o Have you ever heard of durians? That is an example of a wild fruit.

_Somebody put one under my nose, once, at a tropical food fair. I have never smelled anything so foul. Even, the looks I find repulsive; it’s so huge and bristling with green spikes.

o And yet, that’s the favorite fruit of orangutans, and, as if quite by chance, of raw food eaters! You can find it in every tropical forest. It’s true that for a body clogged up with cooked food and dairy products, durians stink horribly.

_A bit like badly ventilated toilets... after they’ve been used!

o In our civilized nations, shipping them by train or plane is prohibited. I myself only found that out after having been on instinctotherapy for some time. At first, I found that they smelled like onion pie. The taste also of the yellow cream around the pips remined me of onions in cream sauce. Then, as I gradually recovered from cooking intoxication, they started tasting even better. When I feel like durians now, they smell so wonderfully fragrant, as if I were in the middle of a field of flowers or in a florist’s shop.

_And what are you going to dream up to describe their effects on one’s taste buds?

o It’s hard to describe. There are several facets to every natural flavor, which intermingle or superimpose themselves with subtle propensities. You must have tasted maraschino cherry trifles, haven’t you?

_My diplomatic bag isn’t as impressive as yours. You seem even more focused on eating pleasure than I am.

o My mother was a very good cook. That perhaps explains why I developed cancer much younger than is normally the case.
Maraschino trifles were among the special delicacies I relished. The trifles consist of candied fruit-filled sponge and soggy with maraschino cherry liqueur and underlain with genuine custard made with vanilla and egg yolk and lightly topped with a little whirl of whipped cream.

_I don’t know how you manage to stick to your diet with such a liking for tasty dishes. You’re making my mouth water!

o My mouth is watering too, but because I’m thinking about durians. They taste about ten times as good as the best maraschino trifles. And you can eat ten times as many, if your instincts feel like it: Just think how much more pleasure there is to be had! According to the different varieties, the degree of maturation, and one’s state of health, the tastes they take on vary enormously: from chocolate truffles to Danish fruit dish, cheese pie, soft cheese, or meringue, and when you bite into the seeds with the fruit, they’re so crunchy.

_Do you think outrang-outrangs feel all that too?

o I have never met any, personally, to ask them.

_You are still very much under the influence of your recollections of cooked food to systematically compare natural flavors with foods that you used to eat.

o I can’t tell you that durians taste like durians. I have to use a common reference point.

_If I were to taste them, I think they’d immediately trigger off a bowel upset; I don’t usually digest fruit as a rule. According to you, my metabolism is particularly clogged up and a little raw dieting would do me a world of good. But, don’t you think I’d be risking colitis? My bowel has always been rather sensitive.

o That’s the typical argument: “I’ve been suffering from colitis for years; the doctor told me to keep clear of raw salads.” Of course, if you scoff carrot or spinach salads, or even if you eat fruit without taking instincts into account, you can put your bowels out of sorts. Whereas, if you properly apply instinctotherapy, digestion is automatically regulated. The most persistent colitis generally clears up within a week or two. Just don’t embark on the experiment without preparing yourself well in advance.

_Do you think that it’s wisest to attend a training course in your center?

o Our aim in setting up the center was precisely to make sure that people starting out on instinctotherapy wouldn’t fall flat on their faces. Eating is an important activity. It’s well worth devoting a few days to being properly coached, at least once in one’s life.
Let’s see, we hadn’t finished what we were saying about prehistoric times and sedentary life. I think that very many misguided interpretations stem from the fact that archaeologists are unaware of how dietary instincts operate. They can’t imagine what our distant ancestors felt when they ate food they found out in nature.
Victor of the Aveyron regularly ate acorns when they found him.
Their gut reaction was to say: “Poor child, he must have been dying of starvation to fall back on such foul fare.” Nobody could have conceived that acorns might have tasted delicious to somebody whose body was in a normal state.

_How is that? Do you eat acorns as well in your system?

o When they smell good and have a pleasant taste redolent of coffee, why not? That could happen, although they are more of a staple for pigs than for man, apparently.
One of the most staggering mistakes made by archaeologists pertains to how cooking actually began. Having discovered animal bones in very old sites, they immediately declared that man at that time cooked his food, assuming that, quite obviously, he couldn’t have eaten his meat raw.
Some of the bones having black traces on them, it was logically supposed that they had been put in fire. For decades, archaeologists didn’t get beyond the idea that cooking had become prevalent since the discovery of fire. Unfortunately, after more indepth research, it was found that those black traces were only manganese deposits. From that evidence, it was concluded that man hadn’t cooked until the Neolithic period. So, cooking was only 10,000 years old.
At the sites, dating back to this last period, relics, that were undeniably cooking-related, were regularly found: i.e. bread ovens, Polynesian ovens, earthen pots, and later metallic ones.

_If I’ve understood aright, not much is known about the early days of cooking between 400,000 and 10,000 years ago.

o Man used fire, but whether he used it to cook his food... No scientific data has settled the issue for the time being.

_And what do you feel intuitively about that? I’m sure that eating initial foods develops one’s sixth sense.

The Birth of Fire by Catherine Perlès, History n°105, Nov 1987, (excerpts, pp. 30-31)
“Nothing enables us to prove a fully fledged harnessing of fire earlier than 400,000 years ago. On the contrary, many of the older extremely well preserved sites, whether they are in caves or out in the open, show absolutely no sign of combustion. Conversely, after 400,000 years, the floors of the dwellings that have been found intact reveal, in a regular fashion, that fire had become a domestic commonplace, in the literal sense of the word: Fire was integrated into the living space and it represented its most unbending mainstay. (...)
In fact, it does look as if one of the main motivations of harnessing fire was to cook food. It so happens that a taste for cooked meat already shows up in wild carnivorous animals that were seen looking for carcasses that had been burnt during natural fires. Now, burnt bones, probable remains from cooked meat, are regularly found in prehistoric dwellings whenever they had fireplaces. And doesn’t traditional mythology help spread the prominence given to cooked food by stressing this fundamental difference between man and animal? (...)
Note: This difference shows up, most conspicuously, in the deficit run by Social Security.

o I have the impression that man, who is curious by nature, must have experimented with cooking for a very long time. Just watch children play with the flame of a candle. They automatically put all sorts of objects through it to see the effect of that little bit of sun that they feel they’re in control of.

_You sound very poetic, talking about an element that you hold responsible for all kinds of evils.

o I have nothing against fire, any more than I’m against dynamite or electricity. It all depends on the use one makes of it.

_Can’t you consider yourself the guru of a new religion?

o Whose god would be raw food and the devil would be fire? That would be tremendously misinterpreting my purpose. In fact, I try not to have any prejudices, no moral judgement neither in favor of nor against fire, cooking, pleasure, nature, artifice, in order, quite simply, to call reality into question.
Man devised cooking, by chance or out of spite; even now, he hasn’t yet come out of his saucepan. That must be viewed as a historical phenomenon, a kind of experiment on a vast scale that took place on the strength of man’s soul having the right to exercise its own free will. The question that needs answering is what are the real consequences of that pact with fire, rather than covering up the problem any longer.

_If cooking first began, according to you, 400,000 years ago, don’t you think that genetic adaptation to cooked foods has had enough time to occur?

o Genetic adaptation shifts much less quickly than is commonly believed.
In that line, I must tell you about a reaction, that really took the cake, among the responses that were echoed back to me after my first book was published. A journal, “The Impatient,” that claims to defend people who rely on medicine, asserted point-blank that my notions were utterly unscientific. Such a statement didn’t fail to appall an eminent biologist who was well acquainted with the issue. The latter sent a letter to the editor of the journal, to appear in the “letters to the editor” column, and in which he accurately demonstrated how my approach was indeed scientific. The chief editor then sent him, in turn, this outrageous reply: “Homo sapiens, whom we are the direct descendants of, appeared 40,000 years ago at a time when fire was already harnessed. Therefore, obviously, we are adapted to cooking.” And he refused to publish the letter.

_I don’t follow the reasoning.

o Nothing is less rational than rationalizations. I think that people unspecialized in the field often misunderstand the concept of genetic adaptation.
Recent progress in molecular biology proves more cogently than ever before that genetic inheritance changes very slowly in the course of time. The synthesis of hemoglobin, for instance, is under the control of a gene whose code has been fully cracked.
This gene can be studied in different animal species whose respective dates of origin are provided by paleontology. It can thereby be shown that the gene has undergone gradual mutations from one species to another, in the course of millions of years, quite regularly over a period of time. Only, pay close attention to figures: for 1% of mutations, it takes millions of years.
The figure is of the same order when it comes to man or primates. The difference between human DNA and that of chimpanzees is 6 per 1,000, whereas the two lineages split up 6 million years ago.
For some genes, evolution is quicker; for others, it is much slower. The time required for a 1% change in the genome to occur ranges from one million to 20 million years; that is, between fibrinopeptides and cytochrome C.

The Evolution of Proteins _by G. Hervé, published by Masson, 1983, p. 16 (graph)
Recent comparative studies between paleontology and genetics have shown that adaptation time is extremely long. One can compare genes of related living species whose date of origin is comparatively well known. What one notices is that the number of mutations that separate the corresponding genes is approximately proportional to the time elapsed between the dates when the species first appeared (at which time mutations occurred).
In the graph below, the horizontal axis records the date of origin of the species under review. On the vertical axis, the number of mutations that distinguish the different species are provided. In this way, sloping lines indicate the rate of mutation per time unit.
The time necessary for mutations changing 1% of genes are the following:
1) The gene encoded for fibrinopeptides (proteins involved in coagulation): 1.1 million years
2) The gene encoded for hemoglobin: 5.8 million years
3) The gene encoded for cytochrome C: 20 million years
4) The gene encoded for histones IV: 1000 million years
Note: How long, according to these new figures, must we go on waiting for our genes to adapt to cooked food? And how many more hospitals shall we have to build?

_That’s all gobbledegook to me.

o That shows at least one thing: It was taking things for granted to assume that adaptation to cooking took care of itself. If we are not completely adapted today, we shall have to wait millions of years before achieving perfection. It is all the more urgent to worry about the impact gastronomic traditions might have on our health, and to try to correct what can be put right.

_Before that, you would have to know exactly what diseases prehistoric man suffered from. If they already developed cancer, all the while eating more natural food than one can nowadays, it’s hard to see how your diet could bring about therapeutic benefit, at least as far as that disease is concerned.

o Your reasoning is dangerous! Many cancer patients and patients suffering from other diseases who are given up on by medicine, have been able to disregard anything connected to diet because they thought that our pre-cooked ancestors suffered the same health trouble as they did. Maybe they paid for that hoax with their lives...
True enough, a few tumors have been discovered on old skeletons. But, before mentioning cancer and drawing conclusions, it had to be proven that those tumors were malignant. Now, it so happens that those tumors were benign, and to boot, they were rare moreover, and, apparently, didn’t bother the individual who had them. According to the most recent studies, it seems that the general rate of cancer, in ancient times, didn’t overshoot 1 per 1,000. Nowadays, more than one man out of every three develops cancer during his lifetime. When, on top of it, statistics call into question dietary factors...

Diseases at the Dawn of Western Civilization
(excerpts) by Mirko D. Grmek, published by Payot, p. 113-114
“The uncommonness of cancer in older cultures as compared to modern society can be partly accounted for by the differences in the average life span, in chemical pollution, and the quantity and quality of cancer-causing radiation.
The importance of these factors is undeniable, but that is not enough to explain such a great discrepancy.
To our knowledge, no indisputable case of a malignant tumor has ever been detected on ancient bones found in Greece (...). Besides a few instances of benign tumors, there are no osteo-archaeological signs of carcinomatous diseases having occurred in prehistoric times and in ancient Greece.
Yet, it is true that the seal of sarcoma can be detected on human bones from any period; be that as it may, signs of cancers are very rare on specimens predating the modern era. For the periods spanning prehistoric times all the way up to the sixteenth century, the frequency, although hard to calculate, is, undoubtedly, far below 1 per 1,000.
Note: Today, that figure stands at approximately 400 per 1,000.

_Isn’t there proof that life span was very short? We often hear the figures 25 to 30 years. That is a far cry from the 900 years of your patriarchs.

o It’s not easy to determine the age of a skeleton, for the simple reason that the aging processes weren’t necessarily the same as they are today. Given that bone tissue deteriorated 10 times more slowly than it does in our own skeletons, an archaeologist will say that the remains of a foot bone were those of a 25 year-old, whereas maybe the foot walked for 250 years.

_There must, however, be a reason why archaeologists claimed that the body was 25 years old.

o It was claimed through analogy with the life span of chimpanzees. The only somewhat reliable method that archaeologists use to determine the age of a body is based on examining the knitting on the skull bones. This knitting gets more pronounced with age; it is almost fully apparent when it’s 24 years old and it still etches itself in the bone until about the age 60. Only, how fast depends on health: The poorer the state of health, the quicker it is. If our ancestors were in better health than we are, we have necessarily underestimated their length of life.

_By a ratio of 1 to 10?

o One has to be very cautious with figures. Bone growth is bound up with calcification and if there is as much difference in the knitting development as there is between the bone structure of Neanderthal man and modern man, it may be feared that the margin of error is very great.
In any case, the knitting method does not enable us to assess age beyond 60 since the knitting process is over at that age. What if on top of it, changes in bone structure that occur in present-day man between the ages of 25 and 60 are due to abnormal calcification?

