Fighting fire with fire

[JeuneKoq]

I remember reading in Guy-Claude Burger's "Manger Vrai" an anecdote about a Belgian guy who ate half a kilo of potatoes per day for three months in his instincto beginnings. And Guy-Claude Burger jokingly adding "Yet another Belgian who used to eat too much french-fries!".

Joke or not, it made me wonder if their was actually a connection between what type of processed food we ate in the past, and which kind of food we were later attracted to when our dietary senses were finally able to function properly. As far as I know, their is always a phase in the beginning when our body is attracted to certain foods in sometimes huge amounts to correct some deficit, repair, and detoxify.
Maybe the fact that some people, like this Belgian guy, were craving potatoes in such important amounts is really because these raw potatoes were useful to the body to counter the damage done by their highly processed equivalent.

My question is then this: Is it important to put on a plate any type of food that could've harmed us in their processed form in the past, to see if our body is attracted to them for healing purposes?

eg: Put plain wheat grass or sprouts on the table and see if our senses make us want to nibble on it, or eat it whole.
      Or put sugar beets and sugar canes to see if our body wants to detoxify from the processed sugar.

Has anyone ever experienced something like that while on the instincto diet?

[cherimoya_kid]

I would guess your body would want the opposite, if anything. That's been my experience.

[JeuneKoq]

I would guess your body would want the opposite, if anything. That's been my experience.

There's also people who are at first repulsed by such foods, especially when they have "overdosed" on it in their SA/€D days, and only later begin to get attracted to them again, in their raw form.

A lot of people get powerful detox reactions when drinking wheat grass juice, which may suggest that the stuff is getting rid of the processed wheat toxins.
 It's only a hypothesis.

Have you tried implementing these foods to your diet in their raw form again, recently?

[TylerDurden]

I wholly disagree. I recall one famous pop-singer revealing how, for reasons of poverty, he once had to  eat just raw potatoes for one whole month and very nearly died as a result. Bad idea.

I always recall drinking raw wheat-grass juices and they always tasted vile and gave me no benefits at all.

Once one goes RVAF, one usually develops an instinct for specific healthy, raw foods. When I first started, I had to turn to raw wildcaught seafood as I could not stand raw, grainfed muscle-meat. Then I found a source of raw, 100% grassfed muscle-meat(albeit ground) which tasted fine. I then switched to raw wild game and organs and so on. It all takes time to adjust to a raw diet. I for example did not have enough courage to try the delightful "high-meat" until after doing a rawpalaeodiet for 3 years or so.

[JeuneKoq]

I wholly disagree. I recall one famous pop-singer revealing how, for reasons of poverty, he once had to  eat just raw potatoes for one whole month and very nearly died as a result. Bad idea.

Well there's a difference between being somehow forced to eat raw potatoes, and actually finding them appealing and in the end benefiting from it, like this Belgian guy. GCB agrees that it is not a regular paleo staple food. It's more of a medicine food that people may sometimes be attracted to in usually less extreme amounts.

[TylerDurden]

Well there's a difference between being somehow forced to eat raw potatoes, and actually finding them appealing and in the end benefiting from it, like this Belgian guy. GCB agrees that it is not a regular paleo staple food. It's more of a medicine food that people may sometimes be attracted to in usually less extreme amounts.

Wholly disagree. Most people would not touch raw potatoes, given the appalling taste thereof.

[Iguana]

Wholly disagree. Most people would not touch raw potatoes, given the appalling taste thereof.

That’s true: most people, as you rightly write. But “most people” isn’t synonymous with “everyone”! The taste of something is dependant on 2 factors: the thing itself and the animal (individual) who is tasting it. Something may be tasty for someone at a given moment and appalling for somebody else at the same moment.   

My question is then this: Is it important to put on a plate any type of food that could've harmed us in their processed form in the past, to see if our body is attracted to them for healing purposes?

eg: Put plain wheat grass or sprouts on the table and see if our senses make us want to nibble on it, or eat it whole.
      Or put sugar beets and sugar canes to see if our body wants to detoxify from the processed sugar.

Not wheat: raw or not, it’s a troublesome food, like dairy. Drinking raw milk or eating raw wheat won’t help our body to detoxify from cooked wheat or cooked milk: on the opposite, it will add new toxins without giving any instinctive sign to stop. 

But sugar cane, as every unprocessed paleo foodstuff, can be useful and should not be excluded a priori. Raw potatoes, as an extreme example, show a very strong and clear instinctive stop so that there’s no risk to eat too much of it. Most people will never feel like eating the slightest amount of it and will even spit it if they try.

However it’s true that at the beginning we often tend to eat huge amounts of some specific raw paleo foodstuff, for example 35 eggs yolks or a whole big bonito fish in a single meal, a kg of boar everyday during a few weeks, several melons or durians everyday during a period, etc.         

[JeuneKoq]

Thank you everyone for your answers, and thanks for clearing that up, Iguana.

I was recently thinking about this hypothesis and how it would not work well with dairy, as it is potentially harmful either way, processed or raw.

I once ate a raw potato just to try it, and it actually did not taste that bad to me. Not delicious (then again, fewer raw foods are delicious while on a S€D), but somehow quite refreshing.

[TylerDurden]

Raw potatoes contain lots of antinutrients which give it the bad taste. Similiarly, raw broccoli is unpleasant in taste due to the antinutrients. Hmm,  I had not considered the possibility that some types of potatoes might have much lower antinutrient levels in them.

[JeuneKoq]

It's not as much about the anti-nutrient content as it is about how well the body can deal with them to access the good stuff. Same with some fruits like pineapple that are deliciously sweet when needed by the body, and awfully acidic otherwise (from my experience).

Of course when the nutritional value of a certain food is a lot lower than it's anti-nutrient content*, like raw grains, our body simply does not bother to put in the effort to counter these anti-nutrients, as it would not be worth it in terms of energy loss, which is translated into the fact that they often do not appeal to the person's senses (view, smell, taste, texture in the mouth...).


*Or rather when a certain type of food cannot be processed properly by humans, like grass, or eucalyptus leafs that koalas enjoy so much.

[kalo]

I've been into eating raw meat, but now that I am learning about instincts, the meat doesn't taste like.. well anything.. I'm bummed out.. I have no idea what will taste good now. I miss Hawaii

[FRANCIS HOWARD BOND]

A caution with eating potatoes is that they must be completely buried during growth as they can turn green if exposed to sunlight which produces Solanin which is highly toxic.    This cannot be removed by cooking, and is dangerous, so keep them in a dark damp sack if stored in a shed or cupboard.