Paleo Diet: Raw Paleo Diet and Lifestyle Forum
Raw Paleo Diet to Suit You => Instincto / Anopsology => Topic started by: Sully on July 16, 2008, 02:06:51 am
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Please... ;D Anyone, share some knowledge and info on this diet
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All I know about it is that you eat what your body tells you to. I've read people will put out a bunch of food and smell it and try and listen to what their body is telling them about what they need nutritionally then.
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In theory instincto means you just follow your natural instincts as regards food( but since instincts are warped by unnatural foods like dairy, grains and cooked-foods, these are avoided). It's very similiar to the Rawpalaeo diet except that, given the rules re following instinct, most Instinctos eat mainly raw fruit and avoid raw animal food except for one or two items like raw eggs or steak tartare or whatever. They don't understand that our instincts can be easily warped through years of bad habits and social conditioning, so that it takes quite some time for people to adjust to a raw animal food diet.
*I should add that Instincto has been discredited somewhat by the fact that Guy-Claude Burger, one of the main Instincto gurus, eventually ended up in jail for sex with an underage girl(no doubt taking the rules re following one's instincts a bit too far).
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In theory instincto means you just follow your natural instincts as regards food( but since instincts are warped by unnatural foods like dairy, grains and cooked-foods, these are avoided). It's very similiar to the Rawpalaeo diet except that, given the rules re following instinct, most Instinctos eat mainly raw fruit and avoid raw animal food except for one or two items like raw eggs or steak tartare or whatever. They don't understand that our instincts can be easily warped through years of bad habits and social conditioning, so that it takes quite some time for people to adjust to a raw animal food diet.
*I should add that Instincto has been discredited somewhat by the fact that Guy-Claude Burger, one of the main Instincto gurus, eventually ended up in jail for sex with an underage girl(no doubt taking the rules re following one's instincts a bit too far).
:D Thanks for the info!
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Doesn't it seem silly that an instinctive way of eating, which seems prevalent among all other animals on this earth, should be wholly discredited because of one human's love-life? Guy-Claude did not invent a way of eating, he was simply a mouthpiece, drawing public attention to the bizarre fact that humans are both the sickest animals on earth and the only ones who make their dietary choices from (usually irrational and/or incomplete) intellectual beliefs!
Who is the "they" that don't understand that our instincts can be warped through years of bad habits and social conditioning? Comby certainly acknowledges the difficulty of transition to an instinctive diet in his books. Just because it is difficult at first does not mean it's not worth striving towards. If we all embraced this approach to challenges no one would ever have learned to ride a bicycle!
As I understand, most instinctive dieters draw their inspiration from our closest living relatives, the bonobos and the chimpanzees, and their eating choices, which are, like every other animal except humans, based upon instinct, paying special attention to olfactory cues, taste, and feeling of internal fullness/satiation, and responding to the body's immediate needs rather than some intellectual stimulus that says "I need more Omega-3s!" or "And now for some magnesium!" The latter being based, mind you, on the findings of particular fallible human scientists --or worse, pseudo-scientists!--who profess some magical formula that may well have worked for them, but may not work for you! Our bodies are infinitely complex organisms and each individual's needs change constantly. The only thing we can be sure we Don't need is drugs and junk-food and processed-food products. But to forbid oneself a whole category of whole, raw, natural edibles on intellectual grounds given by somebody else seems to me to be folly. How could anyone else know what Your body needs right this minute? Instinctive eaters often go for long spells on just-meat or just-fruit or just-onions (why not?) but they do so because they are carefully listening to their own bodies' requests and not some self-professed health guru.
So long as the choices we make available to ourselves are well-varied and consist in whole, raw fruits, veggies, nuts, seeds, sprouts, meats, fish, eggs, insects, earth, our natural (yet admittedly sadly surpressed) instincts tend to kick in after 5 days or so, no more, after which it becomes surprisingly easily and opens us up to whole new worlds of gustatory pleasure. And what is the great risk of having eaten "wrongly" for 5 days if your "wrong" choices were nevertheless only whole, raw foods?
-Za
In theory instincto means you just follow your natural instincts as regards food( but since instincts are warped by unnatural foods like dairy, grains and cooked-foods, these are avoided). It's very similiar to the Rawpalaeo diet except that, given the rules re following instinct, most Instinctos eat mainly raw fruit and avoid raw animal food except for one or two items like raw eggs or steak tartare or whatever. They don't understand that our instincts can be easily warped through years of bad habits and social conditioning, so that it takes quite some time for people to adjust to a raw animal food diet.
*I should add that Instincto has been discredited somewhat by the fact that Guy-Claude Burger, one of the main Instincto gurus, eventually ended up in jail for sex with an underage girl(no doubt taking the rules re following one's instincts a bit too far).
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I've never heard of Instinctos going in for an all-raw-meat diet even for short periods. Almost all of them were either 100% raw plant-food eaters or ate just 10% raw animal food. Guy Claude Burger even recommended against eating raw meats. Also, one criticism commonly levelled at Instinctos is that they tend to overeat sweet fruits - this strong inclination is due to the fact that sweet fruits are the easiest raw foods to get used to on a 100% raw diet, so that they take the easiest route and overindulge in the stuff. Mind you, Primal Dieters are similiar in their addiction to raw dairy.
Also, wild animals don't necessarily follow their instincts. They are also driven by constant hunger, due to foods not being instantly available, so are prepared to eat human junk-food leftovers found on rubbish-tips.
But you do make some good points re not linking Burger's conviction to the Instincto movement. After all, there were other Instincto gurus.
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Hmm, yes, clearly I have not done enough research on the history of the Instincto Movement to comment much on them, and should consider myself an instinctive whole raw foodist rather than an "Instincto", since I don't know enough of the connotations of that word. But I was introduced to the idea by my own internal gurus/guides, several years ago when severely ill, and applying the basic principles of "only eat food the way nature makes it available" and "only eat what you strongly feel compelled to eat, of these natural foods" worked wonders. When, later, I read Comby's books, I recognized what I thought were those same two principles that had saved my life, and felt a kinship. Plus my left-brain was satisfied by his scientific rigor, I think.
I'm curious as to what exactly you mean by "overeating sweet fruits"? How do you know what constitutes overeating in a particular individual's situation? What are the symptoms? What harm is done?
Thanks!
-Za
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"1. Dental problems: severe erosion of tooth enamel (enamel hypoplasia) - caused by consumption of excessive amounts of acidic fruit like citrus, pineapples, kiwi - may be caused by acid reflux, due to overconsumption of sweet fruit, esp. dried fruit/dates; common in sugar addiction - very similar to dental damage encountered in bulimia (an eating disorder) - if damage already done, see your Dentist for restorative work: bondings, veneers, crowns, etc. - prevention is better than repair! Limit acid fruit, always brush with baking soda and floss after eating acid fruit, do something about acid reflux/sugar addiction. Have your teeth checked by your Dentist for enamel erosion. " taken from:-
taken from:-
http://www.godsdirectcontact.com/vegetarian/abc/troubleshooting.htm
Someone on this sub-forum mentioned that Comby is no longer eating raw.
I agre re differentiating between Instinctive Nutrition and Instincto(the latter term is associated with Guy-Claude Burger).
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I've heard of fruitarians suffering from soft bones ('Shazzie') I would starve on just fruit!
People on here have mentioned their teeth went translucent.
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... eventually ended up in jail for sex with an underage girl(no doubt taking the rules re following one's instincts a bit too far).
You go to jail for this?!? ;)
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Transfered from http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/welcoming-commitee/hi-from-france/
Welcome from the green hills of Vermont, USA, which derives from the name a French man applied to it: Verde Monte. We have many people of French descent in this state.As you probably know, flus do not last 4 months. That sounds more like it was food intolerance and/or allergy, which your improvements with diet would seem to confirm, yes?
Thanks ! As a matter of fact, each of my flus didn't last 4 months (perhaps a few weeks only) but adding all these weeks together made up for several months a year. Some looked like allergy to pollens while some other were just colds.
So Instinctotherapie: Manger Vrai (aka Anopsology at http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/7627/ggindex.html) is the third edition of La Guerre Du Cru?
Exactly
What do you think of Dr. Seignalet's cure claims? They sound too good to be true, but there are many reports of amazing health improvements on RPD, RAF, Paleo, Near-Paleo and Zero Carb, of which I have personally observed more than a dozen cases.
As far as I know, Jean Seignalet was not only extremely knowledgeable but also a very honest man, so I have no reason to challenge his claims. It’s a fact that we are badly or even not at all adapted to dairy products and cereals, especially wheat and to a lesser extend, corn. So, removing them from our food intake can only be beneficial – as long as we eat other animal food such as meat, eggs and seafood.
The reported favorite foods of Instinctos--fruits, meats, fats, organs, and seafood--match up pretty well with what people have found to be their favorite and healthiest foods here, and Instincto also shares raw-eating with RPD, so there seems to be much in common.
Really there is. Instincto could be called RPD as well, or preferably RPN for Raw Paleo Nutrition since I don’t consider it as a restrictive diet : you can eat whatever tastes good as long it is not something processed or artificially made. That makes it much easier to follow for me than any restrictive diet such as J. Seignalet’s.
It just occurred to me that one member here is almost Instincto, since he seems to eat based on his tastes, though he cooks his animal foods. As a result he eats a lot of fruit--which, as Carnivore indicates, seems to be the Achilles heel of Instincto. I remember reading about that problem at beyondveg.com some time ago. Perhaps modern domestic fruits lack the "stops" that wild fruits have?
Exactly, that’s why it’s always better to choose the wildest fruits available or otherwise limiting oneself by reasoning.
Another problem, of course, is that fruits are not available year-round in the wild like they are in supermarkets.
In the tropics, there are fruits all year round. There no season for bananas, papayas and pineapple, for instance. The season for jackfruits and durians is very long and if you move some hundreds km you may get to another climatic zone and always find ripe ones without (or almost without) interruption. The question is rather that there are few wild fruits in most places, even in most tropical jungles. It seems one can find fruits only in jungles were big apes live and have spread the seeds. However a friend of mine who has lived in Amazonian told me there’s a lot of different fruits there, most species we’ve have never heard of elsewhere.
My guess would be that the most successful Instinctos would be those who limit their intake of fruits, such as by eating only wild fruits and/or only in season. What is your take on the fruit issue?
I think it varies largely from one person to another. “Carnivore” can barely eat any fruit at all while I have no problem eating a lot of fruit. Of course, wild fruits (or as near the wild species as possible) must be preferred. Cempedak, jackfruits and durians as well as figs seem to be quite near their wild counterparts and most instinctos (including me!) can eat larges amounts of them for extended durations without any problem.
By the way, it’s the same kind of problem with meat. It’s always better to eat wild game meat (as long as the animal didn’t have access to our garbage and corn fields) than beef. Burger especially warned about over-eating beef, which is easy to overeat – this being apparently due to thousand years of artificial selection. The instinctive stop is much neater with wild animals meat, its taste being a lot stronger.
Cheers
Francois
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Thanks for the info. You spoke of Dr. Seignalet in the past tense--is he deceased?
Fruits have been hashed around elsewhere in this forum before. Tropical fruits weren't available in the African savanna, Europe or Northern Asia during the Stone Age, based on what others have said here and what I've read, and some tropical fruits commonly eaten today weren't even edible in that era. For example, wild bananas were limited to parts of SE Asia and are reportedly an "inedible fruit with numerous seeds but little pulp” http://encyclopedia.stateuniversity.com/pages/2306/banana.html. It seems debatable whether we can even call bananas Paleo, though I did eat them until recently for the potassium and as a "fast food." If you have different info on bananas, please do let me know.
Ironically, since I cut out the bananas and increased raw meats and tallow in my diet I have less need of potassium supplements rather than more. Meat seems to provide me with more than bananas, or perhaps it heals my GI tract so it can absorb more potassium? I never would have guessed this.
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I live in the tropics and we never run out of fruit.
I know what the intensively farmed fruits are and we avoid them like the plague:
- sweet yellow mangoes (the ones we export and make into dried mangoes)
- cavendish bananas (the ones we export because us natives don't like this variety)
- Dole and Del Monte Branded pineapples and small papayas. (the ones we export)
I have a customer who is in the business of distributing pesticides and these fruits are their main business.
The fruits we do not export are merely planted and left alone to grow by themselves. The Philippines never runs out of fruit. There is always something in season. Every month we look forward to something new.
I think the people with bad experiences with fruit are pointing out to their own rotten fruits, maybe their own fruits suck, but our organic / wild be default fruits in the Philippines rock.
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Regarding the over consumption of beef... hmmm... that is new to me, thanks.
I'm having problems trying to execute a mono beef diet. It's too alien to my instincts to be on mono diet. But it won't stop me from self-experimenting.
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I know what the intensively farmed fruits are and we avoid them like the plague:
- sweet yellow mangoes (the ones we export and make into dried mangoes)
- cavendish bananas (the ones we export because us natives don't like this variety)
- Dole and Del Monte Branded pineapples and small papayas. (the ones we export)
I have a customer who is in the business of distributing pesticides and these fruits are their main business.
The fruits we do not export are merely planted and left alone to grow by themselves. The Philippines never runs out of fruit. There is always something in season. Every month we look forward to something new.
I think the people with bad experiences with fruit are pointing out to their own rotten fruits, maybe their own fruits suck, but our organic / wild be default fruits in the Philippines rock.
I have lived in the tropics, and the fruit was REAL! Fruit other places rarely compares.
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I lived in the tropics and the only fruit we found was domesticated mangoes figs etc
As far as I know the bananas are not native to the Philippines and originated from plantains in South America.
I would really be interested how endemic all these tropic fruits actually are. I find it hard to believe this fruit salad paradise is not man made to a large extent.
Everyone else is trolling!;)
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There were hundreds of varieties of mangoes and bananas, several varieties of bread fruit and sops, lemons bigger than grapefruit, small grapefruit full of seeds, bitter oranges full of seeds, several varieties of guava, a bunch of varieties of spondias, I could go on all day and night listing the fruit where I lived.
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Which tropical countries did you live in?
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Australia
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Australia
Are marsupials part of your diet? Are they good?
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Regarding the over consumption of beef... hmmm... that is new to me, thanks.
I'm having problems trying to execute a mono beef diet. It's too alien to my instincts to be on mono diet. But it won't stop me from self-experimenting.
Why don't you eat water-buffalo ? They feed on grass only and are very near their wild cousins, don't they ?
Some years ago we could find fresh kangaroo meat in a supermarket near my former home in Switzerland. I found it to be the very best meat I ever ate - raw of course.
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Thanks for the info. You spoke of Dr. Seignalet in the past tense--is he deceased?
Yes, unfortunately :'(
It seems debatable whether we can even call bananas Paleo, though I did eat them until recently for the potassium and as a "fast food." If you have different info on bananas, please do let me know.
No, I once searched about the origins of bananas and found something similar. I agree with you, but still eat bananas when I don't have durians, cempedaks or jackfruits ! Our experience doesn't show any troubles as long as we eat them instinctively: there's a neat "stop", you can hardly eat too much of them.
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Yes, unfortunately :'(
OMG that's awful! If half of what he said is true then humanity has suffered a great loss. He was the only doctor I know of who I think was treating his patients with close to a RPD and reporting the results publicly. There are still some near-Paleo doctors but their diets don't sound as optimal and they don't seem to talk about the results. In combination with GC Burger's incarceration, it seems to be a catastrophic setback for trying to get the world headed back in the right direction.
On the other hand, if more people started listening to a Paleo doctor my foods would get more expensive and what could the world do? Dr. Seignalet described the problem brilliantly and with a sense of humor:
"The obstacles that [Guy-Claude] Burger has to face have nothing to do with religious forces, but, for all that, they are nonetheless daunting. In the first place, he has to persuade people that what he asserts is true. Now, he is aiming his blow at bread, milk, and cooking - all of which are part and parcel of civilisation, and that is the devil's own job. Imagine that Burger's ideas could be accepted. Could they actually be put into practice? That seems quite feasible, provided only a few supporters are concerned. However, expansion to a grand scale would mean nothing less than a revolution. Farming, cattle-breeding, catering, and many other walks of life - in short, society as a whole - would have to be turned on its head. Burger, then, obviously runs the risk of not only disturbing scientists but also many of his fellow citizens. Fortunately, innovators are no longer burnt at the stake. That would be an undeserved end for someone so much against any kind of cooking."
May he RIP.
No, I once searched about the origins of bananas and found something similar. I agree with you, but still eat bananas when I don't have durians, cempedaks or jackfruits ! Our experience doesn't show any troubles as long as we eat them instinctively: there's a neat "stop", you can hardly eat too much of them.
Have you seem ex-Instincto Kirt Nieft's supposed quote of GC Burger about how many bananas some Instinctos have reported eating? Quite a bunch! ;D Though the passage doesn't seem to be in the 3rd edition. Bananas don't seem to have nearly as much of a stop as wild fruits, and that matches my own experience. US President Jimmy Carter even gained weight to get in the Navy by eating bananas. If too much fruit didn't ruin my health I would try the same thing.
Kirt Nieft wrote: "The quantities of an original food some instinctos have demanded can be surprising (to say the least ;-) ), as a few of these extraordinary examples from instincto lore will attest:
* 52 egg yolks at a single sitting.
* 151 egg yolks over two days.
* 156 oysters at a single meal.
* 48 bananas at a single meal.
* 67 bananas in a single day.
* 120 passionfruits at a single meal.
* 210 passionfruits in a single day.
* 7 cucumbers at a single dinner.
* 16 melons (about a pound each) at a single meal (a twelve year-old girl).
* 1.35 kilos (approximately 3 pounds) of honey.
(Above examples are from the online translation of Guy-Claude Burger's book, Manger Vrai, part one.)
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Yes, I read carefully Kirt Nieft’s account in 2002 and I wrote him the e-mail below to put things right. As he didn’t answer, I finally posted the same message on the “Raw-food list”. A long suite of public exchanges followed, which is unfortunately lost since that “Raw-food list” doesn’t exist anymore. But my first e-mail to Kirt survived on my computer and here it is !
I notice that Kirt didn’t bother yet (even more than 7 years later !!) to correct his text on Beyondveg of the several mistakes I pointed out to him.
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15.1.2002 14:54
Dear Kirt,
Some time ago I sent you this mail. Did you get it ? I wonder, because their was no reply from you. But yesterday I appreciated your posts answering to those of Stefanie. As you wrote, she really doesn’t reply to our questions in a proper way, most of the time going sideways and trying to make us look ridiculous.
Could you at least acknowledge reception of this mail ? If you have any comments, I’ll be glad. Would you mind me post it on the list, so you’ll be able to answer directly and publicly?
Kind regards,
François
Comments on : An Ex-Instincto’s Guide to Instinctive Eating
Reading you on the Web was great and very enjoyable. Congratulations for your style, it is very funny! It seems to me that your article will appear objective to most people – I don’t say that it is, since perfect objectivity is a hard to achieve ideal to which I don’t pretend myself.
Don’t worry: even thought I have been “officially indoctrinated” (!), I didn’t get any mental anguish after reading you. Since January 1987, I’ve been practicing instinctive nutrition and I’ve not eaten any cooked food from February of the same year on. Nevertheless, I can’t say that I do it 100% : sometimes I drink wine. And if we consider the fact that most of our food is not really ancestral, as you rightly point out, 100% pure instincto is almost impossible.
Furthermore, I buy Australian horse meat and New-Zealand lamb as well as meat from Orkos and I’m not sure at all whether those animals haven’t been fed grain or/and processed food.
If G.C Burger and Bruno Comby are a bit too optimistic about the healing power of our organisms once the intake of Neolithic cooked food has been abandoned, it seems to me that you are too pessimistic about it. It looks like their goal is selling Burger’s theory and that yours is to appear objective…
Now, since here in Europe we are more and more attacked and considered as a sect of indoctrinated fanatics led by “Burger the Guru”, it may be good for us that you, as well as many other guys eating instinctively, somehow criticize the theory while explaining it. Some of your critics are all right. But there are some, which I consider baseless and I’ll try to explain you why while correcting also some mistakes:
1. Burger is not French but Swiss.
2. I doubt he didn’t have any heather system in his farm, since the thermometer may sometimes go down to minus 15°C here in winter.
