Instincto Debunker debunking

[GCB]

I attended during many years the gatherings of instinctos here in France and in particular those instinctos living in the château de Montramé and from Orkos , which had access all year round to the best instincto food ever available and were according to Burger himself in ideal conditions to test his ideas. Most of even these people were emaciated, did'nt look healthy, had to take B12 or other vitamin and complement shots etc.

Alpagruis,
could you please tell me something more about this cases?

They suffered mainly from deficiencies, emaciation, skin troubles etc. Eating more food of animal origin available didn't cure the deficiencies and B12 shots were indispensable. It is remarkable that this condition takes usually many years on instincto to show up and that these people had access to the "best instincto food" according to Burger himself.

What kind of skin problems?

Vitiligo as far as I can remember is an example.

Instincto doesn't work, never.  

Now that our Great Chief Debunker has been able to thoroughly release his abhorrence of the instinct on a thread especially dedicated to his noble debunking mission, I’ll take his arguments one by one and show that they are either baseless or fallacious. Let’s examine first the "facts" on which Alphagruis claims to build from.

People working at Orkos, the European distribution center of unheated natural foodstuf originally created to supply instinctos, "would be terribly thin and should have resorted to B12 vitamins injections to avoid denutrition".

This issue started from a particular case of someone who remained in Indonesia during approximately five years, where he practically did not consume any animal protein. Very thin at his return, he noticed that his rate of B12 was extremely low. Knowing that an insufficient rate of this vitamin make its further absorption impossible, after some attempts at oyster consumption (rich in B12), he decided to get it by injections. He then found back a standard weight showing that his only deficiency was B12, something perfectly explainable considering the duration and the conditions of his stay in Asia.

Two other guys were then alarmed with the idea they may also lack B12 vitamins: a young guy had decided to try a rather risky experiment by taking a single meal every other day, then a meal every three days. He felt initially perfectly well (that shows that the caloric intakes can be enough even with very spaced meals!). But after more than a year and half, he lost weight in consequence of the exhaustion of his stock of B12 vitamin, stock already weak from start given the psychological rejection of animal proteins in his former vegetarian diet. His weight actually went up after a transitory contribution of B12 and remained stable since.

The same dangerous experiment was continued by another young man, himself skinny since childhood for a lack of animal food due to his education. A very low rate of B12 encouraged him to also try the supplementation experiment. I emphasize that I did not suggest to both of them to try such an experiment and that they did it by personal interest, in order to explore the limits of the body operation and to even counter my advices, which on the opposite recommend more regular meals.

A young woman, vegetarian up to that point, also took B12 supplementation as a preventive measure, in particular because she feared a deficiency during her pregnancy.

Another former vegetarian, who practiced instincto-nutrition since 18 years old, but with a mainly psychological systematic reluctance for animal food, had then his rate of B12 checked: it was at 60µg, hence insufficient. Preferring to avoid injections, he decided to overcome his psychological blockages and simply obey to his instinct with animal foodstuff, just like with other food. Result: his B12 rate raised in a year to 230µg, a completely satisfying rate. His BMI, of 17,5 before eating instincto (mild thinness according to WHO standards), has then been since four years at 20,2 kg/m.

It is on such elements that Alphagruis drew his convictions, by erroneously allotting to the instincto practice itself disorders due to other causes, and by taking care to hide these causes and lead us to believe it would be a general phenomena.

As an example of such biased assertions, he quoted – still about Orkos staff – skin problems as a sign of failure, implying that there would be several cases. Pressed to specify, he could only quote a single case of vitiligo. But he avoided mentioning that vitiligo is a hereditary disease! Therefore, if your nose is too long or your jawbone too narrow, it is due to a (late) practice of instincto… It’s possible that autoimmune mechanisms contributed to this case of vitiligo, but it still should be seen from where these disorder originated from, per example an excessive supply of B12 vitamins injected in large amounts, or an imbalance in proteins intake – result of a psychological blockage to some classes of animal food.

Alphagruis stand is rather faraway from the behavior a professional scientist should stick to. Vis-a-vis a disorder like a too low BMI, the correct attitude is to seek all the relevant factors, then to take a sufficient number of persons chosen randomly so as to determine if the instinctive choice of food leads to disorders. For example, in the case of people concerned above:
 
•   Stress
•   Insufficient sleeping time
•   Overwork
•   Not enough physical activity (long working days behind a computer screen to care of the company bussiness)
•   Former vegetarism or veganism, per example
•   Medical antecedents  (numerous instinctos are medecine’s and SWD survivors)
•   Psychological blockages to animal food
•   Heredity
•   Congenital or growth malformations due to mother’s diet or diet during childhood
•   The way to practice (food choice limited to unsold company foodstuff, thus difficult balancing)
•   Extreme experiments to eat every other day or even once every 3 days !

Taking account of instinctio-nutrition only as an indisputable cause of some perceived cases of thinness and to draw general conclusions from visual impressions, without even taking the trouble to enquire about the past of the persons nor to collect statistical data, is to take pleasure in a whole series of bias any researcher would be ashamed to.

Following these fallacious charges, we undertook last year a small study consisting in a request from all long term instinctos we know to state their weight and size, as well as the main features of their practice. We had in one week 43 answers, allowing to have a rough idea of the general results of the practice. It isn’t, of course, a statistical research up to the standards, but nevertheless a good indication of concrete reality. The results were: mean BMI: 20,9 kg/m² with a standard deviation of 1,5 kg/m² (the normality range according to is WHO and 18,5 to 25 kg/m² with a standard deviation of 4kg/m²: thus a median value absolutely in the standards for the instinctos and much less deviation). The only cases of extreme thinness (16,2 = moderate thinness according to WHO), were those of people applying a kind of instincto while preserving their vegetarians or vegan principles, contrary to my recommendations and elementary common sense.

