Reflections about blockages.


Burger often talks about the fact of being blocked to a peculiar
food. One can be blocked to some foods that were very familiar as
cooked staples (such as endives), or to unknown foods (such as
durian or wild, acid fruits).

In the first case, he thinks that we are blocked because
the body has accumulated excessively over the years some substances
coming from that food. The main weakness of that interpretation is that
it doesn't provide any clue concerning the nature of those
substances. Moreover, the fact that I am still blocked to many
vegetables I had practically never eaten before, and not to RAF or
salad, cannot be explained by his theory.

Another way to explain blockages is the concept of neophobia. Experiments
on humans and rats show that a new food is generally less palatable
than a known one. Scientists have also shown that rats that have been
exposed during their gestation to apple's flavor become, as _adults_
more attracted to apples than other rats. As we and our mother usually
hadn't eat many raw vegetables before, it may be one of the reasons
why we tend to overeat fruits.

We should also point out that, up to a certain point, instinct is also
efficient with cooked food. Indeed, if a digestive disorder follows
the ingestion of a meal within 6 hours, aversions to a particular food
can appear and remain for a long time, even if the stomach pain was
artificially created. A food, even if cooked, can also become less
palatable if it is eaten in excess: that's how children develop
aversions to cooked spinach (or cooked endives, as in Burger's
case). Now, it would be interesting to determine if an aversion to
cooked X always implies an aversion to raw X.

Anyway, those two phenomena (neophobia and aversion) concur with the
statement that instinct should be reeducated. That a X is more
palatable than Y doesn't necessarily mean that X is more beneficial:
maybe neophobia makes Y less palatable, or maybe aversions interfere.


Best,

Jean-Louis