Instinct and Dietetics

[NOTE] Intrinsic impossibility given the variability of needs depending on ongoing biological processes (viruses, bacteria, autoimmune processes, fighting cancer cells, etc.) Harmful display of food components Example of the belief in the necessity of animal proteins: blepharitis, keratoses, painful fissures, Dupuitren’s syndrome, tumors.

Dietetics has made nutritional balance its focus. Everyone knows today that the body can only function properly if it receives adequate amounts of the various nutrients it needs: sugar, proteins, fats, vitamins, and trace elements. Intakes must be between a minimum and a maximum threshold for each of the necessary substances; otherwise, there is a risk of deficiency or excess with their respective harmful effects: blockages of certain functions, disorders such as excessive weight gain, or organ damage.

This same approach to dietetics, however, is unable to tell us how we can achieve this balance. The generally taught rule is to eat a little of everything and nothing in excess. This is a double bind, because it’s precisely a matter of knowing the minimum quantities for each food and where the thresholds of excess lie. Eating meals with a table of food components and a calculator is incompatible with peaceful ingestion and digestion. The calculations are inextricable if we want to take into account all the essential components (not to mention toxic substances), and very approximate given the variations between foods within the same category.

Worse than that: moderate portions, calculated as an average, are ipso facto at odds with the body’s needs, for the simple reason that these needs are constantly changing, without us being able to measure them objectively. A flu virus, physical exertion, a period of rest or recovery, healing, detoxification, etc., are all it takes. So that foods that are usually beneficial can suddenly become harmful, or that desirable quantities can vary drastically. Dietetics thus stumbles on the inherent impossibility of knowing exactly what happens inside the body and can only offer vague and general indications about the types and quantities of foods that are desirable.

Furthermore, foods are extremely complex biological realities, and the approach that nutritional science can take remains very rudimentary. One cannot identify a nut, for example, by the substances that chemical analysis can detect, because many subtle substances slip through the net; complex molecules can take on different forms while retaining the same chemical formula. An excellent example is fats, which were once all lumped together, whereas advances in knowledge have led to a fundamental distinction between saturated and unsaturated fatty acids, then polyunsaturated fatty acids, then omega-3 fatty acids, then cis- and trans-fatty acids, and many other essential health characteristics certainly remain to be discovered.

Ultimately, dietetics brings us back to culinary tradition and certain highly questionable criteria for moderation.

However, research advances are demonstrating with increasing precision that tradition is no guarantee. For example, fried foods, common in all traditional cuisines, are a well-known cause of cardiovascular disease. Grilled foods, considered a panacea in the mid-20th century due to the absence of heated oils, have been shown to be highly carcinogenic. Milk, for its part, has been touted as an essential source of calcium, even though we now know that sufficient amounts of calcium are readily available in fruits and vegetables, and that the calcium content of cow’s milk, three times higher than that of human breast milk, can pose problems for the infant’s future health. All these foods remain tempting even though they are either useless or harmful to the body.

This seemingly unsolvable situation stems directly from the loss of the natural guidance provided by the senses: smell and taste have always had the essential function of identifying and determining the amount of beneficial nutrients. The smell of rancidity, for example, protects against carcinogenic substances that appear as a result of oxidation. In natural conditions, no animal eats without first smelling the food, and then stops when its sense of taste and other internal signals indicate that its needs are met. Such regulation is possible thanks to the sensory modulation capacity: food changes its smell and taste according to the body’s needs or overload. This function has been called “olfactory and gustatory alliesthesia” since the 1970s and has been the subject of numerous publications, without, however, having been integrated into nutritional science or dietetics.

This is undoubtedly one of the most significant contributions of instinctometry: basing dietary balance on the senses of smell and taste, that is, eating what is appealing to the senses. The only rule to follow should be to follow pleasure and heed any sign of displeasure.

Despite its universality in the natural world, this rule is unfortunately inapplicable to processed foods, simply because the central purpose of culinary preparations is to make food more palatable than it is in its raw form. Therefore, a second rule must be applied: avoid any alteration of the “organoleptic” characteristics of food—that is, its smell, taste, texture, and so on. Experience shows that the appeal of foods left in their natural form, provided they are close enough to their original varieties, does indeed change according to the body’s needs and imbalances.

At first glance, these rules may seem restrictive, as they require foregoing culinary embellishments. But in reality, they allow access to levels of enjoyment far surpassing gastronomic pleasures, and to an incomparable form of serenity: pleasure (re)becomes the natural guide to nutritional balance and its corollary: health. Through a period of re-education aimed at restoring the natural links between sensory signals during ingestion and subsequent feelings of well-being or discomfort, nature reasserts itself and surprises us with the precision and relevance of its regulatory mechanisms. The calculations of food rations and the concerns of dieticians then give way to the spontaneity of pleasure, to trust in one’s own body and in the natural laws that govern the mysteries of life.