I is for Instinctivore

First came the raw food movement, with advocates munching away on carefully prepared uncooked dishes. They argue that heat destroys goodness. Then the trend went one step further. Dubbed ‘Instinctivores’, California-based Roman Devivo and Antje Spors believe we need to recover our instincts about what we should eat and go right back to our original diet, from a world long before processed food and even farming.

An ‘instinctivore’ training meal involves first carefully smelling a selection of foods to see what appeals. Then you eat the chosen food slowly, noticing how the tastes change. You stop at the point that a pineapple ceases to be a sweet pleasure or a carrot no longer appeals. This, they claim, is when your body has got what it wants and needs. Devivo and Spors run a ‘Genefit’ nutrition course that requires all food to be utterly unprocessed, down to the last detail. If a plant has been ‘overhybridised’ for human consumption, it is out — so no wheat, corn or soya. Not only is cooking forbidden, but also freezing, sun-drying fruit (too hot), juicing and even slicing.

But it may be precisely our instincts that have led us into trouble with food and modern diet-related diseases in the first place. In an engaging new book about evolution and food, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Harvard professor Richard Wrangham argues we may have evolved to become modern humans when we began to cook. This meant we had to work less hard to digest our food, leaving more energy for the growth of our brains. It may be that our instincts are, in fact, towards soft, calorie-rich, easily digested food. Sounds familiar? Is fast food the ultimate embodiment of our caveman desires? Eat raw food if you want to lose weight (it is harder for the body to digest), Wrangham says, but it is not our ‘natural’ diet.

Genefit: www.genefitnutrition.com