The human condition and raw paleodiet

The dietary method named instinctotherapy (or instinctive paleolithic diet) which arose from our research, consists of the integral return to raw foods regulated by our dietary instinct that all animals possess, but that cultural habits systematically inhibit and repress.
Setting as hypothesis humans’ genetic and metabolic non-adaptation to cooked food, experiments on thousands of subjects showed consequences to be so numerous and far-reaching, that the relatively recent advent of cooking in our (pre)history can in all seriousness be likened to the Fall from a semi-divine state as described by Genesis and the mythology of many cultures around the world, Hesiod’s greek myth of the 5 races, egyptian scriptures or Buddhism alike.

After decades of observation of thousands of people, it has become clear that cooking is responsible for most bacterial, viral and degenerative diseases. In fact our very understanding of disease is wrong, as represented by the fallacious Germ theory whose own creator understood that the terrain of the body is what plays a crucial role in the progress of disease.
However, with a certain amount of food discipline and a fairly broad range of healthy foods, a very strict discipline and obedience to the sense of smell (letting the body determine its needs), we can use our body as it was meant, once again.

It is possible to awaken our eating instinct, which all animals have, and bring about the near complete elimination of disease, especially as a life-threatening phenomena. Strength, agility, recovery time, mental acuity, all stats improve samewise on their own, fairly quickly, in proportion to the quality of your diet (and secondarily of your genetics). Access to the food range as close as can be to that of the great apes (whose needs are near-identical to our own) also proved absolutely essential.
The main reason is the AGEs: AGEs, or advanced glycation endproducts are a class of very specific molecules, produced in large numbers at the time of cooking, and associated with disorders as varied as cancer, diabetes¹ or oxidative stress in general, which we know the key role in the ageing process. AGEs are the results of a chaotic blending of sugar chains and proteins, while ALEs are the same with lipids.

Both broad categories are produced during cooking at a rate exceeding several thousands times, if not more, than what is found in nature (outside forest fires of course, though they usually burn trees to a crisp instead of cooking them). Yet despite several findings indicating their major role in health, nothing even remotely of a corresponding scale was undertaken to curtail the issue. Even the bloodiest dictator, could never fight against his people’s habit of cooking…
We will see what consequences this constant chemical onslauhght has been tempered with the brain and been disrupting its higher functions since tens of millenia (increasingly so), twisting the development of culture since then. we will also see the omnipresent effects on health in general, creating what is in effect is a false, feeble human condition, a fallen nature.

But first, we shall define what exactly is the natural diet, by example, before going through the numerous change that occurs, how it truly sets correct raw instinctive paleodiet practionners apart from the rest of humanity.

Defining a Natural Diet

Criteria

• They feed only on raw food, neither mixed nor processed or seasoned
• They are guided mainly by smell and only then by sight, color or memory.
  Under optimal conditions the following pattern invariably applies:
  attractive smell → salivation reflex = physiological need → luminous phase, an excellence in taste confirming the smell.

Saturation of need is indicated by an unpleasant sensation in the mouth: acidic, bitter, raspy, difficult swallowing etc, meaning that enzymes are missing. Forcing us to stop eating, as continuing regardless causes a painful sensation in the stomach, if not immediately the mouth. Some food have a stronger character than others for instance pineapple (that contain a protease) will make you bleed from the moment your body stops producing anti-proteases. This doesn’t mean pineapples are inherently better though, all wild food can become unimaginably repulsive to the point of throwing up.

The wideness of tastes they can take depending on your inner state, is a crucial characteristic of wild food compared to domesticated or selected species - which can’t be as rich in taste nor as harrowingly distateful when the body refuses it. Just bland in comparison. It is a dialogue, an active exchange, like talking but in the primeval common language of chemistry and maybe more. Ultimately the level of delight we can attain, exceed by far anything cooking can invent: in fact it only ever tricks our tastebuds, playing on a few strings discordingly while a original taste is a symphony in comparison.

(Wild) animals do not have our intellect, they spontaneously obey their senses to regulate the quantities. Too dumb to disobey nature. Influenced neither by dietetics nor the fear of missing, a good smell is followed by a good taste, they continue to eat, stop at the first sensation less pleasurable.

It must be understood that metabolic needs evolve slowly therefore kept very close to those of our ape cousins. wikipedia says for bonobos (for a more quantitative analysis see below). Precise menu content:

• Fruits (pulp + seeds) > 50 % weight
• Other important plant foods: stem pith, leaves, petioles, seeds, flowers
• Beetles, bees, butterflies, snakes, shrews, earthworms, millipedes
• Sometimes small mammals, up to young antelopes. Or smaller monkeys.

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• honey, eggs, soil

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• Mushroom and termites, insect larvae

  

Composition of bonobo diet

Bwindi Gorilla

Ngogo Eastern Chimpanzees

Rio Muni Central chimpanzees

We find that monkeys (like bears and many omnivorous animals) to be very opportunistic. They show clear preferences but the most important seems to have varied food in 4 categories: carbohydrates (fruits, honey), vegetables (greeneries !), animal proteins, vegetable proteins. Depending on local availability, it is possible to rely on honey or a small variety of fruits… for a limited time.

Place of Insects

In practice, the proteins constitute ~ 15 to 20 % of our intake in weight. Insects have revealed in fifty years of experience to become over time, for people practicing assiduously this diet, the most appreciated proteins to our gustative buds, much more than meat and eggs or fish.

Seafood (crustaceans and bivalves) are phylogenetically close to insects and thus therefore very far from us, while meat (especially mammalian) has molecular structures close to ours, therefore more likely to mislead the immune system, at least in the presence of excess quantities. More simply, even for a long-time practitioner with a relatively regenerated body and sense of taste, wild meat has as woefully or wonderfully strong a taste and stops you very quickly: That means we are not made to eat a lot of meat.

The irreplaceability of insects is also understood by their easy access in nature, which makes our adaption to them an evolutionary and logical necessity.

Behold the delicious larvea of our forests

Walk through a virgin forest like the Białowieża Forest in Poland and you will see the ground littered with huge dead tree trunks, swarming with worms and insects. In a climate supposedly cold and inhospitable for a naked monkey ! So in a tropical climate, without human deforestation, abundance is a certainty and the primitive tribes of the New World know it well.

The larvae of barbels are found - in Europe! - inside oaks, beeches, ashes, willows, chestnut trees, apple trees, lime trees. Insectivorism is not very developed in Europe (probably because of the omnipresence of dairy), creating a rather important lack in our practice of instincto. I am convinced much more positive effects could have been observed during these years otherwise.
Excesses of beef and other farmed animals could have been avoided, instead they caused a few cancers among those who settled in carnivorism in the wake of our first mistakes: Guy-Claude’s wife died in the early 1990s from eating resolutely against the very principles of the diet, eating a truly immense quantity of fat and meat, for psychological reasons which would require a book in and of themselves !

