Ellie:
> To whom do the deadly mushrooms not taste bad, people on SAD or to
> someone like you whose taste sensations have been awakened by the way you
> eat? For example I never appreciated the taste of a tomato until after I
> did a 15 day water fast.
I don't think that a poisonous mushroom will taste worse for a long-time
instinctive eater than for a SAD-eater. The only difference is that a (good)
instincto will not eat a food that tastes bad.
Animals have more than one strategy than smell and taste to avoid poisoning:
-neophobia: when they encounter a new food, they won't eat more than a
very little quantity. Children still have that behavior. When I was 3 years
old, my parents really had to force me to eat a new food, or a food I
didn't like. It wasn't until I was 6 years old that I could appreciate a
banana, and until 14 years old that I could begin to accept tomatoes [But
perhaps I would have liked them more if they were ripe?? I don't understand
why people usually eat unripe fruits]
-Some animals live in community, and experienced members can recognize
poisonous foods. Whenever a rat recognize a food that had caused problems,
it defecates on it so that no other member of the herd eats that food. That
strategy also works for cooked/processed foods, that's why it is so
difficult to get rid of rats. I believe (although I lack knowledge on
ethnology) that "primitive" humans societies also accumulate knowledge
about which plant is poisonous, etc.
You say that you began to appreciate the taste of a tomato only after a
15-day fast. One of the possible explanations is that, after your fast,
your body became very deficient on some nutrients that are present in
tomatoes. Myself, after a 10-day fast, chinese cabbage (bak choy) tasted
extremely good: I ate about one half of it in one meal. But the next day,
it stung my tongue so much that I was unable to eat more than 1 leaf, and
I am still unable to eat more than 1/4 to 1/2 leaf in its raw form now.
The question would be: how come you can still appreciate tomatoes, and I
can't appreciate chinese cabbage anymore? I have no real answer. From the
theory (or speculation) of Guy-Claude Burger, a raw food tastes bad, either
because a] your body is not yet able to digest/use it efficiently, or b]
after many years of cooked food eating your body is overloaded in some
nutrients and eating that raw food will aggravate the overload, or c] the
detoxification caused by that raw-food would be too violent and your body
can't accept it yet.
I have no opinion about explanation a], it doesn't seem impossible to me.
Explanation b] can be, IMO, valid only in the short term. If I eat cucumber
every day for 1 week, it will taste horrible on the 8th day, but after a
few days without cucumber, the pleasure of eating it will come back. I
don't believe in hypothesis c]. And I would add d] As a part of "neophobia",
a new food actually *tastes* on average worse than an usual one. My first
Brazil nuts tasted horrible, but the 3rd or 4th time they began to become
plesant, and now I like them very much.
> Are natural toxins actually destroyed by cooking? Is it possible they are
> changed to some form that is still toxic, but tastes good? If I started
> to eat Haagen-Das again, I suspect it would taste good, but have plenty
> of toxins in it that my body would have to eliminate of adapt to.
All natural toxins are certainly not destroyed by cooking. Some poisonous
mushrooms still remain deadly after cooking. The question would be whether
the instinct remains as efficient with cooked than with raw food, and I
have no opinion about that. I have been cooking a little quantity of
broccoli and cabbage for a few weeks now. They taste very good, much
better than in their raw form, and they seem to be more digestible
[perhaps they ferment inside my digestive tract when ingested raw??].
This of course doesn't mean that all natural toxins are destroyed, nor
that some artificial ones aren't introduced, of course. Fried potatoes
taste very good, but are not really good for health.
Best wishes,
Jean-Louis
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