Hmmm. Don’t know what you found, but there have been numerous posts since January. Many about what to do to modify your diet.

I’m more cynical. I think they know that it would be bad for business if people fed their cats and dogs raw meaty bones. The animals would be healthier than eating the high-carb rancid garbage filled with corn and soybeans. And the vets would be out of business. That’s why the majority of them tell people to feed their animals processed chow filled with rancid fats and grains. For the same reason, the manufacturers of the food sell “weight loss formula” which is lower in fat and higher in carbs and fiber, the exact opposite of what a carnivore needs. The people are all very shrewd and they know what they are doing, just like the cardiologists who tell their patients to eat grains and vegetable oils. They have a good racket. They don’t want anyone rocking the boat by pointing out that cats are carnivores and have no need for corn, rice, soybeans, vegetable oils, and fiber – nor do humans for that matter.

The leptin deficiency post weight loss/maintenance is related to the former obese individual having hypotrophic (small) fat cells that are hyperplastic (numerous). Even the most obese individuals only have 3xs the amount of fat cells as a normal weight person, which approximately means that leptin deficiency shouldn’t even begin to be an issue until fat mass has been diminished to a level that is no greater than 3 times the amount of an average non-obese individual. If you’re more than 100 pounds over ideal weight, it probably isn’t a n issue.

Wooo, I learned today that I’m not deficient in leptin. Just went to my Dr today and that’s one thing we’ve monitored. He is going to have me ‘test’ for it at the end of my next weightloss cycle though. Thanks for sharing more with me as well!

Leptin deficiency is only likely to be a problem AFTER considerable weight loss. If you are still obese or morbidly obese it is unlikely you have leptin deficiency. Genetic abnormalities in leptin synthesis are exceedingly rare, there is only a handful of people in the world and they are almost all part of the same inbred family… although mutations in receptors are somewhat more common in obese people.

Leptin deficiency will make someone chronically prepubertal. Women will not ovulate and men cannot produce mature sperm, which is why deficiencies of synthesis are almost unheard of except in heavily inbred families who have a recessive trait (otherwise you can’t pass that gene, can you?)

I know leptin cannot effectively cross the BBB if triglycerides are high, which is another way of saying that leptin signaling in the brain is blocked if you have really high insulin and are building fat like a mofo.
I do not know if hCG has any effect on the BBB. The primary role of hCG in the body is to support the placenta until it is mature enough to produce enough progesterone of its own to keep it alive.
I know that morning sickness and food aversion in pregnancy is very strongly related to high hCG combined with high estrogen. I know hCG makes estrogen, like LH would (LH being the estorgen-making hormone dominant during fertility and hCG stepping up after implantation and pregnancy).

Intuitively I doubt that hCG works via leptin at all… leptin is mostly relevant AFTER weight loss, when cells are hypotrophic and insulin is low. Leptin is only dominant when body fat/insulin is relatively deficient, because leptin will never be deficient unless all of those are.

If hCG works at all besides placebo I would expect it to work somehow via estrogen, testosterone, and whatever neurotransmitters/hormones affect the phenomenon of morning sickness.

But again, if it worked for you, that’s great.

I hope your trainer has you doing squats or something else remotely functional as a primary lower body movement. While it is great to progress in certain movements, I would rather people be able to execute a proper squat without weight than 1000 lbs leg press. I would advise staying clear of any machine you could fall asleep on : ) Squats help promote stabilization in the trunk and are vastly superior in terms of their cross-over benefit to daily movement. At least you aren’t doing leg extensions… if so, hopefully not regularly.

I would advise mixing it up, too – perform leg movements in varying planes, playing around with the volume, repetition speed (yes, it is advisable to lift weights fast, too) and implements (dumbbells, barbells, cables). I highly recommend reading the methods of Chad Waterbury, Mark Ripptoe, Eric Cressey and Tony Gentilcore – they are true masters of performance enhancement and lifting.

http://www.naturalnews.com/024887.html

The abstract:
http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/68/22/9274
“[W]e noted a markedly elevated risk for carcinoid tumors of the small intestine with saturated fat intake in both the categorical (highest versus lowest tertile: HR, 3.18; 95% CI, 1.62–6.25) and continuous data (HR, 3.72; 95% CI, 1.79–7.74 for each 10-g increase in intake per 1,000 kcal). Our findings suggest that the positive associations for meat intake reported in previous case-control studies may partly be explained by saturated fat intake.[Cancer Res 2008;68(22):9274–9]”

A couple of things. First, this is an observational study (of tiny numbers), and as such, can’t be used to determine causality. Second, there are numerous observational studies out there – some show a positive correlation between meat eating and various cancers, other show no correlation, and others yet show a negative correlation. This gives people a choice of studies to rely on to substantiate their own bias.

