Human Being are Fruit-eaters

Every animal is restricted to what it can eat by its biological design and environment.  Human beings have usurped this restriction by learning to make tools, use fire and live outside of our ideal climate and environment.

Some scientists believe that we are cooked food eaters and this can be proven by the fact that we don't have the strong jaws and large stomachs of other herbivorous apes.  For some reason they gloss over the possibility that we a frugivorous apes and that fruit is the most ideal food for our design.  The idea of fresh fruit as a staple food is so alien to many that it does not factor in their thinking.

If we consider most of the things we eat we see that they would be virtually inedible without processing or cooking of some kind.  This does not necessarily mean that these things are poisonous but just that we would not have been able to eat them at one time and therefore it is likely that our body had no need to adapt to digesting them.

Fresh fruit is the one thing commonly eaten without any processing or the addition of any condiment.  Vegetables are also eaten raw but often with a dressing or the addition of other foods to make them more palatable.  Nuts and seeds are often processed or heated in some way and would be difficult to gather and remove from the shells without the machines used in these industries today.  Grains and starch foods are tasteless and inedible raw and would require a lot of chewing and digestive enzymes that we don't have, the same can be said of cruciferous vegetables which tend to be cooked to soften them for human consumption.

Animal foods would also pose great difficult in acquiring.  None of us know how difficult it is to hunt animals bare handed as we have never tried to do this, it is simply not in our nature to hunt after animals and we avoid doing it in daily life as we know that we would most likely get injured in the process.  Complex systems of farming have been created to increase the animals foods in our diet along with huge marketing campaigns to convince us of the benefit these foods have to us despite the fact that science continues to show strong links between high consumption of animal products and poor health.

Also if we look to environment, without clothing or heating the only place we could comfortably spend an entire year would be the tropics.  Perhaps we did some migration between tropical and subtropical environments during the summer months but in general it seems we would have stayed in a tropical climate. This raises the question as to whether we are really best sticking to tropical fruits rather than temperate fruits as out staple?  Desert fruits also like dates may also not be the ideal.

Personally I feel like fruit in any form be it whole, fresh, ripe, raw and organic, smoothied, juiced, cooked, pasteurized, dried or processed in any way is still a superior choice than eating foods that would not be an option without cooking.

When transitioning towards a raw diet I went through stages of experimenting in all sorts of ways.  Once I had given up salt, I tried to create versions of cooked food without salt.  I found bread to be almost impossible to eat as a salt-less food, far too dry for my mouth.  I have noticed that when salt comes into contact with our mouth that we produce a huge amount of saliva which makes it easier to eat the dry bread (as well as eating together with soup).  As a side point I believe the large saliva release to be to do with protecting our mouth from the corrosive and irritating effect of salt by diluting it in as much liquid as possible, perhaps I am wrong on that one, but if salt water can wear away cliffs I can imagine it does the same to our much more delicate mouths.

Also when I gave up refined sugar I had the same experience.  I was shocked to realise that when sugar was removed from certain foods it didn't just reduce the taste...the food had no taste at all anymore.  We are sweet seekers and the sugar really helps the medicine go down.  Remove added sugar and salt from processed foods and they would become completely inedible and no one would but them again.  Remove refined sugar from your diet and fruit will become more and more appealing.

In conclusion, if we are not fruit eaters then what else would we eat?  What else can we eat?  While you are fiddling about with rubbing two sticks together I shall head over yonder where a field of mango trees are shedding their fruits.

Thanks for visiting,

Ronstero Delicioso

Fruitcamp UK 2013!!

Last weekend, I was at Fruitcamp UK. This was an event that I had organised with the help of my friends Angie, Simon and Diana and it was set in a campsite in the village of Flagg in Derbyshire.  This was not any usual campsite as it consisted of Yurts instead of tents or caravans.  The Yurts were large enough for 5 people and had a wood burning fire inside.

The organisation took a good few months of preparation and we were lucky that Simon lived near a large fruit wholesaler and market in Leicester where he could get good bargains for the fruit.  We mostly got bananas, mangoes and grapes with some apples and dates as additional fruit.  We had a small amount of lettuce which in hindsight was not quite enough as it was disappearing fast by the second night!

The first night we got to know each other at an opening ceremony outside under the moonlight and hung out in the caravan where I and a few others were staying.  That became the main communal space for the event and many great conversation were had there and friendships were forged.

