Replies

The doctor who diagnosed me with diabetes could have used some "light popular" reading. He was still stuck on stupid, if you ask me... as in counting calories instead of carbs, going heavy on the prescriptions, advising me to take a statin, etc.

He would not even look at the mound of material I had brought him, which I had already read, concerning low-carb dieting for diabetes (which I suspected I had)--some of which books and articles were written by other MD's who were much more nutritionally aware. He had obviously not been reading anything much more up-to-date than what he'd gotten in medical school.

When someone with a fancy degree is that stupid, you better believe that I will run away instead of walk.

I'm not claiming that I am smarter than doctors, or even that I know everything--far from it. I'm just not into worshiping doctors as little tin gods. I'm not into blindly following their advice, because I know for sure that they make mistakes too.

And if I were into taking prescription medications, I'd be more inclined to take a pharmacist's word for it, because they have MUCH more chemistry training, and they are much more aware of what will cross-react with what else.

I do medical transcription for a living--and every once in a while I do a report for someone who is taking so many medications (all prescribed by someone with a fancy degree) that they are actually worse off--as in, stuporous, with kidney damage, etc.

It's also my understanding that a lot of veterinarians aren't taught much about animal nutrition, whereas they are taught a lot about surgery and writing prescriptions. Now, sometimes you need surgery and prescriptions... but the animal might not have needed surgery and drugs in the first place had it been fed a better diet.

The prerequisites for veterinary school sometimes, but not always, include ONE course on animal feeds and feeding--maybe two. (I found out because I used to want to be a vet, and I checked out things such as prerequisites and ratios of applicants to seats available in several veterinary schools.) It's not enough, if you ask me.

To name just one problem... renal failure is often a long-term consequence of feeding a cat high-carbohydrate, cheap supermarket crap food. But the last time I took any of my cats to a local vet, the vet tech was telling me to feed them ONLY dry food. Just a little bit of a contradiction there?

If fresh foods for humans are better than canned food and fast food, I would expect (for much the same reasons) that fresh foods, especially fresh raw foods, would be better for cats than dry food that is full of grains, fillers, and possibly even toxic stuff (remember the scandal about the Chinese adding melamine to animal feeds).

Yes, I could probably keep my cats going for a few more years on crappy food... but they'll be spending lots of time in the vet's office because of dehydration brought on by dry foods with high carbohydrates.

My oldest cat, now 12-1/2, probably won't live as long as the other two, because I adopted her at 7-1/2 years of age, and she had been fed only crappy dry food by her previous owner. When I adopted her, she had horrible breath and had to have two teeth pulled, along with cleaning the rest... complications of the crappy diet she'd been fed before I took her in. And yes, at 12-1/2 years, she's older than some cats, but she's not as healthy as she'd have been with a better diet.

Re: Your assertion that 30 was old in medieval times: There have always been people who lived to ripe old ages, even in medieval times. It's not as if they were all dropping like flies as soon as they reached 30. The number "30" may be an average, but it doesn't mean that no one lived a long life.

So, no, I'm not too stupid to either feed myself or to figure out how to feed an obligate carnivore.

I'm all in favor of real science--but people with fancy degrees succumb to fads just like anyone else. Also witness how politicized science is nowadays, and how some people have turned into what are charitably termed "grant whores." Also witness how many of 'em voted for the Obummer. Some of them wouldn't know objectivity if it smacked 'em in the face.

So, of course, you now know more than anyone who has spent years studying human or veterinary medicine, or chemistry or physiology or microbiology, because a handful of such people are loons.

Good luck with that.

I have the good fortune of having a doctor who works with me when I have a problem. That's why I have been going to him for 20 years. Not all doctors are slugs, or expect to be worshipped.

Nowhere in this thread did I advocate feeding dry food of any sort--quite the opposite. I give people good canned cat food to try to wean them away from the convenience of dry foods.

And if I were into taking prescription medications,

The need for prescription medications isn't something one is "into", like jazz or painting water colors. I don't have a thyroid gland anymore. I'm not "into" taking replacement thyroid hormone, I won't function normally without it.

If fresh foods for humans are better than canned food and fast food,

Get past superficial labels. Nutrition is about chemistry, and the reality is molecules have NO souls. Analyze the cooked hamburger from Burger King and the cooked hamburger from your own kitchen, and it will have the same analysis of amino acids. "Fast food" is not inherently evil or bad--eating a lot of fatty food prepped in your own kitchen day after day isn't wise, either.

Canned food is one of the great triumphs of human ingenuity. Before canned food, food preservation was limited to what people could dry, salt, or harvest in an already storable form.

Re: Your assertion that 30 was old in medieval times: There have always been people who lived to ripe old ages, even in medieval times. It's not as if they were all dropping like flies as soon as they reached 30. The number "30" may be an average, but it doesn't mean that no one lived a long life.

Most people being long croaked by age 30 with a handful of outliers does not make longevity commonplace or something people planned upon. That's why the concept of childhood is a recent one because children were treated as small adults, and married as soon as they hit puberty. Most children never got that far. A walk through an old American family cemetery is an eye-opener--most are full of children's graves.

fresh raw foods

There are good reasons for cooking some foods, not just because digestibility is improved but because eating them raw is likely unsafe because of bacteria or parasites. Unless you are also planning on slaughtering your own meat, you'd better be careful with where you acquire meat. If you are going to be grinding meat, I'd urge you also to have a way to thoroughly disinfect all surfaces beyond soap and hot water after each use.

For a lot of people, nutrition is a religion in much the same way that global warming catastrophism is a religion. Just like the warmists, they don't want evidence, they want "locally grown" "organic" foods. It makes them feel wonderful to spend a lot of money for such food so they can commune with special and sacred molecules. I usually let them go on their way worshipping because they only affect themselves.

But when it comes to kitteh, kitteh is at their mercy, and I tell them bluntly that cats are obligate carnivores who do not have the metabolic capacity to handle processing of carbohydrates as we do, and that dry food has a high potential of leading to problems later, so break out the can opener and start feeding canned food of quality. Dry food also tends to produce cats who do not get enough water, and produces male cats who plug up and do not pass urine properly, with dire effects and eventual death.

I wouldn't want to drive over a bridge designed by well-meaning amateurs instead of professional engineers with "fancy" degrees who understand things I do not about materials handling, corrosion, stress loads, metallurgy, and more. I love reading about challenging construction and building, and how problems were solved and innovations made, but I am not an engineer.