Instincto and meal plans

Choosing a menu is an integral part of gastronomic pleasure. It retains an essential place in instincto practice, except that it no longer operates arbitrarily, but by questioning the senses on the real needs of the organism.

It is the sense of smell that has always operated this capital function: since the dawn of time, all living beings have chosen their food using their sense of smell. Man is the first to have neglected this primordial law, although the aromas of a prepared dish and their memories play a significant role in food choices.

The crux of the matter is that a prepared dish can give off an alluring smell, even though it does not meet the body’s need: an individual overloaded with carbohydrates, for example, will be drawn to a curry pasta dish, fascinated by it. he smell of Indian spice while consuming cooked starch will only make his obesity or hyperglycemia worse if he is diabetic. If he tasted the pasta without salt, or the grain of wheat, he would realize his mistake.

As the olfactory mechanisms are not genetically adapted to the aromas of prepared dishes, they cannot ensure their essential function in the culinary context of selecting foods according to needs. All that remains is dietetics, or gastronomic memories, to establish the menu of the day. Neither one nor the others provide a correct answer, knowing that the needs of the organism change from day to day according to the biological processes underway, while memories or dietary precepts remain fixed.

When faced with a choice of unprepared foods, the surest way to select the most suitable food is through the scent test. Experience shows that the sense of smell is able to take into account the needs of the body, even if they are not accessible to conscious perception, and to guide the choice in an extremely reliable way. You still have to know how to use it, which requires a learning period, just like for the taste.

In general, you just need to choose the food whose smell seems the most pleasant in quality (not in intensity) to discover the one that will provide both maximum pleasure for the palate, and maximum nutritional benefits. . If the taste does not seem pleasant at the first bite, or if it changes after a certain amount ingested, you must wait a moment and start an olfactory selection round again with the remaining foods. Even if the amount of food absorbed is very small, do not worry: sometimes a tiny amount of active substance is enough to trigger a biological process, as is the case in herbal medicine.

The arbitrary, or voluntarist, side of the classic choice of the menu thus gives way to the wonder of finding delicious foods that are often unforeseen. Thus an attitude of obedience to one’s own body develops, in contrast to the Promethean attitude which deludes itself of being able to control nature …

Practice

It is not possible to choose in advance the foods that might make up the optimal menu.

Indeed, if the organism has for example a strong need for vitamins C, the smell of citrus fruits and other fruits rich in ascorbic acid will be dominant. Oranges, clementines, grapefruits, kiwis will all smell positive (although kiwis have minimal odor). By going around several times, we see that one of the odors takes precedence over the others: it is the fruit that the body identifies as the most appropriate. But after consuming and covering the desirable vitamin C intake, other fruits will have lost their appeal. It is therefore necessary to restart a selection between all the available fruits, this time the body will set its sights on the one that will best cover the other needs, for example bananas in the event of a lack of potassium. And so on.

We thus arrive step by step to discover by smell each time the ideal food, the one that will best meet the instantaneous nutritional needs, and thus give maximum pleasure to the palate and in-depth satiety. It is not recommended to make this selection while tasting the food: the fact of putting several foods in the mouth (even without swallowing) triggers reactions that complicate the situation, the olfactory calls become confused as if several digestive programs were set in motion. square. People deprived of smell (anosmia) can however proceed by “taste-spit”: taste the most probable food, spit out if the flavor is not attractive enough, taste the next one and spit out the mouthful, until they find the most attractive food. The precision of nutritional regulation will of course be less than with olfactory selection, but still much better than with prepared food.

It is also not necessary, and even not recommended, to review all the foods available at each meal. Better at noon to go around the fruit and eat two or three varieties of fruit. And in the evening, start with foods rich in protein and fat, preferably one of which is enough to cover your needs, then review the vegetables and consume several in succession. If you haven’t eaten any meat, you can finish with a variety of fruit chosen in the same way. Meat more fruit at the same meal is often a bad association.