_So, Methuselah’s skeleton was rated to be 25 years of age?

o Archaeology is a tricky science. Have you ever heard of the Piltdown man affair? Some students had put together the jaw of a monkey with the skull of a man, and that composite skull served the advocates of Darwinism as a polemic bone of contention for some 40 years, the so-called missing link.
If you’re out to prove something, you will invariably hit on the evidence you need. Darwin’s theories, like trying to set at 30 years of age the life span of prehistoric man or to burden those men with every disease under the sun, all have this in common: They comfort us in our assumption that we are top of the heap, and that progress has extended our lives, endowed us with an unrivalled culture, and sheltered us from natural scourges and diseases. This accounts for their popularity at a time when that same progress was taking its toll through moral and social hardship of every description.

_Yet, you do rely on Darwin’s theories. Have they not been dated by all that is now known?

o Far from it. Recent genetic discoveries are fully consonant with evolution. The exact similarity between human and simian DNA with both sharing 99% of their length in common is no accident. It is mathematically patent that man and chimpanzees are both descended from a common ancestor, unless an Almightly hand managed to line up twice in a row some five billion nucleotides in the very same order. Since there are four bases available each time, the probability of coming up with the same order is four out of five billion.

_Two people from a god squad called on me the other day and asserted that Darwinism and paleontology as a whole were merely a huge scientific hoax. In their view, creation dates back 6,000 years, as described in the Bible; anything else is nonsense.

o Everyone may believe what they please.
I do not happen to find Darwinism and Creationism contradictory. The Almighty may well have used the laws of random and natural selection to achieve his creation.
That may take longer than seven days. But, since the Creator is everlasting, a week is the same as seven billion years in his sight.
Even if scripture is to be read to the letter, that makes no difference to my theory. Man was created to eat of the fruit of the Garden of Eden and of all that bore seed. There was in Heaven neither cooking, nor dairy, nor wheat. It is hard to conjure up Eve scouring her pans and Adam rising at dawn to milk his cows or drive the plough. Fire is only mentioned after the Fall, as is the ordinance to feed on the seed-bearing plants, which presumably means, using grains.

_Are you thinking of starting a movement in nutritional theology?

o Let us rather keep to facts and take a look at the effects of a prehistoric diet on our present-day bodies. I recently sounded out 433 people who were on instinctotherapy. They were required to fill in a form giving a fairly comprehensive account of the improvements or deteriorations of all kinds in those people’s health prior to instinctotherapy. Out of a total of 1005 symptoms that had been alleviated or fully cleared up, only 25 took a turn for the worse, 45 remained unchanged, and 54 minor ones developed_which makes the method 90% efficient.

_That’s not so bad.

o All the more so considering that a sizeable number of those people turned to instinctotherapy because medicine had bowed out on them. As far as I’m concerned, that speaks volumes for genetic maladjustment to modern lifestyles and diets.

_And what of dental decay? I happen to know a missionary who spent several years out in the bush in an African village. He told me that the monkeys who lived around his house had holes in their teeth.

Diseases at the Dawn of Western Civilization
(excerpts) by Mirko D. Grmek, published by Payot, p. 125-126
“Spondylitis is indisputably the disease paleontologists most commonly diagnose. In the vast majority of cases, talking of actual disease is mistaken, in view of the fact that documented changes in bone structure cause no major functional disorder. Paleopathological bony processes due to rheumatism were first diagnosed in pre-historic bears. Initially, the cold and dampness of caves were thought to be causative factors. This appeared borne out by a description of like lesions on the vertebrae of Neanderthalian skeletons (...). However, evidence piled up, corroborating that the disease was also common in Neolithic European population groups who were fairly well sheltered from what the weather could throw at them. This especially holds true for the inhabitants of Pharaonistic, Hellenistic, and Roman Egypt. (...) Acknowledgedly then, spondylitis was neither climate- nor germ-bound.
Note: Do not confuse spondylitis with ankylosing spondylitis, which is a serious spinal disease (that joins the vertebrae, completely stiffens the bottom of the spine, causes pain, and so on) of the modern age. Switching to an uncooked diet appears to prevent the condition from getting worse and may even possibly improve it. It will, therefore, come as no surprise that our prehistoric forbears were not prone to ankylosing spondylitis.
pp. 208, 209, 212, 228, 229, 230, 263, 400, 404.
Venereal syphilis, endemic syphilis, and yaws cause bone lesions that often unfailingly warrant diagnosing treponematosis (...).
No bone remains pre_dating 1,500 CE and showing incontrovertible signs of treponemal infection have been found in Europe, Africa, or Asia (...). The Ancient Greek World was free of any kind of syphilis or treponematosis.
Leprosy made its lasting mark on bone remains (...). In France, out of 1,000 skeletons examined that covered the period ranging from the Neolithic Age to the year 1,000, only a single skull and which dated back to the sixth century, was found to bear leprous stigmata.
It is worth noting that there is no trace of leprosy on human remains of the pharaonic period in Egypt (...). Out of some 20,000 samples (...) from three different countries, leprous stigmata were detected on eight individuals who lived before the year 1,000 (...). All those cases date back to a surprisingly recent period, i.e. the sixth century C.E.
Likewise, no TB suspect lesion was detected on human Paleolithic bones (...), the oldest TB-ridden samples dating back to 3,000 B.C. The falciparum type of malarial fever correlates with porous hyperostosis. In the Greek World, porous hyperostosis definitely appears in the Mesolithic Period, reaching a high point beginning with the Neolithic Period.
If malaria was a time-old feature, it didn’t necessarily erupt in every period with the same intensity. Admittedly though, in prehistoric times, its radius of effect was rather restricted. But, subsequently, definite factors presumably caused endemic bursts. This extended the area infiltrated and worsened the clinical outlook (...). Starting at the end of the fifth century B.C., malaria became a standard Greek disease.”
Note: Was it the anopheles mosquito or the art of cooking that was perfected?

_Talk about instincts in animals straight from the bush!

o A dirty shirt is no initial food. Neither are human feces. The by-products of the human body have abnormal smells that can mislead the instincts of animals, as their instincts are not encoded for either cooking or any of its indirect, beneficial effects. The chimpanzee is, undoubtedly, attracted to the aromatic molecules of the cooked food discharged in our various excretions without being fully broken down, which helps them retain fragrances, that to chimpanzees’ tastes, are enticing. Just think of stray dogs. The same observational mistake recurs every time man studies wild animals in their natural habitat. He leaves his table remains lying about in bins, his latrines are looted, or, better still, animals are fed tinned food to monitor their behavior, and after that, people boo-hoo over their sorry state when they are taken ill. In the meantime, man convinces himself that medical progress is necessary to ward off the evil spells of nature. To get around that kind of misunderstanding, zoologists, too, would do well to open a biology textbook to the chapter on genetic adaptation.
Be that as it may, our prehistoric ancestors, to all intents and purposes, didn’t suffer from tooth decay. Tooth decay appeared on the scene with the Neolithic Period: that is, when man started eating grains (that were eaten whole at the time) and drinking good calcium-rich milk. How’s that for a contradiction, then? The rampant increase of tooth decay is very recent. Some people put it down to the upturn in sugar and bread consumption, which are said to enhance the growth of bacteria that gnaw away at the enamel. I think that things are rather more complex than that.
As regards the rest of pathology, one can sum it all up by saying that all the diseases that have, in the present day, been detected on bone remains_thanks to progress in paleopathology_are nowhere to be found on skeletons dating back to periods before cooking appeared. Tuberculosis, for instance, is unrecorded before the third millenium_and likewise leprosy, syphilis, and even malaria, or, better still, aggressiveness. The first signs of war go back 3,000 years, except for a single burial site that dates back 12,000 years before the Common Era. After that, arrowheads are commonly found in bone remains.

Diseases at the Dawn of Western Civilization
(excerpts) by Mirko D. Grmek, published by Payot, pp. 173-174
“Even in Hippocrates’ day, Greece had never known smallpox, measles, or the plague. At the beginning of the classical period, the inhabitants of the Aegean area enjoyed exceptionally good health, but such was not to be the case for long. The change occurred during the fifth century B.C. It was not sudden, but was, nonetheless, deep and lasting. The rise of scientific medicine came into being exactly when people began to feel unwell bodily without there being any clinical signs of functional or organic disease.
Parallel to its development, the health of the Greeks deteriorated. One could view that as a kind of paradox.”
Note: That paradox still seems to be with us.

_But can’t that be explained away by the progress made in making weapons?

o Unless, in the opposite way, such progress can be explained by mounting aggressiveness.
Pre-historians generally accept that warfare developed once man’s sedentary lifestyle had enabled him to stow away riches, which, in turn, gave rise to looting, the need to defend oneself, sophisticated means of aggression, the arms race, and everything else that led up to the atomic bomb. I don’t endorse that explanation as valid. From what I have been able to see, what with switching to an initial diet, eating cooked food_and especially cooked grains_induces excitability in the nervous system that more than accounts for the change in the behavior of our great-grand fathers.

_Eating cooked grains? And yet...

o Especially wheat-based products. I ran a wide range of experiments on mice and children (the latter were involuntary subjects!) that convinced me of something quite surprising: Wheat makes one go mad.

_Is that so? According to you, bakers might as well shut up shop?

o People enjoy feeling a bit crazy. It has always been the done thing.

_Come off it. The people one sees in the street all eat bread as far as I can tell. They’re not crazy.

o Seemingly not. Yet, if they were mice, you’d be looking at quite a different picture.

_I don’t follow.

o The human brain has all sorts of regulatory processes. That’s why dysfunction doesn’t immediately show up. With mice, things are different; it scarcely takes the brain centers time to record a slight disruption by a stimulant for the entire behavior to go beserk.
I have seen field mice, for instance, start going round in circles in their cages, raise their paws like ticklish girls instead of scurrying away when I prodded them with knitting needles, and I have seen them devour one another.

_And what about men?

o The tie-in exists with human behavior.

_One might well wonder, I’ll grant you that. But do you have scientific evidence for such an assertion? The dice are heavily loaded after all: bread, pasta, etc. From time immemorial, wheat has been the staple food in the West.

o I, myself, would hardly have expected to be told that that grain_which man has even turned into a cult_had such properties. I was able to confirm my findings again quite recently in the course of experiments on white mice, divided into two groups_one fed initial food and the other receiving a bread supplement. Already, as far as handling the animals was concerned, the difference in behavior was striking. The first group readily let us pick them up, whereas the others bit us mercilessly for the slightest negligence.

_Wasn’t it quite simply that the calmer ones lacked tone?

o We enjoyed taking them in our hands, making a little cage with our fingers. The mice not fed bread reacted calmly. They’d put their faces through the spaces between our fingers and would energetically try to push our fingers aside_their tone was what it should be, but there was no nervousness; whereas, the other group trembled so nervously, that was strangely reminiscent of some artists (including myself) about to walk on stage. Their efforts were scattered so to speak, much less efficient.

_Could their state of panic have something to do with food?

o All of my observations of human beings fall into line with that. You’ll see for yourself, after only a few weeks. What one observes on oneself is most convincing. When driving, for instance, every time I had a close shave, when another driver swerved out in front of me, or if I hadn’t seen a bend in the road, I would feel a lump in the pit of my stomach, my heart would beat rapidly so that I could hardly breathe for a few seconds. Ever since I’ve been on instinctotherapy, I no longer feel any such discomfort, besides a slight tingle in my fingers, as if my nervous energy radiated out to the tips of my limbs to enable me to react with maximum efficiency. My dizziness went away as well; I can walk on rafters without feeling as if I were being sucked in by the drop below. The same thing was true for shyness and aggressiveness.

_And what about sleep?

o No insomnia has ever held out against instinctotherapy, except for rare exceptions. When the nervous system ceases being disrupted, one falls asleep never remembering having had to court sleep for a single moment. One no longer has to count sheep. One sleeps deeply, but not heavily. Wild dreams no longer occur. In the morning, one immediately feels as fresh as a daisy, much better than on black coffee!
All the psychological functions are altered. We were able to see the most striking differences in children. Once we let our two oldest children stuff themselves on bread and butter, thinking that would rid them of their cravings. They were between the ages of seven and eight. Anne-Catherine, who played the piano splendidly, was unable to play a tune in time for several days; she could no longer concentrate or count measures. It was as if she had to start all over again from the first lesson. As for Christian, he was unbearable. He kept squabbling with his sister, and he tossed about in his sleep. Family life became hellish.

_There are children who eat bread and play the piano very well.

o Mozart ate some too, no doubt! What I’m getting at is that with repeated use, every stimulant can induce a state of addiction. Little by little, the visible effects wear off or are channelled into forms of behavior that are ultimately ascribed to the normal personality of an individual. When somebody is given a stimulant on a one-time basis, the effects show up much more clearly. That is always the trouble with initial reference. I, myself, found it hard to believe that a normal diet could disrupt one’s mind to such an extent. Was I to think that all those facets of what is called the human soul_tension, anxiety, hilarity, aggression, depression, obsession, inhibition, unbearableness, anger, all those imbalanced traits that make social relations difficult_were mere crystallizations of permanent disorders in our brain centers? The upper limit being madness.
Ultimately, science confirmed what I feared: Research carried out in psychiatric units has shown that eating gluten heightens symptoms of schizophrenia.