The Place of Hunting

In this sense vegetarians are right: eating animals regularly is not natural for a primate and the health effects are very damaging. Observations indicate monkeys have a clear preference for eggs and invertebrates, followed by reptiles and birds. I suggest you take a good look at these charts, which speak for themselves. How not to deduce the consequences could be anything but immense ?

Besides, I must stress out how chimpanzees get most of their meat not from hunting, but already dead animals. Yes, dead, rotting corpses. Which were all the rage in Roman times, so I don’t think there is much danger about them, except under conditions of an extreme degenerate industrial diet like today’s. The preference for stale or rotten (for our standards) meat was universal in primitive societies, up to the Middle Age, and for excellent reasons.
Victor de l’Avéron, a wild child found at the age of 12 in 1785 by Dr. Itard, naked and unable to speak, could spring like a gazelle, catch birds in flight as a cat would and pluck them in an instant. Compared to mammoth hunting, which presupposes organization and an elaborated use of tools, ask yourself which activity has had the most chance to mark our genetics! Our ancestors ate more birds and eggs and shellfish than mammals.

Vegans refuse insects and eggs assimilated to animal exploitation, banning themselves even honey, labeled bee vomit!
Obviously there is an element of intuitively perceived danger, as it was the case for Pythagoras, and Hitler, avoiding meat. Not to mention the ecological damage of hunting and farming. And the ethical problems of this industry.

An objective point of view would take into account the practices of monkeys, consuming animal proteins in non-negligible though very limited quantities. Man is not above the general laws imposed by his biological data, which even the most fanatical vegans as inveterate carnivores (zero carb) must obey lest not suffer illness and death.
Total deprivation of meat causes deficiencies, which explains why vegans always make exceptions for meat, or end up so thin as to look like Auschwitz survivors.

In nature, monkeys of our lineage or in general are not carnivores like lions or dogs, jumping on the prey and gobbling it up alive, fresh. Eating fresh meat is not strictly impossible (especially the entrails and brain, of course). But it is noticeable that all populations eating raw prefer aged or downright rotten meat, like the Inuits.

Some people put meat and fat in a plastic garbage bag, in order to quickly get the fermentation traditionally taking place in a bag through the skin of the sewn animal. The meat is also placed in a large plastic tub with a lid, which is then kept warm in the kitchen.

The maturation of a product (typically meat, but this applies to fruit) is typically separated into autolysis and ripening (or rotting for fruit). Aseptic autolysis is the rupture or degradation of cell membranes and cell walls, through programmed cell death, without the action of bacteria. Degradation by bacteria means rotting.

The processes are not totally distinct as they occur simultaneously: in mammals, certain bacteria are transferred from the mother to the child, the same bacteria which after death and the cessation of regulation by the immune system, are responsible for the onset of putrefaction.

The online encyclopedia Gastronomiac defines ripening as follows:

Operation consisting of leaving a game animal in a cool place for a variable period of time (up to 8 days, and even more for some amateurs) in order to tenderize its flesh and obtain a particular flavor under the effect of mortification. This aroma is produced by germs in the intestine, which invade the tissues and break down the proteins, producing substances which, in the long run, become toxic. Mushrooms are also involved in the practice of dry curing, where they form a kind of hard green crust on the outside of the piece of meat: they actually help the enzymes in meat tenderizing and add flavor. This crust is then removed.

We no longer push aging to the point of altering the scent as Montagne advocated in the 16th century, until the 19th century when Brillat-Savarin, the inventor of the eponymous cheese, is said to have said that he bothered all his colleagues with the smell of the game he brought in his pockets to have it aged.

This is almost impossible today, and perhaps not without reason:
Foreigners eating for the first time in developing countries often get “turista”, an explosive intestinal reaction to inferior food “hygiene” conditions. This is a way of saying that the intestinal flora has been disturbed and must take a few days to change and adapt.

Our advanced industrial populations live in almost total asepsis, compared to poor countries. The image of Indian children living in slums for years is well known… Even if these countries suffer from epidemics that have long since disappeared in Europe, the immune resistance of these people, exposed all their lives to various germs, vastly exceeds ours.

It is no exaggeration to say that Westerners live on a permanent drip-feed of medicine, and without it infant mortality would immediately skyrocket while life expectancy would stop at 40 years. The time for a new cleaner generation could be raised.

Although monkeys can hunt incidentally, neither their dentition nor their digestive system allows them to eat and digest fresh meat. For tens of millions of years - before their brains developed sufficiently - primates remained opportunistic occasional meat eaters.

So it makes sense that we have adapted to consuming bodies found in the wild, already dead in a hot humid tropical climate thus quickly emitting a strong, attractive scent. In fact, even dogs bury their game in the ground.

So that’s it for the meat. We have all the enzymes we need, we just have to let our friends the microbes do their job.
But while some idiots find eating meat disgusting, some go the absolute opposite extreme, claiming we abandoned fruits and can’t compete with other animals in climbing. Let’s debunk this, shall we ?

Any farmer will tell you how hard it is to protect fruit from birds. One can legitimately ask the previous question for fruit: even if humans are decent climbers with training, can they really compete with birds or other tree species?
Apes have four opposable thumbs, not two, and the proportion of their limbs is much better suited to arboreal locomotion: the ratio of forearms to arms is greater, and the whole thing is longer than ours in relation to the rest of the body, allowing for efficient swinging. The evolution of our morphology shows a shift from an arboreal to a predominantly terrestrial lifestyle over the last three million years.

Apes have four opposable thumbs, not two, and the proportion of their limbs is much better suited to arboreal locomotion: the ratio of forearms to arms is greater, and the whole thing is longer than ours in relation to the rest of the body, allowing for efficient swinging. The evolution of our morphology shows a shift from an arboreal to a predominantly terrestrial lifestyle over the last three million years.

But these reflections cannot determine how adept the original man was at moving through the trees. A good approximation can be reached however, by studying the ‘wild children’ who lived in the forest. Wild children are typically described as climbing trees to escape animals.

We are still - without doubt - adapted to ripe fruit, and often birds are adapted to other fruits than us and only fall back on our agricultural products to the extent that we have greatly reduced the diversity around which these species have evolved. We have ruined nature as a whole, creating an image of scarcity and permanent shortage in a wilderness that is supposed to be abundant.

