Hello,

In this issue you'll find the transcript of a fascinating talk by Guy-Claude Burger. The English translation of this talk is a REAL News scoop, folks! The tape of Guy-Claude's talk in French was transcribed and translated into English by Veronique, and I want to thank her for such a mammoth effort.

Because Burger advocates obeying our instincts as the way to health, you may be inclined to think of him as possibly a little bit on the lunatic fringe. If that's so, reading this article will change your opinion. Burger has in fact a solid scientific background, and came up with his instinctotherapy principles without abandoning the scientific method.

We've also included some shorter articles that confirm the ideas of instinctotherapy.

Cheers,

Andrew Partridge

Dear friends of Real News:

I will tell you about the way I live. Here in my farm there is no kitchen. I and my guests—who stay here for days, weeks or months—do not use a kitchen at all. All the food we eat is never heated or boiled. We eat only RAW FOOD as it naturally comes from trees and vegetables.

Nature is more wise than humans. There are no trees or plants growing boiled, roasted or fermented fruits and vegetables. The rest of creatures—besides man—only eat raw foods. Animals only eat cooked food when humans feed them. This information is becoming more and more general, therefore sensible and open-minded people are getting benefits thanks to it.

On the other hand, there are people who cover their ears when they hear the expression 'The best is to eat RAW FOOD' and think that is something for barbarians, troglodytes, primitives, etc. ...!

Unfortunately they ignore that HEALTH is intimately bound to RAW FOOD.

It is not possible to enjoy a healthy life if we eat cooked food. During the last 10 years I have not eaten meat or fish. From 1990 to 1994, I sometimes took milk, cheese, yoghurt, kefir and honey—and very occasionally I cooked the food—but since August 1994 I have only eaten raw-vegan food.

In this way I feel myself closer to Nature and learning things about me that before now I had ignored. I enjoy a lot writing my bulletin, sharing my experiences with friends and guests, also receiving letters.

The project of a 'Crudivegan Community' in Spain is advancing quite fast. There are people from different countries and it is very possible they will set-up very close to my farm, and from here they are preparing the necessary documentation to constitute the project.

It is a pleasure for me to receive bulletins about crudivorism from other countries. I am open to the divulgation of this way of life that for me it is the most healthy as much for humans as for the rest of the creatures of this planet. In this way animals will not be exploited or killed. They will live FREE as Nature teaches us, if we are sensible and perceptive.

I am totally convinced that our work will do a lot of good to all the species in particular, also to the planet in general; and that this is the only way to eradicate pain and suffering from our present society.

If we take a look at animals, we will realise that if they suffer it is because ignorant humans think that if they do not eat meat they will not have good health or physical strength. What a terrible mistake! Please, WAKE UP! This is my hope!

Best regards,

Your new format is very nice—I like the smaller size. The old format was folded and a bit awkward at times.

Versions of the articles (first published in the SF-LiFE newsletter) that I wrote commenting on Dr. Bratman's Orthorexia article, are available online at:

By the way, Dr. Bratman's book has a new title and release was postponed by the publisher until the latter part of 2000.

I enjoyed the interview with Dr. Fielder—interesting reading!

Hope things are going well for you folks!

Regards,

I was most impressed by Ward Nicholson's researches into Palaeolithic diets.

Thanks for that. May all your content choices be so good as the Ward Nicholson choice.

Most sincerely

This lecture was given by Guy-Claude Burger in 1993. It was translated from French to English by Veronique and fairly liberally edited by Andrew Partridge to improve the readability.

I discovered the noxiousness of the two foods I am attacking this evening about 30 years ago, completely by chance, during a series of experiments on nutrition I undertook.

First I bred a whole group of mice with a dietary basis that mainly consisted of wheat. It was excellent wheat, organically grown, even though at the time this notion seemed to be very avant-garde. My mice received all sorts of foods, but wheat was the staple, raw wheat.

I observed those mice, hoping to obtain evidence of the harmful substances I gave them on top of the raw wheat. Yet, after a certain time, every mouse cage that received this wheat as a staple diet started to show an amazing number of growths, tumours, of the salivary glands, of the thyroid and pancreas too. I had these tumours analysed by the biological faculty in Geneva, and it was certified that they were carcinogenic, a rather nasty cancer.

I asked the biologist herself why stocks of non-selected mice—they were very common white mice—could suddenly develop so many tumours. And this biologist answered me: "Well, it certainly must be what you feed them." At the time it appeared to be rather progressive to dare say such a thing. I had just finished treatment for cancer because I had a lymphoblastic sarcoma of the pharynx, which left me no longer than 5 to 10 years to live, and the doctors had told me there wasn't any connection between diet and cancer. It is true that today medicos have changed their mind following all sorts of statistical, epidemiological studies, but at the time this biologist—she was actually very old—had said something which we could say was nearly premonitory.

But then how could a food as natural as wheat possibly be a cause of cancer? Cause of cancer, or because it could have been a cancer provoking substance? Which means it would have provoked the appearance of abnormal cells, cancerous cells, like all sorts of substances such as tar, etc. as we know well today. Or was it perhaps because this wheat disturbed the system of immune response that is there to protect the organism against abnormal cells. It certainly is either one or other of these two causes.

Well, I kind of stayed in an expectant mood. I performed a series of experiments. My aim wasn't the cancer in mice, so I did not especially develop that direction, but I have been able to verify that wheat in other circumstances caused problems in my mice cages too. I had at least a thousand mice at the time and every time wheat was given to them there were behavioural problems, nervous problems. The mice were terribly excited. I could see some of them running in circles in their cage, a little as if they were obsessed to perhaps find a small escape hole and, not being able to find it, they would run around for 3/4 hour without stopping (this is a small observation I did some 25 years ago).

At the same time I observed the mice with another traditional food: milk, milk and cheese. I gave cheese, good Swiss cheese—these experiments took place in Switzerland—to certain of my mice, and I observed that the mice who received cheese suddenly showed abnormal crystallisations in their urine, something I had never observed with any other natural foods I gave to them now and then. 

It is interesting how I noticed this. I had placed mirrors underneath the cages to be able to correctly see what was happening, and as soon as the mice ate cheese, I noticed that the small urine spots they did through the cage wires onto the mirrors were crystallising in a completely abnormal way when drying. This showed me in a rudimentary way—but still it showed—that different substances were passing through the urine when I gave them cheese.

Yet when I gave them insects such as spiders and cocoons, flies, etc. which contain protein, lipids and glutamine, this problem did not exist. So something was metabolising differently in their organism with these milk products.