_Gluten is wheat protein, isn’t it?

o Gluten is the name commonly given to the traces of protein found in cereal grains. The experiments I have discussed were done on wheat; I don’t know what would have come to light with other cereal grains. Going on my own observations, I have the feeling that wheat is not the only culprit. Every time, abnormal molecules are taken up by the body, that are likely to arouse the brain centers, behavioral balance is more or less affected. Cooking is jam-packed with abnormal molecules, and what has been shown with gluten brooks calling into question the whole concept of dietary progress. Fortunately, not everyone goes schizophrenic. But, it is well known that the trait exists in every supposedly normal mind. In more respectable terms, it is know as schizothymia or schizoidia.

_That’s a great blow to one’s daily bread.

o I don’t ascribe the Sunday sermon as intended for bread ovens: “Give us this day our daily bread,” whereas Christ taught us not to worry about our food any more than birds do. Rather contradictory, isn’t it? Must be a metaphor devoid of any dietary intention!

_And yet, whole-wheat bread has been advocated by almost every dietary school of thought. In effect, you’re saying that it must, by rights, be more toxic than white bread.

o I think that is reason enough why our medieval ancestors had the drive to bolt flour. By so doing, they sifted out some of the gluten.

_I still don’t see why gluten is harmful.

(excerpts by T.C. Dohan, Department of Molecular Biology, Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute in The Lancet, May 12, 1979, p. 1031.)
Moreover, I have evidence that the polypeptides that develop during the digestion of cereal grains are trigger factors, and it has been observed that the activity of some of them is comparable to that of endorphins.
This (...) is based on three observations:
1) There seems to be a strong correlation between the changes in behavior of schizophrenics when first admitted to the hospital and the changes that occur with wheat intake, or wheat and barley intake (multiple regression).
2) The kind of diet and epidemiological data leads one to conclude that the risk of morbid schizophrenia is greater if an individual eats a lot of wheat (and barley), slightly lower for rice-eaters, and still lower with individuals whose staple grains include corn on the cob, millet, and barley.
3) Clinical observation suggests that allergies to gluten (coeliac disease) and schizophrenia are genetically linked; such an assertion requires formal confirmation through indepth studies of families showing signs of coeliac disease.
These facts, as well as others, impelled us to confirm whether eating wheat gluten again was enough to revive all the disorders that had subsided on a 100% cereal grain-and milk-free diet.
That was the case (...). It was shown that there was endorphic activity in the peptidic metabolites in milk casein, and in corn and barley gluten, as well as very strong activity in wheat gluten.
Note: It’s true that a Westerner, fed on wheat, is even crazier than a rice-fed Oriental.

o Wheat has been subjected to intensive cross-breeding for thousands of years. The mutations that have piled up in its DNA might easily account for the defects in the proteins it synthesizes.
In any case, the peripheral layers of cereal grains contain molecules that are more complex than the starch of flour. Under the effects of cooking, they generate by-products that are even more complex, hence more toxic for the body.

_Really?

o Do you remember “Maillard’s molecules?” The more proteins contained in the flour, the greater number of chemical reactions that will occur with complex sugars_hence, the greater number of Maillard’s molecules, whose attributes you are now well acquainted with (in terms of toxicity and carcinogenic potential). This year, with the help of an experienced electrician, I built an apparatus that measured microscopic muscular spasms in man as well as in mice. Even in moments of complete rest, muscles twitch imperceptibly to the naked eye_that reflects minimal stimulation of the nervous system. In this way, we were able to see, with figures backing us up, that mice fed white bread shook twice as much as mice fed initial food, but that the ones that ate whole_meal bread shook four to five times as much! Such a level of stimulation, affecting most probably the entire nervous system, could well account for behavioral disorders ranging from ordinary stress to complete loss of self-control.

_But then, what was the trend for whole-meal bread based on?

o It was based on simplistic reasoning, as is often the case in dietetics. Stress was laid exclusively on the problem of tooth decay, that had hit the headlines after some outcry over tooth decay and, straightaway, whole-meal bread was marketed, and an advertising campaign was engineered that drummed the idea into people’s minds. The same method has been used to launch all the great dietary hoaxes.

_I find it unbelievable that people can be led astray, ultimately, in matters of interest.

o Commercial interests are inevitably compounded by the mistakes of theorists. The public foots the bill when it comes to their health, all the while convinced that they are doing what’s best for them, and industrialists line their pockets. That way, everybody has what they want.

_I don’t understand why such things have never been pointed out before; it’s somewhat disquieting that you should be the first to do so.

o “If that was true, we would have heard about it long ago.” That’s what I invariably heard, when I started out.
Fortunately, scientific progress has come to the rescue. A vague awareness that cooking is harmful has begun to gain a foothold. And about time too, because all alone up against five billion “cooked food adepts,” the struggle wasn’t exactly fair.

_You must have come under terrible pressure....

o The worst was my own resistance. Nothing is more difficult than owning up to the obvious!
I well understand the protests that my arguments have fuelled and still stir up. But I don’t believe that we should cry over it. Protest, however unpleasant, is always useful; it forces new ideas to prove themselves. If my ideas are right, nothing will prevent them from ultimately winning the day. They will emerge from the battle, strengthened. If they are not right, it’s better to chuck them as soon as possible!

_That holds back progress in knowledge.

o “You don’t impose a new theory; you wait until its opponents are dead,” according to the great physicist, Max Planck.

_In this case, it’s not a matter of quantum physics. If you’re right, we’re talking about patients who are dying while medicine is up the garden path.

o Medicine goes along with the culture that devised it. What people want is to be cured of their minor complaints without lifting a finger. Just imagine a doctor saying to this patient: “I order you to change your diet.” What would the patient do? He wouldn’t change diets, he’d change doctors!

_Medicine should, at least, inform the public that there is a dietary risk.

o That is happening, more and more, but people don’t respond instantly to that kind of warning. You’ve heard about those anti-smoking campaigns that helped the cigarette trade boost their sales. There are suicidal forces within our society. Besides, medicine can’t offer any enticing substitutes for present-day food.

_Don’t you think that it’s simply a matter of what’s easiest?

o It’s much more expedient to prescribe pills than to search out causes and reform habits.
In my view, every practitioner does their level best, but they have to cater to demands. To make it possible for medicine to change, attitudes first have to change. As long as people are afraid of disease, we’ll need shamans and quack nostrums to conjure away evil spells.

_It looks as though you’re implying that one ought not to be afraid of disease.

o Just think back on the problem of infection that we were speaking of a little while ago. If cuts don’t get infected any more, why be afraid of germs?

_All the same, they are pathogenic agents; one never knows the turn things can take.

o And what if they had been dubbed “pathogenic” by mistake? Suppose that they wreak havoc in a body upset by traditional food and that they are useful in the opposite case.
No one bothered to check up on how initial diet worked.

_It’s hard to believe that a difference in diet can have an influence on the development of infectious diseases, at least, to the extent of making them useful!

o Medicine took a picture of each disease based on facts observed within a cooking scenario.
The concepts of “typhoid” or “smallpox” are weighed down by all the anxiety heaped up over the centuries every time things took a turn for the worse. Every name of every disease contains within itself the memory of all the suffering and horror it was a commemoration of. No one can remain objective with such a liability in one’s unconscious mind. The anxiety is handed down from one generation to the next.

_And has having cancer freed you from that?

o That stoked me up a bit against the fear of dying. For a long time, I thought of other diseases in much the same way as everybody else. I had to have years of observation in an initial eating scenario to come up with a clearer picture of things. First of all, I was surprised to see the progress of the most usual ailments.

_I thought that, in your system, illnesses no longer existed?

o It’s much more subtle than that. -Illnesses develop, but in a mitigated form, so much so that one hardly detects the signs. Hasn’t it ever struck you that an illness can sometimes appear in a mild form scarcely recognizable, and sometimes break out in a symptomatic, perfectly straightforward form? Before antibiotics were widely used, doctors, for instance, spoke of a “tiff” when the patient only suffered a touch of typhoid that didn’t get beyond a bout of diarrhea.

_Those differences are ascribed to the greater vigor of some bodies.

o I have reason to believe that the mild form of a disease is in keeping with the normal development of a disease and that the symptomatic form stems from things getting out of hand.

_Isn’t that the very opposite of what is held to be true in the medical profession?

o Only insofar as a disease only develops in a mild form in virtually every case.

_The usual form, consequently, appears accidental.

o Quite. That is what we have grown to be convinced of from our raw, instinctive standpoint. Typical forms of all viral and bacterial diseases occur in the wake of loss of immune surveillance, resulting mainly from dietary havoc. On instinctotherapy, those same diseases remain under predictable control, so much so that they may be surmised to have been genetically encoded for a specific purpose.

_Aren’t you overstating your case? If you were diagnosed with hepatitis, would you turn down any kind of treatment?

o Hard luck. There is no cure for infectious hepatitis, any more than there is for viral diseases. In my system, instinct ensures I am provided with all the nutrients requisite for the body not to get out of gear, to make up for nutritional leeway, and also to back up organic function.
So, you’re bent on knowing how the disease strikes someone on instinctotherapy? Let me recount to you our very first experience. One of my co-workers came in one morning with the white of his eyes turned slightly yellow. I advised him to see his family doctor, who diagnosed hepatitis B (the most serious kind). He immediately put him on a three-month sick leave and ordered him to stay in bed and eat a low-calorie diet. My friend had just purchased a farm and enjoyed three months’ paid sick leave to work it into shape. He wasn’t bedridden for a single day and felt as fit as a fiddle, going about his masonry work and roofing.

_How did his doctor feel about that?

o He never found out. He would very likely have said that the disease sometimes occurs in its mild form, which in all fairness is true.
There is, indeed, a mild form, and medicine is open-minded enough to acknowledge it. But, a slightly more inquiring and scientific turn of mind would lead one to wonder what the causative factors are that bring it out or make it break out.
If such had been the manner of inquiry, the dietary factor would have been unearthed long since. But since such a surmise is preemptively brushed aside, differences in diet, as connected with disease pathways, and cause and effect relationships, lie outside its scope, or fail even to show up in any kind of statistic and, ultimately, medicine remains unruffled in the system it has comfortably sided with.

_What did your friend eat while he had jaundice?

o He began by fasting for a few days (instinctive fasting is part of instinctotherapy) and then he started indulging himself with grapefruit, eggs, and lard.

_Isn’t that very tough on the liver?

o Nothing is tough on any organ when instincts give the go-ahead.

_Not even in the event of an illness?

o Seemingly, instincts can accommodate particular sick states, which leads me to believe that illnesses are also genetically programmed.

_You’re taking things an unprecedented distance. It’s appalling to consider that the body could be mapping out its own diseases. To what end?

o That’s a good question. We ought to be wondering whether such diseases couldn’t possibly have a purpose or an end that eluded medicine. A number of reasons warrant our taking a step in that direction:
1) under proper dietary conditions, viral and bacterial diseases normally occur in their mild form. That might prompt us to consider them to be controlled processes;
2) they develop along lines that are basically similar from one person to the next. One might, therefore, conclude that they are engineered directly or indirectly by genetic coding, given that no other known body could guarantee such regularity;
3) the diseases spontaneously lead to recovery (under instinctotherapy!). In other words, they are encoded for a particular period of time, like work that has to be completed before a deadline;
4) timetables imply organization; if life takes the trouble to organize some process, it’s most probably with an aim in mind. All one has to do is discover what that aim is.

_Isn’t your position somewhat in line with the philosophy of final causes?

o Ever since mechanistic theory got off the ground, finalism has been derided. You’ve heard of the joke about the melon that the dear Lord drew meridians on in an attempt at making it easier to cut up, or the one about the nose that he made stick out on the face so as to be able to put glasses astride it. Finalism is ridiculous if one claims to explain away the nature of things by the extent of their usefulness in unforeseeable situations. That doesn’t prevent finality from existing, given that life itself exists_whether the latter is a result of chance or not. Every biological process must be useful for the species or for the individual; if not the laws of natural selection would have done away with it in the course of evolution. That means that it must serve some purpose or, better still, that it must have some finality. Ultimately, finalism follows directly from the laws of necessity and contingency!

_What would Jacques Monod think, with a perspective of 30 years?

o Chance would perhaps seem to him like a sign of divine will; existence would have seemed less futile.
What remained to be done, therefore_to make headway in our theory_was to find the purpose of such infectious processes as are typically called “diseases.”

_And what if this were to do away with the weakest representatives?

o That would be equally useful for the species, without, of course, being particulary alluring from an individual point of view! Any hypothesis is worth considering. To begin with, we could make use of present-day knowledge about germs to help us in our approach. Do you know how a virus is set up? You, no doubt, learned about that at school.

_It’s a kind of germ that is extremely small, that can’t be seen under a microscope, and that can only live off a cell.

o Indeed, a virus is not, strictly speaking, a living organism. It doesn’t breathe; it doesn’t eat; it doesn’t replicate on its own. It does so, as you say, “at the expense of the cell.” But, such an expression, “to live off,” reflects some preconception. One could say, on the contrary, that the cell is the one that replicates the virus; since the cell is alive, and the virus is not. Wouldn’t that be more logical?

