Research Proves It: Cats and Carbs Don’t Mix!

Cats are obligate carnivores, meaning they have nutritional requirements that can only be met with a diet based on animal tissue. The macronutrient profile for cats is high in protein and fat, consistent with a meat-based diet.

According to study authors:

The carbohydrate ceiling explains many of the intake patterns seen in both dry and wet diet experiments and suggests that cats may only be able to process ingested carbohydrate up to a certain level.The feline body is specifically designed for a low-carb diet. Indicators your kitty isn’t equipped by nature to process a lot of carbohydrates include:

• No taste receptors for sweet flavors
• Low rates of glucose uptake in the intestine
• No salivary amylase to break down starches
• Reduced capacity of pancreatic amylase and intestinal disaccharidases

In other words, cats don’t produce the enzymes required to digest carbohydrates. The only carbs felines eat in the wild are pre-digested and are found in the stomachs of prey animals.

If your kitty’s body is incapable of digesting a heavy carbohydrate load and she’s eating a cat food with high carb content, she could potentially develop digestive disease and other serious conditions, like diabetes and pancreatitis, related to eating a diet unfit for her species. And certainly, too many carbohydrates aren’t the only problem with most processed pet foods.

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Do not feed cats food with grains, or high in carbs. And avoid dry; cats are desert animals who get most of their moisture from what they eat. If they drink, they are dehydrated.

“I would like to take this opportunity to thank you on behalf of all my family, for introducing us to so many lovely things…the paleo diet for example. My mother’s lupus is in remission, she is now 56 kg from 69 kg, her renal impairment has reversed. She has now normal renal functions and no blood pressure. Her facial lupus scars are fading and she is again as beautiful as she use to be. She was a very beautiful woman and she again is…thank you.

My father is also doing very well, he would be doing better, but his work does not allow him to be back home before 1am and 100 % paleo when he is out is not possible for him, but nonetheless he is doing MUCH better.

Every time my kids breeze through a virus or bounce back healthy and well we send a silent thank you to you. Merry Christmas, we hope one of these days we get the chance of meeting you in person.”

You can learn more on Dr. Loren Cordain’s Website, Robb Wolf’s Website, Art DeVany’s Website, and others.

So they feed rats a diet that is not species-appropriate, and the rats develop health problems? Anybody with even slight knowledge of biology, nutrition, and evolution could tell you that.  I wonder what the actual diets were. I’d like to see that. Or is this stuff, “bacon, sausage, cheesecake, frosting, and other fattening, high-calorie foods,” appropriate and typical for rats? I cannot imagine that they evolved on that stuff. Have they had time to evolve to adjust to such foods?

Bacon is very different chemically from cheesecake and junk food. So is sausage. So why are they classified together? The body would respond to these things differently.

What’s more, they conflate “containing fat” with “causing fat.” And they draw conclusions about fat consumption based on feeding fat along with sugars and other crud. It’s impossible to tease out causes the way this study was done, or at least according to how it was reported. If A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, create a certain effect, how does one know A was the cause? Or B?

It would be interesting to see the actual study report. Was this bad “science” or bad reporting?

No wonder American health is bad and getting worse!!

On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.
…
If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.

© 2011 The New York Times Company

Read the rest. Interesting article, food for thought — and action. And, like Dr. Emily Deans says in “Do Carbs Make You Crazy?:”

What have I learned from Gary Taubes and Peter and Kurt?  Don’t believe anyone.  Look it up your own self, and see if it makes sense in the context of physiology and evolution.

Researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greebelt, Md., report evidence that ready-made DNA parts could have crashed to the surface on objects like meteorites, and then assembled under Earth’s early conditions to create the first DNA.

The discovery was made using samples from 12 carbon-rich meteorites, nine of them from Antarctica. The team extracted small fragments of the meteorite and ran them through a process to determine their structure. What they found was adenine and guanine. These are two of the nucleobases needed to make the rungs of DNA’s spiral ladder (in addition to thymine and cytosine, which were not present in the sample).

© Copyright 2011 The International Business Times Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The Department of Chemistry at Duke University discusses some of the past experiments, like the Miller-Urey experiment, that have been done regarding producing amino acids from simple compoungs:

In 1953, Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey, working at the University of Chicago, conducted an experiment which would change the approach of scientific investigation into the origin of life.

Miller took molecules which were believed to represent the major components of the early Earth’s atmosphere and put them into a closed system.