Alphagruis immediately disputed these results with his usual vehement insults. I concede that these aren’t obviously statistically sure results, considering possible bias in sampling – for example, the instinctos died of skinniness could not have answered (even that there are none…). The gathered data  nevertheless shows that the long run instinctos we could contact, without prior selection, are not in an alarming state of thinness, as he would like to make us believe. I emphasize that instinctos with vegetarian or vegan tendency were not excluded from the study! Moreover, these figures are to be revised upwards, knowing that the body constitution (quotient of the vital tissues mass compared to the total weight including fat) is definitely better for the instinctos.

The remaining question is then to know whether Alphagruis proceeds in this way because of a sincere conviction that instinctive nutrition cannot work, and in this case what are the true reasons of his conviction, or if he does it by a visceral need to destroy something disturbing him, the instincto theory or its application, or perhaps the perception he forged himself of my person. It would then be necessary to seek the causes of these destructive impulses.

I’ll try to answer these questions in subsequent posts.

[Hanna]

This is an interesting discussion! There are further cases to be debunked. An instincto child who became deaf, for example. How do you explain this?

[GCB]

This is an interesting objection! The case you quote and which I know quite well brings in fact a confirmation to the thesis of the molecules denatured by the culinary processes.

During the nine months it spends in the womb and during breastfeeding, the baby receives all the nutrients necessary for the construction of his body. But it receives simultaneously a variable amount of non-degradable molecules such as AGEs, ALEs and others new chemical species the mother could accumulate in her own body. Various observations even led me to think that the concentration of toxic molecules can be more important in the baby than in the mother. These molecules can cause all kinds of disorders.

Let us examine the state of the maternal body in the case you quote. It is about a young woman who began instincto diet in 1989. She’s then gone in a few months from an increasing obesity (85kg for 1m65 if my memory is good), to an almost normal weight (approximately 55 kg). Following the journalistic turmoil of 1997, she reverted to standard diet and, under the influence of her family and by adhesion to social norms, to all her bad past habits (a lot of fried stuff, cereals, dairy, etc). In one and half year, her weight increased again to approximately 95 kg. Forced to notice the disaster, she then started instincto-nutrition in Burger’s method. In approximately six months, her weight was normal again (around 55 kg, hence a BMI close to 20kg/m2).

This is a spectacular result of the instincto diet’s effects on staturo-ponderal balance! All would have been fine if a pregnancy had not taken place precisely during this period of slimming. Where did all evacuated kilos go? The fat tissues and other accumulated matters flowed into her circulating masses, some abnormal molecules crossed the placental or breast’s barrier during breast feeding and accumulated in the body of the fetus, then into the very young baby. By the way, it is to keep away from such a phenomenon that I recommend to avoid triggering any reaction of detoxination during pregnancy, this by avoiding any food overload or any exception to the raw diet which could excessively stimulate the immune system, or by delaying the diet change.

Unfortunately, under the influence of her relatives, this young woman did again some incursions into traditional gastronomy. At all events, the baby suddenly presented symptoms of meningitis, treated by antibiotics. An usual complication, deafness, was discovered the following weeks. Fortunately, a cochlear implant enables the kid to hear more or less normally. He’s now ten year old and growing perfectly well. Hence, there’s in this case no element contradicting the theory: the accident was on the contrary predictable and tends to confirm the harmfulness of abnormal molecules created by heat. Let us note however that the case is extreme, in the sense that all the mothers do not lose forty kilos during pregnancy! It is besides the only case I know of a child developing a pathology under instincto-nutrition – but can we speak of instincto diet when the mother discharges loads of toxins coming from cooked food, and additionally often eats cooked meals?

If you find more such examples, don't hesitate to point them out here!

[Susan]

Thanks for this information. Another case showing that problems with instinctive nutrition are not caused by the diet itself but for many other reasons. Unfortunately there are a lot of reasons why it doesn't work.

[Hanna]

Thank you for this open discussion!

[Hanna]

There were reports on dental defects, especially in the case of children, and tooth enamel erosion/loss. These problems were attributed to the consumption of fruit. Does this mean that instinctive nutrition does not prevent damage to the teeth?

In my case caries stopped throughout the mouth, even under my fillings (gold, ceramic) and cured (i. e. has hardened) but I do not know when exactly this happend and why. Usually, I did not eat much fruit compared to other rawfoodists.

[Susan]

Maybe the observed teeth problems of raw children were not only attributed to the consumption of fruit but attributed to the consumption of cultivated fruits. I've seen raw children eating a lot of Durian Morn Thong. I would never offer a children this sort of Durian because it is very difficult to find a stop. The consumption of this (and other cultivated) fruits results in an overloading of carbohydrates and therefore to the loss or destruction of enamel. Moreover fruits only contain a little portion of minerals. For this reason it is helpful to start or to complete a fruit meal with herbs because they contain a lot of minerals. The most raw children I've seen don't eat herbs because they parents do it neither.

Hanna, you wrote that in your case caries stopped, even under your fillings? How can you see what happens under your fillings?

I removed my fillings and crowns (even the ceramic ones) and at the beginning it was very difficult to convince the dentist to do this because my teeth seemed to be perfect. And the x-ray picture showed the same.  But I insisted. Later on he made congratulations to my intuition: nearly under all fillings and crowns caries has continued unvisible from outside and unvisible for X-rays.