_It wouldn’t be in the cell’s interest to replicate the virus!

o You, yourself, are lapsing into finalism.

_Viruses are, after all, nefarious. Neither the cell nor the body has anything to gain by replicating them.

o Be wary of platitudes. If we want to explode the present-day theoretical basis of medicine, we have to rid ourselves of all our preconceptions. You view viruses, from the outset, as harmful entities, invaders in whose interest it is to attack our cells. It’s ludicrous to ascribe intentionality to micro-organisms that are incapable of living on their own. That would be animism; that would be projecting aspects of our own mind onto a particle of inanimate matter.

_Don’t viruses contain DNA, that is to say, genetic information that amounts to a living process?

o Viruses do indeed contain either DNA or RNA (in the case of the latter, they’re retroviruses). In other words, they carry a portion of the genetic encoding that is in keeping with the basic processes of life. Viruses, therefore, are organized entities; and whenever organization exists, one has reason to believe that somewhere there is finality. It is generally admitted that the finality of a virus is self-replication.
But, since viruses don’t have a separate existence, one might well wonder whether that finality ought not to be sought elsewhere; i.e., in the cells, which the viruses splice.

_If I remember properly, when a virus infects a cell, the former thrusts forward its DNA, that, in turn, diverts cellular genetic encoding to its own advantage.

o You have exact recall. That’s the very terminology used to describe the process. But, beware. That language is the immediate consequence of the assumption that the virus is an invader. Let us now reconsider the scenario, admitting that the genetic data contained in the viral DNA is useful to the cell or to the body.

_Doesn’t the virus destroy the cell?

o In some cases, admittedly, the cell dies, but that’s not necessarily very serious. A virus, known as a bacteriophage, for instance, destroys colon bacillus. At first sight, it looks lethal. But the presence of these germs is not always desirable: that spells colibacillosis.

_And what of the viruses that destroy the cell of the body itself?

o After viral disease, hepatitis, smallpox, etc._however serious_I have never known anyone find a pool of serum in place of a patient. When the process remains under control (a mild form), the virus only destroys a minute proportion of body cells. That’s nothing to be alarmed about. The bowel loses an incalculable number of cells every day, through desquamation; one doesn’t feel the worse for it. Life is a constant renewal.
Instead of ascribing to the virus the evil design of destroying our cells, one might infer that the body (which has reason to follow a goal) sacrifices a few cells with the intention of replicating the virus. Moreover, with some viruses, that replication goes ahead without the cell being killed.

_One might fear, all the same, that the virus could replicate so much as to proliferate and invade the whole body.

o In matters of warfare, the attacker that ventures across the border usually intends to invade the territory. He destroys in his wake everything that prevents him from achieving his end. He doesn’t check his offensive to reassure the population. With viral disease, things develop differently. Nature has foreseen regulatory processes whose existence is much more readily understood if one accepts that there is a kind of pact between virus and body. Every cell that replicates the virus, concurrently manufactures a special protein in charge of warning the other cells that they are not to replicate any more. In such a way, the process levels off so that there are a reasonable number of viruses.

_I have never heard of that.

o Of course you have. You have even read about it in the papers: That protein is none other than interferon.

_If I managed to follow your reasoning, after recovery from a viral disease, the virus remains in every cell of the body?

o I understand your surprise. That’s something that had a deep impact on me. After “recovery,” viral DNA maintains itself in every cell of the body. That’s a strange kind of victory: as if, after the last war, a German had been kept in every house!

_True enough, that doesn’t tally neatly with the notion that viruses attack, but what purpose would such a scenario serve?

o There is something else that seems contradictory to me. Interferon not only prevents the virus from replicating further, but, at the same time, prevents the replication of other viruses that could potentially invade the body.

_Is that why one can’t go down with two viral diseases at the same time?

o Precisely, in theory, two viruses can’t be incubated at the same time. But, just think about it: If the body can prevent a second virus from replicating_whereas, it is, in theory, weakened by the first one_why should it not be able to prevent the first one from replicating?
That question should have disturbed researchers when interferon was discovered. The existence of a regulatory process that doesn’t involve suppressing the virus, but keeping replication under control in a precise manner, and, on top of that, which proves able to prevent a second virus from making matters worse_none of all that looks like a battle against an opponent that goes in for surprise attacks, but much rather like an overall process that goes off like clockwork. Setting aside any interpretation, and even if, in some cases, this process entails health trouble, one might safely say that everything seems to be set up in such a way that every cell should receive viral DNA and keep it for good.

_I don’t see what purpose additional DNA would serve in my cells. Isn’t their own genetic data vast enough? You were comparing them to a library housing a thousand huge volumes.

o No matter how vast the file, it can never contain all the possible data. I think that the DNA brought by the virus is a kind of supplementary file that enables the cell to do a job that the latter was not initially encoded for.

_Ah! I’m beginning to see what you’re driving at.

o All it takes is observing a body once viral DNA has infiltrated into all the cells, in other words, as soon as the incubation phase is over. All kinds of signs show up, depending on the type of virus: running a temperature, perspiration, catarrh, diarrhea, rashes of all shapes and sizes, and so on. Old-style doctors rightly upheld that “you have to let it run its course.” The only thing that was lacking was the definition of “it.”

_I see. In each case, one’s always having clean-outs.

o Once one has understood that the body is weighed down by abnormal substances, it’s plain sailing!
Unfortunately, modern medicine has flown in the face of its former intuitiveness, and erstwhile formulas seem old hat. Bent on what’s rational, medicine dismisses out of hand everything it cannot explain. As it has not yet come up with the great question of genetic inadaptation to food, it hasn’t made the connection between abnormal substances that the body flushes out and abnormal substances that are put in. And yet, what one draws out of a bag is usually what was put there in the first place!
It must be said that due to the immoderate amount of undesirable substances characteristic of traditional food, viral processes take on alarming proportions and coexist with unpleasant signs, that can even be dangerous, and that really makes them look like full-blown diseases. Fear jams reasoning ability. For want of anything better, doctors have observed, described, and itemized those signs to come up with highfalutin diagnoses. They conferred on them the illustrious name of “symptoms,” a word that was quite cleverly concatenated from the Greek: syn = with, and ptôma = corpse. That etymology is deeply meaningful.

_So, it would be a mistake to put up a struggle against them?

o Given that viruses are looked on as invaders, medical know-how automatically involves leaving no stone unturned in destroying them or inhibiting their range of action. But that’s an uphill struggle; it is difficult to act against a virus since it has to do with genetically controlled processes. One can’t prevent it, short of deeply disrupting the body, for instance, by thwarting the immune system with the use of vaccinations or with antivirals like AZT.

_Are you against vaccination?

o If disease is useful...

_And what of antibiotics? I remember many instances when the doctor prescribed me antibiotics for colds.

o That’s become automatic behavior. Antibiotics, in fact, have no effect on viruses, all they do is curb bacterial replication_the superadded infections that occur and that, from the medical standpoint, make for complications as regards disease.

_You’re claiming, then, that viruses set up a kind of clean-out. I don’t understand for what reason our cells are incapable of cleansing themselves. That would be easier.

o The genetic information contained in our cells was compiled under “initial” life conditions. It enables the cells to break down what might be termed “initial molecules” (namely, molecules found in “initial” food) as well as metabolites that are their derivatives (the molecules produced through normal metabolic alteration).
Now, traditional food contains long chains of molecules that are light years away from anything initial, and that releases abnormal metabolites that the cells can’t get rid of_given that the latter weren’t encoded to that effect.
The theory I’m putting forward is that viruses provide our cells with added data that is necessary to clear the body of “non-initial” metabolites.

_A bit like a special software that I might load into my computer to program it to carry out a special purge.

o You’ve hit the nail on the head. Of course, I don’t claim that all viruses act like that; I haven’t yet run experiments on all of them from our new reference point. Some are perhaps really harmful, due to ill-timed mutations. Others are perhaps intended to eliminate individuals who are carriers of defects with a view to preserving the species; that’s not really in keeping with the emphasis laid on individuality that holds sway in the West. Jean Rostand already remarked on the fact that medicine, by preserving the individual, prevented natural selection and enhanced degeneracy of the species. Nature was perhaps more cunning than that. One can well imagine that certain viruses were developed, through evolution, to prevent over-population and the destruction of nutritive habitats. For instance, when deer over-reproduce, as is the case in natural reserves where predators have been killed off, the oldest animals are stricken with conjunctivitis and can no longer feed themselves. What better solution for controlling over-population?
The theory of vector viruses providing genetic additions seems to have been discovered by bacteria well before the Common Era. Indeed, bacteria, when attacked by dangerous molecules, know how to make and replicate a small strip of additional DNA, called a plasmid, on which is encoded an ad hoc defense system. They can even transmit this plasmid to a passing sister cell by means of a “sexual hair.” Scientists gave that learned name to the tubule that erects itself on the surface of the first bacteria, and that is inserted into its partner’s membrane.
The DNA that is transmitted is immediately replicated and makes a sexual hair appear on the inseminated bacteria that, in turn, can offer their services to other partners. In the twinkling of an eye, the whole colony will have acquired the same additional genetic information. This is how, for instance, one can account for bacterial adaptation to antibiotics_that is, those molecules which bacteria most certainly did not foresee the presence of in the body.
Burger’s theory consists in considering viruses to be an advanced form of sexual hairs on which a capsule had been added, so that a strip of DNA can be transmitted from one cell to another, and from one organism to another. Viruses, therefore, can be regarded as vectors of genetic data transmission by para-sexual means with a view to bringing about adaptation to new or unusual situations. This theory enables researchers to bridge the gap between the theory of plasmids well-known to biologists and the theory of viruses that, for the time being, still boils down to considering viruses to be pathogenic agents.

_What do you think of AIDS? In that case, you can’t speak of the beneficial effects of a virus.

o The first experiments carried out on individuals testing seropositive or on full-blown AIDS patients_up until now only on a restricted number of them_have all proved to be quite encouraging. I can recall the case of a young man, for instance, who was in a critically advanced stage of impaired health when his doctor advised him to try his luck with instinctotherapy. The unfortunate man was disfigured by pustular acne that had spread from his face to his entire body, in spite of traditional treatment. Here and there, his flesh had worn so thin that the bone was actually visible. His lymphocyte ratio had already dropped to 0.59. He didn’t have the strength to go upstairs. I saw him six months later; I barely recognized him: He looked bright-eyed; the skin of his face was perfectly smooth; he was bursting with energy. He had gone back to work; his lymphocyte count had returned to normal (the ratio T4/T8 had gone back up to 1.06). After one and half years, he told me that his great hope had seemingly come true: he no longer had motile antigens.

_Well, then, why aren’t you having it published, with the rampant panic that attaches to that disease?

o It’s not easy to get across. There are huge vested interests at stake with AIDS.

_Was he receiving treatment from a doctor?

o Yes, it so happens that he was in the care of a well-known figure in medicine.

_And he didn’t undergo any medical treatment?

o None whatsoever. In any case, allopathy hasn’t much to offer at this point.

_Don’t you hold with vaccination?

o My closest medical colleague, who shared in our research for 10 years, later went to work in the United States on an AIDS vaccine for several years. He managed to isolate part of the viral membrane, which raised great hopes. Unfortunately, there are most assuredly several AIDS viruses. Already over a hundered different morphologies have been identified. If there are as many as there are for the common cold, that comes to over 300!

_We’ll have to be vaccinated every day of the year.

o I think that the only answer lies in diet.

_So, the AIDS virus wouldn’t particularly frighten you?

o Not particularly. The African green monkey, who also eats raw food instinctively (that goes without saying!) seems to hit it off with this agent that is supposedly pathogenic with civilized beings. Even chimpanzees in captivity, who are fed raw fruit because they can’t digest cooked food, don’t react when they are inoculated with it.
In my view, the AIDS virus could make people become aware that there is a dietary problem to be sorted out, and also t hat viral theory has to be completely reworked.

_As for considering the AIDS virus a useful virus... It’s a bit hard to inoculate oneself along those lines!

o It should, at least, come as a surprise to medicine that the forebear of that virus, which is so threatening to man as a whole, should have been discovered in the heart of the jungle that was our primeval cradle.

_I don’t find that very reassuring.

o Two stances are tenable:
1) the medical viewpoint, which amounts to saying: “See how poorly nature is designed; the worst viruses are always popping up in every nook and cranny,” or
2) the one I’m putting forward: “If a virus exists in nature, it is probably part and parcel of the natural balance.”
I might add that the green monkey, once captured and given adulterated food, develops the same AIDS symptoms as man_fortunately for researchers, who, in that way, can carry out their experiments.

_I, nonetheless, find it unfortunate that you can only put forward one case of remission. A single case isn’t enough to draw any conclusions from.

o Careful, I was just referring to the first individual who tried out the program. Since then, we have been able to observe the changes occurring in thirty-odd cases of the disease, from individuals testing seropositive all the way down to the most severe forms, for dietary periods going from three weeks to coming up to four years_which allows us to have some idea about the matter that carries a shade more weight.
The greatest snag that we are up against is the instability of the patients who throw in the towel as regards dietary discipline as soon as they sense the slightest clash with society at large or with medicine.