When thinking about it and of course trying to find an explanation for this phenomenon, a fundamental analytical explanation is difficult. To really find the substances which do not transform themselves, which are maybe the enzymes in the animal which do not function with the molecules in these foods, takes years and costs millions! That was not in the capacity of a marginal researcher like I was and still am.

In any case, this observation showed me that certain substances escaped the metabolic control of these animals instead of being assimilated normally—you know that during digestion and metabolism the food substances are taken apart and only waste is left for elimination through the natural track, without particular problem. But with the milk products there was something abnormal in this waste, and with the wheat there was something abnormal about the function of the immune response. All that deserved a more thorough examination.

The first hypothesis I can think of is that the organism of a mouse is perhaps not adapted to foods that in fact do not exist in primitive nature. They were mainly field mice, wild mice living in the forests, you probably known them, they are small rodents dressed up with grey-brown fur with a lighter part underneath the belly, exorbitantly large eyes, very fast, very pretty little animals. I was catching them in the forest, and it is true that in the forest of origin they found neither milk products nor wheat. 

Milk and wheat are foods which go back a few thousand years at the most, and mainly in the human diet, so these foods are relatively new and we could ask this question: "Would the metabolism of these animals perhaps not have foreseen for foods not available in nature?" Evident question it seems and we can generalise it to include man too, since wheat has only existed for about ten thousand years in his nourishment, and milk for approximately eight thousand years—so the same question can be asked again: "Would there be certain problems for the organism with new foods?"

Of course, we cannot induce a serious scientific affirmation of what happens in man by what we see in the animal. But still a few more questions deserved to be asked. If these problems occurred in the animal organism with foods that at first sight appear to be rather natural and traditional, could these same problems also occur in man? And can these problems be explained by the fact that these foods are new and did not always exist, either in the usual natural food chain of these animals or in the primitive dietary range of man? 

It is true that when we try to reason with the subject of food we depart from hypothesis or known notion. For example, we know that milk contains many substances such as proteins, calcium, lactose, etc. that we know are useful in man. So we deduce that milk is useful nourishment. But if we look closer, food is something very complex. There is an almost unending succession of different substances whose properties we are far from knowing anything about. In particular, we don't known what actually happens in the human organism with all the substances in any food. 

A food is in general something that's alive. Wheat, for instance, is a live grain containing everything that's necessary to life—thousands of different molecules, different substances—and to pretend to know everything by way of analysis seems to precede reality a little bit. In fact, what happens in the organism with each of these substances is extremely complicated. Today we know the metabolism of glucose very well, that's true, but what happens with the other food substances, even with the other sugars, isn't as well known as we imagine.

And to say, for example, "There is calcium in milk, so milk is useful to health", that is a short cut. Any short cut we make is dangerous, because it is quite possible that although calcium is found in milk, it is in a form convenient to calves if it is cow's milk, or the kid if it is goat's milk, but unsuitable to a human baby who has other enzymes, other characteristics in the whole of his assimilating mechanisms. So to do this kind of generalisation is dangerous. 

I think that if we want to reason correctly it is better to start from the datum nature itself proposes. In nature, animals that preceded us—the primates too—nourished themselves with foods such as they found them and could find, of course. At the time there were a great deal of wild fruits, roots, insects, different animals to catch for meat, eggs. Today, though, the human diet is made of masses of artificial substances, new products that are not found in nature. Straight away we see that to reason and ask fundamental questions... well I do not see any other way to ask: "Does the genetic programming of our organism allow us—or our organism—to function correctly with these new foods which have been introduced in our diet in the course of history?" 

In former times, before man discovered fire, it is certain that he ate raw foods mostly. Before he could domesticate cattle, animal milk would have been a rare occasion, completely accidental. To get animal milk in nature is just about an impossible task—wild nannies do not let you milk them, you'd have to kill them to get the milk. And in addition agriculture allowed selection of new plants to take place, like cereals, as actually a whole range of other plants, having been selected throughout millennia or centuries. These plants too have widened the gap from the datum of primitive plants. So in today's wheat, since we mainly talk about wheat, we can find substances that do not exist in the ancestors of wheat, such as the Triticum equilops, which are the presupposed ancestors of this familiar cereal.

Good, well, if we reason in such a way I think a small graphic will show us better what it's all about. Man has a genetic make up today which determines the whole of his/her functions, the detail of function of all those mechanisms of assimilation, a genetic make up that goes back to very ancient times.

We often say: "Oh well, yes, wheat, milk and the traditional foods of our culinary art are ancient things." In fact, no. In relation to the evolution of our genetic code, these are completely new things and if we want to function correctly with these foods, they have to fall into the very potentialities of our functioning or else our organism should have been able to adapt itself to these new foods.

Yes! So we see instantly if we admit that there are new substances in the animal milk compared to mother's milk or other foods man could have had in the past, if we perhaps admit that there are new substances in wheat which is a mutated plant, which contains different proteins compared to the primitive plant, then we have to ask: "Are our assimilation mechanisms functioning correctly, such as they are supposed to according to our heritage? Could they function correctly with those new foods or, to put it another way, has a certain adaptation really taken place?" 

To answer this question we first have to consider the scale of time. In actual fact our genetic make up has changed very little from what it was in the distant past when the primates and Homo Sapiens separated. If we think of the genealogical tree of man, Homo Sapiens, the orang outang separated from him about 16 million years ago, the more recent primates like the chimpanzee and gorilla about 7 million years ago; at least, that's what palaeontology teaches us today and I hope it isn't too mistaken. 

You can see that the human genetic make up transformed itself in 16 million years. We are not orang outang any more—luckily!—less body hair and more hair on the head. True, not everybody! But in any case, the genetic make up did not transform itself all that much.

Today we can we can amuse ourselves by comparing, for example, the genome of a gorilla with ours. It isn't very difficult to do. Geneticists known how to do that quite rapidly. In each of our cells there is a strand of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid. DNA is a tiny, but very long and spiralled molecule consisting of a sequence of about 5 billion nucleotides. The nucleotides—there are four different ones: cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine—are like four different characters, groups of which code proteins. All the proteins our cells know how to produce are encoded in the DNA.

If we have the human DNA and the gorilla DNA facing each other, there is a part of the gorilla DNA which fits exactly with the human DNA, and for that to happen the same information must be there. There is also a small part that doesn't fit, because there are differences. The length of the differing parts can be measured: 11mm, while the total DNA measures 1730mm.