3. He doesn’t say that cooking has been used only for 10000 years, but he understands that large scale cooking could only take place once we manufactured pottery, in the Neolithic. Before, foodstuffs could only be grilled, and Burger writes and also told us he supposes we started to experiment this quite soon since we mastered the fire, 350000 to 500000 years ago.
4. He states that practicing a perfect raw instinctive nutrition is impossible in our civilized world and that we can only try to approach this ideal, without ever reaching it. He totally agrees with you on this point as well as on the former one, so it’d be fair to give it to him.
5. Fermenting is an original process, which occurs naturally in overripe fruits and is by no means a method of denaturing food. As a matter of fact, some animals as well as most instinctos are very fond of partially fermented fruits. Never tried it ?
6. Burger doesn’t pretend that every cooked food is toxic. What he says is : we have no proof that it is not noxious and that any instinctive stop with it occurs when the proper amount has been eaten – by the way, he also agrees that the same problem happens with modern artificially selected fruits & meat. He suspects that cooked food (or at least some cooked food) is, along with milk and cereals, the cause of many health problems and since we ignore exactly which foodstuffs, if not all processed ones, are responsible of these problems, it is safer to avoid them all and eat as much as possible only raw original food. He told us almost exactly what you say about a contingent minimum adaptation to some processed food, probably for some folks at least.
( I read some of Jean-Louis Tu article, and I have no arguments against it, except that I doubt very much that our analytic science is able to observe and predict the molecular outcome of all biochemistry events happening with an increase in temperature of hyper-complex organic structures and the end result of their interaction with an animal organism. It is quite possible that some food cooked at low temperature won’t make any health problems – I mean long-term problems, not only short-term ones. But I do not see any interest in cooking food at low temperature, since the pleasure of eating instinctively raw original foodstuffs is much greater that what we could ever obtain with a diet. Any such diet would be more difficult to practice than strict original nutrition, as many guy have found out since long ago here in Switzerland. Long-term instinctive nutrition is easy only as long as you do it without exceptions. It’s like if you quit smoking: you better not smoke again a single cigarette if you don’t want to start smoking again.
Also, there is a recent article in the very official French “Impact Medecin Hebdo” of February 2, 1996 reporting that the first 4 known human diseases appeared simultaneously with the mastery of the fire. But sure, they didn’t bother to cook at low temperature…)
7. I would rather write: according to instincto empirical findings and theory.
8. Is really the whole scene at the Chateau very cult-like ? I’ve been several times there and I never saw any form of cult. What I found there was rather some ordinary people as well as some very brilliant persons. Of course, like everywhere, ordinary people have a propensity to be dogmatic and tend to understand more than what Burger says, taking for the ultimate truth what he presents as hypothesis. Most people need solid ground to believe, not a theory to be put into questioning every day and every hour as Burger strongly recommended. He took long diatribes to explain us that what he says is only a theoretical model, that a theory is never the ultimate truth but a temporary explanation to be modified or abandoned in the future, once we have more facts and understanding of these facts.
9. In 1987, Burger warned us that instinctos could contract MALARIA and would not self-heal with instinctive nutrition. In case of malaria, he said, we better immediately take chloroquin. Bruno Comby apparently ignored this fact: in a discussion group some years latter, someone asked him if there was any diseases which couldn’t be healed with instinctive nutrition. I answered “malaria” and he was really surprised, disagreeing with me.
10. In 15 years (edit : 22 years now) of instinctive nutrition, I never got any parasite. I heard of some instinctos getting taenia. I consider it as a risk, a remote risk if you don’t eat meat of animals having access to garbage, human crops such as corn, or processed food leftovers. But anyway, since drugs are available against most parasites, what is the problem ?
11. Corn and cereals grains, specially wheat, shall better be avoided. The reason for it was initially unknown, thought artificial selection inducing mutations was suspected. The discovery was empirical, as it was with milk. Now, this finding has fond scientific evidence in well-documented papers, such as: “The origins of agriculture ? a biological perspective and a new hypothesis” by Greg Wadley & Angus Martin, Department of Zoology, University of Melbourne. Published in Australian Biologist 6: 96 - 105, June 1993
http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff/gwadley/msc/WadleyMartinAgriculture.html . I also found on the web a document in French called “A qui appartient le blé” which entirely confirms Burger’s initial suspicions : http://www.legraindesable.com/html/ble.htm. Alternatively, it can be found with the word “Aegylopse”: the author made a spelling mistake, the proper name is “Aegilops”. I contacted him, and his answer further confirmed Burger’s hypothesis. He got those infos from his father, who was working at the external relations of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research ( INRA, former CNRA ).
Rice, for instance, does not seem to give any troubles (see Seignalet). But you don’t need to germinate it to eat it, unlike what you write. It is hard when dry, so you can soak it in water and eat it when it is soft and tasty as you like. By the way, the choice of instinctive food is unlimited: anything is edible in any state as long as you like it and the thing is ancestral and unprocessed.
12. Of course instinctos also die and I never thought I will get immortal… Everyone knows that some pesticides and other stuff such as asbestos fibres, air pollution or exposure to high levels of radioactivity may trigger a cancer 20, 30 or more years latter. Maybe wheat and dairy products too, whatever your diet is at the time. Instinctive nutrition is not a bulletproof armour against cancer: it only diminishes your chances of being struck by diseases due to processed food, not eliminating them totally if you ever ate that kind of stuff ( that’s only logical reasoning ! ). Many living instinctos could be dead today if they had gone on with processed food. Who knows ? I could even be dead myself, or at least sick or looking older, but that I can’t prove, of course !
13. Less frequent sexuality ? No. No more compulsory, OK, that’s right, I can testify. But I can also testify that in a relationship some time ago, neither her nor I ever before experienced so frequent intercourse. ( She had started instinctive nutrition along soon after we met. )
14. Burger’s metasexuality theory is another subject, a subject on which instinctos disagree. I think it’d be better not to write comments about it without a good knowledge of it.
15. A further interesting subject is Burger’s theoretical model of the viral phenomenon. A paper on it in English can be found at:. Alternatively, the word “Anopsology” will lead to it.
17. Burger’s personality is the target of French journalists, administration and justice. Whether the charges against him are groundless or not is an issue which doesn’t concern his theories. These theories go very much beyond the nutrition problems and that’s where it becomes really interesting, controversial and… disturbing for many persons. I do not know whether there is real Justice and I doubt that Justice can be done by humans beings. It is rather vengeance.
Best regards,
François
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I went through a fruitarian phase so I have some experience with fruits.
I view bananas as some of the least desired, least nutritious fruits. (Although there is a wide variety of them.)
When the only fruit left are bananas, the kids will tell me there is nothing to eat.
There are therapeutic uses of bananas. We have a variety called latundan and its use is for potassium deficiency.
Eating any more than 4 or 5 (6 inch long) bananas a day I have never done even during fruitarian. Sounds gross.
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Interesting information on the instincto diet.
It's funny it's illegal to get horse meat for human consumption in Australia but legal to sell it overseas.
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Nice post, Iguana. Most of your rebuttals seem reasonable, though I don't fully understand the whole context of course, but I think we agree on most points. I just have a question and some quibbles.
Did you address somewhere Nieft's quotes on quantities of bananas and passion fruit consumed? They don't seem to have any "neat stop," given these figures and the experience of President Carter (who seems to be an honest man), myself and others.
Before, foodstuffs could only be grilled,
Actually, there were a number of cooking methods in the Stone Age, such as heating on stones around a fire, burying in a pit with hot rocks, throwing into or on top of a fire, cooking in a pit filled with water and hot stones, boiling in a gourd, smoking, hanging well above a fire instead of grilling directly over it, etc., and I would be surprised if standard grilling was the most common. My guess would be that most times people didn't bother to cook until fairly late in the Paleolithic, in part not to attract other people and animals who might want to steal the meat, but that is speculation on my part and it is an area that needs more research.
Rice, for instance, does not seem to give any troubles (see Seignalet).
It gives me troubles and it is well documented to cause deficiencies in vitamin A and other nutrients and contribute to myopia, blindness and certain cancers. Maybe he meant it gives less troubles than the gluten grains?
I went through a fruitarian phase so I have some experience with fruits.
I view bananas as some of the least desired, least nutritious fruits. (Although there is a wide variety of them.)
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I have come to the same opinion. I had been eating them often in an attempt to counter my potassium deficiency (which caused cramps), but even eating a banana every day in combination with a potassium supplement every day was not enough to completely avoid the cramps. I have now completed my third day in a row without any potassium supplement or banana, eating little else than meats, fats, eggs, greens and a little liver and I have not had any cramps. Goodsamaritan, can you explain this, or anyone else? Maybe Lex understands it. Apparently, the potassium in bananas is not nearly as well absorbed as that in meats/liver? This is truly fascinating and unexpected--AND WONDERFUL. HOORAH! I didn't expect my deficiencies to be cured within days of eliminating fruits and increasing my meat/fat/organ intake after one last week of increased fruit intake. It will be interesting to see if meat & fat alone prevent the cramps, or if I will need to continue eating liver as well.
It's funny it's illegal to get horse meat for human consumption in Australia but legal to sell it overseas.
PETA got horse export for meat banned in the US. The result was that old and sick horses lost their value and were allowed to starve to death in miserable conditions. PETA didn't seem to put nearly as much effort in preventing or fixing this disaster as they did in getting the ban through. They seem much more concerned with stopping humans from eating meat than they are with the actual welfare of the animals. When it suddenly becomes illegal to use millions of animals for food, as in this case, they are either starved or slaughtered and dumped into landfills, not put in massive animal refuges and kept alive with cleared land and expensive feed at government expense.
Europeans and Asians, and such historical cultures as the Celts, Turks, Mongols, Huns, Tatars, Scythians and their predecessors have been eating horse meat for at least tens of thousands of years. According to the Romans and others, most or all of these cultures regarded raw horse flesh and blood as very nutritious and a secret weapon that gave their warriors an advantage. There are even some horses in the Stone Age cave drawing in the Raw Paleo Forum logo image (all the animals portrayed were eaten by the people who drew them).
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(http://www.marketmanila.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/aabananas3.JPG)
Every Filipino MD or Traditional healer knows the LATUNDAN variety of bananas is known to stop a loose bowel movement condition caused by potassium deficiency or any potassium deficiency.
Note that you want LATUNDAN bananas for potassium and not the other varieties.
A few years ago, I was out of town, my little girl was hospitalized for non-stop loose bowel movement. Her hospital medical treatment was to pause eating and drinking by 3 hours and feed her lots of LATUNDAN bananas. I could have treated her that way myself, but I was out of town.
These common things cost 30 pesos per kilo. Ultra cheap.
These bananas are organic by default.
If you are getting cavendish bananas, those are not good. Nobody eats them in my country. They are loaded with pesticides and washing chemicals.
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Reply #11 on: Yesterday at 07:22:21 PM (http://tinyurl.com/n3jhl6) »
Thanks, RawZi. I only need something on rare occasions, such as when I accidentally eat the wrong thing or cheat too much, so it would preferably be something I could store a long time. Your mention of herbs reminded me that I do have ginger tea, thanks. It's not truly raw, but as an occasional medicinal I think that would be OK on a RPD. I could drink that and eat raw bone marrow or suet when my stomach needs soothing.
Re: tofu, I can't stand the taste or mouth feel of straight tofu, even when mixed with other foods. I can't imagine how anyone could think it tastes good. To me soy is one of the nastiest foods on the planet. The only soy food I liked that I tried was soy ice cream, and even that was not as good as dairy ice cream or avocado ice cream or sorbet.
Maybe terramin clay would work, as it's easier to keep around.
Soy masquerades around as scramble, sausages, etc, the key word being masquerade. It's really not food at all. That being said, I'm fine avoiding cacao altogether and coffee, but if I had to have soy ice cream, cacao and coffee have been the only (ayurvedic) antidotes to get that ice cream down my gullet.
I do like marrow a lot, I'm sure I posted that somewhere on this forum recently.
It gives me troubles and it is well documented to cause deficiencies in vitamin A and other nutrients and contribute to myopia, blindness and certain cancers. Maybe he meant it gives less troubles than the gluten grains?
Rice can contribute to myopia? No wonder I found it so acidic. Thank you!
Apparently, the potassium in bananas is not nearly as well absorbed as that in meats/liver? This is truly fascinating and unexpected--AND WONDERFUL. HOORAH! I didn't expect my deficiencies to be cured within days of eliminating fruits and increasing my meat/fat/organ intake after one last week of increased fruit intake. It will be interesting to see if meat & fat alone prevent the cramps, or if I will need to continue eating liver as well.
Thank you. I was getting muscle cramps lately, and have not been eating liver. No wonder the lamb liver looked so good to me tonight in Whole Foods.
They seem much more concerned with stopping humans from eating meat than they are with the actual welfare of the animals. When it suddenly becomes illegal to use millions of animals for food, as in this case, they are either starved or slaughtered and dumped into landfills, not put in massive animal refuges and kept alive with cleared land and expensive feed at government expense.
How sad.
Europeans and Asians, and such historical cultures as the Celts, Turks, Mongols, Huns, Tatars, Scythians and their predecessors have been eating horse meat for at least tens of thousands of years. According to the Romans and others, most or all of these cultures regarded raw horse flesh and blood as very nutritious and a secret weapon that gave their warriors an advantage. There are even some horses in the Stone Age cave drawing in the Raw Paleo Forum logo image (all the animals portrayed were eaten by the people who drew them).
Is horse these days generally healthier to eat somehow than other meats?
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I'm eating (grassfed) horsemeat right now on vacation and it tastes great. I prefer the taste to grassfed beef, IMO. I suppose I trust horsemeat more as horses are generally more likely to be left out to pasture etc. whereas cattle are more likely to be "managed" re diet.
Bo Derek was the vegetarian(vegan?) moron who managed to ban US horsemeat for export. Feel free to send her hate-letters and the like.
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Note that you want LATUNDAN bananas for potassium and not the other varieties....
I've never seen those in the US, though there is a variety they just label as "small bananas," but I don't think they are Latundan, because they are not as plump as the images on the Net.
Thanks for the clay idea, RawZi. I had tried ingesting healing clay in the past with no effect, but now that my diet is more optimized, perhaps it would help on the rare occasions I might need it. It is certainly known to help the old-fashioned folks and chimps who use it.
Yes, I found even soy ICE CREAM to have a sour, off-taste. I was SOOO happy to be able to give up on soy foods. Darn that nutritionist! I have found anthropologists to generally have more knowledge on what to eat than nutritionists or doctors.
Yes, at least 3 factors have been identified in myopia--inherited tendency, diet (such as heavy consumption of rice, wheat and other nutrient-depleting foods), and believe it or not the old wives tale of using lots of close vision, such as with reading, appears to also be a factor, according to the latest science I read.
I completed day 5 without potassium supplements or bananas (and 3 days without zinc, yay!). So far, raw and low-cooked meat and fat alone have been enough to keep the potassium cramps away, unless I'm still benefiting from the liver I ate days ago.
Curse the ignorance of that Bo Derek!
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Nice post, Iguana. Most of your rebuttals seem reasonable, though I don't fully understand the whole context of course, but I think we agree on most points. I just have a question and some quibbles.
Did you address somewhere Nieft's quotes on quantities of bananas and passion fruit consumed? They don't seem to have any "neat stop," given these figures and the experience of President Carter (who seems to be an honest man), myself and others.
Thanks Phil. No, I didn’t. I don’t know about Jimmy Carter’s experience with bananas… Mine is that I can’t hardly eat too many of them since a slight nausea occurs as I ate enough of them. The question probably is : “How much is too much and how much is enough ?” Is 48 bananas in a meal too much ? Well who knows ? Nutritionists think they know, but I do not and only my instinct tells me ! There are so many variables such as the size, ripeness, variety and quality of the bananas, the age and size of the person, his/her physical condition and digestive power at the moment and so on. I don’t think I ever ate so many bananas in a single meal : sometimes I feel that I ate enough after 2 or 3 and sometimes such a feeling comes after perhaps more than 20 very ripe small ones ( I do not count !).
But that’s it : someone is occasionally able to eat instinctively an amazing amount of a particular food. For me it was for example about 35 seabirds eggs in an afternoon, a whole 50 cm (20 inches) long tunafish in a few minutes, a big deer leg in two days or several large durians at almost every meal for two months. Such nutritional behavior is widespread amongst wild animals.
You are right to point out that wild bananas are barely edible and I agree it’s better to eat wild foodstuff whenever available. Nevertheless, plants are constantly evolving and new varieties continually appear, even naturally. To what extend our instinct is able to cope with these new varieties is an open question to which GC Burger and us have tried to answer by experimenting – and this experiment has been going on for more than 40 years with thousands of persons as well as with hundreds of laboratory mouse (early GC Burger’s experiments in late 60’s and early 70’s) and other mammals.
Actually, there were a number of cooking methods in the Stone Age, such as heating on stones around a fire, burying in a pit with hot rocks, throwing into or on top of a fire, cooking in a pit filled with water and hot stones, boiling in a gourd, smoking, hanging well above a fire instead of grilling directly over it, etc., and I would be surprised if standard grilling was the most common.
Right !
(Rice) gives me troubles and it is well documented to cause deficiencies in vitamin A and other nutrients and contribute to myopia, blindness and certain cancers. Maybe he meant it gives less troubles than the gluten grains?
Yes, probably. Of course, a diet based on rice leads to such troubles, but once in a way a few raw whole rice grains soaked one or two days in water shouldn’t hurt much, certainly much less than wheat.
Cheers
Francois
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I am familiar with Jimmy Carter's story, as I heard him tell it in an interview. He ate a lot of bananas to successfully gain weight so as to get into the Navy. My own experience matches his, in that I find that bananas don't have nearly as much of a stop as raw meat and other foods. That could explain those numbers that Nieft quoted. Some people may get early stops with bananas, but it seems that in general they have much less of a stop than most Instincto foods.
Personally, I find that I start developing negative health symptoms, such as dry, dead skin (dermatitis, dandruff, chapped lips, etc.), gunk on my teeth, morning breath, bleeding gums, poor quality sleep, fatigue, etc. from eating bananas long before any stops kick in. I didn't realize that bananas and some other fruits were having this effect until I stopped eating them completely. Maybe my case is rare. I'm hoping that I'll be able to eat at least some wild fruits and berries in the future, but if it impacts my health I've found I can live without fruits and nuts much more easily than I expected.
...Nevertheless, plants are constantly evolving and new varieties continually appear, even naturally.
The generally accepted definition of a Paleo diet is one that draws on the types of foods that were available more than ten thousand years ago, before the diseases of civilization became prevalent (granted, that GA definition could change). Since I've found that I benefit from a Paleo diet and it makes instinctive as well as rational sense to me, I'm not particularly interested in newly evolved varieties of foods at the moment. I've found in my experience that the more ancient a food is, the less of a negative effect it is likely to have on me. So once I found that bananas provided less potassium for me than meats do, it didn't surprise me to learn that bananas were basically inedible before the Neolithic and that their range was originally limited to parts of Southeast Asia.
I've found that the biggest key to sticking to the foods I do well on is to not bring other foods into my home at all. Since buying rice requires buying at least a bag of it, I don't intend to ever buy any. I don't find rice to be particularly tasty anyway, so I'm also not likely to eat it as a cheat outside the home unless it becomes inconvenient to not do so (such as when someone cooks something for me that already has rice mixed in with it--that's the only time I've found a reason to eat it).
Each to their own, of course, and I don't claim to have all the answers. I'm still learning and the differences between Instincto and RPD are pretty minor when compared to SAD and vegetarianism. Thanks again for the info.
