Hello

I would appreciate comments on this text about the problems of cooking.

"Through the working of natural selection, each species adapts to the conditions of its
habitat. Such adaptation, however, takes many generations ; the genetic code changes
very slowly over time (less than 1 % in the six million years since our forebears diverged
from the chimpanzees). The practice of cooking is quite recent in relation to the biological
time scale, each new alimentary challenge introduced by intelligent artifice may pose a
new metabolic problem and entail pathological consequences. For any culinary artifice,
there is a reason to ask :

whether a genetic adaptation has been or would have been necessary
whether such adaptation is possible
whether it has had time to occur

This issue, apparently ignored by medical research, is quite critical, being at the very heart
of the world health problem. The prognosis in any illness depends inevitably on nutrition.
Therefore the illness depends on nutrition (even if one is ignorant of its mechanisms). It is
helpful, then, to pose the problem of adaptation before plunging blindly into a quest for
therapeutics that risk missing the point, that in fact remain unavailing in the face of various
diseases. Three quarters of the population die of neoplastic or cardiovascular diseases,
which are not necessarily preordained by nature.

Non-original foods introduce molecules into the organism to which the enzymes,
programmed by the genetic code, have no reason to be adapted. These "non-original
molecules" may be created in chemical reactions induced by cooking, or may come from
foods not in the original alimentary spectrum of humans (such as animal milk). It will be
impossible for some of these to be metabolized normally ; instead, blocked at some stage
of transformation, they will accumulate in the organism, provoking a gradual culinary
intoxination. They will be found in the circulating fluids (blood, lymph) or stored within the
cells or in the interstitial spaces (amylose), in fatty deposits, or even integrated into cell
and tissue structures (membranes, collagen, joints, dentin, etc...)

Contemporary studies of metabolism have not yet given much consideration to these
abnormal molecules, whose transformations constitute an anomolous, or "paradoxical"
metabolism (= processes not provided for by the genetic code, which we call
"parabolism"). Some of these substances could provoke all kinds of disorders (as many
disorders as there are classes of substances and functions in the organism). In other
words, the culinary intoxination will give rise to a "molecular pathology" which could
constitute the cause in whole or in part of numerous illnesses.

The notion of intoxication as conceived by medical science refers either to chemical
substances or to alimentary intoxication due to accidental contamination, fermentation,
surfeit, or any intolerance ; and in pathological cases, to an excess of the waste products
of normal metabolism. Fringe medicine gives more weight to the alimentary factor than
does conventional thinking, but at present neither seems to have distinguishe clearly
between original toxins and non-original toxins.

In fact, certain molecules present in original foods are toxic, as are certain by-products of
metabolism : these substances, however, have existed all the time, so that the
programming of our genetic code provides for their elimination through normal channels
(= detoxication). The same cannot be said of molecules that deviate from this
programming, which must be eliminated by various unexpected mechanisms (deviant
channels) and over much longer periods of time."

Thank you for your time
Jacques Laurin