I’m sure gut microbes play a role since there are God only knows how many of them residing within us. They play a large role in herbivores because herbivores get most of their protein from digesting their dead gut microbes.

It’s amazing to me how horrified we were that some Chinese manufacturers added melamine as filler to cat food, when the manufacturers’ “correct” recipe calls for lethal amounts of (carbohydrate) filler!

Trap-neuter-release activists have found that if you clear all the feral cats out of an area, more cats will move in but if you simply neuter the ferals and return them to their territory, they keep strange cats out and the population stabilizes.

I am currently owned by a tux kitty who knows when I have migraines. She follows me around as it is and often lies at my feet when I’m online, reading a book, or knitting; she follows me around even more and cries outside my bedroom door if I’m headachy.

I want to feed her and the other three girls a raw diet but we need to get settled here after our move and then I need to convince the other adult in the house that it’s a good idea. I compromise in the meantime: they eat kibble, but there is no grain in said kibble. It’s meat-based with a few plant foods thrown in. I don’t have the ingredients list right in front of me but I went out of my way to find something low-carb. The three cats being re-introduced to my household had been vomiting frequently with the crap previously fed to them. They do it a lot less now.

I don’t get dogs. You have to pay even more attention to them than you do to children, and I have never been a touchy-feely kind of mom aside from what attachment parenting techniques I picked up in parenting my younger one. I can’t stand someone bouncing around me being needy 24/7–I was a pretty independent child myself, for one thing. Meanwhile, I’m finding you do need to work with cats a lot more than was previously believed if you want them to be less likely to pick up annoying behavior patterns, and if you want it to be easier to do things like administer medicine and bathe them. If you don’t handle them a lot as kittens it will be an uphill battle.

I’m beginning to loathe the term “omnivore.” I think there must be an incredible amount of overlap in what foods animals tolerate, that while our GI tracts *are* geared toward a certain class of foods, what sorts of enzymes we produce in response to which specific foods is going to vary hugely depending on a lot of factors. So you have cows who get certain B vitamins from the bugs they eat along with their grass, you have dogs who can eat vegetarian (at least for a short time), and you have animals who originally descended from bug-eaters running the whole gamut of gastronomic possibilities.

I mean, that’s what primates are. We’re bug-eaters. The only reason we humans have not drawn the logical conclusion that this makes us carnivores is that for a long time we did not define bugs as animals. Some of us still don’t define *fish* as animals, which is why Catholics can get away with eating them on Fridays during Lent.

At this point as far as I’m concerned “omnivore” means “I can eat foods beyond what my GI tract is equipped to handle and not die soon afterward.” But I suspect that if you scratch an omnivore you will still be able to look at their GI tract and be able to tell where the bulk of their diet should come from.

I was shocked to learn recently that robins eat mulberries. I had always pegged them as bug-eaters, but one had nested in a magnolia in front of our house and she was picking the berries from our tree to feed to her chicks. Bizarre, but no different than orangutans eating salad. By the way, did you know orangs have culture? They released this group of them from a zoo or something and rehabbed them to the wild–well, the poor things hadn’t been in the wild for so long they didn’t know what to do with themselves, so they kind of made it up as they went along. No wonder they’re vegetarian. At some point they must have made a conscious decision that that was a good idea too, and then passed it on to their kids. They could as easily go the other way and get back to bugs and monkeys, of course.

By the way, another thing that annoys me aside from the word “omnivore” is the term “is designed to…” when referring to a living thing’s body parts. It’s one thing if you are a creationist, quite another if you hold to evolutionary theory. I won’t be a hypocrite here, I know it’s a habit and I’ve been trying to kick it myself. Been trying to substitute “is adapted to” instead, and seem to be getting better at it.

My cats and dogs all eat a grain-free, high-protein, low-carb diet, but I’m lucky enough to be able to afford to feed them at, as well as being able to afford grain-free, sugar-free, low-PUFA, low carb food for myself as well.

And two of my cats are sleek and skinny, but one – even on this diet – is still immensely fat. And my 5-year-old dog is battling an agressive cancer, even though I was sure his grain-free, low carb, high protein diet would be protective against it. And me? I can barely manage to keep my weight below 300 pounds despite strict adherence to all the low carb principals in the book.

But sometimes it works. For years I had one of my dogs on the stardard low-fat, high-carb “diet” food recommended by my vets because she was very overweight even though I was feeding her so little food that she was constantly ravenous. She weighed 52 pounds and I fed her less food than her 22-pound brother, but she still didn’t lose anything.

Then, a few years ago, I “saw the light” and switched her to a grain-free, low-carb, high-protein, higher-fat diet. Within months she went from 52 pounds to 36 pounds (a good weight for her) and has stayed there ever since, even though she is now 13 and not that active.

So it can work! Just have never been able to get to to work well for me, ever since I first went on the Protein Power plan in 1997. I reach a brick wall about 100+ poounds from my goal every time, and then never lose another ounce. And so far it is not working for my cat Ming either – who continues to *gain* weight on her low-carb cat carnivore diet.