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He ate a lot of bananas to successfully gain weight so as to get into the Navy. My own experience matches his, in that I find that bananas don't have nearly as much of a stop as raw meat and other foods. That could explain those numbers that Nieft quoted. Some people may get early stops with bananas, but it seems that in general they have much less of a stop than most Instincto foods.
Maybe my case is rare. I'm hoping that I'll be able to eat at least some wild fruits and berries in the future, but if it impacts my health I've found I can live without fruits and nuts much more easily than I expected.
So once I found that bananas provided less potassium for me than meats do, it didn't surprise me to learn that bananas were basically inedible before the Neolithic ...
Since buying rice requires buying at least a bag of it, I don't intend to ever buy any. I don't find rice to be particularly tasty anyway, so I'm also not likely to eat it as a cheat outside the home unless it becomes inconvenient to not do so (such as when someone cooks something for me that already has rice mixed in with it--that's the only time I've found a reason to eat it).
I'm still learning and the differences between Instincto and RPD are pretty minor when compared to SAD and vegetarianism.
I had this neighbor in the tropics, regular omnivore, when she wanted to lose weight she would switch from rice to potatoes and start eating a lot of bananas. Seemed to work for her for weightloss. She talked about banana weightLOSS connection like it was something everyone knew. The bananas grew everywhere, so they were pritttee natural.
Bananas just about always made my stomach turn, yuck.
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Heh, yeah, if bananas make your stomach turn then I could definitely see how they would lead to weight loss. :)
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So long as the choices we make available to ourselves are well-varied and consist in whole, raw fruits, veggies, nuts, seeds, sprouts, meats, fish, eggs, insects, earth, our natural (yet admittedly sadly surpressed) instincts tend to kick in after 5 days or so, no more, after which it becomes surprisingly easily and opens us up to whole new worlds of gustatory pleasure. And what is the great risk of having eaten "wrongly" for 5 days if your "wrong" choices were nevertheless only whole, raw foods?
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Our food instinct is always "on" and working . But it has evolved and has been perfected with the stuff available in the nature for hundreds thousands years or rather millions years. Therefore it is unable to work properly with artificial, processed, mixed or spiced things like chocolate, lemonade, antifreeze, salads, soups or any cooked foodstuff.
Wild animals fall into the trap when they have access to our garbage, bread or any cooked leftovers, and it's easy to understand why. It has been the same for the mankind once we mastered the fire: we fell just into the same trap - in which the vast majority of people on Earth are still today ! Even nutritionists haven't yet understood that :o
So , you don't even have to wait 5 days for your food instinct to work when you eat unprocessed, non-spiced, unmixed paleo-food ! It works immediately.
Cheers
Francois
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Our food instinct is always "on" and working . But it has evolved and has been perfected with the stuff available in the nature for hundreds thousands years or rather millions years. Therefore it is unable to work properly with artificial, processed, mixed or spiced things like chocolate, lemonade, antifreeze, salads, soups or any cooked foodstuff.
So humans must eat a food for hundreds of thousands of years to develop a "food instinct" about it?
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Heh, yeah, if bananas make your stomach turn then I could definitely see how they would lead to weight loss. :)
Supposed to be that people on an omnivore cooked diet, when they eat a lot of ripe local untreated bananas, it's laxative, maybe the type of fiber in banana. My instinct tells me bananas smell bad.
She told me grain puts on and keeps on weight. I was thin then and ate grain everyday. I know now that grain is used to fatten animals, and for me grain just destroyed my appetite, etc because it was bad for my liver, adrenals and thyroid. Of course, getting grain off the menu took unnecessary weight off my body.
Grain is just so unhealthy generally and/or difficult to use, it's a wonder it's so popular worldwide. That must be due to its addiction factor.
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So humans must eat a food for hundreds of thousands of years to develop a "food instinct" about it?
I'm not sure I understand correctly your question, but I'll try to explain what I mean in a better way .
Animals (humans included) instincts have evolved along with their environment. An animal found of a toxic stuff would probably die without being able to procreate and therefore would be eliminated by natural selection, which insure that only the individuals with a food instinct working correctly will survive and reproduce.
Said differently, the food instinct attains its fulfillment in whatever makes the individual survive; all individuals which have not had the instinct to eat in proper amount what their body needs have been eliminated by natural selection.
It doesn't work with cooked food because the selective pressure is too low: the troubles induced happen most of the time late in the individual's live, leaving enough lifespan to procreate and reproduce. There is nevertheless a slight selective pressure, so that a partial adaptation to some neolithic food such as dairy products is probably underway in some populations.
Cheers
Francois
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I'm not sure I understand correctly your question, but I'll try to explain what I mean in a better way .
I understand the general principal of food instinct, I'm just exploring which foods it would apply to. You've identified cooked foods as foods which the food instinct doesn't apply to and you said that human food instincts developed over hundreds of thousands of years of eating certain foods, yes? Do you have a very rough estimate as to how many hundreds of thousands of years it takes to adapt to a new food, like your example of dairy?
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I understand the general principal of food instinct, I'm just exploring which foods it would apply to. You've identified cooked foods as foods which the food instinct doesn't apply to and you said that human food instincts developed over hundreds of thousands of years of eating certain foods, yes?
Not necessarily eating the stuff, but that particular stuff must have been present in the environment for a period long enough to allow natural selection the duration necessary to eliminate the individuals which haven’t perceived it as poisonous.
Do you have a very rough estimate as to how many hundreds of thousands of years it takes to adapt to a new food, like your example of dairy?
I suppose there are some stuffs to which partial or total adaptation is relatively easy (different plants and animals specie’s meat) and others to which any human adaptation is impossible, no matter how long (ethylene-glycol for example ;)). Other animals specie’s milks may be nearer the first category whereas cooked and mixed food may be nearer the second. But I wouldn’t dare guessing any duration, even rough. Suffice to say that since our split from the chimps branch and now about 6 millions years elapsed. And some individuals may more or less be adapted while some other wouldn’t be adapted. We are all different.
Cheers
Francois
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Yes, I read carefully Kirt Nieft’s account in 2002 and I wrote him the e-mail below to put things right. As he didn’t answer, I finally posted the same message on the “Raw-food list”. A long suite of public exchanges followed, which is unfortunately lost since that “Raw-food list” doesn’t exist anymore. But my first e-mail to Kirt survived on my computer and here it is !
I notice that Kirt didn’t bother yet (even more than 7 years later !!) to correct his text on Beyondveg of the several mistakes I pointed out to him.
Wow, I found the “Raw-food list” archives ! Here it is : http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?A1=ind0201&L=raw-food&T=0
Cheers
Francois
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Interesting that people don't seem to like bananas. Really ripe brown spotted bananas are the best fruit for me. Other fruits with a creamy/fluffy type texture such as durian are also good. Very sweet sugary tasting fruits make me feel sick and fruits where the skin is eaten make me terribly bloated.
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I do have to force myself to eat more than my body signals for, or I lose too much weight--and I already have what some people would consider an "emaciated" body (though that's largely because I was born very thin and with fine bones and very little muscle tissue). I also have to drink more than my body calls for to minimize dehydration (and even doing so I'm still chronically slightly dehydrated). The Instincto instincts idea doesn't work for me--probably due to my body being messed up in some way. I know this is hard for people who have perfect instincts to understand, but I hope they will try to understand that not everyone has perfect instincts--even many months after adopting a RPD.
I think the key lesson to bear in mind, once again, is to speak for one's own experience, rather than for everyone.
For sure, we are all different and we all have a body messed up in some way ! Results of years of cooked food don’t disappear straight away miraculously without leaving long-lasting damages.
The conventional way of dietary thinking doesn’t work with raw, unprocessed food : for instance, our weight gains or losses are not directly correlated with the amount of food and calories we ingest. In fact, many people loose the more weight the more they eat ; and on the opposite, some people gain weight while eating only a little bit. It seems that eating a lot of raw food accelerate the elimination rate of some kinds of molecules our body had to live with because no better material was available for its construction.
Even if we are already thin at the start, we may initially loose some more weight, but after a while (maybe a year) we regain what has been lost and perhaps even more until we reach a normal weight.
By forcing yourself to eat more than you instinctively would, you get into a vicious circle of overload in some nutrient your body cannot use at the moment and you may feel therefore less and less hungry. It’s also very important when switching to raw food to have enough choice so that you can find what your body needs the most for the time being and to avoid overfeeding on some unneeded nutrients. Nothing that could be found in the nature should be excluded a priori for theoretical or idealistic reasons.
Instincts are good...but I don't think they'll always serve you right. A lot of animals overeat in captivity. I'm not saying we don't have any good instincts worth listening to, just that I don't think the idea that everything can be perfect and natural works.
Of course it’s not perfect since we are in interaction with our environment and we live in a more or less spoiled situation. But still sufficient as long as we avoid processed food, dairy, grain and also as long as the foodstuff we may need is available. Animals in captivity are often fed unsuitable or processed food and therefore their instinct is somehow fooled.
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the problem with this idea isn't the concept that we are so polluted that are instincts are polluted (which is of course true and a problem) but the more basic, that for most modern people, we have to purchase food from outside sources, and probably not on a meal to meal basis. So there is absolutely no way the mind is never involved in terms of choosing what to eat and how much.
I've tried that 'your weight will automatically balance itself' stuff for years. and seen very few or any actually achieve a normal build doing so on any methodoloy. This is a thread in almost every raw food camp, and yet very few people have proved to maintain or create builds that completely defy the calorie paradigm, only ones that stretch it.
actual numerical weight is effected by cellular gunk, so examples of people's expanse, even on fasts is not completely impossible, but in most cases, the body is calling for a rest from eating perhaps, but the fasting is not healthful for their individual at that point. Which seems to be the whole rational behind eating animal fat other than our biological requirements, but to buffer these toxins.
as for excluding food sources, I've heard of some extremes in instinctive nutrition that will not eat at all from domesticated animals, and therefore flying all their food in from outer sources. how is it possible to know what they instinctively want for Tuesday? if the body only requires a certain amount of protein to function optimally, than clearly any excess of that in paleo times was just thrown away to the pursuit of petunias or whatever. The problem as mention is that these 'instincts' and selectivity go above and beyond what an animal actually uses to decide what to eat and becomes equally theoretically and of the mind.
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I'd be highly skeptical of my instincts unless I was actually living in my natural environment away from all the distractions of modern life.
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the problem with this idea isn't the concept that we are so polluted that are instincts are polluted (which is of course true and a problem) but the more basic, that for most modern people, we have to purchase food from outside sources, and probably not on a meal to meal basis. So there is absolutely no way the mind is never involved in terms of choosing what to eat and how much.
It doesn’t matter if our mind is somehow involved at the moment of purchase and reaching for our purse: we know roughly what we’re gonna eat preferably in the following days, and probably animals also know more or less as well. But the mind should be under the command of our alimentary instinct rather than the opposite. We can store a lot of food at home: different meats, liver, eggs, shellfish, fish and vegetables in the fridge, as well as different nuts, dates and fruits in a cool place. Where is the problem ? When we want to eat, still we can choose instinctively (what smells best and what tastes best at the moment) between the available stuff. And if we don’t eat something immediately, we can most of the time store for latter.
I've tried that 'your weight will automatically balance itself' stuff for years. and seen very few or any actually achieve a normal build doing so on any methodoloy. This is a thread in almost every raw food camp, and yet very few people have proved to maintain or create builds that completely defy the calorie paradigm, only ones that stretch it.
We aren’t defying the calorie paradigm. The point is, most people eat more in calories than necessary and the excess is either stored in their body or it goes through without being assimilated. It’s also a matter of difference between what comes in and what goes out. It’s a fact that people initially loose weight (up to 1 kg daily for the really obese) if eating larges amounts of raw food after years of cooked diet, whereas those eating less don’t loose much weight or don’t loose weight at all. It seems that eating a lot spurs the elimination process. The skinny ones generally take on weight till they get in the norm, as long as there’s enough % of RAF in their diet (unfortunately, many are still influenced by vegetarian, or worse vegan ideology).
as for excluding food sources, I've heard of some extremes in instinctive nutrition that will not eat at all from domesticated animals, and therefore flying all their food in from outer sources. how is it possible to know what they instinctively want for Tuesday? if the body only requires a certain amount of protein to function optimally, than clearly any excess of that in paleo times was just thrown away to the pursuit of petunias or whatever. The problem as mention is that these 'instincts' and selectivity go above and beyond what an animal actually uses to decide what to eat and becomes equally theoretically and of the mind.
I’ve never heard of instinctos excluding meat from domesticated animals, but I do not know every one of them ! As I said above, a lot of different foods can be stored at home, so that say on Tuesday, you can choose between what is in your fridge, kitchen, basement, garden or surroundings. Once you’re in “cruise” mode, after a year or so, you don’t need so much choice and you could be satisfied with what is easily available around, especially in summer or in the tropics.
I'd be highly skeptical of my instincts unless I was actually living in my natural environment away from all the distractions of modern life.
The experience shows that our alimentary instinct works well enough as long as the kind of raw, unprocessed foodstuff we need is available. It’s impressive with babies; it works just as well with cats and other pets. It is sufficient to avoid any food cooked, mixed, spiced, processed, as well as dairy and wheat.
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We aren’t defying the calorie paradigm. The point is, most people eat more in calories than necessary and the excess is either stored in their body or it goes through without being assimilated. It’s also a matter of difference between what comes in and what goes out. It’s a fact that people initially loose weight (up to 1 kg daily for the really obese) if eating larges amounts of raw food after years of cooked diet, whereas those eating less don’t loose much weight or don’t loose weight at all. It seems that eating a lot spurs the elimination process. The skinny ones generally take on weight till they get in the norm, as long as there’s enough % of RAF in their diet (unfortunately, many are still influenced by vegetarian, or worse vegan ideology).
well, let me say first off that my intention is not to point out random fallacies of Instinco within its own forum, but to continue the conversation moved form Tyler's Journal about whether to really on 'insticts' to stop eating or to have some artifical sense of how much and what types of things one should eat. I think what I said proved pretty well that you have to take some mental initiative and theorizing to fill your stores with X amounts and types of food. It's signifigant because even if you have a fridge full of every possible food on the planent that is 'natural', the cleanest of humans, or any wild animal will not choose the food necessarily that provides for their best health. And the narrowest of choices will obviously lead to less chance of choosing a food that is most needed. In my mind, when you start saying that it does, even though it is not present in wild animals, it makes it way more theoretical than the idea of estimating food through weight, known nutrition, or calories, which makes way more sense in terms of estimating what one needs to improve, not just to be satisfied. for many things like liver, which might seem totally unappealing might be totally essential for nutrition, and of course the idea that other 'medicinal' foods, which are probably turned down by instincto, as with hygiene, are also notoriously poor tasting, which animals sometimes seek out as well. These would not be on the shopping trip/order so in total how can your estimate, ever qualify without deciding those foods are healthy, and if you are eating all time tailored to a small appetite, how do you reconcile that the types of foods behind chosen, would only be possible in such a modern domestic setting. Not to mention never in the wild eaten in such fashion or sucession, and likely gorged upon at any opportunity and availability.
what you are saying about calories pretty much only applies to fruit in my research. people eating 4k of animal fat, will likely not lose weight in a similar fashion even against the convention that carbs make people gain weight. likely most people will some weight on a raw diet initially, but my point was, is that telling people who are already thin not to 'force' eating, is really equally idealistic and potentially dangerous advice. People can only claim that skinny returns to normal only by shifting the definition of normal away from SWD. Ironically if we are to obtain clean healthy bodies on a natural diet, we should be able to preform as well as our ancestors, including having large filled out frames. not merely non-emaciated ones.
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I disagree. A lot of the time, our instincts are not truly natural - whereas wild animals seem to instinctively find the right kind of nutrition for most of the time.
As for weight-gain, raw foods seem to constantly cause weight-loss, with the sole exception of raw dairy(and possibly) raw fermented grains. I do wonder if those RPDers who mention they are underweight, are actually at their normal weight, but won't admit it, due to bodybuilding concerns.
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whereas wild animals seem to instinctively find the right kind of nutrition for most of the time
This is not conclusive and is very debatable. Cats do not have sweet receptors and care less about sugary foods. Dogs and bears on the other hand would be all over sugary foods. Bears are known to have a thing for alcohol in the form of fermented grains.
If I had a dog I would do a simple experiment. Wait until dog is really hungry and then give it 2 choices, meat and sweets, and see which one it will choose.
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I disagree. A lot of the time, our instincts are not truly natural - whereas wild animals seem to instinctively find the right kind of nutrition for most of the time.
Of course over the long spectrum of their lives, wild animals instinctively choose their proper foods, but not if there is a shift in their environment or a drastic artificial change in circumstance or most importantly a choice in food supply. A Bear with the faculty to call Honey Pacifica would eat more honey than it needs in its diet and as long as it was readily available without effort. It doesn't stop eating fish with the idea that it can go to the store and pick more up if it goes bad.
as for weight-loss this sounds totally ridiculous in contrast to your argument - unless I perceived it wrong - that paleo men had far greater functional strength than Olympic lifters. wild animals are able to have huge muscular builds eating their biologically appropriate diet, whether plants or animals. They often consume a very specific and often large amount of food to maintain this equilibrium. Unless one is to believe humans are from outer space with other requirements, which is possible, they too have these requirements.
I don't see this as anythign other than the same logic proposed by vegans, that 'normal' SWD eaters are 'overweight'. Of course on a tissue level this has truth, but theoretically according to the proposed models, that once one become pure enough and emptied of these toxins, their bodys become full and healthy, often proposed regardless of intake. I spouted this garbage for years and have yet to see one concrete example of a person as majestic as an animal in this respect. So either this pursuit of cleanliness is largely impossible, OR the entire idea is just wrong, including the ideas of what constitute our natural diet. Clearly people are less than convinced here about the possibility of such eating only plants, so it makes the argument for eating RAF fairly poor if the outcome is essentially the same in respect to this issue anyway. Just because some might as they become healthier absorb more food and require less than someone unwell, does not change the fact that others might need that extra food to maintain healthy weight, no matter how pure their instincts become, because there is never a situation where those instincts manifest as per above.
as for the aesthetic element, I guess the photos of modern HG's and Native Americans, and Greek statues are all we have to go by, even though they all ate cooked foods. I think this comes down to again, looking at other animals and their weights/builds/and densities and if so that this theory is again largely mistaken. I know with myself my numerical weight I've heard is way lower than to the eye, however even still if I was to play a role in a film, like a fit thin Average Joe or something, I would probably have to gain 15 lbs. Of course again that is comparing it to 'toxic' people, but if one is truly healthy, than weight gain, like it is for expecting mothers, should be an effortless endeavor on our true natural diet. Its fine to be thin, as long as they are truly healthy enough to gain on natural raw foods and not hiding behind some notion that can't be possibly accurate for clean or ancient humans re: raw foods and weight-loss. Again this brings up basic suspicious about the contents and quantity in the diet being adequate for building OR cleansing. Only in health, what people CHOOSE to be at that point is their own business.
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(http://i177.photobucket.com/albums/w223/greeksquared/moar.jpg)
(http://stalkingelmo.net/random/funny_pics/MOAR.jpg)
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I do wonder if those RPDers who mention they are underweight, are actually at their normal weight, but won't admit it, due to bodybuilding concerns.
In my case everyone else tells me I'm underweight, though I do have a little flab on my belly they usually don't see, so it's not just a figment of my imagination or the result of some bodybuilding fantasy. Robb Wolff even said that he was "emaciated" when he was at a weight and height that was less thin that I am now--though his view is probably a little skewed by working in the bodybuilding/fitness field. I'll even send you a photo of myself if you like, so you can judge for yourself. Rather than lose weight on RPD, since starting it I vary between 5 - 10 lbs. heavier. I see this as a sign of improved health in someone who was in poor health, with poor digestion and a damaged gut, and still has a ways to go.