_You amaze me. AIDS patients who feel that medicine can do nothing to bail them out_you’re not going to tell me that they end up letting their last hope go down the drain.

“First Statistical Survey on the Influence of Instinctotherapy on Changes Occurring in AIDS,” Bruno Comby, U.R.C.A. Montramé, March 1989 (excerpts)
The survey was carried out on 27 HIV-positive individuals: 22 men, 2 women, and 3 children. In all cases, of individuals testing seropositive or of full-blown AIDS patients, instinctotherapy was submitted to for over three weeks. The subjects were subdivided into three groups: 7 silent carriers (stage one), 5 individuals testing seropositive (stage two), and 15 full-blown AIDS patients (stage three). The average period of time on instinctotherapy was six months and seventeen days, the maximum length being 33 months. Raw, instinctive diets were maintained by six individuals when this study was still underway, 12 had switched back to a traditional cooked diet, and 7 had taken up a mainly raw food diet.
The evolutionary constant factor was worked out in relation to the improvement or worsening of the various symptoms, on a scale from -3 to +3. The evolutionary constant factors that were obtained are the following:
on instinctotherapy: _0.76
after shelving instinctotherapy: + 1.39
after switching back to a 100% traditional diet: + 2.27
on a mainly raw food diet: 0
Inference: these figures clearly point to a causal relationship between “non-initial” food and the heightening of symptoms in AIDS cases. It would obviously be jumping the gun to conclude that eating according to the rules of instinctotherapy can guarantee recovery from this disease. The sampling of patients has to involve a larger number of individuals (although the figures are statistically meaningful as it is). Moreover, what one means by “recovery” will have to be spelled out: does it mean no longer testing seropositive or no longer having any symptoms?
It is, all the same, relevant to note that the symptoms recede on instinctotherapy and recur on a 100% traditional diet, whereas they remain constant after adopting a diet close to instinctotherapy. All that might be accounted for in light of the number of pathogenic molecules present in the body _nil in the first case, great in the second, and scarce in the third. It is worth noting as well that patients who submitted to instinctotherapy for periods long enough showed a gradual improvement that seemed to lead to the complete disappearance of their symptoms; those facts have gone on being confirmed since the publication of this survey, with several years intervening.
Note: The survey summarized here was sent in full to the French Ministry of Health. To date, there has been no response.

o Don’t delude yourself! The patients that feel most let down by medicine are the ones who really hang on for dear life, oddly enough. Yet, it’s easy to understand the psychological mechanism. If medicine pulls the plug on you, your level of anxiety automatically increases. Now, unconscious anxiety impels one to stick to anything that might denote paternal protection, and doctors are excellent father figures. Fathers know everything and can do everything, even if for centuries medicine has proven the exact reverse of all that.
Everyone is in a blue funk about AIDS these days. AIDS victims simply feel they have to die because, out of some guilt, they don’t want to go public, fearing that society will ostracize them completely.
AIDS death has become a new archetype of Divine Curse. That is no doubt bound up with its being transmitted sexually.
As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be loathe to prove that a disease transmitted in love is a good disease and that its perverted development stems from another sin against nature; namely, the sin of gluttony.

_You’re really waxing metaphysical now.

o Let’s get back to facts. One of my scientific colleagues has recently drawn up a short statistical survey on the first thirty-odd AIDS cases to have submitted to instinctotherapy. In connection with the psychological reasons I mentioned earlier on, those patients alternated raw food and cooked food. We have, thus, been in a position systematically to compare the profile of symptoms in a food-bound way. The results speak for themselves. The evolutionary constant factor for those people who used instinctotherapy was _0.76, whereas eating cooked food brought it down to + 1.39 _meaning that eating raw food quickly reduced symptoms all round and that switching back to cooked food brings out symptoms ever faster.
I, instantly, had the Health Ministry informed of those figures, but failed to draw any serious answer. I find that most unfortunate. After all, time is wearing on, and AIDS death cases are in full swing.

_Indeed, there is a lot to get worked up about. Apparently, medicine hasn’t saved the life of a single AIDS patient to date. Its first duty should be to try for any solution that might raise a glimmer of hope.

o That’s why I thought the title of my next book should be: AIDS, Cured or Your Money Back
In spite of all my problems, I’m still willing to lay a bet. Any AIDS patients, having seriously tried out instinctotherapy for six months under our guidance without getting satisfactory results, could ask for a complete refund of course and housing fees. That seems a fair deal to me, of a kind intended to encourage patients, that feel like victims in the hands of medicine, to try the experiment_a dietary experience that is, at once, very pleasant and involves no risk. But, it looks as if the idea hadn’t gone down well in every quarter.

_You were saying, then...

o ... that the first results, with figures to back them up, are quite in keeping with my first theory about viruses; in short, that
1) viral processes are not intrinsically pathogenic; that
2) their function is to clear our cells of certain groups of undesirable molecules; and
3) that the body taking up too many such molecules through the digestive tract would account for the process running away with itself and its pathogenic aftermath.
Disease, strictly speaking, would, therefore, not be determined by the presence of a virus, but by disorders induced by an overload of abnormal molecules from cooked food.

_Is that why fasting or starvation diets have always been considered beneficial in those kinds of diseases? There is a flaw in your reasoning, all the same; it’s hard to understand why a virus like the HIV virus should have suddenly given rise to an epidemic. Either it already existed among human beings and had no reason to peak so abruptly in its virulence; or else, it existed in remote spots in the world_but, if it’s part and parcel of nature, it would have been passed on from one generation to the next.

o I noted long ago, that especially in a natural-eating scenario, viruses only spread in bodies that tolerate them. Bodies seem to enhance or jam viral replication, depending on whether the former have the potential or not to carry out, without too much damage, the clean-out that the viruses are going to bring about. A virus that would trigger cellular detoxification that is too potent is automatically toned down. Hence, when a population is overly toxic, the virus that has become too dangerous replicates so infrequently that, in time, it is forgotten.
After that, it is only recovered if one goes and looks for it in some natural pool.

_If I follow your reasoning, you think that Americans were too toxic to keep HIV in their inheritance of diseases.

o All it takes is seeing their cooking inheritance.

_Whereas Africans, who eat a more natural diet, still pass it on from generation to generation, isn’t that right? That doesn’t strike me as illogical, except for one thing: the Americans shouldn’t have got themselves contaminated, since the virus was dangerous for them.

o You’re right. Particularly insulting inoculation methods were required to overshoot the bounds: shots, blood transfusions, and rough sexual movements, all helped the virus directly enter the bloodstream. Then, the way was paved for mutations. Every time a virus replicates in the body, it does so in excess of some ten thousand million times. As the copies that are most contagious are passed on best, the process gets out of hand. The overall picture, therefore, is that of an epidemic, perfectly in line with Louis Pasteur’s thesis regarding pathogenic agents. There’s only one stickler for theorists: the mystery enshrouding healthy “silent carriers.”

_True enough. There is a far greater number of HIV positive individuals around than full-blown AIDS cases.

o That state of things is rather contradictory, if the full-blown disease is considered the normal form and healthy “silent carriers” to be exceptional.
There again, we have to go into reverse. In my view, the healthy “silent carrier” should be considered the norm_the body being able properly to keep viral processes under control (that usually includes people who eat right or more sparingly)_whereas the full-blown AIDS patients are people whose bodily cleansing processes have broken down completely.

_It is said, all the same, that everyone testing seropositive runs the risk of dying in the decade following contamination.

o The AIDS virus is a slow virus. While its activities are underway, the individual testing seropositive has plenty of time to clock up an ever-increasing armada of abnormal molecules, that will end up, sooner or later, making the process explode. I think every individual testing seropositive should immediately change their diet; in that case, they won’t have any more problems than green monkeys have.
At present, I’m setting up an experiment on cats in order to corroborate those theories. Cats, as you know, also have their AIDS virus. The goal is to show that cats fed naturally remain healthy “silent carriers,” and that when on adulterated food, they develop the symptoms of the disease.
The experiment is all set. All I lack is funds.

_The stakes are high; you should be able to come by them easily.

o On the contrary, the higher the stakes, the tougher the opposition. As every researcher only has eyes for his own fame, hospitals haggle over subsidies.

_Don’t you feel helpless, thinking that you hold the key to the problem, and people are left to die in hospitals?

o A feeling of helplessness, you’re right there, but I had to get used to it. I have for a long time seen people die or suffer in ignorance as to the real cause of their diseases, and sometimes refuse to rock the boat when it came to their own diet.
All I can do is inform and calmly forge ahead in my own sweet time. The future will decide who’s right.
For the time being, the viruses of common diseases_at least the ones I have observed over 25 years of experimenting_have never seemed to me to have any other purpose than to set up the clearing of molecules from cooked food. And I stand my ground on that working hypothesis.

_Let me interrupt you. If the purpose of viruses is to flush out molecules that have been adulterated through cooking, they would have no reason to exist in primeval nature. Obviously, that doesn’t hold water.

o I forgot to clarify one thing: The parasitic molecules that are present in cooked food already exist, in minute amounts, in natural food.
Cooking sets off molecular collisions under the effect of thermal velocity and the mixing of substances released when cellular membrane burst. Now, these collisions do occur in a natural food scenario, but at an infinitely slower rate. A fruit that falls and remains exposed to the sun undergoes a similar kind of cooking on a restricted scale under the effect of infrared rays that speed up its molecules and ultraviolet rays that bombard them with photons. The sudden drop to the ground bursts a certain number of cells. All that enables us to foresee the presence of a small percentage of adulterated molecules liable to pile up in metabolisms not equipped to cope with them.
Hence, even in primeval nature, it was in the interest of organisms to have at their disposal supplementary cleansing processes to deal with various molecular headaches that could crop up: droughts, forest fires, famines, changes in climate, appearances of new poisonous plants in the wake of a mutation in their DNA, and so on. All kinds of unforeseen circumstances could trigger off the appearance of new molecules in the available food supply. I think that the human body managed to face those kinds of unexpected happenings by coming up with custom-made cleansing processes, passed on from one person to the next, in the form of viruses, that remain perfectly “silent” so long as the body isn’t poisoned above a definite threshold.

_So, what matters, then, is the quantity rather than the quality of molecules.

o With our cooking practices, we poison our bodies so much that those timeworn processes get out of hand and actually appear as if they were illnesses. Ultimately, as the same scenario recurs regularly (as regularly as cooking intoxication does), medicine takes the view that full-blown diseases are normal and that forms that keep these processes under control are abnormal.

_That’s not simple, but it makes sense, at first sight.

o That can be neatly matched up with the theory of plasmids. When a bacteria is attacked by a dangerous molecule, the former manufactures a small strip of DNA (called a plasmid) that it replicates several times over and transmits to neighboring bacteria by means of a little tube that forms in its surface.
Every bacteria affected follows suit, and, by and by, the entire colony of bacteria, benefits by the antimolecular defense scheme that was devised by a single one of them. Such is currently believed to be the way bacteria speedily become refractory to antibiotics.

_How then did the first virus appear?

o I believe that viral processes date back to the origins of life. If bacteria, having been around from time immemorial, could already produce, replicate, and transmit plasmids, there is no reason to believe that the more advanced cells that go to make multicellular organisms couldn’t have done likewise. The only additional difficulty was that those bacteria had to overcome being static. Since they could no longer freely circulate to hand out additional DNA to cells on the other side of the body they were part of, it did take them devising a packaging and dispatching network.

_Would you say that a cell was bright enough to devise a postal service a few billion years ahead of man?

o Our intelligence is entirely born from the coming together of a sperm and egg so that the postal system also derives from a single cell.
This actually was no invention, but a matter of adapting a process for higher organisms that was already part of the cells they were descended from. I believe that a virus is a constituent inherent in the process of life as a genetic data transmitter. It may have played a major part in the process of evolution by passing on sections of a genome from one species to another. Major mutations, such as those that enabled mammals to readapt to water life, have never been satisfactorily clarified_and there is much else to clear up besides.
However, viruses are highly unlikely to have randomly originated outside a cell. On the DNA of a human virus, for instance, there are whole chunks of DNA that are identical with the opposite numbers on our own DNA.
It is mathematically implausible for a sequence of bases to line up at random in the self-same order as our own sequences. Things make better sense if one allows that a virus derives from a cell. I am not alone in thinking so. The issue involves determining whether viruses were the result either of a hapless contingency or of resourceful planning. As it happens, within the dietary conditions I advocate, viral processes appear beneficial.

_And what of the packaging network?

o A bacteria synthesizes a cylindrical tube from its membrane that can intromit into another bacteria. Is that not strangely reminiscent of how a cell membrane buds out into a viral casing that can merge with another cell membrane? A number of viruses are indeed tube-shaped, which bespeaks some remote kinship.

_That sounds rather disturbing. How long is it since you first aired your theory on viruses?

o Some 15 years or so.

_Didn’t it find favor with any doctors or scientists?

o Oh, yes, it did. I was patted on the back many times behind closed doors. The former head of the University Pediatric Clinic in Geneva, as it happened, had summoned me subsequent to the recovery of a leukemic child. At the end of our chat, he congratulated me on my approach, saying he sided with my concepts. Then, shaking my hand, he entreated me not to breathe a word to his colleagues. Very many doctors have acted very open-minded, virtually all of those whom I managed to expound my views to. But since no man is an island, however clever, he can’t drive back single-handedly the bulldozer of official medicine.

