Instinctotherapy :

Part Three

o So, did things go better than they did at lunch?

_Yes, they did. This time I was much more careful; I stopped every time I sensed the flavor of the food changed. One thing really surprised me. Normally, I can’t stick pulses, lentils, beans, etc... How is it that sprouted lentils tasted so good? I ate two small dishes of them with great enjoyment.

o If you only rarely eat cooked legumes, you can expect, from the outset, not to be repelled by raw pulses. Your body has not been previously overloaded with that kind of molecule. What did they smell like to you?

_A fragrance of flower, very clearly. I would have thought they were sweet peas. It’s true that with your system, one becomes very sensitive to smells.

o That brings us to the heart of the matter, except that the smells we’ll be referring to are less enticing.

_I’m beginning to see what you’re talking about.

o That’s yet another taboo in our society based on cooking. And yet, since we’re concerned about diet, I think we might as well make no bones about the fact that the digestive tract does have two ends.
We’ve talked at length about what happens at the spot where the food goes in, where nature put the hatch where the food goes down. What fate is in store for the bolus once it goes out on its long crossing is not as crystal clear as one might think. Quite recent experiments, carried out with probes held in place by threads that subjects swallowed, have shown that the model of bowel movement that is generally surmised was not exactly the case. It had been believed that the various parts of the substances in the intestines led out in single file, like carriages in a train. In actual fact, not so, they overtake one another like cars on a motorway.

_Is that so?

o This time, I’m not the one talking, but rather Physiology of Digestion, by Bernier, published by Doin. But I’m still going to tell you loads of surprising things: the feces of a normal man ought not to smell bad at all.

_And yet, it’s quite usual for them to smell bad so that there’s no risk of them being reabsorbed.

o All the mysteries enshrouding coprophagy haven’t yet been unveiled. Gorillas, in times of famine, gently scoop up their excrement that, under normal conditions, they leave lying about, and, after breathing in the odor, they put the whole thing back in their mouth for a second round.
I would have doubts about the truthfulness of naturalists who report such observations if I myself hadn’t noticed that the excrement of all wild animals was devoid of any foul odor.

_When you step in dog shit...

o Domestic dogs don’t eat very “initial” food; they usually partake of their masters’ leftovers.

_Would domestic animals fed “initial” food have inoffensive excrement?

o I can well understand that surprising you.

_Well, then, man must be dismally out of sorts.

o If the stench is proportionate to man’s being out of sorts, that conclusion may be drawn, I grant you. For a long time, I found it hard to believe that the feces of a man properly fed wouldn’t stink either. And yet, I was able to confirm that with one of my children that we have always fed according to the rules of instinctotherapy from the word go.

_From the word go?

o Listen, I haven’t yet told you about this experience. We wanted to know if dietary attraction and revulsion were acquired or innate, in other words, whether smelling and tasting processes make for nutritional regulation due to training that takes place in infancy, or if, on the contrary, they are encoded genetically. To better understand, we experimented with babies that were younger and younger, and, as my wife was expecting a baby, we decided to carry out an experiment before any prior training could take place, i.e. before the first feeding.
So came the time for my wife’s delivery. She gave birth to a lovely baby girl weighing four kilos. My wife immediately got up to swaddle the child, as is usual in instincto deliveries.

_That’s like the story of the black woman who left her caravan to have her baby in the bushes... and rushed out to catch it on its way down, is that it?

o “Initial” deliveries are always more or less like that.

_It can be dangerous to compel mothers to take themselves too far in the days following delivery.

o They sense keenly what they can be expected to do. In that case as well, we let instincts have their way. A woman who has just delivered immediately feels an upsurge of energy_no doubt intended to enable her to take care of her baby_which is a very useful thing in nature. I have never observed a state of shock that required special rest as in normal deliveries. After every one of her latter deliveries, my wife got up without the slightest discomfort. She saw to the baby, weighed her, dressed her, put her in her cradle, tidied up the bedroom, changed the sheets, then she went back to her work as if nothing had happened. I even filmed her picking up a 80 pound crate of apples in the hours that followed.

_There are mothers who deliver quite easily. It’s a matter of pelvic girth as well.

o For our two eldest children, my wife had suffered sixteen and eighteen hours respectively; she swore she would never have any more children. I have noted the same kind of change in most young mothers who have taken up this kind of diet.

_And you put that down to food?

o A well-regulated nervous system that keeps contractions under control, the absence of any painful swelling, the uterine resilience to recover after exertion, and, above all, the fact that the waters are only discharged at the last minute_all those factors directly result from food and completely alter the manner in which a delivery goes off.

_Is that to say instincto babies are born with cauls on their heads?

o That’s how it should be, since that’s a sign of good fortune. One might well wonder why expelling the offspring out of the womb always starts out by pushing out the amniotic sac in the overwhelming majority of animals, though not in human beings. When I was still quite a young lad, while on holiday in the country, I was startled to see a kind of bubble precede the calf at the moment of birth. I was told that was normal, and I thought nothing more of it.

_Is that equally normal for women?

o Apparently it is. The amniotic fluid contained in the sac plays a crucial role in bearing down pressure exerted by contraction of the uterus. The build-up of fluid drives the baby out, a bit like a piston in its cylinder.
If the waters burst early, delivery is much more difficult. The baby comes out under the direction of the tightening of the internal membrane, which is much less efficient than a hydrostatic thrust. And above all, contractions are triggered off too early, before other bodily tissues concerned are ready.

_You’re on the way to reforming obstetrics. Normally, the amniotic sac is burst with the idea of easing delivery.

o The effect it has is that is speeds up the process, but by doing so, natural regulation is thwarted. Expulsion occurs in a mad rush; thus, increasing the risk of tearing. That has become so widespread nowadays that episiotomy is preemptively performed. Normally, a mother would never tear while delivering her baby, unless a seven and a half foot giant had accidentally fertilized a Pygmy.
If the amniotic sac bursts too early, that means that it is not well formed, and what lurks beyond the composition of a tissue, is a dietary problem_in particular, the problem of proteins.

_That’s encouraging for future mothers... And what did you do to your baby?

o Nothing very cruel, don’t worry! On the contrary, it was a rather moving experience that played a crucial role in respect of theory. I can still see in my mind’s eye the little darling on my wife’s lap, staring wide-eyed at the light of an old oil lamp. Timorously, we held up under her nose, one by one, all the fruit from the dinner table. There was no reaction for apple, or orange, or for pear. When we came to banana, to our surprise, Marielle opened her mouth. We took the banana away, and her mouth closed. We tried other fruit without any success. We held up the banana again, and the little mouth opened again. After several tries, there was no longer any possible doubt that the baby was reacting in a perfectly coherent way. Her sense of smell had the potential, prior to any learning, to select a given fruit and to start up the ingestive process.
My wife then pre-chewed a mouthful of banana, as any old countrywoman might do. As soon as the spoon was bang under the baby’s nose, her little mouth opened, and, to our surprise, Marielle began sedately chewing, as if she were to the manner born, and then she swallowed her mouthful. We wondered whether to go on or whether we were disrupting her brand-new digestive tract with raw fruit. Mother’s milk is said to be necessary to culture intestinal flora.
In the same way, Marielle swallowed a second mouthful, and then a third one, until she had eaten four-fifths of the banana (a big chiquita)! The following spoonful met with refusal; her mouth remained closed and she turned her head every time we subsequently tried. I persuaded my wife to put another spoonful in the baby’s mouth. The creamy mass spilt out immediately, with her little tongue rolling outwards, as if someone had pushed the reverse stitch button on a sewing machine. That was what I had hoped to demonstrate: that the process is well coordinated. As soon as the smell doesn’t make the little mouth open anymore, the movement of the tongue is automatically reversed to spit the mouthful out.

_Was she able to digest such a large quantity of banana at her age?

o That’s not all. Seeing that everything seemed to be going normally, we tried other fruit. With the same appetite, Marielle ate a good quarter of a papaya, a tropical fruit shaped like a pear but twice as big. Then she had a bit of avocado. Her little belly must have been full. A question bothered me though. Could a baby of that age be attracted to animal flesh? We then held up to her nose a piece of meat, egg yolk, a sardine filet, an oyster, and other seafood.
There was no reaction except to tuna. Her mouth opened wide, and in the twinkling of an eye our newborn delightfully swallowed three spoonfuls of raw tuna!

_And what happened subsequently? Didn’t she vomit? Didn’t she have diarrhea? If I’d had been in your shoes, I wouldn’t have slept a wink that night!

o Nicole and I took turns watching over her. We had put all our cards on the table; all we had to do was to wait and see what would happen. Well, Marielle slept peacefully, without a burp, without a sigh, and without a rumbling tummy! The following day, she started suckling and, in addition to having mother’s milk, ate, in the same way, almost an entire mango. Her first meal came out at the other end, perfectly digested, without the slightest fermentation.

_And odorless did you say?

o Without the slightest smell. But that didn’t particularly strike me, since ordinary babies’ grunts don’t smell foul in the early days.

_As long as they have nothing else besides mother’s milk.

o As soon as they’re given infant formula, or baby cereals, one has to hold one’s nose. I still remember the pleasures of the changing table.
Our first two children had enjoyed traditional feeding methods: gradual weaning after two of three months of breastfeeding. The stench had set in at the same time as the tins of powdered milk and the baby food jars, gradually but most assuredly... well before weaning was over.

_And how was it for Marielle?

o We were surprised. We thought that her movements wouldn’t smell too foul. But we had to admit, much to our surprise, that they plainly lacked any unpleasant smell whatsoever.

_Aren’t you somewhat overstating things for the purpose at hand?

o Not in the slightest. Nature’s nees, as far as “initial” children are concerned, smell more inoffensive than the cellulose in the diapers.

_That’s unbelievable!

o But absolutely true. What a shame television can’t add smell to the picture. If it did, we could have suggested breath-takingly going on the air in Jacques Martin’s Sunday program.

_I don’t know if your ideas would have interested him. He is said to be very much inclined towards table pleasures.

o Three weeks of instinctotherapy is the best way to become inured to the onslaught of chicken and chips. And that’s enough to get excellent results in many different ways, including figure, fitness, sleep, stress, high blood pressure, cholesterol, etc...

_Because is it possible to use your system as a kind of cure?

o Of course. Just as one can go on a fast, except that it’s much more pleasant! I think that by approaching the matter through a cure, the general public will be able to benefit from our experience.
Instead of going on a fasting cure, a grape cure, or a sleep cure, it will be possible to go on a nature cure.

_That will never take the place of a rest cure.

o There’s nothing to stop you killing two birds with one stone. Take advantage of your time for rest by eating properly. While you give your mind a break, you can do the same for your metabolism.

_Doesn’t going back to traditional food involve some danger?

o Out of every case I have been able to observe, I have never seen major problems crop up when a cooked diet was resumed. Only it’s better not to go about it too abruptly. What’s difficult is later reverting back to a raw diet, since it usually requires more willpower than the first time round. The smoker who decides to give up cigarettes for good and all, and who lapses after a period of abstinence experiences more problems kicking the habit the second time round.

_So, somebody who gives up instinctotherapy, then, rarely ever goes back to it?

o That is bound up with psychological factors. If the person involved has decided to change over to instinctotherapy for life, his inability to stick to his resolve the first time round will induce guilt feelings and make him feel as though he’d failed. He will find it harder, the second time round, to muster the necessary willpower. That’s why I advocate starting out with a three_week experience, for instance. One can always decide to extend it into a three-month experience. And should that second experiment prove conclusive, one could decide to take it out to three years. By so doing, one always retains one’s freedom to choose. Nothing’s worse than feeling tied down to a system.

_I find it easier to put up with austerity when you know it’s not going to last too long.

o But remember, instinctotherapy involves no austerity; quite the reverse, it’s sheer pleasure! The difficulties involved basically exist in the psychological realm. It’s much easier to get other people to accept you changing your diet if they think that it won’t last very long. The opposition one encounters is so great that one would be better advised to do anything to avoid rattling anyone. Worst still is the opposition that one sets up for oneself. In that respect, as well, it’s important to plan a particular strategy. For instance, the mere fact of knowing that one falls victim to one’s subconscious mind and that the subconscious mind, in turn, falls victim to all kinds of obsessions relating to eating pleasure, all that enables one to step back from oneself a bit, stay the course, and resist fleeting temptation.

_It all rests on self-control.

o We control ourselves much less than we believe. Making a decision on a conscious level doesn’t necessarily entail the subconscious mind going along with it. Now, the subconscious has a far greater pull than the conscious mind. The former bears the full weight of all the experiences and education acquired from infancy: anxiety, gratification, frustration, etc... integrated into the irrational and pre-critical mind. Morover, those subconscious constructs that cling to us are in keeping with the basic premises of our environment; they make us open to outward agression or pressure. So, we typically remain unable to keep to the behavior that we view as being sensible and that we have decided to conform to for any great length of time. Some preposterous idea arises out of a leaning towards anxiety or a subconscious dilemma and we feel caught off our guard and thrown out of gear. We felt so sure of our position, and overnight, we find ourselves back to our pots and pans, our minds having already worked out a complete array of justifications that buffer us utterly against our own contradictions. One has to be wary of oneself if one wants to manage such a change in diet in the long term. Nothing is as hard as recovering from cooking.

_How do you feel about the idea, for instance, of going on an instincto cure for three weeks a year?

o Why not! I think that’s the best kind of preventive medicine, especially during the holiday period: no more worrying about cooking nor about restaurant expenses. As far as camping is concerned, things couldn’t be simpler: no washing up, no pans to scour, and no danger of forest fires!

_But what about shopping? If such a wide selection of food as I saw on your table is a must...

o Here, in our institute, we strive to provide optimal conditions for people who come here to learn how to apply the method or recover their health. The greatest possible choice makes it easier to retrain one’s instincts. Such a choice is also necessary so as not to waste any time finding foods that can make up for deficiencies or put one on the road to recovery.
Poisoned as we are by cooking, and unlike prehistoric man, we can no longer hope to find wild fruit growing in season along the paths we tread, or to cross paths teeming with game. When taking wing especially, it’s vital to be able to have at one’s fingertips and at the drop of a hat each and every food the body might feel the need for. Later, one will be able to make do with a more sparsely laid table. Needs will, quite simply, take longer to be met. During a holiday cure, for instance, one can quite nicely get by on fruit and vegetables sold in greengrocers’ shops or on markets, fish, shellfish, or seafood from fishmongers’.

_And meat from the butcher’s?

o Commerically sold meat is unfortunately very rarely palatable to an instincto’s taste buds. Animals that have been bred are fed adulterated food that, as is the case for man, builds up in their tissues. Ultimately, the concentration of toxins may be far greater in the animal than in his food.

_But then, that’s not very simple if everyone has to rear their own sheep or their own cattle!

o Some people are tickled pink to have their poulty, their rabbit hutch, their vegetable garden, etc...: the joys of returning to the land. If you don’t live in the country, things are different. You have to rethink your shopping, and be familiar with a whole set of rules to follow_all that’s easy enough to learn. To make things easier and help you get off to a good start, we have devised a delivery from producer network that runs weekly deliveries all over France, and even in neighboring countries. Trucks traveling several set routes freight food to a widespread network of depots where everyone can regularly stock up on the bulk of their supplies.

_Is the produce sold in shops really very different from what you distribute?

o The whole of the food industry goes along with progress. Every time a chemical laboratory puts a new product on the market, it necessarily improves productivity or resale. Producers and tradesmen who turn to innovations can cut prices. Their competitors find themselves priced out the market and, in time, realize that they too have no option but to use them. And whoever chooses to do without the product, for instance after having observed that it was harmful for the consumer’s health, will necessarily be risking bankruptcy. The same holds for such techniques as sterilization, freezing, oven-drying, ionization, etc... Their spread, then, is at once catching and irreversible.

_There is a consumer protection agency, all kinds of upper limits on permitted levels of pesticides...

o In my view, great care should be exercised with any chemical innovation, especially if one is off the beaten track. The amounts one can safely eat, for instance, in fruit are figured out for people who eat a normal amount of fruit. With instinctotherapy, one eats much more fruit: roughly 68% of a chimpanzee’s diet in nature and our instincts lead us to approximately the same figure. One is well advised, then, to avoid fruit too high in toxic residues... even if they are okayed by the consumer protection agency!
That’s why all our products are subjected to a labelling system of pictograms that show production guarantees at a glance.

_You’re not going to tell me that you’re an anti-chemical zealot?

o Fanaticism is never constructive. But I must, in all fairness, admit that food grown on fertilizers and sprayed with synthetic pesticides hold a number of drawbacks: digestion is slowed down, assimilation isn’t as good, and a tendency to overeat sets in, and instincts go berserk since the flavors aren’t normal. Eating those foods over an extended period of time may very well lead to the method failing.