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A Bear with the faculty to call Honey Pacifica would eat more honey than it needs in its diet.
ROFL
The idea of this just struck me as really funny.
HP--"Hello, Honey Pacifica."
Bear--"Roar! MOAR!"
HP--"Oh, hi, Bear...your credit card is maxed out. Do you have another one?"
Bear--''ROAR!! MOOOOOAR!!!!"
HP--"I'm very sorry, but we are going to need another card."
Bear--"Screw it. I going fishing."
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I disagree. A lot of the time, our instincts are not truly natural - whereas wild animals seem to instinctively find the right kind of nutrition for most of the time.
Not even in the case of wild animals is their health and balanced diet merely the result of their ability to select food and limit its intake by means of innate coding of taste and smell functions. What limits their intake for instance is largely a matter of environmental constraints or limited availability of food in natural biotopes as well as many many other factors.
Moreover there is always an alimentary culture i.e. animals do learn from their mother at weaning what to eat , when, how to find it etc.
Balanced diet and health in the wild is an emergent phenomenon that cannot and by far be reduced to any intrinsic capability or instinct of the animal.
This definitely falsifies instincto.
Current evidence for self-medication in primates: A multidisciplinary perspective
Michael A. Huffman *
Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Aichi, Japan
email: Michael A. Huffman (huffman@pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp)
Abstract
The study of self-medication in non-human primates sheds new light on the complex interactions of animal, plant and parasite. A variety of non-nutritional plant secondary compounds and nutrient-poor bark is found in the primate diet, but little is yet known about the possible medicinal consequences of their ingestion. Recent studies of the African great apes support a hypothesis in progress that the non-nutritional ingestion of certain plant species aid in the control of parasite infection and provide relief from related gastrointestinal upsets. Detailed behavioral, pharmacological and parasitological investigations of two such behaviors, bitter pith chewing and leaf swallowing, have been conducted on three East African chimpanzee populations, but they are now known to occur widely among all chimpanzee subspecies, as well as bonobos and lowland gorillas. For both bitter pith chewing and leaf swallowing, selection of the same plant species tends to occur among neighboring groups of same ape species. These local cultural traditions of plant selection may be transmitted when females of the same species transfer into non-natal groups. However, selection of the same plant species or species of related plant genera by two sympatric ape species or between regional populations of great ape subspecies strongly suggests a common criteria of medicinal plant selection. This and the intriguing observation that the same medicinal plant is selected by apes and humans with similar illnesses provide insight into the evolution of medicinal behavior in modern humans and the possible nature of self-medication in early hominids. The occurrence of these and other specific self-medicative behaviors, such as fur rubbing and geophagy, in primates and other animal taxa suggest the existence of an underlying mechanism for the recognition and use of plants and soils with common medicinal or functional properties. Yrbk Phys Anthropol 40:171-200, 1997. © 1997 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
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All that study shows is that chimpanzees instinctively seek out various herbs in order to get rid of parasites that they would get via natural, raw foods. They naturally increase the range of their diets even with respect of parasite-infested foods, for survival purposes.
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In my case everyone else tells me I'm underweight, though I do have a little flab on my belly they usually don't see, so it's not just a figment of my imagination or the result of some bodybuilding fantasy. Robb Wolff even said that he was "emaciated" when he was at a weight and height that was less thin that I am now--though his view is probably a little skewed by working in the bodybuilding/fitness field. I'll even send you a photo of myself if you like, so you can judge for yourself. Rather than lose weight on RPD, since starting it I vary between 5 - 10 lbs. heavier. I see this as a sign of improved health in someone who was in poor health, with poor digestion and a damaged gut, and still has a ways to go.
If you do indeed have a little extra flab on the stomach, that would indicate that you were a little above your ideal weight, IMO.
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All that study shows is that chimpanzees instinctively seek out various herbs in order to get rid of parasites that they would get via natural, raw foods. They naturally increase the range of their diets even with respect of parasite-infested foods, for survival purposes.
I don't think so Tyler.
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As for weight-gain, raw foods seem to constantly cause weight-loss, with the sole exception of raw dairy(and possibly) raw fermented grains.
Our member Diogene wrote in msg35742 (http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/welcoming-commitee/new-frenchy-coming/msg35742/#msg35742) that he recovered from 32 or 34 kg ??? to 54 kg thanks to the practice of instinctive nutrition – his instinct led him to eat exclusively meat during 2 months.
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What limits their intake for instance is largely a matter of environmental constraints or limited availability of food in natural biotopes as well as many many other factors.
Of course there are cases where a food is in limited availability, but there are also a lot of cases where the amount available is largely over what an animal or man can ingest in a single meal. When our ancestors killed an elephant or an hippopotamus, I doubt that a few of them could eat it all at once. The same applies on seashores where are abundant mussels, oysters, clams or other seashells as well as seaweeds. And when fruits are ripe on a tree, there’s also often more than an animal or human can eat at once. Fallen mangoes cover the ground under some trees in season. Even a single jackfruit (up to 30 kg) is more than one could eat in a meal. A sea turtle lays about 120 eggs: would you eat’em all at once if you found the nest ? We should not forget that nature provided a lot of food before we destroyed most of it.
Moreover there is always an alimentary culture i.e. animals do learn from their mother at weaning what to eat, when, how to find it etc.
It’s clear that both instinct and training converge and do not exclude each other mutually.
Francois
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Of course there are cases where a food is in limited availability, but there are also a lot of cases where the amount available is largely over what an animal or man can ingest in a single meal. When our ancestors killed an elephant or an hippopotamus, I doubt that a few of them could it all at once.
precisely why the food consumed is not chosen in terms of what is necessary but what is available? in nature this turns out to be roughly the same and adequate for survival, whether its always the ideal for thriving is a completely other conversation but most importantly animals or primitives do not have the full spectrum at each moment to choose. They might eat per instincts, but they don't eat with the idea that they will have such wide choices in the future in a comfortable controlled setting. for beings in an artificial situation, whether they be toxic or 'pure' humans, or completely feral animals, if you have the widest spectrum of food available or the narrowest, it distorts the picture. Fill a box/fridge with junk foods, fill it with natural foods, it does not matter there is no way an animal unleashed on it will eat in the way of an instincto.
as for Diogene, the healing potential for this diet is not in question - by me anyway, but only the idea that the ultimate 'decision' of what to eat is based on 'instincts' and not within the range of ideas and desires and is less artificial or better than being guided by 'nutrition' or volume or theory any other mental process. Sense of healthfullness might be changed by poor conditions and genetics and can be improved, but the decision is ultimately based more on the learning/cognitive end or pure desires than what may to have to do with what is healthy or unhealthy or in the chosen or dismissed in type or quantity. Also Diogene mentions himself that he plateaus in weight, (at an extremely low weight at that) I think the argument was about maintaining healthy weight, not that raw foods were some kind of continuous weight loss. Even raw vegans can maintain low levels of weight or recover from fasts on purely fruits and vegetables. to me, eating 2 months of meat seems to defy this concept altogether, unless he was deciding from all the natural meals still on a day to day basis which surely would be alot of thrown away food, and likely plucking the idea from somewhere that he might be in need of the meat and meat alone.
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And when fruits are ripe on a tree, there’s also often more than an animal or human can eat at once. Fallen mangoes cover the ground under some trees in season.
I've told you before and this is my last attempt and hope you'll grasp it. This excess of mangoes is temporary in nature and contrary to instincto dogma there is no need for a so-called "instinct" that actually keeps its intake to meet the strict needs during this period. The paleo humans or animals gorged on such fruit and ate much more than they needed as modern humans tend to do but our ancestors did it only temporarily. Most of the year there are no mangoes at all and over a one year period they do not overeat fruit and sugar and everything is OK. In constrast, if in civilized especially Burger Château de Montramé environment with mangoes or other sweet fruits available all year round, telling poeple as instincto does, they can eat fruit "until stop" every day all year round results usually in a dietary disaster similar to vegans with not enough animal food and systematic overeating of sugar.
The fondamental "error of reasoning" ;) of instincto or Burger is to assume that evolution has to optimize intrinsic coding of smell and taste in an animal to restrict intakes to strict needs. In fact it is quite sufficient that the whole system (animal+ environment with its constraints) be optimized by evolution to result in health and balance. This point of what's the selection entity in Darwin's natural selection view is a well known problem completely overlooked by Burger.
In other words our intrinsic attraction with respect to sweet tasting food (rare because seasonal) is actually much too strong to ensure a balanced (in terms of sugar intake) diet by itself. We have to limit fruit intake by means of conceptual intelligence. There is nothing like "instinctive" or better intrinsic regulation in this respect.
This definitely falsifies the instincto dogma.
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precisely why the food consumed is not chosen in terms of what is necessary but what is available? in nature this turns out to be roughly the same and adequate for survival, whether its always the ideal for thriving is a completely other conversation but most importantly animals or primitives do not have the full spectrum at each moment to choose. They might eat per instincts, but they don't eat with the idea that they will have choices in the future. for beings in an artificial situation, whether they be toxic or 'pure' humans, or completely feral animals, if you have the widest spectrum of food available or the narrowest, it distorts the picture especially if you make the initial choices. Fill a box/fridge with junk foods, fill it with natural foods, it does not matter there is no way an animal unleashed on it will eat in the way of an instincto.
When I open my fridge, my cat comes running and immediately wants to reach for the meat. He doesn’t care for vegetables nor for fruits since he’s a carnivore: his instinct tells him, I didn’t have to teach him that he is a carnivore…
Someone in good health practicing instinctive nutrition can of course be ok with what is available and do not necessarily need a broad choice everyday. If there are figs on the trees and oysters on a nearby beach, I can thrive on it for some time since I like both. If I’m on a tropical island and have just a jackfruit for my lunch and a big fish for my dinner, that’ll be more than enough. If I’m on an islet where are plenty of seabird’s eggs to eat and seawater to drink, I’ll be fine with it for a while! But my instinct will prevent me from eating coral, grass, tree palms or leaves or anything toxic for me.
A broad choice is useful, at least when one begins to eat raw, but isn’t necessary everyday afterwards. It’s helpful to learn to know what is good for oneself and what might be good. If someone is never confronted to raw liver, raw eggs, raw fish, for exemple, he or she may never know that it can be tasty raw. Moreover, we all have been more or less intoxicated by processed, cooked food, dairy, grain and we are therefore all more or less sick. Some specific foodstuff, different in each case, may be particularly helpful to overcome a disease or long lasting disorder. Primitive humans and wild animals in perfect health can certainly live with a restricted range of main food, per example fish and coconuts. But the case is quite different for us since we have to reconstruct what has been constructed with bad materials, I mean cooked stuff.
as for Diogene, the healing potential for this diet is not in question - by me anyway, but only the idea that the ultimate 'decision' of what to eat is based on 'instincts' and not within the range of ideas and desires and is less artificial or better than being guided by 'nutrition' or volume or theory any other mental process.
The problem with nutritional theories is that our science is unable to apprehend the whole picture. It’s ways too complicated, there are billions of different substances and interactions. Moreover we are all different, different genetics, different history, different illnesses, different deficiencies. We don’t understand life, how can we understand nutrition, figure out what is healthy or unhealthy? Animals and paleo-humans haven’t checked the weight nor the volume of their food intake. They have never eaten according to an ideology or theory.
Even raw vegans can maintain low levels of weight or recover from fasts on purely fruits and vegetables. to me, eating 2 months of meat seems to defy this concept altogether, unless he was deciding from all the natural meals still on a day to day basis which surely would be alot of thrown away food, and likely plucking the idea from somewhere that he might be in need of the meat and meat alone.
As I understood, he was instinctively attracted by meat, and meat alone. If you know that meat has been tasty meals after meal, you do not have to buy anything else than meat for the next days! You can just smell the other foodstuffs at the market or in the nature and check whether their smells attracts you or not.
Ok, I hope my answers were not too much out of the window… I see that Alphagruis has just posted and I’ll respond to him now.
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I am in complete agreement with Alphagruis on the preponderance of training and culture in several fields, particularly in visceral attraction for sauerkraut and fresh butter... As for knowing what kind of motivations pushes the apes to consume medicinal plants, it would be essential to ask them to know the truth.
I observed several times that animals can find medicinal plants without any training: for example cats separated very early without having had time to make the least ramble in the nearby fields in company of their mother, can recognize the specific grass (catnip) and consume it in case they have intestinal problems. It’s the same for other animals.
In addition, I noticed that humans are language gifted, which provides the advantage they can be asked the reasons of their behaviors. They systematically describe modifications of olfactive attractions exerted by the medicinal plants according to their health condition. It stands true for example for cassia fistula, which takes a bitter, nauseating smell in case of diarrhea tendency and change to Belgian chocolate in the event of constipation.
This leads me to think that animals, whose sense of smell is by far more efficient than that of the remains of apes we are, can recognize among the natural pharmacopeias the specific plants useful for them, and that the first detections made on the ground are then memorized and transmitted by imitation, i.e. they enter the “culture” of the group. This point of view is compatible with the opinion of the researchers as it appears from both of these sentences: "strongly suggests a common criteria of medicinal plant selection" and "suggest the existence of an underlying mechanism for the recognition and use of plants and soils with common medicinal or functional properties".
The innate and acquired cannot be dissociated, hence this apparent oscillation from one to the other in explanations of behaviors. It seems to me equally stupid to put everything on the account of the acquired as to put the whole lot on the account of the innate. Personally, I never thought nor said (contrary to what Alphagruis insinuates) that the existence of innate alliesthesic mechanisms excludes in any way the utility of training. Quite on the contrary, a training is imperatively necessary so that conditionings against nature remaining from the culinary context get erased and leave the field free to the innate reflexes. It’s this rehabilitation of the instinct that constitutes the main part of the instinctive nutrition practice such as I defined it.
For the question expressed here by Alphagruis (http://paleocru.webatu.com/forum/index.php/topic,10.msg345.html#msg345): “Why would it be necessary to transmit that by culture between the animals if each animal can find these plants all alone with its supposedly alimentary "instinct" or else?” the answer is simple: it is advantageous from the evolution viewpoint that the instinctive mechanisms (in particular alliesthesic mechanisms) are integrated in a transmissible group’s behavior by imitation. It shortcuts the necessity to wait for the animal in need of a particular plant to passes by chance in the vicinity to be able to profit from it: the “culture” of the group is given the job to put him in situation. He can then consume it insofar as his olfactory and gustatory mechanisms indicate the plant usefulness to him. The SWD fed zoologists who observed the phenomenon certainly found a bitter taste to the sheets the chimps chewed, but the latter, practitioners of instinctive nutrition since early childhood, would obviously have found a very different flavor to it.
Yet, what is advised by the “instincto” model? To place at disposal, on the basis of our knowledge of the human food range (thus of the culture), all that is prone to be consumed, so that the instinct (thus nature) can decide under the best possible conditions which are the most suitable stuff to ingest at the moment. It has never been question of letting the sense of smell lead the consumers towards an useful food located miles away, but rather of benefiting from the little smell ability we still have left to recognize the most appropriate food in a given choice. Could Alphagruis have understood my position, this time?
gcb
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Yet, what is advised by the “instincto” model? To place at disposal, on the basis of our knowledge of the human food range (thus of the culture), all that is prone to be consumed, so that the instinct (thus nature) can decide under the best possible conditions which are the most suitable stuff to ingest at the moment. It has never been question of letting the sense of smell lead the consumers towards an useful food located miles away, but rather of benefiting from the little smell ability we still have left to recognize the most appropriate food in a given choice. Could Alphagruis have understood my position, this time?
Lovely post, but the problem I have with the above is that these "best possible conditions" are extremely poor and artificial for moderns. Necessarily instinctual eating needs to take place in the wild, or at least with food supplied like it would be in the wild and this is fairly impossible.
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When I open my fridge, my cat comes running and immediately wants to reach for the meat. He doesn’t care for vegetables nor for fruits since he’s a carnivore: his instinct tells him, I didn’t have to teach him that he is a carnivore…
I appreciate your responses but I do feel like you are stretching your ideas to cover things I'm not even disputing and not addressing at all my specific points. Especially when you speak of nutrition in ways that are clearly not geared towards someone who basically agrees the same substances in diet, and various other things about paleo man and metric scales and such which is totally obvious.
I understand that people do not need basic components of nutrition on a day to day or even month to year basis, and that people have been known to live off fruit or even specific types of fruits for long periods or as you mention societies or animals who have pretty limited diets. This does not change my opinion that these people do not make their individual food choices on instinct and smell and believe that simple changes in circumstances and improper activity, as well the pollution and internal toxins are definitive factors. Frr most they are just going on availability which with in a balanced circumstance as I mentioned, seems to work out at least for survival.
as for Mr. Cat its obvious that a pure carnivore is not a very sound example to promote this concept of deciding between a spectrum of omni-market food nor is a domesticated animal that is 100% dependent on you which is in turn largely dependent on artificial sources, choices, and quantities. Cats are also notorious snobby in their choices. Periodlic starving might prove interesting Re: whether it will eat vegetables, cat food, or a squid or other animals it might not prefer in your fridge. You seemed to miss the crucial point of moving the wild animal into a different spectrum of choice and quantity w/o effort or strain and with the confidence that the future food would come as easily. I don't see how you can deny this doesn't impact how one consumes food and what types and quantities especially once we desire less activity and are content with builds that would not survive in nature - in the long haul anyway. The whole "we do the best we can" idea or that all are toxic, while reasonable, do not address that a wild animal (or presumably human) no matter how pure and for the ease of comparison - omnivorous, would not behave the same. And therefore it is not 100% about purity or disease impairing our natural notions of what makes us well. Please consider a Wild Boar in your kitchen.
perhaps this is better example:
if you pluck an animal or primitive into a in-closed environment that is large enough that they do not know of captivity, and you started adjusting the quantities of things or, completely eliminate the possibility of such foods and many generations had passed, they would not know that these foods provided nutrition that they might need. Put foods with higher palatability, altered nutrient content in close proximity than those that were more difficult and it would shift further. Our world might be similarly changed. If not, its totally plausible that crabs and lobsters and other deep seafood might taste the best and might be suited to a different animal. Juicy Mango might be meant to appeal to megafauna that can swallow big seeds, it might appeal to our senses purely for entrapment by megafauna.
You seem to think I'm saying these things have no benefit, I just don't agree that they are determined by instinct no mater how healthy one becomes. In the simple component of mono eating, perhaps since most animals in nature eat this way, that is of our design, but thoughts or research and not desires or smells might drive us to adding fat to our lean meat. Perhaps even primitives that were instructed to be fed better ratios of fat or or given it in times of scarcity or had more variety (or less variety and added artificial quantity of individual foods that are the most optimal, like game) could have lived longer. Although this not worth getting into here. The point is ones satisfaction and sense, no matter how in-tuned, might not be the optimal situation for what is needed for either healing OR maintenance, even though it might for some be more than adequate.
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I've told you before and this is my last attempt and hope you'll grasp it. This excess of mangoes is temporary in nature and contrary to instincto dogma there is no need for a so-called "instinct" that actually keeps its intake to meet the strict needs during this period. The paleo humans or animals gorged on such fruit and ate much more than they needed as modern humans tend to do but our ancestors did it only temporarily. Most of the year there are no mangoes at all and over a one year period they do not overeat fruit and sugar and everything is OK.
Thanks for your ceaseless attempts to teach me that, but I’m so dumb that I still cannot agree. For I lived in the tropics long enough to grasp the fact that there are ripe fruits the whole year round - or almost depending on the place (a fact that you have apparently not grasped). The mango season lasts about 6 months and when it’s over there are several other kinds of fruits, many of them available the whole year. You’re right that here fruits are all seasonal ; but our instinct allows us to fill up when they are available. After a variable number of big meals of wild cherries, for example, their taste becomes so acid, even bitter, that it spontaneously stops our intake.
In constrast, if in civilized especially Burger Château de Montramé environment with mangoes or other sweet fruits available all year round, telling poeple as instincto does, they can eat fruit "until stop" every day all year round results usually in a dietary disaster similar to vegans with not enough animal food and systematic overeating of sugar.