I never regret my decision though I have to bite and to masticate with a lot of ruins. My teeth had become to real indicators of overloading. They start to hurt when I eat to much or something that isn't really suited for me. I will see if my instinctive nutrition can stop caries.

[Hanna]

The dentist removed several old fillings (inlays) and replaced them with new ones. He told me that there is caries (and not only there), but that all the caries in my mouth is cured (hardened). Several cavities (even in the dentin!) he left unfilled. They never hurt in my case. Before that I had not seen the dentist for several years  .

[Paleo Donk]

Susan,

Did you replace your fillings with anything?

[Hanna]

PD,
No, she left all her cavities unfilled.

[GCB]

Before continuing this discussion, I believe useful to define my position concerning the alimentary instinct.

I don’t make a point of proving at all costs that this instinct exists. I don’t assert as well that it should work in any conditions. I was apparently the first to formulate a theory based on the laws of the evolution and to carry on long series of observations intended either to prove this instinct inexistence or dysfunctionig, or to establish the conditions under which it can work so as to guarantee a satisfactory nutritional balance. It is indeed a falsifiable assumption which, according to Popper, can establish a scientific scrutiny.

The fact that I didn’t publish anything on my research in conventional peer reviewed publications comes from several reasons: the concept of human alimentary instinct is still excluded by numerous scientists. It proved impossible to find peers ready to guarantee a research on this instinct. An original research not done within a university framework has no chance at all to be published. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to implement a protocol on human subjects forced to follow a non-already recognized diet, so that volunteers inevitably aren’t objective witnesses.

The fact that there is no peer-reviewed publication thus shows either that no relevant result was obtained, or that the subject does not enter into the existing scientific paradigm. It’s not possible to conclude by the reciprocal stand, like Alphagruis does, namely that the absence of “official” publications would show the inanity of the subject or the lack of serious of the researcher.

Besides, I never claimed to have provided scientifically recognized results, but I made my observations and theorizations known with an aim of interesting scientists to consider my assumptions. The time having gone by, I can currently affirm some elements: I have practiced instinctonutrition for 45 years, my children practiced it since the birth and three of them carry on it very rigorously, as well as others currently adults having followed instinctonutrition ever since birth. The long-run instinctos I know also have excellent results, and the most recent ones show improvements confirming systematically the theory.

I draw also the attention to the fact that my detractors and defenders of other diets, such as integral carnivorism, are far from having the same long term experience. A major difference exists between these diets and the instincto: they are founded on a theory and recommend some nutrition rules, whereas the instincto started from observations around an hypothesis and was structured on the basis of the short and long term results obtained.

In any case, the participants in a forum such as this should benefit from the occasion to hear other stories rather than launch a war, like Alphagruis does on the basis of an un-demonstrable belief: that an alimentary instinct could not exist or be of no use in regard to nutritional balancing.  

By the way, I still have no answer to the question I asked him: which way of thinking enabled him to affirm peremptorily, on basis of the new theories about the auto-organized complex systems, that the emergent functions and alimentary instinct would be incompatible? I would rather postulate that the instinct is an emergent function like another, set up within ecological balances, and I still await the demonstration of the opposite.

[Hanna]

Maybe the observed teeth problems of raw children were not only attributed to the consumption of fruit but attributed to the consumption of cultivated fruits.

As reasons were seen the same factors as with "normal" people: Fruit, especially sour and dried fruit, and honey, because it´s sweet AND sticky. The "instinct" obviously didn´t work.

I didn´t (and still don´t) eat sour fruit because it caused skin problems in my case. Frequently I ate a lot of seaweed because I found it very tasty. My teeth, that once were sensitive, then lost their sensitivity.

[GCB]

Thanks for this information. Another case showing that problems with instinctive nutrition are not caused by the diet itself but for many other reasons. Unfortunately there are a lot of reasons why it doesn't work.

Indeed, many causes can ruin an autoregulated system like nutrition. But it is also true with any system: think of a car, for example. The number of breakdowns causes is enormous; you have to be a specialist to know all, to envisage them and diagnose them. We consider the car itself as a kind of functional unit and we forget that it integrates a vast number of different functions. The same mistake is made in regard to the organism and its operation. It’s so well organized and self-managed that its infinite complexity is occulted. It is only when a dysfunction or a change of environment occurs that we become aware of some hidden elements.

That’s what occurs when the organism is transposed from an usual context into a different context: each factor requiring a rehabilitation can be the cause of disorder if it isn’t taken care of correctly. Thus, paradoxically, the rehabilitation of the body natural operation , which should be the simplest thing in the world, poses a great amount of problems because the number of possible errors is of the same order of magnitude as the complexity of its operation.

Nevertheless, it isn’t a reason to think that this rehabilitation wouldn’t be possible, as are keen to affirm those who failed at it. It results simply from this the need for a sufficient control of the partial problems, if possible of an adequate teaching and an open-mind that guarantees a permanent self-observation.

Unfortunately, that’s not given to everyone…

[GCB]

There were reports on dental defects, especially in the case of children, and tooth enamel erosion/loss. These problems were attributed to the consumption of fruit. Does this mean that instinctive nutrition does not prevent damage to the teeth?
In my case caries stopped throughout the mouth, even under my fillings (gold, ceramic) and cured (i. e. has hardened) but I do not know when exactly this happend and why. Usually, I did not eat much fruit compared to other rawfoodists.

