... 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 ?
Some carnivores
are attracted by fruits, such as wolves:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmuYTb6ynbgCarnivores that eat a significant amount of fruits or other plant foods are called facultative carnivores, whereas big cats are obligate carnivores.
I was not trying to make a point that humans shouldn't eat fruits, rather just making an observation that GCB is doing more than just sharing his success story. His writings suggest that he is trying to persuade others. That doesn't mean that doing so is wrong, it's just an observation. I think that "promoting a diet" is accurate wording for this, but perhaps there is a better wording you might come up with?
PP: 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.
Do you think there is any extra nutrition in the tasty tropical fruits beyond more sugars and if so, do you know what it might be?
Iguana: 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.
PP: Do not some wild animals and Hunter Gatherers teach their young which foods to eat and which ones to not eat?
Iguana: 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.
I was specifically referring to adult wild animals and HGs teaching their children to eat certain things and not to eat certain other things, not how to just save time or energy. In other words, wild animals and HGs do not appear to rely on senses alone in determining what to eat, so why should we? Are you saying that the instinctive regulation of these wild animals and HGs is distorted by not relying on their senses alone, even though they don't appear to suffer any serious negative effects from their choices in nature?
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.
Thanks and no problem. I prefer honest errors to well executed cons by "experts".
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.
Yes, different from the wild fruits of today, and perhaps more different from the cultivated fruits of today and perhaps the fruits available to early hominids in Stone Age Africa, Europe and Northern, Western and Central Asia were also different from the fruits of South Asia, both wild and cultivated?
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.
I was referring specifically to your and my ancestors. I'll use mine as an example. Odds are that none of my ancestors going back to the first hominin set foot in SE Asia, as the evidence indicates that the Stone Agers who populated that area branched off from others and didn't then go to Europe as did some other Asians. So there's no reason to believe that any of my direct ancestors ever ate a SE Asian fruit until the 20th century when tropical Asian fruits became commonly available around the globe, whereas they may have eaten some fruits of Europe and Northern/Western/Central Asia for tens of thousands of years.
You acknowledged that "Plants and animals are in constant evolution," so it's possible that my ancestors may have evolved some while living in Eurasia and eating the fruits of temperate, subarctic and/or Arctic regions. They certainly didn't perish for lack of SE Asian or South Asian fruits. Why should I be more adapted to fruits from a region that my direct ancestors never stepped foot in than an area that they lived in for at least tens of thousands of years? The only possible explanation I can think of is that the SE/South Asian fruits are more similar to African fruits that our ancestors ate, but I haven't seen any research or analysis of this yet. Shouldn't we investigate that before we make assumptions?
The more relevant tropical fruits for my ancestral history would appear to be African tropical fruits, yet they strangely rarely get discussed by Instinctos or Paleos, much less eaten. Why? If plants and animals are in constant evolution and evolution has some sort of role in dietary adaptation this would seem to be an interesting question, not one to be ignored or dismissed. So much time is spent on fruits from an area that my ancestors and those of most Europeans likely never set foot in and so little on the fruits that they actually ate and the descendents of those fruits. The emphasis seems imbalanced. I think part of the reason is that African fruits are not widely sold outside of Africa, but since some Instinctos order durian fruits via phone or Internet, this doesn't appear to be a complete obstacle.
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.
Agreed.
The common elements among the most favored fruits selected by the senses appear to be sweetness (ex: durian, banana, mango, grapes, persimmons, dried dates) and fattyness (ex: durian, avocado, coconut). Are there any other common elements that you've noticed?
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”.
Perhpas we agree on this. I think the training also applies in selecting which foods to eat--even back in Paleo days--not just where to aquire them and in what ways. It seemed before that you disagree with me on this, but perhaps not?
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.
Yes, things have become incredibly complicated by human intervention. This is partly why there is so much disagreement among Paleos. I think personal experience also plays an important role in figuring out what to eat.
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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.
OK, looks like we agree here too. I think the dismissing of potential benefits of pastured meats vs. feedlot meats by some ZCers relies too much on unproven assumptions and puts too much faith in human intervention and human understanding of the complexities of nature.
Yes, the wildest as possible. Training is also crucial.
That's commendable. It sounds like his view on this is more subtle than his prominent critics portray.
PP: 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?
Iguana: We’ve had a whole lot of various ancestors…
It seems like you're avoiding answering my question directly. We don't have the answers to this one but it's curious that both Instinctos and Paleos have put so little effort into finding out. It's as if we're afraid we'll learn that our beloved sweet fruits are not as ancestral as we assume, so we don't investigate. I'm not trying to say that just because our ancestors didn't eat something makes it poison or anything ridiculous like that--just that it would be interesting to know how well the actual facts line up with many people's assumptions. A matter to possibly consider, not a final proof of anything.
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.
Detox holds little meaning any more so I'm not sure what there is to believe or disbelieve. It's a vague catch-all word frequently used to explain away unpleasant realities.
I tend to eat organic fruits raised at local small farms and some organic fruits from FL and California. Basically the best fruits that are available. If they are of poor quality there's nothing better to choose from that I've found. I'm not particularly interested in personally ordering fruits from foreign nations.
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 detoxination is a possible cause of negative symptoms from fruits, but I don't see a way to prove or disprove it scientifically. It would be more believable if it were at least falsifiable. Not sppearing to be so, it does smack of magic to me. Like Tyler reported with raw dairy and I have experienced with multiple foods, continuing to eat a food we are sensitive to doesn't always resolve the negative symptoms, and even if the apparent symptoms are resolved, we don't know what damage is occurring at the cellular level. So there don't appear to be any guarantees one way or another.
I do still eat some fruits, so I am hoping that I'll tolerate them better over time and if your theory is correct, then I should eventually thrive on them. What is the longest period this "detoxination" should take to finish?
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.
Thanks, do you know what source Kirt was quoting from?
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.
Sure, there are variations within all diets. I was just discussing the rough tendencies. I didn't mean to imply that all Instinctos eat exactly the same diet.
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”?)
Vegetarians? Do you know how they explain what's instinctive about a Neolithic invention of human beings like vegetarianism?
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.
OK, I noticed that Kirt liked this about you.
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!
OK, thanks for explaining the hidden meaning.
Please, don’t aggress me if my answers are obtuse… I promise you I did my best!
Well done, thanks.