What Burger tells is quite different: he warns that our “instinctive stop” doesn’t work well with modern, grafted and artificially selected fruits since they have been selected especially to circumvent the instinctive stop signals. So the advice is to prefer wild fruits or the least artificially selected, and in case it’s not possible, train oneself to be aware of the repletion feeling to compensate for an excessive attraction.
The fondamental "error of reasoning" ;) of instincto or Burger is to assume that evolution has to optimize intrinsic coding of smell and taste in an animal to restrict intakes to strict needs. In fact it is quite sufficient that the whole system (animal+ environment with its constraints) be optimized by evolution to result in health and balance. This point of what's the selection entity in Darwin's natural selection view is a well known problem completely overlooked by Burger.
In other words our intrinsic attraction with respect to sweet tasting food (rare because seasonal) is actually much too strong to ensure a balanced (in terms of sugar intake) diet by itself. We have to limit fruit intake by means of conceptual intelligence. There is nothing like "instinctive" or better intrinsic regulation in this respect.
The fundamental error is in your warped way of understanding the instincto theory. Evolution has optimized our genetic code according to the environment as it was at time. Burger emphasizes that our environment has changed ever since and that a specific training is necessary because of environmental alterations.
This definitely falsifies the instincto dogma.
There’s no such thing as “instincto dogma”. The instincto theory is not a religion, quite the opposite. It’s rather your denial which appears dogmatic to me.
Moreover, to decree that the theory is falsified because fruits are seasonal outside the tropics (of which our specie spread away only recently) and that we’ve got to limit our intake of modern fruits by our conceptual intelligence, is alike to pretend so because we use our intelligence to keep away from the cooked and processed food available at every street corner.
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How long was mango season 300 years ago?
Also, what indigenous tribes eat as much fruit as instinctos?
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For I lived in the tropics long enough to grasp the fact that there are ripe fruits the whole year round - or almost depending on the place (a fact that you have apparently not grasped). The mango season lasts about 6 months and when it’s over there are several other kinds of fruits, many of them available the whole year. You’re right that here fruits are all seasonal ; but our instinct allows us to fill up when they are available. After a variable number of big meals of wild cherries, for example, their taste becomes so acid, even bitter, that it spontaneously stops our intake.
Fruits have been widely spread all over the world thanks to modern travel means. For example, banana comes from South Asia, and was not available elsewhere before the XVIth century.
In addition, thanks to selection, fruits seasons have been extended. The mango season can last a few months longer than in the wild (3 months in Polynesia and French West Indies), and even mango tree can give fruits several times (3-4 times) in the year if they are pruned to stress the tree.
So "having fruits the whole year round", even in the tropics, is a recent phenomena.
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I've never believed the tropical year long fruit salad idea. This world doesn't work like that...
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even if we come from complete paradise, and are the polished definition of omnivorous and therefore can thrive off any number of combinations of natural foods, and all our senses were pure and desires healthy it still makes no sense to me as a modern methodology for finding optimal nutrition within artificial circumstances. Once you take that person or animal into an unnatural setting, where the abundance has shifted in any direction, and there is very little energy, strength, or skill involved or required otherwise for daily activity, than the choices clearly change in quantity and type. Even the appearance of thriving in today's nature as a wanderer would be closer to fiction because of these distortions, and still be fairly challenging, especially to create an optimal intake.
If a Bear's natural habitat was suddenly replaced by tanks of fish and tanks of honey, there would be no way its eating pattern would be the same, no internal toxins required. Dwelling on impurities as reasons for making poor decisions does not fly in terms of the factors of desire and our brain. Simple animal brains know to eat what it can when it can, thus any distortion of this is in fact an artificial signal to the brain which says we can eat for our pleasure, and not have to worry about having prowess to secure other types of nutrition.
Even in paradise an animal or person is just eating what is available, choosing within a range dictated by an internal instinct perhaps, but not deciding that one thing is better than another thing - within that range - based on smell or taste. It just happens that although the ratios change, in total they seem to get correct nutrition, but it might not even be the best and they still might overeat unecessary foods or under-eat things that aren't available. I can see just the idea of such to decide what types or foods are good to eat (only if in this case if one was truly healthy like an animal which seems impossible), but no way on a moment to moment basis comparing meats and fruits and vegetables. No untainted omnivorous animal will do this is a controlled setting, nor would they refuse cooked foods from street corners or picnic baskets. Its exactly intelligence and experience which is required to distinguish healthy things from things that seem appealing and the MOST optimal and necessary from the acceptable. animals DO die from eating poisonous things.
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The problem with claims that plants couldn't be eaten year-round in the tropics is that they are based on an entirely false assumption. For example, in more ancient times, plant-life and animal-life were far more abundant than nowadays. So, the vast forests of ages ago would have provided plenty of raw fruits, albeit a much wider variety thereof with shorter seasonal availability. Plus, there are other plant-foods than just fruit, such as raw veg or roots/tubers, nuts etc.
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Yeah, Iguana alias "Burger told me"
you lived in the tropics during paleo times and know everything about year round availability of fruits or other foods there. There were of course no seasons there and highly sweet modern fruit breeds as mangoes were on plenty of trees everywhere, the whole year round, as in wild modern rain forests or savannahs.
I didn’t mean that I lived in the tropics during paleo times, right ? I said :
(…) there are ripe fruits the whole year round - or almost depending on the place
Mind you, I used the present tense ! I’m fully aware that modern fruits were not common place in the Paleolithic era and that there are few fruits in most primary forests, especially in forests lacking apes or hominids to spread the seeds.
Once more, as Burger himself, just a lot of wishful thinking , completely unsupported or utterly false statements at odds with what we are really told by good science or even worse definitely unfalsifiable statements.
You know, those of the kind Pauli termed as "Not Even Wrong".
Please note that your statement
The paleo humans or animals gorged on such fruit and ate much more than they needed
is equally unfalsifiable.
And just one final word: don't be so angry, keep cool, maybe other more naive people are going to believe you and the already huge number of instinctos worldwide will even further increase in future ;D
What makes me angry is the lost of a former very good friend like you because he compromises himself in insulting people, be they others or myself. By the way, I don’t care at all about the number of “instinctos” worldwide. I’m not a shareholder of “Instincto Inc”. Burger may be wrong, you may be wrong, I may be wrong: what’s the matter? Anyway, we are all more or less wrong and it doesn’t prevent me to sleep.
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IThe problem with claims that plants couldn't be eaten year-round in the tropics is that they are based on an entirely false assumption. For example, in more ancient times, plant-life and animal-life were far more abundant than nowadays. So, the vast forests of ages ago would have provided plenty of raw fruits, albeit a much wider variety thereof with shorter seasonal availability. Plus, there are other plant-foods than just fruit, such as raw veg or roots/tubers, nuts etc.
Exactly, Tyler.
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The problem with claims that plants couldn't be eaten year-round in the tropics is that they are based on an entirely false assumption. For example, in more ancient times, plant-life and animal-life were far more abundant than nowadays. So, the vast forests of ages ago would have provided plenty of raw fruits, albeit a much wider variety thereof with shorter seasonal availability. Plus, there are other plant-foods than just fruit, such as raw veg or roots/tubers, nuts etc.
Tyler maybe you did'nt notice but we were talking about sweet fruits, not at all about other plant parts ;D
In contrast to sweet fruits, there is precisely absolutely no risk of overeating raw leafy parts or tubers because of their high plant defense chemicals content. No instincto or human ever seriously overate such parts of plants and my thesis is precisely that in this case our natural intrinsic or so-called "instinctive" attraction toward these plant parts is (and can be) too weak, quite the opposite as compared to sweet fruits where it is (and can be) too strong. Too strong or too weak as compared to what Burger or instincto dogma claims them to be. In this case of leafy plant parts environmental constraints forced our ancestors to eat them in larger quantities than intrinsic attraction or instinct would urge them to do since it was now really often the only food available all year round .
In other words that's precisely another confirmation of my point that falsifies instincto. The quantities of food eaten by our ancestors and relevant dietary balance was not just a matter of intrinsic attraction or repulsion or "instincts" but actually basically a matter of environmental constraints.
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Lovely post, but the problem I have with the above is that these "best possible conditions" are extremely poor and artificial for moderns. Necessarily instinctual eating needs to take place in the wild, or at least with food supplied like it would be in the wild and this is fairly impossible.
All right: it’s impossible to find back a primitive environment. But any serious physicist will tell you that an experiment is always an approximation of the initial assumptions. By excluding cooking, mixtures, seasonings, animal milk, modified cereals and other plants, the conditions of primitive nutrition are approached very closely already. In any case, close enough for the alliesthesic mechanisms to function with a precision sufficient to control nutritional balance in the long run, BMI, inflammatory tendency and several other criteria of good health. That of course under the condition we use the sensory perception nature provided us to choose and control our food intakes (verified by the fact that the same criteria of equilibrium get lost when instinctive stops are voluntarily trangressed).
gcb
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In contrast to sweet fruits, there is precisely absolutely no risk of overeating raw leafy parts or tubers because of their high plant defense chemicals content. No instincto or human ever seriously overate such parts of plants and my thesis is precisely that in this case our natural intrinsic or so-called "instinctive" attraction toward these plant parts is (and can be) too weak, quite the opposite as compared to sweet fruits where it is (and can be) too strong. Too strong or too weak as compared to what Burger or instincto dogma claims them to be. In this case of leafy plant parts environmental constraints forced our ancestors to eat them in larger quantities than intrinsic attraction or instinct would urge them to do since it was now really often the only food available all year round.
You should better, once and for all, stop distorting my speech to assault it as you do. Or then, you never followed my teaching and you built for yourselves a representation of the instincto corresponding to your own phantasms only and not to the reality.
I’ve been teaching for more than thirty years exactly what you wrote in the preceding paragraph. It’s clear that the fruits were selected so as to remain more attracting that nature, whereas this is not the case for vegetables and tubers. This difference is probably due to the fact that the fruits were generally eaten as they are, whereas the other plants passed by a preparation, so that their savor did not constitutes such a major part in the meal’s pleasure. The relearning of our alimentary instinct, such as defined for example on my website (https://sites.google.com/site/guyclaudeburger/) (page : 'Réapprendre l'instinct alimentaire (https://sites.google.com/site/guyclaudeburger/home/home-1/qu-est-ce-que-l-instincto-/de-l-hypothese-a-l-experimentation/quelles-solutions-concretes/si-vous-voule-tenter-l-experience/le-rapprentissage-de-linstinct-alimentaire)'), precisely consists in benefiting from the sensory system’s capacity of adaptation, so that attractions and repulsions lead to a correct equilibration with the products available today.
In other words that's precisely another confirmation of my point that falsifies instincto. The quantities of food eaten by our ancestors and relevant dietary balance was not just a matter of intrinsic attraction or repulsion or "instincts" but actually basically a matter of environmental constraints
You forget the statistics which have been done for example on chimpanzee’s diet in nature: the fruit share represents about two thirds, that of sheets and roots a quarter, and the remainder consists of proteins (oilseeds, meat and insects). However, the alimentary instinct’s experiment shows that humans come substantially at the same proportions simply by listening to their instinct ¬ subject to the few rules I developed to restore as far as possible an adequate nutritional environment.
Stop playing Don Quichotte, assaulting your own makeover of a teaching which you obviously do not know.
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Hello GCB!
Do you really think raw meat can cause cancer, even without fruits? (AGEs)
Don't you think, it could have been the meat and fruit combination (eaten on same day) that was no good?
As you got this lump at the back of your knee (from raw meat eating), was you eating fruits/sugar too, then?
How comes that meat tastes good to me all the time. If the instincto-theory really worked, I had to get tired of it someday..? (I have never been Vegan or such, always eating meat and fish, so my need for these should not be that big, how it comes thaat I feel better without any fruits at all..)
I don't even think of fruits anymore.
By the way, I used Kassia every morning for three years. Now I have the feeling, it just prevented the nutrients absorbing. No good.
I don't use it anymore.
Inger
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How long was mango season 300 years ago?
Also, what indigenous tribes eat as much fruit as instinctos?
Mango season in my country before all this technology was confined to summer time March, April, May.
Another healer in my area taught me to follow the seasons.
The fruits taste best during their natural season.
This June is the start of the rambutan and lanzones season.
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Tyler maybe you did'nt notice but we were talking about sweet fruits, not at all about other plant parts ;D
In contrast to sweet fruits, there is precisely absolutely no risk of overeating raw leafy parts or tubers because of their high plant defense chemicals content. No instincto or human ever seriously overate such parts of plants and my thesis is precisely that in this case our natural intrinsic or so-called "instinctive" attraction toward these plant parts is (and can be) too weak, quite the opposite as compared to sweet fruits where it is (and can be) too strong. Too strong or too weak as compared to what Burger or instincto dogma claims them to be. In this case of leafy plant parts environmental constraints forced our ancestors to eat them in larger quantities than intrinsic attraction or instinct would urge them to do since it was now really often the only food available all year round .
In other words that's precisely another confirmation of my point that falsifies instincto. The quantities of food eaten by our ancestors and relevant dietary balance was not just a matter of intrinsic attraction or repulsion or "instincts" but actually basically a matter of environmental constraints.
Oh, sorry. I was just talking in general re the usual pro-ZC biased claims that plant-foods were rare in the tropics.
(Minor aside:- I seem to recall some claims by scientists that we are naturally attracted to fats and sugars precisely because they were more rarely available in the environment).
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How long was mango season 300 years ago?
Also, what indigenous tribes eat as much fruit as instinctos?
GS answered your first question. But there are not only mangoes as fruits. A short look at this List of culinary fruits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_culinary_fruits) is well worth a few seconds. Quote: "Many sorts of small fruit on this list are gathered from the wild, just as they were in Neolithic times."… and probably in Paleolithic times as well !
For the second question, nowadays-indigenous tribes all eat cooked food, so the comparison is distorted. Instinctos are not required to eat fruits! For example Diogene mentioned he ate exclusively meat for two months.
I cannot balance without fruits, but that could be personal.
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(Minor aside:- I seem to recall some claims by scientists that we are naturally attracted to fats and sugars precisely because they were more rarely available in the environment).
Yes absolutely Tyler.
It's actually not a minor aside at all. It's precisely and exactly one central point in my falsification of instincto. Attraction of fat and sugar is as strong as it is to ensure our ancestors did not miss the relevant fairly rare foods in natural paleo environment and what limited the overeating of such foods in paleo times was by no means a mysterious "instinct" and encoded "instincto stop" but merely environmental constraints.
By the way this is actually a very general well known feature of order formation in complex self organized systems. Such order (here health and dietary balance) is an emergent phenomenon that is brought about by interplay of highly non linear positive feedback or autocatalytic processes (here strong gustary pleasure associated with eating fat or sugar) and drastic environmental constraints (here food availability) that prevent these processes to diverge (as they do more or less systematically in instincto) .
This means obviously that contrary to what Burger "teaches" for instance here
http://www.rawtimes.com/anopsy1.html
17. Taking account of the alimentary instinct suggests a particularly simple and efficient way of approaching the problem of dietetics. Instead of assessing the needs of the organism from the outside (with all the risks of diagnosis in the face of the extraordinary complexity of nutritional processes and their inevitable fluctuations over time), it is enough to comply with the olfactory and gustatory pleasures, expressions of an instinct which is directly in touch with the body's actual needs and which can track unforeseeable and sometimes surprising variations in quantity. Note that Anopsotherapy is not a "diet" ; it implies no obligation nor any prohibition against nature. It tends to eliminate the artifices that are likely to defeat the aliesthetic mechanism (or to pose problems not manageable by metabolic processes). For the artificial scheme of diagnosis - prescription it substitutes the natural process of probing - acquiescence.
it is definitely and precisely not enough and by far "to comply with the olfactory and gustatory pleasures" in order to ensure dietary balance and "body's actual needs".
In other words there is unfortunately no "instinct" or better in scientific words no such a simple ordering principle as claimed by Burger in quote above that still ensures or ever ensured in the past dietary balance and there was not even any need of it.
Again Burger wrongly assumes that natural selection must have led to and optimized such a subtle encoded principle in every organism or animal. Not every feature of a living organism has to be optimized by natural selection, things are a little bit more subtle than that.
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I'm relatively new to all this and appreciate the debates.
Maybe we should move the instincto critiques to a separate thread?
Just as we let the Pro-Primal Diet thrive in their own section. Let's let Instincto thrive here.
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author=Inger link=topic=211.msg37791#msg37791 date=1276819156
Do you really think raw meat can cause cancer, even without fruits? (AGEs) Don't you think, it could have been the meat and fruit combination (eaten on same day) that was no good?
It is always difficult to separate the variables. Is it the protein excess in itself, the more specific meats protein excess, or the combination with other molecules as consequence of an insufficient degradation? I'm just testing on myself to distinguish the things by experimenting. I leave always at least half an hour between the intake of animal sources of protein and vegetable’s intake to avoid the formation of AGE’s (along with others substances not yet identified which I more generally called "molecules foreign to the normal metabolic cycle"). Even in this condition, observation of the hyper-keratinisations immediately allows to see if there is an overload, for example small skins fragments which raise around the nails and become painful at the touch, cracks at the end of the fingers, warts which increase volume, layer of keratin on feet, neoplasic formations, etc.
As you got this lump at the back of your knee (from raw meat eating), were you eating fruits/sugar too, then?
At the time when I saw this tumour growing on the tendon at the exterior of the knee, I was experimenting to eat much meat (beef, porc and lamb), by seeking a clear instinctive stop in order to see if it existed. I did not take any precaution concerning associations, because at the time the issue of AGEs had not appeared yet.
How comes that meat tastes good to me all the time?
Are you eating wild game meat or meat from domestic animals such as beef, lamb or porc? The instinctive stop is extremely indistinct with meats of domesticated animals whereas it’s very clear with game meats (chamois, roe-deer, wild boar, marmot and so on, as well as with shellfish, crustaceans, wild fish, etc). Thus, try any game at least once to see whether you are really attracted by wild meat.
If the instincto-theory really worked, I had to get tired of it someday..?
Exactly! This phenomenon often occurs in the first years of instinctive nutrition. For example, I could eat kilos of honey, up to more than one kilo in a day without the least digestive nor other problem, this during perhaps two years. The same with pollen: an incredible diet of pollen, it appeared as attractive to me as lined biscuits but afterward the quantities fell. I feel now generally satisfied after some spoons of honey, the rare days when it attracts me by its smell. Pollen becomes dry and without taste sometimes after the first spoonful. The same happens with every food, provided it is sufficiently close to the primitive form. For example, durian: when I discovered this fruit, it appeared so attractive to me that I thought I’ll be able to eat it for ever in large quantities. Then the margin between what I call "luminous phase" and "unpleasant phase" became increasingly narrow. I eat it now with the same delight, but in moderate amount.
The problem is to interpret this phenomenon: first, the change shows a selfregulation (= instinct) exists. Then, it could be either a saturation due to the fact that, in the end, one cannot bear any more a certain absorptive total quantity of some toxic or antigenic components of a product. Or more probably, considering the whole picture provided by the observation of many people, a process of compensation, either of old deficiencies due to traditional food or a form of "reconstruction" of the body with natural substances, for example by stimulating the elimination of old foreign molecules thanks to a massive contribution of suitable molecules.
By the way, I used Kassia every morning for three years. Now I have the feeling, it just prevented the nutrients absorbing. No good. I don't use it anymore.
It is true that cassia fistula in excess can prevent the absorption of the nutrients, especially if we eat it in too large quantities or in an unbalanced way. But that occurs only if one eats it by principle, without taking account of the instinctive call. It is not difficult to identify the need for cassia with a chocolate taste making it very pleasant. I never saw it being harmful under these conditions. On the other hand, to do without it by principle can have disastrous consequences by preventing our body to eliminate some toxins through the intestinal tract. The toxins exit then often by other ways, in the form of "elimination crisis". There are in nature all kinds of plants which could have properties similar to cassia fistula, but we didn’t spot them yet. Therefore, to remove cassia locks the body in an environment where it cannot achieve its normal functions any more. More still if fruits are removed…
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Maybe we should move the instincto critiques to a separate thread?