So we get a more precise idea of the genetic difference which established itself in 7 million years, between the chimp and man. Eleven in 1730, at first sight, of course, rather roughly, but still on the level of size order, it's quite significant. There is only a very small proportion of primate DNA that transformed itself to become man. And that necessitated 7 million years—perhaps it happened before, but still it shows that the genetic code doesn't change very fast.

That is, our organism of today quite likely still functions like the organism of men who lived 100 000 years ago or 1 million years or 2 million years ago. However, the dietary 'tricks' that interest us—wheat, milk, and everything that goes with the culinary art—are relatively recent things. Tools go back to less than two million years ago and fire to less than 500 000 years ago, something like that. And 10 000 years of wheat and milk.

If I draw a 1 metre line to represent 16 million years, 10 000 years will be five to six tenths of a millimetre. We see on such a graphic that there isn't enough room to note the story of agriculture, rearing of cattle, and culinary art as we conceive it today. So our dietary habits are only very recent. Looking at this graphic we have to ask ourselves whether our genetic code, which in detail programs the several mechanisms of digestions, assimilation, and all of our metabolism, is able to function correctly, has it gone through the necessary changes to readapt our mechanism to near its datum with our new civilised habits.

I guess that to answer such a question by way of scientific analysis is rather difficult and it is probably for this reason that science has neglected this point. It is rather astonishing to see. I put the question forward now. For the last 28 years I have tried to spread it around me, to publish it, to give lectures. There is an amazing resistance to this question, as if we are touching old taboos as in the time of the Inquisition. It isn't for nothing I have problems with the law!

Anyway, the question seems to assert itself. It is true that since then a few researchers in USA, Eton, for example have observed a certain instinctive inclination or rejection phenomenon in the human being. And in Paris, Madame Louis-Sylvestre, the Director of the Laboratory of Research in Behavioural Euro physiology, who shows interest in instinct—well that isn't the word which is used—recently published an article in a medical journal where she says that we have to ask ourselves whether we are adapted to today's diet or still genetically adapted to the Palaeolithic diet of about 100 000 years ago. 

So I think it is a question we have to face straight in the eye. It is very disagreeable of course because it puts back into question the whole scientific edifice that has been built on the basis of traditional diet. The classical dietetic is built on what we know—we cannot stir up too much, we must also understand that of course. If we for example discover a toxicity in cow's milk, we cannot say to people: "Stop using milk products"—it would lead to a hideous economic bankruptcy. 

So we understand that official institutional classical science, which is subordinate to the rest of society, cannot say everything it wants and cannot put back into question everything that needs to be. Still, I think it is good for everyone to see that there is a certain gap here in our science today, and we are far from asking the questions we should ask if only to guarantee the public health. That is something which didn't get done and stayed hanging in emptiness today, it's a gap, a dark spot. 

So what is there to do to try and see a bit more clearly? First, very recently a discovery has been made about diabetes. A team of Canadian and Finland researchers in collaboration realised that in cow's milk—to be precise, in the bovine albumin serum, the liquid base of the cow's milk, if you like—there is a protein of which a small part resembles a protein which is fixed on the cells of the human pancreas. There is astonishing similarity—it is not completely the same molecule, but there is a very big similarity, a peptide of 17 amino acids named peptide Aboss, a small piece of protein containing 17 links. (Proteins are long chains containing about 400 links on average.) 

Aboss resembles by coincidence a protein fixed on the beta cells of the pancreas, the ones that produce insulin. When we feed our children with cow's milk, there is a possibility that this protein, the peptide Aboss, passes into the inside of the organism through the intestinal barrier, into the blood, and once in the blood triggers an immune system response.

You know that the immune system, in fact, our white blood cells (lymphocytes) mainly, has the function of identifying and destroying everything that is abnormal in the organism, everything that's alien. For instance, if we inject ourselves with cow's milk (not recommended at all!), our white blood cells automatically identify the pattern of the 'cow' proteins from the cow's milk and will neutralise and destroy them.

Normally that's how it should be. But unfortunately when the action is repeated, when we have children regularly taking cow's milk, their immune response can start to react so strongly that it destroys not only this peptide Aboss, but also the pancreas cells onto which similar proteins are fixed.

And so today—for the first time, actually—science proposes an explanation for the cause of juvenile diabetes: it is the destruction of the pancreas cells by the immune response, under the influence of an alien peptide introduced by diet. I have battled for about thirty years trying to make people aware of these hypotheses, and it makes me very happy. On the other hand it does not make me happy for the diabetics. But if we find the causes—this might not be the only one, but knowing it we might be able to avoid it.

It is true that the scientists who discovered this hurried to say that we cannot change the population's dietary habits so fast and what we should rather do is firstly a study on a large scale. Still, they themselves had 137 diabetic children under observation. The other thing is to find a way to neutralise this peptide Aboss in cow's milk. That's how such a problem is scientifically dealt with today of course, in such a way as not to upset the economy—it's understandable.

Personally, I am, let's say, rather a theoretician by nature, which enables me to reason differently. My tendency would be to say: "This peptide brings a lot of serious troubles to certain organisms, we have to be suspicious of this cow's milk which is a new food in our history anyway, and that we may not be adapted to it genetically. That means our organism doesn't have the necessary element to either correctly reduce these dangerous molecules or when they have passed into the bloodstream, to at least destroy them without showing severe complications."

So that was a very beautiful confirmation of these hypotheses and the observations I did at the time with mice. 

With wheat we observed something very similar. I saw that there were cancers and behavioural troubles in my mice. So I came to the idea that there must be abnormal molecules—very probably proteins—entering from the wheat into the bloodstream, and these could be upsetting the cells of the nervous system, perhaps the nervous transmissions too, and at the same time disturbing the immune response. 

If something can disturb both the nervous system and the immune response, we can expect its cause to be proteins. You know that proteins are the most complex molecules, the very basis of vital mechanisms, in an organism. They're the basis of hormones, enzymes, as well as being building materials for cells. There are proteins for everything; for example, there are antifreeze proteins in fish living in the Arctic sea.

Good, so probably a protein. And it was confirmed by discoveries made in the USA: there is a relationship between schizophrenia and gluten. By definition gluten is a protidic residue of wheat proteins. By removing gluten from the diet of people suffering schizophrenia, their symptoms diminish, they are less excited, calmer. And if gluten is added to their diet again in the form of bread, pasta, etc. we see the symptoms of schizophrenia reappear, agitation of the nervous system. And this is bound to a class of a protein that comes from wheat—gluten. It is quite an astonishing thing really.