Present-day scientific bombshells about pesticides
(Toxicology and safety of foods, by R. Derache, published by Tec/Doc/Apria 1986):
“According to Hayes (1975) and Recht (1980), a full four million different chemical substances have been extracted or synthesized, among which 60,000 are currently in use, including 4,000 as drugs, 2,500 as dietary additives, and 1,500 as pesticides, the remainder being used as industrial and farming chemical compounds as well as in consumer goods.
Instances of short-term poisoning of plants, ground life, “domestic” insects, game, and water life are manifold and have been given comprehensive coverage.
Long-term effects are more surreptitious and give greater cause for concern, as we are about to show.
It is believed that some three million tons of DDT and eight million tons of polychlorinated biphenyls have been dumped in the environment.
Enduring effects are rated as following: the half-life of DDT in water lasts ten years and that of dieldrine twenty years.
In the soil, half-life timespan is greatly extended (forty years for DDT).
Metabolically, DDT (0.2 ppm) and PCBs (10 ppm) have been sampled in the fat of antarctic wildlife.
As to the build-up of those chemicals, whether in specific individuals or all the way down the food chain, it has been asserted that earthworms can concentrate soil DDT fourteen-fold while oysters will concentrate 10 to 70,000 times sea water DDT.
In man, who comes last in the food chain, concentration is in no way marginal: 2 ppm of DDT in the fat cells of an average European, and 13.5 ppm in the average American.
In addition to ecotoxic hazards, there is a risk of imbalance, with biological units being destabilized and new chemical-resistant pest breeding, which makes diseases, (viroses, bacterioses, etc...), the more insidious, which merely compounds existing headaches.
Once body-unfriendly chemicals have entered the body, they are most commonly breathed out or voided in feces, or the waters. Aternatively, and quite typically, they are first metabolized in the liver, although breakdown usually yields substances of lesser toxicity. Intermediary metabolites may occur that prove more reactive and more toxic than the initial chemical (cf Parathion, Paraoxon). These may be stored for varying periods of time before being released back into particular organs or body fat, for instance, which preferentially concentrates organic chloride pesticides.
A number of insecticides, be they organic chlorides or phosphates or carbamates, in addition to their primary toxic effects, further affect cell metabolic processes by their impact on crucial enzymes like oxyesterases, dehydrogenases, carboxylases, and so on.
Many pesticides induce multiple_function microsomic monooxygenases (M.F.O.) and, consequently, those molecules warrant close attention. In 1965, FALK showed thta liver cells constantly called upon to release enzymes for the breakdown of pesticides turned irretrievably hyperplasic. It was further hypothesized that such hyperplasia laid the groundwork for nodules, which adverts to the primary stage of liver cancer.”
This is what science conceded about pesticides in the fairly recent past (G. Gregory, 1971).
“The very progress of mankind could be put to ransom with researchers having to reckon with the impact of their research on the quality of life, as many reports insubstantially claim that pesticidal residues from protective chemicals have never done an iota of harm in any possible way.”
Note: Science is forever on the way up.

o Very serious present-day scientific studies have demonstrated that pesticidal residue disrupts enzymatic activity. It also has toxic, carcinogenic effects. At this point, science is now siding with the standard-bearers of organic farming.

_So, how do you manage to balance your budget?

o Organic food is much more expensive than ordinary food and not everybody lives on easy street.
What do you prefer: buying two pounds of organic apples 50% more expensive, or two pounds of chemically produced ones that you have to eat twice as many of to feel the same satisfaction and whose toxicity will surreptitiously and completely throw your digestive potential out of gear?
Experience has shown that an instincto table, in the final analysis, costs less if one buys the best quality food produced without chemical fertilizers and free from adulteration of any kind, even if, on the face of it, they work out more expensive. Everyone reckons in dollars per pound, whereas the only criterion that is meaningful is the price quotient as compared to genuine food value.

_That’s more difficult to figure out.

o When the body has recovered its ability to function normally, it becomes possible to identify_either by the taste of through the effects on digestion_that a food is high-quality and that it has been properly grown. And even then, one has to have gone for a long enough time without chemically produced food to tell the difference. If not, the harmful effects come over one insidiously, through the addictiveness of the food.
Unfortunately, chemistry is not the only gremlin that adulterates food sold in stores. Packaging and preservatives of every description shroud and load the foods that bedeck your natural health table, far removing it from all but the remotest kinship with Mother Nature. Consider: tropical fruits are doused in fungicide, greens are ionized, fish are deep-frozen on board ship, dried fruit is heat-sterilized, dates are fumigated, and I’ll spare you the rest.

_So, what is there left to eat?

o It makes no difference whether you eat raw or cooked food.
Cereals, milk, and everything else made available by industrial agriculture slowly clocks up residual molecules in your body, the long,term effects of which are anybody’s guess.

_Doesn’t one develop greater sensitivity to those toxic substances when using your method?

o The cleaner a body, the more sensitive, and, consequently, the better able it is to cope with toxic invasion by spotting and flushing it out in any serviceable way. Such sensitiveness, however, shows the body to be more immune. It should most certainly not be mistaken for weakness. Non-smokers find cigarette smoke harder to put up with than smokers, but the latter are the ones setting up cancer in themselves.

_How unfortunate we always reason against our better judgement. But surely, such high-quality foods are more expensive than cooked stuff.

o Well, obviously, if you squeak by on daily boiled spuds, you’ll come away better off to pour your money back into health expenses! A reasonably lavish instincto table is no more expensive than typical high-quality ordinary food plus overheads. Just think, you save 100% on your gas and electricity bills. Moreover, taking dry matter as a yardstick, it takes less raw food to have one’s feed: a fine-tuned engine, as you know, burns up less fuel.

_What’s convenient in your system is doing away with cooking.

o You can say that again. I still remember my mother belly-aching about spud bashing, sticky pans, the milk boiling over, doing the dishes, and dreaming up new menus daily.
There are, nonetheless, housewives who enjoy cooking. Sometimes, they feel utterly frustrated as if the bottom had dropped out of their pans, having to shelve an activity that had become their life work. Some people cook to dominate, or out of love or even a sense of duty. The finest feelings can be read into anything. Murder is extolled as heroism in wartime, for instance.

_So, what you’re getting at is that a housewife’s calling is the art of killing for the sake of love or out of a sense of duty.

o True, but it’s very slow-burning. At any rate, all that is much useless toil. Ever since we traded in our cooker, our pots and pans, and all the paraphernalia of cooking utensils that cluttered our cupboards, we have cleared an extra room in the house. My wife has been able to devote her time to her children rather than to her oven and has lent me a helping hand in all my research, and, still more importantly, no one has been laid up in the house for twenty-five years.

_That’s women’s lib to the power two.

o And no more offensive diaper changes.
I clean forgot, but we must go back to our excretory smells. I was telling you that except for the sense of taste, smell is our only gateway to the molecular world.

_I can see you coming a mile away.

o Well, for want of other methods, doctors of yore had to taste the waters of diabetics to detect the presence or absence of glucose. I happen to be quite content with mere smelling. Of course, that yields no accurate figures but is far quicker and more reliable than standard laboratory methods. Unfortunately, some substances give off no smell, which in no way proves that there is nothing to detect. Conversely, any smell clearly puts one on the scent of a definite substance.

_So, in foul-smelling excrement, there are abnormal residues from the digestion of adulterated food, is that so?

o The problem is compounded by possible fermentation. Also, bacteria in the intestinal flora give off a foul stink. But, these bacteria should, by rights, not replicate under normal conditions. Food is what induces their proliferation, either through imbalance or through the presence of abnormal molecules. This is so true that one can safely assert that a bad smell always signals dietary disorder.
When excretory stenches really stink, major problems are already being advertised. I’ve been able to attest to that with my pigs: In the case of a mere imbalance_for instance, when they are fed too much fruit and not enough grass, as sometimes happens in winter_their excrement has a faintly acrid smell, somewhat unpleasant, though in no way redolent of what we normally associate with manure.
The stench of human feces, obviously, testifies to the giddying molecular havoc that has been wreaked by cooking or by the uptake of alien foods, like animal milk.
Besides, pigs stuffed with potato soup, whey, or swill from restaurants come top of the league in that respect!

_So, you raise pigs?

o Pork is one of the best meats. The wart hog has been included in the diet of primates for a very long time, no doubt. The Polynesians considered it a sacred animal and they ate it during ritual celebrations.

_But aren’t you afraid of tapeworms?

o Tapeworms are long but quite harmless! That question is often put to me. In fact, trichina are the worms that could damage one’s health. Our animals come under stringent controls by veterinary health services. But, since we started raising pigs eight years ago (and that comes to over a thousand animal that have all been vetted), not a single parasite has ever been detected.

_That’s a blameless record! But, what do you think, then, of the prohibition in the old testament. I always thought it was justified on the grounds of the danger of parasites.

o Moses was unacquainted with instinctotherapy. Maybe he witnessed disorders in various individuals among his people who ate pork, precisely because they fed their animals table scraps that were becoming increasingly adulterated. Since the Flood, Jewish cooking cannot but have made headway. The biblical prohibition certainly had a reason for being.
Mind you, in France in the olden days, knuckle of ham was said to be ideal for young children. Only, the pigs lived in nature; oak forests were fenced off for them (acorns are their favorite food) where it was even forbidden to collect dead wood. Those animals weren’t the victims of cooking: such contradictions speak for themselves!

_Doesn’t raw pork have a very pungent animal taste?

o In normal breeding scenarios, the hogs have to be gelded; if not, their flesh is permeated by an unbearable male stench. Apparently, the sex scent glands get carried away and oversecrete a smell laden with the flood of adulterated molecules, and overrun the entire body with their secretions. With our methods, one can scarcely perceive any difference whatever between the meat of hogs and that of sow. You can come and see our pigs; they’re charming animals. They smell pleasant; their smell doesn’t permeate clothes the way animals fed traditionally do.

_And so man shouldn’t give off a bodily odor either?

o Quite so, no unpleasant smell anyway. That’s quite an advantage in all kinds of circumstances. I have always loathed hugs seasoned with perspiration!
By the way, I have a friend who got very close to a gorilla in the wild; the animal_or so it seems_smelled exactly like lily-of-the-valley.

_You’re going to put scent manufacturers out of business.

o I don’t know which was the more surprised: my pal because of the gorilla’s smell, or the gorilla because of the man’s smell. The smell a civilized body gives off, undoubtedly, far floods out what could normally be expected by any smelling organ in the animal world.
Without molecular interference, apparently, the human male sexual smell, given off under the armpits, makes one think of lavender. Obviously, that’s more pleasant than the smell of fried onions, vegetable soups, or fried oil residues peculiar to those parts of the body.

_Could that result from food alone?

o With initial eating, gradually all body odors fade away: perspiration, greasy hair that needs washing, cheesy feet, and so on. I think that one can lay down a very simple equation:
Abnormal Smell = Abnormal Substance.

_So, would our nose, then, be in charge of alerting us to the molecules that have nothing to do with our metabolism?

o I have never understood why that strange organ that our maker put in the middle or our faces millions of years ago, could be shocked by odors produced by the body it was part of. That’s contrary to the laws of evolution; every cause of energy loss must, by rights, be suppressed through natural selection. But, that’s not all, gradually, as the body clears itself, the smells of substances flushed out are more readily identified. At first, all kinds of substances are cleared helter-skelter. Later, things become more orderly.

_Are you saying that little by little I would recognize the cooking smells that had smelled so good at one time?

o Yes, and also other less enticing ones.
The first time I observed such a thing was with my son Christian. When he was barely six years old, he said: “Daddy, I have raspberry in my ear!” I thought he was making it up. But since he was insistent, I went and put my nose right up to his ear. There was no doubt about it; it gave off a delicious fragrance of raspberry. With a cotton swab, I then removed a lump of wax that I put in an air-tight plastic container. In that way, every time I opened it, I got a whiff that was potent enough to be identified. It was, unmistakably, the typical smell of raspberry jam. I submitted my sampling to several friends who came up with the same diagnosis.
At first, I thought the smell was due to molecules that had been cleared by the cerumen glands subsequent to overeating fruit. But, as it didn’t recur, even when huge rations of raw raspberries were given, we remained in limbo... until one day my wife remembered that, right before Christian’s birth, she had spent a few months at her grandmother’s. The latter had fed her with raspberry jam, so much so that in the end, merely smelling slices of bread and jam had made her feel like retching.

_Do you think that she would have piled up molecules that carried that smell to such an extent as to pass them on to the fetus?

o At first, that seemed quite implausible to me. And yet, the smell of that ear wax reminded me so powerfully of the raspberry jam cooked with the seeds, not clarified jelly, but exactly what my wife had eaten.

_And that smell came out years later, in an unaltered form and pure enough for one to smell it... I have great difficulty following you.

o If a body clears a substance, it does so by carrying through a biochemical process intended for a particular class of molecules. Ultimately, it’s not very surprising that, in such a way, identical molecules should come together whose smell doesn’t mingle with that of other molecules.
Having got over our initial feelings of surprise, we were able to observe loads of things that all came together along those lines. Through various cross-checkings, it became patently clear to us: the body clears through every possible channel waste that derives directly or indirectly from adulterated food sometimes eaten years earlier. And if the body clears it, that means the body is loaded with it.

_Do you believe that abnormal molecules go through the placenta and build up in the fetus?

o They can also pass into mother’s milk. Haven’t you ever heard people say that some mothers had unhealthy milk? Wet nurses were even advised not to eat garlic, so as to avoid parasitical flavors putting the suckling off his feed. Entire molecules, then, go through the mammary glands.
As far as going through the placenta is concerned, I’ll recount a minor experiment to you that couldn’t be more scientific and goes far in confirming my hypothesis. For two hours at 90°C, we heated a mixture of water, glucose and lysine. There’s no recipe simpler than that, I daresay: the commonest sugar with a basic protein (in fact, lysine is one of the twenty amino acids that are part of the make-up of proteins used by living organisms). We then mixed the concoction thus obtained, to the rate of one to six parts, in the pregnant rats’ food. The result was that two embryos out of three died. The others developed deformities; there were even serious abnormalities (intestines spilling out of the umbilicus). Take my word of it, there’s not a shadow of a doubt that Maillard’s molecules pass through the placental barrier.

“Molecules heated in cooking generate compounds toxic for embryos” in “Cahiers de nutrition et de diététique” (Journal of nutrition and diet), by J. Lederer and A. Dushimimana, March 1982, pp. 36-37
“In 1975, Adrian and Susbielle showed that heating glycol (an elemental amino acid) with glucose released pre-melanoidins (Maillard’s molecules), which are toxic for a rat embryo.”
All it took was blending the compound with the food ration of pregnant rats, in a one-to-six ratio, for the average number of births per litter to drop by 45%.
Other researchers like Chelius et al., Stegink, and Pitkin also noted the presence of pre-melanoidins in fetal blood when the mother was fed a supplement of it.
Lederer and Dushimimana, the co-authors of this article, heated a mixture of glucose (the most widespread sugar) and lysine (one of the eight basic amino acids) for two hours at a temperature of 90°C, by which time, 50% of both compounds had reacted forming random, abnormal molecules (Maillard’s molecules). When they blended the compound with the feed of pregnant rats in a one-to-six ratio, the following results obtained:
1) the number of embryos per litter was down from 9.80 to 3.75
2) embryonic weight and placental weight decreased and increased respectively. The researchers read the results as poisoning rather than dietary deficiency. In the same vein, Kuhler et al. have shown that dietary deficiency induces both weight loss in embryos and weight gain in placentas.
3) moreover, the researchers reported teratogenic vascularized tumor of the navel. This is a most serious malformation so far only attested in rats that had been administered trypan blue coloring (Gillman et al.), or who were severely deficient in folic acid (Nelson et al.), or who were massively dosed with streptonigrine salicylates (Warkany and Takacs).
From all this, it is patently clear that Maillard’s molecules clear the intestinal and placental barriers unimpeded, acting like attested poisons.
Note 1: Already in the womb, the fetus appears to be indulging its gastronomic bent. Of course, we’re only talking about rats. There’s no danger involved for man, naturally.
Note 2: The publication that released the above articles attempted to prevent us publishing them, arguing that we “championed theories that were too far off-center from the views of the researchers.” What odd cookery.

_Isn’t it worrying that a substance as simple as a combination of two molecules should be that harmful?

o Mind you, no two glucose and lysine molecules combine in the same way. Each combination recombines in turn with other molecules present in the mixture, so that from cooking two simple molecules, one obtains a full-blown genealogical tree of substances, each one more heterogeneous than the next.

_Well, then, what happens when one cooks food?

o That’s even worse, considering you have to throw into the preceding picture as many similar pictures as there are pairs of initial elements, pictures whose elements will combine, in turn, with one another. Is it surprising that nutritionists have chosen to hedge the question? When a problem is unsolvable, it’s readily forgotten.

_I better understand why genetic adaptation to cooking strikes you as implausible.

o I, for one, find it less risky to readapt to raw food.

_You’re going to end up convincing me. But what’s the point of changing one’s diet after putting in the wrong stuff for 35 years?

o Because if you pollute yourself for another 35 years, you’ll hit the ceiling before your time.

_Are you saying that death comes once the body has clocked up its load of abnormal molecules?

o Muhammad is reported as having said: “Every man arrives on Earth with a store of food allocated to him at birth, and he dies once it’s all been eaten.”

_That’s another way of saying that one digs one’s grave with one’s teeth.

o At this point in time, one typically digs it with one’s dentures! The words of the Prophet take on a very real meaning when one thinks that a definite percentage of molecules present in adulterated food builds up in the body. The critical threshold is indeed reached once an amount of food, predictable on the basis of each individual’s background, has been eaten. One better understands the importance of being abstemious.

_Isn’t such a model a tad simplistic? After all, we aren’t dustbins gradually filling with waste!

o Above a particular concentration of abnormal molecules, our DNA can no longer handle the biochemical processes our life depends on. Imagine that you have goldfish in an aquarium and, for a bad joke, someone drops in a pinch of sawdust; they’ll still be able to find their food and swim around without mishap. Now, imagine that every day someone tips out an additional pinch of sawdust. The time will come when your poor fish will no longer be able to tell the water fleas from the splinters of wood, their gills will become obstructed and they’ll be brought to a standstill. That’s akin to what happens, making due allowances, when our chromosomes gravitate in plasma laden with abnormal metabolites.

