Whaw! Your links lead me to a lot of questions, Hanna, and to be complete my answers would fill at least dozen of pages…
I attentively read everything you wrote, and finally choose some questions which seem to summarize your concerns.
When (and where) do you think lived the last ancestor of us eating raw?
But there ARE diffences (small intestine more extended, as far as I remember) - and the teeth of humans are smaller. We are e.g. no longer adapted to eat leaves like the chimpanzees and we couldn´t eat the fruits eaten by them.
(…) perhaps YOU could tell me when and where this instincto species eating durian, cempedak, jackfruit, banana, dates, safu, avocado... lived? Where was this tropical paradise and when did it exist? Were the instinctos living there apelike or already human? WHO CAN HELP ME with these questions?
The fundamental meaning of your questions is to know since when our genetic data goes back in time, those of our assimilation system as well as those of our alliesthesic mechanisms. I thus begin by summarizing my position, considering the general confusion spread in the minds by some debunking champions:
The characters of a species do not go back to an exact point in time, since evolution is permanent: the species change, the environment changes in a continuous coevolution. To speak about a specific time ever since the characteristics of our organisms would go back is merely a form of heuristics, a simplification of language meant to ease the verbal expression of the argument, considering the language does not provide terms expressing simply complex phenomena moving in time.
It happens however that the characters specific to a specie are by definition hereditary (mainly determined by the genome). There can thus be a delay between the environmental changes and the adaptation of the species (and reciprocally). A change of diet can obviously cause disorders, the adaptabilities being limited, whatever their nature. So, the question I asked almost a half-century ago appears irrefragable to me. It is in fact a triple question:
• Do the most recent diet changes, inherent in the culinary and agricultural artifices introduced roughly speaking since the Neolithic era, have (or they would require) an adaptation of the species in order to avoid any physiological dysfunction?
• Were these adaptive processes carried out satisfactorily in the interval?
• Was such an adaptation possible and would it still be possible?
If the answer to the second question is negative, which are then the consequences in terms of health of an incomplete or null adaptation to each one of these artifices?
This relates to all the physiological mechanisms, to the mechanisms of assimilation and to the mechanisms of nutritional regulation.
Instinctonutrition is in itself and foremost an experiment intended to answer these questions in an empirical way. I always presented it unlike a diet based on a dogma, but like a personal experience, with for safety guarantee the fact that I practiced it with my family and a large circle of friends for ten years before taking the risk to speak about it publicly. However, the results proved very positive, so that a pre-culinary diet proved to play an important therapeutic role, preventive and curative, in particular thanks to the rehabilitation of the listening of the body (perceptive variations of the sense of smell, taste and stomachic feelings).
Therefore, you’ll notice the fact that an alleged larger or smaller difference between us and the chimpanzees does not change anything to the argument. Indeed, nothing allows us to predict that the human organism works better with a diet similar to that of the chimpanzees, or a contrario that an evolution of our physiological data implies that we need a different diet. To answer this question analytically (comparison of the enzymes, characteristics of the digestive tract, etc) provides general indications only. A single conclusion can be drawn: a nutrition closer to that of the primates from which we evolved has more chances to be better suited to us than a distant one such as a conventional diet.
The empirical way is therefore privileged to bring reliable answers, and it is the line I’ve followed since 1964, with all kinds of corrections made to the practice’s principles according to the observations done on the field. Therefore my approach doesn’t require at all any reference to a primal paradise. If I speak about it sometimes, it is in a humorous way, or as a metaphor. Those attacking me using for argument that such a paradise never existed simply failed to understand anything in my proposal. It doesn’t prevent my preferred oilseed fruit (the safu) to grow in the Cameroon forest, neither the coconut tree to thrive in all tropical islands, nor the durian and cempedak to fall from the trees the last orangutans of Borneo climb.
It is completely indifferent for me to know if there was once a so-called “primal paradise”, a place where all the suitable wild food would have been found nearby. I am satisfied to notice the fact that with a sufficient choice, coming from all kinds of source, a fine nutritional balance is quicker and easier reached, in particular for the ones whose health is severely deteriorated. This point is checked by the therapeutic results, and it is finally rather logical: the wider the choice, the larger the chances to find the adequate nutrients and herbal medical substances. I think for example of former vegans suffering of serious malnutrition. They needed a great diversity of products, not in view to ingest them all at once, but to discover without losing too much time the specific stuff able to resolve the situation. It has been once crab, once jackfruit, once meat, once pineapple, once honey… The need is in these cases very definite and very urgent, and the more choice, the better it is. But it doesn’t mean one needs the same broad choice range in cruising speed, I mean on the table everyday after initial discoveries have been acquired. Each person simply do what he/she feels instinctively or what he/she perceive most suitable in his/hers case.
Concerning the alliesthesic mechanisms, I never pretended they work in a perfect way. Perfection doesn’t belong to this world. I simply became aware that they are able to drive the food choice much better than one can do it mentally. The mental is indeed not in direct contact with the body needs, which proved eminently variable. The dietetic principles, for example, are based on averages, and the attribute of an average is that the individual data move more or less away from it according to each case. Applying a median value to an individual case is in fact a guarantee of error in many cases.
It’s necessary to add that it ain’t easy at all to correctly use these alliesthesic mechanisms, in particular for the reasons explained above: training skewed since early childhood under the effect of savors and consistencies deteriorations, available foodstuff dissimilar to the wild ones and disorders induced in the operation of the sensory perceptions, habits to privilege the arbitrary choices and to force indications of the smell and taste perceptions.
It is indeed difficult to distinguish the disorders caused by a dysfunction of the alliesthesic regulation of those induced by some processes of detoxination. All kinds of criteria nevertheless allow us to discern between the two explanations. It is in particular necessary to observe what the concerned disorders become after years of practice: the differences are then clearer between food overload and faintnesses of any kind.