_There’s quite some time to go before that happens.

o Instinctotherapy helps one keep one’s cool!

_How did you first happen to think of molecules being damaged by cooking?

o Quite by chance.

_Is it another installment of the red cabbage story?

o No. To hammer out the concept of abnormal metabolites due to cooking, it took something less natural than red cabbage. It was a coffee-cream cake.

_A coffee-cream cake? I don’t see why that should be particularly indigestible.

o More than you might think. Coffee-cream cakes aren’t particularly popular in France. And so, I’m afraid I can’t spare you a mouth-watering description of the pastry: two slabs of crunchy crust filled with a thick layer of coffee cream breaded in roasted almond powder and topped with a drop of pink candy.

_Sounds mouth-watering.

o This was only months after my wife and I had firmly resolved not to stretch any more points concerning our own diets. We found it superhuman to let cream-cakes, sweets, and dainties go by the board that might have made up for the spartan starkness of our meals. (We hadn’t as yet let tropical fruit into the experiment and we ruled out any industrial food; just imagine what we had on our plates). To cut a long story short, I had been taken on as a solo cellist to record the complete organ concertos by Handel to the tune of two daily sessions in a Protestant church in Nyon, a small town on the shores of Lake Leman. During the breaks_which were many, technicians having to monitor the quality of the recordings_I paced up and down the neighboring street, where, to my misfortune, stood a top-notch bakery.
Moreover, friends of ours had tried out our diet. Having failed to stick it out for very long (the method wasn’t as yet up to scratch), they buzzed me regularly to talk me into “unfrustrating myself”: what it took to stave off temptation, and better appreciate instinctotherapy, was to let oneself off the hook once in awhile. As I scoured up and down the street, past that bakery window, I felt the pull of wanting to give in welling up to a climax. And in spite of my word of honor to the wife, I finally walked into the bakery, and bought a coffee-cream cake. It held some kind of fascination for me, the more so on account of the scant choice of foods available to us.
The next day, contrary to my expectation, frustration had mounted. It didn’t take me long to find my way back to the counter, and this time I bought three coffee-cream cakes, hoping to unfrustrate myself more efficiently. The following day, I felt even worse: the second I got up, all I could think of was coffee-cream cakes. My mind was completely taken over, and yet again I walked straight into the bakery and bought everything left on the counter. I wolfed down my booty (a good fifteen cakes) in a quiet back alley to avoid drawing attention to myself. And then I felt nauseated_the only hope left to me of freeing myself from temptation.
It took me several weeks to recapture my ability to sense the normal taste of initial food; that’s when I understood how cooking snares us. Going back to cooked food perhaps relieves a feeling of psychological frustration, all the while inducing extraordinary physiological frustration.
But the experience had another unexpected consequence. The following day, when I woke up, my wife said that I had perspired during my sleep. Now, on our diet, we had noticed that we hardly perspired any more_no more beads of sweat on foreheads or soaked armpits (even after exertion). I was wondering how to justify my night sweating, when a gavel rapped with my wife uttering: “That’s strange; your sweat smells of roasted almonds.”
I understood then that I had really cooked it. I tried to explain to my dear wife that I had carried out a scientific experiment. She walked out slamming the door.

_If I’d been in her shoes, I’d have run to the closest bakery!

o She didn’t have time to do that, because another source of worry gripped us all of a sudden. Since my sweat smelled of roasted almonds, that was proof that they contained molecules that carried that aromatic component_in other words, molecules that had not been broken down by my metabolism.

_I don’t see what’s so serious about that.

o At first sight, that may seem unimportant. However, that those molecules should have gone through my body without being broken down raised a basic problem. Raw almonds, even after I had eaten much larger amounts than the few grams of brown powder coating my coffee-cream cakes, had never made for any smell whatsoever. Therefore, I couldn’t conclude that I had taken my digestive potential too far. Those roasted molecules had apparently bypassed the intricacies of my metabolism. To put it bluntly, human metabolism was certainly not adapted to molecules adulterated through cooking. Until that moment, I hadn’t wanted to credit that possibility.

_Can that be explained scientifically?

o Our bodies produce enzymes according to models encoded in their genetic storehouse. Those enzymes are, therefore, adapted, from the outset, to initial molecules. Whenever one puts “non-initial” molecules into one’s body, it’s anybody’s guess what the result will turn out.

_Cooking is said to destroy precious substances.

o Undoubtedly. Some molecules cease to be taken up at all by the body when they’ve been heated, like vitamin C. A lot has been said about that. That’s even the main reason why raw salads are on the increase.

_Don’t you think that was a good thing?

o It had to start somewhere. Unfortunately, so much was made of that destruction by fire that its nightmarishness ended up blocking out what was essential: because, ultimately, none of that is very important. One can always make up for a lack of vitamin C in a cooked diet with a few kiwis, for instance, that contain up to ten times as much as lemon. The real headache is elsewhere: i.e. in the adulterated molecules.

_Do you mean “Maillards molecules?” The ones you were telling me about this morning?

o I’m including all molecules damaged through cooking and even some natural molecules, contributed by unnatural foods, which our enzymes weren’t intended to break down.

_Your experience with coffee-cream cakes shows that they can go through the body without being broken down. If they can come out in the same state through perspiration, they must not be that harmful.

o That’s right. Molecules that go straight through won’t be necessarily dangerous. But out of the countless numbers of abnormal molecules whose presence one may suspect in traditional food, some will stand a good chance of getting stuck and building up in the body. Just imagine being given a bunch of keys to get through a maze made up of crisscross corridors, closed off at every junction by a locked door. How are you going to manage to find your way? Supposing you can choose between several front doors?

_I’d try all my keys again in the doors that I come up against on the way.

o Very good. And, one door leading to another, you’ll follow the itinerary that was, so to speak, preordained by your bunch of keys, and you’ll land up at the exit of the maze safe and sound. That’s exactly what happens when a molecule goes through our metabolism. Every one of its facets has to correspond exactly to the successive enzymes that it meets on its way. And what if one of your keys is missing in your set?

_In such a case, I might get trapped.

o Fortunately, nature has made sure that the different locks fit all the usual kinds of keys: i.e. the enzymes that the body uses are designed so as to unfailingly ensure the proper breakdown at every stage in the assimilation of initial molecules.
Now, just imagine that your set of keys was smashed about as hard as you can imagine. That’s exactly what cooking does on a microscopic level. Raising the temperature means increasing the speed of the molecules.
In the ambient air, for instance, nitrogen and oxygen molecules dart around at an average speed of about 450 meters per second.

_Faster than sound, then?

o They have to traver faster than the sound waves that they carry! Things are different for fluids or solids, where molecules are bonded by cohesive forces. In gases, molecules float freely and reverberate sound waves solely by knocking into one another.
When you heat food, the speed of the molecules increases as well, so that they crash into one another faster.

_I can visualize that for gases. But for food, I don’t see how molecules can move if they are stuck together.

o All material particles move at a particular speed; in solids, they wiggle about their position a bit like a ball on the end of a spring. Except at absolute zero_that is, at -459°F_at that temperature, everything freezes to utter stillness, no chemical reaction can start up. For chemical reactions to occur, molecules have to come together and they have to collide rather energetically. Chemical processes appropriate for life to be sustained occur at temperatures ranging from 0° to 40° C. Heating to higher temperatures, causes further reactions to occur: Molecules crash into one another at much higher speeds, to the point of distorting, getting stuck together, or disintegrating into tiny fragments in a perfectly unpredictable way.

“The Smell and Shapes of Molecules.”
Günther Ohloff, Research n°18, vol. p. 1068, Dec. 2, 1971
Note: The molecules on the right side have the same chemical formula as the adjacent ones on the left side. Minute variations in the structure of a molecule are enough to alter altogether its effect on the body. There is cause for concern about the possible consequences of the countless molecular alterations that occur in cooking food.

_You say “distorting.” Merely concussing a molecule out of shape doesn’t alter its chemical formula.

o Not its formula, but its properties are altered. The molecule that carries the scent of violet, for instance, has a folded hexagonal shape, like a deck chair. If it is bent by bringing up the lower part so that it looks like a boat, the smell changes to petroleum.
The molecular world is governed by highly specific geometrical laws. Chemical formulas only provide a first approximation of the phenomena.
There are, for instance, two kinds of sugars, that have exactly the same formula, C6H12O6, one of which looks like the image of the other in a mirror. Those two molecules, almost identically symmetrical (like one’s left and right hands), theoretically have the same chemical properties. However, one of them, which is called an l-sugar, cannot be in any way used by living organisms, whereas the other, the d-sugar, plays a major part in the biosphere: The latter is the supreme energizing molecule, made by plants from solar energy, that can stock and transmit this energy to all forms of life.

_What do those abbreviations “l” and “d” mean?

o They stand for levogyrate and dextrorotate. The l-sugar dissolved in water makes plane-polarized light rotate to the left; the d-sugar makes it rotate to the right. Only the d_sugar can be broken down, for our enzymes are primed to take up the form that veers to the right and not the one that veers to the left.

_Is that why it has been suggested that cereal grains be heated in order to turn them into something closer to dextrin?

o Once again, there’s a slight mix-up in people’s minds: converting something to dextrin means breaking down the starches through the effect of an acid. That’s how dextrine_a dressing used in dyeing_is produced.

_Doesn’t heat convert starch into sugar?

o Unfortunately, it does other things as well. When you cook a mixture of flour and water, you don’t end up with a pure sugar solution.

_No. That’s how you make paste.

o See, you do know something about chemistry! Starch consists of sugar molecules bonded like the links of a chain with multiple branches similar in appearance to the shape of a pine branch. Under the effect of heat, all those branches break off and then stick back together willy-nilly to form long criss-crossed chains that give paste its thick texture. The starch is then said to have undergone polymerization. Well, when you bake bread or when you prepare baby cereal for your baby, you’re doing the very same thing.

_You’re taking my appetite away: bread, I have to think of as paste now!

o Yes and with little carbon dioxide bubbles to improve on it. Man’s genius foresaw everything as regards eating pleasure! That being so, let’s go back to our story about the maze. Cooking a food, on the molecular scale, is like banging together innumerable bunches of keys belonging to members of a vast crowd of people before setting them loose into a network of corridors. If the keys don’t bang too violently, there won’t be any damage. If the keys are hit too hard, though, some will get bent out of shape, others will break, others will get twisted up together, the blades jamming in the bows, etc.
Dietary molecules have the same fate. One shouldn’t forget that food mainly consists of living beings or direct offshoots of living beings. Molecules used in biological processes were chosen by life to stand up to the temperatures at which those processes take place. There’s no reason for them to put up with higher temperatures, at which some of them would be broken down or change properties.

_At what temperature does such breakdown begin?

o One might be tempted to think that one has to heat a lot, since 37° is 310° above absolute zero. Thirty degrees or so more, 67°C, for instance, doesn’t seem like much; barely a 10% relative increase. And yet, it is known that some enzymes are already inactivated at a temperature of 55 to 60°C.

_It has always been said that enzymes were critically sensitive to heat.

o What is true of enzymes might also be true for other proteins_enzymes are proteins_or for any complex molecule. By the look of it, leeway is rather short.

_So, cooking inevitably entails such breakdown?

o The intrinsic aim of cooking is to break down molecules; otherwise, food wouldn’t change flavor or texture. Cooking at low temperatures carries greater risks as far as unpredictable results are concerned than cooking at high temperatures.

_Didn’t you tell me that grilled meat was highly carcinogenic?

o That’s right. Compounds formed at high temperatures are the most carcinogenic. Make no mistake about it; they go all the way into the nuclei of our cells without having been completely broken down, since they have been shown to spell trouble for our DNA. That’s a typical instance of cooked substances percolating all the way down to the very core of cellular mechanisms. Nevertheless, simmering, which necessarily lasts longer in order to have a visible effect on the food, will also alter a great number of molecules and those molecules will be all the more dangerous in that they will hardly be adulterated.

_You mean to say the opposite: the more a molecule is adulterated, the more harmful it becomes.

o Not at all! The most damaged molecules are not necessarily the most harmful.
Which bunches of keys will be the most dangerous for the people in the maze: the ones that will have been completely damaged or those that only have a minor flaw, scarcely visible at a glance?

_A set that’s been too damaged won’t even allow us to open the first door.

o A molecule that has undergone complete alteration won’t be metabolized either. It won’t be taken up by the first enzymes in charge of commencing digestion. It becomes immediately obvious that the real danger comes, rather, from molecules even so slightly adulterated that still look like tolerably normal molecules to defeat the body’s vigilance. They might possibly go deep into the metabolism, then remain jammed somewhere along the way, like people who might go into the corridors with a single damaged key on their ring. They could remain stuck before the door the key fit, their key could remain stuck in the lock, and all that would hold up the other visitors who want to get by. In short, a terrific jam is inevitable.