This abundance and diversity can still be seen in the Kazakh forests, inhabited by omnivorous bears with similar tastes to ours. If our European woods show few edible fruit trees, it is primarily because we stopped caring for them and living in them tens of thousands of years ago, except for some Amazonian tribes.

As far as the ankle is concerned, it has been said that the human ankle is fundamentally different, preventing it from climbing trees effectively as apes do… But this has been disproved in 2013 by Venkataraman et al, proving that some African tribes still climb trees 20-50 meters high have no special skeletal adaptation.

This is because their ankles are so extraordinarily flexible that their feet can make angles of up to 45 degrees with their shins.
This is a level of flexibility comparable to wild chimpanzees, who climb trees in the same way. They plant their soles flat against the trunk, which allows them to hold their bodies closer to the trees and reduce the energy needed to climb.
By comparison, most people can only bend their feet 15 to 20 degrees. If you or I tried to match the bending of a Twa climber, our ankles would break catastrophically and we wouldn’t be walking, let alone effortlessly climbing a thick vine.
But the secret of the Twa is not in their ankles, which are indistinguishable from others. Instead, the team found that the Twa’s flexibility comes from calf muscles (gastrocnemius) with unusually long fibers, much longer than those of the Bakiga, a group of neighboring Ugandan farmers who do not climb trees.

The same could apply for most so-called key differences between us highlighted every now and then. The adaptations that have taken place all appear to be slow, multiple and gradual, and almost always present to varying degrees in our cousins for millions of years already.

This proves our ancestors were excellent climbers, and contrary to legend, vines do not make supports (sorry Tarzan), brachiation (swinging from one branch to another with the arms only, as monkeys do) as all children around the world know, is still part of our instincts. Ergo we never quit the trees completely, never really suffered the competition from other animals, which never pushed us in the Savannah to hunt big games as many claim.

We did not descend from trees and abandon them, to start hunting a good million years before our brain could grow enough to compete with much superior predators. In fact, according to some, to be anything but a prey. Fruits were and still should be the bulk of our food (even though degenerate civilized men substituted them with grains, it’s still carbohydrates, not animal fat and proteins). It appears that men are still quite good at moving quickly from branches to branches (brachiation), with a little bit of training.

A Prehistoric Fall from grace

About traditional Diets

Bodies need no intellectual guidance from dietetics for the good reason that it knows its own needs to the second and to the milligram of substances: Many people ignore or would deny the possibility for their nose to indicate anything, or that food’s scents can change from one moment to the next. They just never experienced it. It is important to realize we have been subjected to cooking since birth. Every instinct requires a concomitant learning ensuring its correct application.
Herring gulls, for example, drop hard prey from heights onto hard ground, to eat the inside, crabs for instance. Young birds up to one year old tend to fail ridiculously: catching in the air what they just dropped, dropping it on water or soft surfaces or do not fly high enough and must repeat. This contributes to the high mortality of this species’ younglings.

These feeding instinct behaviors require extremely complex cerebral motor coordination, flexibility involving an ability to learn various behavior patterns depending on prey, soil, wind, competitors. Youngsters have the instinct to try but understanding the relationship between hard surfaces, height and success takes time and often fails. Sometimes they lose interest in their prey, which is then stolen by a competitor.

The monkey who did not play as a child is a social misfit. We have seen animals born in captivity and raised alone: once adults, they were not able to communicate properly with others, did not know how to find their place in the hierarchy and were unable to court females or to mate.

In some species, such basic behavior requires a learning process. The same is true for feeding: the instincts are actualized in the key moments of childhood. This notion highlighted by Konrad Lorenz is fundamental for food and love.

Thus the very young baby in front of raw food, will immediately have the innate reflex to smell, to open its mouth if the odor is appropriate, and will turn away its head if the odor is not very engaging or even will spit it out. Many parents will attest to this. Within a few weeks, most of them show an interest in meat, and chew to extract the juice because they have no teeth.

On the contrary, in the culinary context, an habituation born from the constraint of denatured, industrial or otherwise processed foods, compromises the baby’s ability to assimilate the scale of tastes and smells in relation to <inner needs. Cooked flavors change very little, because the genetic programming of senses supposes the contact of raw food. Obedience to parents and conditioning through the vintage command finish your plate eventually replace the baby’s instincts with eating habits, dietary beliefs and a permanent inner metabolic disorder.

The child born raw (or wild animals) on the other hand gets to know his body and its subtle signals by associating pleasure to obeying natural laws and discomfort to disobeying them.

Acquiring this natural acuity of smell and proprioception during adulthood is difficult, it requires a lot of discipline, and the application of some rules developed with the years regarding the number of meals, their quantities, some hints of satisfaction or overload, etc. These are all crutches, but absolutely essential ones for all those who hail from a cooked society.

Maternal diet from the moment of conception to the delivery is known for certain now, to impact the child’s health for its whole life². Even disregarding abnormal heat-related molecules, cooked food’s level of vitamins can be tens of times lower than in raw food So by indulging in cooked food your children are robbed of a normal development, given deficiencies which may potentially not be corrected completely if said child is given raw food from day 1.

Cooking degenerated us from perfect superior beings to the degraded subhumans of today, dying of diseases of the body and mind. But this can change. Not only the future of human civilization depends on it, but of life on Earth itself - considering agriculture and husbandry damaged it beyond any recognition - will depend on our ability to give this dilemma the attention it deserves.
It should matter to you because the health advantage are so potent as to define a new standard for human life. In effect, from the change of habit and physiology alone, one could speak of instinctive rawfoodists as a new species altogether, even more so if they follow the principles of metasexuality.

These by the way absolutely necessitate a change of diet, let alone limiting the extrasensory to a select few rare or lucky geniuses and exceptionally nervously balanced individuals. Instead, the instinctive paleolithic diet makes it available to anyone, given a sufficient food range, and an unwavering discipline. See the articles about meta and spirituality for more details.

In short, counting among the most subtle and sensible functions of the brain, accessing these faculties require an absolutely peaceful, collected state of mind.

But I will leave parapsychics aside to concentrate on the physical and nervous aspects, easier to imagine though not much so to accept.

Psychology

Nervosity

Nervosity outside viral episodes reduces drastically, making advanced mental cases the likes of which one finds in psy wards tolerable or totally normal depending on the syndrome and age, and making parangons of calm in whatever situation out of normal people. Glutens in particular (group of proteins specific to true cereals, from the Poacea family including with all kinds of wheat) were demonstrated in clinical studies to be directly responsable for significantly increased symptoms in schizophrenics.
Sweatened drinks (soda, chocolate with sugar, coffe with sugars, anything with artificial sugars really) have been linked several times with dementia, brain aging, onsets of Alzeihmer and smaller brain volumes³.

