You write as though that is all that GCB has been doing. GCB has done more than just write "eat what you like as long as it is raw and as much as possible paleo," but even that is promoting a raw Paleo diet approach for humanity when it is directed to others. In other words, he's not just sharing his success story, he's making recommendations intended for the whole human race through his published interviews and writings, his website and forum posts. You seemed to acknowledge this here:
(see ref. in PaleoPhil post)
F : > ...15 years of prison is quite cheap for I guy who suggest a theory that might save the whole planet.
Although, afterwards you wrote: "Ha ! Ha ! Ha ! Don't you know I'm a joker ?" when Kirt commented about this. So maybe you were just joking and don't think that GCB's theory might be able to save the planet?
Of course, that was a kind of joke…
If you want my opinion, I think it’s too late and we’re doomed. The planet is more and more overcrowded and we are about to have exhausted all its natural resources. Growth cannot go on for ever. GCB wouldn’t agree on that, he’s an irreducible optimist. Anyhow, all this uncontrolled growth and accelerated destruction of natural resources wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t started agriculture, domestication of animals and cooking. So, there’s a bit more than just a plain joke in my above sentence.
No, of course, he’s not only saying
"eat what you like as long as it is raw and as much as possible paleo," but I feel it’s the core of his message.
I also like fruits very much. Your point?
I thought what I wrote following your quote explained my point:
“I like fruits as much as I like meat, eggs and shelfish. My cat doesn’t like fruits (except durian and avocados!)”. Since you questioned GCBs
“positive remarks about fruits”, my point was meant to ask t if humans are carnivores and shouldn’t eat fruits, how comes that we are attracted by fruits while carnivores like cats are not ?
You act as if I said that GCB is promoting a diet by the mere fact that he likes raw fruit. Surely you know that is not true. Please don't play games with me. GCB has done much more than that, as I explained above.
The points you described are petty, but I did not make them. They are straw men of your imagination. I am disappointed to see you use this same unproductive strategem that GCB has used.
Phil, I try to answer as honestly as possible to your comments and I’m sorry that you perceive my answer as playing a game of unproductive stratagems. I feel the misunderstanding must come that we have opposite ways of thinking about diet - but perhaps I’m wrong.
Now you are confirming what I actually wrote by praising tropical fruits over other fruits. This is the sort of thing I was talking about. I was merely making observations of what I had seen Instinctos write, not making the petty points you described. If they were truly petty, why would you, GCB and other Instinctos write them? Clearly tropical fruits are important to you folks or you would not keep writing about them. Why should simply observing this fact cause defensiveness?
Defensiveness? I just wrote that you’re spot on and that some tropical fruits are more nourishing than pears and apples. What’s the problem with such a statement ? Anyway, we can live without tropical fruits. I don’t have any at the moment, I just eat the apples and persimmons I collected around. In summer and autumn I do well with figs, I like them as much as durians and jackfruits.
That confirms my observation that taste/sense appears to be a main reason that Instinctos tend to eat plenty of tropical fruits, perhaps the primary one, and Tyler and beyondveg.com and others have also reported observing this predilection for fruits, particularly tropical ones. Since tropical fruits tend to be highly favored by the senses, do you think they must therefore be highly nutritious foods, perhaps the most nutritious, since your senses signal to you and other Instinctos to eat them plentifully?
Yes, I think so. They are sweet and not much acidic. Sweetness certainly means they contain a lot of sugars.
Why can't we use our brains as well as our senses?
Using our instinct to know whether we can eat something or not, what and how much to eat doesn’t exclude using our brain to select the shortest way to the bay where there are oysters or how to proceed to trap a deer.
But using our brain to select such or such foodstuff because we know it contains this or this nutrients and avoid another stuff because it’s supposed to contain antinutrients will interfere with our instinctive regulation and distort it.
Do not some wild animals and Hunter Gatherers teach their young which foods to eat and which ones to not eat?
Yes, they do. I recon that training is advantageous, time and energy is saved in searching for food and selecting it. Training and instinct work together without conflicting.
Ah, here is another reference to our ancient ancestors. When I try to discuss these references to ancestors and ancient habitats by GCB he seems to get defensive and change the subject. I hope you won't do that if I explore your views on this further, for how else am I to learn about them if I can't ask questions and get answers to them?