We were lucky to avoid heavy rain and the next day Paul Miller also known as "Wu" gave an excellent Tai Chi class, while others went for a run and some did weight training and calisthenics with Simon. After this we set out for an easy walk on the Monsal Trail nearby. That night we had a Jive dancing class with Matthew Tolley which was great fun. After this we had a fire out under the moonlight and I played guitar and sang, providing some background music to more conversations on health and fruity living.

The following day, Duncan had set out a circuit for the runners to do a distance of their choosing, many choosing to do a half marathon myself Simon, Klaus and James did some tough circuit training within the horsebarn.  Improvising with the equipment at hand we used horse jumping fences for hurdling and doing dips on.  A more difficult hike was taken that day to Mam Tor, a local hill providing great views of the Peak District.  On the way back some of us encountered a very eccentric shop owner in a shop called Charlton Emporium.  He was dressing some of us in sailing paraphernalia and directing us all with a microphone that he had seemingly pulled out of nowhere.  His shop was full of funny signs like "UNATTENDED CHILDREN WILL BE SOLD AS SLAVES".  A very surreal and funny experience.  That night we stayed up late into the night laughing at the crude stories told by James Bailey and others, I stayed up way too late but it was worth it for the laughs.

The last morning was raining heavily and made me realise we had been lucky to miss that kind of rain.  Eventually one by one everyone left and we dished out the remaining fruit and donated the rest to the farm.  It was a nice feeling to know we had put on something special that had worked.

One of the most important aspects of the weekend for me was to bring together UK fruities to meet each other and form more of a community in the UK for the lifestyle.  We had a good meeting about putting on a larger festival in the UK next year and plans are already underway to make this a reality.  We hope you can join us there.

I leave you with a quote from my friend Ted Carr:

"when we fall in line with nature's design, we eat fruit from the vine and feel divine"

Fruity blessings,

Ronnie

Fruit Tourism 2013

This past year I have travelled far for fruit-

At the start of the year I went to Chiang Mai, Thailand to meet up with friends from Woodstock and other fruitarians and to enjoy the much hyped Thai fruit experience.  I had a near life changing meal of Mangoes there and developed a true love for Durian as well as some wonderful new friendships.

In the summer  I went to the Danish Fresh Fruit Festival, quickly followed by the Slovenian Fruits and Health Festival.  Later on followed  the Woodstock Fruit Festival in New York then soon after the Spanish Puraw Festival.  Each was a unique and nourishing experience and I hope to write about each one in more detail.

So why did I go to so many events?  I feel a real desire to try to help grow and support this community as much as possible and I feel each time I pay money for a ticket to an event it is a donation to help grow the community.  I also genuinely that these events will benefit my life in so many ways in the future, not just from the many things I learn about living a healthy and joyful lifestyle.

The fruitarian lifestyle has really made me come out of my shell even more and I have developed a new confidence and sense of purpose in life.  I hope to help expand the community myself and to that end have start a fruitluck in Glasgow.  Details of that can be found here: www.meetup.com/Glasgow-Fruitluck

I also saw there was a bit of a gap in what was happening in the UK and with the help of some friends I am putting on a small event in the UK in October called "Fruitcamp UK".  This has been a real challenge for me so far as I have never taken on this level of responsibility before but I feel it is a very good thing for my growth as a person.

If asked what is the best thing about these events then hands down it would have to be the friends I have made.  To meet other people who "get it" and life vibrant healthy lives free of the usual food addictions and the issues that come along with that is always refreshing and inspirational.  I think we have this amazing sense of community despite being scattered all over the world.  I really think we are a powerful and strong group of intelligent and inspirational people and I don't think it will be too long before we create noticeable change in our world.

Follow the fruit and it will lead you to good things,

Ronnie Ronstervore

Raw Meat Eaters And Richard Wrangham

I recently came across a few things that challenged some of my ideas about diet and nutrition.  The first was a recent article in Vice magazine about a man named Derek Nance who has claimed to lived on a diet of nothing but raw meat for the last 5 years, here is a link to the article:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/this-guy-has-eaten-nothing-but-raw-meat-for-five-years

It was a fruitarian friend of mine who had shared this article on facebook and I had a look through it.  I had already came across this idea as there is a previous example of someone following a raw meat diet for an extended period of time, that being the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson

I believe the story goes that Stefansson had spent time living with inuits who sustained themselves on this type of diet and convinced a friend to do the same for a year as part of a medical study.  The wikipedia article says they were both in perfect health though I believe I have read from other sources that one of the men had developed diabetes by the end of the study.