Ten years ago I confirmed this on my person. I had nervous issues, a dissociative tendency - not to the point of losing my sanity, but just enough to cause severe depression with bulimia-anorexia and the incapacity to concentrate. The bulk of it appeared in a year, while no physician could do a thing, beside giving pills which had no effect, except low-key mimicking a lobotomy.

I had the luxury before, to see for myself what those pills could do to people, and wanted none of it so I decided to learn a new diet philosophy for lack of a better term, and I learnt everything else by the same occasion, in the same movement, in a spa of ten years, while my mind broadened, discarding old psychological fixations and taboos.

This lack of nervousness compared to the state of mind under a traditional diet cannot be envisioned save by seasoned meditation practitioners for whom the perpetual issue is to carry on the calm of their cushion into daily life. into the kitchen sink as the saying goes.
Perhaps the worst place to start ! One really has to live it for oneself: the number of situation one feels normally overwhelmed by impressions and emotions in daily life and acting on them or thinking it’s a big deal is staggering, it is a new way to go about life, that alone offers nearly for free a peaceful state of mind worth a lifetime of investment in spirituality to most of the time, little to no avail.

This relentless inner turmoil and uncontrollable urges are only chaotic dysfunctions of the brain, excited by the constant influx of denatured molecules coursing your bloodstream, now acknowledged both in their psychogenic effects and role in aging under the name of oxidative stress⁴.
We called this the feedback effect.

The case of common excitants and stimulants like coffee and chocolate and anything with too much sugar shouldn’t be difficult to consider today, but what if the whole of cooked food acted similarly, arguably much worse ?
When everyone is mad, no one is seen as such !
Once that most of the immediate feedback effect ruining lives and causing all mental issues (save for clear genetic ones like such as the Down syndrome…) subsumes in a month or two in good conditions (or more a few more for serious cases), one is then free to undertake the worse part, that is rewiring one’s brain.

Because this constant mind poisoning since early babyhood actually wires our brains in a pathological paranoiac (and dissociative) mode that only a long exposure to a balanced nervous state can teach the brain how to react, what to correct. Thus the importance of steadfastness, beyond a simple matter of health:
To correct structural feedback one needs to see the natural state, one oneself and others, to recalibrate and remember it when we lose it for some reasons. This allows us not to invest in erroneous thoughts, emotions and situations. We learn to laugh at ourselves, and not to take ourselves too seriously.

While quickly enough the company of easily triggered normal folk, cooked people, becomes intolerable. We wanna out of the cavern of shadows, and find real people. The same properly mind-blowing gap is starkly exemplified with animals, which do not have the luxury of that big head of ours and its wonderful though deceptive ability for self-control.
But cockerels and pigs fed with (heated) grains and leftovers, routinely attack their peers or females, leading sometimes to an orgy of violence and blood, hence the need to separate males from each other or even from females. The problem is well-known, though the association with dietary conditions, hardly so. In the same vein, niggers skullfuck and eat each others routinely in all of Africa, since time immemorial.

On the other hand, wild animals (or domestic animals not fed with $h!t !) act much more harmoniously, tolerate each other and males do not indulge in reckless fights leading to injuries. Some even grow a liking with each other when females lack… Dogs stop barking ceaselessly at the slightest leaf falling, or for no reason at all.
And cats stop hissing loudly and fighting, while trying to copulate. The list of behavior goes on and on, and their exploration and almost infinite ramifications makes for a lot of unique research in all areas, in human or animal sciences.

At the same time since less and less things manage to trigger us anymore like a diehard feminists presented with facts, the mind becomes able to approach concepts new and old without the overlwgets able to encompass much more thoughts and concepts, hitherto barred from access by subconscious mental blockades, whether born from habits or childhood conditioning.

The tendency (no one claims perfection here) goes toward not a dullness of emotions, but actually a richer inner life, more in touch with deeper meanings in life and relationships, not encumbered. As molecular order is restored, cerebral functions improve and the constant fog that followed us all our life - and for many doomed their school efforts - is lifted, granting a higher clarity of mind.

Compulsive/obsessional ideas lose their strength, progressively discarded as one comes to terms with their meaninglessness. Things we were taught as evil or diabolical, appear not so bad or at least not a reason to kamikaze oneself for an unseen God and his quite hypothetical hourris, burn people to the stake… or send them to jail for revisionism. Negative feelings of all kinds, fade faster and do not take hold of us like before.

Sex

Talking about obsession, sex becomes an entirely different affair. For men, the very nature of the sexual drive shifts from an obsessive, compulsive and very physical need for gratification - the need to jerk off - and enlarges into a more satisfying experience, leading to heighten communication between partners and a keener perception of each other’s wants and desires (and ones’ own !), a clearer perception of reality overall. In fact, while lacking intimacy for too long does erode one’s inner peace it never constitutes a physical urgency or urgency anymore, as some autoerotism suffices on that part.

We become also increasingly aware of ourselves, notwithstanding or trespassing the barriers of our education and prejudices, or seemingly deep-rooted disgust. From the moment we consciously choose to let go of conceptions of sex and age of partners, we become spontaneously more in tune and approach the natural norms and inner states of mind described by metapsychoanalysis. No more uncontrollable erections: these only rise when the moment call for their use. No more muh diik ! Men stop seeing women as walking pieces of meat. All of it, out of the mere nervous system’s gradual re-normalization.

Physical Perks

First off the tolerance for mental and physical exertion skyrockets.
Once we decide on a course of action, it is not unusual to continue for hours, until late in the night… or the morning, technically. Of course the need for sleep doesn’t go away, though it does diminish as sleep gets both lighter and restful, depending on persons and state of supply, as with any other trait. So sleep or fatigue in general can stack up a lot, until a day later (or several) one has to clear up one’s debt (hardly a healthy practice though).

The disappearance of menstruation in a few months without any adverse effect on fertility, as well as the famous pain of childbirth, after a year, can be mentioned. The strong tendency for inflammation or autoimmunity caused by a permanent influx of denatured cooked molecules also disappears, releasing a treasure of bodily capabilities and resistance to muscle and psychological stress of all kinds. With time (more or less years depending on the choice of food) the tissues rebuild themselves on a stronger and more durable healthy basis.

Many other elements hitherto considered perpetual constants of human nature, are products of cooking, mere artefacts of our lifestyle. The idea of an intrinsic human weakness (which we would come as a cost of a bigger brain) in comparison to animals goes up in smoke along with the susceptibility to infections and inflammations. The rejection of the germ theory in favour of a new understanding of viral phenomena as symbiotic and beneficial for our health frees the mind and increases the capacity for regeneration, allowing us to live fully without a care in the world. The need for nearly any medicine, save for a few cases of surgery (dentistery and accidents), is no more.

We don’t exactly regrow entire limbs the lizard way… not yet at least though proper magical miracles would fit well with our worldview… However in good conditions bruises and hurts, even serious, not only do not hurt at all except on the very moment of injury, but heal up several times faster than a normal person without any disinfectants, barely any care even letting dirt and whatever on the surface, just for the lulz.
Impressive doesn’t do justice to that kind of feat. We truly enter the realm of superhumanity… or rather, normal animality !

Blood clotting takes less than a minute at least for life-critical outflows. It appeared that the considered normal levels of pain is not natural but caused by a constant high level of autoinflammation, raging on the smallest occasion. That explains why wounds just do not hurt when let them still and the work to do its work. The body can regenerate damaged internal organs to the extent to cure almost all diseases, and slow down the degenerative part of aging to a significant degree. We age much better, and slowly, even without training. Samewise, the amount of flesh that is possible to regrow when still enclosed by sufficient surrounding tissues approaches the healing factor of the likes of lions, healing big wounds healed in no time nor a care in the world.
Similarly, those born or at least raised on rawfood will never worry anymore about tooth decay. Wild animals with a balance diet have zero caries, and it wasn’t uncommon for people before WW2 to never had a single cavity in their entire life, simply because we started eating so much shit only with the economic boom that followed.

Then we develop a heightened healing factor (choose the English subtitles).

Those two points together make for a much higher tolerance for grueling training, while better quality muscles coming from natural proteins (insects, shellfish, wild game, nuts) ensure a more resilient body which doesn’t tend to break down nearly as much: therefore we can take much more punishment to get back on feet quicker, with a zenkai boost. But this wasn’t explored nearly as much as it should considering an even more surprising realization: training proved useless in so far as keeping in shape is concerned. Animals are basically born with rippling muscles and maintain them regardless of training, as long as they have good quality food: May they slacken as they please, they do not fatten.

Men eating cooked food that is. It appeared obvious that this was no design of ours but a degenerated state with autoimmunity plus low-quality proteins constantly broke down our body which loses shape. With a good instincto diet, even a potato crouch will never accumulate fat but stick to a low to very low percentage though never down to a dangerous level. It doesn’t mean either a loss of reserve: fasting a few days is no big deal.

It appears the body can and should regulate both the muscle and fat level to an optimal staturo-ponderal equilibrium.

It might range from being slim to getting ripped for almost effort, depending on how long you ate traditional before and what (seasoned salads or Big Macs ?) made the transition. The more those molecules stay inside you, the longer all the processes mentioned in this text take long before acting their full power. That means people born raw, as we saw, do not need any exercise and develop splendid tough muscles, including girls. Therefore, a potent benefit of the raw paleo diet is to get jacked and hot.

And maintain that physique for much longer as well: aging slowing down, we keep a slim/athletic physique as long as we keep a varied enough diet to continue on the cleansing process, and most of all if we keep clear from excessive animal meat, especially domestic meat which proved degenerative sometimes even more raw than cooked, as less damaged molecules bypasses the immune system more and in the end cause more autoimmunity. Excess proteins do the same as unnatural proteins, and shorten lifespan, eating away at our healing factor.

The best part of our lifeforce is constantly undermined and spent on fighting off the autoimmunity caused by cooked molecules. That’s why you would find no prescription nor medicinal drugs, nothing special to do than to follow one’s instinct to a T, and certainly artificial nothing to take. While some herbs or plants may or do have special properties, they are nothing in isolation and would prove detrimental when issued out of intellectual considerations. As Hypocrate did not say (but thought nonetheless):

Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food.

As for what he really said:

But the original Greek oath, literally translated, says: I will apply dietetic and lifestyle measures to help the sick to my best ability and judgment; I will protect them from harm and injustice.

Infections and dangerous viral episodes become an outright impossibility and decades of experiences taught us that no genetically healthy wild animal (among vertebrates at least) that has not been polluted by denatured molecules, should be prey to microbes present in his natural environment.

These confounding and paradigm-shaking observations became the basis of the virus theory or its generalization in what became the exogenetic command theory, which necessitated a natural balanced referencial (both in men and animals) first in order to draw conclusions. We need healthy people to realize how sick everyone was, regardless of the official definition of diseases.

Years showed the complete eradication of infectious diseases and cancers alike when the latter are not too advanced. Even then, it allows for a painless death with full mental faculties and no medication.

Hitler’s Insights in Food

Hitler predicted a great many tendencies, and his insights covered a lot of areas too. A true polymath. But among the most chilling, awe-inspiring pieces of gold one can find in his Table Talks, are his numerous attacks on cooking. I laid them here, they deserve praises and commenting, to put in perspective at the light of our instinctive diet experiences several decades after, how remarkable he was there too, even if he wasn’t always the first to make them.

When I was a young man, the doctors used to say that a meat diet was indispensable for the formation of bones. This was not true. Unlike peoples who eat polenta, we have bad teeth.
It occurs to me that this has something to do with a diet that’s more or less rich in yeast. Nine-tenths of our diet are made up of foods deprived of their biological qualities.

When I’m told that 50 per cent of dogs die of cancer, there must be an explanation for that. Nature has predisposed the dog to feed on raw meat, by tearing up other animals. To-day the dog feeds almost exclusively on mixed bread and cooked meat.
Country folk spend fourteen hours a day in the fresh air. Yet by the age of forty-five they’re old, and the mortality amongst them is enormous. That’s the result of an error in their diet. They eat only cooked foods.

Everything that lives on earth feeds on living materials. The fact that man subjects his foodstuffs to a physico-chemical process explains the so-called “maladies of civilization”. If the average term of life is at present increasing, that’s because people are again finding room for a naturistic diet. It’s a revolution. That a fatty substance extracted from coal has the same value as olive-oil, that l don’t believe at all! It’s surely better to use the synthetic fatty substances for the manufacture of soap, for example.

At the very least, our heavy emphasis on other proteins (and fat) sources than animal meat would please him immensely. For decades after the war however, gains in lifespan came nearly entirely from modern medicine, but constitutional health steadily decreased, as indicated by the heightened tendency to get sick, quickly loose teeth without at least semi-regular dentist check-ups (an issue generations born before WW2 simply did not know), and most importantly the slow reduction in the West, for about 20 years now, of the health-adjusted life expectancy: the average number of years a person can expect to live in full health, that is without suffering from disabling or debilitating illnesses.

We may come to the point, where the most advanced medical clutches can not compensate anymore for our organisms’ rate of degradation. What could happen for our current generation, if the medical infrastructure were to fail, due to EMPs, or a shortage of oil (vital to produce drugs) due to geopolitical reasons, or a global economic crisis ? I let you ponder.

The monkeys, our ancestors of prehistoric times, are strictly vegetarian. Japanese wrestlers [ - Sumotoris- ] , who are amongst the strongest men in the world, feed exclusively on vegetables. The same holds true of the Turkish porter, who can move a piano by himself. At the time when I ate meat, I used to sweat a lot. I used to drink four pots of beer and six bottles of water during a meeting, and I’d succeed in losing nine pounds ! When I became a vegetarian, a mouthful of water from time to time was enough. When you offer a child the choice of a piece of meat, an apple or a cake, it’s never the meat that he chooses. There’s an ancestral instinct there. In the same way, the child would never begin to drink or smoke if it weren’t to imitate others. The consumption of meat is reduced the moment the market presents a greater choice of vegetables, and in proportion as each man can afford the luxury of the first fruits.

I suppose man became carnivorous because, during the Ice Age, circumstances compelled him. They also prompted him to have his food cooked, a habit which, as one knows to-day, has harmful consequences. Our peasants never eat any food that hasn’t been cooked and re-cooked, and thus deprived of all its virtues.
It’s not impossible that one of the causes of cancer lies in the harmfulness of cooked foods. We give our body a form of nourishment that in one way or another is debased. At present the origin of cancer is unknown, but it’s possible that the causes that provoke it find a terrain that suits them in incorrectly nourished organisms. We all breathe in the microbes that give rise to colds or tuberculosis, but we’re not all enrheumed or tuberculous.

Nature, in creating a being, gives it all it needs to live. If it cannot live, that’s either because it’s attacked from without or because its inner resistance has weakened. In the case of man, it’s usually the second eventuality that has made him vulnerable.

We saw the confirmation of those early intuitions: all but the most advanced terminal stage cancers proved remissible, in so far as people access a wide variety of food and stick to discipline as if they life depended on it… Because it really does. But usually people at such a stage, or before for that matter, like for AIDS, reject the most wondrous signs of healing to keep cooking, even when it comes with the come-back of symptoms, and near-certitude of death. It has been said that cancers can be fought back with the will to live: this can’t possibly negate the reality of feeding shit to your body thrice a day, but at the same, we know for a fact that such a will is decidedly rare in most people, some desire - to fit in in a social group - can and do override the most basic instincts, that of survival, no question asked.

While Hitler was wrong in rejecting meat wholesale or that children would never hunt instinctively (we saw them do just that, with delight and without weapon), meat absolutely has very limited appeal for healthily calibrated bodies. I mean that it can be delicious, the best food in the world - as all food should be if they smell the best - but very rarely so, once in a while, a few times per month at best, and more so fish or reptiles. I am not aware of Hitler’s opinion of fish and seafood in general, let alone insects. Wild raw meat is no poison, and the body will definitely default to it for a significant amount of time if need be, however to conclude that the Ice Age made cooking a necessity is a fallacy: Many Ice Ages and Interglacials succeeded for the better part of the last million year. It stands to reason we adapted to them.

Moreover, people used to move, a lot: why on Earth would a tribe stay at a place with nothing to eat but animals which quickly enough would prove unsavory, relatively costly to catch compared to fruits, and weakening your folk the longer you keep on such an unbalanced diet (as proved by Inuits, until recently total raw foodists yet age very fast) ? Animals would flee. But super-intelligent big-brained primates would not ?

As I said, we underestimate the amount of food a wild forest would provide, mostly because we ceased to live in them and maintain our ecological role in this obligate co-dependent symbiosis when we started cooking, so even dense forests are no primate forests anymore. In the span of a few millennia, we must eat fruits for them to persist, through our feces, since beside bears (that we proceeded to genocide) no other animal in Europe presents the same balanced, omnivorous range of appeals plus active metabolic needs as us. Lastly, I strongly believe paleoclimatic modelization (let alone vulgarization material) are vastly erroneous , painting a picture of the Ice Age as a kind of barren, sterile no-man’s land frozen half of the year. This could not be further from the truth.

Ice Age Food

Ice ages are defined by winter cold enough compared to hotter seasons, so that ice does not thaw entirely, but either sustain itself or pile-up over the years. A good part of Swedes, in particular edges of hills and mountains, are in that situation, and forests do not shy from nearing glaciers. The same occurs in Switzerland, owning to its topology. It is a matter of temperature averages, and most of Sweden isn’t barren half the year, but features summers hot enough to get naked comfortably.
The part of Europe not under glaciers knew climates varying between modern day Sweden, Switzerland or Norway, with inland masses (and coastal areas, depending microclimates) had a lot more of the typical continental climate (unlike the current temperate one), with strong winters and warm summers Definition: Summer in Moscow are warm with moderate temperatures: the warmest months are usually June, July and August with average highs of around 24ºC or 75ºF and lows of 13ºC or 55ºF as if suddenly placing France into Ukraine or Poland, or Russia for more Northern places. One could hardly call those regions deserts.

Beside, the idea circulates that our ancestors, the Neanderthals were ubiquitists able to thrive in any sort of environment but mainly inhabiting woody forests:

We hypothesise that the highly muscular Neanderthal body form reflects an adaptation to hunting conditions rather than cold, and here both review the palaeoecological evidence that they inhabited a mainly woodland environment, and present preliminary genetic analyses in support of this new hypothesis.

Then how to explain that most H-G populations, like North-American Indians, prefer meat when possible ? Excluding Inuits - who eat raw and have literally nothing else - we think cooked food is a potent drug. Cereals, as mentioned earlier, but where agriculture can not (or has not yet) developped the most appealing food source is cooked meat.

Although it is true that places where one has to eat animal food a priori also produce less of what we primates like, it still seems that people relying on meat quickly loose the ability to eat a lot of plant-based food, and their population get to correlate with animal population density. Studies of huntn-gatherers populations bring an evidence of this:

The emergent macroscopic relationships from the model are well supported by ethnographic observations of contemporary hunter-gatherers, revealing a causal mechanism whereby short growing seasons drive high fractions of meat in the diet, leading to greatly reduced population density per unit NPP largely as a result of trophic inefficiency.
Our results suggest that a shift from meat-dominated to plant-dominated diet could have boosted population much more than implied by NPP changes alone.

