request for information pertaining to inflammatory conditions

[Raw Kyle]

Yo. I have a friend with MS and she likes hearing about foods she can cut out of her diet that contribute to inflammation, and I suppose on the other end foods she can add that either don't contribute to inflammation or reduce it. But mostly it seems like there's info out there about nightshades and vegetable oils. I sent her a link to the Loren Cordain write up about hot peppers and other nightshades, and was wondering if you guys could rustle up some other stuff in that vein. Scientific journal articles or journalistic write ups are what I'm looking for, anything about foods that cause inflammation. Thanks!

[TylerDurden]

Well, AGEs, caused by cooking, are notoriously well known to cause the most inflammation. Will provide specific scientific studies tomorrow.

[bharminder]

I believe cooked foods cause major inflammation in the body, from toxemia of the cells. Chronic acidity can also cause inflammation.



This is where I learned that from:

http://www.youtube.com/user/liferegenerator

[turkish]

milk/dairy causes inflamation.

Tumeric is anti-inflamatory, i guess so is ginger.

[Iguana]

According to GCB and others, yes, especially milk and dairy cause inflammations. Cooked food also. Dried fruits, dates, honey maintain it and should be avoided as well in case of inflammation. Fresh fruits intake should be limited. On the opposite, most vegetables would have anti inflammatory properties.

I don't know myself because I never meticulously experimented about this.

[TylerDurden]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15306213

http://pen.sagepub.com/content/31/5/430.full

http://www.arthritistoday.org/nutrition-and-weight-loss/healthy-eating/food-and-inflammation/cooking-temperature-inflammation.php

[RomanK]

http://crohnscarnivore.blogspot.com/
http://www.frot.co.nz/dietnet/reviews/mcferran01.htm
http://www.thehealthierlife.co.uk/natural-health-articles/chronic-pain/low-starch-diet-ankylosing-spondylitis-00044.html
http://www.biblelife.org/bowel.htm#starting

Unfortunately I am in the same shoes. I tried to find anything about inflammation and autoimmune deceases bcs I think they all got the same origin.
I tried fruitarian, felt not so bad but blood work was mess. Vegetarian raw kept me on the flow but inflammation was there all the time (I did not take any pills though). I switch to raw paleo and cooked paleo (due to circumstances). Cooked gives more inflammation but raw too! I did coconut oil detox (4 days) and continue paleo: eggs, fat, meat. Still no good. I will continue till next blood work to get facts on the hand to make further decision.
The only things that worked for me: green leaves, carrots, coconut oil, looks like eggs.
In my mind the green salads and eggs - my last frontier if paleo does not work.
IMHO: first - drop all gluten stuff, next step - sweet, next step - milk product. Sometimes even first step is enough. Of course more raw -better.
I recommend also Dr.Brass reading. It is free on the net.

[subfarm]

RomanK- Did you already go gluten free? When I was drifting towards raw paleo, I first cut out all gluten and felt better instantaneously. My chronic conditions/inflammation improved a great deal overnight. I hear from a lot of people that it takes weeks to months for them to notice a difference. What was your experience?

[RomanK]

From 2008 gluten-free, it means 3 full years. Well, enough time to be free. Plus a lot of serious water fasting - the only real working stuff for me!

[PaleoPhil]

Inflammation:

> Cordain L. Cereal grains: humanity's double-edge sword. World Rev Nutr Diet 1999;84:19-73. www.thepaleodiet.com/articles/Cereal%20article.pdf
> Cordain L. The Late Role of Grains and Legumes in the Human Diet, and Biochemical Evidence of their Evolutionary Discordance, http://www.beyondveg.com/cordain-l/grains-leg/grains-legumes-1a.shtml
> Seaman DR. The diet-induced proinflammatory state: A cause of chronic pain and other degenerative diseases? J Manipulative Physiol Ther 2002 Mar-Apr;25(3):168-79.
> A New Dietary Inflammatory Index Predicts Interval Changes in Serum High-Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein, http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/short/jn.109.114025v1: "The results are consistent with the ability of the Inflammatory Index to predict hs-CRP and provide additional evidence that diet plays a role in the regulation of inflammation, even after careful control of a wide variety of potential confounders." [The study found that the top anti-inflammatory nutrient was magnesium.]
> This site lists an "inflammation factor" for various foods: http://nutritiondata.self.com/

Jack Challem, an early Paleo diet proponent, focuses a lot on inflammation:

The Inflammation Syndrome
Your Nutrition Plan for Great Health, Weight Loss, and Pain-Free Living
By Jack Challem
(John Wiley & Sons, 2010)
http://www.stopinflammation.com/
  "Every disease process is either caused by or strongly influenced by inflammation. The original 2003 edition of The Inflammation Syndrome was the first book to connect the dots to explain how inflammatory diseases were related to each other. In this revised and updated 2010 edition, Jack Challem zeroes in on the dietary issues that promote inflammation—and foods that help control inflammation."
[Warning: Jack advocates strongly for a lot of different supplements and he's negative about saturated fats.]