I actually made some apparatus to measure the excitation of the nervous system by measuring the microscopic muscular tremor. I had in done one the mice experiments equally with and without bread. One of the cages received only natural ingredients, such as nuts, hazelnuts, seeds, grains, but left in the natural state. The other cage received the same natural foods, but with bread as well.

I observed while manipulating the mice every day that the mice receiving bread were trembling like leaves in the wind. I was placing them into some apparatus to measure the velocity of their running, their length, etc. to see their endurance, but these measurements have not really been interesting.

However what was very interesting was simply the contact with the animal. I saw a significant difference: the beasts not receiving bread showed exemplary calm. Between my two hands, they were trying to 'sniff' themselves away through my fingers, but in a very focused and relaxed fashion.

But the ones who ate a bit of bread every day, perhaps 1 to 2g per animal—that was already enough to have them completely agitated—they shook madly like an artist who's on stage for the first time with a huge stage fright. These abnormalities had to be measured, and thanks to friends (electricians) and all who helped me, I developed such a device.

Today we have a device that effectively measures either the tremble in the mouse or the tremor in man. The device sorts out the moments of minimum, because otherwise the quaking from a moment of emotional excitement would spoil everything. But between moments of emotion and moments of rest, in the lowest moment, we have 20 units for the naturally fed mice, 40 units if they eat white bread, and with wholemeal bread, the famous good old brown bread of our dieticians, they reach 100.

If our theory is correct, this seems to show that the substances causing the trouble are to be found in the peripheral layers of grains such as wheat, and that's where we find proteins. That confirms what has been observed with the gluten in people suffering schizophrenia. 

It seems that it's mainly wheat grains that possess these extremely exciting substances. I experimented with other grains, and they gave far less results. So it seems wheat fabricates proteins that disturb the organism of mice and humans. Any why? Well, perhaps it's not so astonishing. Wheat has been selected and reselected each year for thousands of years. The selection happens much faster than with a fruit—with a fruit you have to plant the seed, wait for the tree to grow, perhaps wait for a golden apple to appear in an orchard and multiply the golden one to have a new variety of apple. But the cereal is sown each year. 

So it is not astonishing that a plant like wheat has been able to undergo a kind of genetic diversion by dint of mutation. In fact, from one year to another there is sometimes a grain among thousands of ears that can have a mutation, a chromosomal accident, a small change in its DNA. Following this change, the plant will have a different appearance, better looking perhaps, taller, more nutritious, more flour, etc, that is what was looked for in wheat. But it will also produce other proteins because it is exactly what is encoded by the DNA that determines the synthesis of the proteins in a plant. A mutation. And our ancestors and today our agriculturists who select a new plant variety, bring new molecules into our diet without realising, new proteins, and in some cases they can cause problems.

There is no reason for our organism to function correctly with proteins that have not existed before. Our organism adapted itself during millions of years to the substances that existed in nature, so there is a certain danger in practicing such a thing. I think that in the plants we use today, wheat must have strayed more than others, since it seems to be wheat that causes the most problems.

Good! So these few hypotheses bring us to ask ourselves what could happen when we absorb these foods. Once upon a time we used to say it isn't dangerous to eat either this or that protein, because what goes into the blood, what passes through the intestinal barrier, are only amino acids.

Proteins are made in a chain of amino acids. A plant contains from a hundred to a thousand amino acids. The proteins, once through our digestive tract, will be decomposed into small pieces because we have enzymes that cut them and what finally remains are the amino acids which constitute them.

There are about 20 different kinds of amino acid molecules, and combinations of these are chained together to make all the proteins. The character of each protein depends on the way the amino acids are arranged to form these chains. Once these amino acids are separated they are normally absorbed by the intestinal wall.

Let me explain what happens. The cells which form the intestinal mucous membrane are called epithelial cells, and that's where the amino acids pass through the membrane, they go through the cell by diffusion and go into the lymph and then into the blood, since the lymph throws itself into the blood. That's how the intestinal function takes place.

With this picture in mind we felt completely secure. The large proteins are not able to pass through the wall. So if a protein has not been digested properly it will be rejected into the bowel movement—no problem. What can enter are separated amino acids, and these do not have any characteristics that could be dangerous; on the contrary they are necessary for the organism to be able to construct its own proteins. So everything was fine. 

Unfortunately, about 15 years ago we discovered that things can go wrong with this mechanism. In certain cases the epithelial cells can absorb whole proteins. This happens in particular when these non-degraded proteins are in too high a concentration in the surrounding of the membrane. These high concentrations can be due to bad digestion, for example—we'll look for the causes in a minute. 

So it is clear that these proteins shouldn't pass through the membrane, but they do. The cell, it is exactly the same as an amino that wants to eat, that is a fagocytosis, where the membrane loses its shape. In this particular case we call it an endoexocytosis to simply say that a transport will take place, enter and exit, endo-exo, direct transport of these proteins through the cell by this mechanism.

Here a big problem arises. It happens mostly in children. It is perhaps not for nothing that in the case of diabetes this protein plays a bigger role in small children, but now we know it also happens in adults. Actually, this has been evident to me for a long, long time. Certain proteins are toxic when we absorb them. If they poison the organism it proves that they go through the intestinal wall, so there has to be a mechanism of passage, otherwise we couldn't understand what was happening.
 

There are actually other ways proteins can permeate the intestinal wall. The epithelial cells are welded together at their upper part, but there is also an intercellular permeability between the cells in addition to the intracellular permeability I discussed before with the endoexocytosis. So let us not imagine too much that our organisms are so well protected against abnormal or alien protein—a certain quantity can go through the wall. 

I think that this permeability to proteins is actually a way to warn the organism that something has been badly digested, because in fact the first thing that happens when foreign proteins pass in such a way into the lymph and blood is a reaction of the immune response. 

For instance suppose we have eaten some cheese, proteins built on the pattern of the cow and not on the human pattern. Once they pass inside the blood without having been broken down, reaction. So we have foreign proteins in our blood and it is the immune response that will intervene. It will immediately attack these foreign molecules, destroy them.

So in principle everything should be all right. But there is a first consequence and that is that the intervention of the immune system is often coupled with nausea and I think that it is the mechanism through which disgust will be introduced against all ill-digested food which poisoned the organism. Automatically a reaction of disgust is produced and we will not feel like eating this same food again.

If an animal in nature feels ill because proteins passed through into its blood and its immune response has had to react, it certainly won't be eating that very food again. Unfortunately, another thing will be happening, mainly in humans, because if a food doesn't agree with him or her, parents for instance will say to their child: "It's good for your health, drink your milk", or "You have to grow, eat your soup".

