Pseudoscience or science ?

Let us start from the definitions of these two concepts:

For “science”, dictionaries indicate:

a coherent body of knowledge relating to certain categories of facts, objects or phenomena obeying laws and / or verified by experimental methods;

a structured body of knowledge which relates to facts obeying objective laws (or considered as such) and whose development requires systematization and method;

set of bodies of thought on nature, man, society, being the subject of studies according to objective methods.

On the other hand, we do not find any definition for “pseudo-science”. The prefix “pseudo” is taken from the Greek ψευδ(o)-, itself taken from ψευδής “false, misleading”. By pseudo-science is therefore understood a set of knowledge or beliefs taking on the aspects of a science without respecting the rules of objectivity, the issuance of hypotheses, or their verification. There is a certain vagueness around this notion, leaving room for all kinds of quibbling.

A tendency specific to skeptical circles, in particular to zetetics, consists in recognizing as scientists only the results of research carried out and verified within the framework of the scientific corpus. This is obviously an abusive position, because many notions which subsequently transformed science were first put forward outside the institutional framework and have long been rejected. Leading example: heliocentrism. A closer examination, from the epistemological point of view, further reveals that “science”, despite its claims to objectivity and universality, is in fact locked into a paradigm which has nothing to do with it. absolute, but depends on the contrary on an era, a society and the unspoken “complicity” between the representatives of knowledge. We must therefore find another criterion than the non-acceptance by the scientific corpus. Or, we would have to accept the idea that a pseudo-science can be both a false science and a source of science …

First precaution: a crazy idea is generally rejected by the consensus. The converse is not true: just because an idea is rejected does not mean that it is far-fetched. But it is not because an idea is rejected either that it is not far-fetched … The question is therefore to know why a relevant idea can be rejected by supposedly scientific minds? By attachment to the usual modes of thought: the scientists are not exempt from this defect of the human spirit which consists in believing hard as firm in what it considers to know or to have previously demonstrated. Opening up to an idea that calls into question certainties abuses both security (knowing everything is a way of guarding against ignorance and danger), self-esteem (it is unpleasant to have to admit a mistake ), and the “cognitive cost” (reconstructing a point of view requires a much greater intellectual effort than staying in one’s position).

However, it turns out that instinctotherapy is particularly unsettling for those who refuse to question their own eating habits. The hypothesis of a genetic maladjustment of the human organism to the productions of agriculture and the culinary art amounts to saying: you make yourself sick by eating as you eat. Each one being attached by the pleasure to his eating habits, there is immediately a conflict between the beliefs in the merits of the traditional food, advocated throughout the education, and the anguish of death or illness that arouses a new theory, anxieties all the more significant as the theory is more logical and obvious. The most immediate solution is to reject the embarrassing theory and implement all possible defense strategies to bolster the dominant thought system.

Second, scientists bear a responsibility to the public: what they teach is supposed to benefit those who trust the system or inform them of a danger. To have concealed a hypothesis which is the key to the problem of food and health appears to be an extremely serious breach of this essential social duty. To quantify this level of responsibility, it suffices to count the deaths from cardiovascular diseases or cancer that we know today are attributable to bad eating habits, which occurred between the time when scientists could foresee the danger (from Darwin’s publications on the laws of evolution) and one where they resolved to publicly question food. The world of science is therefore implicitly accused as soon as this hypothesis emerges from the shadows. Everyone would be tempted to say: you let us believe that everything was in order in the medical approach to the food system, while a fundamental flaw was undermining the construction and that you had everything in hand to pose the problem and warn the population. It is therefore both self-esteem and the weight of responsibility that push scientists to reject any hypothesis calling into question the diet supported by the mainstream belief system.

Third, it is no small effort to start over a system of reasoning built on an erroneous basis. You have to start all over again from a to z, not only to understand how the logical chains are reorganized, but to re-cross the old cause and effect relationships on which we had relied to organize the dominant thought system and to endorse it. The closer the error is to the basics of the system, the more important this work. Cognitive psychology has shown that the human psyche is reluctant to undertake mental operations whose “cognitive cost” is too high (= which represent too much mental effort). However, calling into question the implicit hypothesis of genetic adaptation to traditional food amounts to taking up at the base all the medical reasoning and all the research carried out in this field, as well as all the dietary recommendations.