The most typical case  I saw is of an young woman who had practiced during a few years the Wandmaker method, 100% fruits and almost nothing else. She regularly consumed up to 8 kg of oranges in a day! Her teeth had been literally leveled, they had melted to the collet. A child raised in an instincto family also had this type of problem for its baby teeth. That is certainly not due to the instincto itself, because we had on contrary excellent results, for example on my youngest son raised in a high fruit context, mainly exotic (no decay nor wear at 25 years old), on a grandson raised in Asia (no decay at 14 years old nor any wear), etc.

It was thus essential to seek the factors able to determine, in certain particular cases, a weakening of the enamel. The first suspect, except a genetic predisposition, is obviously the acidity of the fruits, prone to dissolve the enamel’s calcium and to make it lose its resistance. Several causes can worsen the action of this acidity:

1.   To eat too much fruits
2.   To keep them too long in the mouth
3.   A lack of salivary enzymes able to neutralize the acid molecules
4.   The consumption of more acid fruit than those our physiology is adapted.

The basic instincto way of thinking would be that the instinct avoids any acid fruit excess and that the body is able to control the quantity in a way that no damage occurs at the passage. It is obviously what happens for the primates in the wild, which practice by definition a pure and hard instincto diet. They are in a natural environment and have wild fruits; they obey their instinct without being parasitized by any dietetic beliefs; perhaps they have a better heredity.

However, it is immediately seen that artificially selected fruit consumption acts on points 1,3 and 4 (point 2 could rather be in connection with a greedy or philosophical will to prolong chewing). The “improved”savors by the artificial selection result in an excessive consumption of fruits. Once the requirement met, the secretion of salivary enzymes is inhibited, but if the stop on the level of gustatory alliesthesia is delayed, the acids present in the oral cavity are not degraded normally any more. It can then attack the enamel and cause all kinds of damage through repetition.

Comes in addition that fruits selected within the framework of the cooking art are often particularly acid, undoubtedly by a need to compensate for an acido-basic balance put out of order by the current cooking and culinary recipes  (think for example of the use of the vinegar and lemon). This phenomenon seems less important with tropical fruits, perhaps because the art of cooking has been less developed  in the tropics than in the moderate climate areas.

I indeed have never seen the occurrence of dental problems in a context of tropical fruits consumed within the instincto rules. It’s one of the reasons that made me think we are originally adapted to tropical fruits, and that fruits the agricultural techniques enable us to have in colder areas must rather be seen as substitutes. It is obviously different for bilberries and forest strawberries, which are still 100% wild.

I have consequently integrated in the practical instincto rules that we should as far as possible have a choice of tropical fruits, as little selected as possible (because they are also selected), and that we take some care with the selected fruits of our temperate areas, in particular to be extremely precise on the level of the instinctive stop. The trick is to stop the ingestion not when savor becomes frankly crippling, but at the appearance of the very first unpleasant components like a slight astringency or a first sign of stomachic satisfaction, beyond which the secretion of salivary enzymes is likely to be stopped.

This way of slowing down oneself before the total instinctive stop quickly becomes an habit: that’s the way the overall maximum pleasure and the maximum of benefits are obtained, therefore a most pleasant spontaneous process of positive conditioning.

[Hanna]

Thank you for the answer!

[Hanna]

gcb,

your children (and maybe grandchildren?), who ate or still eat raw - what were/are their physical reactions when they eat/ate heated food? How does a healthy person eating strictly raw for a (very) long time physically react when he/she eats a cooked meal - or two...or three..? Or (even more interesting!) how does a person, who ate strictly raw since birth, react to eating heated food? I ask because I had strong physical reactions to heated food when I ate usually strictly raw, but sometimes still ate something heated. I panicked because I thought that I had ruined my health by eating rawfood. I stopped then to eat any heated food, because these reactions were really frightening and became worse and worse. Furthermore, I heard that an instincto, who ate a big cooked meal after eating strictly raw for some years, had an even more severe reaction... How do you explain strong reactions like this? Shouldn´t a healthy person be able to tolerate heated food?

[majormark]

Anyone knows real cases of curing tooth decay with instincto? or regrowing teeth?

Maybe regrowing teeth is not yet possible for adults, but if it were, I'd be all over this diet. :-)

[Paleo Donk]

Heres my simplistic summary of what I think of intsincto.

I said this previously but I think its simply an initial values problem where the body will crave an energy source that can fuel it most efficiently at its present state. This happens to be glucose even when only small amounts are present in the diet. I don't believe there is anything special about these instincts that are claimed as so holy and like I just said, I think they are merely cravings. The only true instincts come alive when there is a severe nutrient deficiency such as the need to eat some animal protein. Once this has been satisfied you may go back to gorging on tremendous amounts of fruits and veggies again. So it seems to me this way of eating, which is like an optimal version of fruitarianism (and far superior) will simply ward off the worst health problems. Though it is completely raw and perhaps could be better than a cooked paleo diet heavy on the protein long term but substantially worse than a raw paleo diet.

I actually think instincto is very close to being right, it just manages to get its energy requirements backwards. No one has reported any of the issues that burger claims high intakes of raw fat will do and I doubt he has much experience with dieters eating lots of raw fats for any length of time. I actually think its quite possible Burger believes a low protein high-fat diet is superior but just can't admit it. This is my instinctual feeling from the messages he posted in the pro-instincto thread. He avoided my questions about fat at first and then when he did answer he was not as direct as his previous answers. They did not contain any solid evidence.

Also, the fact that there are a record of long term instinctos with "normal" BMI's tells us very little as this is subject to tremendous survivorship bias and does not account for all the others who have tried and quit or failed.

And any guru that claims to look up to 20 years younger should automatically be deemed suspect.