_And how many abnormal substances does there have to be in the body to bring about death?

o The lethal dose is obviously different for every kind of parasitic molecules. Their mutual interaction will lead them to recombine in a thousand different ways, so much so that no rough-and-ready computation can have the slightest predictive value.
But, perhaps you ought to know something about one of the most toxic proteins known to science: the toxin secreted by a bacteria that develops in canned food (clostridium botulinum) and that sets off botulism. It only takes 20 millionths of a milligram of that minute wonder of molecular engineering to bump you off in 48 hours cold.

_So, it is lethal?

o That germ has the decency not to develop in the presence of oxygen; in that way “initial” food are necessarily immune.

_And how does it show up?

o By all kinds of disorders shading the whole gradient, right to gradual paralysis of the limbs and ultimately of the respiratory centers.

_You’re doing your best to frighten me.

o It’s not bad to know what surprises can bob up out of a mere tin can.
In fact, all it takes is less than one molecule per cell in the body for the living machine to give out for good. Such amounts, in most cases, elude present-day analytic methods.

_I trust that not all adulterated molecules are that toxic....

o Fortunately not! But with the amount of food one eats in a lifetime, one can expect all kinds of problems, even with toxins that are millions of times less potent. Starting now until you’ve reached the end of your life, you will have put through your intestinal villi, at the rate of four pounds daily, the tidy sum of 50 tons of goods.

_So, all it takes is a minute proportion of abnormal molecules to touch off mayhem.

o If one considers that a molecule has a lethal effect when there is 50 grams of it in the body, it becomes obvious that, in theory, all that’s needed is to take up a fraction of a millionth of one in one’s daily diet.
Now, such a small concentration isn’t very easily traceable in analyses. I think that explains why chemists have never woken up to the problem; such phenomena go unnoticed in standard research methods. Still, if it had been a matter of conducting studies on known molecules, gaseous chromatography, for instance, could have been resorted to, as is the case for pesticides.
But, in this case, the matter in hand involved spotting the presence of molecules that one had no prior knowledge of and whose presence wasn’t even suspected.

_So in fact, when I nibble at my crust of bread, I’m nibbling a hunk of serviceable molecules, that enable dietitians to work out its nutritional value with, to boot, a small percentage of damaged molecules that can have a toxic add-on effect, though they go unnoticed by the sharpest analysts.

o But don’t escape instinctos’ sharp noses, since years later they filter out concentrated in feces, urine, perspiration, and excretions of all kinds.

_Perhaps you could clear up one thing for me. When you say that offensive-smelling feces are due to molecules previously stored up in the body, aren’t you suggesting bowels work in a backwash?

o Quite right. The bowel does not merely take up, but it also efficiently removes unwanted waste from the body. It has been proved that the bowel also cleanses the blood by passing waste from it into the feces by means of the following experiment: a dog was operated on with a view to tying off a section of his bowel and then stitching up the loose ends for the animal to experience normal movements. Two days later, the section tied off, which had been found empty during the operation, had again filled up with waste.

_How very cruel.

o In science, reason, unfortunately, has to prevail over feeling. Fifty percent, at least, of the feces consist of substances filtered back out of the blood into the gut, which is standard lore in a medical student’s second year in training. Our bodies exporting superfluous molecules through such channels should come as no surprise. All the less so as the active surface in the bowel, taking into account all the villi and micro-villi in the bowel wall as well as constituent cell micro-villi, come to some 300 square metres.

_What a huge entrance.

o And an exit, too, remember! It must be obvious now that constipation can be dangerous. It holds back the voiding of toxic substances and concentrates them in the bloodstream.

_Now, that sounds interesting. Does that mean that your system gets the better of constipation?

o The most invincible forms of constipation break within a few days. Instinctotherapy gives top priority to bowel clearance, since sluggish bowel function spells disorder for everything else, including the uptake of foods and the clearing of toxic residue.

_When the bowel is in good shape, everything’s fine.

o There is a fruit that really puts the bowels in order: I’m talking about cassia, a kind of legume that grows on a tree and looks like a finger-thick stick, 30 to 40 centimeters long. Inside, there are little slices coated in black pulp, that one can suck, for instance, in the morning for breakfast. When one needs cassia, it takes on a flavor of licorice or chocolate.

_Don’t you eat breakfast?

o We’re never hungry in the morning.

_And yet, dietitians advise having a good meal in the morning to get off to a good start and the make the most of your day.
It’s tough enough as it is having to cope with you taking my coffee and buns away; couldn’t I at least replace them with a fruit?

o As soon as your bowels have got rid of the rest of your normal food, you’ll no longer feel like eating before noon.

_And what about having what it takes in the way of glucose?

o Unless you get a shot of insulin when you hop out of bed, you’ll have enough carbohydrates available in your system to stay the course until noon, even for much longer if you skip breakfast. The substances that pass through the bowels distill glucose all along the way. Even as far afield as the colon, they meet up with bacteria that manufacture enzymes capable of digesting about 50% of vegetable fibers (that are indigestible by our own enzymes). As the substances remain in the bowels for 2 or 3 days, you have some leeway_not to mention the sugar stored in the liver and the muscles, and the fat layers stashed away for rainy days. Apparently, it has been demonstrated that the body also knows how to store amino acids, contrary to time-honored conventional theory.

_All the same, every morning, I feel ravenous, and it gets worse if I don’t eat breakfast.

o Feeling ravenous has nothing to do with feeling hungry. That emptiness in the pit of your stomach merely lets you know that your internal organs have been overstrained and that they haven’t completed their nightly detoxification processes. Later, when you bolt your buns, your feeling of ravenousness abates. You assume you were hungry and that you were right to eat. In actual fact, all you’re doing is forestalling the cleansing process that’s under way, by compelling your organs to undertake new digestion.

_It’s true that fasters don’t feel hungry, even after several days of fasting.

o That pain in the pit of their stomach eases off because they have got over intoxicating themselves. As soon as one stops trouncing oneself with cooked molecules, one’s internal organs can at last get their breath back. That’s as true for instinctotherapy as it is for fasting. But, it’s misguided to believe that because one doesn’t feel empty in the pit of one’s stomach that one shouldn’t eat. In our cooked culture, the disorder resulting from intoxication is misinterpreted as feeling hunger.

_If I understand correctly, cooking lands us in catch-22. Cooking induces intoxication that sets off a feeling of bogus hunger, that impels us to eat even more. By eating more, one poisons oneself more, and so on?

o Unfortunately for our health and in respect of hunger in the world, a lot of food is wasted!

_When people say that cooking has enabled man to survive...

o I rather think the opposite is true. Cooking has made men into compulsive eaters. It has led them to razing primeval vegetation to spread their cereal grains all over. The fertilizer that they put back in the soil is chock-full of adulterated substances that insidiously poison topsoil.

_Well, what of the problem of famine in the third world?

o If mankind ate according to “initial” nutritional laws, the problem presumably would be easier to solve.
When you love the fruit, you love the tree as well. One plants and looks after one’s orchard. Under the rule of cooked starchy foods, fruit was demoted to the rank of snacks. We don’t find it “filling” nor does it cause our stomach to swell; actually, it even irritates our bowels.
In Africa, I was struck by the fact that the natives had forgotten their fruit trees ever since cassava had been introduced. Young blacks can’t stomach ripe mangoes any more; they are too overloaded with glucose. They prefer mangoes green, after slogging them against the bole of mango trees to bruise them soft, and they leave the good ripe fruit to rot on the ground.
If the love of fruit took up its rightful place in the world again, soon would spring up, on those stretches that have been razed by our single-crop farming schemes, fruit trees of a million different varieties. Spring would be a flower and scent garden, bees could make us mountains of honey.

_Would that be a real Garden of Eden?

o That fantasy doesn’t exist in the collective unconscious for nothing!

_But output would never be enough to feed the whole of humanity.

o How can we possibly know? After all, no one has ever bothered to work it out. Of course, it isn’t easy, because many parameters have to be taken into account. On first showing, I think we’d come out on top, especially in the realm of proteins, where the biggest threat of shortage looms large. Huge surfaces of land could be salvaged for breeding, since all kinds of animals can very well be left to graze under trees: chickens, sheep, pigs, geese, rabbits, and even cattle as was common in orchards of former times. In that way, the grass would automatically be mowed, the fallen fruit would be recovered, the fertilizer would spread quite naturally and replenish the soil, and the chickens would peck insects that developed in the dung, thus destroying parasitic larvae and caterpillars to make healthy, delicious eggs! No further need to milk cows; just leave the calves to suckle their mothers.

_That would spell upheaval for all present-day agro-economic structures.

o Let me take issue with that one: Where are those structures leading us now?
I don’t believe they’re as “economical” as they claim to be. In the short term, bumper crop yields are anticipated. But, the soil is poisoned with fertilizers of doubtful origin, it is imbalanced by fast-growth vegetation, it is stripped bare, and erosion takes over. Under the pretense of survival, topsoil, which is the irreplaceable source of all plant and animal life, is being destroyed. And all for what? For umpteen tons of bread or boiled potatoes per square mile, the better to wreck the health of the masses that have fled to cities, disgusted by that frenzied industry that one no longer dare call “working the land.”
A single man on his tractor plows, sows, and harvests 50 hectares of land per year, while 50 blue-collar drones are bored stiff in factories that turn out the very same tractor that they clear through customs, that they sell, that they levy a tax on, that they service, and that they put out advertising for the new model of.
How can it come as a surprise, then, that people have quit the countryside? The love of money has taken over for the love of nature. The stench of diesel fuel dispels the tang of the rich loam, while sputtering exhaust drowns out bird calls, and noxious gases choke your lungs.
If, at least, people were able to line their pockets with money! But even that doesn’t work as it should: devaluation, taxes, and loans turn farmers into the slaves of their bankers. Wouldn’t it be more pleasant to harvest fruit, in the wind and sunshine, and lie prone in the grass while looking after a herd of cattle?
I have seen a profound change at work in myself and in everyone who has taken up an “initial” diet; love of the fruit revives a love of life. One feels an upsurge of respect for natural values. Cutting a tree feels like inflicting a wound; bulldozers and combine harvesters take on the appearance of devilish fiends. If everyone could find within themselves a little more sensitivity for and thoughtfulness towards nature, I don’t believe that the planet would be marred the way it is at present.

_Do you think that changing diet is enough to reverse the situation?

o The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Love of the earth goes that way as well!
You have to be utterly blinkered not to see that the present system, hellbent on its development, can only lead to a final bang that might possibly cause great suffering. I don’t believe that anything much can be altered unless man is undermined in his fundamental being. And in man’s basic make-up, there’s food and instinct.

_I thought I understood you to have said a while ago that human manure could pollute the soil.

o That’s one of the unfortunate consequences of cooking: the adulterated molecules that daily go through the digestive tracts of the 5 billion “cooked food eaters” that exist in the world, not to mention the domestic animals, that later spill themselves out on arable land and in rivers.

_With water filtering systems, nowadays, most of the organic waste is reprocessed

o ... To make mountains of sterilized filth, that is compressed and later used as night soil. We’ll never get around it: the food we eat has to go back to the earth. As long as we go on adulterating our food, we’ll go on adulterating the Earth.

_Do you think that molecules adulterated by cooking are harmful for the topsoil? Aren’t the germs in the soil better adapted than our molecules that have been adulterated by heat? The sun has always cast its rays on the ground.

o The problem is the same. Most molecules given back to the topsoil in manure decompose perfectly well, giving the impression tht all is for the best in the best possible manure_as Voltaire would have said. Meantime, a minute percentage of molecules elude the available enzymes in the environment and slowly build up in the topsoil.
If one calculates the number of millions of men, each of whom has polluted tens of tons of organic matter in their existence for almost 10,000 years, it becomes obvious that that’s enough to alter the biochemical content of all the topsoil available on the planet. I have the feeling that that insidious pollution, that began well before industrial pollution, would explain the gradual weakening of the health of plants, cryptogamic diseases, parasitoses, viroses, that are spreading like wildfire from year to year. There is a lot of research to be done in that field. By coming out against chemical pollution, people thought that the problem had been seen to.

_Well now, if the effects of cooking pollution on soils also have to be taken into reckoning, that really is the limit!

o To which you can add the effects of air pollution: home fireplaces that are lit for hours every day, slash-and-burn, stubble-blazing, in short, all those techniques, which, since the beginning of the Neolithic period, have seared from the soil all the organic nutrients necessary for its balance to send them up into the air in palls of ash and tar. Work it out for yourself: If every man has to burn a kilo of fuel daily to cook his pittance, for the nineteenth century alone, that comes to 100 x 365 x 3,000,000,000 individuals on average, or about 100,000 millions of kilos of burnt matter that poured their fumes into the atmosphere.
That’s the equivalent of a gigantic volcanic eruption, as there never was one in living memory_to which have been added, since very recently, factory smoke, domestic fuel, central heating, car exhaust fumes, toxic by-products from refineries, etc... Is it surprising that the sky turns a little greyer every year?

_Indeed, days when the sky is blue seem to be getting rarer and rarer.

o I’ve heard it said that, before, the stars could be sighted in the sky at noon, if one went down to the bottom of a well.

_That problem of the thermal pollution of soils bothers me. Is it true that no one has pointed out the danger?

o In the whole of scientific bibliography, I only found one publication, dating back to 1947. An American, named Pottenger, who raised 900 cats for 10 years, half of them on raw meat and the other half on cooked meat, in order to observe the effects of cooking on the general pathology of the animals.

_So, the cooking problem has already been set out?

o Yes, but it was soon forgotten. Maybe because Pottenger’s experiment was purely empirical. Its organization had not been based on a theory, but on simple coincidence. At first, the researcher used the cats to study the effects of adrenalectomy. This was at the time when the first discoveries of cortisone were being made. He had worked at his experiment for many years, when the animals suddenly appeared better able to withstand surgery. Nothing could explain the drop in the number of deaths following surgery, besides changing diets. At first, the animals had been given meat scraps from the campus dining hall, i.e. cooked meat. Then, due to an increase in the number of enrollment his endeavours had required taking on the services of the neighboring butcher shop, so that the meat provided was raw. So right after that, Pottenger and his team undertook a large-scale experiment intended to show the differences between cooked food and raw food.

_That’s exactly what you needed!

o Unfortunately, it didn’t cross his mind for one minute that genetic inadaptation to cooked food potentially exists. Consequently, as a supplement, they fed their guinea pigs a certain amount of cow’s milk that, no doubt, muddled the results.

_What are you waiting for, then, to redo the experiment?

o Necessary funding! I have already raised more than a thousand mice, dissected them, and put all their organs in a jar in the hope of giving the necessary capital to enable me to study microscopic sections, as that costs a fortune. To date, nothing has materialized! But, I’m still hoping.

_And what of Pottenger’s results?

o They were breathtaking, according to his account. For the first time ever, the results clearly marked out the consequences of thermal adulteration. Cats fed cooked meat showed almost all the signs of human pathology: rickets, jawbone deformities, trauma, infections, miscarriages, suckling difficulties, aggressiveness, tuberculosis, early senility, heart attacks, etc...

_In that case, why hasn’t the public been alerted to the problem?

o That was right after the war. At the time, people were much more concerned about stuffing their bellies than playing at being dietitians. Even in 1960, when I began my own procedures, propounding any dietary precept was felt to be an act of aggression.

_How is it that scientists didn’t feel it incumbent on them to expose such momentous findings? They could at least have confirmed the results; that was a matter of professional responsibility, if not a downright crime against mankind.

o Scientists can only sell information that people are willing to buy. That cost me a lot as well. I tried, for instance, to publish an article, in different scientific journals, on the change in the eosinophil rate that is noted when people take up an “initial” diet_which is a matter of great importance when it comes to cancer and auto-immune diseases. But, my remarks came across as too unexpected for any journal to dare publish them.
I consider that Pottenger did everything he should have. He published a pamphlet that explained in detail the whole of his experiment. Researchers were the ones at fault for not having taken the matter seriously. They should have demonstrated either that Pottenger was mistaken or that he was right, in which case, they ought to have elaborated on the subject. But, his findings upset too many applecarts.

_He was far ahead of his time! I wish you better luck.

o Things are looking up.
In fact, I was telling you about those cats because they enabled Pottenger and his teammates to take note of something, quite by chance, that directly pertains to our concern_that is, once everything was finished, the grounds where the animals had lived were turned into a market garden to supply food for the dining hall. But, there were complaints. From the spots where the soil had got manure from droppings of cats that had eaten cooked food, the peas had an aftertaste of cat ordure, whereas, in the other parts of the garden, they tasted perfectly good.
That can be accounted for if one is prepared to admit that some molecules adulterated from cooked meat had been passed on into the exrement of those animals without having been broken down properly, then from the earth they were taken up by the plants without having been broken down any further.

_By dint of polluting the earth, then, there’s a risk of a boomerang effect: Will the plants poison us, in turn, even if we decide to eat our food raw?

o We even run the risk of the effects of being at the end of the chain, as in the case of chemical pollution. You’ve heard of the problem of mercury that concentrates a little more in every successive link of the food chain, from plankton all the way up to big fish, to end up, with a flourish, in the human body. Who has forgotten what those hapless Japanese fishermen paid for with their lives; the Minimata tragedy should have served as a lesson. What’s true for mercury can happen for any molecule that can’t be broken down and that is let into the metabolic cycles of the ecosystem. To our great misfortune, it’s not the done thing in present-day research to allow people to talk about what hasn’t been clearly shown in analyses. Now, analytical research is prohibitively costly and is never funded except when plenty of untoward effects have shown up. And since the poisoning of soils might well be irreversible, the problem will come up for review when it’s too late.

