MGTutoring.com. A Rational Perspective on Education.

January 14, 2012

Feeding Cats

Filed under: Animals,Biology,Exercise, Health & Nutrition,Science — Administrator @ 3:54 pm

In  “The Healthiest Diet For Your Cat,” Dr. Karen Becker says:

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.

Nutrition: Rapper vs. Trained Doctors

Filed under: Biology,Child Development,Exercise, Health & Nutrition,Parenting,Science — Administrator @ 3:11 pm

The rapper Fat Joe has more sense about nutrition and health than most modern doctors!!! Watch his interview on VLAD TV.

January 5, 2012

Wow: Paleo As “Cure” For MS

Filed under: Biology,Child Development,Exercise, Health & Nutrition,Parenting,Science — Administrator @ 7:10 pm

Dr. Terry Wahl gave a great TED talk on how she beat MS by fixing her diet and Minding Her Mitochondria.

 

The Benefits of a Paleo Diet

Filed under: Biology,Child Development,Exercise, Health & Nutrition,Parenting,Science — Administrator @ 7:05 pm

Wow.  I received this email from some people I tutor:

“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.

August 30, 2011

More Against “Man-made Global Warming”

Filed under: Astronomy,Physics,Science — Administrator @ 1:09 pm

In “CERN: ‘Climate models will need to be substantially revised’, ” Andrew Orlowski  (Science, 25th August 2011 10:42 GMT) writes:

CERN’s 8,000 scientists may not be able to find the hypothetical Higgs boson, but they have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised.

The first results from the lab’s CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets”) experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. …

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a “heliocentric” rather than “anthropogenic” approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.
…
When Dr Kirkby first described the theory in 1998, he suggested cosmic rays “will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century.”

© Copyright 1998–2011

August 26, 2011

Bad Nutritional “Science”

Filed under: Biology,Exercise, Health & Nutrition,Logic,Science — Administrator @ 10:38 am

I don’t know if “Fatty foods may cause cocaine-like addiction” (by Sarah Klein, Health.com, March 28, 2010 2:42 p.m. EDT) is incompetent reporting, or incompetent “science,” but it’s fundamentally flawed and incompetent somewhere.

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!!

August 19, 2011

Sugar is Bad?

Filed under: Biology,Child Development,Exercise, Health & Nutrition,Parenting,Science — Administrator @ 12:18 pm

Gary Taubes writes in “Is Sugar Toxic?:”

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.

August 17, 2011

DNA Components From Space

Filed under: Animals,Biology,Science — Administrator @ 1:01 pm

In “NASA: DNA Found on Meteorites Indicates Life May Have Originated in Space” (The International Business Times, August 9, 2011 12:51 PM EDT), they say:

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.

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August 11, 2011

Nutrition, ADD/ADHD, & Autism

Filed under: Biology,Child Development,Exercise, Health & Nutrition,Parenting,Psychology,Science — Administrator @ 9:53 am

Children with Starving Brains: A Medical Treatment Guide for Autism Spectrum Disorder by Ms Jaquelyn McCandless might be a good book — not one I have read or had recommended, though. Amazon says:

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

(more…)

August 9, 2011

Fighting Autism, ADD/ADHD & Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Filed under: Biology,Child Development,Education,Exercise, Health & Nutrition,Parenting,Psychology,Science — Administrator @ 2:46 pm

The book The Myth of Autism: How a Misunderstood Epidemic Is Destroying Our Children by Dr. Michael Goldberg sounds good. I have not read it and have not had it recommended to me, but it sounds like it is on the right track and full of good information. To find out more about him, read Dr. Goldberg’s bio on Facebook, watch the 8-minute video of his on YouTube, and read the interview of Dr. Goldberg on the Website The Autism Connection!.

On Amazon, the book is described as follows:

Experts agree that America is in the midst of a disturbing epidemic of what has thus far been diagnosed as autism. In just thirty years autism diagnoses have risen from 1 in 5,000 children to 1 in 110, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But in the history of our society there has never been an “epidemic” of any developmental or genetic disorder—it is scientifically impossible. So what is this mysterious affliction known as “autism,” and how can we stop it? Dr. Goldberg and his colleagues illustrate why autism cannot be genetic, but is a symptom of a treatable neurological disease that attacks the brain’s immune system. Readers will come to understand:

• Autism is not psychological or developmental, but a medical disease.
• Autism is caused by a dysfunction in the neuro-immune system and often by secondary neurotropic viruses that impact the neuro-immune system and brain.
• Illnesses such as autism, ADD/ADHD, and chronic fatigue syndrome all have different “labels” but are actually variations on the same thing: neuro-immune dysfunction syndromes (NIDS)

(more…)

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