My vet’s objections to feeding a more natural carnivorous diet (raw meat and bones) were these:

a) feeding raw food to the cats would increase the risk that the human family members would somehow get sick ourselves from the raw food – perhaps a valid concern – but it hasn’t happened in nearly three years of regularly making and feeding raw food – and one cat likes to lick our hands when she sits in our laps. I employ normal kitchen hygiene when preparing the food and I guess we wash our hands enough after handling the cats. I’m sure my son doesn’t wash his hands enough, though no raw pet food induced illness has occurred.

b) cats especially, being obligate carnivores, have extremely specific nutrient requirements that must be met to avoid poor health, malnutrition, and even premature death. She’s right about the important nutrient balance, but not about it being to hard to achieve. Her view was that most pet caregivers don’t have the ability to get the nutrients balanced and that 60 + years ago before commercial pet food was available, many cats and dogs were malnourished because of the “unbalanced” table scraps fed to them. Perhaps so. People certainly didn’t pamper their pets the way they often do now, but at the same time, some of the current “spoiling” is literally sickening those beloved pets (cats and dogs are now getting the same chronic illnesses that humans get, primarily caused by a lifetime of eating crap, as well as exposure to tobacco smoke). My guess is in the past cats were fed scraps obtained from the butcher more than scraps from the table, and were also likely to have access to the outdoors, where they caught their “daily vitamins & nutrient supplements” (yes, sadly, that might include songbirds). But they also lived shorter lives due to cars and diseases caught in the wild. My cats are great at catching small rodents and lizards, even the older fat, slower cat. Since transitioning to raw food, they now sometimes eat the mice they catch, especially the heads.

My vet is right in that there *is* a lot of varying and sometimes confusing information on pet diets online and in print, some good and some awful advice, with inclusion or exclusion of plant foods being the most controversial, so if choosing this raw meat & bones route, it is important to “get it right” to provide all the essential nutrients. But domesticated cats have been around a long time (though they often were “companion workers”, meant to keep the rodents population down and out of the grain stores, therefore self-feeding); somehow humans have managed to keep cats all these nearly 10,000 years, so it isn’t rocket science as long as one keeps their natural predator diet of small animals in mind. Cats and dogs certainly need more than muscle meat to eat – they also need the minerals in bones and organ meat, especially liver. Cats in particular, also need heart muscle for a certain delicate amino acid (heat sensitive) – taurine, though it can also be provided with taurine supplements. But of course, the full complement of nutrients in the whole food is preferable. And feeding real food is a bit more expensive and more work than cheap kibble, but it saves time and and potentially a lot of money at the vet, which isn’t a small consideration at all (some might think that is the primary reason for the typical vet advice against raw food, but I really don’t think that is the case, I think they are well-meaning but just brainwashed by the pet food companies from vet school to the company reps that frequently visit, just like many physicians are heavily influenced by big pharma).

c) She wouldn’t recommend anything that wasn’t back up by peer-reviewed vet journals. So until it is officially sanctioned in “the literature”, no matter how many clients have great success preventing and reversing disease with real food from raw meat & bones, she won’t recommend it to her clients. Well, hell with probably freeze over before that happens, because the pet nutrition research and education is primarily sponsored and funded by pet food companies, creating a huge conflict of interest and certain slant. Commercial pet food, even the “premium” stuff is made from the dregs of the food processing industry, formulated with a very “reductionist” view of nutrition and the low price and convenience of commercial pet food will continue to win over pet caregivers, as they are conditioned to only think of commercial feeding options and cost/convenience factors.

So I think this movement towards feeding real food will be primarily driven by a few (the the number is increasing) smart pet care givers who can see the connection to poor pet health and commercial pet foods, with some breeders and a few enlightened independent-minded vets chiming in.