I was interested by how my fruitarian friends reacted to it.  Many were disgusted, or did not accept that Derek could live on such a diet without developing problems and many ridiculed the man in various ways.  In reality the guy looks in pretty good health and has been able to recover from illness as a result of this lifestyle. He also takes the responsibility to kill the animals he eats which I can respect him for in a way.

I think the strong reactions were a result of a similar thing that happens when you tell someone that you are vegan or fruitarian; people can get very defensive and uncomfortable and aim a barrage of questions at you about protein, fats and other things while their mind is busily coming up with reasons as to why they could not or would not follow that diet themselves.

The article is a challenge to high carb vegans and fruity people who have learned so much about the dangers of the paleo low carb diet and have convinced themselves that this diet is not possible to follow for long periods of time and will lead to an inevitable collapse in health.  For me it is another testament to the strength of the human body to adapt to various diets and continue to function.  It makes me wonder if this ability to adapt to a wide range of diets is one of the many things that have let us come this far as a species.

This leads neatly on to a video I watched recently of a short interview on Dr John McDougall's Youtube channel with Evolutionary Biologist Richard Wrangham about the role that cooked food has played in the human diet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVeGHIEtBAA

This information is particularly challenging to raw foodists as Wrangham is saying that we are not evolved to cope with a raw food diet.  The timing of this video is apt coming as it does only weeks after Dr Douglas Graham, one of the worlds leading advocates of the raw food diet, responded to Dr McDougall's criticisms of the fruitarian diet.  McDougall famously believes that we are "Starchivores" and are evolved to live on a diet of cooked starches.

I could make an attempt to respond to Wrangham's points but I'm sure others will do that much better and at greater length.  The reason I have brought it up is that it is another challenge to a fruitarian's beliefs. Sometimes we get too used to our reasons and motivations for following our whatever out particular path is, especially if that path seems to be one in which you are depriving yourself of some of the pleasures that you once enjoyed.  So when these beliefs are challenged it can make us reconsider why we are doing what we do.

The truth is I would love Wrangham and McDougall to be right.  I would love it if cooked starches had the same effect on my body and mind as fruit does and I would probably never have went fully raw if it wasn't the case that there was a marked difference between eating starches and eating fruit.  Fruit was always clearly the food that was most easily dealt with by the body and gave the best effect on my emotional and mental state and I could immediately see that change for the negative with the re introduction of cooked food.  Eventually I realised I had to go with my body on this one and gave up the starches, a lot harder that it sounds.

One of my main motivations for staying on this path is the consideration of what we as a species want for our future.  Even if we have some adaptations to eating cooked starches or raw meat, the important question is not to consider the extremes that our brutal past have equipped us to deal with but to consider what food we want to choose to shape our collective future.  I believe we have suffered as a result of moving away from the natural diet indicated by our frugivorous design, not just in terms of our health but in terms of losing our connection to the planet and our place in its natural order.  I believe all of these things has had a huge impact on us psychologically, making us feel insecure and unsafe on the planet that for years we were sustained on without the need for cooking, weapons, tools, money, clothing, housing and all of the other aspects of modern life that we deem necessary to thrive happily.

Cooked food and raw meat are parts of our past that should remain there, we should head towards our fruitarian future.  The process is simple: eat more fruit and plant more fruit trees!

Ronster

Frugivore Super Powers

I have often been amazed by facts regarding animals and how they get their food.  The classic example is something like "sharks can taste 1 milliliter of blood in the ocean from X miles away", "polar bears can smell rotting carcass from X miles away during a snowstorm" * or "cheetahs can accelerate from 0 to 60mph in X seconds" and so on. We humans seem so bland in comparison; how come we don't have these types of super hero skill?

When we consider that we may be frugivorous and not omnivorous our apparent lack of killing and hunting instincts makes a lot more sense.  In fact, most of our instincts and daily habits in many areas of life make an awful lot more sense when we consider the hypothesis that we are an elite specialist fruit eater and not a generalised omnivore.