The gases they used were methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), hydrogen (H2), and water (H2O). Next, he ran a continuous electric current through the system, to simulate lightning storms believed to be common on the early earth. Analysis of the experiment was done by chromotography. At the end of one week, Miller observed that as much as 10-15% of the carbon was now in the form of organic compounds. Two percent of the carbon had formed some of the amino acids which are used to make proteins. Perhaps most importantly, Miller’s experiment showed that organic compounds such as amino acids, which are essential to cellular life, could be made easily under the conditions that scientists believed to be present on the early earth. This enormous finding inspired a multitude of further experiments.

In 1961, Juan Oro found that amino acids could be made from hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and ammonia in an aqueous solution. He also found that his experiment produced an amazing amount of the nucleotide base, adenine. Adenine is of tremendous biological significance as an organic compound because it is one of the four bases in RNA and DNA. It is also a component of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which is a major energy releasing molecule in cells. Experiments conducted later showed that the other RNA and DNA bases could be obtained through simulated prebiotic chemistry with a reducing atmosphere.
…
There has been a recent wave of skepticism concerning Miller’s experiment because it is now believed that the early earth’s atmosphere did not contain predominantly reductant molecules. Another objection is that this experiment required a tremendous amount of energy. While it is believed lightning storms were extremely common on the primitive Earth, they were not continuous as the Miller/Urey experiment portrayed. Thus it has been argued that while amino acids and other organic compounds may have been formed, they would not have been formed in the amounts which this experiment produced.

Many of the compounds made in the Miller/Urey experiment are known to exist in outer space. On September 28, 1969, a meteorite fell over Murchison, Australia. While only 100 kilograms were recovered, analysis of the meteorite has shown that it is rich with amino acids. Over 90 amino acids have been identified by researchers to date. Nineteen of these amino acids are found on Earth. The early Earth is believed to be similar to many of the asteroids and comets still roaming the galaxy. If amino acids are able to survive in outer space under extreme conditions, then this might suggest that amino acids were present when the Earth was formed. More importantly, the Murchison meteorite has demonstrated that the Earth may have acquired some of its amino acids and other organic compounds by planetary infall.

• High levels of phytic acid in soy reduce assimilation of calcium, magnesium, copper, iron and zinc. Phytic acid in soy is not neutralized by ordinary preparation methods such as soaking, sprouting and long, slow cooking. High phytate diets have caused growth problems in children.
• Trypsin inhibitors in soy interfere with protein digestion and may cause pancreatic disorders. In test animals soy containing trypsin inhibitors caused stunted growth.
• Soy phytoestrogens disrupt endocrine function and have the potential to cause infertility and to promote breast cancer in adult women.
• Soy phytoestrogens are potent antithyroid agents that cause hypothyroidism and may cause thyroid cancer. In infants, consumption of soy formula has been linked to autoimmune thyroid disease.

…

• Soy foods contain high levels of aluminum which is toxic to the nervous system and the kidneys.

© 2011 The Weston A. Price Foundation

You can hear what it sounds like by watching the ABC GMA report on YouTube.  The video was, I think, originally on National Geographic.

Product Description

Children With Starving Brains is a message of hope in the midst of a worldwide epidemic of autism, ADD and ADHD. This is the first book written by an experienced clinician that gives a step-by-step treatment guide for parents and doctors based on the understanding that ASD is a complex biomedical illness resulting in significant brain malnutrition. Genetic susceptibility activated by “triggers” such as pesticides and heavy metals in vaccines can lead to immune system impairment, gut dysfunction, and pathogen invasion such as yeast and viruses in many children. Dr. McCandless, whose grandchild with autism has inspired her “broad spectrum approach,” describes important diagnostic tools needed to select appropriate treatment programs. Her book explains major therapies newly available and identifies safe and effective options for parents and physicians working together to improve the health of these special children.

About the Author

Jacquelyn McCandless received her M.D. from the University of Illinois College of Medicine and is certified as a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Since the early 1990s, her interest in women’s issues and sexuality has led to an alternative medicine practice with a focus on anti-aging, brain nutrition, and natural hormone therapy. In 1996, after her granddaughter was diagnosed with autism, she returned even more to basic medicine and began working with biomedical aspects of developmentally delayed children. She now utilizes the knowledge she gained searching for treatments for her grandchild to help other ASD children.

© 1996-2011, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates