The Theory in Brief

Excerpt from “The War of the Raw, Instinctotherapy”, pp. 207-211, Roger Faloci Publishers, 1985 (out of print); illustrations by Frapar. For a complete explanation, see the updated edition, “Manger Vrai”.

INSTINCTOTHERAPY, Synopsis

A food is said to be original for a given species if it belongs to the food range available in nature and has not undergone any of the artificial processes that have allowed humans to transform their diet. These processes fall into five main categories:

  1. Mechanical adulteration: mixing, seasoning, layering, pressing, extraction, grinding, crushing, kneading, blending, etc.
  2. Thermal adulteration: various forms of cooking, hot-drying, freezing, deep-freezing, irradiation, sterilizing, etc.
  3. Artificial selection: cross-breeding, and certain techniques of cultivation, animal husbandry, or genetic engineering.
  4. The consumption of animal milk and its derivatives.
  5. Chemicals: fertilizers, pesticides, additives, synthetic products, medications, etc.

Adaptation and evolutionary time

Through natural selection, every animal species adapts to its habitat and to the foods it can eat there in their natural state. A change in the quality, appearance, or chemical structure of the available food may call for a new adaptive process. Yet genetic inheritance changes very slowly over time (a mutation rate of around 1% is observed over periods ranging from a million to a billion years). Where human food is concerned, the first rudiments of culinary art go back some two million years, when the first tools were invented; the mastery of fire dates back to roughly 400,000 years; while cooking itself, together with the use of cereal grains and animal milk, only became common some 10,000 years ago.

For every type of culinary practice, then, it is worth asking: whether genetic adaptation was or is necessary; whether such adaptation was even feasible; and whether enough time has elapsed for it to have occurred.

The law of the feeding instinct

When returning entirely to original foods, we observe the reactivation of an extremely precise feeding instinct, expressed mainly through changes in our senses of smell and taste. Experience allows us to state the law of the feeding instinct: any original food that is attractive to smell or taste is beneficial to the body — and vice versa.

This law follows directly from the laws of evolution: an animal driven by instinct to eat poisonous plants, or to unbalance its diet, would be weakened and eliminated by natural selection. There must therefore exist, in animals, processes that adjust the perception of smell and taste according to the body’s current metabolic state and needs. These processes — known as alliesthesia (not to be confused with the pathological symptom of allesthesia) — operate in humans as well, and, like any other function, can only have been refined over the course of biological time.

It should be noted, however, that this evolution took place almost entirely on unprocessed, original foods. It is therefore unsurprising that these instinctive mechanisms go awry when confronted with non-original foods, which are far too recent, on an evolutionary timescale, for our genetic code to have adapted to them. The existence of an innate programming of the feeding instinct is evident, for instance, in newborns, who are immediately able to select and correctly portion original foods without any prior learning.

Instinctive stop

A useful food can become unnecessary, or even harmful, once the body’s needs have been met: we then observe an abrupt change in flavor, or the appearance of unpleasant sensations — sourness, acridity, astringency, sharpness, a burning sensation, bitterness, or a texture that feels rough, dry, or sticky. We call this change the instinctive stop (not to mention satiety, disgust, and other negative bodily signals).

Smell and taste are unlike our other senses: they are the mouthpiece of the feeding instinct, as shown by structures such as the olfactory bulb and the hypothalamus, which modulate the nerve impulses sent to the cortex according to metabolic data. As the body clears the metabolic overload and disruption caused by processed food, these instinctive signals grow clearer and more intense, and we rediscover the original flavors of natural foods — far richer and more rewarding than those of culinary gastronomy.

The trap of culinary art

Anthropologically speaking, culinary art can be seen as a kind of short circuit between intelligence and instinct: intelligence allows us to transform food to obtain pleasure at will, which amounts to deceiving instinct. Pleasure obtained through artifice catches our nervous system’s genetic coding off guard and is, in truth, only an illusion of the senses. It also leads to a progressive overload of the body, which gradually blunts the intensity of pleasure — defeating its own purpose. This overload makes even the most natural foods unpalatable, so that pleasure can only be found in cooked food: cooking is thus a kind of trap that humanity fell into with the advent of conceptual intelligence.

In nature, whatever is good for the senses is good for the body, and whatever is bad for the body is bad for the senses: all that is needed is to give in to natural inclinations. Such is the law of pleasure, a direct consequence of instinct, itself derived from the laws of evolution.

With culinary artifice, however, what is bad for the body can be made to taste good: pleasure can lead to error. Rules must therefore be established, and willpower brought to bear, to limit the damage — hence the rise of dietetics, made all the more necessary by disorders linked to ordinary food (obesity, heart disease, and so on), and by the corresponding rise of diets, “health foods,” supplements, fasting, and the like.

It is worth noting that no gluttony is involved here: with original foods, pleasure and harm never go together — a tasty food is a useful one, and a harmful food tastes unpleasant. Relying on the feeding instinct therefore resolves the dietary question outright. Rather than assessing the body’s needs from the outside — an approach that runs up against the sheer complexity of nutritional processes and the unpredictability of individual needs — smell and taste simply return to their natural function, pointing directly toward actual needs and their sometimes striking fluctuations. Instinctotherapy is, incidentally, not a “diet”: it neither compels nor forbids. It consists simply in removing whatever artifices are liable to mislead the instinctive mechanisms or to trigger metabolic disturbances.

Molecular pathology

Non-original foods introduce into the body molecules absent from original foods — “new chemical compounds” — for which our genetically encoded enzymes have no reason to be adapted. These molecules may arise from chemical reactions inherent to culinary heat, or be introduced by foods originally absent from the human diet, such as animal milk. Some of these molecules cannot be properly metabolized and accumulate in the body, gradually setting up a culinary intoxication. They may build up in body fluids (blood, lymph), stockpile in cell vacuoles, turn amyloid, deposit in fatty tissue, or become woven into cell and tissue structures such as membranes, collagen, or dentin.

Current metabolic research has yet to take these non-original molecules into account, even though the disruptions they cause amount to nothing less than a genetically paradoxical metabolism, or “parabolism.” It is troubling that such food “intoxication” may be responsible, in whole or in part, for a great many diseases — what we call a dietary molecular pathology.

Minute amounts of these parasitic substances are enough to trigger serious symptoms, and identifying which new chemical compounds are involved in our vital processes is a thorny question. In the absence of adequate analytical tools, empirical observation — including smell — has had to fill the gap: experience shows that any bodily excretion (sweat, breath, intestinal gas, stool, urine, earwax, pus, and so on) that gives off a foul odor points to a pathological process. The whole of medicine has been built up without taking into account the presence of these parasitic new chemical compounds in the body; disease as a whole ought to be reconsidered in this light, which also accounts for individual variation in disease background.

Homeostasis and useful illness

Homeostasis — the body’s ability to restore its own integrity and balance — suggests the existence of processes meant to clear out some or all of these non-original molecules. Such processes give rise to signs that conventional medicine, unaware of the alien cooked molecules lodged in the body, mistakes for morbid symptoms. Some diseases, then, may be better understood as useful illnesses, or detoxification processes (also called orthopathic), aimed at restoring the integrity of the body’s internal environment.

Experience suggests that most infectious diseases are in fact orthopathic, which calls into question the classical view of viruses and bacteria as straightforward pathogenic agents. A virus appears to supply cells with a fragment of DNA or RNA that functions as an addition to their genetic coding, enabling them to flush out certain classes of non-original molecules. Bacteria, for their part, appear to be harnessed by the body — which, under proper dietary conditions, keeps their proliferation fully in check — to provide enzymes capable of breaking down particular non-original molecules or their metabolites, which the body’s own enzymes cannot handle.

Several familiar phenomena take on new meaning once we accept the presence of these alien substances in the body:

Immunity, cancer, allergy, and autoimmune disease

The body’s immune system, whose task is to identify and destroy abnormal cells and alien molecules — chiefly through the action of leucocytes — is, like every other system, genetically adapted only to the foreign elements found in our original environment. It may, therefore, fail to respond properly to non-original molecules. When the immune system is too frequently overtaxed by an alien molecule, or dietary antigen, it may settle into a state of immunological tolerance, in which the body allows the alien molecules and their by-products to infiltrate, undermining the genetic background, harassing cells, and lodging in membranes. Should a cancerous cell later develop, its membrane molecules — which the immune system would ordinarily recognize as foreign — may, by coincidence, resemble the tolerated dietary antigen closely enough to be read as normal, allowing the cell to go undetected and giving rise to a tumor.

The same theory accounts for allergies: once tissues have accumulated alien dietary molecules, it may take no more than a grain of pollen, a speck of dust, or a drug to jolt the body partly or wholly out of tolerance, producing a disproportionate inflammatory response.