MS:

MS is one of the areas of focus of Dr. Cordain's team. This video presentation by Cordain summarized their findings up to that point:

The Paleo Diet and Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
Potential Therapeutic Characteristics of Pre-agricultural Diets in the Prevention and Treatment of Multiple Sclerosis
Presentation to the Direct MS (Multiple Sclerosis) of Canada Conference. Calgary, Canada
Loren Cordain, PhD
Part 1/7
October 3 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhkmDHLCUEs

http://www.thenutritionreporter.com/Multiple_Sclerosis.html  Jack Challem
http://www.paleodiet.com/ms/  MS and Dietary Intervention
http://www.mult-sclerosis.org/Paleolithicdiet.html  Paleolithic diet and MS Web Site
http://www.ms-diet.org/ Ashton Embry's Best Bet Diet

[RomanK]

Just checked a lot of info re pro and anti-inflammation food (from given sites). Mostly it looks like right direction.
 But I was in the condition when my staple food was raw mackerel and sauerkraut (fish - high anti-inflam, fermented cabbage - slightly but still anti). It was not bad by feelings (I was pills free) with some permanent hunger, but blood work was mess in any case! Especially in the way of inflammation markers...
 From this site (nutrition analysis) the most safe meat is pork, beef, bison better grass-feed. Tallow - pro-inflam, lard - mild pro, lamb- pro, yolk - very much pro! That is strange I started after WF with yolks and did not feel any problem, when added raw meat, it started! From fruits best are pineapple and avocado. From nuts - pistachio, almond et flax, from fat - fish oil, flax, olive. Coconut - strongly pro! I ate it for 4 days with lemon, Inflammation was mild...
Thus, it is difficult to tell if given info is proved...

[turkish]

Everyone.

Just to make things explicit - what indicators do folks use here to determine if they have inflamation or not?

[Iguana]

The instincto offers a base of empirical observation different from other diets. The nutritional balance auto-regulated by the instinct is characterized by all kinds of physiological criteria that are no longer respected when some “errors” are made.

The most significant criterion is the inflammatory tendency: with a correct balance, there is for example neither oedema nor erythema around a small open wound. The crust is bordered by the skin without any swelling nor redness. However, it is enough to force the carbohydrate consumption beyond the limit indicated by the alliesthesic mechanisms or to use a foodstuff which thwarts these mechanisms (highly selected fruit, honey in jar, etc) to see signs of the inflammation increasing in the next hours after consumption. Other signs indicate the presence of an imbalance (dyspepsia, flatulence, somnolence, etc). In their absence, one can thus be sure that balance is respected.

The problem is a little different for fats: the most apparent criterion of overload  is seborrhoea (fatty skin and hair). On the level of digestion, one also notices the loss of the “transparency” feeling characterizing ideal digestive balance. These signs appear when one exceeds the oral feelings of pleasant savor, melting consistency, and easy swallowing which indicate (when fat is consumed without mixture nor process of any kind) the real need for lipids. Therefore, there are for the lipids too the same correlation between signs of alliesthesic overload and signs of metabolic overload.

The rations to which these criteria lead correspond closely enough to the nutritional standards, i.e. one eats definitely less fats than carbs, and than any variation compared to these values induce easily observable disorders. But once again, these disorders are observable only if basic balance is sufficiently precise so that these signs are usually not apparent, and can thus reappear in the event of overload. When we are permanently overloaded, a point of comparison is missing and we can be convinced to be in a correct balance whereas it is far from being the case.

[Hanna]

According to GCB and others ... Dried fruits, dates, honey maintain it and should be avoided as well in case of inflammation. Fresh fruits intake should be limited. On the opposite, most vegetables would have anti inflammatory properties.

But this is not instincto! Doesn´t the instinct know best which food is the best for you, even more so if you suffer from a disease?

