Instinct and Cooking

All populations on the planet cook their food. Cooking is considered inextricably linked to and essential for human nutrition. When going camping or exploring, a gas canister or the ability to light a fire to heat meals is a crucial part of one’s gear.

Yet, given that all animals in the world have always fed on raw food, many questions arise: Is cooking truly necessary for human nutrition? Why did humans develop the habit of cooking their food? Doesn’t cooking have health risks? What happens to natural food molecules when they are subjected to heat? What are the consequences of cooking on the ecological balance?

The Instincto experiment was the first large-scale, long-term study to provide both theoretical and empirical answers to these questions. It has now been proven that food is in no way necessary for maintaining health or for the growth of children from conception to adulthood. This latter criterion demonstrates that food provides the body with all the elements necessary for its growth and functioning.

The experiment began in 1964 and was conducted continuously by a significant number of people over periods exceeding forty years. Many children born during this period developed a constitution equal to or above average in terms of skeletal structure, musculature, endurance, digestive function, resistance to disease, dental caries, physical and intellectual performance, and other indicators of general health.

These observations shatter the stereotypes that cooked food is essential for human beings, and that it supposedly allows the brain to use the energy saved during digestion. Experience shows, on the contrary, that digestion works much better with raw foods, provided that these foods meet a genuine need of the body, recognizable by the alliesthetic appeal and the sensation of hunger.

Why then did cooking become so prevalent throughout history, in all forms of societies, even the most ancient ones whose remains have survived? It is possible that humanity experienced periods of famine, linked to natural climate changes such as ice ages and desertification. Cooking has the advantage of making usable foods that would not be edible in their raw state, at least not in sufficient quantities to ensure survival, such as starches and grains. The question remains: why has its use persisted?

The discovery of alliesthetic mechanisms provides the explanation: when an individual begins to consume cooked foods, the negative perception of tastes no longer functions normally, so that the quantities consumed systematically exceed nutritional needs. The resulting state of overload then produces an aversion to foods left in their natural state, with which alliesthesia operates. For example, consuming cooked potatoes causes a calorie overload in someone who does not deliberately limit their intake, leading them to reject raw fruits rich in carbohydrates (or to drastically limit their consumption). The individual can then only regain satisfaction by returning to cooked foods (ideally seasoned to enhance the level of pleasure).

Since the discovery of alliesthesia is very recent, it was impossible for our ancestors to understand why they were so reliant on cooking. As generations passed, the inability to achieve the natural level of pleasure from raw foods led them to relegate them to a secondary category, a disdain that was still very strong before the discovery that heat destroys certain vitamins. The neglect of alliesthetic mechanisms, which persists even in modern dietetics, makes it impossible to represent the flavor changes that could make raw foods more appealing than cooked ones. It should be understood that the level of pleasure depends on the state of overload, and that inhibiting alliesthetic mechanisms with cooked foods leads to permanent overconsumption of all kinds of substances.

Furthermore, the systematic consumption of cooked foods leads, through habituation, to a decrease in digestive capacity. Cooking, to some extent, amounts to predigestion; the stomach becomes accustomed to performing less digestive work, so that many raw foods seem indigestible at first glance. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the fact that raw foods are chosen by those who prefer cooked food without reference to alliesthetic mechanisms, but rather based on subjective perceptions. Under these conditions, it is impossible to choose the raw food that corresponds to actual needs, resulting in a lack of both pleasure and digestive response.

This is a vicious cycle that can only be broken with a sufficient understanding of the processes involved.

Conversely, the almost automatic nature of this vicious cycle might lead one to postulate that humans are equipped, both cerebrally and physiologically, to resort to cooking. In other words, that it would be natural for human beings to cook their food. The only way to settle the matter is to examine the effects of cooking on the body: if they are beneficial, then humans can be considered a “cooking” species. If cooking proves to have harmful effects, then the vicious cycle described above should be seen as a kind of evolutionary accident: humans have developed an intelligence that allows them to invent all sorts of devices, including cooking, without their bodies being metabolically adapted to them.