Just as we let the Pro-Primal Diet thrive in their own section. Let's let Instincto thrive here.
GS, Part of this thread was a discussion in a totally non-instincto thread/journal that was moved by one of the main instincto posters to here. I don't think people are attacking the possibility of thriving on the diet or 'danger' like people sometimes do with PD, but specific points which apply in some ways to all of paleo/raw type eating. For instance, the issues in the other thread was about amounts of food and amounts of types of foods, being dictated by instinct, and that these are distorted by internal toxins and not at all to do with environment and distorted activity from aquireing food. Making the point that everyone else was basically 'wrong'. I think as alphagruis points out, it has way more to do with the environment, which is a general comment on natural diet and choice.
No proof of original paradise disputes that even wild animals do not eat this way in contained environments or really even in natural environments in choosing between two food choices within their diet range - completely based on the best nutrition. We just happen to be even more worse off due to deficiency and toxin which distorts ours desires but it doesn't define them as they in nature have their own distortions per circumstance. Looking at natural situations -in this case- has little value other than assumptions that beings always got 100% their best sources of nutrition in a balanced copious environment, which in itself does not alone disprove intellectual manipulation by a stronger intellect might be superior.
using chimps and trying to find their natural setting to see what they do is completely useless in disputing this, even if we have 100% the same requirements and ratios, you could do very simple experiments of controlled artificial circumstances which would cause chimps to eat away from optimal range with 100% their own choosing. Even if give an excess of their most abundantly required food, and bringing them to a food storehouse or market, they would not dismiss more fruits based on smell or taste, and roam around searching out their most needed nutrients. Especially if their specific nutrient needs were not even satisfied by what was there. Therefore even their natural balance which was outlined would be changed and would be worse off than other captive chimps fed high quality percentages of foods based in knowledge of their environment, and they would not refuse the foods in likely any order given.
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No proof of original paradise disputes that even wild animals do not eat this way in contained environments or really even in natural environments in choosing between two food choices within their diet range - completely based on the best nutrition. We just happen to be even more worse off due to deficiency and toxin which distorts ours desires but it doesn't define them as they in nature have their own distortions per circumstance. Looking at natural situations -in this case- has little value other than assumptions that beings always got 100% their best sources of nutrition in a balanced copious environment, which in itself does not alone disprove intellectual manipulation by a stronger intellect might be superior.
Yes, very important point. In nature wild animals usually don't have to choose between different foods by smell and taste to supposedly (according to instincto dogma) find out which food is presently best for them and how much they have to eat just because it's rare that two or more different ones (in particular in case of meats, fish or fruits) are available simultaneously at the same spot. They eat or not what's available and how much and what they eat is definitely intertwinned with their daily hunting and/ or foraging activities and by no means just a matter of taste and smell or "instinctive stops".
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GS, I think it's a good idea to split this topic into two threads, as the original thread was simply a question about what Instincto was all about, whereas this is now a thread about the pros and cons of Instincto. Both should stay in the Instincto forum, though, I think.
As for me, I find some of the ideas behind Instincto persuasive to some extent, purely because of my own experience. That is, my digestive system was so badly damaged by the time I went rawpalaeo, that I found that mono-eating was the best solution re digestion. It took some time before my digestion was flawless when mixing 2 different raw animal foods together, for example.
Then there was the raw dairy issue:- some years back, back when I was in my raw-dairy-phase, my mother(well we all know how mothers are) mentioned how I constantly rejected the raw buffalo milk she offered to me as I was being weaned as an infant. This seemed to imply that my natural instincts warned me at the time that this, re taste/smell, was a particularly dangerous food for me. Unfortunately, constant pressure and exposure to the raw dairy meant that I quickly developed cravings for the stuff(cravings for the very foods one is allergic to are a common trait).
Another point is that I used to be assured by some that raw grassfed meats were as good as raw wild game, but I objected, as raw wild game had a far better, richer taste, generally speaking - I subsequently found,via Cordain etc., that raw wild game is inherently superior, nutrient-wise.
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Mango season in my country before all this technology was confined to summer time March, April, May.
Here is a concrete fact: three months of wild mangos in the Philippines. Here in France, about 3 months of figs, in the rainforest of Borneo several months of wild cempedak or wild durian and so on.
These fruits and many others thus do not appear just the time for someone to barely overfeed and then disappear in order to avoid any serious nutriment’s overload to animals and hominids excessively found of sugar. One day under (or on) a fruit tree is enough for an animal to dangerously overfeed if there’s nothing to limits its ration. It is undoubtedly for this reason that the emergent function ensuring nutritional regulation includes a large intrinsic part: the animal limits itself spontaneously with every natural product, because there are frequent situations where the natural products are available in amounts sufficient to endanger its physiological balance and temporary capacity to flee or respond to a predator’s attack. This intrinsic part of the regulation appears by various alliesthesic mechanisms (sense of smell, taste, repletion, dislike, etc): it is precisely what I call the alimentary instinct.
This June is the start off the rambutan and lanzones season.
It’s in my turn to ask you a question: are there during the year, in the Philippines, periods without wild fruit? Let us point out for Alphagruis that the existence of such periods does not exclude at all the utility – neither in terms of survival capacity and evolution nor in terms of emergent functions – of regulation mechanisms ensuring nutritional balance during each specific fruit season.
Maybe we should move the instincto critiques to has separate thread?
It is true that this thread is named “Explain Instincto Diet Fully”, and that the object should be to explain how and why it functions. But how do want you to calm the detractors who cannot stand >: the idea that an alimentary instinct does exist?
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the point is even if animals have a natural stopping point with food, they don't when it is artificially controlled even if they are healthy.
Since actual criticisms about pure wild animals as example are not even being addressed at all, obviously the use of such instincts to overcome BOTH toxic inheritance AND unnatural environment, surplus of choice, and no requirement of prowess or ability in obtaining them, have still not been sufficiently explained.
in the case of chimps, many of these protein sources that make up the smaller part of their diet would be coming from insects and the like. Wouldn't it then be that a human would likely salivate more at the nutrition of a large spider over that of wild bear meat or a deep ocean fish? which would prove difficult in obtaining especially if this so called optimal approach does not produce the greatest specimens in strength and speed even among the contemporary human race. Nevermind our ancestors no matter what diet they were on.
Stopping point in nature is totally different anyway with how any human today possibly eats, if a day of reaching that stopping point can be repeated again and again on store bought food, and even if as mentioned they do some kind of pretentious wild foods walk without predators. Frutarians make the same comments about shifting in flavors of food and yet switch to the same exact classifications when foods go out of season or begin to taste strange. One can say even pure frutarians are neglecting some instinct at that point to search out other types of foods, or are merely not well enough to have this sense, but they still arrive at a stopping point in eating, which according to them, becomes refined over time in a similar fashion in terms of how much to eat. of course they don't have the size, strength or activity level necessary if they were to run down wild game and certainly would continue choosing fruits on preference over grubs and things based on smell and taste. Unless you can actually run down an animal, how do you know what requirements exactly your nutrition is serving if they are sufficient for wellness or simply existing on artificial circumstances? Obviously people can eat all manner of ratios of foods and survive, it doesn't mean that the ratios even in nature are optimal. Some calorie restricted chimps and things fed higher % meat have lived longer.
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Perhaps the thread has run its course where we can all take something from it. I think alphagruis' "falsifies instincto" comes across as too strong as you only need one minor point of contention to technically falsify one's way of eating. To me it seems clear that there is obviously an element of instincts that come into play when deciding what to eat and how often and its not wholly completely simply surviving on what is easiest available. I've seen lions kill other carnivores and leave the meat untouched even though it seems it would be beneficial in some way for the pride to eat the meat (perhaps not, animals usually know what they are doing). GCB also seems to make too strong of statement where he states that our instincts completely fail us ("extremely indistinct") when eating domesticated animals. Perhaps there is a middle ground.
For me, I think the emphasis on eating wild game is now enough to at least make a point in the future to attempt at securing it on a regular basis and I thank this thread for that.
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GS, I think it's a good idea to split this topic into two threads, as the original thread was simply a question about what Instincto was all about, whereas this is now a thread about the pros and cons of Instincto. Both should stay in the Instincto forum, though, I think.
For me, explanations and critiques work fine together, clashes generating further clarifications and questionings. Critiques are welcome, since there would be no point in discussing between people already agreeing on everything.
Most of us agree on the main points and as far as I know, Alphagruis also agrees on the principle to eat raw, without proceeding, without grain, (also without dairy and mixing, still ?) as well as the “new model of the viral phenomenon”, the usefulness of bacteria sicknesses as GCB theorized it decades ago, and even that we should not ignore our alliestesics signals. In this case case, the divergences are minor.
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GCB,
Are you eating wild game meat or meat from domestic animals such as beef, lamb or pork? The instinctive stop is extremely indistinct with meats of domesticated animals whereas it's very clear with game meats (chamois, roe-deer, wild boar, marmot and so on, as well as with shellfish, crustaceans, wild fish, etc). Thus, try any game at least once to see whether you are really attracted by wild meat.
I usually eat pastured beef, and wild caught fish, like halibut.
But it differs with wild meat. Deer I cant eat long time, then it tastes strange to me, same boar.
Elch I never get tired of.. Strange..?! Halibut is also wild, I don't get tired of it eather, I usually eat 150-200 gram per serving. Linden leaves I never get tired of, I love them. Every singel day.
What do you think about pig (also boar?) and cancer? Could there be a connection?
Why is it that so many traditions do not allow to eat pig.
When i eat Kassia I never used more than a teaspoon or two / day. I still have the feelings it somehow was not healthy for me. Especially not for my teeth's.
It also soon can get a bulimic note, you eat too much / strange combinations, then just take Kassia and all is good (because it comes out fast the other way and you feel good again.. ).
I used it this way too myself back then, I just did not wanted to see it.
Somehow I also have the feeling it is no good to eat all these fruits etc. what naturally is not growing here in the north.
I come from Finland, and I feel so good on only animal foods - zero fruits. Could it be that for high fruit consumption to be healthy, you need a lot of strong sunshine, like in the tropics?
That's what I start to believe..
Inger
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It’s in my turn to ask you a question: are there during the year, in the Philippines, periods without wild fruit?
No. There are fruits all the time. There will always be some fruit in season. It is a never ending abundance of fruits in the Philippines.
Coconuts, bananas and papayas are always in season.
I notice me and my children have some sort of instinct for fruit and meat and we try to follow that. Although these instincts may be right or wrong sometimes because we are not as 100% raw as is required for instincto (especially my children).
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the point is even if animals have a natural stopping point with food, they don't when it is artificially controlled even if they are healthy.
I’m not sure I catch your point. What do you mean by “artificially controlled”? Healthy or not, there’s an instinctive stop point for the intake of every stuff, even cooked, processed and mixed. The question occurs: is that stop happening after the optimal amount of a specific food has been ingested? Years of experiments with thousands of animals and people show it happens at the optimal point if (and only if ) the stuff is raw, unmixed, unprocessed and wild – except for vegetables which can be of cultivated varieties without problems.
Since actual criticisms about pure wild animals as example are not even being addressed at all, obviously the use of such instincts to overcome BOTH toxic inheritance AND unnatural environment, surplus of choice, and no requirement of prowess or ability in obtaining them, have still not been sufficiently explained.
Please tell what you would like to be explained. Is it the point below, originally from you?
Yes, very important point. In nature wild animals usually don't have to choose between different foods by smell and taste to supposedly (according to instincto dogma) find out which food is presently best for them and how much they have to eat just because it's rare that two or more different ones (in particular in case of meats, fish or fruits) are available simultaneously at the same spot. They eat or not what's available and how much and what they eat is definitely intertwinned with their daily hunting and/ or foraging activities and by no means just a matter of taste and smell or "instinctive stops".
Of course, they can’t eat what is unavailable! When awake, they are quite often searching for something to eat. Doing so, they move around not only because, as you say, it's rare that two or more different food are available simultaneously at the same spot, but because there are plenty of spots where there’s no food at all. Animals don’t eat whatever is available, they eat only what is a food for them and that depend on
- their specie
- their actual state (very hungry or a little bit hungry, metabolic state, healthy or ill, old or young growing up).
How do they know what is actually a food for them, since a particular stuff may be a food for an animal specie while it is a poison for another specie? A fraction of their knowledge can certainly be transmitted by their mother, but even animals having been separated early without any chance of getting trained by their mother know quite well what to eat and what not to eat.
It must be emphasized that the notion of food is relative. Most of the stuff found in the nature is no food for a carnivore, while for a goat there’s much to eat about anywhere over the Earth surface. Hell, how comes that carnivores do not eat what a deer eats? A cat, even separated before any training with his mother and grown up with rabbits won’t in anyway feed on grass. How do they know what is a food for their own specie? Training? Perhaps, for a part. Instinct for the most part.
That damned instinct has apparently for tools the senses of smell and taste. That stands true at least for the mammals, which all have and by a happy coincidence, the nose just over the mouth. Elephants even have an extremely long, flexible nose able to move around somewhat in search for food, constantly checking the smell of what will be ingested while the rest of the huge animal stands more or less still, high above the ground.
:D ;)
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I’m not sure I catch your point. What do you mean by “artificially controlled”?
I gave 4-5 examples of various situations over a number of posts detailing exactly what I mean by changing a wild animals circumstances to mimic modern humans. Perhaps not all of them are good, but at least one should give an idea of what I'm talking about.
Instead of looking at animal in their natural environment, to talk about how pure our instincts can become or return, you need to take the animals and give them the same artificial circumstances and choices and probably make them at minimum comparatively sedentary and atrophied, although that probably isn't even necessary. At least from my end, I'm not contesting animals have a specific range or food or use their instinct to decide between types of food and eat single foods till satisfied. In a nutshell, this is not news.
I've never said animals and humans do not have an innate instinct of what types of things to eat, only skepticism that this instinct causes them to eat an exact optimal percentage of foods or decipher between foods within that range as being better, worse or needed, especially when they are divorced from their environment AND especially when those choices are limited or increased beyond what is natural, or possibly obtainable.
My comment was and remains simple, if you take two types of food which are both compatible for an animal or a human, and take them out of their natural circumstances, the choice between them will NOT depend 100% on which has the best or most needed nutrition. And therefore the idea that our instincts lead us to choosing WITHIN THOSE RANGES the right kinds of foods and ammounts is false. Just having the choice makes far more difference than any internal blockage of instinct IMO and this is why I've cited animals with no mark of cooked food pollution given artificial circumstances. This is way more conclusive than trying to prove anything about our failings and deviations due to millennia of bad habits. Simply put, even within an animals natural diet choices, like a bear with honey, the most appealing thing might not be the most nutritious, and especially with contemporary humans the most nutritious OR the most appealing might not even be able to be obtained through their own capable means which greatly distorts both types and amounts.
If we are closer to chimps, we should not even be possibly eating things like large game meat and things, and certainly not in small percentages based on instincts about how much is necessary to fuel a body incapable of killing a bear due to inactivity, THAT is a distortion and will reflect how much one desires! perhaps we were scavengers and eaters of bugs like chimps, but if that is the case we should as humans relish the rotten foods and grubs, and spiders and deeper sources of nutrition founds in brains and kidneys and things over muscle meats and ocean fish, especially when we are ill or deficient. Similarly our instincts might also drive us to eating feces or mounting others of the same sex, which I'm not passing judgment on but might not be the best smelling or tasting of the options.
So at least from my end, no information about animals in their setting has any value to me in this theory. Of course animals will even smell their food, but as long as it passes whatever test it doesn't weigh if it carries all the nutrition it needs or the best choice at that moment, at that point it eats what is available, so given a completely altered landscape it could never know definitively that is was getting the best nutrition or a facsimile or that there was an artificial abundance of this or that.
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If you do indeed have a little extra flab on the stomach, that would indicate that you were a little above your ideal weight, IMO.
But the rest of me is still fairly skeletal, though improved--thinner than your images. I'd hardly call 5'11+" and 135 lbs. overweight, would you? Besides, I'm not 100% convinced that having a little fat is so terrible and studies have been reporting that being too thin can actually be dangerous. Too many people seem obsessed with shedding every ounce of fat until they look like Death. I haven't found a way yet to add muscle without also adding a small amount of fat. I think it may be in part because of the insulin resistance you reasonably suggested I might have. I'd rather have a little fat than no muscle and I think it's probably more unhealthy to be anorexic-looking, and putting on some weight thrilled my physician and relatives. I'm up from my really skeletal low of 122 lbs, but I've dropped from my recent high of 140 lbs, which means that my relatives are going to start hassling me about being too thin again if they see me this way. Not that it bothers me, it's just a waste of time to have to go through that whole rigmarole of them making lectures before we can get on with life.
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Just look at the number of people who still claim to be "instinctos". There are presently probably not more than a few tens of them, worldwide. After more than 40 years since Burger invented it....
Well, I would disagree as "Instinkto" is reasonably popular among followers of the rarer quirky diets in Germany, for example. And I remember hearing reports from raw-food-gatherings in the US, where it was mentioned that the Instinctos-dieters looked much healthier than the Primal Dieters(simply cutting out all raw dairy, avoiding raw veggie-juice, and preferring raw wild game to other raw meats appears to do wonders, IMO, even if many Instinctos seem to have overdone the raw-plant-food-intake).
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I presume, that Instincto doctrine would imply only eating when hungry, right?
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Well, I would disagree as "Instinkto" is reasonably popular among followers of the rarer quirky diets in Germany, for example. And I remember hearing reports from raw-food-gatherings in the US, where it was mentioned that the Instinctos-dieters looked much healthier than the Primal Dieters(simply cutting out all raw dairy, avoiding raw veggie-juice, and preferring raw wild game to other raw meats appears to do wonders, IMO, even if many Instinctos seem to have overdone the raw-plant-food-intake).
Tyler, I agree that instincto is fairly popular in Germany (and France) in the sense that many people heard about it and a sizable number of them even tried this diet yet very few succeeded to stay on it.
And those very few (as myself) who apparently succeeded actually do not practise instincto but just a form of raw paleo i.e. do not regulate "instinctively" their food intake as Burger claims them to do.
Yet I do not at all underestimate the tremendous outstanding role of instincto and Burger in popularizing and promoting the RAW PALEO concept and diet. Burger was aware of and worked out these ideas more than 40 years ago long before many others came to them in more recent years. Instincto in spite of its unfortunate label implies and is basically a RAW PALEO diet.
What I criticise sharply is that part of instincto which tells people they can regulate their food intake by means of an "instinct" based on olfactory and gustatory sensations. Roughly the stance "eat what smells and tastes goods and so long as it does so and don't bother about food composition, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, omega 3 fatty acids etc". That part is just pseudoscience and unfortunately eventually very dangerous.
The fact is that unfortunately no such simple principle of dietary balance actually exists and that we have to find out and learn how and what to eat to be healthy.
Please notice also that the superiority of wild game meat can be understood in simple terms of healthier diet, life and also sharper naturel selection constraints in the wild as compared to domesticated animals. No need to invoke the dodgy concept of "better adapted instincts" in this respect.
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I usually eat pastured beef
Ok for the pastured beef, but two questions remain open: how is this meat after (or right before) slaughter treated? How do you eat it? All kinds of reasons can make that the organoleptic characteristics of the meat are altered (for example mechanical treatment to make it more tender, grinding, addition of a little salt, too systematically mixing fat and flesh, etc). It is enough to modify a little the organoleptic characteritics of the meat for the alliesthesic mechanisms do not function normally anymore. One can then be accustomed to eat a food very frequently while the body doesn’t have any need for it. The danger is double: on one hand overload in some nutrients, on the other hand a blocking to other foodstuff may occur.