You’re welcome to ask me whatever you want, but I’m very far from having any kind of ultimate and total knowledge! So, please don’t get irritated if I can’t answer to every point you raise. And if I try to answer, my answers may be flawed.
Do you think that our Paleolithic ancestors, including yours and mine specifically, had access to plenty of tropical fruits for an extensive part of the year?
I don’t know. Most hominids must have had access to some kinds of fruits, but they were probably different than even the wild actual fruits. Plants and animals are in constant evolution. There’s co-evolution also, animals spread the seeds of the fruits and plants they eat.
Do you think that the tropical fruits of South and SE Asia that Instinctos tend to eat (durians, bananas, [fill in the blanks]) closely resemble the fruits that our Paleolithic ancestors ate?
I don’t know, but your question applies even more to the fruits of temperate areas (apples, pears, cherries, grapes, prunes, etc.) which are extremely unlikely to have existed in the Paleolithic era in a form closely alike to their actual form, and moreover in areas were our ancestors lived. It depend also to which ancestors we refer to and all this becomes highly hypothetical.
Anyway, most fruits contain a lot of common substances such as acids, sugars, vitamins and so on. Therefore an adaptation to various species of fruits is likely to be not so difficult, not as difficult as to entirely new classes of food such as cooked stuff, cereals and dairy.
Do you think that they relied on their senses alone and didn't teach their children anything about what to eat and what not to eat?
No, I don’t think they relied on their senses alone. Yes, I think there’s transmission of knowledge between the generations. This has already been talked about above : “training is advantageous, time and energy is saved in searching for food and selecting it. Training and instinct work together without conflicting”.
Does relying on the senses apply equally as well today as it did then? If not, what other considerations apply today?
It’s very probably more difficult today for we have certainly lost a good part of our smell sensibility and today’s foodstuff have evolved very rapidly. We also have to use our brain not only to find the easiest way to get food, but also to find the wildest foodstuff and the less artificially transformed.
You have mentioned cultivated fruit being an issue today. Does this mean we should prefer fruits that are closer to their wild origin and artificially restrict consumption of cultivated fruits?
Yes, sure, I think so. This applies for meats as well.
I'm not saying that I don't like fruits or honey. Quite the contrary, I enjoy them very much. It just happens that for whatever reason I experience negative symptoms after consuming more than a small amount of most of them.
Does he offer any other criteria for determining the foods that suit our needs other than the senses?
Yes, the wildest as possible. Training is also crucial.
In my case, my senses have guided me in harmful directions at times. Could this mean that tropical fruits and honey were not plentiful year round in the habitats of my ancestors?
We’ve had a whole lot of various ancestors… You say below you don’t believe in detox reactions, but I don’t have any other explanation to offer, unless the fruits you ate had been irradiated or immerged in a fluid at 55° C, a mandatory procedure to import fruits in US, I think. It’s very difficult as well to find real raw, unheated honey from bees not feed with industrial saccharose.
Perhaps, but based on what evidence? Didn't tribes at times gather many different foods and bring them back to the camp to share? I have seen photographic evidence of a single zhu/wasi lady gathering a remarkable diversity of foods and bringing them back to camp in a cloth sack. Hide skins, bags and parfleches and reed baskets would have served this purpose before cloth, and before these aids, many hands could have carried smaller quantities of diverse foods short distances to a camp or gathering spot to feast. Even chimps like to combine leaves with the meat that they eat. So while our ancestors did more mono-eating than we do today, they sometimes combined their foods. Some foods in nature are themselves combinations. For example, honeycomb with grubcomb, coconuts and avocadoes that contain both carbs and sugar, insects that contain both protein and fat, animals that contain protein, fat and carbs, nuts that contain protein and fats and so on.
Yes, I agree. I just mentioned that it’s better to eat a minimum of different foods in a meal because some stuffs are difficult to digest when mixed in the stomach with others, and the more different food eaten in a single meal the more complicated the digestion may be. 2 or 3 different compatible food are fine, 5 or 6 may be ok. But on the other hand, some are very hard to digest when mixed in the stomach, so here again experience and training are useful.