Then when the disease is identified (a little late) as “diet-related,” move the animals onto a more specialized food that costs more and that only vets sell. It’s the perfect scam!

Excuse me for being cynical, but my cats don’t get vaccines and they eat raw meat and I avoid antibiotics whenever possible, and I can tell you most vets are VERY unfriendly to and unwilling to work with me. So I quit going to them.

By the way, I had a conversation with an out-of-work vet who told me the latest marketing model was when very ill animals are brought in the vets write up the most expensive, most comprehensive treatment plan. If the owner can’t afford it, then the vet recommends euthaniasia. This way the vet cultivates monied owners and cuts out all the riff-raff.

It’s a good thing physicians don’t follow that model with people.

The Next Blockbuster Drugs – Newsweek, July 22, 2009
From cholesterol fighters to asthma relief, these treatments could earn Big Pharma $170 billion

“Cholesterol-lowering agents are arguably the top U.S. lifestyle drug. An American Journal of Medicine article in June suggested that Americans have worse health habits than they did 18 years ago. Waistlines are expanding. Physical activity has decreased, and so has healthy eating. It’s why doctors are apt to prescribe cholesterol-lowering drugs such as statins to patients as young as their late-20s. The drugs have been shown to cut cholesterol, and thereby reducing the risk of heart disease.

“In the future, even patients with normal cholesterol levels may be prescribed statins. An American Heart Association study in November showed that AstraZeneca’s statin Crestor dramatically cut deaths, heart attacks and strokes in patients that had fine cholesterol levels, but high levels of a heart disease-related protein.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/207928

Here is my post on that study.

Did you see this?
It reports on selectively breeding caterpillars on different protein-carb ratios so that:

“After as few as eight generations, individuals from the high-carbohydrate diet will be much less prone to store the excess carbs as fat. Conversely, those from the low-carb diet will be more prone to deposit carbs as fat.”

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/coping-with-excess/

Desmondo

Yes, I saw it. I think we humans need a lot more than 8 generations to desensitize us to carbs. The ‘thrifty gene’ hypothesis was promulgated by James Neel a number of years ago, but now even he has backed away from the idea. A recent study actually did a genetic analysis looking for the ‘thrifty gene’ without finding it.

With the change in diet and development of a smaller gut in the transition from australopithecine > habilene > Homo erectus that Wrangham describes, our gut flora must have been significantly reduced. Unlike the western lowland gorilla, which subsists on a leafy diet, we don’t have a large hindgut where huge colonies of bacteria can ferment carbohydrates to produce short chain fatty acids that can then be absorbed by the body to be used for energy. Nonetheless, according to this study I came across today which reports comparative analyses of extant mammalian gut microbial communities, our gut microbiota seem to peg both us and the gorillas as omnivores.
Ley, et al. (2008) Evolution of mammals and their gut microbes. Science, 320(5883), 1647–1651.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2649005#SD1

All of the above seem to track with Ungar et al.’s conclusions on early Homo’s ”dietary versatility” quite plausible:

“Craniodental adaptations and material culture would have allowed early Homo, and especially H. erectus, to eat a broader spectrum of foods than could earlier hominins. This does not mean that early Homo individuals had particularly varied diets, but rather that they may have been capable of eating a broader range of foods. Chimpanzees and gorillas show significant differences in their diets, depending on the individual population and the seasonal availability of resources within home ranges (e.g., Goodall & Groves 1977, Vedder 1984, Wrangham et al. 1991, Yamagiwa et al. 1992, Tutin et al. 1997, Yamakoshi 1998). Ethnographic studies over the past century have shown human foragers to have an even greater range of diets, from nearly all animal products (e.g.,Hoet al. 1972) to mostly wild plant parts (e.g., Gould 1980). This finding led Milton (2002) to argue vehemently against a single hypothetical “Paleolithic diet.”

Perhaps then, early Homo, and especially H. erectus, had an adaptive strategy of dietary versatility. This versatility would have been advantageous in an unpredictable, changing environment or an environment dominated by many different microhabitats. Perhaps H.
erectus was the first hominin to leave Africa because it was the first with sufficient dietary versatility to allow it to do so. It may be no coincidence that this species spread into habitats as far north as the Republic of Georgia, and perhaps as far east as Indonesia, so quickly following its origin and first appearance in Africa (Swisher et al. 1994, Gabunia et al. 2000).” (Ungar, Grine, & Teaford, 2006, pp. 220-221)

Ungar, P. S., Grine, F. E., & Teaford, M. F. (2006). Diet in early Homo: A review of the evidence and a new model of adaptive versatility. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35, 209-228
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/fae/PSUFEGMFT2006ARA.pdf

There are basically two types of digestive systems: one that is found in herbivores and one found in carnivores. The carnivore GI tract can digest plant foods and the herbivore digestive tract can digest animal foods (which is how mad cow disease was thought to have started). But, in keeping with their design, the carnivore GI tract does better with meat and the herbivore with foods of plant origin. Gorillas and pandas are carnivores that have adapted to vegetarian diets, but they end up having to make eating their life’s work to get enough calories to support their lives. I plan a long post on this subject as soon as I can get some consolidated quiet time to get it written.