Indeed, the factor “inadequacy of the principles of the traditional diet to the genetic data of our metabolism” constitutes the most fundamental articulation of the reasoning concerning the pathogenesis. The concealment of this factor in the initial hypotheses of any medical research could have resulted in a biased interpretation of the results: the correlations found are automatically attributed to secondary factors, the causal relationships reversed, false relationships invoked, etc. For example, overweight is attributed to sedentary lifestyle or genetic predisposition while neglecting the causes of excessive calorie intake (failure of the dietary instinct in the face of unnatural flavors); the accumulation of adipose matter is related to a simple excess of calories while forgetting the presence of molecules denatured by heat, etc.

Other examples: a significant correlation was demonstrated between the intelligence quotient of children adopted early and the socio-cultural level of their biological mothers, although they did not know them. We draw the conclusion that it is not the environment in which the child grows that determines his IQ, but the IQ of biological mothers, and therefore that the IQ would be hereditary. But we do not find any correlation between the IQ of different biological mothers and that of their children … We say to ourselves that the IQ depends on something that is already happening in the womb of the mothers and which is related to their level. sociocultural. The conclusion remains mysterious, we invoke the sounds that the fetus perceives in the amniotic fluid, the emotional state of the mother and all kinds of imponderables, while neglecting the food factor: mothers of a lower socio-cultural level have statistically a poorer quality food, containing more cereals and dairy products, than those which are more educated and have better financial means; they also absorb more alcohol and nicotine. If these factors had been taken into account in the initial hypotheses, the study could have concluded to the effect of the mother’s diet or generally of the hygiene of life on the development of the fetus’ brain. Or the effect of the duration of breastfeeding, which may be statistically shorter or rarer in poorer mothers.

Second example: the numbers show that obesity and cardiovascular disease are correlated. We therefore deduce that obesity is a factor favoring cardiovascular disease, or even a cause of cardiovascular disease, given that patients are obese before suffering from a heart attack and that being overweight can tire the heart. However, statistically, obese people are among those who eat the most. It is therefore possible that the facilitating role attributed to obesity is attributable to diet: a poor diet, in particular an excess of calories, can generate both obesity and cardiovascular disease. But this correction still misses a factor that could be the main one: a diet poorly adapted to the genetic data of the metabolism may be accompanied by an accumulation of poorly degraded molecules leading to pathological weight gain at the same time as the formation of atheromatous plaques undermining the cardiovascular system. The cause would be in this case the molecular denaturation due to the culinary preparations, generating all kinds of molecules escaping the normal degradation by our enzymes which would end up accumulating in the adipose tissues. In fact, observations seem to show that caloric overload and the accumulation of denatured molecules cooperate in the genesis of obesity, the second leading to the constitution of a stock of “toxins” much more dangerous than the simple constitution of reserves. caloric. It is also apparently impossible to cause overweight by consuming an excess of undenatured food.

Third example: Contamination of a wound with pathogenic bacteria often leads to a dangerous infection if left untreated. However, medicine cannot know how a contaminated wound behaves when the body receives original nourishment. She therefore attributes the infection to contamination. However, observation shows that the same contaminations do not lead to infection in the context of an original diet, so it is no longer the bacteria that must be considered responsible for the infection, but the food practice incompatible with the genetic data of the organism.

Despite the huge gap between the conventional medical paradigm and that of anopsology, several researchers became interested in instinctotherapy, but had to abandon their research under pressure from their peers. For example, Professor Blanc, who headed the Swiss Institute for Dairy Research, undertook in the 1970s a study on the molecular denaturations of proteins during UHT treatment: a few years later, he was forced to stop his research, which was too conclusive. , under pressure from his board of directors, at the risk of losing his post of director.

Other scientists have shown themselves to be completely closed. A young doctor who was then collaborating with me met in 1971 Dr Neukomm, director of the Swiss Institute for Research on Cancer, and explained to him my hypothesis according to which denatured molecules can escape normal degradation by digestive enzymes while retaining antigenic structures and, by entering the blood regularly, induce tolerances liable to promote the proliferation of cancer cells. The only answer is: “And the intestinal barrier ?! “. I still see my friend come back sheepishly and tell me about his disappointment. At the time, it was not yet known that this barrier allows about one in a thousand macromolecules to pass, which is enough to cause immune disorders. Not to mention the chilomicrons, small drops of fat combined with proteins, which passively enter the enterocytes (cells of the intestinal wall) and can introduce significant amounts of molecules into the lymph.

