Instincto and Natural Diet

A difficult question: what is a natural diet? A diet without artificial additives, as the saying goes.

The definition is easy when it comes to wild animals: the cheetah’s natural diet consists of gazelles and other game from tropical countries, which this feline instinctively hunts. The forest buffalo’s diet consists of foliage, grasses, and bark for the winter. The shrew’s diet consists of earthworms and insects, which also satisfy its predatory instincts.

The problem is more complex for domestic animals. A cat’s natural diet is undoubtedly mice, but can we consider fish to be part of it? Cats in the wild sometimes catch small fish. Should we then consider canned sardines to be a natural diet for our feline friends?

As for dogs, they love biscuits: does this fondness mean that biscuits are part of their natural diet? No, because dogs wouldn’t find biscuits in the wild. And what about cheese, which they also enjoy? Perhaps canines encounter female mammals injured or killed by predators during their wanderings, offering a few portions of curdled milk from their teats. However, this natural cheese won’t be salted. Moreover, the opportunity will arise very rarely, as predators can more easily obtain weak animals than females capable of giving birth and defending their young.

Another example: the force-feeding of geese and ducks: these birds would never consume so much food without humans’ fondness for livers enlarged by excess fat. This, too, cannot be considered a form of natural feeding, even if the force-feeding is done with raw corn. And even less so if it’s made with cooked corn.

The main limitations that emerge from a purely logical (or rather, linguistic) point of view are therefore the following:

• A food can be defined as natural for a given animal species if it is part of its diet in its natural habitat, that is, the environment unmodified by humans, from which that species originates.
• A food transformed by salting, cooking, or other processes not occurring (or occurring only very accidentally) in natural living conditions cannot be considered natural.
• Feeding techniques that encourage consumption beyond the natural regulation of food intake are also contrary to natural rules.

Based on this definition, a dog’s natural diet would consist of raw meat, perhaps intestines still full of digested grass, certain fruits, or other plants that canines know how to find in nature. At a stretch, grated carrots could be considered part of a natural diet, but not if they are seasoned, since seasoning is not found in natural conditions and encourages consumption.

Defining a natural diet is therefore not simple for animals, and it is even more complex when it comes to humans. Humans are by nature capable of ingenuity: it would therefore seem natural for them to obtain all sorts of food through various means, to transform it using all sorts of techniques such as cooking and seasoning, to fry food, to soak vegetables in liquid nitrogen, etc.

It is clear that this definition is flawed, since it lacks any limitations related to the concept of nature. Yet, some foods processed by human intervention are demonstrably harmful: we know that fried foods contribute to cardiovascular disease and cancer, that hamburgers promote obesity, and so on. It is therefore more logical to consider as natural for humans those foods unprocessed by any artificial means, or very close to raw foods as provided by nature.

And what about milk? Breast milk is obviously the first and most natural food for infants, but is it natural to consume milk beyond the normal breastfeeding period? How long is this breastfeeding period? And above all: is it natural for the human body to absorb cow’s milk?

Under natural conditions, no animal feeds on the milk of another animal species. It is therefore not necessarily natural for humans to consume the milk of their domestic animals—cows, sheep, mares, donkeys, camels, etc.

In short: the notion of a natural diet is based on certain dietary habits that are not necessarily natural, and on certain linguistic habits that are not always clear. Therefore, this notion can hardly serve as the basis for a scientific approach. This is why the instincto approach avoids the notion of natural nutrition and prefers that of progenetic nutrition.