[GCB]

Quote from Alphagruis on July 19, 2010, 05:02:01 AM

This is my final comment on instincto. The subject desserves no further comment as far as I'm concerned.

After the points on which Alphagruis built its anti-instincto theory fell into decline and now that the stream of insults and jeers seemingly ended up by wearying the moderators, a single solution remained at his disposal: a great unverifiable demonstration to definitely shelve instinctotherapy. Let us examine his arguments one by one, and we’ll see they are once again bogus.

Instincto is one of the best examples, I know of, of what physics Nobel price winner Robert Laughlin calls an antitheory or ideological thinking.

The instincto theory is founded on a fundamental assumption: the incomplete genetic adaptation to food processed by the culinary or agricultural artifices. Progress of epigenetics and theories on self-organized complex systems evoked by Alphagruis don’t change anything to the fact that the adaptability of any system, whatever it is, has limits: it is thus a matter of knowing if processed foodstuff, compared to what they were initially, can be absorbed by the organism of modern man without harmful effects. This argument has nothing to do with an ideological way of thinking. On the opposite, it is ideology to start from the idea that the alimentary instinct is not a viable concept, without being able to show it.

A key symptom of ideological thinking is that it is stated and re-stated at will in such a way that it cannot be tested. By no means.

The starting assumption and its various corollaries perfectly lend to empirical checks.

Example: this assumption results in raising questions about the adequacy of animal milk in human consumption. The removal and experimental reintroduction of milk in the diet, especially when milk is in addition close to its natural state (few or no culinary artifices), causes symptoms that would not take place if the human organism were genetically adapted to it. I undertook this experiment with cow and goat milk for the first time in the Sixties, and everyone can reproduce it. In the same way, my observations on the alliesthesic mechanisms can be reproduced and checked, for example those on very young babies. Each point induced by the starting assumption could and can always be tested in the same manner.

What cannot be tested, and which undoubtedly annoys Alphagruis, is his assertion according to which the alimentary instinct does not exist or is unusable. One can admire his art to turn over reality according to his personal beliefs.

It’s a logical dead end called antitheory because it has exactly the opposite effect of real theories namely to stop thinking rather than stimulate it.

On the contrary, the instincto theory opens the way to numerous questions that could not be asked without the assumption of the genetic maladjustment to traditional diet (SAD or SWD).

The raw paleo concept, for example, results directly from this assumption. As a matter of fact, it is perhaps the hypothesis causing the largest number of questions concerning diet, metabolism operation, immune system operation, role of viruses and bacteria, genetic degeneration, operation of the endocrine and nervous system, psychosocial consequences of a diet, statute of sexuality, environmental pollution and so on. All those questions can receive answers the classical theories are unable to provide.

Instincto stance functions as a typical antitheory called upon to « explain away » the occurrence of the complex emerging phenomenon of health or alimentary balance in nature as well as any related  embarrassing experimental shortcoming or observation and legitimize at best highly questionable statements and at worse not even wrong ones.

Ridiculous! There is no incompatibility at all between my assumptions or my various theories and those of integrative levels and complex systems. Alphagruis exploits the ignorance of those he scorns, quite conscious of the impossibility for non-specialists to know who’s wrong and who’s right. For example, he affirms that the instinct is incompatible with the concept of “complex emerging phenomenon of health or alimentary balance in nature”, ascribing me a stupidly deterministic concept of the instinct, which is his own one! By doing that, he shuns the fact that innate and acquired characteristics are not dissociable and that my concept of instinct presupposes innate tendencies which the proper exertion depends basically on training: it is this interaction between genetic and environmental data which is at the base of my reasoning. Otherwise the instinct’s rehabilitation and that about the reading of its signals, something I recommend as an essential condition to a suitable nutritional balance, would be totally meaningless.

The examples given by Alphagruis are foolish caricatures of my way of thinking:

Wild animals perfectly balance their diet ? Instinct does it !  

It is plainly verifiable that animals select the type, quality and quantity of their food by their instinct (of course, it does not exclude the role of training and environment).

My diet doesn’t cure me or makes me ill ? Wicked or denaturated instinct is at work !

Why conditionings due to cooked and processed food shouldn't prevent the instinct from working correctly? Alphagruis himself insists on the importance of training: he is therefore in a perfect position to know that a deficient training can compromise an instinctive function.

Our organism’s nutritional needs are complex and hardly known ? Instinct manages it!

I never trusted anything else than empirical observations to determine the limits of operation of the alimentary instinct. It is even what constitutes the instinctotherapy.

Our organism needs a specific herb to cure it ? Instinct makes him to find it  etc  etc

There also, observations show the capacity of the sensory smell and gustatory alliesthesic mechanisms to indicate in many cases the utility of a usually nonfood plant. I have never pretended these capacities are omniscient or omnipotent: here again Alphagruis distorts and caricatures my point of view in order to make up arguments.

If ones tries to put on test of logical consistency any of Burger’s specific « theoretical » considerations  such as the existence of « an original biotope our genetics had supposedly adapted to » or the nature of his so-called « alimentary instinct » and then argues that it doesn’t work actually one is told that either this concept is in fact not necessary and instincto is a fact-based method that doesn’t need any theory or/and the « theory » is readily re-stated at will in contradiction with its previous form and usually in a form of the « not even wrong » kind, i.e ; wishful thinking and unsupported statements that cannot be put to test in any way. Of course even the first alternative is utterly vain and useless because it is false to believe that there is any experiment, instincto included, that does not need theory to formulate it. This is thus itself nothing but a cleverly disguised  antitheory intended to evade the requirement of logical consistency.