This buildup of alien cooked molecules under tolerance also offers a basic explanation for autoimmune disease: should tolerance break down, the immune system will destroy the cells marked by these dietary antigens as though they were foreign. This helps account not only for arteriosclerosis — a leading cause of death — and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus erythematosus, but also for the premature aging of organs and a shortened lifespan.

Redefining health

Health, on this view, is no longer defined as the absence of disease, but as the body’s ability to react against unsuitable substances — that is, by the occurrence of “useful illnesses” that persist until toxemia is cleared. Thanks to the instinctive regulation of food intake, symptoms remain minor, or at least not severe, and reversible. Experience shows that detoxification proceeds at the same pace as intoxication: recovery begins once toxemia drops below a critical threshold, and the more recent the disease, the faster this happens. Genuine diseases, as a result, tend to clear quickly, while useful disorders may persist — latently, if the diet is well balanced — until alien substances have been fully cleared.

Weight loss can signal the expulsion of alien matter or, where mistakes are made, the loss of useful substances (depleted stores, cell lysis, dehydration, and so on). When starting a raw, instinctive diet, the weight loss typically observed comes partly from reduced water retention — previously caused by cooking salt, and worth roughly two pounds — and partly from the clearance of substances that had built up under tolerance. Afterward, muscle mass is restored and clear signs of rejuvenation appear.

Nervous system, psyche, and metapsychoanalysis

Abnormal molecules circulating in the blood can disrupt neuron and synaptic transmission, whether by inhibition or overstimulation. Abnormally amplified nerve impulses can produce self-sustaining “feedback” loops that disturb the mind at every biochemical level, potentially fueling anything from obsessive neurosis to schizophrenia. An original diet is known to be highly effective in relieving anxiety, stress, and aggressiveness, as well as insomnia, nightmares, and tics.

More specifically, once the sex drive is no longer overridden by endogenous overstimulation, it naturally resumes a largely forgotten function: supporting the exchange of subtle energy-information involved in a being’s metapsychic development. These observations invite a reconsideration of psychoanalysis as a whole, and of love, in connection with extrasensory perception and spiritual matters. This is the basis of metapsychoanalysis, a teaching grounded in the natural regulatory processes that restore the fundamental unity of matter and spirit, body and mind.

Don’t play around with raw food!

This book may give the impression that practicing instinctotherapy is easy: eat natural things, follow your pleasure — what could be simpler or more intuitive? Experience shows otherwise. Relying on the feeding instinct calls for a number of precautions and rules that cannot be improvised overnight; even the pioneers of instinctotherapy spent years feeling their way toward understanding and mastering the core mechanisms of nutritional balance.

It must be remembered that, from earliest childhood, we all learn our bodily and digestive reactions on denatured food — food for which no alliesthesic phenomena exist (alliesthesia being the shift in perceived taste): a sweetened baby bottle or a starch porridge tastes much the same from first spoonful to last. In a sense, our psyche’s deepest layers fix the image of a body without a feeding instinct.

What is left, then, are feelings of disgust and digestive unease — themselves distorted by addictive phenomena: sometimes the foods provoking the strongest disgust are precisely those that would cause harm, while at other times they are the very foods most active in detoxifying the body. Telling the two apart is far from easy, and there is often no way to know in advance whether a given trouble stems from a mistake in practice or from a legitimate detoxification reaction.

With more than fifty years of hindsight, experience shows that it is unwise to plunge into such a radically different diet without proper preparation and supervision. Countless pitfalls await the beginner: errors in food supply, misreadings of instinctive signals and bodily reactions, and mistakes driven by social, medical, or subconscious pressures that keep us tied to our mother’s cooking. All of this can turn a beginner’s path into a long, unpredictable obstacle course that threatens failure at every turn.

Do not play around with raw nutrition: the first steps in instinctotherapy should never be taken alone. Trusting one’s instinct is a wonderful thing, but that instinct must not be misled, under any circumstances, or a serious misstep may follow. Learning to recognize and avoid every possible cause of instinctive error is therefore essential, and requires solid theoretical grounding as well as real practice. In the early stages, you need guidance, supervision, and cues from someone more experienced, along with a suitable environment around you.

Signs of correct practice

Outside periods of detoxification, and provided the method is practiced correctly, general health should meet the following criteria:

If these criteria are not met, the cause should be sought either in the quality of one’s practice, in the quality of one’s food supply, or in a temporary “detoxification” reaction. Experience shows that once the underlying mistakes are corrected, these criteria can be met again — they represent, in other words, the organism’s normal operating state, once disorders induced by culinary artifice are set aside.