_So, what of those pressure cookers extolled by advertising or steamed vegetables reputedly easier to digest?

o You put me in mind of the misfortunes of a famous head of a big chain of health shops, who shall remain nameless. I was attending a lecture he gave in Lausanne many years ago. In the first part of his talk, he had convinced his audience that cooking was extremely harmful, by emphasizing the fact that the enzymes necessary for digestion were destroyed by heating. Then, after the break, he really started laying into oil-fired ovens commonly used to bake bread in, and extolled cooking in a wood-burning stove _a process that his own production obviously guaranteed. When question time came round, I raised my hand and asked very innocently: “What is your position on the preserving of enzymes in bread baked in a wood-burning stove?” The hapless man didn’t know what to say and stood there with his mouth wide open. So, his wife butted in forcibly, and to help her husband save face she went off on a tangent on the beneficial effects of fresh fruit jams.

_Which is another hoax, is it?

o The damage caused by freezing fruit (that are preserved at low temperatures before being made into jam) are most certainly minor as compared to the effects of heating.
The lowering of temperature produces crystals in the cells that make up a food, and, when the frozen food thaws (the membranes being pierced by the crystals’ tips), it means that the substance of the cells flows out. All kinds of chemical reactions follow: oxidation, hydrolysis, etc., all of which make thawed frozen fruit look as if it were rotting.
Recent studies have also shown that some proteins disband and are damaged simply when exposed to the cold, but such occurrences are probably less harmful than breakdown induced by thermal velocity. In our culture, there’s a real taboo around cooking. That, for a century, man couldn’t get beyond the stereotypical notion that nutrients are destroyed by heating and that the danger arising from damaged molecules has been completely swept under the rug_which was, after all, a crucial issue_is ample proof that “something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.”
Have you ever read the book by Doctor Jackson, a leading naturopath at the turn of the century?
It’s a striking example of such a rift. The first part of the book is devoted to a staggering demonstration that tends to prove that man is exclusively suited to raw food. Then, without further ado, the second part gives a complete set of recipes including steamed foods, boiled foods, etc.

_If your ideas take hold, what are all the novice cooks going to do once they get their diplomas?

o They can always retrain as instinctotherapists....
Hold your horses a bit. Society will still need cooks for a long time to come. Cooking is a great star in the firmament of our culture. Five billion digestive tracts are riveted to it. I’d be ever so happy just to be able to make something move in the eyes of medicine. That would be a good start.

_You yourself said that to change medicine, one had to change society at large.

o Let’s not go round in circles: dead-ending on drugs is a rut that has to be got out of. In that connection, I’m thinking of theoretical mistakes that have crept into medical dogma, since medicine_like dietetics_has remained a hostage to the doctrine of cooked food. Medicine has never given a second thought to the presence of abnormal substances in the body.
All that joins up with what I was trying to demonstrate a while ago: that is, every molecule that enters the “corridors” of one’s metabolism, after having been partially damaged, risks becoming trapped. For that to happen, all it takes is getting through the first stages of assimilation, which constitute the normal channel for such a molecule, and then failing to connect properly with the enzyme in charge of carrying out the following stage. All similar molecules, affected by the same shortcoming, will jam at the same juncture in the assimilation process and will pile up in the body.
I don’t understand why that problem didn’t cross nutritionists’ minds. It has been known for a long time that metabolism hinges on enzymatic activity and that food is made up of molecules.

_When Claude Bernard said that germs were irrelevant, and that diathesis was all-important...

o He most certainly had a point. But his lesson didn’t bear fruit_at least, no raw fruit_since whatever factors were well and truly responsible for worsening diathesis were as yet unknown. Ultimately, Louis Pasteur’s theories won the day; doctors went hammer and tongs at germs, bacteria, viruses, fungoids, and other agents. By merely labeling them pathogenic, the impression was distilled that the cause of disease had been curbed. In fact, nobody has yet managed to figure out why the same germ replicates in one body and not in another. Differences in virulence, heredity, psychological states, and so on are often put forward, but it’s my impression that one can’t see the forest for the trees.

_Nobody thought of the molecular aspect.

o As a matter of fact they did, but they didn’t give it a serious hearing. Undoubtedly, no one could imagine that it was possible to live without cooking. But things go fast. Medicine will soon have to change its allegiance. In the nineteenth century, it concentrated all its efforts on germs. Now, it will have to take on board another scale to go back to the cause of causes: i.e. the molecular scale.

_That’s a colossal shift you’re announcing there, and you can say all that with a perfectly relaxed smile on your face.

o I don’t think science and humor are incompatible. In this particular case, it’s better to take things good-humoredly, so as not to think too much about the suffering such an oversight might have been responsible for.
The idea that a functional disorder could be due to an abnormal molecule was expressed around 1940, by Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine and a strong proponent of vitamin C. In fact, he demonstrated that some forms of anemia resulted from a malformation in a hemoglobin molecule, this malformation itself being ascribable to a flaw in an enzyme, all of which boiled the problem down to a genetic defect. That was the first time that a causal relation was set up between molecular abnormality and a symptom. Pauling was, thus, the first to define the concept of molecular pathology.

_He wasn’t far from understanding the whole process.

o Strangely enough, he only thought of the case in which molecular alteration failed due to abnormality in an enzyme’s makeup, and not of the case in which a normal enzyme bit off a bigger abnormal dietary molecule than it could chew. He didn’t dare, either, call cooking chemistry into question. The same hedging always seems to prevail.

_In those days, genetics was more in fashion than dietetics.

o Indeed, DNA was on the way to being discovered. Researchers strove hard to attribute every physical defect to genetic background. That way, those awkward little cooked molecules that Maillard described could be disregarded.

_I must admit that I feel a bit uneasy about knowing that my body is swarming with millions of little, broken-down molecules. Every time I go and eat something cooked, I’m going to have butterflies in my stomach! With your ideas, you run the risk of upsetting a lot of people. Don’t you think it’s dangerous to assert such things without having copper-bottomed scientific evidence?

o In one of the first lectures I gave to inform the public of the problem, I was viciously heckled by a doctor. I had already noted that he had been seething with rage on the spot, in a front-row seat, for some time, when he got up and started holding forth at the crowd: “It’s outrageous that fellows like that can spread panic in public by describing molecules that have never even been proven to exist. Cooking is part of our cultural heritage; the human body must definitely have adapted to it long ago.” I tried to keep calm. And when he seemed to have finished his harangue, this is what I answered him: “Theory allows me to suppose the possible existence of adulterated molecules liable to stack up in the body and trigger off all kinds of disorders. It’s not up to me to prove that those molecules exist, but it’s up to medicine to prove that they don’t.” I saw the man turn as white as a sheet, and I was able to go on with my talk uninterrupted.

_You’re merciless with doctors.

o Not enough to shake them out of their sleep. At times, I’ve felt that I should have taken more drastic action, being more “directive,” for instance.

_Doesn’t natural medicine go along with your viewpoints?

o According to the latest surveys, the majority of the population said they favored “natural” medicine. That clearly shows that there is a current trend in public opinion that is not satisfied with “official” medicine.
The social subconscious mind holds something against Asclepius’ descendants, but that hasn’t yet been clearly formulated. I think it won’t take much longer to piece together that the model of reasoning, on which medicine has founded its structure, is wonky. Pathology has been depicted as the result of two contrary forces: the one positive, i.e. genetics, and the other negative, i.e. the pathological agent. In my view, the whole model has to be scrapped: on one side, I put genetics with most germs, and, on the other, I put molecules as well as any unsuitable factor liable to disrupt the functioning of the machine.

_In short, you think, the pathogenic agent is the molecule and no longer the germ.

o That’s about it. Abnormal molecules upset the balance between the body and the germ. A mad rush was made to indict the germ, which was easier to spot, and interferences from cooking on diathesis were utterly overlooked.

_And yet, natural medicine is always going on about poisoning the body. In homeopathy, lymphatic drainage of toxins is widely practiced, which proves the idea of abnormal molecules has already been formulated.

o People feel their presence without clearly knowing how to account for how they arose. That leads to contradictory situations. Natural doctors tell you to fast for three weeks to clear toxic waste. Then, you are told to eat a natural diet of whole-meal bread and cottage cheese.

_Obviously, if whole-meal bread is more toxic than white bread and if cottage cheese enables the alien molecules of milk to pass into the bloodstream more quickly, that’s hardly ideal.

o Not to mention that you have to be deluded to think that you can cleanse your body after three weeks of fasting.

_Are you against fasting as well?

o I favor instinctive fasting. The body keenly senses when and how long it should fast. Fasting for an arbitrary length of time can be counter-productive. In any case, I have noticed that in many cases instinctotherapy is more efficient than a self-willed decision not to eat. The body clears its toxins more efficiently, if it can draw freely from a varied range of foods the nutrients that will enable it to “fill in the gaps” as the clean-out proceeds.

_And yet, fasting is said to force the body to draw from its reserves and that that is what releases the accumulated toxins.

o That is precisely the danger. One runs the risk of compelling the body to put back into circulation toxins that it can’t cope with. Fasting is a bit like sending somebody out across the desert with a bag full of rotten food. The person will end up poisoning themselves. Whereas, if you go for a stroll in a garden of Eden, nothing will prevent you from dumping your rubbish and you can push off again restocked with fresh supplies. In a raw, instinctive diet scenario, the body takes up only what it can put up with. I have never seen it doing anything else (except if one doesn’t apply the method properly)_not to mention that fasting doesn’t make up for deficiencies. However, I do grant you that before understanding exactly how food set up intoxication, it was the best way of calling a halt to the daily onslaught of cooked molecules. Alternative medicine no more than orthogonal_sorry, I mean orthodox_medicine...

_You’re still thinking about mathematics?

o It’ll soon be time for dinner. Can you still hold out a little longer? No medicine, we were saying, has as yet clearly defined the principle of genetic suitability to initial food. Whether one goes towards analytic methods or towards holistic ones, the theories will necessarily remain dead letters due to this initial oversight. The main pillar of medical reasoning, the one that should be based on biological facts, is still missing from the structure. Is it surprising then, that the whole thing looks rather shaky?

_It is, all the same, rather a shame that you can’t analytically prove the existence of those abnormal molecules in the body.

o Scientific progress always comes in successive stages: the existence of viruses was postulated well before they were seen under electronic microscopes. The concept of “gene” was defined without prior knowledge of the structure of DNA; since only very recently has it been known how antibodies are formed. The technical means that enable us to prove the existence of an element foreseen by theory require clearing up a lot of loose ends. As for anti-matter, which physicists first started working on in 1958, it took 20 years’ work on accelerators to come up with a few particles of the stuff, and the price per pound was no giveaway, I can assure you!
As far as molecules damaged by cooking are concerned, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the idea existed long before it was confirmed. To begin with, what matters is that the theoretical model be logical, that no contradictions crop up, that the model allow one to understand phenomena that had previously gone unexplained, and above all, that the facts that it enables one to foresee can be confirmed through experience: hypothesis, confirmation, and conclusion.

_I learned that in philosophy class, but...

o That’s the ABC’s of any science. When a new mode of thought can help us get around suffering and cure illnesses that can’t otherwise be cured, it would be silly not to use it. Ultimately, facts are all that matter. Some doctors have sometimes chided me for devising a theoretical model. According to them, medicine, not to fall victim to interpretive mistakes, must be strictly bound by facts and refrain from any abstract speculation. These selfsame doctors don’t realize that they too apply a theoretical model_so far up to their neck are they in it: namely, their concept of disease, that of pathogenic agent, medication, the definition of normality, etc... In each case, those models_which, on top of it, are utterly wrong_are referred to for making a diagnosis, prescribing a drug, giving a prognosis for death or recovery, etc...
No science can derive the momentum to bear itself along without a theoretical model. That this is so is entirely bound up with the intricate workings of the mind.
Whenever one strays from applying a theoretical model, that means one has no hindsight from the subject and what you’re actually doing is sticking to the model in spite of yourself. In such a case, it’s no longer possible to call the model into question. And such an attitude is perfectly unscientific! When viruses were first talked about, the only proof of their existence was the fact that their symptoms could be transmitted. As for my “abnormal molecules,” as you call them and whose existence I’m postulating, the systematic occurrence of all kinds of symptoms has also been noted when eating “non-initial” food: stimulation of the nervous system, phlegm, rashes, oozing, peeling, seborrhea, etc... The simplest hypothesis is that substances abnormally excreted by the body more or less directly results from abnormal substances put there in the first place.

_I’d be surprised if doctors could ever take you seriously. All that is a bit quaint.

o I’ll have you known that modern medicine hasn’t yet come up with an explanation for the two most common disorders that bob up in any infective illness: catarrh and rashes!
When you develop a slight sore throat and you go and see your specialist, he probes deep into your throat with his speculum and tells you: “I see that your mucus membrane is swollen; there’s danger of the mucus coating it infecting your bronchial tube.” If you have a curious turn of mind, you might ask him: “How is it that my mucus membrane has secreted mucus that is nefarious to my own body?”
A knowing professional will invariably respond: “I’m going to prescribe you antibiotics, and it’ll all clear up in a jiffy.” I have never found that kind of conclusion very satisfying.