Congratulations to Alphagruis for his supreme art to muddle the minds! He’s method consists to take quotations out of their context, to let imply elements contrary to my own presumptions, to present my queries as peremptory assertions and so on:

Burger’s specific « theoretical » considerations such as the existence of « an original biotope our genetics had supposedly adapted to »

I specified that this presupposition is not necessary to build the theory. Alphagruis seemingly fails to understand or don’t want to understand that our genome is the heir of an incalculable number of situations where our ancestors were confronted with such or such stuff, and that it can consequently program the alliesthesic mechanisms as to ensure nutritional balance with a food range ways more extended than that of a single and specific “original paradise”.

In other words, I always regarded the idea of an original environment as an heuristic , hence a postulate without other interest than leading us to ask questions about our actual culinary and industrial biotope. The fact that it either existed or never existed doesn’t changes anything here: the alliesthesic mechanisms and those of assimilation apparently work with all the natural unprocessed stuff one can find on the planet – some rare exceptions aside. And if we find someday a natural environment as that where the orang-outangs still live today, that simply let’s think that this heuristics is not too far from reality. But, once again, it changes nothing to this point.

If one tries to put to independent experimental test the method itself and happens to report results at odds with the guru’s claims, one is systematically told that it’s bad experiment or practice and an endless string of pretexts are invoked to dismiss these observations.

False: if one wants to test any assumption or theory, it should be done by carrying out the experimental conditions correctly, which is far from being the case when Alphagruis or some other detractors build on some visual observations randomly done at meetings and stripped of any quantization to declare that the theory does not hold true. The most than they could draw from such subjective verdict, it is that the practice as done by the observed persons would not lead to convincing results. It’s up to them to take into account the cases where the practice is assumed in accordance with the theory and with its correct application, most convincingly ever since birth and even before birth by the mother. But that requires a little more enquiries and seriousness.

In other words only the guru himself can actually « test experimentally » his method and do good experiments.

Utterly wrong and deceitful: ever since thirty years ago, I’ve never ceased to urge scientists to try out the various facets of the instincto theory within the framework of conventional protocols. The researchers who risked their reputation in doing so have butted against serious obstacles of social sort: one does not find master's thesis directors nor scientific refereed journals willing to support a research project effectively calling into question the entire system of current supposed knowledge in this field, for example the utility of milk rich in calcium, the utility of cereals, basis of the world’s food supply and trade, or the art of cooking to which six billions greedy mouths are attached… in short: all the bases of the existing socio-economic system.

This situation is of course deadly for instincto’s status as a sound scientific matter. For it means that instinctobabble cannot be independently tested in any way and is therefore definitely sheer bullshit from a scientific point of view.

Here is what Alphagruis would like to prove: that the instincto theory is not viable from a scientific point of view. But he’s seriously mistaken because each point of the theory can perfectly enter into a conventional research protocol. Besides, several of its essential aspects already found confirmation during the last decades: the presence of antigenic molecules in animal milk (ABBOS peptide), the pathogenic role of AGEs and ALEs, and even the failure of the alliesthesic mechanisms confronted with processed foodstuff. In other words, even the instinctive aspect of the theory already received some first confirmations. Some of these scientific studies are already accessible on the page "Recherches scientifiques" of my website “INSTINCTOTHERAPIE”.

In conclusion, I can’t resist the pleasure of quoting a translation of the flabbergasting and praising words about me that Alphagruis himself wrote on April 17, 2007  (previously posted somewhere on this forum by Iguana):

http://fr.groups.yahoo.com/group/Ecologie-Alimentaire/message/5553

Thank you Francois, I am glad that you perceive my critiques as constructive and I hope that GCB will perceive them as such. But even if his reaction were to be more irritated I will understand very well and that would not remove in any way the respect, admiration and thankfulness I have for him. I do not forget he provided me the means of getting definitively rid of my damned recurrent renal calculus in a few months thanks to his instinctotherapy, whereas the ignoramus full of themselves, pretentious and narrow-minded of the medical institution had been taking me for a ride during 10 years.

By the way, I wont’ be able in the next weeks or even months to write up such long answers, as it takes too much of my time.

[GCB]

Heres my simplistic summary of what I think of intsincto.

Your summary of what you think about the instincto? Absolutely simplistic, indeed.

I said this previously but I think its simply an initial values problem where the body will crave an energy source that can fuel it most efficiently at its present state. This happens to be glucose even when only small amounts are present in the diet. I don't believe there is anything special about these instincts that are claimed as so holy and like I just said, I think they are merely cravings. The only true instincts come alive when there is a severe nutrient deficiency such as the need to eat some animal protein. Once this has been satisfied you may go back to gorging on tremendous amounts of fruits and veggies again. So it seems to me this way of eating, which is like an optimal version of fruitarianism (and far superior) will simply ward off the worst health problems. Though it is completely raw and perhaps could be better than a cooked paleo diet heavy on the protein long term but substantially worse than a raw paleo diet.

The questions of the calories are commonplace. The effects of food on health goes through much more complex ways.

You did not test the alimentary instinct operation, otherwise you would have observed that the alliesthesic mechanisms are able to deal with problems much more subtle than major deficiencies. You apparently did not read my previous posts since you failed to notice the instinctive role of balancing on the inflammatory tendency, therefore on the immunizing system, this tendency being the guarantee number one of large and small health disorders.

It has nothing to do with regarding the instinct as something "holy": I use my mouth every day to eat, and do you too. There’s no reason to make a religion of it. The instinct is quite simply a tool nature provides us, like our teeth and our language. Not using it is as stupid as to decide to eat without our teeth.