Logic would entail, that wherever you are on Earth, whatever the climate, you should eat more plants when they were available and more meat (or seafood) in the non-growing season. What we see is a nett shift in trophic position Definition: The trophic level of an organism is the position it occupies in a food web. A food chain is a succession of organisms that eat other organisms and may, in turn, be eaten themselves. The trophic level of an organism is the number of steps it is from the start of the chain. even in the growing season when they shouldn’t need to, thus lowering the ΦNPP Definition: Net primary production is the amount of biomass or carbon produced by primary producers per unit area and time, obtained by subtracting plant respiratory costs from gross primary productivity or total photosynthesis. , the fraction of the nett primary production Net Primary Production of the environment/forest. Unfortunately studies lack the resolution to tell apart the effect of meat and different availability of edible food.

Use of Fire

We make the case that fire was never needed to thrive, and that it is the cause of all bodily pathologies and suffering, directly or indirectly.

Because we attack something so close to people’s heart, maybe dearer than anything, anyone or any belief, something most think we can not even survive without let alone thrive,a logical reaction would be to wonder, why then it started in the first place, and how did it become universal ?

Men have used and controlled fire fully or partially for more than a million year, but we believe that for the most part, it was not associated with cooked food, which came only recently (compared to the age of our species, which we will come back to later).

The Official Myth

In 1995, the British primatologist Richard Wrangham formalized in Catching Fire what everyone in paleontology and anthropology, not to mention the general public, had thought for a long time, namely the hypothesis that the reduction of the jaw and the size of the teeth accompanying the growth of the brain in Homo Erectus and the species that followed it would not have been possible without an early mastery of fire allowing the cooking of food.

Thus cooking, by outsourcing part of our digestion, would have allowed us to waste less time and energy eating, devoting these resources to developing our brain and properly human symbolic activities.

With an enormous jaw comparable to that of a chimpanzee, pre-humans found an energy balance by devoting only a small part of their time to efficient chewing of raw food, summarizes Mr Hladik. Without cooking, which makes food more chewable and digestible, the reduction in dentition, and therefore the increase in the size of the skull of our ancestors, could not have occurred.

This author, by the way, might mention several times in my writings, as he is the quintessence embodiment of everything rotten in modern science: Not only is he an enemy regards to cooking but he spearheaded the notion of Chimpanzees being raping killing machines viciously waiting for the smallest overtures to gang up on females and children.

But this thesis dates the mastery of fire to nearly two million years ago, whereas the certain habitual use of fire in households dates, for most specialists, to 500,000 years at most… as reported for the Qesem cave which associates the earliest control of fire mainly with the first Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
In 2012, microstratigraphic evidence (based on microscopic analysis of sedimentary layers, looking for chemical or isotopic traces) of the earliest fire use by hominids in situ one million years ago in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape Province, South Africa, arrived.
This is considered unequivocal evidence for the habitual use of fire by Homo Erectus.

Does this mean that cooking is a million years old? Not really.
Simply a fire nurtured with food remains of the last meal. However, it illustrates well the ease with which the overwhelming majority of specialists (and common folk) just can’t separate fire from cooking. First, I would like to make a point about the state of meat consumed in nature. The idea that cooking is necessary for the digestion of raw meat comes mainly from the fact that we imagine a fresh leg of lamb with the consistency of rubber.

In reality, meat only becomes edible - and much better digested than in the cooked state - when it is allowed to age.

If a prehistoric man used fire but did not cook, what did he use it for?
Several hypotheses can be put forward:

1. to scare animals at night to sleep in peace (especially since we no longer sleep in trees)
2. to light up
3. to keep warm
4. to make tools.

Only ideas 4 and 5 make the slightest sense. This is not to say that fire does not warm or light. But we just don’t need it ! Our natural abilities should ensure (and do ensure given some uncucking/uncivilizing) survival in our natural environment. Let’s go over each point.

Scaring Animals

Most people, including scientists, think fire instinctively scares all animals… This is completely wrong. Try it in the African savannah and the next day you might be missing a few toes, with the compensation of having caused a nice indigestion to a lioness or hyena: because these intelligent animals are not afraid of fire.

Of course they avoid it and know its danger, but a fire that is neither too big nor too fast will not worry them at all. The same goes for wolves and bears. Most animals flee from humans, and it is proven that it is the human presence behind the fire that discourages them… but that also means that if you do nothing special to keep them away, they would not come. On the contrary, some will be attracted by the smell, and if they smell something they like they will come and help themselves. So it’s habitual behavior: they will come all the more if they recognize the human presence and associate it with food. But there is more: fire often indicates cooking so the particular smell will have the same effect of fascination on animals as it has on us. Fire is very well-known not to repeal animals but attract them, which in the case of bears is bad news.

Lastly we are not natural prey for any animal. Neither sharks nor tigers will instinctively pounce on us until they are starved to death… or drugged by the denatured molecules. Numbers alone would deter predators interested in your children or pets, more than fire can. Also, don’t expect to keep mosquitoes away either. There is very little reality behind the common picture of weak prehistorical men only surviving the assault of cruel wild beasts with the product of his brain.

Lighting

Of course, we are not cats, we do not have a tapetum lucidum which reflects light behind their pupils, and incidentally they have 150 million rods instead of our 120. But in the end, it’s not a question of being able to hunt in the forest as if it were daylight… but simply of managing to navigate through obstacles two or three meters around you, in the dark. And this is easy enough if the moon is beautiful, or the stars numerous… Which was always the case before the industrial age.

There is a special training for night vision (scotopic), well studied during the Second World War. It is often mentioned about “wild children” that they have excellent eyesight, especially in the dark. It is hard to say how far this can go. In any case, it is obvious that the long-term adaptation capacities of the eyes are more important than is said… Similarly, the sense of smell and hearing of these children is described as being above the average person.

Research shows primates to be very active during the night , which closes point 2.

We obviously evolved to find our way around at night even in the darkness of rainforest forests (which aren’t that dark actually), it is not the same for the caves, devoid of any light, so much so that typically the animals having evolved in them, lose all sense of vision, become blind. Our ancestors found a way around this issue, with charred bones, as mentioned below.

Against the Cold

Heat! The question is: Does primitive man need fire to survive? In tropical countries, no, it is rather too hot. Even in Southern Europe one might bitterly regret not being able to tear off one’s skin, once already naked.

This is not the case in a continental climate like say… Aveyron, in France: 20° in August, 5 in November. Yet:

Victor de l’Aveyron, famous wild child perhaps born in the Tarn around 1785 and found in the Aveyron in 1797 at about twelve years old used to live naked as a worm, and although unlike other wild children, he came to take refuge in the houses several times, he was still said to be insensitive to heat and cold

More convincing: Meet Wim Hof or Iceman

I am able to control the body only through the power of the mind" said Hof, who calls himself the “Ice Man”. “The cold is unforgiving. It shows you where you are. What you are.”