_You’ve got the blues tonight!

o Don’t worry. It comes over me. When I fear that peas won’t ever be able to go back to tasting the way they initially did... Peas are one of my favorite foods, you see.

_They are a particularly easy vegetable to eat raw.

o In time, all vegetables end up becoming almost as good as fruit, provided one really chooses them instinctively and that they come from proper crops.

_That’s hard to believe. For my tastes, everything is too bland or too strong: lettuce, fennel, cabbage, leeks, chicory, etc... You’re not saying that raw chicory can take on a particularly good taste! I have never eaten anything more insipid.

o How so very mistaken you are! It can smell like a flower and become as fragrant as a fruit! But, sometimes it takes a long time to reach that stage, especially if you have eaten a lot of cooked chicory in the past.

_I’ve always loved braised chicory, wrapped in thin slices of lard.

o You’re conjuring up bad memories. My mother used to prepare chicory in all different ways: boiled, baked, with a cheese topping, as a salad, and so on. I hated them, but I was told that they were a food that was very high in mineral salts, that it was very good for my memory, and everything else that it took to shovel them down my throat. Ultimately, though, even in salads, I found them to be insufferably bitter.
When I first started out on instinctotherapy, I went for a long time without being able to go near them. After a few months, the bitterness had gone away, but they still tasted insipid to me. I even thought that was the normal taste of the vegetable. However, one fine day, at suppertime, as I was smelling the different vegetables present on the menu, the chicory that I put under my nose smelled so fragrant that I suspected my children of having played a trick on me. Had they put a drop of scent on it? I went and got another one from the cellar just to make sure; the second one smelled just as good, and the taste I found it to have confirmed the verdict my sense of smell had returned. It was as subtle and sweet as a stick of barley sugar.
I have systematically noticed that people who have eaten a lot of cooked vegetables find it hard to stomach the same vegetables raw for a very long time. Their body is most certainly clogged up with adulterated molecules that obstruct the corresponding channels, and, so, instincts put one off the raw vegetable as if there was an overload.

_I accept that vegetables may become edible, but, all the same, they can never be as delightful as fruit.

o Gorillas love wild celery. If fruit tasted better to them, why should they bother to go and chew grass? Instincts regulate the balance between fruit and vegetables by sometimes making us feel more like fruit than vegetables, sometimes more like vegetables than fruit, depending on the acid-alkaline balance of the body and its basic needs. If, due to the effects of cooking, you’ve eaten too many vegetables and not enough fruit, you’ll automatically feel more inclined towards the latter than for the former.
But, there is, indeed, another cause of dissymetry. Vegetables have been crossbred to be eaten cooked. Therefore, fruit that was typically sweeter than usual was selected and vegetables that were stronger were favored so that they should retain some flavor after cooking. If one eats everything raw, there’s a tendency to eat too much fruit and not enough vegetables, and that can lead to unfortunate imbalancing.
In fact, the scale of tastes for each crossbred food has to be readjusted, as each one of our cultivated plants have strayed, to differing degrees, from what they once were in the wild. That’s one of the things that requires the most rethinking from the outset.

_Ultimately, instinctotherapy has a very simple theoretical basis, but putting it into practice is another matter.

o Instinctotherapy poses no problems for animals; they don’t need to attend a course to learn how to apply it. All of those readjustments take care of themselves automatically. But, man is so complex that he can’t get it right without a long stint of deconditioning and retraining of his instincts.

_How long do you consider retraining to have to last?

o Under good conditions, three weeks is enough to guarantee getting off to a good start. I think a three-week period of time is a minimum. In relation to 30 years or so of conditioning through cooking, that’s only a 500th of the time.

_And what if one starts all on one’s own as you did?

o We wasted years groping in the dark, before stumbling onto what one might call the state of being “raw, instinctive eaters,” in other words the normal balance of functions. Once that pivot of balance has been located, everything becomes much easier. From then on, one sees what one loses out on every time one makes a mistake. A kind of self-teaching results.

_Do you organize training periods?

o Yes, two-day long weekend courses. Before, I had hoped that a single day devoted to theory would be enough to secure success, but repeated failure convinced me that it would be more profitable to map out a two-day training period of lessons, plus two or three weeks of practical training with guided meals and weekly seminars in order to answer questions that never fail to crop up.

_I see. One has to undergo very serious training. At first sight, one would think it was so obvious_eat everything raw and obey one’s sense of pleasure.

o You put me in mind of a story that conservatory pupils are told. A young lad was seated in a concert hall while his older brother, already a virtuoso violonist, was playing a concerto on stage. A gentleman, wanting to encourage the child to study music, leaned over him and asked him: “And what about you? Do you play as well as your brother?” To which the little boy responded without batting an eyelid: “How should I know; I have never tried.” There’s no point in deluding oneself: Even if I show you how to play a scale on the cello and how you have to hold your bow and put your fingers, all you’ll be able to do is make horrible scraping noises.
It’s about the same with instinctotherapy. The principles are easily understood, because they’re quite simple. But, when it comes to practical application, you realize that the most basic things are much more complex than you had bargained for.

_What might happen, then, if you don’t do things as you should?

o You waste a lot of time for one. In some cases of illness, that might prove fatal. There are some points of no return. You can waste money, too. Most of the people lapse into overeating without realizing it and, so, one lives far above one’s needs and overshoots one’s budget, without getting worthwhile results.

_But, supposing I’m in good health?

o You run less of a risk, but that won’t last long. You won’t get enough pleasure out of your food and coffee, buns, cream-cakes, creamed cod with garlic....

_I love creamed cod with garlic.

o So, you see, I do have a good memory, even when it comes to cooking. In short, you conjure up all those delicacies of bygone days and you’ll end up ditching your most fervent resolutions. It’s a bit like wanting to ride off on a horse before you’ve seated yourself properly. Try riding sidesaddle, a few degrees down from a vertical line, you won’t last out a mile and you’ll have to let go of the reins. You’ll quickly resume your vertical position, but below your mount! That’s to say, you’ll be landed in the bottom of a pan.
There’s something more: As soon as you allow your body to function under conditions that are a bit more normal, it will regain strength and take off like a shot_if you don’t rein in all kinds of detoxification processes.

_And yet, that’s what one expects from a natural diet.

o You’re right. There’s nothing for restoring true health besides getting rid of abnormal substances that hang heavy on whatever tendency we have to a particular disease. All the rest is merely symptom-based medicine.
But it’s best to remain in control of one’s food and learn the rules that help prevent the cleansing processes from getting carried away. That’s much more subtle than simply being in tune with one’s sense of smell and taste. One has to know how to be receptive to one’s body and go along with feelings of revulsion and satedness. You can’t learn that overnight.

_So, what about people who eat raw foods without taking instinct into account? Aren’t they simply bad instinctos?

o As it happens, crudivorians experience very many bouts of detoxification that sometimes spell untoward consequences. The same thing happens if you spring-clean with too much elbow grease. You can scratch your tiles, break your china, and overload your rubbish bin to the point of its bursting.
When the body pulls the chain, whatever waste is in the fat and inside cells has to pass into the bloodstream to be cleared by our excretory organs: kidneys, liver, gut, and the skin. If the progress gets carried away, damage can occur, setting up unpleasant symptoms and possibly worsening the illness one was hoping to cure.
Instinctotherapy is rather like “formula one” in detoxification. It seems no exaggeration to say that there is no better method to be restored to the peak of health. However, it is best to learn to drive before starting out in the race.

_Did you say “the peak of health”?

o When things have gone too far for the body to react, no detoxification symptom is touched off and this ought to give us cause for concern. But, given that there is no understanding of some symptoms betokening useful processes inside the body, people reason the other way around and believe they’re in sound health.
I grant you that when instinctotherapy is deftly applied, detoxification symptoms remain virtually in abeyance. However, if you take yourself over into an imbalance during a cathartic clearance, that clearance is likely to run away with itself and take on the guise of a varyingly definite illness.

_Do you have in mind the viral diseases we were talking about this afternoon?

o As a matter of fact, I have. Consequently, I would advise applying instinctotherapy properly, all the way, or keeping to traditional food, making sure one’s abstemious and carefully screening out particular factors like milk, wheat, and all their by-products.

_Can a reaction getting out of hand turn dangerous?

o Well, you’re simply back to the typical course of those illnesses: running a temperature, feeling exhausted, perspiring heavily, bringing up phlegm, developing rashes, as well as experiencing pain and lesions.
If you’re well-balanced, the disease will go virtually unnoticed. You work through it scarcely noticing anything or feeling any pain. Nor does it leave any after-effects. At the very most, short-lived symptoms will be witnessed that soon are promptly dispelled.

_This is the second time you’ve mentioned pain. Does one really fell pain less?

o Inflammatory pain entirely vanishes as soon as one’s balance is right.

_Come on, stop pulling my leg. Don’t tell me that if you break your shin, it’s painless?

o Of course, sudden pain remains. After all, something has to let me know that I have injured my body. I’m talking about swelling pains, those that increasingly worsen after the accident and, in fact, serve no purpose.

_It is nonetheless normal that swelling should be associated with some degree of pain.

o On a traditional diet, yes, that’s perfectly normal.

_So, you never feel pain, your tissues are never congested, you never feel your blood throbbing?

o Well, no, I don’t suffer from any of those things. You can confirm it for yourself. If, after only a few days of instinctotherapy, you break a leg, you won’t develop any inflammatory complication.

_I prefer not trying it.

o To witness that something is amiss, you obviously have to have reason to feel pain somewhere.

_If that’s all it is, I very often have migraine at bedtime.

o How unfortunate! You’re going to be able to vouch for its disappearance in the very near future.

_It’s true that tonight I haven’t so far felt anything. But how is medicine to explain that changing one’s diet can make pain disappear?

o Medicine doesn’t explain it, since such a thing has never been noted.

_How does medicine explain, then, that inflammation is associated with pain?

o Medicine doesn’t explain that either; that’s simply asserted to be normal. And if there are differences from one person to the next, those differences are said to be psychological.
That’s generally how it is with doctors. When a disorder can’t be explained, it is put down to something mental. In that case, since no one can go and check, there’s little chance of getting it wrong.

_You don’t deny psychological influences, all the same?

o Not at all. I only think that because it’s impossible to draw connections between all kinds of disorders and their dietary causes that a lot of diseases have been called psychosomatic without really knowing where one stood.
In fact, all causes pile up. It would be senseless to overlook the psychological factor, but, it’s even more foolish to deny the dietary one. You can’t build a sturdy house with mildewed beams. The building materials our bodies are made of are the molecules that enter our mouths.

_I’ve heard it said that what makes man impure is not what goes in but what comes out of his mouth?

o Let us not confuse spiritual with temporal! Words full of hate poison our minds much more than dainty chocolates do, but the wisdom of the mind is, unfortunately, not sufficient reason for the body to be healthy. In no sacred text can one find really cogent teachings, as far as diet is concerned.

_And yet in every religion, a not inconsiderable number of hygienic, dietary precepts are urged on their faithful: Lent for Christians, Ramadan for Moslems, etc...

o Except that in time, things have markedly worsened. In the beginning, Lent was a 46-day fast, from Ash Wednesday all the way to Easter. As that seemed a tad long, it was lopped off to Good Friday. To make up for that, meat was prohibited every Friday of the year. All it took was replacing it with fish and that did the trick: One could stuff oneself with ease.
Things are somewhat different for Ramadan. Food is only prohibited between sunrise and sunset. Moslems, apparently have never had trouble making up for their abstinence during the night, since in Arabic “Ramadan” is pronounced “ramdam,” which in French means “razzle-dazzle.”
It may be that originally those periods of fasting actually meant eating everything raw, as if to allow the people a breather in memory of “initial” diet. You must have heard of the Falachas (Black Ethiopian?) who have lived at the furthermost boundaries of Sudan in complete isolation since the first century of the Common Era and who have retained all their customs of the time. In spite of harsh famines being common, those men will refuse the foodstuffs flown in for them, as they don’t allow themselves any cooked food during their ritual fast.

_What would you have done in their place? Isn’t it better to eat cooked food than starve to death?

o Knowing that cooking turns one into a compulsive eater, I would have thought twice about it. I ran an experiment along those lines, at a time when I had a lot of wild field mice. I began by fattening up a few of my little rodents with cooked food, whereas the others were fed raw food. Then, I fasted them all. The first group didn’t stand up to famine any better than the second group! On the contrary, when feeding was resumed, some of the fat animals previously fed cooked food died, while none of the thin, raw ones did.
The fat that builds up when one eats adulterated food, unfortunately, contains toxins that make it lose the advantages that it might potentially have had in times of famine.

_So, it’s not worth being plump.

o Apart from some advantages in terms of comfort...

_What do you think of people who claim to be able to eat anything without it doing any harm to their body, provided that their spirit is sufficiently advanced?

o I’ll respond to your question with facts. My yoga teacher, Selvarajah Jesudian, who came straight from India to pass on to the West the teachings of the greatest Hindu masters, died of a heart attack when he was still in the prime of life. His wisdom didn’t protect him from dietary mistakes.
As for Râmakrisna, he was, undoubtedly, one of the most outstanding spiritual figures. He is, moreover, known to have loved cooked rice cakes with butter. Today, it is established that that kind of fried food is highly carcinogenic. The wise man suffered from larynx cancer, on the very spot where the little cakes slid down. His first reaction was to revolt against the unfairness of his fate, then, he gave himself up to the idea of death and bravely endured terrible suffering.

_Suffering can be beneficial for spiritual progress.

o In that case, let’s poison ourselves, let’s torture ourselves, and we’ll get our place in heaven that much more quickly! No, I think that Râmadrisna’s initial reaction was perfectly justified. He was right to rebel, as that mistake was prematurely shortening his career_or his earthly duty, if you prefer: a dietary mistake, quite simply, that the channel of Revelation had not disclosed to him.

_That’s enough to make one lose one’s faith in anything that spirituality or religion can bring one.

o I believe that we fall victims to some confusion if we expect spiritual enlightenment to provide answers in concrete matters. To clear up the dietary problem, all we have to do is use our intelligence. Is it really up to the Creator to come down from the clouds and see to our roasted aromas?

_Haven’t you asserted, on the contrary, that intelligence made us lapse into the cooking error?

o Undoubtedly. But, only intelligence can enable us to make up for the mistakes of intelligence.
Waiting around piously for the answer to come down from on high, without making the effort to call into question our pet gastro_intestinal habits, that looks to me less like faith than intellectual sloth.

_Do you trust science more than religion?

o Yes, when it comes to concrete phenomena. Think of all the mistakes that landmarked the history of Catholicism, for instance, the case of Galileo. Too often people confuse the two classes of phenomena: matter and spirit.

_Isn’t the current trend an attempt at providing, rather, a link between body and mind?

o It would have been better never to have separated what formed a whole. Nowadays, we apply to spiritual matters analytical forms meant for concrete matters, and we seek to resolve our biological problems by having an approach we should adopt with respect to spirituality.
Waiting for enlightenment to tell us what menu will secure health already means separating body and mind. The state of inner unity results from detachment; in other words, calling things into question. All the great philosophers expressed such an idea: Socrates’ “Who am I?,” Saint Paul’s “Do not judge,” Buddha’s middle course, and so on. It seems to me that such an attitude allows one to call everything into question, and if it is truly thorough-going does not mean sweeping the problem of cooking under the rug. I don’t understand why, in the name of the spirit, we should have the right to spread disorder in bodily matters.

_It can always be claimed that spirit prevails over such disorder.

o A spirit strong enough will have no difficulty giving up gluttony.

_Do you believe in the miracles at Lourdes?

o I think that if one added a proper diet to the water and the prayers, miracles still would be wrought!
Many times, I have been told by people very much into spiritual matters that food didn’t matter. I was able to note that when those same people were asked whether they would give up their recipes, food suddenly became highly important.

_The fact still remains that Christ ordered his disciples to receive communion with bread and wine.

o True, but if you look at the amounts he was talking about, you’re not risking obesity or delirium tremens.
Quite seriously, I think that, at the Last Supper, Jesus had other more urgent concerns than a dietary issue. He most certainly took the food that was handy to turn it into symbols of, or props for, food of a superior order.

_Not too long ago, I read a little pamphlet entitled “The gospel of peace according to Saint John.” Apparently, Christ gave advice that was very close to what you teach.

o Nature doesn’t run two different courses. Any vital teaching inevitably converges on the same great principles.

_Didn’t you derive your inspiration from that gospel?

o Somebody gave me that book a good while after I was first into instinctotherapy. At first, I was thrilled, since in it Christ indeed details the great principles that governed our experience: no cooking whatsoever, no mixing, and no seasoning. The only point of contention was that of vegetarianism. The text roundly condemned meat, all the while advising drinking animal milk periodically. Now, the phenomenon I was able to observe in all of my experiments convinced me of the harmfulness of milk and the usefulness of meat. Not knowing what to doubt, my observations or the gospel, and as I mistrusted the translation, which had been rendered by eminent vegetarians_one never knows, the fear of a carcass can influence how one interprets a text_I undertook to research the original manuscripts cited in the work: two ancient texts which tallied and guaranteed their so-called genuineness, the one in Aramaic stored at the Vatican Library and the other in old Slavonic in the Royal Habsbourg Library in Vienna. Now, neither of those manuscripts existed in either one of the references cited.

_That’s surprising. The origin of the text still begs the question.

o I’m puzzled. Did the so-called translator have a kind of revelation, a great intuition, that was true for the most part, but was distorted when it came to vegetarianism because of his personal obsessions?

_If it’s not too nosy to ask, are you a believer?

o What do you mean by “believer”? I have a lot to say about that area of interest. We’ll talk about it some other time. If you want us to finish before sunrise, we have to go back to more worldly food.