A protein overload is particularly dangerous because of the interactions with the immune system, knowing that the surplus molecules, badly degraded, keep their antigenic structures. The reactions can be of two principal types: a food intolerance of allergic type, or a tolerance which settles with the long-term repetition, i.e. the immune system will not react any more to certain antigen classes close to bovine molecules. It is in my opinion this tolerance (or more exactly the whole lot of these tolerances induced by all kinds of food molecules badly degraded under effect of digestive or metabolic overloads) is partly responsible for the immunity failures which leave the field free to the proliferation of abnormal cells, therefore to cancer.
and wild caught fish, like halibut.
According to what I could very often note, wild fish takes a crippling flavor when a protein overload induced by an overload of meat is present. I fear that your halibut is also victim of an unspecified treatment, for example irradiation, or simply of salt for the conservation.
But it differs with wild meat. Deer I cant eat long time, then it tastes strange to me, same boar.
Absolutely: wild game meat quickly gets a strange taste, which corresponds to the instinctive stop. The rule which has been empirically set is that one should eat only wild meat and only if it is marvelously tasty, just like seasoned (what I call the “luminous phase”). As soon as it takes a strong and unattractive “wild game” savor, it is quite simply that it is useless or harmful.
Elk I never get tired of.. Strange..?! Halibut is also wild, I don't get tired of it eather, I usually eat 150-200 gram per serving.
Check the processes these products are subjected to. They are certainly denatured for an unspecified reason. It is a rule that has always been checked: a product which has a “bottomless well” effect, i.e. one can consume it in excess without it becoming repulsive (or at least not attracting) is a denatured product. You should tell me your total intake of proteins on average per day if you want me to get a better grasp of where you stand, nutritionally speaking.
Linden leaves I never get tired of, I love them. Every singel day.
A repetitive fondness for a nonfood plant precisely testifies to a permanent disorder, which could be due to a systematic protein’s overload. Normally, after having ingested some a few days, the linden leaves should appear detestable to you. Unless, once again, that you bought them in the traditional circuits, where they are very generally hot dried.
What do you think about pig (also boar?) and cancer? Could there be a connection?
Why is it that so many traditions do not allow to eat pig.
The problem is not different of the other wild meats: Care should be taken that the animals live in free range and do not receive a denatured food which could distort the taste of the meat.
Why is it that so many traditions do not allow to eat pig.
To my knowledge this tradition comes from the Jewish religion. It could be explained by the fact why the Jews nourished their pigs with their kitchen left overs. It was then not difficult for them to notice some disorders of behavior in the consumers, the abnormal molecules concentrated in the meat causing an anomalous excitation of the nervous system, for example an aggressiveness or sexual excitation excess, therefore a difficulty to obey the Ten Commands…
When i eat Kassia I never used more than a teaspoon or two / day. I still have the feelings it somehow was not healthy for me. Especially not for my teeth's.
One or two teaspoons can be an excess, if your body does not need any cassia this day. The absolute quantity does not make sense since it does not take account of the real needs of the body. Excess starts at the time one absorbs a quantity exceeding the need (or digestive potential). Perhaps there are days when you would need carob, or another antidiarrhea
It also soon can get a bulimic note, you eat too much / strange combinations, then just take Kassia and all is good (because it comes out fast the other way and you feel good again.. ). I used it this way too myself back then, I just did not wanted to see it.
Indeed, a vicious circle can settle: alimentary errors --> excess of cassia --> new nutritional error, etc. It is enough to avoid alimentary errors, and to respect with cassia as with the other products the indications of the sensory organs.
Somehow I also have the feeling it is no good to eat all these fruits etc. what naturally is not growing here in the north.
I thought the same thing during years, then experiments led me to reverse the idea: we evolved from primates which would have adapted during million years to tropical countries, so that an exotic choice of products compensates for the scarcity of adequate products in our current habitat (which would probably never have been possible without the use of fire).
I come from Finland, and I feel so good on only animal foods - zero fruits. Could it be that for high fruit consumption to be healthy, you need a lot of strong sunshine, like in the tropics?
The reasoning has something satisfactory: the products found where one live should be eaten. But nothing says that in a few thousands years we adapted physiologically to the Scandinavian region. We likely live in places where the products which should eat do not grow… :'(
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Ok for the pastured beef, but two questions remain open: how is this meat after (or right before) slaughter treated? How do you eat it? All kinds of reasons can make that the organoleptic characteristics of the meat are altered (for example mechanical treatment to make it more tender, grinding, addition of a little salt, too systematically mixing fat and flesh, etc). It is enough to modify a little the organoleptic characteritics of the meat for the alliesthesic mechanisms do not function normally anymore. One can then be accustomed to eat a food very frequently while the body doesn’t have any need for it. The danger is double: on one hand overload in some nutrients, on the other hand a blocking to other foodstuff may occur.
I eat it in different ways.
Often just sliced directly from slab, eating it pure and cold, but I also airdry it sometimes, like ground beef burgers airdried for 12 hours, or jerky. Love them. Sometimes I make beef tartar.
Seldom I fry it rare (rather "blue" ;)) in the pan, this could also happend if I eat out. I always feel great after eating meat, it is so strange! Feel just good.
Oh, I like aged meat too. I often age it for a week or more in the fridge.
I eat about 500 grams to 1 kg meat a day, about 90-160 grams pure protein maybe.
My Halibut is wildcaught and fresh, not frozen etc. or salted. I always eat it plain, love the fatty taste.
A protein overload is particularly dangerous because of the interactions with the immune system, knowing that the surplus molecules, badly degraded, keep their antigenic structures. The reactions can be of two principal types: a food intolerance of allergic type, or a tolerance which settles with the long-term repetition, i.e. the immune system will not react any more to certain antigen classes close to bovine molecules. It is in my opinion this tolerance (or more exactly the whole lot of these tolerances induced by all kinds of food molecules badly degraded under effect of digestive or metabolic overloads) is partly responsible for the immunity failures which leave the field free to the proliferation of abnormal cells, therefore to cancer.
I try to follow my body every day to see if I get some symptoms that are no good, but still nothing there.
Only good things happend, like my skin is better, my teeths, my gums never bleed anymore not even after flossing!
I feel calm and strong. Satisfied. :)
I also was taking bloodtest a few weeks ago, they was abslot perfect, also my B12 status was very good and vit.D too!
My cholesterol-levels was totally fine, high cholesterol, but a lot of HDL and my triglycerides was really low. Perfect.
Absolutely: wild game meat quickly gets a strange taste, which corresponds to the instinctive stop. The rule which has been empirically set is that one should eat only wild meat and only if it is marvelously tasty, just like seasoned (what I call the “luminous phase”). As soon as it takes a strong and unattractive “wild game” savor, it is quite simply that it is useless or harmful.
Yeah, I never continue eating if strange tasting, that's for sure.
I was ordering Entrecote from Orkos sometimes, I never got tired of that eather.. ;)
A repetitive fondness for a nonfood plant precisely testifies to a permanent disorder, which could be due to a systematic protein's overload. Normally, after having ingested some a few days, the linden leaves should appear detestable to you. Unless, once again, that you bought them in the traditional circuits, where they are very generally hot dried.
Oh, no, it is not that I am craving Linden-leaves.. ;) I just eat them if I am out walking, just because they are there and for free. They are tasty too, and I eat some other wild edibles like nettles etc. too but just a little.
But Linden-leaves I can use for food, they are so mild and soft. That's when there is only a little money back for food, then I eat them in larger quantities.. :)
To my knowledge this tradition comes from the Jewish religion. It could be explained by the fact why the Jews nourished their pigs with their kitchen left overs. It was then not difficult for them to notice some disorders of behavior in the consumers, the abnormal molecules concentrated in the meat causing an anomalous excitation of the nervous system, for example an aggressiveness or sexual excitation excess, therefore a difficulty to obey the Ten Commands…
Yes, that must be why pork is no good.. eating kitchen leftovers. No wonder the meat stinks. l)
One or two teaspoons can be an excess, if your body does not need any cassia this day. The absolute quantity does not make sense since it does not take account of the real needs of the body. Excess starts at the time one absorbs a quantity exceeding the need (or digestive potential). Perhaps there are days when you would need carob, or another antidiarrhea
Hm. But it tasted good back then. Sweet. I liked it.
Now I can eat it no more.. I have some in my fridge and when I tried it it was so ugly-sweet.. -X No thanks.
I thought the same thing during years, then experiments led me to reverse the idea: we evolved from primates which would have adapted during million years to tropical countries, so that an exotic choice of products compensates for the scarcity of adequate products in our current habitat (which would probably never have been possible without the use of fire).
But we also evolved from Cro-Magnon, and have Neanderthal-genes in us too. They was eating mostly meat.. -\
What do you think?
Aren't we used to it? That is what my body tells me.. ;)
The reasoning has something satisfactory: the products found where one live should be eaten. But nothing says that in a few thousands years we adapted physiologically to the Scandinavian region. We likely live in places where the products which should eat do not grow… :'(
Yeah. But I believe I have extremely much of the Neanderthal-genes.. ;)
They lived in the North, don't they?
Inger
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presume, that Instincto doctrine would imply only eating when hungry, right?
We should rather say : number one rule of the natural diet is to eat when the body needs it.
Hunger does not always match a need for food since it has been distorted by the cooked food effect. Therefore, we must learn to recognize the real hunger from false hunger: it’s one of the first steps of our alimentary instinct rehabilitation. To feel puckish might for example mean something quite different than a need of food, a digestive difficulty due to an overload at the previous meal or a detoxination problem.
After practicing for a while, your principle becomes applicable and it is, of course, an advantage of not feeling compelled to eat in absence of a need for food. But real hunger does not drive us to eat whatever is available (except perhaps in case of denutrition): even in case we need sugar, for example, some fruits may still be repulsive. Real hunger is therefore something much more selective than what the culinary tradition would imply, knowing that cooking recipes largely result in the disappearance of the instinctive appeals selectivity.
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Can someone explain the difference between eating fruit that was picked several days ago and ripened off the tree vs. fruit picked and eaten immediately from the tree in the area that it was designed to be eaten. I hear there can be quite a difference with respect to taste for fruit that is eaten freshly picked. Papaya's for example generally taste like vomitted mango to me but I've heard first hand accounts that their taste changes within 20 minutes of being picked.
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Tyler, I agree that instincto is fairly popular in Germany (and France) in the sense that many people heard about it and a sizable number of them even tried this diet yet very few succeeded to stay on it.
It’s true that only a small number of the persons who decide to practice instinctive nutrition are able to do it for a long period. But it would be an error to conclude from this fact that our alimentary instinct doesn’t work. Several other factors (social, correct food availability, psychical conditioning problems and so on) explain the difficulty of such a diet and all should be taken into consideration before conclusions are drawn.
And those very few (as myself) who apparently succeeded actually do not practise instincto but just a form of raw paleo i.e. do not regulate "instinctively" their food intake as Burger claims them to do.
This time it's an error of premises: I’m very well in position to know that someone practicing “instincto” and being attentive to his/her intrinsic feelings (instinct) fare much better than others who, like Alphagruis, don’t have the patience or the motivation necessary to care of their sensory perceptions. (A small reasoning error comes) In addition, the ones who do not care to feel the smell of all the foodstuffs available before to choose a particular one or don’t consciously watch for the savor modifications, nevertheless obey to their instinct since they don’t swallow the stuff having or getting a bad taste ( and it’s well known that the sense of smell contributes to the savor’s perception).
Yet I do not at all underestimate the tremendous outstanding role of instincto and Burger in popularizing and promoting the RAW PALEO concept and diet. Burger was aware of and worked out these ideas more than 40 years ago long before many others came to them in more recent years. Instincto in spite of its unfortunate label implies and is basically a RAW PALEO diet.
Thanks for the unusual compliments. I must however note that alphagruis briskly confuses what I call “instinctonutrition” (a diet without food preparation nor denaturation and without wheat and milk) with a RAW PALEO diet. However, the alliesthesic mechanisms function anyway with foodstuffs left in the rough, whereas they are disorganized by the mixing and processing generally practiced by the raw foodists. No reasoning nor conclusion drawn from observation are relevant if the differences between these two contexts are not taken into account.
What I criticise sharply is that part of instincto which tells people they can regulate their food intake by means of an "instinct" based on olfactory and gustatory sensations. Roughly the stance "eat what smells and tastes goods and so long as it does so and don't bother about food composition, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, omega 3 fatty acids etc". That part is just pseudoscience and unfortunately eventually very dangerous.
Alphagruis lacks a complete sight of the facts, his views being based on appearances without having looked further into the cases. In opposition to he’s affirmations, nutritional balance occurs in a manner very close to the quantities recommended by the nutritionists, even for the B12 vitamin on the persons free from ideas against animal foodstuffs. On the contrary, to draw from a general theory on the complex systems that the instinct could not exist is pseudoscientific. The subject would deserve to be discussed objectively and without insults.
The fact is that unfortunately no such simple principle of dietary balance actually exists and that we have to find out and learn how and what to eat to be healthy.
False: the experience shows the opposite. Such a system exists and is located at the level of the various alliesthesic mechanisms. But it is necessary to place the body in an adequate context so that this system is able to work properly. It is in particular put at fault by the preconceived ideas taught by dietetics, whose principles cannot take account of the instantaneous nor individual needs.
Please notice also that the superiority of wild game meat can be understood in simple terms of healthier diet, life and also sharper naturel selection constraints in the wild as compared to domesticated animals. No need to invoke the dodgy concept of "better adapted instincts" in this respect.
Indeed, the quality of wild foodstuffs does much for the superiority of the wild game meat. However, a wild animal nourished in captivity, like the bison for example, keeps a wild meat savor which marks out the instinctive stop correctly, whereas the meat of a domesticated animal like the pig, even living under conditions close to wild boars, does not take at all the taste of the last. The genetic drift is undoubtedly the simplest explanation of this difference.
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Obviously, there is no "adequate context so that this system is able to work properly" possible If wild animals placed in and undergoing changes in context do not behave according to this theory.
My comment was and remains simple, if you take two types of food which are both compatible for an animal or a human, and take them out of their natural circumstances, the choice between them will NOT depend 100% on which has the best or most needed nutrition. And therefore the idea that our instincts lead us to choosing WITHIN THOSE RANGES the right kinds of foods and amounts is false.
no replies to anything, obvious instincto while able to defend against minor attacks about speculative benefits, cannot defend against common sense things about animals even in their own environment - nevermind ours- not choosing the best nutrition in every meal but rather between foods that they CAN eat. If so, the crapy bird seed I have i the most nutrient dense product in a 20 miles radius.
Can someone explain the difference between eating fruit that was picked several days ago and ripened off the tree vs. fruit picked and eaten immediately from the tree in the area that it was designed to be eaten. I hear there can be quite a difference with respect to taste for fruit that is eaten freshly picked. Papaya's for example generally taste like vomited mango to me but I've heard first hand accounts that their taste changes within 20 minutes of being picked.
There is such a huge difference between eating food "off the tree" than in any other situation even than eating wild fruit. The reason that is in quotes, is even that concept is fairly unnatural in terms of what delivers the 'best' experience of fruit eating.
In my time on fruit farms, the fruit trees that were not managed and grew relatively 'wild' and uncollected at the periphery of the acreage had fruit that was either a.) on the tree and un-ripe or b.) on the ground and either fermented or at least partially infected by maggots, bugs, worms and even spiders. This was the case in all sweet fruits, and citrus I found in other places traveling like oranges and starfruit. Berries and a few other fruits being exceptions. The 'wild' type bananas and dragonfruits and all kind of things that grew on preservation had the same issue, you had to take the fruits and bring them back home and ripen them. Fruits like mamey (which is one of the most delicious of fruits) many of the fruits that fell never even riped, you would pick it up and it would be like a fruit funeral inside. To get a really delcious fruit, I would have to score one that looked well by taking a chunk with a knife to the skin, and then put it in a paper bag under my tent for two weeks. Papaya was the same thing, once it got a little yellow on the tree you had to pick it an place it in the sun away from insects like a rope basket for many days. I have some pics of fallen jackfruit that look like some kind of horrendous monster oozing bugs and fermentation.
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I think someone that already does well with fruit, being among fresh fruits would be a big advantage, but I'm not sure it would make much of a difference for those that have problems with fruit because of fungal type issues, although just being in the tropics is somewhat detoxing/healing.
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Yum! in fairness I carved it to look like that.
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My comment was and remains simple, if you take two types of food which are both compatible for an animal or a human, and take them out of their natural circumstances, the choice between them will NOT depend 100% on which has the best or most needed nutrition. And therefore the idea that our instincts lead us to choosing WITHIN THOSE RANGES the right kinds of foods and ammounts is false.
Not 100% perhaps, I may agree. What about 99% ? Or is it 88% ?
Thanks for your nice pic of a jackfruit. I saw a lot of them like that in Sri Lanka. I observed monkeys eating it and I’ve eaten it too several times: they are most often delicious in a similar state, just perhaps a little bit less advanced. I’ve frequently eaten papayas picked straight from the tree; sometimes birds had began to eat it before me, but I don’t care. I’m very found of fruits fallen on the ground, such as very ripe mangos, figs or whatever. The EROEI* (energy returned on energy invested) or EROI* (energy return on investment) is extremely favorable in such cases.
*ratio of the amount of usable energy acquired from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy resource.
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Can someone explain the difference between eating fruit that was picked several days ago and ripened off the tree vs. fruit picked and eaten immediately from the tree in the area that it was designed to be eaten. I hear there can be quite a difference with respect to taste for fruit that is eaten freshly picked. Papaya's for example generally taste like vomitted mango to me but I've heard first hand accounts that their taste changes within 20 minutes of being picked.
Depending on fruit it is well known and one can easily check that there is often a marked and sometimes even a huge difference in taste, smell and most likely in quality as a food.
Let's notice by the way that this fact by itself highly questions the instincto dogma and practice.
Yet, there is precisely much more in this respect that falsifies instincto even if one neglects such "details". Burger's views sound like a joke when one realizes that one cannot seriously assume, as instincto dogma implicitely does, that the quantity of fruit that's ingested is the same when eaten directly by picking them on tree in wind, sun or rain and eating them from a basket in a modern air-conditioned home after buying them from someone who has done the picking job. When one has to climb to an upper level in the tree to get at the next fruit as compared to stretching one's arm toward a basket on a table...
Obviously the amount of food eaten cannot be essentially a matter of gustatory and olfactory sensations. Things are much more involved and complex than that ;D
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Thanks for the responses KD and alpha. I eagerly await the instincto retort to this very obvious and very important fact that the differences in taste and quality of wild fruit changes dramatically over fruit on the kitchen table.
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Not 100% perhaps, I may agree. What about 99% ? Or is it 88% ?
I didn't say I didn't eat any bug infested fallen fruits :). The large Florida type avocado fallen and sitting in the sun is incredibly tasty, compared to store bought tasteless watery crap. With the jak, yes, you CAN eat it, and in fact I made off with half of a similar one. But the question is would a modern person choose a perfectly ripe fruit where all the starches had converted to sugars and not at all fermented, or a rotten mess inhabited with spider eggs? Again just because a monkey does it doesn't mean its most optimal for us OR them. No matter how you swing it they are also more suitable for digesting both starch and I assume do better with fermentation. They also seem far more attracted to those sources of "protein", which any comparison to them should make insect eggs and grubs far more enticing than even game meats we could scavenge.
point still that you can alter nature with perfection or distortion by artificial conditions and quantities without resorting to unnatural process like cooking especially if we are talking stopping points and the like.
anyway, even if we can argue about this fruit eating...