_Medicine is an art, not a science.

o Put it this way, it has the artfulness to pass itself off as a science.
With my cunning turn of mind, typical of physicists, I have never been able to put up with not being able to explain something, even if all it took was a few pills to make it go away. I’d much rather hypothesize, for want of anything better at the moment, that the mucus membrane is intended to secrete mucus that is normal, fluid, and transparent and that protects its surface and lubricates incident friction. Thick, creamy, yellowish, or greenish mucus clogging up the respiratory tract seems abnormal; hence, what produces it must needs be traced to some abnormal source.

_Because traditional doctors haven’t a clue as to what mucus really is, is that it?

o Does that surprise you? Well, no they haven’t. Such an extraordinarily basic aspect of pathology has never been properly investigated. Doctors simply don’t know what mucus is.

_Haven’t specimens been taken?

o Saccharides and protein were sampled all right, but what then? The same thing is true for rashes. A dermatologist first studies general medicine for seven years, then for three years he specializes in dermatology and he learns to put names on every one of the infinite variety of spots that develop on the human body. When he’s through with all that, he still doesn’t know what issues from the spots.
Now, experience has shown that all the different kind of catarrh and rashes clear up when one uses instinctotherapy for any length of time. The simplest explanation is that the purpose of those substances is to get rid of the residue of certain “non-initial” molecules contributed by ordinary food.

_Why shouldn’t they be cleared by mainstream excretion, in urine or feces?

o Because those tracts were not genetically evolved to cope with just any old molecule.

_That holds water. But if such was really the case, we would have known about it long ago.

o Obvious facts have always been stumbling blocks to consciousness. I had a dust-up one day with the head of a training hospital who called me a nincompoop, and asserted that, in any case, the bowel lining was impermeable to undesirable molecules. Now, that person had devoted his entire life to studying carcinogenic substances. It goes without saying that carcinogenic molecules present in food pass through the bowel lining, since they finally land up in the nuclei of our cells.
However, he remained dead-set against me throughout our discussion, so my theories drew a blank and I went away empty-handed.

_In fact, the existence of carcinogenic molecules strengthens your case, which clearly proves that the body is not adapted to certain molecules from food.

o Quite so. There is yet another instance that is even more convincing which no one seems to have drawn the obvious conclusions from. I’m thinking of 2-deoxyglucose.

_What’s that?

o Nothing to be afraid of, you’ll see. It’s a sugar like glucose in every respect. Both molecules are identical, except that 2-deoxyglucose lacks an atom of oxygen in the second carbon (the carbon atoms that make up the backbone of the molecules are numbered from one to six), hence the name 2-deoxyglucose. You see, chemistry is very easy!

“How oxidative by-products released from heating oils makes its way into lymph,” by N. Combe, M.J. Constantin, B. Entressangles in Journal of Nutrition and Diet, Sept 1982, pp. 139_141
“Heating oils to deep-frying temperatures alters fatty acids chemically, which forms new chemical coumpounds, NCCs. (...) On analysis, the chemical structure of those compounds discloses them to be potentially toxic.” It is as yet unclear whether those compounds can percolate through the bowel wall into lymph and subsequently into the bloodstream. To ascertain this, rats that had developed a fistula in their ribcage lymph duct were fed by the researchers in the study, either heated soybean oil, incorporating a complex blend of new chemical compounds, NCCs, or a clearly structured purified NCC. Lymph was subsequently sampled and analyzed.
“The results showed that 53% of the overall intake of oxidized monomer was recovered from the lymph in the ensuing 48 hours.” Some rats were also parenterally tube fed a cyclic acid (fatty acids having coupled as simple cycles) containing a cyclohexenic compound. Frying oil contains approximately 0.2% of such heat-released cyclic acids.
“With this kind of dietary supplement, our results have shown that 95% of the cyclohexenic compound intake may be traced in the lymph.”
Note 1: That the bulk of fat-derived NCCs enter the bloodstream makes it clear that the putative intestinal barrier was merely an intellectual one!
Note 2: The infinity of random molecules generated in the myriads of chemical reactions in cooking and what becomes of them in our bodies is even more impenetrable for present-day science.
Note 3: The matter seems hushed up by the medical-cum-scientific powers-that-be, presumably not to get public opinion worked up in such a way as to damage health in the circles concerned. Consequently, the editorial staff of the Journal of Diet and Nutrition, a publication admittedly put out to “bring closer together the medical and food-production worlds,” forbade us to release this article. Tough luck for consumers!

_That hangs like a doorstop on my stomach.

o If I could see both those molecules with the naked eye, you could barely tell them apart, at best a difference in thickness. Nor does the body tell them apart. When someone is fed 2_deoxyglucose, their body processes it exactly as they would glucose. All the conveyance and absorption pathways specific for genuine glucose are taken in so that the ensuing molecule easily bluffs its way into your cells. Into your neurons, for one, where the relevant enzyme will be stumped in trying to metabolize it, failing the presence of the oxygen atom normally bonded to the second carbon atom. The molecule will remain in an unaltered state, together with its sister molecules, stacking up in your body and biding its time.

_Is that an acknowledged fact?

o Absolutely. However, medicine is utilizing that fact to other ends, the idea being to rumble the secrets of schizophrenia. The build-up of 2-deoxyglucose in the brain cells is a reliable yardstick to contrasted nerve-center electric activity, given that the cells most aroused require the most energy; hence, they will prove the greatest 2-deoxyglucose guzzlers.
On our side, we may infer a line of reasoning crucial for our theory. Any molecule only minutely different from an initial molecule can find its way into our metabolic pathways and get caught up at some stage in the process. Sharing a common fate with other similar molecules, it is likely to set up all kinds of disorders depending on its nature and where it builds up.

Prometheus Unbound
The men of yore who partook of the fare of the Gods once quarrelled with them (1). Called upon to arbitrate, Prometheus (meaning “he who foresees”) is tapped to act as ombudsman discharging the duties of a herald, which duties also accrue to Hermes, in the world of the gods (2). Taking a stand in favor of mankind, he selects a huge ox and brings it up for an offering, but halves the ox unequally (3): on one side, the flesh under the unappealing skin of the animal’s belly and, on the other, all the bones embedded in alluring, glossy fat. Prometheus, who engineered this crooked shar-out in favor of mankind, invites Zeus to select the share he likes best (4). Zeus is aware of trickery, but plays into the game, selecting the inedible bones hidden in the fat (5). All of a sudden, he feels an upsurge of bitterness and, to punish men for being accessories to Prometheus’s deceit, he makes it incumbent on man to feed on flesh and blood (6). Mankind was henceforth utterly cut off from immortal Divinities, no longer being entitled to “superfoods,” like ambrosia, nectar, and fragrances. His bitterness still rankling, Zeus would also punish Prometheus. He withheld fire from the earth, thereby forbidding man to cook meats for food (8). Prometheus decided to rescue his beloveds yet again. He went and stole fire from Zeus, giving it to mankind (8). In return for this, Zeus laid an awesome snare for mankind, sending them the first woman, Pandora (meaning “gift for all”) (9). She was greeted with acclaim, but for man’s greater misfortune, since as the lustful and enticing, and above all inquisitive female that she was had nothing better to do, having reached her destination, than heave the lid off the box that had in it all the scourges and illnesses (10). Ever since, mankind has been fated to aging and death.
(Encyclopaedia Universalis)

Note: Mythology appears several thousand years ahead of science. Rather a hard lesson to learn with that Promethean pride of ours!

Simultaneous translation
Mankind, had up until then, remained faithful to initial food, but began to fall foul of natural laws (1). To make up for the consequences of their disobedience, they resorted to conceptual intelligence, believing themselves thus able to supplant their primeval intuition (2). Standing four-square behind their contrivances, they imagined being able to enjoy the greatest pleasure, that of gluttony (3). The share-out and dressing of foods, camouflaged in recipes, enabled them to pervert their senses. The best foods were now overshadowed by disgust, and mouth-watering concoctions were as meritricious as they were inferior (4). They knew in their heart of hearts that they were deceiving organic wisdom, but gave into the temptations of pleasures of the palate. (5). Their bodies were at once beset by disorders and mankind was now paying through the nose for a dietary imbalance that compelled them to eat animal flesh to survive (6). This exposed them to auto-immune aging processes that shortened their lives. They became aware of their earth-bound condition and of being deprived of the bliss which eating initial foods once afforded them.
The result of man’s default from natural laws stranded mankind in deadlock. People’s responses to cooked foods are such that they cannot use fire to prepare their food, while, at the same time, raw foods are becoming unavailable (7). Turning yet again to the cunning of their intellect, they spread cooking to the whole of mankind in a drive to break the barriers of instinct (8). Consequently came changes in their sex drive, and a new role for women in front of an oven. (9). Yet, the bliss they expect from longing and charms will have to be paid for in sufferings no one can avoid. When those circumstances set in, a spate of diseases and plagues ensued, which legacy we attribute to our human estate (10).
Ever since Genesis, we have been doomed to untimely aging and returning to dust.

Note: If Eve and Pandora are of the same kin, they must have cooked their apple.

_And so cooking has proved the source of all those evils, that beloved cooking of ours we deem the cornerstone of every culture.

o Custom has it that cooking originated at the dawn of civilization. If one is to approach the subject with a slightly more critical mind, one would be better advised to investigate what early cultures thought of cooking.

_Are you thinking of mythology?

o That was the science of the day. Take it from me that the fire that Prometheus stole from the gods was not the symbol of esoteric knowledge or some enlightenment, as was believed in the nineteenth century. The Romantics tried to turn the hero of humanity into the hero of the progress of civilization.
Well, that’s not how it was! Unfortunate Prometheus gave men the gift of fire quite simply so they could cook their food, which Zeus, the god of gods had prohibited them from doing.

_I never learned that at school.

o Prometheus suffered harsh punishment for his theft; he was chained to a rock forever, and was at the mercy of an eagle bidden to peck at his liver; the seat of his soul and passions. As for men, the punishment was every bit as horrible; Zeus sent them Pandora, the prototype of the inquisitive, whimsical, and seductive woman who couldn’t help lifting up the lid of the box that contained all illness. That’s how scourges spread throughout the world.

_Obviously, that explanation changes the meaning of the narrative. The ancients were aware, then, that illness stemmed from cooking?

o They were unconsciously at least. Myths are not the direct results of the conscious mind. When one considers the extent of suffering all that represents...

_It’s enough for one to feel like remaining silent for a brief mement.

o That’s the dinner bell already? Time flies. So far, we have only talked about molecules adulterated by thermal velocity. But, as a matter of fact, the problem is more general than that. In any non-initial food, there might possibly be a certain number of substances that our enzymes aren’t adapted for. Therefore, every time one drinks animal milk, eats cheese or seasoned vegetables that our instincts would normally reject, or a fruit that wasn’t part of our initial food range, a pile-up of abnormal substances can potentially occur.
Even by simply forcing oneself to eat a very few mouthfuls more that one’s instincts require; for instance, if one eats too much raw meat, one makes it impossible to break the meat down adequately. In that case, some residues won’t be metabolized and will stack up all the way down to one’s toes.

_Are you referring to gout?

o The crystals that excruciatingly affect people suffering from gout result from excess uric acid, a waste_product from protein metabolism. I have noted that overeating raw meat can cause signs of gout to show up. Insulting one’s instincts is not “initial” eating.

_You run cruel experiments.

o They were quite involuntary. Out of all the people who have tried out instinctotherapy, there have been enough of them to have made all kinds of mistakes.

_In fact, then, an excess in amount can trigger off the same overload as abnormal quality?

o In both cases, there is potential overload, the outcome is somewhat different. If one eats too much of a natural substance, the accumulated by-products won’t set up too many problems, since they are among the kind of metabolites that are usually present. They will be easily excreted by the body once a better food balance is restored. As far as non-initial molecules are concerned, that’s another kettle of fish; their successful passage through our metabolic network involves tremendous risks, given that they are not part of the set of molecules encoded by our genetics. Set theory even holds for biology.

_Language for mathematicians again, and modern math on top of that!

o The set of initial molecules which, along with metabolic processes built into our genetic code and has constituted a well-balanced whole from time immemorial throughout evolution, can be readily distinguished from a second set that includes all the unpredictable molecules that result from food preparation that came in on the scene after man’s intelligence developed, as well as the abnormal biological processes that they are apt to give rise to.
The second set is, of course, not governed by the same laws of balance as the first. The second is a rather recent newcomer in the history of life. From the outset, one might expect it to spark off all kinds of disorder, since it doesn’t belong in the initial order. And talk about disorder; for fun, just try to imagine the number of chemical reactions that might take place with ten or so ingredients that are cooked together, for instance, in a ratatouille Provençale.

_Right before a meal of raw vegetables, that’s downright sadistic.

o We were saying that 450 new chemical compounds were created in a potato cooked all by itself. That makes 450x10 possible reactions between the ten presumed vegetables, or about two million million million molecules to contend with. Now, if you appoint two million chemists to work out what those molecules consist of at the rate of a molecule per year, it will take them a million million years to consider all the possibilities. Now, according to the present-day results of theoretical physics, the universe is only expected to last for 19 million years. Therefore, what happens in a simple vegetable stew can never be disclosed.

_You’re doing everything you can think of to get my goat! You know very well I hardly have any knowledge of mathematics...

o I think that we should go and have our meal first, considering the subject I’ll be embarking on. Let’s first go and methodically smell all the proteins that will be on the dinner table. I wouldn’t want to spoil your appetite.