_You’re right. We were talking about inflammatory pain. How does medicine account for inflammation?

o That’s the basic process the body brings into play every time that an abnormal situation has to be put right. Whether you jab a splinter under your nail, or break a bone, or an insect injects you with its venom, every time you will observe the same swelling of tissues, redness advertising an uprush in blood circulation, and increased sensitivity compelling you be gentle with the affected area. All the while, quite a lot of work happens on a microscopic level, your white blood cells coming out of the blood vessels to go and patrol inside neighboring tissues.

_Can white blood cells exit from the normal channels of blood circulation?

o In the case of an emergency, various hormones issue them a special license to circulate. The capillary vessels dilate in favor of a general swelling, and the blood cells can then pass through their distended membranes as through the mesh in a net to go and discharge their purpose in the disaster areas. That phenomenon goes by the scientific name of diapedesis.

_White blood cells are somewhat like firemen who rush to the scene of a disaster by emergency routes, are they?

o Except that they’re very clever firemen and supremely organized. They’re more like the whole of the military and police forces of a country, comprising the troops in charge of fighting off attackers coming from without, that are subdivided into different army corps as well as a militia in charge of maintaining law and order at home, with its detectives, and its national guardsmen, its inspectors, its judges, its executioners, its highway departments, not to mention the weapons and ammunition. Medicine called that organization the immune system, which is a very inappropriate name chosen during a period in history when its only identified function consists in immunizing a body against a disease.
Don’t be surprised, then, to find out that white blood cells appear on the scene every time there is something to correct, clean, kill, or clear.

_That still doesn’t make it clear why there’s pain when one eats a cooked diet and there isn’t on raw food.

o We’re entering the murky waters of speculation here again. But I feel that we have opened up a very good model of analysis that nothing to date has refuted.
In a general way, pain signals lesion. Every time something is destroyed in the body, an alarm goes off and the brain is alerted to damage being undergone in the form of pain. If, for example, someone jabs a needle into your buttocks for some reason or other, you’re going to feel the prick until the needle stops thrusting, in other words, as long as your flesh in enduring additional damage. Predictably, then, the pain warns of nefarious action to be avoided, and hence more of things getting worse than of how bad they actually are. Accordingly, a simple equation may be posited: pain = ongoing damage.
This is borne out by the fact that the pain recedes once the needle’s progress is halted, i.e. when no further deterioration ensues.
Supposing we now apply that question to swelling...

_You sound like a math teacher I once had.

o Not to worry. I’m almost through with the point I want to make. If swelling occurs with dull pain, this tells us that pain is spreading on the molecular level, for instance, healthy cells are being destroyed by white corpuscles.

_And so why should such a thing occur on one diet and not another?

o What if you get the firemen you called in to douse a blaze over-excited about the situation, what then?

_They’re really going to start acting up.

o Who knows? Perhaps, they’ll flood your house, wreck the furniture, and possibly even let the fire spread.

_Are you saying that traditional food stirs my white corpuscules to a frenzy?

o Even in marginal numbers, abnormal molecules can flummox white corpuscules. White corpuscules operate by spotting telltale molecules on target receptors, so that if you scatter on the battlefield all kinds of alien molecules, they will serve as so many wrong primers, purposeful action will sour to sheer destruction, with healthy and target cells alike being blown to smithereens.

_So then, my white blood cells would actually set about vaporizing my own cells?

o That is indeed the conceit I am submitting. Medicine has amply described this kind of about-face in all manner of so-called auto-immune diseases. It is also a known fact that inflammation travels the road to self-destruction, but the whole process remains fuzzy: Inflammation is alternately construed to be restorative and destructive by turns.
Our model explains what causes the shift. Painless swelling remains the norm as long as the restorative process is fully under control. However, when the body is flooded with alien molecules, inflammation goes on the rampage, setting up microscopic damage that we sense as macroscopic pain. Basically, painful swelling is the archetype for auto-immune diseases. It is a hallmark of the widespread immunological disarray ordinary food steeps us in, and this, in turn, proves that dietary imbalance induces the body to overall self-destruction.

_Yet, inflammation always remains well circumscribed, doesn’t it?

o If there’s only one volcano erupting, it is clear that the deep strata of magma are already bubbling up under the entire continental surface. We have noted that circumscribed inflammation only shows up against a background of generalized tendency to it.

_That’s cold comfort. To think that soldiers upon whom one has pinned hopes that they would defend your territory set about slaughtering rightful citizens...

o All the more so as this leads to gentle death. The auto-immune theory of aging thus accounts for the debilitation of our organs: With every microscopic inflammation, scheduled to clear out a dead cell, for instance, the process runs a full course in destroying neighboring cells. Whatever scarring cells are manufactured in the emergency to step into the breach lack the genetic intelligence to stand in as replacements. Consequently, organs become riddled with disaster areas. Meantime, remaining active cells have to function under duress, and this snowballs all the way to final annihilation.

_I used to think that death was cranked up by some genetic timeswitch.

o Both processes can overlap: natural, biological aging, on the one hand, and diet-based auto-immune aging due to molecular havoc. The question is which one beats the other to the finish.
It is very likely that poisoning induced through cooking gives a fillip to our death-headed biological time-bomb. A cell that can replicate fifty times will reach the end of its tether that much sooner if it has withstood poisoning that required its being renewed faster than it should.

_Meaning that lifespan is, arguably, in inverse proportion to the speed of poisoning?

o Now, you’re speaking mathematics, so we’re on the same wavelength.

_And what of other auto-immune diseases?

o I believe them to be cases in point of such auto-immune aging as affects the specific part of the human body. Take, for instance, arteriosclerosis, the top killer in heavy-eating, highly-developed countries.

_I thought it was due to high blood cholesterol?

o To cut a long story short, put it this way: Cholesterol is the Dow Jones for a body in the doldrums. The higher the concentration, the worse it is for your arteries. And as you’re as old as your arteries....

_Have you ever treated people with that kind of complaint?

o Let me set the record straight, if you will: I never treat anybody. Instinctotherapy means treating oneself to better health! Cholesterol can melt like fat in a pan. I have known refractory concentrations that had stood undaunted for twenty years drop to normal within three weeks, which comes as no surprise since there is no abnormal fat in initial foods.

_That’s as good as saying: no more animal fat.

o Wrong, I mean no more abnormal fats. Animal fat, per se, causes no trouble at all when animals are suitably fed and provided it is not eaten beyond what instincts call for. It contains polyunsaturates and all kinds of substances of high nutritional value. In the past, fatted calves, lard, or smoked raw ham were made much of. Zeus himself loved fat. Try a closer reading of Prometheus Unbound.
Of course, now, with feed pellets, oil cake, and everything domestic animals are fattened up on, their blubber banks have become the dung deposits that store up every possible kind of toxin.
The ideal thing would obviously be to be able to come by wild meat.

_Isn’t merely overeating fat what is being indicted?

o The worst of the problem pertains to abnormal substances that contain fat as a result of the animals’ unsuitable diet and, quite naturally, owing to whatever cooking adulteration they are subjected to before being eaten by man. It’s true that cooked food impels one to eat too much fat, but I think the nature of the molecules is more at fault than surfeit due to recipes_in French, recipe and receipt are the same word. (Excuse the pun, it’s getting late)! Within an instincto framework, the problem is settled quickly: There is no likelihood of any thermal adulteration and, moreover, it is literally impossible to take up the slightest excess in animal fat. Your salivary glands simply stop secreting the requisite enzymes and you have the impression that a ball of modelling clay is stuck to your palate.

_That can’t be too pleasant.

o What’s unpleasant is there to preserve our health: Better to have those excess molecules sticking to our palate than cleaving to our arteries! In any case, all it takes is stopping in time.

_I still haven’t understood exactly how arteriosclerosis is an auto-immune disease.

o It’s easy to understand that the white blood cells attack the cells of the walls of the arteries if one merely accepts our theory that they are permeated with abnormal molecules (possibly in connection with heavy cholesterol). If things move too quickly, the cells destroyed are not replaced by suitable ones. The body, consequently, has to rush to fill in the gaps as best it can. Deterioration ensues in the walls of the vessels which lose their flexibility and it can actually bulge into folds, where blood builds up, which causes high blood pressure, due to the heart’s difficulty in making the blood circulate_unless a fragment tears loose and goes and stops up a lesser artery, and you know the rest.

_If I had to die of something, I’d still prefer dying of a heart attack.

o It’s called infarction, from the Latin “infarcire” which means to stuff (“farcir” in French). The etymology always says more than one might want it to: Arteriosclerosis is most assuredly the worst “farce” (meaning “practical joke” and “stuffing”) that cooking did to our arteries.
Personally, I’d rather do without that kind of euthanasia. A heart attack doesn’t necessarily kill you off the first time around nor is it painless. Not even coronary thrombosis, the damaged section of the heart muscle, is stifled, because the blood doesn’t get to it any more, but it has to soldier on, since the heart can’t stop for the occasion! That explains the faintness, the tremendous weakness, and the typical crushing crowbar pains in one’s left arm, that aren’t exactly orgasmic, if what heart patients say is anything to go by. Not to mention cerebrovascular incidents (i.e. congestive brain failure) that set off strokes that leave you paralyzed for life or senile when chain-clotting occurs to the extent of making your brain shrivel up like a soufflé that has been taken out of the oven too fast....

_Can the brain shrivel up?

o Medically, it’s known as softening of the brain, and it’s considered more or less normal that the brain should have lost a sizeable chunk of its volume by the time retirement ages comes round. The destruction of neurons is most likely due to two things: lack of oxygen to the brain resulting from the obstruction of arterioles that supply blood to the brain cells and auto-immune micro-inflammation. Those two processes can be explained away by adulterated food.
As long as french fries are around....

_And with instinctotherapy, do you think that arteriosclerosis can diminish?

o Prevention is better than cure. When the body has suffered lesions that run too deep, usually one can’t hope for full recovery. Although I have seen very encouraging cases: for instance, a woman in her sixties who was operated on for coronary thrombosis, whose doctor had assured her that she would never be able to walk upstairs again. After two months of instinctotherapy, she had recovered so well that her doctor decided to try out the method himself! As she was retired, she volunteered to come and help us in our institute and got down to work again with all the vigor of youth. She carried crates of apples, and scuttled up and down stairs without getting out of breath.

_Is breathing at all improved with your diet?

o With my “anti-diet,” as you should say, breathing improves markedly. Heart beat also slows down and deepens. When you wake up in the morning, for instance, your pulse beat is about 52 beats per minute.

_Just like for sportsmen, then?

o But not necessarily because one practices sport. The heart benefits by a greater recovery time between two beats, which is crucial for one’s lifespan.

_You’re not going to tell me you’re against sport?

o You can take sport easy or go all out on it. The spirit of competition inevitably compels the body to give beyond its means. It is put in a state of stress, the unloading of all kinds of hormones (adrenaline, endorphins, etc...) is set in motion, the immune system suspends part of its activity (which, paradoxically, makes one fee tremendously fit, as one can freely use all the energy that is no longer diverted to cleansing). In the long run, lasting damage can be expected. I have seen many a former tennis champion, fencing expert, professional cyclist, etc... end their career on cancer or heart attack.
On the other hand, a moderate amount of sport, ever rather taxing, but without going beyond the instinctive boundaries of exertion, seems quite appropriate to counterbalance the future effects of all the time the average person spends lounging around in slippers in front of the boob tube. That’s arteriosclerosis for you, that nice little civilized disease that kills close to one man out of every two. There are other auto-immune diseases, since white blood cells can attack all parts of the body.

_What about varicose veins? Can one account for them in a similar way?

o The walls of the veins whose normal cells have been replaced by scarring cells stand up to blood pressure poorly, especially in the legs, where blood pressure is highest. They expand and deteriorate gradually.

_How do you feel about vein-stripping surgery?

o I think that it’s always a shame to strike a blow at the body’s unity. If you remove a major vein, the neighboring ones will be overworked. Circulatory problems will inevitably follow as well as a decrease in muscular contractibility and other problems in the long run unless you have enough veins_in the plural.

_All the same, one can’t hope to get rid of varicose veins with diet, can one?

o And yet, it is possible. I had serious doubts, but I was able to witness with my own eyes that varicose veins draw in completely sometimes, especially if one sees to them early on.
For other even more serious disorders, like arteritis and vascularitis, instinctotherapy has also afforded excellent results. I’m thinking, for instance, of a doctor in his thirties, who had vascularitis.

_More scientific lingo! Dare I ask you to translate for mere mortals like myself?

o The suffix “itis” is used every time there’s inflammation.

_Like as in cellulitis?

o You’ve hit on the only exception. Cellulitis has nothing to do with inflammation of the cells. In that ailment, the flesh is distended by abnormal fat to the point of becoming painful.

_And that can, undoubtedly, be put right with instinctotherapy?

o In a few weeks or months, usually, provided that one does things properly. It’s not easy to go and release substances that have been crusting over for years. That requires conditions every bit as precise as those necessary to be cured of reputedly serious diseases. Fat can harbor all kinds of toxins that, once released into the blood, will have to be broken down and conveyed out of the body through the available channels. That’s work that the body will only undertake given the right conditions: perfect dietary balance, enough sleep, lack of stress, positive mental state, physical activity, etc...

_In the final analysis, cellulitis is a as difficult to cure as vascularitis?

o I’d say, rather, that vascularitis is as easy to cure as cellulitis. A serious disease is not necessarily more stubborn that a benign one. What are called incurable diseases are those that doctors are unable to cure. With instinctotherapy, we have a new therapeutic key at our fingertips. Former classifications are no longer very meaningful.
In vascularitis, the capillary vessels are affected. White blood cells start attacking their walls. As the canals are very fine, they are either obstructed quickly or disintegrate. Some parts of the body cease to be irrigated properly and undergo mortification. The nervous system in particular is subjected to damage that has very serious consequences. The young doctor I mentioned had already lost his hearing in the left ear, and he couldn’t move or feel anything in two of his fingers, that were completely paralyzed and his electrocardiogram showed abnormality: the cardiac nerve that controlled his heart beat was very seriously affected (in technical language, he had a bundle branch block).
The disease was slowly wending its way toward disaster. Specialists had advised him to undergo chemotherapy of the kind that is generally used to destroy cancer cells and, in his case, would supposedly kill white blood cells, in the hope of preventing things from getting worse.

_It is sheer nonsense to kill white blood cells, since their function is specifically to protect the body!

o As you see, medicine is trapped in deadlock. Law and order cannot be maintained in a country where the policemen are suffering from utter madness. What’s not yet known is that that state of madness has been set off by the food! At least, I can’t explain the facts otherwise. As soon as that doctor started eating in keeping with instinctotherapy, his condition began to improve. In two months, he recovered the use of his two fingers. His blood tests showed that the disease had remained stationary. Six months later I heard the news I had been hoping for: his electrocardiogram was absolutely normal!

_And how did he feel about all that, from a medical point of view?

o He remained rather puzzled. I almost had the impression that he was annoyed at his recovery; it proved to him, when all was said and done, that food was more efficient than medicine.
Nonetheless, that kind of experience shows that there is a close connection between food and immunological disorders. That’s a very important subject, since the more research makes advances, the more researchers discover that diseases whose causes were still shrouded in mystery are, in fact, auto-immune diseases.

_Have you witnessed other case of recovery as spectacular as the one you’ve just mentioned?

o Yes, in people suffering from rheumatoid arthritis or disseminated lupus erythematosus who properly applied instinctotherapy, for instance. Unfortunately, I always have trouble convincing hearty eaters of the need to respect strict dietary discipline.

_It’s hard to believe that slightly bending the rules can play such a crucial role!

o All of us are used to considering the kinds of food that have been familiar to us for centuries innocuous. That’s one of the major stumbling blocks in people’s acceptance of instinctotherapy. Who’s going to believe that a glass of milk or a slice of bread can really do one harm? And yet, once one frees oneself of a cooked reference point, one is forced to admit that ordinary food is toxic. Cause and effect are even more striking when someone already has a disease, since the latent disorder resurfaces whenever a disrupting factor is introduced.

_So, am I to understand that it’s rather dangerous to use your system to cure oneself if one doesn’t apply it exactly right?

o If what you call dangerous means running the risk of making former symptoms recur.
Don’t forget that we’re talking about curing diseases that medicine has given up on. Miracles are wrought at the cost of minimal discipline and know-how.

_People come to you, no doubt, only after everything else has failed, is that right?

o Unfortunately, that’s the most usual course things take with incurable diseases. Doctors, feel helpless; they sense they can’t tell the patient the truth. They encourage them. They lead people to believe that such and such a drug will make things better. When the patient realizes that medicine can’t do anything for him_which often requires many years_he undertakes his exhausting round of homeopaths, acupuncturists, hypnotisers, diviners, and fortune tellers, who, each one in turn convinced of the usefulness of their art, make the patient lose even more precious time.
When all the cards are on the table and the game threatens to be definitely jeopardized, then he starts wondering whether diet could well and truly be the trump card that was missing from his hand.
That’s exactly the reverse of what one should do ideally_i.e. start by correcting one’s diet before the illness becomes too serious and turn to medicine only if things don’t get any better. Or, if need be, do both at once. Statistics would take a different turn!

_Have you thought of the number of people that would put out of a job?

o Fewer than you think. Medical assistants or para-medicals will go on being necessary to ensure medical supervision, give advice, encourage dietary discipline. All that should be necessary would be to give to all those involved the requisite training in nutrition.