[Iguana]

But this is not instincto! Doesn´t the instinct know best which food is the best for you, even more so if you suffer from a disease?

Good point. Normally, yes, when we have a disease the best is to even more carefully choose our food by smell and taste. But dried fruits cannot be found in significant amounts in nature, ours are artificially obtained by a process and the instinctive stop is very weak with them, so they're better avoided as much as possible anyway. It’s the experience which shows that dates and honey tend to maintain inflammation. Probably, in some cases at least, we would not be tempted to eat honey when we are in an inflammatory state or perhaps we would be unable to collect it? About dates, I don’t know.

Anyway,  the instincto theory is not a dogma.

[PaleoPhil]

OK, Iguana, but you also noted that "Fresh fruits intake should be limited," which are not dried fruits. I haven't noticed GCB positing this view before. I would be curious about where he advocated this, as it seems to contradict what he has written elsewhere.

[Iguana]

I don't know whether he has written something about that anywhere. He's book http://www.reocities.com/HotSprings/7627/ggindex.html is only intended to explain the fundamental points of his theory, and in the last edition he warns against starting to eat "instincto" for more then a week without appropriate training and knowledge.

So he gave seminars for those intended to go raw for a longer duration. There was a week-end  short course and a one week seminar in which we discussed all the theoretical and practical points, starting with the basics of scientific procedures (he lengthily emphasized that every theoretical model is always an approximation that will be modified or superseded one day and that we have to always ask how and why for every affirmation, including his, of course) and going on with biology, biochemistery, immunology, explaining on the way, amongst other things, his new theoretical model of the viral phenomenon http://www.reocities.com/HotSprings/7627/ggvirus.html  and so on.

On the practical side, he advised us to be careful with cultivated fruits as well as with meats from domesticated animals. He says that those fruits are too easy to eat and we tend to eat too much of them, emphasizing that this problem doesn’t occur with vegetables because they have mostly been selected to be eaten cooked, so that their taste is rather strong raw and their instinctive stop neat while it’s the opposite with fruits, the sweetest ones having been selected. So he has always advised to eat as much vegetables as possible and the minimum of fruits, especially when we are in an inflammatory state, having noticed that sweet fruits tend to boost inflammations.

[PaleoPhil]

So he has always advised to eat as much vegetables as possible and the minimum of fruits, especially when we are in an inflammatory state, having noticed that sweet fruits tend to boost inflammations.

I'm trying to understand his message on fruits and inflammation. I don't want to seem like I'm seeking to criticize before seeking to understand. I do want to try to clarify some things, as his message on fruits seems mixed and confusing and even contradictory at times. He has written "Experience shows that all fruits work very well on the instinctive and metabolic points. The fruits grown in South-East Asia are in general particularly well suited...." (http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/instinctoanopsology/explain-instincto-diet-fully-2/msg46743/#msg46743)

Though he later contradicted himself with this statement:

"I do not promote South East Asian fruit" (http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/instinctoanopsology/explain-instincto-diet-fully-2/msg47069/#msg47069)

If saying that SE Asian fruits are "in general particularly well suited" is not promoting them, then what is? His arguments seem to change as needed as though he were seeking more to win debates than explain a consistent Instincto approach.

He also appeared to favor tropical fruits over nontropical in Anopsology and even claimed that early fruit "eaten off the tree" was "coincidentally" associated with an absence of disease:

JS: How can you even allow tropical fruit to be served at your table?
GCB: Because our instincts often prompt us to choose it over local produce.

....

JS: Meaning that someone who's starting out in instinctotherapy and wolfs down two pounds of bananas, like a young child, at the prompting of their instincts, won't be endangering their health?
GCB: No more than they would with any other cultivated fruit, provided their instincts were in working order.

JS: Adam wouldn't have had to eat of the fruit [of the Garden of Eden]?
GCB: It looks as though in those ambrosial times, fruit was eaten off the tree and, coincidentally, there was no such thing as disease.

However, he does also talk about artificially restricting one's intake of fruits in "ANOPSOLOGY: PRACTICAL ADVICE FOR BEGINNING ANOPSOTHERAPY":

> "Be moderate with sweet fruits, honey, dried fruits, etc..."

> "Fruits have been cultivated to be eaten raw while vegetables have been bred for cooking. Consequently fruits tend to be comparatively too delicious, while vegetables are too strongly flavored in their "original" or natural state. Both may distort the working of the instinct. To correct for this effect, eat a maximum of vegetables (even to the unpleasant stage) and a minimum of fruit (always stop in the pleasant stage)."

