Espurr,

I appreciate and respect you opinion and helpfulness.

Perhaps every body is different and every body changes.

I am confused by how you could know what my ancestors natural choice or instinct was.

My instincts actually clearly direct me to consume animal foods and not abiding in that instinct for 20 years caused me health problems. Nearly all of the problems went away when i honored my instinct and started eating animal foods when my body calls out for them. I had zero health problems prior to going into vegetarian and vegan diet experiments.

If we look at all known living pre-agricultural tribes and those that have been recorded in the past by explorers, they all eat a meat based diet usually with honey, wild tubers, and seasonal fruits, nuts, and seeds . Nuts and seeds are very seasonal and require storage. Fruits are very seasonal as well. What fruit is available is hard to get when competing with all the other animals that can get up in the trees more easily. The hunting of animals proves to be the one thing that can go on year-round as long as humans live in balance with the ecosystem. Of course, cutting down the forest and starting agriculture changed everything (environmental destruction, overpopulation, ownership concepts, ect.).

I tried nearly every variation of vegetarian and vegan raw and non-raw diets extensively for years. I did not only try a high fruit way of eating and experimented for years with the type of diet that you happen recommend as well the very common style of cooked legume and grain with veggies diet with factory produced b12 pills. I found it all proved unhealthy for me. But definitely the high fruit diet did more damage than the others. If a vegan diet works great for you long term, i think that is wonderful. Seems everyone is different. I do, however, know personally loads of people that failed on vegan diets in the long term.

I have not found success in concepts (dogma, belief, or even knowledge), but instead by abiding spontaneously in natural sensory instinct and heart intuition. This is what Aya, Soma, and Manna, have taught me. Just like channeling an icaro. The plant and mushroom medicine experiences have actually been unteachings/unlearnings into pristine awareness rather than a learning or accumulation concepts (belief/knowledge). La Purga It has taken me awhile though to let go of many mental attachments to conceptual ideals, fantasy, and assumptions. My attachment to romantic/idealistic dietary concepts was a hard tension to break down. I am no longer thinking/believing in a way my mind prefers but instead being. It has always been the clinging to mental concepts that has caused suffering to this body and mind. I feel that the vegan and vegetarian dieting was actually a response to the trauma of growing up in a disconnected society and my return to non-conceptual being with instinctual nourishment of my body a healing and release of that trauma.

Could you please point to where this has specifically been shown in reiable scientific research? It's just that, from a chemistry point of view, it's extremely unlikely that harmine would become converted to harmaline simply by boiling in a pot.

In the laboratory energetic reagents like sodium dissolving in amyl alcohol are required to add hydrogen to harmine. The harmine molecule has extra stability because of its special degree of unsaturation that allows it to attain a higher stability via an electron resonance known as aromaticity. Of course, we might have to see if boiling harmine in an aluminium pot produces any harmaline just to be sure, but the energetic equation strongly suggests that it won't.

Unless the products of prolonged boiling have specifically been analysed your anecdotal report of "it didn't work" doesn't validate the hypothesis that harmaline and harmine are being converted into THH. It seems more likely that they are converted into some other substance that isn't effective as a MAOI, like maybe, uh, burnt crud or something. There's plenty of sugary material in the vine that will slowly react with the harm(al)ine to produce useless junk.

All that said, your input of specific data regarding this phenomenon would be very welcome; our most excellent member, Endlessness, would have much to say on this matter, I suspect. There are still plenty of ideas and hypotheses around what happens during the boiling of caapi which require testing out. My own line of enquiry runs along analogous lines of cooking Syrian rue with ascorbic acid in a pressure cooker. This may produce some THH from harmaline but I've still not done the analysis. The smoothing out of the rue experience may be occuring through some other mechanism.


I've been in a similar boat to you with the experiments with veganism and raw food and similarly have reverted to eating high-quality animal products when it feels necessary. Of course, my health is (discounting age-related factors) considerably better but then again pretty much everything in my life has changed.

Do you use any herbs/healing plants to support your cardiovascular system? One which I use regularly, which is well-attested in the literature (at least here in Europe) is hawthorn berries. I can't say that this will help your venous valve issues however. (Nor that it won't...) I also use mistletoe regularly.

Here's a bit of fun reading for you about ayahuasca research:
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...mp;m=1155293#post1155293
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=31699

It does seem like some researchers have claimed the conversion from harmine appears to take place, but I'm still more than sceptical. Current research indicates that the harmine simply crashes out of the solution as it becomes more concentrated, which would also explain why prolonged boiling makes your brews seem inactive.

(From the first link)

Very interesting downwardsfromzero.

I will respond further when i have more time.

https://www.mdpi.com/2223-7747/9/7/870/htm

"Six ayahuasca samples in this study were prepared using B. caapi which sample were also analyzed. The ratios of the β-carbolines were calculated for the ayahuasca samples and for the B. caapi extracts, and the results are shown in Table 2. In all samples, the harmaline/harmine ratios were higher in the brew compared to the plant (1.3- to 2.2-fold higher). The THH/harmaline and THH/harmine ratios were higher in the brew in four cases (1 to 4), reaching 10.9- and 6.7-fold higher ratios, respectively, in case 3 (Table 2)."


"The analysis of paired ayahuasca/B. caapi samples confirmed a previous hypothesis that harmine is reduced to harmaline and further to THH during the preparation of the brew."