_All things considered, why not teach instinctotherapy at school?

o That would most certainly be more useful than courses in sexual education! Hardly anything is offered to children in the way of hygienic eating habits. Nothing worthwhile is given to them, other than their sweets to reward them for their assignments, ice cream to chip the enamel on their teeth, and cream cakes to teach them how to be gluttonyy. I was forgetting the glasses of milk for their calcium! Later, if they want to take themselves by the hand, if they’re concerned about their figure or their health, they’ll have to struggle for life against the fixations that are every bit as bad as ours.
It’s high time to understand that good habits begin in childhood. Instead of the endless: “One for mommy, one for daddy,” they could be trained in the natural laws of nutrition. Why not?
In children, instincts are still very strong; they’re merely waiting to express themselves. It’s up to parents not to corrupt them. The bodies of very young children often energetically defend themselves against food that could disrupt them. Newborns regurgitate their first formula, they make faces when they’re given baby food, and so on. When they’re given a fruit, they open their mouths wide, but people are afraid of making them ill, without understanding that the reaction triggered off by the natural food is beneficial. Often years are spent, day after day, forcing children to drink down a bowl of milk coffee or eat up a slice of brown meat that they loathe. And when resistence breaks down completely, everyone rejoices and says: “Look how well the little tyke eats now,” whereas, in point of fact, the child’s protection has merely collapsed through repeated pressure!
Parents are in the front line as regards needing to return from the grave in learning how to respect the normal development of dietary sense in their children. If not, all the effort that might be summoned up at school would be thrown away; children would feel torn between the teaching they’d received and their habits at home_not to mention advertising that swamps them on TV, at the movies, and on posters at every street corner.
Sweeping dietary appraisal comes up against an entire and complex array of factors. Only time can bring a change. But, it’s true that children could at least be taught a few basic notions about nutritional biology: One could make them understand that human genetics date back to very ancient times, that genetics are largely adapted to unadulterated food, that there are instinctive mechanisms that are part and parcel of smell and taste that guarantee metabolic balance, that all kinds of molecules become dangerous through the effects of cooking, and that milk and wheat aren’t perfectly natural foods.
I think that those ideas would be enough to shake people into some wariness of scoffing. The insurance companies would save a pretty penny.

_And what about tooth decay?

o Cro-Magnon man didn’t need a dentist. As I told you, tooth decay first appeared in history in the Neolithic period. That, unfortunately, hasn’t got any better over the centuries, not even with the invention of the drill or the tooth brush!

Diseases at the Dawn of Western Culture
Mirko D. Grmek, published by Payot, (excerpt pp. 173-174)
“Tooth decay is, nowadays, much more common than it was in the past. In Europe, it was on the increase in the Middle Ages, and there has been a very steep rise in modern times. There’s not the slightest doubt that this increase is largely due to the gradual change in dietary habits. Sugar and bread are probably among the main culprits at work in this present-day widespread phenomena, since they enhance the virulence of germs in dental plaque.
However, that would be too simple an explanation. The causes of tooth decay are highly intricate and, for the most part, still beg the question.
Provided that minimal requirements are met, overfeeding seems to be far worse for teeth than deficiencies. Industrial nations are far more prone to tooth decay than lesser developed nations.”
Note: The auto-immune concept of tooth decay propounded by instinctotherapy may someday help clear up the mystery.
It remains unknown to this day why the haves among the nations have teeth riddled with holes, whereas poorer nations can boast virtual freedom from that ailment. How tooth decay does its damage is as yet unclear. A fair section of public opinion commonly believes that food particles, and sugar particles in particular, rot, thereby eating away tooth enamel_which explains why children are urged to brush their choppers and that toothpaste manufacturers peddle their stuff. In actual fact, statistics in no way speak in favor of efficient tooth brushing by any means. As for many other things, it all boils down to obsessive neurosis.

_I always thought that tooth decay was due to the onslaught of germs.

o Apparently, things are a bit more complex than that. Some forty different kinds of bacteria cleave to tooth surfaces as a highly stable sticky layer that consists of a binding substance, known as intergerminal matrix, i.e. dental plaque.

_So, those bacteria zero in on our enamel, do they?

o That was the initial thinking. Unfortunately, although dental plaque cannot be removed (it even stands up to brushing and toothpastes), it turns out that sometimes holes hollow out and sometimes they don’t. It’s anybody’s guess why.

_I don’t believe that you don’t have some idea.

oDoctors overlook the presence of abnormal molecules in body tissues, which is why it makes sense to investigate that field.
For one thing, why is it that tooth surface is always covered by germs. Could it possibly be an unrelenting effort by the germ world to destroy our teeth and gums? Nature lying in wait for the slightest deficiency of ours to strike us off the biosphere is unmistakeably in line with Pasteur’s pronouncements?

_Goodness, you’ve got your teeth into Pasteur!

o Good Lord, no. How could I not have a soft spot for him since he discovered germs and that on instinctotherapy, germs are popular.

_Sounds as clear as dishwater.

o If dental plaque is a constant factor, isn’t that a good reason for thinking that the body needs it for some specific purpose, not to ruin our teeth but to protect them from corrosive molecules contributed by foods?

_What then, is tooth decay due to?

o Teeth are living structures, fed by the blood that flows through the root canals (nerve and vessels). However, there are no vessels in the dentin tubules, which is the white substance that forms the basis of the tooth. The nutrient molecules percolate from the center outwards.
Now, suppose the blood is ferrying partly metabolized abnormal molecules, for instance, Maillard’s diet-based molecules or fragments of partly digested protein. Even should the amount of those alien molecules remain very low, in time they will fix into the dentin, rather like dirt in a filter. They will build up in pet areas where it is trickiest for them to get to, and possibly all the way into the enamel (which incorporates a number of complex organic molecules they will presumably couple with).

_I understand your idea. The bacteria from dental plaque could then attack the molecules deposited in the tooth, and mistake them for the molecules to be cleared that originate from the outside.

o That’s the idea I’m putting forward. Tooth decay may be considered an auto-immune disease, in the broad sense of the term. The bacteria normally used by our immune system to destroy the dangerous molecules present in our oral cavity, would attack our own dental tissues congested with similar molecules brought by the flood following our dietary degradation.
In usual auto-immune diseases, white blood cells turn against one’s own cells. In this particular case, the actual bacteria are deflected from their normal function by the presence of abnormal molecules in the dentin.

_I always thought that our immune system aimed at destroying germs, but it sounds as though you are saying that it uses them.

o Sorry, I was forgetting. We haven’t yet touched on that subject. Of course, one can wonder why all the pathogenic bacteria in creation have accumulated in our poor bodies. I too was completely baffled when I learned at school that all kinds of nasty bacteria (cholera, typhoid, etc...) set up permanent residence in our mouths or in our digestive tracts, only becoming virulent from time to time, for unknown reasons.

_You were telling me that you no longer observed any infection under your dietary conditions.

o As it happens, the last infections that I was able to witness provided me with the key to the mystery. That goes back to the period when I was still hoping to consider milk a semi-initial food. Because of its protein content, I thought that it would enable us to live without slaughtering, and above all, to tell the truth, I loved fine cheeses.

_It gives me some comfort to think that you’re a human being like the rest of us.

o I was even markedly gluttonyier than the average person. That’s perhaps why I came up with a dietary method based on pleasure. Anyway, we had bought our two goats, so as to have our organic milk straight from the udder. I was quite put out to note that every time I went on a milk cure, the slightest cut got infected. There are people who drink milk and who don’t develop infection. We’ll come back to that. For the moment, let’s stick to the facts. I was eating a 100% initial diet and, under such conditions, my cuts got infected as soon as I went near milk, whether it was fresh or with curds. I often scratched my hands; I was in the process of renovating the very old farm that became our first institute. Once when my left forefinger was on the verge of developing an infection, I decided to go on drinking milk in order to see how far things would go. The inflammation on my finger soon turned into a festering bubble, then a red line appeared on the back of my hand and gradually spread to my forearm, then all the way up to my shoulder. Fearing septicemia, I stopped drinking milk. The following day, the line had already receded. When the line had gone down to the middle of my forearm, I resumed milk drinking to make sure that it wasn’t mere chance. The line shot up again in a few days to the middle of my humerus. Then, I stopped drinking milk for good and all. Everything went back to normal gradually. The experience had lasted close to six weeks. I still have a slight scar you can see up close.

_You have to know to be able to see it.

o With instinctotherapy, one scars fast and well. After a cut, for instance, the blood clots in no time. There is no pain, there is no redness on the edges of the wound, and in a few days, it’s all dried up. My wife had the exact same experience as I had. I even noted that infection could develop without an open cut, as if it was triggered off from within, which was at loggerheads with the theory of the attacking germ. Moreover, I noticed that the pus that flowed out of it smelled of goat, something between the milk and the urine of those animals. At first, I thought it was a germ that was contaminating us when we touched our horned animals. However, no hygienic precaution was successful in dispelling the smell.
After six months of cross-checking, I resolved, on the one hand, to put milk in the category of dangerous food (too bad for cheeses) and, on the other, to change my theory.

_Admitting milk contains abnormal molecules....

o I had to admit that those molecules that carried that goat-like smell had got beyond my bowel wall. And as they were also present in my infections still many days after having stopped drinking milk, it seemed obvious that they had stacked up in my body. All subsequent observations came together in proving my model of reasoning; milk poisons us as adulterated food does. It most likely contains a certain percentage of molecules that our enzymes aren’t adapted to, that remain stuck in our metabolism the same way as molecules damaged by cooking do. To get rid of them, the body has to set in motion all kinds of complicated processes.

_From your point of view, then, infection is an outlet?

o I’d call it a refining factory.

_What purpose do germs serve then? Why doesn’t the body quite simply clear those parasitic molecules in a flow of serum, for instance?

o It does sometimes. Some rashes show up in the form of translucent blisters. In such cases, it looks as if a virus were setting up the development of special locations, as a kind of outlet intented to evacuate unwanted molecules.
In other cases, bacteria are present; I think that the body uses them to break down dangerous molecules that it can’t break down with its own enzymes_given that our enzymes are not adapted to non-initial molecules. Our body has available to it enzymes through the agency of bacteria, so to speak.
That’s already what happens in our intestinal flora. The gut cultures a whole range of bacteria whose enzymes manages certain processes that our own enzymes don’t know how to carry out. That is how we digest plant fibers.
Fiber, in essence, is the name for what our enzymes are not able to digest. To make up for that shortcoming, the large intestine has recourse to a handy bacteria which wisely measures out replication, and the enzymes synthesized by that bacteria (the B-amylase) take it on themselves to digest refractory molecules. That way, man can assimilate almost 50% of the plant fibers that are part of his diet.
I think that so-called infectious processes are, in fact, symbioses analogous to the ones that take place in the gut. Along similar lines, an abscess could be likened to a kind of refining system, where all the parasitic molecules piped in by the blood are broken down by the enzymes of bacteria that have replicated for that purpose_exactly as in water purification systems, where colonies of bacteria whose enzymes can digest petroleum-based by-products and other non-degradable pollutants.

_In infectious diseases like typhoid and tuberculosis, aren’t there specific organs that are nonetheless affected more than others?

o Bacteria can carry out a purifying operation in any part of the body: the bowels, the lungs, etc...

_Isn’t the immune system’s calling to destroy germs? You seem to think that it copes with their presence. Isn’t that contradictory?

o I think that we have to learn how to reason differently. The usual assumption is that the purpose of the immune system is supposedly to destroy whatever micro-organisms have beleaguered the body. Everything I have witnessed ever since I took up raw food leads me to think that its actual purpose is to clear foreign molecules parasitic on our bodies by means of germs: Viruses would accordingly “code” for abnormal molecules stacked in the cells to be flushed out, with bacteria breaking down those molecules once they were into the bloodstream.

_Is that how you account for additional infection as commonly occurs in the course of viral diseases? I find your reasoning slightly anemic, considering that such an outcome can sometimes possibly be lethal for the patient.

o Every one of our genetic processes is genetically engineered, and our genetics slowly accomodate to changing circumstances. If target molecules swamp the bloodstream in consequence of overeating, the process may get out of hand and cause death.

_Nature could have come up with a safety valve to cancel out such possible hazards.

o In nature, as you will accept, abnormal molecules were few and far between: One can strain to visualize a tuber baking on a flow of lava or in a forest fire, but that kind of dietary incident is no daily happening. Whatever purging processes have come up to scratch and have been retained in our genetic coding do not enable us to fight off the daily molecular onslaught wrought by our cooking habits! Understandably then, all it takes is having a blow-out to get strepcocci or salmonellas thriving. If that is indulged in daily, obviously one’s health will take a turn for the worse.
On the other hand, it’ll only take fasting or feeding on initial foods to dispel an infectious syndrome, as is shown by experience.

_Well, now, you’re saying that our immune system isn’t simply around to eliminate germs. Give me time to get used to that.

o My belief is that its blanket function is to control the spread of useful bacteria and to defeat excess ones. The immune system may keep a few bacteria on stand-by for a possible clean-out, in which case all it’ll have to do is let them spread. That explains why inactive pathogenic germs can sometimes be detected.

_Doesn’t that call into question the whole concept of virulence?

o I had indeed always found it very strange that silent carriers can sustain Eberth’s bacillae (Salmonella typhi) in their bowels without developing any of the symptoms of typhoid. The usual medical viewpoint seemed contradictory. After all, if a germ is the crucial factor in a disease, surely that means any disease is, in fact, a symptom of health!
In the perspective I’m putting forward, infectious disease appears rather like a particular instance of auto-immune disease. The bacteria normally used by the immune system to eliminate certain types of alien molecules, when the latter are too numerous, replicate to such an extent that the process becomes pathological.

_Infection as an auto-immune disease... That’s rather unexpected!

o As in the case of dental decay. The bacteria earmarked to do their job in the oral cavity dig holes in the spots of our dentin that have been too seriously undermined. Streptococcus hollows out our lungs and Eberth’s bacillus bore into our bowel wall; all that is easily accounted for by the presence of an excess number of target molecules.

_You’re asking people to turn their usual way of reasoning on its head. Do you think that doctors will go along with you?

o Most doctors are very much aware that something’ s out of joint in present-day theories. However hard researchers try, the problem can never be solved within a cooked framework. The number of disorganizing factors is far too great to make sense of the matter; misinterpretation is inevitable. The first requirement is to find out how disease develops in a raw, instinctive scenario, where everything is necessarily much simpler, given that food is in keeping with the genetic needs of the body.
In the case of bacteria as in that of viruses, when a clean-out would be too dangerous, apparently, the body knows how to stop within safe limits. That’s why infections that one can observe subsequent to milk-drinking occur more commonly in people whose diet is appropriate in other respects. On a cooked diet, the body is typically already too disrupted by the flood of molecules adulterated by heat to deal with the even more foreign molecules taken up in milk.

_So, when one has the impression that one has stood up to a germinal infection, it may, in fact, mean that one is unable to use a germ to struggle against molecular intoxication, is that it?

o That’s exactly what I think. One often sees people who were never ill, never had childhood diseases, influenzas, or bronchitis, meet with sudden death in the form of cancer or a heart attack. Their diathesis is so deeply embedded that those cleansing diseases can no longer even occur, which makes matters that much worse.

_If I follow your reasoning, one has to be ill often to be in good health?

o On cooked food, we are led to such a paradox. Everything becomes clear if one no longer uses the word “disease,” as doctors wrongly do, but the words “cleansing process” or even “orthopathy,” in order to put across the idea that such a disorder is intended to restore order.

_In the final analysis, everything is a useful process. According to you, then, the concept of disease doesn’t
exist?

o Wait a minute. When the body reaches a critical level of intoxication, some functions are no longer possible. Things deteriorate and disease indeed rears its head: cancer or coronary thrombosis, for instance. Arteries clog up, that obviously reflects disorder, just as do cells that replicate and destroy organs.

_Obviously, blocked up arteries aren’t going to be flushed clean as soon as one takes to raw carrots.

o Instinctotherapy has many surprises in store for us. You’re right, doctors assume once a congested artery, always a congested artery. That’s a typical case of an irreversible process. The deteriorated tissue forms a mass that’s more or less calcified, and it’s hard to imagine the plug dissolving. All the same, I noted in a man fifty odd years old that a huge cerebral artery that was fully obstructive had come unblocked in a few months.

_And how did doctors react to that?

o The patient himself recounted the scene to me. The radiologist and the section head, utterly baffled at the X-rays that were now showing there could be no further possible doubt about the patient’s condition, couldn’t stop repeating: “In that one, it’s congested, and in that one, it’s unblocked, and yet a congested artery never comes unblocked.”

_How do you account for the phenomenon?

o For the moment, I’m reporting the facts. The body has its reasons that reason is unaware of. On spec, I feel that explanation has to be sought for in the immune system. All it takes is our white blood cells suddenly identifying the components of such a plug before they automatically get down to clearing it molecule by molecule.

_If I am clear about what you’re saying, “impossible” is not part of instincto vocabulary.

o I don’t know whether Napoleon ate raw food.
The Huns, apparently, were 100% crudivorians. They have been witnessed devouring raw rabbit without even bothering to dismount their horses, and the Romans considered them indomitable.
Let’s go back to more serious matters: that everlasting confusion between cleansing process and morbid process. For the moment, medicine is systematically confusing orthopathy with true disease. As doctors don’t take the presence of abnormal molecules in the body into account, they obviously aren’t even aware of the problem. With the few notions of physics I have, I suggest the following distinction: True diseases are those that lead to disorder and orthopathic ones those that tend to restore order.