The ultimate test for Hof was an Arctic half-marathon (21 km). He would have to battle the prolonged effects of exposure to the cold (average of -20°C). Experts estimated that a normal person would not last 15 minutes running in such conditions.
At first, Hof ran at a steady, consistent pace. But halfway through, he began to falter. After three hours of exposure to the icy conditions, Hof’s mental powers began to fade. After five hours, Hof could no longer run. But his slowness increased the risk of cold damage.

In 2004, in the Netherlands, he spent 1 hour and 08 minutes in a tube filled with ice. On 26 January 2008, in New York, he stayed 72 minutes in a translucent container filled with ice, beating his 2004 record of 68 minutes.

In 2002, he spent 6 minutes 20 seconds under the polar ice. In spring 2007, Wim Hof climbed Everest (Tibetan side - North East Ridge route) with minimal technical equipment to withstand the cold. Wim Hof was equipped with shorts, gloves and a cap, but had to stop at 7,400m due to a foot injury sustained during the half marathon in January.

And many monks develop similar abilities in Tibet through concentration and training, which is now being studied in the laboratory under controlled conditions.

Hard to guess what use such adaptability might have had for African apes, or even Neanderthals for that matter: what sense is there to survive places where nothing grows anyway ?

We can safely assume that at no time did our ancestors need fire as long as they stayed where there was food to eat, which in any case excludes the Arctic Circle. Even so, clothing (animal hides) would provide more than adequate protection.

The origin of Cooking

Fire allows (and is absolutely necessary, regardless of brain size) for an unprecedented development of technology. These are the only arguments that hold water for me. Homo Erectus seemingly got to control fire. Determining the intelligence of Homo Erectus is more difficult than it seems, because even if his brain (546 to 1251 cm³) was notoriously smaller than ours (1200-1500).

Anatole France, a writer and moral authority of the first order in the 19th century, recognized as such by Marcel Proust, had a brain of around 850 cm³.
Was Erectus perhaps remarkably more intelligent than we imagine ? No artifacts have been found suggesting a use for, say, hardening spears or making tar for the same effect, as has been shown for Neanderthals. That said, a long time has passed and absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
It could mean on the other hand, that current humans are well, well below our potential, because of cooking and other circumstances. Amusing idea to entertain at the very least, and not entirely without substance…
I’ll come back to it.

Fire fascinates, that’s for sure, every child knows, just as it certainly did for our ancestors. For want of the capacity to reconstruct their lifestyle in any significant way through scattered (both in space and time) remains (contrary to what some hazy archaeologists claim) the brain sizes we are talking about, from Erectus to early “men”, doesn’t exclude, for the longest time, a mostly symbolic use of fire.

Some functions of fire that few people think of:

• Burnt bones become fluorescent, and are very effective as a light in cellars.
• Burnt animal remains are hardly unmistakable signs of cooking, as the food remains are always thrown on the hearth to maintain it.

Thus it is quite impossible to ensure with any certainty that burnt remains involve culinary practices, as is equally impossible to know whether said bones (or what covered it) were eaten before, or after getting frisky with the holy flame.
The quantity of such burnt remains may be indicative, but these clues are both rare and always in need of interpretation. On the other hand, the majority of tuberous vegetables such as manioc are absolutely impossible to eat raw, as are grasses (some cereals such as maize can though). Their place in today’s diet is explained by the opiates they contain, which make for a terribly addictive effect.

The first attested granaries date back to 11,000 BC. The consumption of cereals may of course be older. I am of the opinion that cooking must have appeared several times in several places, more or less accidentally, because consequent control and taking thousands of years to develop, allowed sufficient food security to concentrate populations in sedentary centers, contrary to what has always been the case. This article may point to an early, if short-lived, establishment of cooking and cereals⁵.

One can conceive cooking must have fascinated relatively primitive populations in terms of intelligence, once a certain brain size threshold was reached, say, 800 cm³ perhaps. But groups falling prey to this lack of instinctive programming against the product of our own intelligence, soon would degenerate physically, devoured by predators (as happening with Bengali tigers) or supplanted by other healthier human groups, either breeding them out of existence or slaughtering them as an act of mercy. Studies (and the experience of any animal breeder or farmer whatsoever since the beginning of husbandry) supports the universal preference or addicting effect that light controlled cooking is intrinsically attractive to animals⁶. But the thing is, light cooking is fairly rare and very difficult to pull off by chance, as opposed to the much more frequent occurence of unappealling charred remains in the trail of wild fires, just like failing recipes 9 out of 10 ruins the result if not induces food poisoning.
Arguably, early recipes were probably much more immediately toxic than now, and got refined over time not to kill you too soon. That process happened automatically, as the faster the disorder, the easier one could make the association with said recipe. On the other hand, even a 100% chance of getting cancer or kidney failure 30 years after, is very unlikely to occasion any change. Such is the shortsightness of the masses, in particular when addiction kicks in.

That all might explain, why only humans practice cooking willingly, despite a few animals having the intelligence to try it enough to overcome the instinctive repulsion and get hooked. Same could be said for smoking and alcoholism. Hence, animals getting hooked on half-baked cooked remains, for both practical and physiological reasons, is extremely rare, if by happenstance one happened to make it a habit, predators, mosquitoes and all parasites in creation would make quick work of his deteriorating health. Such is the natural order, the beauty of natural selection, whose remnants haven’t totally disappeared from the sanest human cutlures⁷.

Then as hominids reached a threshold in intelligence, we came able to repeat the mistake intentionnally, and not live long enough afterwards to make babies… unfortunately cooking increases fertility at all levels, chemically, psychologically and socially, setting breeding instincts on overdrive on a biological level. So we can expect that after a certain population threshold, the health detriments would be offset and cooked groups would start breeding more than naturally, replacing others, eventually forcing them to intermarry due to the sheer pressure. Our intelligence conjugated with the unexpected effect on our nervous system, would have allowed individually sick individuals to gang up and survive, then take over.

That is Mr Burger’s take. But I don’t agree as it would imply a very early generalization of cooking, and very stupid early humans too, not really the demi-gods our analysis led to nor a time compatible with the evolution of European racial morphology 50,000 years ago. The apparent reduction in brain size, we believe, could only have come from self-domestication, followed and accelerated by subsequent cereal consumption and sedentarisation. Europeans of that time were largely superior, making the simplistic thesis of a seamless world-wide adoption of cooking seem very doubtful and incomplete.

Truth to tell, the origin of cooking might very well be the most important mystery ever, and the worst calamity ever to occur in the history of life.
Let us all explore it together.