Then again, he advocates in the same interview for eating fruit every day with at least one of the two daily recommended meals and optionally at both meals:

> "Lunch should include two sequences : one with fresh fruits and another with nuts and oil-bearing seeds."

> "Dinner may have four or five sequences : (1) animal proteins, (2) vegetables ans sprouted cereals, (3) fresh fruits if desired, (4) nuts and oil-bearing seeds, and finally (5) dried fruits and honey."


What do long-time instinctos actually eat?

...one criticism commonly levelled at Instinctos is that they tend to overeat sweet fruits - this strong inclination is due to the fact that sweet fruits are the easiest raw foods to get used to on a 100% raw diet, so that they take the easiest route and overindulge in the stuff. Mind you, Primal Dieters are similiar in their addiction to raw dairy.

"What foods do long-time instinctos actually eat?"
From An Ex-Instincto's Guide to Instinctive Eating
...and crash course for the instinctively perplexed
by Kirt Nieft
http://www.beyondveg.com/nieft-k/instincto-guide/instincto-guide1e.shtml

"Foods in Group I are known for the "ecstasy" they often provide the long-time instincto. ...

INSTINCTO FAVORITES
[I have inserted the native region of origin for each fruit]

Group I
* Land Animals
* Seafood
* Juicy Fruit: Champedek (aka cempedak; SE Asia), mangosteen (Indonesia in SE Asia), rambutan (SE Asia), lychee (southern China in SE Asia), figs (southwest Asia and the eastern Mediterranean), papaya (southern Mexico), sapote (Mexico, Central America and northern parts of South America), cherries (Europe), wild berries (global, but especially in temperate parts of the northern hemisphere and South America)
* Heavy Fruit: Durian (SE Asia), dates (Middle East), dried figs (southwest Asia and the Mediterranean). (Also comb honey - global tropical and temperate regions)"

Notice that 2 of 4 of the food categories in the top group of foods are fruits. 7 of 12 of these fruits come from South Asia (SE and SW), including 5 from SE Asia. Anyone who communicates with Instinctos long enough discovers that they talk about tropical fruits quite a bit and extoll their virtues, including the wonderful tastes, especially SE Asian fruits like durian.

[donrad]

This is a pretty good book on the subject:

"The Inflammation Syndrome: The Complete Nutritional Program to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, Arthritis, Diabetes, Allergies, Asthma" - by Jack Challem

[Iguana]

ISo he has always advised to eat as much vegetables as possible and the minimum of fruits, especially when we are in an inflammatory state, having noticed that sweet fruits tend to boost inflammations.

I'm trying to understand his message on fruits and inflammation. I don't want to seem like I'm seeking to criticize before seeking to understand. I do want to try to clarify some things, as his message on fruits seems mixed and confusing and even contradictory at times. He has written "Experience shows that all fruits work very well on the instinctive and metabolic points. The fruits grown in South-East Asia are in general particularly well suited...." (http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/instinctoanopsology/explain-instincto-diet-fully-2/msg46743/#msg46743)

Though he later contradicted himself with this statement:

"I do not promote South East Asian fruit" (http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/instinctoanopsology/explain-instincto-diet-fully-2/msg47069/#msg47069)

If saying that SE Asian fruits are "in general particularly well suited" is not promoting them, then what is? His arguments seem to change as needed as though he were seeking more to win debates than explain a consistent Instincto approach.

He also appeared to favor tropical fruits over nontropical in Anopsology and even claimed that early fruit "eaten off the tree" was "coincidentally" associated with an absence of disease:

JS: How can you even allow tropical fruit to be served at your table?
GCB: Because our instincts often prompt us to choose it over local produce.

Isn’t it a semantic point ? If we say that wild game raw meat is "in general particularly well suited", are we promoting it ? I suppose he meant that he has no commercial interest in promoting SE Asian fruits. It seems to me that it’s just noticing a fact rather then a kind of promoting. We can eat only apples as fruit if we like it (I just ate one now). As a matter of fact, it works for a while, but he, his friends and family noticed that after a while they were bored of eating only local fruits - mostly apples as it is about the only local fruit available in Switzerland in winter.