_That sounds logical to me. But, can’t it happen that a cleansing process goes awry?

o Certainly, when certain factors make the body lose control, for instance, if an overly high intake of abnormal molecules from food occurs or any imbalance. In such cases, the condition will lead to disorder, and will necessarily spell illness.
That also explains why the strict adherence to instinctotherapy plays such a decisive role in the development of common diseases.

_You’re going against very many preconceptions, there.

o Under traditional dietary conditions, orthopathy frequently leads to things getting out of hand and disorder. What results is that medicine mistakes them for true diseases.
That’s probably the biggest medical blunder of all times: by “curing” orthopathy, that is, by beheading the detoxification process with the help of antibiotics or any therapy, medicine nudges the body towards ever increasing intoxication, hence the upsurge of true diseases that are, under the circumstances, terminal. Some schools of alternative medicine claim, conversely, that all diseases are useful, including cancer. That too is a serious misreading: There’s some risk there that things will be left to their own devices, whereas, in fact, natural reactions are heading one for disaster. In my view, I rather think that one can speak of pathology as soon as a process results in an increase of disorders: molecular abnormalities, irreversible lesions, degeneracy, tumors, etc...

_You haven’t yet told me much about cancer; that was, after all, what spurred on your investigation. Are you sure that you had cancer?

o I myself was able to read in my record: lymphoblastic sarcoma of the pharynx.

_And were you cured with instinctotherapy?

o I was first operated on and given radiation treatment. However, the statistics of the day (this goes back to 1961) only gave a 20 to hundred chance of a five-year survival, or 80 chances out of hundred of kicking the bucket. There’s nothing like it to make one think. It was after that that I evolved my dietary approach.
Quite apart from any mathematical rigour, therefore, there were 80 chances to a hundred that my recovery was due to my change in diet.

_That set you thinking.

o I’m thinking about something that happened to one of my former patients (although that term is inappropriate, since I merely teach people to heed their instincts). That man, a hydraulic engineer, came and saw me right after he was diagnosed as having an undifferentiated trophoblastic teratoma. That’s a type of cancer that cuts you down in under three years; at the time, no patient had ever been recorded in the annals of medicine as having survived.
The unfortunate man, whom doctors hadn’t told the truth to_at least not the whole truth_preferred undergoing chemotherapy and not altering his diet. A year later, he came back with two metastases in his left lung. At that point, he decided to give instinctotherapy a crack, which also afforded him great peace of mind. One feels much more at peace with oneself when one feels one is doing what is right, i.e. when obeying natural laws; that’s an important psychological factor in aiding recovery.
Month by month, we kept abreast of his X-rays and our wish came true: his metastases shrank to nothing. A few years went by. His doctor, who expressed surprise, told him it was a spontaneous recovery, without bothering to ask him what kind of diet he ate.

_He should have looked into the case, so that other patients could have benefited by it.

o You’re very sanguine. When a man of the trade sees that his prognosis is that off-target, the only course open to him is to disown his diagnosis: the medical goddess has to keep her snake-on-the-cross in one piece.

_I find it revolting that patients shouldn’t be told the truth, because that crushes to powder their chances of recovery by means other than those of official medicine.

o As long as medicine holds that there’s no hope through other channels besides its own, doctors will not only feel it is their prerogative but that it is binding on them to lie! There’s even an article in the deontological code that bars a doctor from telling a patient the truth if it is in any way detrimental to them.
Get me straight: Medicine is the art of curing. Now, truth kills the placebo effect; and as the placebo effect plays a key part in recovery, medical art necessarily involves lying to patients!

_Ah! What a pleasing syllogism.

o I always loved formal logic.

_And what happened to your cancer patient?

o He was considered an exception, of course.

_The patients who are indebted to you for their lives are, undoubtedly, eternally grateful. In the long run aren’t you afraid of turning into a latter-day Christ, or a kind of health guru?

o I wouldn’t worry. People who save their skins with instinctotherapy usually turn me into the scapegoat for a loss that they’re not reconciled to, that is all the oral stimulation that made up for their mother’s breasts.
Even if they’re consciously grateful, quite often they unconsciously bear me a grudge. However, I don’t particularly expect gratitude. I have managed to sort myself out, and I have understood a few obvious facts; it’s only normal that I should let people benefit by my experience.
That’s what I call the proselytising urge. When chickens are thrown a piece of meat, the first one that finds it immediately starts clucking so that the others are instantly alerted to the fact that there’s something interesting to peck at. That’s undoubtedly the reason that one can’t help sharing with others what one has discovered for oneself.

_Do you think that a taste for proselytism is instinctive?

o Instincts are very complex in human beings. But I told you that story about the teratoma patient for quite another reason. Once his recovery was confirmed after a few years, my ex-patients decided to disclose his experience publicly: he organized talks and called in journalists who published an article in the biggest daily paper in French-speaking Switzerland. In their concern to appear objective, they also went and asked the best cancer specialists in the local hospital in Lausanne, the very one where I had received treatment 20 years earlier, what their opinion was.
Those big shots formally asserted that all he said could only be a hoax, “given that there was no proof that any particular food could have the slighest impact on cancer.”

_One could have answered that there was no proof either that food didn’t have an impact on that disease!

o That too is formal logic!
The unfortunate bigwigs, no doubt, were unaware of the fact that the year before, the Americans, who are always streaks ahead of Europeans_so even more so in respect of the Swiss who are always trailing behind_published in their official papers the opposite conclusion: “None of the risk factor for cancer is probably more significant than diet and nutrition.” I haven’t heard about those men since.

_Science ends up restoring justice.

o You’re right. It’s best to play the waiting game. From the word go of my instincto experiment, a great many scientific discoveries were made that systematically bore out my theories. I must admit that they have been a comfort to me.

_Is it now known why food has an influence on cancer?

o For the moment, statistics have shown there’s a causal connection. But, the exact nature of that connection is still not known. A lot of research has been done with respect to carcinogenic substances. In my view, that’s not what’s crucial.
Those substances disrupt cell genetics, but, normally, the immune system is there to recognize and destroy abnormal cells.

“Advances in Cancer Research”
Academic Press, New York, 1980, vol. 32, (excerpts pp. 329-331)
“At present, we have overwhelming evidence of remarkable variations in the overall cancer incidence and of the incidence of specific types between countries and within countries. None of the risk factors for cancer is probably more significant than diet and nutrition.
The various aspects of the article provided the evidence that justifies the exclusion of environmental, occupational or genetic factors as significant contributions to the etiology of these cancers.
While the experimental scientist is rightly preoccupied with the need for a mechanistic understanding of the precise epidemiologic and experimental clues on hand, those with interest and responsibility in public health cannot fail to visualise the present opportunities for intervention even before the detailed mechanistic picture is precisely and totally defined. With certain limits, dietary intervention seems to offer an exceptionally favorable ratio of risks and benefits, a situation where the population would have little to lose and probably much to gain.
If the measures are taken and if, in addition, the readily preventable occupational and other environmental cancers are eliminated, we would enter an era where cancers of all types would no longer represent a major cause of death in man.”

Note: Among those measures, instinctotherapy, and the dietary adjustments that it entails, would certainly be among the most efficient.
Every day, we manufacture hundreds of abnormal cells that, fortunately, get cleared out of the system before we develop tumors. The problem lies, therefore, in understanding why the immune system no longer does its job.

_I think I can guess what you’re going to say: The molecular morass brought by adulterated food prevents it from being able to function.

o Roughly speaking, that’s right. When we take up protein in any food, our digestive enzymes supposedly cut them up into litle pieces. Only, for our enzymes to finish their task, they have to be adapted to those proteins.
If we eat initial foods, in theory, there shouldn’t be any problem, inasmuch as one doesn’t go on eating beyond the amounts limited by instincts_if not, part of the protein runs the risk of passing into the blood without being completely digested, for instance, in the form of peptide.

_Therefore, mere overload already sets off an abnormal situation.

o Which proves the importance of instinctive balance. In the case of non-initial food, like milk, we are faced with basically the same scenario: Besides the fact that instincts no longer gauge amounts properly, this time the nature of the protein knocked about by thermal velocity, mis-shapen or bound with other compounds, might stand up to the digestive enzyme’s activities and pass into the body all the while retaining its alien structures. Is that too difficult to follow?

_No, I still understand very well what you’re on about. Those foreign proteins, then, should trigger off immunological reactions, should they?

o Of course; the problem of allergies to milk is well known, especially in the case of babies. Those allergies don’t necessarily last very long. After some time, the body gives up reacting. The immune system enters a state known to specialists as a state of “breach of immunological surveillance.” That’s the time when mothers jump for joy proclaiming: “Ah, now, my baby is at last getting used to milk.” In fact, that’s when danger shows up: The body gives up defending itself, and from then on, the foreign protein can infiltrate through and through without being prevented by anything. It can dissolve in fat, stick to cell membranes, enter the plasma, and go and disrupt DNA in the nucleus.

_Is that what you have already explained to me about non-initial dietary molecules?

o The problem is different with proteins (or possibly with other large molecules) that retain an immunological description that is alien to our body. When that is so, we’re not just dealing with poisoning, but an assault on the immune system health is dependent on.

_Doesn’t the bowel wall screen out large molecules?

o Unfortunately, it lets peptides (sections of proteins) through which are long enough to be antigens, and that sparks off reactions throughout the immune system.
It has even just been discovered that polysaccharides (chains comprising several simple sugars in a given order) perhaps play a more crucial role than proteins. Now, those sugars trickle through the bowel wall even more readily; you see that dietary antigens can’t possibly be uncommon in reputedly normal human blood!

_And yet, medicine hasn’t alerted us to any particular abnormality in the way most bodies function.

o I fear, yet again, that medicine has fallen victim to misinterpretation. As all bodies are invaded by the same dietary antigens from early childhood, they have all more or less entered the same states of breakdown of immunological surveillance, so much so that those states of breakdown are normal: Ultimately, what is called intolerance is when a body reacts normally!

“Immune response to environmental antigens”
“(food) taken up by the digestive tract” in “Federation Proceedings,” vol. 36, n°5, April 1977, (excerpts p. 1732).
“The macromolecules are not taken up in an immunologically active form by the normal adult intestines, for the two-fold reason that, on the one hand, they are fully broken down in intestinal lumen and that, on the other hand, intestinal mucus is impermeable to macromolecules (intestinal barrier).
In some cases, dietary antigens are sometimes reactivated after dietary antibody-producing proteins have been eaten, as is shown by direct immuno-chemical measurements.
Plainly, in the normal human adult, sizeable amounts of macromolecules are taken up from the bowel.
When a critical concentration of proteins is reached around the cell, the cell membrane draws inward, thus forming vesicles inside the cell. Subsequently, a vesicle establishes self-generated motion within the cell. Most of the protein absorbed is digested by lysosomic enzymes, but minor amounts filter through the cell out to extracellular fluids on the other side of the mucus membrane whence they can enter the bloodstream and lymph.
Besides intracellular conveyancing, those proteins are believed likely to fan out between the cells, amoung nodes where epithelial cells are bonded to one another.”

Note 1: The above wrecks for good the theory of no entry to alien molecules. Biochemists, please note.
Note 2: Repeatedly letting dietary antigens into the body and thereby inducing immunological tolerance opens the right royal road to cancer and auto-immune diseases. Immunologists, please note.
Note 3: Unfortunately, tolerance to antigens doesn’t lead to immune revolt against customary foods, which are therefore considered normal by medicine. Strikingly enough, a pre-cancerous state induces the greatest tolerance to traditional food. Cancer specialists, please put your thinking caps on!

_There’s that problem of initial reference point again.

o Do you remember the milk that was shipped to the Third World in the 1970s? The hapless beneficiaries, who had never drunk milk, were so badly affected that they accused the Americans of having poisoned them: They were right, but the poison hadn’t been added to the powdered milk. The milk itself was what had sparked off their disorders. Apparently, no one pieced it together.

_Does the same go for the powdered milk that supposedly killed so many newborns in developing countries?

o It was put down to the germ-laden water used by African women when they prepared the milk in feeding bottles. That was a bit ill-considered, since in those countries you can find salmonellas all over, even on the nipples of the loveliest mommies!

_Do you have any experience of that?

o Of salmonella, yes, I do; of nipples, not in Africa.
In young babies, milk triggers off intolerant response that can prove serious. If a baby has evinced an intolerant reaction to milk previously, it is prohibited by law to have the child resume milk-drinking outside hospital, since that can cause death (by anaphylactic shock).
But, in the long term, breach of immunological surveillance seems most dangerous of all in my view. When the whole body is swamped by cow’s milk protein, for instance, when every cell is, so to speak, branded with an alien stamp. From then on, the body can no longer safely resume immunological surveillance.

_If it can’t, does the immune system self-destroy?

o Obviously: If it starts working again, as its mission is to destroy everything that’s foreign, it will automatically destroy the cells earmarked by alien molecules. I think that’s what happens in most auto-immune diseases.

_So you have rent the veil...

o Studies are underway, at the University of Montpellier, to confirm that theory, in the case of rheumatoid polyarthritis. In that disease, white blood cells attack the cells of joint caps; all kinds of lesions, deformities, and pain ensue that slowly end in disaster. No treatment is, at present, able to call a halt to the worsening of symptoms, while instinctotherapy has had conclusive results in almost all cases.
The same thing holds for disseminated lupus erythematosus; I can testify to the fact that miracles were wrought every time the patient had the mental strength to apply the method without stretching too many points. Obviously, all it took was a glass of milk or a slice of whole meal bread to revive the disease through the unexpected uptake of dietary antigens.
The results have been every bit as astonishing for the various kinds of allergy: asthma, seasonal runny noses, eczemas, hives, itching, etc...

“Intolerance to lactose among various population groups.”
Molecular Biology and Evolution, by F.J. Ayala, published by Masson, 1982.
“Differences in lactose tolerance document a worthwhile instance of an adaptive geographic differentiation among human population groups. The proportion of adults who can put up with milk sugar is much higher amid population groups that have been drinking and eating milk and dairy for thousands of years. Groups that traditionnaly abstain from dairy are virtually 100% intolerant of lactose (Kretchma, 1972).”

Note 1: giving the lie to what the researcher deems conventional knowledge, advertised intolerances are not due to lactose, it not being an antigen, but rather to cow dairy proteins.
Note 2: the article infers genetic suitability to milk without due regard for habit or breakdown of immune surveillance. In dairying countries, where children are fed cows’ milk very early on, it is accepted that a regular intake of antigen can breach surveillance in infants (or at the fetal stage through the mother’s body).
Note 3: Subconscious affection for cows’ udders seem to leave scientific reasoning as toothless as the fetters that bond them to their pans.

_If conclusive results have been obtained in a medical school, I don’t understand why they aren’t better known.

o They will be soon, no doubt.
Doctor Jean Seignalet, in Montpellier, who, after having heard me in a seminar I gave for a small group of doctors a few years back, set up a research protocol that consisted of cutting milk and wheat, as well as their by-products out of the diets of serious polyarthritic patients. In my view, those are the greatest sources of non-initial protein.
Instinctotherapy applied 100% would have, no doubt, been better, but the results have already been rather convincing in that they have set off violent reactions from certain doctors. There were phone calls put in by well-known Parisian figures who tried to cover up the experiment.

_Shouldn’t they have been interested in it, on the contrary? Just think of the responsibility for all those patients given up for dead with that dreadful disease.

o That was how I used to reason. Unfortunately, experience has shown me that such a disinterested sense of responsibility as you’re pointedly touching on works only if it holds for personal interests as well.
In the cooked food struggle that medicine is waging against us at the moment, the same argument is always being tossed at my head: It would be dangerous if quacks like me gave false hopes to patients seriously suffering from a disease, as they might dare give up their allopathic treatments. Yet, we’re not saying that those treatments don’t hold out any serious hope, precisely, for incurable diseases (else, they wouldn’t be called “incurable”). Some people also willfully neglect the fact that having a natural diet is perfectly compatible with traditional treatment.
There’s something quite different that lurks behind all that: the fear of seeing one’s business drop off, which is necessary for the health of medicine! Perhaps, it ‘s the fear that somebody else has discovered something important, or perhaps the shame of not having been able to express, in spite of millions of in wasted funds, the most basic question: that of genetic adaptation to cooking.

_You have touched on the point you weren’t supposed to touch on.

o Obviously, it’s bothersome: Instincts free people from doctors. They make people responsible for their own health, which everyone thinks a good thing, but it shatters the dependence that keeps medicine, laboratories, and chemists’ shops going.
What disturbs those doctors, isn’t that I raise false hopes in patients that they can cure, but that I give real hope to those that they can’t cure! I have become, in spite of myself, public enemy number one. I can hardly be surprised that no stone is left unturned in trying to bring me down: press campaigns, slander, false accusations, court trials, and the whole caboodle.
But, why drivel into pessimism. The studies at Montpellier were the object of a thesis, which had all the trappings to look hyper-official, and which was submitted this year by a candidate for a doctorate in medicine. They have just been given front-page coverage in the medical rheumatology journal R; so the obtained results can no longer be denied. Out of 24 cases of rheumatoïd polyarthritis among which some were very serious, after periods of 4 to 38 months of the diet, 19 spectacular cases of improvement were noted. That’s the first official breach into the enemy stronghold.

_So, nineteen improvements, had they carried on with their medical treatments or not?

o Most of those patients stuck to their treatments along with their diet, but as they were undergoing the experiment, their treatments had obviously not given them satisfactory results. Those cases, therefore, were difficult ones that medicine had failed to give relief to. And_is it chance?_the clearest cases of improvement were obtained by patients who eased up on or shelved their treatment. The exact breakdown was as follows: six full recoveries, six major improvements, six obvious improvements, one slight improvement, and five cases remaining steady.