It is clear that humans are capable of inventing seemingly useful devices that ultimately prove detrimental to their bodies. Examples: opium extraction and heroin production were invented for the purpose of euphoria, and yet their effects on physical and mental health are demonstrably harmful. Weapons of war were invented for the conquest of territories, and humanity has since become trapped in an arms race that now threatens its very survival. The same pattern applies to cooking: perhaps invented to combat famine, it has become a kind of trap, into which populations worldwide have been drawn for millennia.

The crucial question, therefore, is to determine the effects of cooking on health, starting with its effects on the nutritional properties of food. Raising the temperature produces chemical reactions that create new molecules, initially called Maillard reaction molecules, named after the American chemist who observed the phenomenon in 1917. Renamed New Chemical Species (NCS), they represent an extremely broad and unpredictable range of random chemical substances and have consequently been little studied. Since the 1990s, researchers have focused particularly on AGEs (Advanced Glucose Endproducts), which result from reactions between proteins and glucose. Acrylamide, for example, is found in potato chips, French fries, bread, pastries, etc., at levels up to a thousand times higher than the permitted levels in treated drinking water. Most AGEs are produced during high-temperature cooking (frying, grilling, baking), but some can also appear at moderate temperatures. For instance, excessive glucose levels were initially considered the source of AGEs that are particularly active in diabetics, as excess glucose was thought to combine with proteins already at body temperature.

These foreign molecules, absent in natural foods, have been shown to be toxic, carcinogenic, neurotoxic, and genotoxic. For a long time, nutritionists considered them negligible, believing that the intestinal barrier should only allow useful molecules to pass into the bloodstream.

However, they are found in numerous pathologies, for example in atherosclerotic plaques: they appear to inhibit the elimination of bad cholesterol and promote its accumulation on the artery walls. Their carcinogenic effects also represent a serious health threat. Their neurotoxic properties can impair brain function by exerting excitatory or inhibitory actions, which can play a role in psychic balance and the regulation of behavior, particularly in relation to sleep, sexual drives(meta “/”) and the demographic explosion, or even in relation to psychotic tendencies (dissociation, hallucination, delusion etc.) and their consequences on aggressive tendencies and the course of history.

As for genotoxicity, it can cause an increase in chromosomal abnormalities, some of which are transmissible from generation to generation and responsible for a progressive degeneration of the genome, explaining the rise in cancers and so-called genetic diseases (disabilities, Down syndrome, intellectual disability, etc.).

From a more fundamental perspective, cooking induces molecular disorder in the biochemical structures of food, and some of this disorder remains in the body after consumption, where it can disrupt numerous functions, given that all biological functions occur at the molecular level.

In light of all this data, it appears:

The addictive processes it induces at the alysensory and digestive levels must therefore be understood not as progress in civilization, but as a kind of trap. This trap has been closing since the dawn of time on a humanity that was neither able to understand its mechanisms nor to foresee its consequences. The process may have begun as soon as our ancestors mastered fire, or as soon as they used it to cook their food. Thus, cooking may have led, well before the Neolithic period and the development of culinary techniques, to an overconsumption of simply braised meat and a loss of interest in plant-based foods, hence the systematic hunting probably responsible for the extinction of mammoths, just as it is today the cause of the endangerment of many fish species.

Instinct seems to be one of the first approaches addressing This situation is scientifically examined. It allows those who wish to rediscover within themselves the natural laws of eating, as well as the infinitely higher levels of pleasure that have been lost over millennia.

From the perspective of planetary ecology, cooking consumes a significant amount of energy and contributes directly or indirectly to environmental degradation. It fuels deforestation in desertifying regions through the uprooting of bushes or the burning of organic waste, causes the emission of smoke and greenhouse gases, and leads to the proliferation of radioactive waste.