We don't have many means to react, we have the mind which keeps interfering, we say "It's healthy, it's good, I must eat it, it'll be lost", all sorts of reasoning and if it is really too awful we add ketchup, salt, lemon, we cook it a bit more, or anything, and we are eating the same food again.

I have seldom met people who eat cheese only once in their life because they felt nauseous the first time. No, they'll find a way to eat it again under another shape, in pastas, or as a fondue. Something not quite natural is happening here, it is a recurrence of the introduction of these foreign proteins.

But today science in immunology has made progress. Any substance that induces the immune system to produce antibodies is called an antigen. Today we know that when we repeatedly introduce a food containing antigens—usually proteins—into the organism, the immune system at first produces antibodies every time. This is the first intolerance reaction. The immune system reacts with increasing violence. It gets furious with those foreign molecules and it can lead to what we call allergies, food allergies. That's how we explain food allergy.

But if this introduction of foreign molecules keeps happening for a very long time there is a moment when the organism will stop being furious, it'll have had enough and it will go on a strike. It will say: "I do whatever I can and it continues on and on, I have had enough". The immunologist calls this tolerance.

Unfortunately, it is not a recommended tolerance like the Christian tolerance. No, it is simply a total lack of reaction. The organism stops reacting. What will happen now is that those foreign proteins will be able to accumulate in a dangerous way. What can then happen—what I suspected about 18 years ago now—is that these foreign molecules, for example protein molecules from the cow, will be able to stick on different receivers placed on the membrane of our cells. We can instantly see that this is a risky situation.

It is a well known fact in immunology that tolerance is not a stable state. A shock, a new food, even a sun stroke, a psychic shock, is sufficient to have us fall back into intolerance. Intolerance itself is actually better than tolerance, because the body defends itself again. But what has happened in the meantime is that the foreign molecules have accumulated on our cells, so our own cells will be stamped with cow proteins.

What will the immune system do? Our white blood cells recognise abnormal cells when they have proteins on their surface that are foreign to our own proteins. So they will attack the cells covered with foreign proteins as if they were foreign cells. So if we have proteins which do not belong to our organism our immune response will treat them as foreign cells as if we had grafted cow cells inside the human organism. There will be an immediate attack. We can foresee an attack of the immune response against our own cells.

We call the diseases where our immune system attacks our own cells autoimmune diseases. It is true that the medical profession keeps discovering more and more autoimmune diseases, or discovering that more and more diseases are in fact autoimmune diseases. On the other hand, the mechanisms of this auto-destruction remain rather mysterious to them.

Fifteen years ago I gave a lecture in Montpellier (France) where I exposed this idea to a college of medical doctors. Of course, it is very difficult to have new ideas accepted, particularly in the world of research, especially when we attack the classic way people feed themselves, we have to know that.

One of the doctors who attended my lecture, Professor Ceniale, a specialist in immunology, the directory of the laboratory of immunology at the faculty of Montpellier, finally said: "It's true, this theory is OK. There is nothing in what we know today in immunology that opposes itself to this theory."

But still it annoyed him a lot, and he spent 3 years trying to dismantle it. He looked for every possible argument, trying to show improbability. After 3 years, having found nothing, he told himself, "In this case, in all honesty, we must do the opposite." You see, honest researchers can be honest too. He then said, "Since we haven't been able to show that the theory doesn't stand, we'll try to check it empirically, by experiment." 

And so Professor Ceniale started, 6 years ago now, a very precise experiment in Montpellier. He put a rather large number of people suffering from rheumatoid arthritis on a special diet. 

You'll know this disease which deforms the joints. It starts with swelling and pains in the joints, difficulty to move, and then it is the inflammation produced inside the joints that degenerates. The very cells of the cartilage are destroyed, the joint loses its shape, and the bone becomes extremely painful.

And what have we got against it? Pain killers, anti-inflammatory drugs, and that's all and apart from that, golden salts, which have no fundamental effect, in actual fact it causes more trouble than anything else, and it remains a big dark spot in medicine—on the therapeutic level it's rather a zero!

And that's why Professor Ceniale, who had heard my lecture, decided to try this experiment. On my recommendation he put patients on a diet without milk or wheat, because I think that nowadays in our diet these two ingredients are the main source of protein, a bit of a worry—milk and wheat are everywhere in our food. So he omitted wheat and milk, and all their derivatives, of course—you don't want the same proteins to sneak in in a pie covered with cream.

Not a very easy diet, but over a period of around 4 years he was able to convince a hundred rheumatoid arthritis sufferers to follow the diet. These were people who were seriously hit with the disease—no doubtful cases were taken, they were all confirmed cases, most of them not reacting to drugs any more, that was why they accepted such a draconian change in their diet.

Anyway, the results were completely astonishing. The results Professor Ceniale obtained—and these were also published in official medical journals—were that 82% improved significantly and 46% had total remission (these are included in the 82%) according to a number of different tests. He waited a whole year for all symptoms of the disease to completely disappear before publishing the results.

Of course, there are perhaps other sources of problems than wheat and milk—that is only a part of the work. Before that I had proposed other experiments in which people with the same disease follow a Palaeolithic diet, such as our pre-Neolithic ancestors could find in nature, and without cooking, so perhaps it was a little bit harder to do.

But Professor Ceniale already obtained good results with this diet without milk, wheat and derivatives. It seems to demonstrate that there is quite a direct action, probably from milk and wheat proteins, which disorganise the immune response. 

So why now cancers with my mice? Let us go back to this example of cancer from the start of the talk. In cancer we have disorganisation of the immune system. It's not quite the same as the previous case where the immune system attacks cells that have been stamped by foreign elements. Cancer is something else: it is abnormal cells that are mad. 

Normally on a cancerous cell there are abnormal molecules fabricated by the cell itself. The immune system recognises these molecules to identify and destroy the cancerous cell. This is how mad cells, which fabricate abnormal proteins, are recognised.

But sometimes by chance there is a resemblance, an analogy, between foreign molecules that have settled on the membranes of our own cell and the molecules fabricated by a cancerous cell. Then the tolerance which has been induced by the foreign molecules can also be valid for the molecules that otherwise cause the cancerous cell to be recognised.

So if there is tolerance, the organism will on one hand tolerate for instance protein from cow's milk, but if by coincidence the molecules fabricated by the cancerous cells look like this cow protein, the organism will also tolerate its own cancerous cells. The tolerance induced by diet can by chance function for cancerous cells. We can in any case fear it.

