Stefan: >Sometimes I think that everybody sees the results he wants to see. I >want to see excellent health, you want to see 100% failure. :-( Naw, don't be so gloomy about me. I see what is good about instincto and have experienced much of it for myself. I just get tired of the super-health stuff. The track record is what it is. Perhaps when I see folks minimizing the negative reports (by going on about the excellent health of instinctos) I tend to maximize the negatives. Reality is surely somewhere in between. >Then I think perhaps you are right. (Or is it indeed a failure of U.S. >instinctos because they don't have Orkos? ;-)) Ha! There you go again ;) Trust me, the food at Pangaia is probably better than ORKOS' imports. >I know a family of instinctos here in Germany. They were vegans before >they went instincto and experienced a severe problem with their youngest >child because of B12-deficiency. Apart from this they never saw a doc- >tor for their children. This I call excellent health. I would be very interested to hear more details about this situation. >The same with the baby of an instincto woman in my city. No doctor, >no medicine. The child is 15 months old now. This is all great news, but it doesn't mean all that much really. There are lots of healthy kids on this planet who have never seen a doctor or a needle. I am more than willing to admit that instincto-from-birth kids would probably fare much better on the regime than adults who switch to instincto after decades of SAD. And that such kids would show statistically better health than SAD kids. Yet, would we ever hear about an unhealthy instincto youngster if/when there was one? Now, I admit/suspect that they may be few and far between but my question is: would we ever hear about such troubles if they did exist? Melisa and I had two miscarries on a mostly instincto regime (several years) and I seriously doubt that our experience is repeated much by idealistic instinctos around the non-campfires--it just doesn't fit, does it? Even if every instincto kid has Perfect Health, they would have to be compared to "paleo kids" to see if this was due to instincto practices or the simple avoidance of grains and dairy. Nevertheless, I do enjoy anecdotes of raw vegans who end up instincto when they have infants who don't thrive...so can you talk a little bit about that? >>Herbal medicine to deal with the failings of instincto? That's a new >>slant, but if you think modern medicines contain the active ingrediants >>of herbal medicines then what is so bad about modern medicine? >That's how you would express it. I would say that in nature it seems >to be quite normal to get some infection or parasite here and there. >And herbs are used by animals as natural remedys. What's wrong with >that? Does it make herbs a mean to deal with the failings of the diet >of the animals which of course is instinctive? This is a farily controversial assumption. Herbs, I don't much care to debate--but animals eating instincto? That _is_ debateable. We would agree that wild mammals do use their noses to find food and, when possible, eat their fill of a particular food. We could imagine that they are getting a "stop" or "taste-change", maybe. But beyond that, what is _instinct_? Is it instincto theory--including "eat only one food at a time" and "don't eat too much fruit" and the latest, "don't eat meat more than once a week and only then if it taste superb" (!) etc etc--which wild mammals use as a guide? Certainly the increasingly cumbersome _rules_ of instincto are of little concern to a wild mammal. OK, so I can hear you saying, "but those rules are just to deal with the oversupply/domestication problem in civilization". Except that a mammal (ignorant of Burger's instincto) will indeed switch back and forth between a few foods, will alter its foods (salt water on tubers), mix foods (wadging), etc etc. In short wild animals engage in many feeding behaviors which are inconsistant with instincto theory. Further, wild animals do not have perfect health. >If modern medicines contain the ingredients of herbs I just think it >would be easier and cheaper to eat the herb instead of taking the >drug but there's no money to be earned by this way and therefore we >do not find it. In some cases, yes. But my understanding is that there are lots of folks selling lost of herbs for lots of money. >Wild speculation: if indeed it turns out to be true, that the kernels >of jackfruits contain a substance that kills AIDS viruses and if (big >big if) indeed AIDS can be cured by eating those kernels then this >of course is n o t the way that will be gone. No no. The scientists >and pharmacologists will of course try to extract the substance of >those kernels and sell it for extraordinary prices - I read it in the >newspaper. Why would an instincto in super-health need the AIDS virus need to be killed (by jackfruit seeds or the next wonder drug) anyway? Are you saying that AIDS is a couter-example to the useful virus theory? Besides, have you ever _tasted_ a raw jackfruit seed! Believe me I would have to choke it down with some honey (as opposed to a spoonful of sugar ;)) in order to kill any AIDS viruses... Cheers, Kirt