Then they naturally came to question the common belief  that we should eat only local products and therefore they experimented by introducing tropical fruits. They found that we often prefer tropical fruits to temperate areas fruits. That’s all and that’s it…

I think this dogma of “eating local” is illogical and baseless. What if Bedouins traveling on their camels arrive in the Taurus mountains in Turkey carrying some dates with them ? Dates became not local anymore, so perhaps they shouldn’t eat them ? What about sailors ? Should they eat fish only ? What about GS ? He would be allowed to eat tropical fruits because they are relatively local (probably they come from somewhere else then his immediate surroundings, brought by trucks) for him in Manilla ? But what about me then ? I would have to go to the tropics to be allowed tropical fruits ?

What is “local food” ?  Something that you can gather by walking around ? In which radius ? If you’re 200 miles away from the sea, is seafood local ?

However, he does also talk about artificially restricting one's intake of fruits in "ANOPSOLOGY: PRACTICAL ADVICE FOR BEGINNING ANOPSOTHERAPY":

> "Be moderate with sweet fruits, honey, dried fruits, etc..."

> "Fruits have been cultivated to be eaten raw while vegetables have been bred for cooking. Consequently fruits tend to be comparatively too delicious, while vegetables are too strongly flavored in their "original" or natural state. Both may distort the working of the instinct. To correct for this effect, eat a maximum of vegetables (even to the unpleasant stage) and a minimum of fruit (always stop in the pleasant stage)."

Then again, he advocates in the same interview for eating fruit every day with at least one of the two daily recommended meals and optionally at both meals:

> "Lunch should include two sequences : one with fresh fruits and another with nuts and oil-bearing seeds."

> "Dinner may have four or five sequences : (1) animal proteins, (2) vegetables ans sprouted cereals, (3) fresh fruits if desired, (4) nuts and oil-bearing seeds, and finally (5) dried fruits and honey."

Yeah… Those quotes are extracted from an old rough guideline for beginners, with the advice not to proceed further than one week without more information and training. The “ans sprouted cereals” is not in the original French text, if I remember. It looks like an addition of the translator (I only have the 3th and last edition in which this whole damned chapter was deleted, which is a real good thing). But anyway, let it be clear  that it’s not compulsory to eat everything available, nor necessary to go through all those bloody sequences ! As a matter of fact, the less sequences in a meal, the better it is. If you feel fully satisfied with sequence one (animal proteins), then it’s all good and your meal can be over.

Anyway I concede that that both advices to have some fruits available everyday and to eat the minimum of them may seem contradictory, but it’s not necessarily so. To me, it means something like: “eat fruits, but in moderate amounts, and especially if they are modern cultivated fruits”.  

Then you quote Kirt Nieft who quotes a classification due to Jacques Fradin. I think such a classification is particularly stupid. And Kirt writes at the bottom of the page:

I would love to hear feedback from any long-term instinctos about the listings above--do you find it is representative in your experience?

Hmmm…

Yes, I read carefully Kirt Nieft’s account in 2002 and I wrote him the e-mail below to put things right. As he didn’t answer, I finally posted the same message on the “Raw-food list”. A long suite of public exchanges  followed, which is unfortunately lost since that “Raw-food list” doesn’t exist anymore. But my first e-mail to Kirt survived on my computer and here it is !

I notice that Kirt didn’t bother yet (even more than 7  years later !!) to correct his text on Beyondveg of the several mistakes I pointed out to him.

And he still didn’t yet. For those interested I wrote in a later post that I found the “Raw-food list” archives. Here is my debate with Kirt : http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?A1=ind0201&L=raw-food&T=0

Hope this helps... if not, let me know!
Francois

[donrad]

Everyone.

Just to make things explicit - what indicators do folks use here to determine if they have inflamation or not?

Inflammation is the body's response to damage from the environment. Indicators are disease, swelling, stinky-irregular-loose bowel movements, pain, confusion, weight gain, mental and physical weakness, impotence, cancer, deformed problematic children, and runny noses.

These indicators are alleviated by living in accordance with our biological evolutionary heritage and avoiding any environmental conditions changed by man. Easier said than done.

[Hanna]

> "Lunch should include two sequences : one with fresh fruits and another with nuts and oil-bearing seeds."

> "Dinner may have four or five sequences : (1) animal proteins, (2) vegetables ans sprouted cereals, (3) fresh fruits if desired, (4) nuts and oil-bearing seeds, and finally (5) dried fruits and honey."

Yeah… Those quotes are extracted from an old rough guideline for beginners, with the advice not to proceed further than one week without more information and training. The “ans sprouted cereals” is not in the original French text, if I remember.

But these combinations were really recommended by gcb?  