Until now I haven't found any explanation which seems more logical for it than that. Well, nature is extremely complex, we must never be in a hurry with conclusions, but it is an hypothesis which could explain it all. Even if it is false, it at least has the advantage to have been able to allow one hundred rheumatoid arthritis sufferers to function again normally, to walk without pain and avoid having distorted limbs.

So there is what we can say from the few bits of knowledge we have today in science and these hypotheses I just proposed.

Aging touches everyone—we all hope to stay young as long as possible. But we do not really know the length of life of our distant ancestors. For instance, how long did people live during the Palaeolithic age without wheat or milk or culinary art? And what were their diseases? It is not such a very long time ago. 

The length of life is still not clear because it is very difficult to identify the life span of a skeleton. It is much more difficult than we think, because the very criteria on which we base our dating are not even health criteria. If health was much better at that time they might have lived much longer while having the same skeleton degradation at the end of 150 years as we have at 70 years.

But what we know today is that there wasn't any rheumatoid arthritis. The first cases of rheumatoid arthritis go back to 3000 years, which is in fact a period of agriculture and domestic rearing. And there weren't any cancer cases either. Palaeo-pathologists studying skeletons going back to the Palaeolithic—there aren't tons of them—have found that the rate of cancer was certainly less than 1 per 1000. Today the rate is 1 per 400.

So things have changed significantly, and I think that we should put these changes in relation with diet. This doesn't mean that food is the only cause—there might well be other causes, such as pollution, stress, whatever. But in any case we cannot disregard the food by saying, "The Palaeolithic human beings were sick, they lived short lives, so it is not today's food which destroys us." This type of reasoning is not possible any more. 

Now about aging. It is always interesting when we read ancient myths. When we read the bible, we get the impression that there is a certain period when the length of life was reduced. True, when we read the bible it seems aberrant, I wrote about it in my book in a folkloric way—anyway, there are astonishing happenings in our culture, we are told that the patriarchs lived 900 years. It seems to be a completely overstated statement. When I questioned my catechism priest, he replied that the calendar changed at a certain time.

Later on I read all of the Old Testament looking for the calendar change. I did not find it, because if we locate the length of life of the different patriarchs, we see that it happened progressively from 960 or 965. In any case, the bible gives us the exact day or month of the different life span. It's astonishing. Indeed, it is either lying or it is symbolic. In the beginning we are at 960 until Noah and then it progressively decreases, 600, 400, 300, 200, 240, 120 with Moses, 70 with David. And 30 with Jesus Christ, but that is another story.

It is strange that the life spans decrease progressively. It's annoying, and a calendar change doesn't explain it very well. Not even a symbolic, cabalistic, explanation works, where we could say the number of years is represented by sacred numbers, bla, bla, bla—you know all these stories. We cannot explain it like that either because there would be a fair chance that one may be shorter or longer, etc. There is no reason for it to have progressively decreased.

In my book you can see I have the patriarchs in function of time, it is a superb exponential decreasing which ends in the Middle Ages, with 30-35 years. Today without the help of medicine I don't think we would be better off. If antibiotics didn't exist, if there wasn't any medical treatment to save people every time a disease broke out, the average length of life could be very short. We mustn't forget.

So something seems to have taken place. The bible—well, some believe in it, others don't. However, there is an astonishing crosscheck with the story of Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Prometheus represents the intelligent person and Prometheus did something—if intelligent at all I don't know—anyway, with his intelligence he went and robbed the fire of the Gods to allow humanity to cook their food, something which wasn't customary until then. So Prometheus would have brought cooking to humanity, and it is from then on that something changed in diet and agriculture.

At the same time, the myth tells us human life has been shortened. The myth says exactly that the human who had an eternal life before—which means very long in the ancient's language of images—all of a sudden becomes mortal, becomes very short. So twice we can see this in mythology. There are other myths making similar statements. So perhaps we ought to ask ourselves a few questions. 

Today we effectively know how aging is produced. There is firstly a genetic clock that gives a normal life duration for each living species. We are meant to live for a certain number of years. Of course, even if we are meant to live for, let's say, 120 years, we can always manage to die earlier! For instance, we can upset the organism and die beforehand. 

So we must be aware of the fact that a second aging process superposes itself onto the genetically programmed aging process. This second aging process might perhaps be due to a degradation of the organism.

Some 25 to 30 years ago a theory about the auto-immune aging process was proposed and is still current today: it is that the organism ages through an attack of its own cells, by its own white blood cells. That is, our own immune response—which is normally there to protect us—attacks our cells a bit at random everywhere.

Perhaps the immune system should destroy the cells to renew them, but it seems that it happens so fast that our organs cannot regenerate the attacked cells. The result is that it creates microscopic scarred lesion tissue—very small dots like micro explosions where cells have been destroyed. These lesions riddle our organism in a particular area and the function of those tissues is weakened or completely absent.

For instance, think about the important work the kidney cells are doing. If certain zones are damaged by an auto-immune attack—our white blood cells have dug holes—the kidneys will react by filling the holes with scarred tissues. They won't be operational cells but scarred tissue cells that will not know how to do the very specific kidney work and so the organ will degenerate. It will be riddled with non-functional zones.

That's how we explain the aging process. It happens in the vital organs, including the brain. So we mustn't be astonished with what I said earlier on—I guess you have made the bridge yourselves—if we see that we create auto-immune mechanisms when we introduce abnormal proteins into our organism, we mustn't be surprised if our life span is shortened. 

What are the causes which can create this phenomenon, the presence of non-degraded proteins inside the intestinal lumen—even though it is very dark in there!—and cross the intestinal wall. 

I guess that the first logical cause is that the food we have consumed has not been able to digest completely. This can happen if there is excessive food, an overload. The excess will bring a large quantity of protein into the system. This uses the enzymes in our digestive juices, and if we go too far we will have more non-degraded proteins. Dietary excess, yes. 

A second cause could perhaps be the introduction of proteins that our digestive tract is not equipped to deal with. Enzymes are the large molecules that digest the food molecules. Our cells fabricate enzymes like tools, if you like. They cut the food protein into pieces. But our enzymes are made for the food nature has foreseen for us, and if we now ingest other proteins, it can very well be that our enzymes cannot degrade them correctly. 

There is yet another cause. On the intestinal wall there is a kind of mucous secretion, a film, which is made of special molecules we call mucins. The mucins are proteins that constitute the intestinal mucous membranes and stop the passage of foreign proteins through the intestinal wall.

But our mucins are programmed too. These molecules are very complex things that function like precision machines, and they are genetically programmed for natural proteins. So for foods to which we are not genetically adapted may contain foreign proteins that are not degraded by our enzymes then permitted through the intestinal wall by our mucins.