When it comes to food we are taught the notion that man was at some point a hunter gatherer that then started farming and became fully domesticated.  A classic meat-eater thought is that this relatively short period of domestication led to us losing our killer instincts and we would regain those instincts if we went back to living in the cold, brutal reality of nature.  Often this sort of sketchy theory is the basis of fad diets such as the Paleo diet but it does not take into account our anatomy, instincts and the real science regarding what foods we were consuming during the paleolithic period.  For me our instincts are all still alive and well even in our intensely domesticated setting and the evidence of those frugivorous instincts is all around us.

When it comes to hunting, this has remained the same thing now as it always has been; a sport and nothing more.  Hunting is a completely unreliable way for us to get sufficient quantities of food because we are so laughably bad at it.  We have no natural flair, skill or desire to hunt, and we really don't have the patience for it.  Also, regardless of how much the family cat gets fed and housed, it continues to go out to hunt everyday, it follows its inborn instinct and surely we should too if we are truly designed to hunt?

Lets look to our own habits.  Personally, I think over the course of my whole life I have maybe killed 1 or 2 fishes from a few fishing trip experiences when I was younger and maybe some insects and I don't think I was particularly happy about these events at the time.  It is an inarguable fact that the vast majority of the population are in the same boat: the animal kill-count of the average human being, in terms of actual killing at their own hands, would be extremely low and ridiculously disproportionate to the number of animals they have been responsible for the death of.

Generally most people I know "gather" their food.  The food generally requires no killing and is judged upon appearance, colour, smell and texture from an up close perspective and receiving the food is usually a pretty peaceful and non- violent event (Glasgow takeaways on a Saturday night excepted).  We clean or avoid food with any dirt on it, and often receive that food in colourful packaging that keeps it clean and free from dirt or insects.  We either eat the food straight away, especially if it is sweet or we collect enough to last a number of days and bring it back to our living space to store.  All of these fall in the line with how we would acquire fruit in nature, in fact it is quite an "AHA!" moment when we start to think about it.

What I believe to be our most impressive ability is something that we never consider as being special and yet it takes an amazing mental capacity to do this.  If I were to meet you at your house, your workplace, a local gym or another place you visit regularly and asked you to take me to a location to get food it is likely that without looking at a map you could take me on foot to numerous locations.  In fact if we both had the energy, in that one day we could probably visit perhaps hundreds of locations if not more that you are aware of covering a distance of many miles.  We have the ability to hold in our memory a huge and complex map of likely locations where we can get food, picture what type of food is there, and predict when is the best time to go. When we move to new locations we rapidly create this map in our head, and I know personally I still have mental maps of various cities and neighborhoods that I may not have been to in years.

In a short conversation with Anne Osborne, a fruitarian pioneer originally from Leicester in England, she explained how the leaf eating apes do not need to develop great intelligence as their diet is abundant everywhere in the tropics all year long but the frugivorous apes must have the mental capacity to store in their memory where the fruit is, when it will be ripe and how long it takes to get there.  I have heard that the Orangutans arrive at fruiting trees at exactly the time when the fruit is ripe and it is completely necessary for their survival that they can do this.  My friend Dr Robert Lockhart often mentions in lectures that during the breast feeding stage a female Orangutan must consume the tropical fruit Durian otherwise the baby's brain will not be able to develop the ability to memorise the mental map of the forest.

When we consider the size of forest that apes inhabit this is a truly an awesome skill which we generally take for granted.  Of course it is a symbiosis in which the trees have provided us with the sweetest and best fuel with which to power our advanced brains and feed their evolution.  We would probably find ourselves very capable of replicating the same skill that the Orangtuans show for ripe fruit punctuality, perhaps over even longer distances, if we returned to our Eden like natural environment.  It makes having a sharp sense of smell seem fairly one dimensional in comparison...

As ever, these words have come to you from a brain powered by an abundance of fruit sugars,

Take care and remember what John Lennon said "Health is what happens to you while your busy eating other fruits"

Ronstervore

Youtube: Fruity Ronster

Instagram: fruityronster

Facebook: Fruitful Scots

Meetup:  www.meetup.com/Glasgow-Fruitluck

*ps come to think of it Fruitarians can smell Durian from 1000s of miles away... or is that my imagination ;)