I actually think instincto is very close to being right, it just manages to get its energy requirements backwards. No one has reported any of the issues that burger claims high intakes of raw fat will do and I doubt he has much experience with dieters eating lots of raw fats for any length of time. I actually think its quite possible Burger believes a low protein high-fat diet is superior but just can't admit it. This is my instinctual feeling from the messages he posted in the pro-instincto thread. He avoided my questions about fat at first and then when he did answer he was not as direct as his previous answers. They did not contain any solid evidence.

I did not undertake a prolonged experiment with deliberatively hyper-rich in fat diets, because it doesn’t take long to realize they cause large metabolic imbalances. If I indeed did not do such a long run experiment, it’s because the criteria of balance reached thanks to a natural diet regulated by the instinct allow to quickly observe the imbalance induced by the overload of lipids. A durable overload of lipids obviously compromises the therapeutic virtues of a correct nutritional balancing. The organism manages to draw its calories from lipids, but that does not mean that there are no other problems, like in particular the formation of atheromas.

I said that an overload of lipids should be less dangerous than a protein overload (especially animal proteins, for immunological reasons). But be reassured: if I had reasons to think that an hyper-lipidic diet could be beneficial for our health, I would have admitted it long ago! If I defend the instincto, it is not because it is the instincto, but because forty-five years of hindsight obliged me to admit that the only nutrition without harmful effects is a 100% natural diet regulated by the instinct, the latter being  also a natural function. It does not mean it is applicable without thinking and adjustments derived from the intelligence and science, as some would make me say.

How long you and your fellows zero carbs lipid dieters have done this experiment? Health troubles may take several years or even a decade or two before appearing. There are as well some people eating a standard cooked diet with dairy and grain and showing no sign of health troubles for decades.

Where do you find a sufficient supply of high quality natural fat from wild animals elsewhere than in the unpolluted Arctic of years ago?

Also, the fact that there are a record of long term instinctos with "normal" BMI's tells us very little as this is subject to tremendous survivorship bias and does not account for all the others who have tried and quit or failed.

You speak about all those who failed: on which factual basis do you do that? I believe useful to let you know that following a journalistic campaign against natural medicines organized by the French government at the end of the Eighties, I was under examination for fraud, misleading advertising and illegal practice of medicine. Newspapers had even writen about deaths due to the instincto diet. A lawsuit was immediately launched, followed by  an in-depth inquiry which lasted nearly eight years with an appeal for witnesses. Do you believe that if there had been deaths, or simply people disappointed by my teaching, the case would have been dismissed? Of course, I would have been condemned for fraud and even manslaughter. I was finally condemned to three months of suspended sentence for the only chief of illegal exercise of medicine (to have mentioned cures of serious diseases in my books). But if the instincto had not held its promises, I would inevitably have been condemned for fraud. Therefore, you should better be careful when you speak of the so-called failures of the method.

And any guru that claims to look up to 20 years younger should automatically be deemed suspect.

Finally, you describe me as a guru: could you explain me how you justify this denomination? Perhaps the word “guru” is not seen as injurious in English than its equivalent in French (gourou), but I nevertheless rather don’t want to be so called. And if you could see me beside other 76 year old people, you would note there is nothing surprising that those who estimate my age without knowing it are systematically mistaken of 10 to 20 years. It belongs to the results I can personally be delighted after soon a half-century of instincto, and I do not see why I shouldn't testify about it.

[Iguana]

Anyone knows real cases of curing tooth decay with instincto? or regrowing teeth?

Maybe regrowing teeth is not yet possible for adults, but if it were, I'd be all over this diet. :-)

Weston A. Price reported he saw some tooth decay cured after natives abandoned industrial food because they had to return to their ancestral diet since the boat service to their island was discontinued. I was skeptical about that, but a few contributors to this forum testified they also experienced some the tooth regeneration after shifting to a raw paleo diet, mainly carnivorous I think.

I had a lot of tooth decay before 18 years old, but it almost completely stopped since I suppressed white sugar, white bread, coffee and all synthetic industrial food. I didn’t notice any difference with instincto-nutrition (since 41 years old until now, 64), except that I have almost no tartar nor plaque anymore whereas I still had a lot before.

Tooth decay may totally stop as long as we don’t eat heaps of oranges and other acid fruits, but re-growing teeth… no, I don’t think! 

[GCB]

gcb,
your children (and maybe grandchildren?), who ate or still eat raw - what were/are their physical reactions when they eat/ate heated food? How does a healthy person eating strictly raw for a (very) long time physically react when he/she eats a cooked meal - or two...or three..? Or (even more interesting!) how does a person, who ate strictly raw since birth, react to eating heated food? I ask because I had strong physical reactions to heated food when I ate usually strictly raw, but sometimes still ate something heated. I panicked because I thought that I had ruined my health by eating rawfood. I stopped then to eat any heated food, because these reactions were really frightening and became worse and worse. Furthermore, I heard that an instincto, who ate a big cooked meal after eating strictly raw for some years, had an even more severe reaction... How do you explain strong reactions like this? Shouldn´t a healthy person be able to tolerate heated food?

Individuals all react differently at a return to cooked food. Those being at that time in full reaction of detoxination can feel better because the intake of denatured molecules blocks their reaction… or on the contrary worse in case this intake overboosts the reaction in progress.