For instance, if cow's milk is a food that neither man nor his ancestral primates have used, there is no reason we should be well protected against it or well equipped to degrade all the proteins that it brings into our body. Actually there is a very simple example with milk. We know that if we give cow's milk to infants, it can happen that a clot of casein builds up in the stomach and that will create a very dangerous, possibly fatal blockage. Why? Well, it shows clearly that cow casein is not degraded by human enzymes. There might be many others too, of course. 

There is yet a third cause that needs an explanation. When I cook a food, what is going to happen to the proteins in it, and their amino acids? Well this chain will break into tiny pieces—that's actually why we say cooking is like pre-digestion, as it cuts the chains of proteins a bit like our enzymes should to enable digestion to reduce it to an amino acids, so it is digestive work starting there. We say that the protein has been denatured. 

But unfortunately something else happens: other molecules will hook themselves onto the proteins. You know that in cooking the elevation of the temperature means an increase of the velocity of the molecules and when we cook a food the molecules knock against each other. This facilitates such reactions as sugar fixing itself on proteins. For instance, glucose, the good old traditional glucose, has an unfortunate tendency to fix itself onto proteins and so we now can have proteins with a kind of growth, other molecules attached to them. We call these molecules the Maillard molecules.

The enzymes that digest proteins are big structures that envelop the protein to chop it into pieces. But when our enzymes have to digest these Maillard molecules the enzyme will knock against those abnormal growths, what we call the shield effect, and the protein won't be correctly degraded.

So here is just one example—there are others—that shows that molecules disturbed by cooking cannot be correctly degraded. In certain cases these non-degraded molecules keep their antigenic property so they can then disturb the immune response. 

Another interesting thing is that alcohol can increase the permeability of the intestinal wall. But it is not the alcohol itself that passes. Rather, the alcohol simply damages the protective layers of immunoglobulin and the mucin that line the intestinal wall. This favours the penetration of foreign proteins. So alcohol can have a certain noxious effect too. It is perhaps not a coincidence that statistics show more cancers where there is more alcohol. 

Q1. Which are the most acceptable cereals apart from wheat?
Q2. What should we think of spelt? [Spelt is a primitive form of wheat, Triticum spelta, now rarely grown. Editor]
Q3. What should we think of wheat eaten as a sprout?
Q4. At the planetary or familial level a natural diet is rather difficult to achieve. What solution do you propose?
Q5. How many different kinds of produce do you choose from?
Q6. So is it not possible to find ideal produce in any shop?
Q7. Isn't it essential to respect the rhythm of the seasons?
Q8. What about goat's milk?
Q9. So can we consume goat's cheese?
Q10. How should we feed children?
Q11. And what foods are best for children?
Q12. Are you for or against vaccinations?

So that's it, I'll now let you ask questions and I'll try to answer them. 

A1. At this time I have not been able to observe a noxious effect with the other cereals. In particular, rheumatoid arthritis seems to disappear when we take wheat away, even though people replace it with barley.

But even here we have to be suspicious, it doesn't mean the barley is good. It is perhaps because people have eaten a lot of wheat before and in changing the cereal, even if the new one is also noxious, it still stops the troubles done by the former. The research has to be done for a longer period to get more exact results.

Rheumatoid arthritis appeared for the first time 3000 years ago in South America and there they were eating corn. It is possible that corn as a main staple causes similar phenomena. Corn is also a plant that is selected and surely fabricates non-original proteins.

A2. I don't know. It seems to me that it causes less trouble to the nervous system than wheat for instance.

It is funny that if we experience a diet without cooking, without milk, without wheat and without seasoning, as I have done myself for about 28 years now, we notice very well that if we eat it there won't be any disturbance of the nervous system. When we eat wheat, however, we dream, we feel aggressive, sexual excitement, we straightaway have nervous system disturbances. 

A3. I don't think it contains the elements we need, but still I think there is something good about the germination in the sense that when a plant germinates, the enzymes present in the seed transform all sorts of proteins belonging to the plant.

So there are less original proteins in the sprout than in the unsprouted seed. This is perhaps why dieticians have observed the advantage of germination. My own experiences with sprouted wheat have not been very successful.

But to see clearly through all this we need to have a very clear basic diet, otherwise we don't see. There are so many superposed noxious effects in the traditional diet that it is very difficult indeed to see clearly. It is actually for that reason that for the last 28 years I have toyed about, endeavouring to abolish if possible all tricks belonging to human intelligence in the diet, and observe what happens when a human organism is nourished with a totally natural diet, eating the different foods separately, a bit like animals do in their natural state. I must say it was a success.

A4. It is very difficult. Cures are the things to do. There are many advantages even if such a diet is only practiced periodically. First, we wake up the immune system in a rather short time. This helps against cancer, against all disorders that can take hold of the organism, it is very precious.

We jump out of immune system tolerance in 2, 3 weeks after a change of diet, that's why I think a cure is good. Yes, the best about it is that it is the easiest way.

But if we take a half measure it doesn't have the same effect on the immune response at all. For example, it is enough to take a small spoon of milk each day to induce enough foreign molecules to keep the tolerance asleep. We maintain the immune system with small doses, so we have to do things rather strictly to really allow the immune response to change the conditions of function.

Second, there is something else as well which functions when we consume a natural diet and which plays an important role here: the alimentary instinct, which functions very well. It's simple: the food changes taste as a function of the body's needs. But only when it is left completely raw, unprepared.

For instance, you go into your garden and pick carrots, enjoy eating a certain quantity. At the beginning they will perhaps be very fruity, sweet, agreeable. Suddenly they become bitter, they scratch your throat.

An animal certainly wouldn't go on eating them at that stage, feeling those disagreeable sensations—it's how the instinct works for animals, while man would say, "Oh, no! These carrots are scratching my throat, what can I do to still be able to eat them!" We add oil, lemon, salt, whatever and so we can swallow them. So we understand rapidly that food preparation is a way to get over barriers which would otherwise be imposed by the alimentary instinct.

I believe however that this very instinct is extremely precious. I do not see any other solution to avoid excesses. This instinct indicates to each organism what it is able to digest and assimilate, what it really needs. But if we consume foods that falsify instinct, how are we to know what quantity each individual can correctly digest for each food? I do not see any other solution. 

A5. At the moment on our tables we are doing it on a large scale, our centre is quite large and caters for many people who wish to experience this natural way of eating, cleansing cures. I guess that we have at least 150 different kinds of produce to choose from.

