GCB, Thank you for further articulating points that I had already acknowledged earlier. ie. that instincto is more that just reverting to a basic instinct. In this case I was merely responding to Susan and was talking about my philosophy. Since they line up with certain aspects of instincto philosophy, all the better.
as for everything else, no dead horse here. Your cat story - while touching - is less satisfying than to my analogy, which deals not at all with consuming direct pollutants or even really modern toxins within foods but in choosing second-class fare for eating.
I am not sure you’ve understood the reason why I quoted this observation on my cat: it was only the starting point of thoughts, which, of course, were developed with the support of experiments and extended to all the alimentary artifices, including the recent ecological modifications introduced by man. Just as the instinct of the cat can be misguided vis-a-vis a product inexistent in the environment to which its genome adapted, our senses of taste and other mechanisms of regulation can be fooled by artificially selected fruits sweeter than natural, etc.
But the
main cause of failure of the instinctive operation remains the
culinary artifices: to season a salad with a drop of oil, lemon and a pinch of salt is enough to make this salad delectable whereas the body would refuse it under natural conditions. It’s the same with any preparation modifying the organoleptic characteristics of natural foods: for example, the simple fact of pressing a grapefruit to extract its juice disorganizes the gustatory mechanisms and inhibits the signal which would allow to limit the quantity of fruit according to the needs and potentialities of the body. It’s much worse if one adds sugar to the juice, but a simple pressing is enough to erase the normal instinctive stop. The experiment is very easy, at least when the sense of taste is regenerated by a period of natural nutrition.
I don't see how you can't argue that even in nature this can happen based on lack of diversity, or similarly to have increased proximity of adequate food that desire can be satisfied. Most of my points here:
http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/instinctoanopsology/explain-instincto-diet-fully-2/msg38617/#msg38617 revolved around these issues.
Of course, in nature an animal must face all kinds of difficulties. But it cannot be deduced that these difficulties are favorable to health! There are for example volcanic eruptions and forest fires. It is not a reason to think that a prolonged famine allows the children to better grow or that roasted meat would be healthier. I do not see any relevant way of thinking which would allow saying that one would be better if undergoing the same deprivations as those occurring in the primitive world. A wild species encountering too many difficulties in its biotope either ends up being delocalized, or by adapting (if it is possible, because there are limits to any adaptation), or else by disappearing.
The experiment has shown me that the provision of a great choice of different foodstuff permits the individual, in so far as he obeys to the alliesthesic mechanisms and by disregarding any preconceived idea, to discover the best suitable stuff for the maintenance or the re-establishment of his health. The specific choices of sick people are sometimes astonishing: one will pounce on crabs, another on water melons, a third on bundles of parsley. But each time, the results show that the choice was not the work of chance.
That’s what makes me think the genetic (including epigenetic) programming of the organism can take into account a immense lot of situations, relating as well to the various possible disorders of the organism than to the various foodstuffs available in nature. On the other hand, the experiment shows that deteriorations of savor commonly done by processing food to “improve” it, more or less disable this wisdom of the body and leads to a systematic imbalance – against which only dietetic principles remain to avoid the worst troubles.
All I have to do is observe that modern Instinctos are dismissing huge varieties of certain foods that we *know* would have been eaten in nature in favor of other foods which could not even be compiled in nature to know that this instinct - even with accompanying intelligence and self-observation - as you say can be possibly trumped by more 'rigorous' systems.
I’m not sure I’ve understood properly your sentence.
It’s a fact that the products we have today are not the same as those available for example to primates in a primary forest or those our hominid ancestors had. But once again, according to the experiments, products provided by agriculture seem closer to bring a correct operation of the instinctive regulation than products modified by the art of cooking and even by raw paleo processing and mixing.
The experiment is quickly done: take somebody who has eaten “instincto” for a while and tell him to eat his avocados with salt; his avocado consumption will be multiplied by two, even perhaps by five or ten under the only effect of this seasoning: the normal alliesthesic signals will not intervene or in a so fuzzy way that they won’t be recognizable. But if you give him the most artificially selected and easier tasting avocados, such as of the Hass variety, the stop will certainly be less clear than with wild varieties but it will nevertheless happen much earlier than with salted wild varieties. With a bit of self-observation and intelligence, it will suffice to watch for the first negative components appearing in the taste or consistency to stop at an adequate amount.
It’s the same if you compare wild strawberries and cultivated strawberries: the selected strawberries stop much less clearly than their wild ancestor, but they stop nevertheless. With a minimum of training, one can perfectly recognize the right dose whereas with whipped cream and sugar you can absorb quantities of strawberries without any connection to your digestive capacity nor with your needs; it then becomes necessary to stop by observing external, dietary rules having the disadvantage of not corresponding to individual specificities. In other words, dietetic is the corollary of culinary food processing…
Available fruits and foodstuff constitute an approximation of an ideal environment, sufficient for the modifications due to the artificial selection and other agricultural processes to not distort too seriously the operation of the instinct. A suitable training allows to compensate for the drift and this compensation is precise enough so that the listening of the body (= instinctotherapy) allows to reach a much more precise nutritional balance than any other method. It is indeed impossible to know from outside what exactly occurs inside an organism.
The criterion which best highlights this precision of the balance obtained is that of the inflammatory tendency, as I already wrote elsewhere. This commonly observable tendency to oedema, erythema and pain in the event of lesion does not belong to a normal operation of the body. It shows a dysfunction of the immune system under the effect of nutritional imbalance, phenomenon still unknown by the medicine because it is only observable outside the culinary context. It enabled me to precisely delimit the rules to be complied with so that tour alimentary instinct can work correctly.
that said this is 100% my opinion and think you make good points about deviating from averages, and that our needs can possibly shift even on a day to day basis. Once again however if these 'averages' can produce seemingly optimal results, while satisfying 'instincto philosophy' in all it entails produces inferior results (again if this is the case) It matters little as another theoretical system of the many that SHOULD work. My typo may have been a misunderstanding, but it should have wrote: nature doesn’t necessarily work against non-nature. I’ve totally lost faith in ‘natural’ or ‘original’ as having much of a qualifier, so i'd weigh alot more on the 'self-observation' and intuition component than the instinct component personally, as I believe the instinct part can be largely dictated by artifical avaliability.
Have you ever thoroughly tested your alimentary instinct? For that, you should avoid during a week any seasoning, culinary preparation (not only cooking, but also all mixing), nibbling between meals, inappropriate food associations, have an adapted provisioning, etc and observe what occurs. As long as you haven’t done this experiment, your opinions will remain based on representations drawn from what you could notice with processed and mixed food, which disorganizes the alliesthesic mechanisms. Moreover, your observations were done on the basis of a body itself faded in its operation by imbalances due to food processing, or by imbalances induced by dietetic beliefs.
So that the facts on which your representation of reality and your personal opinions are build up were doubly distorted and will remain so until you’ve done this experiment. Once you’ll have done it, we will be able to talk about all that on a common basis.