The ones practicing the instincto since birth generally don’t seem to react violently. Some are fascinated by culinary savors while on the contrary others find them uninteresting. If I taste some bread, for example, I have the impression to chew modeling clay or sponge; I don’t have anymore the cravings for a slice of bread and butter I had in my childhood. Figs or oysters are so much better…

[chrysalide]

I have just seen on the article of French Wikipedia the quotation of a report of the Swiss League against Cancer which appears to me being a characterized debunking of instinctotherapy. Wikipedia summarizes the conclusions of a certain Dr. Jallut in the following sentence, amidst the introduction of the article:

No clinical studies on instincttherapy exist, the theory of Burger is based on his unverifiable personal experiences [1].

This is included in the body of the article (under criticalities):

A Swiss article of 1989 [15] indicates that there are no clinical studies confirming Burger’s theory, that it results from unverifiable personal experiences and concludes, on the basis of a single case of an undifferentiated trophoblastic teratome, to the absence of proof of its effectiveness against cancer.

Could you explain me why your personal experiences should be unverifiable? Is the conclusion of Jallut really based on only one case of cancer?

[GCB]

I have just seen on the article of French Wikipedia the quotation of a report of the Swiss League against Cancer which appears to me being a characterized debunking of instinctotherapy. Wikipedia summarizes the conclusions of a certain Dr. Jallut in the following sentence, amidst the introduction of the article:
No clinical studies on instincttherapy exist, the theory of Burger is based on his unverifiable personal experiences [1].
This is included in the body of the article (under criticalities):
A Swiss article of 1989 [15] indicates that there are no clinical studies confirming Burger’s theory, that it results from unverifiable personal experiences and concludes, on the basis of a single case of an undifferentiated trophoblastic teratome, to the absence of proof of its effectiveness against cancer.
Could you explain me why your personal experiences should be unverifiable? Is the conclusion of Jallut really based on only one case of cancer?

Your questions (and your astonishment) are completely justified.

It is absolutely aberrant to say that experiments are unverifiable. What Jallut should have said is that this particular case of cancer doesn’t bring a definite confirmation to the theory crediting cancer to SWD diet in consequence of a bad genetic adaptation to the products of cooking art and agriculture.

In fact he cites two cases of cancer, basing himself only on media sources and the writings of the survivors. At the time, the cure of a case of an undifferentiated trophoblastic teratome, in theory incurable and quickly mortal, had made a great to-do about. I would have expected the Swiss League Against Cancer to take a closer look on that and encourages researchers to look further into the relationship between nutrition and cancer, still ignored in the Eighties. The happy survivor of this cancer, Jean-Jacques Besuchet, had written two books which disturbed the medical corps, knowing itself helpless against this type of tumors.

The facts are precisely the following (it is important to know them to appreciate the methods of Dr. Jallut): in 1977, Besuchet contacted my Centre d'Ecologie Alimentaire. He just had testicle surgery and worried for its future. But the instincto practice appeared difficult to him, for family reasons. He preferred to trust the intensive chemotherapy his physicians had proposed him and he did not change anything about his diet.

After one year, x-rays showed two serious metastases within the lower lobe of the right lung. This  evolution convinced him of the medicine’s helplessness in such a case. He then decided to change his diet. He took several training courses at my Center, and the result was spectacular: the metastases had completely disappeared after nine months. He wrote a first book “Course towards life”, which tells in detail his whole adventure. The media spoke about it, he wrote a second book, and even ended up founding a centre for instincto beginners.

Then a new adventure came: he fell madly in love with a woman who was very displeased about his diet. After a lot of beating about the bush, she required of Besuchet to return to the common diet, telling him: “Me or your diet”. So, he sought a compromise by eating cooked (SWD) each time he was with her, and eating instincto as well as he could in her absence. After two years of these back and forth, his physician discovered a new mediastinal cancer (a carcinoma if my memory is right), without any correlation to the teratome of ‘77. His love attachments prevented him from taking up again the instincto diet, his cancer also made metastases against which the treatments were ineffective and he died in the following years after being abandoned by his partner.

However, how does Jallut summarize this epopee? He affirms against any obviousness that the metastases did not appear under chemotherapy, but under instinctotherapy!!! Obvious deceit highlighting both a deliberate intention to destroy a therapeutic approach calling the medical beliefs into question and the very limited means the medicine had at that time.

Second distortion of reality: Jallut wrote that I have declared to have cured my own cancer thanks to instinctotherapy, and that this claim is untrue. But I have never said or written that my cancer has been cured by the instincto practice. I always specified that it was the psychical shock caused by this cancer that pushed me to question the alimentary causes of this disease. I’ve always plainly said that I owed life to the surgery and irradiation undergone in 1960, but that I had according to my physician only 1 chance out of 5 to survive more than five years, in spite of the treatment. It follows that the change of diet had contributed to my survival, and that with a probability of 4/5…

It remains that the cover up the Swiss League Against Cancer has done may well be responsible for many dead, which could have been avoided if research had been undertaken earlier about the role of modern diet. Some research work was sponsored and published by WHO in the Eighties, but it could have been much better targeted if they had taken into account the problem of genetic inadaptation to the food changes occurred since the Neolithic era, with their exponential prolongations during the industrial era. If I can regret one thing, it is the wasted time and the lives lost in consequence of the voluntary blindness of the medical persons in charge, whose Jallut is a sad example.

I am also astonished to see Wikipedia propagating such false allegations without even worrying about the fact that they are in obvious contradiction with Jallut’s own sources. It tells a lot about the reliability of this encyclopedia.

[chrysalide]

GCB, thanks a lot for your comprehensive and historical answer. I found some presentation about Besuchet’s book:

http://www.secondemain.ca/acatalog/Secondemain_Besuchet__Jean_Jacques_726.html