My senses almost invariably find fruits to be pleasing, I don't tend to get an immediate "detox," whatever that is supposed to be (it's a term that is used in so many vague and magical ways that it is essentially meaningless and useless). Rather, I get negative symptoms some hours after I have finished eating fruits. So the senses fail me when it comes to fruits.
There’s a theoretical model of detoxination, nothing magical about it.
When our body receives the proper raw food it should have received from the start but never got before, these food must be digested first, and then the nutrients molecules must be transported to the cells by the blood and lymph. This process takes a few hours. When the cells receive those undamaged, proper molecules, they are supposed (according to the model) to proceed to some exchanges, expelling a number of doubtful molecules they were constrained to use because there was nothing better at hand. These molecules more or less damaged by heat or other factors are put into the lymph and blood before being eliminated by the emunctories, some more hours latter.
I think Kirt's main point was that these are the foods that Instincto's tend to eat. The only error I can see is that his list appears to under-represent fruits, which I thank you for confirming.
Can you direct me to the source, I'm curious to check it out, as I hadn't heard of Fradin until you mentioned him.
Fradin was a MD who worked with GCB at Montramé. While working there, he promoted the “hypotoxic diet”, which was basicaly excluding grain and dairy but allowing cooked food. The aim was to provide a easier diet than the instincto to people who found difficult to eat 100% raw. After a while, he had some disagreements and disputes with GCB. Moreover, he was very eager to cash a maximum amount of money in his pocket. He finally left and started to commercialize pots of cooked “hypotoxic” stuff. Subsequently, his commercial enterprise went into bankruptcy, I think.
Classifications of natural things are merely conventions intended to promote learning and understanding. They have utility so they continue to be used whether you or I like them or not. Let's not get distracted by this tangent.
OK!
You appear to be evading the real issue with this tangent. Of course Instinctos are not a separate species, no one said they were. That's a straw man. My definition of an instincto is someone who eats an instincto type diet and roughly follows the principles. You don't have to be in a different species to do that. If you're doing that then under my definition you are currently acting as an instincto. There is also the term Anopsology, but it never caught on and likely never will. If you have another term to suggest, fine, but as you implied before, let's not quibble over semantics. We need some term to describe the approach you're following and advocating in this thread and Instincto seems suitable.
Right sir! I put it in that metaphoric, caricature way to mean that so called “instinctos”are not a standard type of persons. They don’t belong to a monolithic sect and there are extremely different ones, eating very different things. Some are great carnivores, some are vegetarians (even if excluding a paleo food class for ideological reasons is anti-instincto; should those be labelled “instinctos”?); some eat tropical fruits, some don’t; some live in Europe, some live in the tropics; a few eat 100% raw, many don’t; some eat a single food at a time with several meal a day, some stick to 2 meals a day with different stuff in the same meal; most don’t take any breakfast, some do; some don’t want to be called “instinctos”even if they eat raw, unmixed and unprocessed paleo the very same way than I…
That's commendable. Someone who doesn't doubt would lack credibility with me.
I’ve never strictly believed in the instincto theory as I avoid beliefs as much as I’m aware of. For me, it is a very new and interesting theory that I’ve been experimenting, but of course that’s an approximation, like every scientific theory.
That "theory" is part of what I was referring to as "Instincto" or "Anopsology." All human beings do not consciously apply that theory. Instinctos do, or at least try. This is what I was referring to as Instincto, not some different species.
I hope you didn’t take me seriously about that “different specie” caricature !
Here is what you wrote:
(see ref. in PaleoPhil post)
Kirt: Is there a list of cooked foods that Burger considers non-toxic?
Francois: Jean-Louis Tu has one on this site (see my original post).
Ah! Here again, I was kinda joking! Jean-Louis Tu is not Burger! If I remember correctly, this answer of mine to Kirt’s question means that for non toxic cooked food, he can go and read Jean-Louis Tu, because that guy has his own list of food that himself considers non-toxic, in total opposition to Burger’s ideas!
Wawh… what a post… it’s half past two in the morning…
Please, don’t aggress me if my answers are obtuse… I promise you I did my best!
Francois