[PaleoPhil]

Thanks for the reply Francois.

Isn't it a semantic point ? If we say that wild game raw meat is "in general particularly well suited", are we promoting it ?

I don't consider what GCB has done in promoting fruits as part of his dietary regime that he continues to promote on the Internet to be just semantics, no. He isn't just sharing his success story, he's promoting a diet for humanity. Do you consider his positive remarks about fruits in Anopsology and in this forum and on his website to be just semantics?

I suppose he meant that he has no commercial interest in promoting SE Asian fruits.

I didn't get that sense. I lost interest in his reasoning when he contradicted himself, though maybe I'll inquire again some day.

Then they naturally came to question the common belief  that we should eat only local products and therefore they experimented by introducing tropical fruits. They found that we often prefer tropical fruits to temperate areas fruits. That's all and that's it...

GCB has made more claims than just good taste for tropical fruits, though I suspect that good taste is the real main reason that most people eat them, and it would not be surprising for Instinctos, since GCB advocates letting one's senses determine what to eat. Could it be that some people tend to look for reasons to justify eating their favorite foods and avoiding their leasts favorite foods and so find health reasons to add to the taste reasons? Do you think there are any other reasons beyond taste and senses why tropical fruits seem so popular among Instinctos (as well as vegetarians, vegans, fruitarians and fruit-eating raw Paleo dieters)?

But anyway, let it be clear  that it's not compulsory to eat everything available, nor necessary to go through all those bloody sequences ! As a matter of fact, the less sequences in a meal, the better it is. If you feel fully satisfied with sequence one (animal proteins), then it's all good and your meal can be over.

Has GCB made these new points in English somewhere that I can access?

To me, it means something like: "eat fruits, but in moderate amounts, and especially if they are modern cultivated fruits".

That is more understandable, thanks. I wish you were the Instincto guru, because I understand you better than GCB. Unfortunately, the "eat fruits, but in moderate amounts" advice hasn't worked well for me up to this point, but maybe some day. The advice of Aajonus and KGH to limit fruits to well below moderate levels and GCB's discussion of fruits, especially cultivated ones, as inflammatory has been more on the mark in my case.

Then you quote Kirt Nieft who quotes a classification due to Jacques Fradin.

Are you saying that what Kirt listed in "Group 1" foods does not apply to a significant number of Instinctos? It looks like it matches pretty well with what I've seen Instincto's write about in this forum and elsewhere except that Instinctos seem to talk about fruits even more than meats and seafood, especially South/Southeast Asian fruits, for some reason. What do you consider the top three food categories of Instinctos in actual practice (not just in theory) to be? I recall Tyler also mentioning that, in practice, Instinctos tend to eat a lot of fruits.

I read Kirt's replies to you at that thread you gave a link to and his remarks in that thread seemed very reasonable, rational and easy to understand [though that of course doesn't mean his remarks elsewhere necessarily are, nor do I agree with all the views he stated]. I didn't find anything that applied to the Group I foods quote I posted, but maybe I missed it?

In that thread you mentioned a list of cooked foods that GCB considers OK, but I couldn't find the list.

[TylerDurden]

I seem to recall that Kirt Nieft got into trouble on livefood because he was a bit too fanatically anti-raw, and that he had some rather ludicrous arguments. Ages since I checked the archive, though.

[Iguana]

But these combinations were really recommended by gcb?  

Not recommended, it's more like a suggested rough guideline for beginners :

- Choose an animal protein first, eat it as much as you like.
- If you’re still hungry, then why not choose some vegetable?
- If still hungry, you may perhaps have a fruit sometime later.
- Hungry still ?!? After a while, then have some nuts if you really persist  to be hungry.
- If, after, all this you’re still hungry (then you probably didn’t eat much of the former stuff or skipped some sequences), you could maybe test the smell of honey or some dried fruits: I won’t forbid you to have some!

Of, course, especially once you’re used to eat raw, you can proceed in a different way and you don’t need a broad choice everyday, at every meal. You may well have only one stuff to eat, and if you like it, you eat it. This rough rules are nothing more than suggestions.

You may as well eat a single stuff per meal. 2 meals a day seem the most suitable for most people, but it’s not obligatory, of course. If nothing is appealing, then skip one or even several meals. If you prefer to have several meals a day with a single stuff per meal, then go on.

All this has nothing to do with the theory: it is just a way of practicing suggested 25 years ago and every person is free to find the way that suits her best.