I had made my theses known to Professor Le Magnen around 1966, when he went to the University of Lausanne to receive the title of Doctor honoris causa. He asked me to write a summary of my ideas and observations for him, which I did under the title of the Essay on dietary instinct in Man and the definition of instinctotherapy (in French). However, I was left without any news from Le Magnen, except that my article ended up published in La revue des professions de santé) in 1984¹, available in various scientific libraries in Paris (cited in Wikipedia article on instinctotherapy).

In 1971, the physiologist M. Cabanac proposed the term alliesthesia for perceptual variations in taste and smell. The notion of dietary instinct, frequently used by researchers during the first half of the 20th century (notably by the well-known American physiologist Curt Paul Richter), was no longer fashionable after the sixties².

At the start of the 1980s, Ms. Louis-Sylvestre (a close collaborator of Le Magnen) directed research on food intake at the Collège de France. She encountered a real outcry when she wanted to talk about dietary instinct at a conference.

Then there was Professor Seignalet, who clashed even more violently with his peers (for example a certain Dr Quiquempois) and the Order of Physicians for having prefaced my book Manger Vrai. The fact remains that his study on rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases related to the consumption of wheat and milk provides major confirmation of my hypothesis of genetic maladjustment to dietary changes that have occurred since the Neolithic era.

Faced with all these obstacles, I had one solution to back up my theses: to look in the existing literature for work confirming the forecasts resulting from my hypotheses. However, it turns out that each new discovery in recent decades concerning the relationship between diet and pathology has only provided additional confirmations. The main studies are listed on the ‘Scientific references’ page. It is also necessary to note a significant fact: one does not find in the new discoveries any invalidating the hypothesis of the genetic adaptation to the primitive diet nor the derived theories (relationship between nutritional balance and regulation of the immune system, theory of the process. viral, etc.).

What can we then conclude from the scientific or pseudo-scientific nature of instinctotherapy? I believe that the theoretical approach is based on plausible hypotheses in terms of scientific discourse: the questions that I ask regarding the genetic adaptation to the dietary changes that have occurred since the Neolithic, or even earlier with regard to cooking, are prove irrefutable with regard to the laws of evolution. That is to say, to reject these questions, it would be necessary to deny the laws of evolution and to affirm that the Creator had foreseen the invention of the culinary art in order to adapt the human organism to it as a preventive … Note that, if this were the case, modern food would not be implicated in all kinds of diseases, in particular in the epidemic of obesity and overweight which is gripping the planet at the same time as Western food habits.

On the other hand, I am the first to recognize that the adaptation to the original diet, or the adequacy of the diet that I have defined under the term of instinctotherapy, has not been demonstrated or accepted by the corpus. scientist. It is not that I did not try to interest scientists in it. Dr Seignalet also unsuccessfully invited institutional researchers to look into the question. I had to be satisfied for the moment with my own observations (while knowing that personal observations have no value of proof in the eyes of scientists) and could only draw provisional conclusions while waiting for third parties. undertake research in accordance with the enforced rules.

The situation is therefore this:

• the anopsology is unquestionably based on scientific bases;
• the theory has found numerous verifications and no contradictions in the discoveries made since its formulation in the 1960s;
• empirical observations made with the means at hand largely confirmed his predictions.

Those who intend to qualify it as pseudo-scientific must attack not the theory or my own positions, but the refusal or indifference of the scientists in place who are responsible for confirming or denying it. On the contrary, it is medicine that appears to be a pseudo-science for having neglected a fundamental potential factor of pathogenesis, namely the genetic maladjustment of the organism to dietary changes that have occurred over the course of history.

For more details on the positive and negative reviews of instinctotherapy, you can go to the Wikipedia article. The Seignalet-Quiquempois exchanges will give you an idea of​the way in which a researcher, however recognized, who deviates from the beaten track gets attacked by his peers.