I honestly still think 88% is way too high. I have no doubt that instinct can even make people seek out certain foods that they are deficient (this part is true both in nature and in people that are unwell) but not that an animal will put up any fuss in accepting whatever variation of its natural food at any moment or given choices. An experiment would have to be done wherein an animal became totally deficient upon eating the given food in which it turned it down and returned to its own resources to hunt down or acquire other wild foods. This leads me to believe that when conditions are completely in ones control, divorced from ones actual skill or prowess, that choosing small amounts of this or that (like in the case of game meats which would be unlikely), or large amounts of this or that, is dictated equally by artificial means, needs, or desires. So even if one has a genuine signal to eat this or that, it probably isn't estimating a situation of highest health.
I've never been in a true jungle, and maybe the places I visited were artificial precisely because they had no indigenous fruit eaters, but the unkempt/unharvested areas really were a complete rotten stinky mess. Bugs everywhere, fire ants etc...definitely not a place where you'd want to meditate all day in some garden of eden. This is not a retort against instincto, just a general observation that although fresh fruits are tastier, that some level of 'farming' and proper harvesting can also yield tastier results. The general criticism is that all store fruits are picked early and unripe, and I can say that this is definitively true, as you can not ship and sell a fruit picked at its proper level of ripeness, but intellect and maintenance in this case is also useful.
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What about the fact(almost a fact ;)) that our ancestors were Cro Magnon and Neanderthals, both mostly Carnivores as far as we know?
Aren't we genetically adjusted to eat mostly animals?
Why do the Instinkto-theory warn against larger meat consum? But not larger fruit consum.
How comes that Instinctos eat mostly fruits.
I think fruits/sugar is addictive for a lot of people. Not wild berries/local wild fruits I think, these would be no problem, but almost ALL fruits are NOT wild.
How comes all the talk about wild meat but not wild fruits that much.
I think you should be more careful with fruit overload, especially if you live in colder climate like I do.
High fruit consume are in no way natural for us up hier. That I think would be so important to mention.
Look how many instinktos and rawfooders get problems with their teeth's and other things..
Inger
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Technically, Instincto philosophy doesn't mean avoiding raw animal foods and there are Instinctos who eat lots of raw animal foods. And the studies claiming that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon were mostly or wholly carnivores have been completely debunked by newer, more recent studies showing that Neanderthals etc. ate a degree of plant-foods etc.
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Hi Tyler,
yes, I know that Instictos eat meat too. Most of them.
But from what I know here in Germany (people I have met) they eat a lot of fruits too.
And there was always this talk about; be careful not to overload meatconsum, that could be dangerous!
These are only my personal experiences, though.
What plant foods could our ancestors have been eating in north Germany / Scandinavia? I just wonder. In summer berries etc. ok, but in winter hier is nothing.
I also have nothing aganst a little seasonal plant food now and then, I actually think that is good for us, like some wild berries in season or wild edibles. But not like most are practizing! Loads of tropical fruits and vegetables and nuts. -X
Oh no. Me it made kind of addicted, I fear. :'(
And it hurted my teeths.
But I do not know for sure. Maybe I did something else wrong? But oranges (ripe) always smelled and tasted good to me and they still hurted my teeths. :'(
My body should have known, they did me no good!!! Why it does not?
And fennel (also from Orkos) I loved to eat it pure, mono. But it gave me terrible gas. How do it still tasted and smelled delicious to me. I do not understand.
Inger
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Technically, Instincto philosophy doesn't mean avoiding raw animal foods and there are Instinctos who eat lots of raw animal foods. And the studies claiming that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon were mostly or wholly carnivores has been completely debunked by newer, more recent studies showing that Neanderthals etc. ate a degree of plant-foods etc.
Most carnivores eat plant foods too, so eating some plant foods doesn't mean one can't be considered a carnivore. Remember these wolves eating berries? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmuYTb6ynbg They're still carnivores.
It's only obligate carnivores that don't eat significant amounts of plant foods (and even there the obligate carnivore big cats eat some grass--probably medicinally, though). So eating of some plants is not disproof of carnivory.
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more recent studies showing that Neanderthals etc. ate a degree of plant-foods etc.
Got link Tyler?
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What about the fact(almost a fact ;)) that our ancestors were Cro Magnon and Neanderthals, both mostly Carnivores as far as we know?
Aren't we genetically adjusted to eat mostly animals?
Why do the Instinkto-theory warn against larger meat consum? But not larger fruit consum.
How comes that Instinctos eat mostly fruits.
I think fruits/sugar is addictive for a lot of people. Not wild berries/local wild fruits I think, these would be no problem, but almost ALL fruits are NOT wild.
well the only problem with this as Tyler says is none of it can be proven. Never mind in our origins, I personally do not believe even on an anatomical level today we are closer to a chimp then say at cat or pig, but for the sake of argument, I'd be willing to accept that the instinct mechanism was suitable for choosing the right percentage of foods, if I thought that any animals in the same conditions would eat this way. Since I don't even believe this is true, I don't even have to speculate if this method brings us to our natural percentage of plants to meat or types of each.
As for the wild/cultivated thing, this is totally true. very few true wild fruits exist in the form of their origins and even many pure fruit eaters will admit that true wild fruits would not have the appeal of contemporary fruits, mushy, non-sweet, tasteless etc...basically non sustainable for their current 'success'.
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Yeah, have you tasted wild Durian.
That is nothing like Morn Thong, Chanee, Gradoom.. all those. Nothing like them.
It have a very thin layer of meat around the kernel, like some millimeters only, and the meat is gray and not looking good.
The taste is.. amazing. So much more satisfying than cultivated Durian. But what a huge difference.
I love wild rosehips, I really do. And wild strawberrys (the very small ones) and wild blueberries etc.. From all these I never ever got any negative symptoms.
That is the proof to me that only these are really good for me. Not cultivated fruit.
I have made this conclusion to my self; Just eat that what can also easily grow around where you live.
So, in winter it will be animals only, and other times wild edibles and berries in season in addition.
That is optimal nutrition to me.
So easy, so viable.
Inger
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Got link Tyler?
The link he has is from one young woman who has written a few papers and from my knowledge is the only person on the planet to have "proof" that neaderthals were not carnivorous. In her research, she lasered off some gunk off the back of the teeth of some neanderthals and found traces of grains iirc. This one researcher far from disproves anything since I don't think the research has been repeated by anyone else and we have no idea (and might never know) to what degree these grains were present in the diet. I, for one would like to see much more evidence than this one person, before saying anything like "completely debunked"
Here is her home page
http://home.gwu.edu/~ahenry/index.html
In most areas of the world, plant foods are abundant and predictable dietary resources that have played important roles in the social and behavioral organization of present hunter-gatherer groups. It is likely that plant foods were similarly important to our ancient ancestors, but due to vagaries of preservation it has been difficult to answer questions about their use of plants. Having been trained in plant microfossil analysis, I am particularly interested in examining questions regarding:
I'm tempted to call her and ask if shes a vegetarian.
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When arguments are missing, there’s still unproven assertions and deliberated distortions, even stabs in the back and insults to vilify the disturbing ideas.
Alphagruis never provided a single clear reasoning, nor answered my arguments so as to show that the concept of alimentary instinct such as I define it would be incompatible with scientific theories, in particular with the new theories of the complex systems and emergent functions. He’s pleased to launch peremptory assertions, which impress some… even though no one understands them, perhaps not even himself.
He’s not the first to be disturbed by the human alimentary instinct concept: therefore one should wonder, on one hand if this concept is truly aberrant and dangerous, and on the other hand why it triggers visceral reactions up to the point to indulge in insults and slandering and to refuse an equitable debate
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I have noted ever since 45 years that the concept of a human alimentary instinct disturbs. It is firstly necessary to know what one understands by instinct: my use of this word takes into account perfectly rational alliesthesic mechanisms, namely the whole cluster of perception variations able to contribute to the regulation of the food intake. These variations are recognized today as alimentary alliesthesia has been the object of several scientific publications since the first was published in 1971(Cabanac), seven years after my own observations.
It would obviously be ridiculous to claim that these variations of sensory or proprioceptive perceptions would guarantee a perfect nutritional balance by themselves alone. On the opposite, the instincto theory such as I developed it consists to establish an inventory of the reasons which make that these simple mechanisms are not operative and can lead to imbalances.
Therefore, it’s an occultation of the essence of my theoretical model to claim (by quoting for example an extract of my writings taken out of its context) that my thesis on the instinct would be dangerous.
Such a method consisting in the occultation of a major part of the opposite speech to attack parts which can only find their sense in the whole thesis, is nothing else than intellectual dishonesty. In Alphagruis case, it could be explained by the fascination exerted on a retired physicist by the new theories like those he systematically vindicates (complex systems and Co). It could be by unconscious motions related to the concept of instinct.
To respect the language of the body represents indeed a fundamental move back from the common desire for power. It is very flattering, and usual for intellectuals who take themselves seriously, to think that one can know everything by the cerebral way. To admit that the instinct is in some cases more reliable than the mental requires a kind of modesty that many feel like an offence.
It is nevertheless clear that the needs of the body vary from a moment to the other and from an individual to another, so that any dietetic regulation cannot be relied upon. For example, the simple fact of only knowing that proteins support the muscular grow lead to force the rations of animal foodstuff without taking into account the signals sent by the body, which are the only means to limit intakes in real-time.
The instinctive nutrition consists to give back its paramount importance to the language of the body. But that doesn’t mean it should be done in just any careless way! The body is obviously adapted to an archaic environment, which one can only approach in order to avoid the main causes of distortion. It is thus necessary to take all kinds of precautions so that this language can insure its function. The empirical results show that’s possible.
A single solution remains to those whose ego can’t bear the modesty required for listening to their instinctive signals: to distort my speech and occult the results of the method, all this seasoned with aggressiveness, sarcastic remarks and insults of any kind. Let them be reassured: I’m used to it and I will only adress the relevant arguments – the kind of they have been alas unable to provide yet.
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GCB, what if any influences did inspire you all those years ago when you came up with your ideas that people call Instincto?
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I didn't say I didn't eat any bug infested fallen fruits :). The large Florida type avocado fallen and sitting in the sun is incredibly tasty, compared to store bought tasteless watery crap. With the jak, yes, you CAN eat it, and in fact I made off with half of a similar one. But the question is would a modern person choose a perfectly ripe fruit where all the starches had converted to sugars and not at all fermented, or a rotten mess inhabited with spider eggs? Again just because a monkey does it doesn't mean its most optimal for us OR them. No matter how you swing it they are also more suitable for digesting both starch and I assume do better with fermentation. They also seem far more attracted to those sources of "protein", which any comparison to them should make insect eggs and grubs far more enticing than even game meats we could scavenge.
About jackfruit it’s at its best for me when overripe, maybe fallen and split open by knocking the ground. If you could also attach the smell with your photos :P I would be able to tell you if I’d eat it (the one on the first photo, probably not the one on the second photo -X). I was “a modern person” till 1987, and then I became a savage. Its’ an achievement I’m very proud of… even that I’m not a perfect savage though, since I still have a lot of cultural blockages, preconceived ideas and totally irrationals degusts. Some guys became better savages than me, being able to eat a very broad range of insects, larvae and worms…
point still that you can alter nature with perfection or distortion by artificial conditions and quantities without resorting to unnatural process like cooking especially if we are talking stopping points and the like.
Sure.
I honestly still think 88% is way too high.
I was kinda joking. How can we put a percentile to such a variable parameter?
I have no doubt that instinct can even make people seek out certain foods that they are deficient (this part is true both in nature and in people that are unwell) but not that an animal will put up any fuss in accepting whatever variation of its natural food at any moment or given choices. An experiment would have to be done wherein an animal became totally deficient upon eating the given food in which it turned it down and returned to its own resources to hunt down or acquire other wild foods. This leads me to believe that when conditions are completely in ones control, divorced from ones actual skill or prowess, that choosing small amounts of this or that (like in the case of game meats which would be unlikely), or large amounts of this or that, is dictated equally by artificial means, needs, or desires. So even if one has a genuine signal to eat this or that, it probably isn't estimating a situation of highest health.
I’m not sure I understand your point.
I've never been in a true jungle, and maybe the places I visited were artificial precisely because they had no indigenous fruit eaters, but the unkempt/unharvested areas really were a complete rotten stinky mess. Bugs everywhere, fire ants etc...definitely not a place where you'd want to meditate all day in some garden of eden. This is not a retort against instincto, just a general observation that although fresh fruits are tastier, that some level of 'farming' and proper harvesting can also yield tastier results. The general criticism is that all store fruits are picked early and unripe, and I can say that this is definitively true, as you can not ship and sell a fruit picked at its proper level of ripeness, but intellect and maintenance in this case is also useful.
Most fruits sold in stores are uneatable for me: full of pesticides and chemicals, industrially grown with heaps of fertilizers, harvested unripe and never ripening, finally rotting... >D
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Thanks for the responses KD and alpha. I eagerly await the instincto retort to this very obvious and very important fact that the differences in taste and quality of wild fruit changes dramatically over fruit on the kitchen table.
I’m precisely experimenting on this right now, by comparing the fruits collected on wild trees to on those of an orchard, eaten on the spot or at table and to those bought in stores. The difference is striking.
But the experiment shows that this difference does not irremediably ruin the function of our alimentary instinct: fruits too “easy” (artificially selected to fascinate the mouth), produce a temporary overload, but this overload dopes the alliesthesic reactions so that balance is restored rather spontaneously. This under condition of taking account of all the instinctive signals: smell, taste, changes of consistency and stomach's feelings (fulfilment, not filling up!). It is true that in my first writings I didn’t sufficiently emphasize the importance of the proprioceptive feelings.
The danger of dependence to fruits does not exist under these conditions. However (and that could explain the divergences on this point), the alliesthesic mechanisms do not function correctly when the body is under the effect of a major overload (for example a ZC diet, a partly cooked diet, a too narrow range of foodstuffs, etc) or under the effect of an intoxination resulting of years of SWD.
It would be helpful that those intervening here start by at least three weeks of proper instinctive nutrition so that they can experiment by themselves the way in which the body ensures its self-regulation. No danger for them, I’m practicing strictly for soon half a century and feel perfectly well. :-*
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About jackfruit it’s at its best for me when overripe, maybe fallen and split open by knocking the ground. If you could also attach the smell with your photos :P I would be able to tell you if I’d eat it (the one on the first photo, probably not the one on the second photo -X). I was “a modern person” till 1987, and then I became a savage. Its’ an achievement I’m very proud of… even that I’m not a perfect savage though, since I still have a lot of cultural blockages, preconceived ideas and totally irrationals degusts. Some guys became better savages than me, being able to eat a very broad range of insects, larvae and worms…
but are you also saying we are closest to chimps? and that your desires become pure, so how is it instinctos pick foods that are less likely to be consumed by chimps or savages? They should taste/smell better, brains and liver should always taste/smell better to muscle meats unless we have over-sufficiency of those nutrients.
I've tried to give a number of examples of what I mean. What I am saying is pretty much all wild animals do not decided between foods based entirely on what is best to eat, I'm not speaking about some holy grail of health with the word 'optimal'. I've written the same thing 10 different ways and not got one single response.
I mentioned in one of my first responses about inscintos I knew that wouldn't eat from domesticated animals and therefore had to use their human resources and brain to fly in other kinds of foods, and you said that is unlikely that people ate this way, and yet the conversation has turned to exactly that the effects of purely wild non-store bought foods -that people are still not acquiring with their own resources - as being the only efficient tool to know this mechanism. how is it possible that according to you at least all of the animal kingdom is potentially food for humans, but no matter what the weight or difficulty in catching the animal, it can be totally possible that the bodies innate desire -not at all distorted by inactivity and size -would naturally in its optimal condition crave .25 lb or bison meat per day: without refrigeration, or idea that another bison would come by or be obtained so easily for the next minute portion?
In other words you talk about your instinct preventing you from eating harmful foods like grass, but you have not adequately explained how the body actually get the proper (best) ratio of nutrition either per individual or per human race by simply deciphering what is not food, which seems to be the only ability we can agree on that animals practice. The issue in question is how can you decide how much meat, fruit etc..if you are not even aquireing all within nature, and if given an abundance even an animal would not hesitate to 'jeopardize' its health and wander from this ideal ratio in such a way to eat of less quality or a less needed food that was artificial available. In other words even if the sense is clear, how do you know your requirements are not limited by the environment or being dictated by distorted sense of need or intrinsic desire for tasty foods that might be limited in availability (for instance honey).
GCB is clearly on the defense and not responding to actual points but merely criticizing or ignoring forum members based on the same bs idea that people haven't experienced this refined quality. This is not at all an argument and could be used for any idea to 'convince' without true proof from ideas as varried as immortality to Scientology. and yet no one can say why animals eat whatever food I give them that is remotely natural and even sometimes otherwise? I see the same return on crappy birdfeed from birds, night creatures will continue to eat garbage (although the cooking here upsets their natural sense of smell). and whatever meat I dispose of there seems to disappear and even the rotten eggs and high egg I have thrown out with the compost. no one responded to the fact that animals routinely die of eating poison through natural means, and its quite easy to poison an animal with chemicals.
I myself have what seems to be innate taste and smell preferences to foods with pesticides and or fed poor diets, and yet wild or domesticated animals (which you say have that innate sense of what they are) do not. They will continue coming back for whatever food is upsetting their natural ratio as long as it is available. They might have some sense of when this eventually becomes in dangerous zones or deficiencies, but its far from what is needed to decipher what is ideal. There is no need to define what is ideal or how far all of us are from it for that to be a clear departure.
or my other examples of a Bear's natural habitat was suddenly replaced by tanks of fish and tanks of honey, or a wild boar inside of your kitchen. I guess these examples are too silly no matter how true to Mr. Burger to consider.
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Come on guys:
REMINDER: THIS IS THE PRO-INSTINCTO SECTION
I would like to see the original spirit of the discussions in each raw paleo diet be observed.
There is a logic to why Geoff and Craig made a board section for each raw paleo variant.
We have precedents with other boards like the Primal Diet and the Raw Omnivore sections where people were asked to take their anti-Primal Diet and anti-Omnivore attacks outside of those boards.
The logic is that the Instincto forum is meant primarily for discussing the Instincto diet in a positive, constructive way and that anti-Instincto posts should be made in the Hot Topics forum
Since Iguana is the moderator in the Instincto board, let's respect his decisions to keep this board in order.
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I think fruits/sugar is addictive for a lot of people. Not wild berries/local wild fruits I think, these would be no problem, but almost ALL fruits are NOT wild.
Inger
I do think there is a lot of genuine wild fruit around. Sure, sometimes there are hybrids resulting from domesticated plants interbreeding with wild varieties. However, it has been claimed that domesticated plants are generally far more sickly and prone to health-problems(in effect many such domesticated plants are as heavily inbred as many farm-animals) so that they quickly die out when introduced into the wild.
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The link he has is from one young woman who has written a few papers and from my knowledge is the only person on the planet to have "proof" that neaderthals were not carnivorous. In her research, she lasered off some gunk off the back of the teeth of some neanderthals and found traces of grains iirc. This one researcher far from disproves anything since I don't think the research has been repeated by anyone else and we have no idea (and might never know) to what degree these grains were present in the diet. I, for one would like to see much more evidence than this one person, before saying anything like "completely debunked"
Here is her home page
http://home.gwu.edu/~ahenry/index.html
I'm tempted to call her and ask if shes a vegetarian.
She isn't the only one to mention evidence of plant-foods in the Neanderthal diet. There are others:-
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/human-origins/neanderthals-diets/index.html
As the woman above mentions, the only reason why meat-consumption was focused on by scientists was that evidence of meat-consumption can be easily found by examining bones which easily fossilize. Plant-foods, on the other hand, do not survive at all well in the fossil record, so it's much more difficult to determine the amounts of plants eaten.
1 point raised by a particular scientist was that collagen(from which they work out what the Neanderthal diet consists of) does not survive well in warmer climes, so that it's not possible to easily determine what Neanderthals ate in warmer climes such as the Middle-East. Logically, one would have to assume that they simply ate what was available in their environment, so ate far more plant foods the nearer they got to the Equator(Neanderthals hadn't heard of concepts such as zero-carb at the time, after all).