_In five cases, however, things didn’t get any better.

o Almost all those constant cases included patients who had only been on instinctotherapy for four or five months. A longer period of time is needed to restore order in a body that has reached the threshold of self-destruction that auto-immunity embodies. And consider that, by cutting out wheat and milk, one is only taking away two types of non-initial food. In ordinary food, there are many other possible sources of antigenic molecules that are liable to slip by unnoticed by our digestive enzymes and go and earmark our cells. A 100% instincto diet would have probably given even better results.
For the time being, hospitals are not prepared for that kind of experimentation. Barring exceptional instances, feeding patients a 100% raw diet is still perceived to be rather appalling. Even some professors who were willing to set up such a protocol had to face fierce opposition from their colleagues or hospital management. We should at least be happy to have achieved a partial success, having attained an almost 80% recovery rate and having been able to conclude that it was well worth carrying on research in that line. That’s not so bad for a beginning!

_I’d even say that it’s quite extraordinary. Shouldn’t have all patients doomed by that disease been contacted or, at least, their family doctors?

o Medicine is like justice, it takes its time over things, and doesn’t at all like facelifting its structures.

_Yes, but in the meantime, patients die.

o So do prisoners. I’m talking from experience.

_Apparently, you’re not yet over your troubles with the law.

o No doubt, I won’t ever be, but that’s not necessarily detrimental to spreading my ideas.
Everybody remembers, for instance, the TV broadcoast at the end of which I was arrested by nine plainclothes policemen who entered the studio, because I had been forbidden to talk about instinctotherapy in public. That was a great honor justice was doing me: I am the first man to have been thrown in prison for having aired his views on television_at least in a non-totalitarian country.

“Trying a diet without cereal grains and milk in cases of rheumatoid polyarthritis.”
Thesis submitted at the school of medicine in Montpellier by Helen Rouxin to qualify as a (medical) doctor in June 1989, excerpts.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is the commonest form of chronic inflammatory rheumatism. In France, it affects over 1% of individuals and around three women for every man.
In spite of very great strides made in basic immunology, the mechanism for auto-immune diseases has not yet been brought to light.
In keeping with Burger, we believe that minute amounts of peptides, and even proteins, can make their way through the intestinal barrier.
This phenomenon increases in certain circumstances: when intestinal mucus changes, when huge amounts of protein are eaten, and there’s an enzymatic deficit of enterocytes.
The theory of enzymatic unsuitability to a new protein fits in well with the background surrounding RA. A modification, through one or more mutations, of a commonly eaten protein could explain the rather recent appearance of the disease.
As for the spread of RA in the nineteenth century, it could be accounted for by the world-wide distribution of a food containing a protein that appeared recently through mutation.
In this study, we had patients who were clear cases of RA, according to ARA standards, go on a diet from which was excluded two non-initial substances eaten and drunk in huge amounts, wheat and milk, as well as all their by-products.
We were able to bring together the results of the diet for twenty four people who tried instinctotherapy for at least three months. It must be pointed out that traditional therapy was not given up when patients took up the diet.
Out of the 24 RA examined with the distance of at least three months, there were:
_5 constant conditions
_1 slight improvement
_6 clear-up improvements
_6 major improvements
_6 full recoveries
Therefore, it seems advisable to search out the possible presence of suspicious peptides in various kinds of wheat protein and cows’milk. The positive effects of the diet not only involves morbid joint symptoms but, also, and quite significantly, the general and psychological condition of the patient.
This preliminary study does not enable us to conclude that the first of those effects is not merely the consequence of the other two and, therefore, to conclude that the theory is valid. But the results are interesting enough to hope that research into that field will proceed.
Note: Research that will, undoubtedly, take years to be able to successfully determine which peptides are responsible for this disease_years during which the patients will have to bear not being informed of results they could hope to get from adjusting their dietary hygiene, and who, therefore, will go on suffering uselessly from the disease or its side effects from medication taken that it sometimes very harmful. Well, at least, we’ve got the ball rolling!

_That’s an open breach of individual freedom of expression.

o That shows one thing that is worth being aware of, which is that, unbeknown to us, we live under totalitarian rule, cooked rule. It’s not a political regime, but... (“regime” means diet in French as well).
Natural medicine has taken on too much importance in the last few years. Scapegoats had to be found to put a damper on the movement. I’m not the only one who was taken pot shots at.
In fact, I knew that an inquiry had been ongoing for quite a while, to secure access to my record. I asked to be charged in April 1989. Subsequently, the examining magistrate forbade me “to go to any meeting where instinctotherapy might come under discussion,” “to give any kind of public or private lecture,” and even to live in my institute and in my flat. Due process of law has been underway now for more than a year. And that could well last forever. The procedure is under no limit whatsoever as to time. All it takes is some judge reviving the case every three years and I’ll be left on the shelf for the rest of my life.

_That sounds like a terrific breach of habeas corpus. You’d think this was the middle ages.
But, what did they hold against you?

o I was accused of unlawful medical practice and dubious advertising for therapy, and, at the last moment, I was said to be spearheading malpractice_whereas I have never taken the slightest fee for advice I had ventured to patients.

_Didn’t you, all the same, take undue risks? I heard Professor Marcel-Francis Kahn say that you almost killed off a Mrs W. who sought out his services in a terrible state.

o That’s a good example. This distinguished professor proclaimed up hill and down dale that I almost killed his patient off. He didn’t say that he himself managed the job unneedful of my skills. This is how things actually happened. That Mrs W. suffered from Still’s disease, an early and particularly intractable form of rheumatoid arthritis. No longer being able to put up with cortisone treatment that had seriously impaired her joints and triggered off unbearable discomfort, she had seen a doctor, who had leanings for something a bit more natural, and he advised her towards instinctotherapy.
After a month-long cure, she felt much better to the point of no longer needing cortisone. However, her family was dead-set against her new diet and she went back to family meals scarcely had she arrived home. Her mistake was that she didn’t go back to cortisone. The symptoms of the disease reappeared at the end of one or two months, and that was when she got in touch with Dr. Kahn again. The latter, completely ignorant of any relationship that might exist between food and disease, came to the serious conclusion, I prefer to take him at his word, that his patient’s condition was owing to instinctotherapy. A little later, he gave her a mega-treatment of methotrexate, a powerful antimitotic that could supposedly check the replication of white blood cells thought to be responsible for the destruction of articulary caps.

_That drug, then, was to decrease immune potential, in order to slow down the auto-immune process.

o That’s it. It decreased the potential so much that poor Mrs. W came down with a violent case of cancer that killed her off in three months.
That’s a typical case of contradictions that medical obscurantism lands us in. As the cause of the disease is unknown, there’s no other approach besides destroying the body to destroy the evil.

_Pathetic. But I’m still puzzling out why you have the law so hard on your heels?
Don’t you have other things to worry about?

o The law functions in a much less rational way than you might think. It consists in projecting on some individuals that depart from the usual paths the horrendous phantasms that hold sway over people’s minds, just as the media do. In the eyes of an examining magistrate who doesn’t pick up a word of what I say, I am, from the outset, a guru, a quack, a fraud that cashes in on public gullibility, and even a sexual pervert. All that goes so well together. Moreover, since I’m Swiss, I most certainly have a tidy sum put by in a Swiss bank; anything to the contrary would be inconceivable. People who work without lining their pockets, that simply doesn’t exist.

_All the same, you have to live on something, don’t you?

o I’m paid for my courses_at a rate, moreover, that’s well under that of equivalent training periods in yoga, sophrology, or cooking! I’m also entitled to royalties, which is perfectly legal. But that’s how the judicial system works; one is charged and later proof of guilt is sought.

We would do well to become aware that healthwise we’re all tied down to a system from the outset and are caught in a web of thought and taboos that reach deep into our subconscious mind. I sometimes feel that doctors don’t feel like seeing their patients recover and apparently the patients don’t really want to see their ailment clear up.
In this respect, I’d like to draw the story of the teratoma patient to a close, who officially acknowledged to have recovered after four years of instinctotherapy; remember I was telling you about him awhile ago. He was as high as a kite, considering that to cure that kind of cancer was as much of a victory for us as it was for that person. He wasn’t quite through though. A few years on, against his better judgement, he resumed a normal diet.

_After all those years, he couldn’t have been running much of a risk.

o For a start, he laid in a store of oven-dried raisins. Since he had bought a whole coachload of the stuff, he turned a deaf ear to my admonishments. And altered fruit had found its way to his table and would deceive his instinct as a matter of course as well as jeopardizing all his endeavours. My predictions were soon verified. Within a mere year, he was telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry that instinct doesn’t work, as he could see for himself. Overloaded with raisins as he was, he couldn’t face anything else.
He then fell head over heels for a pretty woman who faced him with a choice: instinctotherapy or love. He chose a halfway house, thinking himself immune from danger. Publicly, he ate raw food, not to tarnish his public image, and whenever he kept company whith his intended, he ate cooked food. Love, however, didn’t ward off a fresh spreading tumor, an epidermoid sarcoma to develop in one of his lungs, if I’m not mistaken, and return him to dust in under a year.

_How come he didn’t have time to resume instinctotherapy?

o In spite of his epoch-making recovery from a first onslaught of cancer (he had written a book: “Sailing Out to Live”), the fellow had always had a chip on his shoulder about me and my method. As if to deny the importance of diet, he had gone all out on positive thinking and ended up deluding himself into thinking that in illness it was simply a question of mind over matter.

_Do you honestly believe there was a causal link between resuming a traditional diet and his relapse?

o Such correlations want statistical backing, and that is a concern for medicine. However, even if current medical dogma is as yet powerless to account for such correlations, they may someday manage. For the time being, white-gowned wizards have excelled in denying the impact of diet on recovery from cancer, without ever bothering to ascertain the point. In that field, pamphlets rule, as does wool-pulling, and unsubstantiated statements.
Shortly after the poor man’s death, the highly esteemed Swiss Cancer League released a major article going into the details of his demise to lend weight to the worthlessness of instinctotherapy, all the while carefully refraining from specifying that he had given it up long before his relapse. Widely circulated dailies splashed out “Instincto... zero!” What greater comfort than to think food is of no consequence.

_Quite frankly, don’t you find it worrying that relapse is still possible after several years on a natural diet?

o That is, of course, most worrisome, as regards the effects of cooked food against such a background, naturally. It would be misguided to infer that natural food was ineffectual. Quintessentially, instinctotherapy is little else than the most natural food possible and, if cancer disappears in someone using the method, that simply proves that the cause of it lay in ordinary food.
This would account for my stance on cancer. In addition to medical treatment, any practitioner worthy of the name, ought to advise radically adjusting one’s diet so as either to forestall any lurking relapse, or to aid recovery by removing the cancer-inducing dietary factors. Unfortunately, many cancer specialists are as yet blissfully unaware of the health damage induced by cooking!

_Come, come. It is becoming common knowledge that there’s a strong link between diet and cancer. Science is gradually coming over to your views.

o Statistics will always end up getting researchers to redirect their aims. Unfortunately, a theoretical basis is still lacking for research firmly to be grounded in, and I happen to think that my contention that we are genetically maladjusted to altered foods would help medicine forge ahead. Would it not be the first time that therapy backed by experience wasn’t generating any untoward side effect?

_So, what you’re saying is that the side effects to your theory are all positive. But, how, in your view, does ordinary food have a bearing on the likelihood of developing cancer?

o A body produces hundreds of cancer cells daily whether under the impetus of various cancer-causing factors or simply at random. Such is not the crux, however, given that the immune system comes into play to identify and banish abnormal cells. The proliferation of disrupted cells can only occur when the immune system is not doing its job. As a matter of fact, a regular intake of dietary antigens may black out immune surveillance. What with repeated insults, our white blood cells can no longer identify specific classes of antigens, as is wellknown to immunologists. Consider now, what happens when a cancer cell comes into being and is a carrier for identificatory antigens that do not arouse the suspicion of immune surveillance.

_Identificatory antigens, did you say?

o A cancer cell with abnormal DNA sequences abnormal proteins that call the immune system’s attention to them when it is in order.

_I see. If such proteins fail to be identified on account of immunological tolerance being induced by dietary antigens, the cancer cell won’t be destroyed!

o Clearly, any kind of peptide or other dietary antigen in the body is apt to play hovoc in every possible way with our defense mechanisms. Figures speak for themselves: One gram of hydrogen contains 6 x 10 23 atoms. In a gram of dietary substance with a molecule that is 1000 times as heavy as a hydrogen atom, that will amount to 6 x 10 20 molecules. Now, seeing that the body contains approximately 6 x 10 12 cells, that will mean that if you take up one gram of substance that will put 10 8, which amounts to 10.8, that is one hundred million molecules per cell. Do you read me?

_At this point in time, I’d rather take you on trust. My memory molecules turn scarce after midnight.

o Now, if one molecule out of a million (one ppm) is abnormal in one gram of dietary substance and makes its way into the body, it is already clocking up 100 molecules per cell, which is quite enough to cause disarray.
We’re talking approximations, but the actual occurence speaks louder than figures. All the more so as all kinds of abnormal molecules may build up over time, and that we do eat more than 25 grams worth of protein every day, for instance.
From the standpoint of the immune system, competition appears even fiercer. In seven liters of blood, we have around 7000 white blood cells per mm3, or a total of 500 million cells commissioned to defend us against outer forces. It so happens that the substances taken up by the intestines pass into the lymph that, in turn, are spilled out into the blood where they can, first and foremost, blitz white blood cells. According to the immunologists I discussed the matter with, all it takes is about a thousand peptides or other antigenic molecules for a lymphocyte to inhibit its functioning. The figures speak for themselves: If one reckons with a ppm of antigenic molecules, that is one million 6 x 10 20s, which comes to 6 x 10 14 molecules divided by 5 x 10 10 white blood cells, or more than 10,000 molecules per gram of absorbed matter...

_That would be enough to inhibit the whole of our immune system; that’s rather worrying!

o The spread of immune-related diseases is indeed very worrying. I don’t believe that those approximations are particularly overrated. The ppm or the ppb (part per billion) are the units used to assay very weak concentrations, for instance, residues in pesticides, etc...
Once again, those figures do not in any way constitute evidence. They merely show that the problem can no longer be swept under the rug and that, most certainly, there are things to be sorted out in respect to genetic inadaptability to daily fare to account for cancer and auto-immune diseases. That goes without saying.

_Have you talked to cancer specialists about that?

o I have often tried to, but the ones I did get in touch with seemed far too concerned with their carcinogenic substances and their chemotherapies than by problems of hygienic life.

_So, for over a century of cancer research, man has searched high and low, and everything could have been so simple. To think that no one ever even thought of diet.

o It was thought about quite a lot, from a gastronomic angle! Creamed cod with garlic is so tasty.

_Don’t rub salt into the wound!

o Nor turn the omelette over in the pan, and things will go better.

_When you said that you had declared war on cooked food...

o I rather think that it’s cooked food that declared war on mankind _firewars, so to speak.

_Do you have hard facts to confirm your theory about cancer?

o The cases of remission that I have witnessed on instinctotherapy, and further, the onset of cancer in the mice I raised, for instance, on a wheat-rich diet.

_Do you think that wheat too is carcinogenic?

o I’d rather think that it contains abnormal protein that can induce, like those of milk, either immune intolerance, or tolerance, and, therefore, pave the way for cancer and auto-immune diseases. I feel that the main causes of those horrible diseases are milk and dairy, wheat and everything that it’s turned into: bread, pasta, ect..., all forms of cooking, and dietary overload in a general way.
In fact, molecular disorder, whether it’s qualitative or quantitative, induces an immune disorder in bodies and that immune disorder spells cancer, auto-immune diseases, or allergies. Over the last fifty years, substantial advances have been made in drugs and better than ever before so-called infectious diseases are thwarted in discharging their business, whose aim is to straighten out molecular jumbles. Cancer and auto-immune diseases are correspondingly boosted to the top of the league!

_So, then, does medical progress fuel the rise of serious diseases?

o If viral and bacterial diseases are hygienic, we’re going to have to face the fact that medicine is carcinogenic: hygiene, antibiotics, innoculation, anything that jams discharge. I believe that medicine is coming to a turning point; witness the growing popularity of alternative medicine. If the great medicine goddess doesn’t want to cook her goose, she’d better start reckoning with facts she has been suppressing for centuries.

_It used to be said that having had one’s childhood diseases was a must.

o Nowadays, shots go off left, right, and center without a second thought about viruses or germs possibly being endowed with some purpose. And whenever some doctor tells another tale_I’m thinking of one such who claimed that typhoid could incept natural recovery from cancer, which ties in neatly with my theories_he is being branded either a heretic or a criminal. Most accounts of my experiments have either been censored or garbled.

_It’s the inquisition all over again!

o Nutrition and disease-wise, we’re still in the Middle Ages. We daren’t challenge our taboos, while scientific research has entirely proceeded in fear and trembling of concussing tradition, a fate that also befell astronomy in the days of Galileo. It’s high time we had a change. Every year we let by clocks up tens of millions of avoidable deaths. And see what AIDS has yet in store for us.

_Does one’s sexual response change?

o Doing away with cooking poisons ushers in changes in every psychic and instinctive process.

_Well, well. Instinctotherapy always has something new in store for you!

o We’re going to have to shake up all those cultural values of ours.

_So, it’s also a matter of diet?

o The molecules from cooking that disrupt one’s background have a bearing on our nervous system. We had already mentioned the subject in connection with gluten, mice, and schizophrenia.
The issue, as it happens, is far commoner. Poisoning through cooking is endemic.

o Let’s begin with the beginning: A healthy mind in a healthy body (mens sana in corpore sano).