There are many foods that have been ignored in traditional food preparation, where you'll be offered spaghetti bolognaise one day, the next day cheese macaroni, and the next mushrooms on toast, and each time you are getting wheat in a different form. For milk products it is similar. If we look at the basis of the traditional diet, it is rather restricted, when in reality should we explore nature and see all that it offers.

It is quite extraordinary—the choice is incredible. But when our organism is overloaded with cooked foods many of these natural foods are not edible any more. If, for example, we eat carrots and add seasoning, we'll eat ten times as much as what the body could normally deal with. Automatically there are excesses, all sorts of difficulties, and if at that moment we taste another food that contains similar elements to the carrots, we'll also be blocked towards that food.

We certainly understand what must have happened in the history of humanity. From the time humans invented culinary devices, they were able to overload their organism and automatically many wild plants have been forgotten. Fruits and many plants have been forgotten in the course of time. 

A6. Today it is rather difficult because fruits and vegetables we find in the shops do not have the normal taste, they are treated, or taste enhancers have been added, or they are produced with chemicals; a great salad, and we do not know what we are eating any more.

That is why we have created a system of production, importation, and distribution for people who want to follow a natural diet. The produce we seem genetically well adapted to is tropical. It seems that our genetic make up is rather close to that of primates, so it is rather well adapted to the produce from tropical countries.

So to do this experiment correctly we had no other solution but to do enormous work installing a supply, including tropical produce. We now distribute all over the place, to Berlin, Perpignan, even Italy etc. for everyone who wishes to experience it. It is technically possible. 

A7. It could perhaps be harmful to ignore the seasons, but we can't really highlight it. We must not forget that if we are made to be living in the tropics, there are hardly any seasons in the tropics. So it is perhaps contrary to our genetic make up, which is not very well adapted to the seasons. We can indeed question that. But in practice it works very well. 

A8. I think that for people who have had cow's milk for a very long time as well as cow's milk products, it will be an improvement to change. When suddenly consuming goat's milk, they do not ingest the same proteins and relief will follow. And it's probably for that reason we say goat's milk is healthier.

There is a second reason: goat's milk has a sharp taste, if I may say so, as there is no vocabulary to describe taste in our culture, a sharp taste which cannot be found in cow's milk. So there are less overload problems with the goat's milk. Try to drink your coffee with goat's milk!

I once tried it up on a hill where I had goats 40 years ago—it wasn't drinkable. The first days were OK, but then my taste buds wouldn't take it. But with cow's milk you can gulp endlessly! 

A9. If someone is already intoxicated with cow's cheese, to turn to goat's cheese will be an improvement. 

A10. Well, I have a lot of experience with that and I'll talk to you about it. I feed children with natural foods only, such as they are in nature, letting the children free to choose. I have had six children: three cooked and three raw as I call it.

The first three were born when we were still on the conventional diet and since 1964 my wife and I have decided to go ahead with this experience. Since 1970 we have had another three children and so we have been able to compare.

It was very interesting to observe how children could develop their skeleton, muscles without milk products, without cereal, without cooking, without seasoning, without advice, nor any alimentary education.

I must say it has been a spectacular success. They are all, especially the three raw ones (which started since birth), very strong, have superb muscles, skeleton, without any problem, no sign of rickets, and never had a childhood disease. We have never, except for the first 6 years with the three cooked ones, had to nurse or look after them. A child in bed needing care is unknown at our place. The influence of food is much bigger than we can ever imagine. 

A11. Everything that exists. I believe the organism is adapted to anything that is given in a natural state from nature. Well, it is an hypothesis I based my theories on, but until now I haven't seen much that could invalidate it. I even think that everything I have been able to observe confirms it.
 

Even if natural foods are offered to a newborn baby he'll know straight away what to eat. I experienced this fact with very young babies, not only my own, about 30 to 40 babies.

The first day, even before mother's milk, they are presented with a whole scale of foods under their nose and their mouth opens for precise foods. And if we pre-chew these foods for them, they'll swallow it and digest it perfectly well. So already there and then the baby is able to recognise by his instinct the food which suits him/her.

And it is for this reason that I have the impression that with natural foods everything works out well as long as we don't transform them. Toxic foods exist, but I have never seen a baby open his mouth for a venomous mushroom. These experiments were done a long time ago because we wanted to prove that the instinct works. Since then we do not try that any more.

But we have to be careful with older children who already have imagination and curiosity. If they taste a bad mushroom in the forest they could find it not too bad and poison themselves.

This happens because instinct doesn't function in finding bad the thing which can be dangerous, but in finding a good taste in something that will be good. So an instinctive rejection of dangerous foods doesn't necessarily exist in nature.

A dangerous mushroom is not forcibly as bad tasting as it is dangerous. In fact, when it is not really good, no animal will eat it in nature, animals only eat what attracts them. 

A12. That is an area I won't stick my nose into because I have already gone to gaol after a TV broadcast in Switzerland 4 years ago when I was arrested by nine policemen as I was walking out of the building.

Well, I had said we shouldn't talk about instinctotherapy. So they told me: we'll change the title to 'Instinct'. I agreed: this is a word in the public domain, they won't be able to attack me. But unfortunately the people who were there did speak of instinctotherapy. I should have left the studio, but they insisted I stayed, etc.

The judge sitting in front of his TV set must have become red hot, as he immediately contacted the policeman who was in the room. They then arrested me and fortunately the judge in question had to release me because there would have been a scandal at the next interview. They let me go half an hour before the next broadcast.

Well, anyway I'll tell you about viruses, because our experience seems to show as well that viruses are not at all the noxious and dangerous elements they are generally believed to be.

First, there are many viruses that express themselves by reactions that are not natural. Even with poliomyelitis only one case in a hundred appears and it spontaneously disappears in three-quarters of those. To say that the virus of poliomyelitis is there to paralyse our children is a bit of a shortcut. It's better to say that for 1 case in 400 paralysis sets in.

It seems that viruses bring a little bit of DNA and RNA into the organism, into our cells. Which means that after a viral disease, the virus is in every cell of the body. There is one left in each cell, so they complement the program and it allows our cells to eliminate abnormal molecules that have accumulated in the organism—molecules that our own genetic programming does not know how to eliminate.

So if the virus is useful, you will conclude yourself whether vaccination is useful or not.

The thing is with a diet that puts all these mechanisms out of order, viral processes can become dangerous. So medicine adapted itself to society's need, to the culinary art. But in natural living conditions, those same phenomena are useful—the value system is changed.

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