Let us know how it’s going when you hit your 50’s. It begins to sound like your diet was real crap at 23 and now you are closer to normal, but no matter what diet you are on, you are eventually going to get back to slower recovery from injury, joint problems, lack of strength, etc.
Actually, allergies ARE becoming more common in dogs, at least - there are a number of dog foods sold as “hypoallergenic” and touting the lack of this or that particular ingredient. If there wasn’t a market for it the commercial producers wouldn’t bother, right?
Dogs, cats, etc. still get more parasites than humans because, well, they’re animals with virtually no sense of hygiene, manipulate objects with their mouths rather than hands, and often enough will eat contaminated food without a second thought.
So yes, doggie allergies have also been increasing alongside human ones. I don’t know about cats and other domesticated critters but it wouldn’t surprise me to find the same is true of them as well. In the past I did know a horse with allergies to, if I recall, one of the common grasses that make up hay (timothy? alfalfa? It was over 30 years ago so I don’t recall exactly) and the poor dear required a specially ordered diet and occasional medication with antihistamines (imagine a horse groggy from Benadryl… with watering eyes and a runny nose. It wasn’t pretty). It’s certainly not unheard of for animals to have allergies even if it is less common than in humans.
In other words, when you can’t control the conversations opposing viewpoints join in and you can’t silence them.
Yes, my diet WAS crap at age 23.
As far as how I feel at age 50, I’d say I’m on the right diet, or reasonably close, to slow aging as much as possible. Raw veganism, when done correctly, works great in the short term for this, but physical strength is usually lacking on that diet. In addition, the EFA deficiencies and B-12 deficiency on a vegan diet can cause serious brain problems over the long term.
So basically, I eat enough fish/shellfish to keep my brain and my physical strength in relatively good shape, and the rest of my diet is mostly high-quality fruit.
If those genes made them healthier in the presence of a heavy parasite load then yes, in fact, having “allergic” genes under those particular circumstances might have been more desirable as mates while their peers without the “allergic” genes may have been stunted, sickly, or visibly damaged by parasites and thus less desirable.
The immune system is a balancing act - you don’t want it too sensitive or not sensitive enough. There have always been some people with allergies, it just used to be extremely rare, probably those with the most hypersensitive systems who would likely have problems no matter what. Assuming the hygiene hypothesis is correct (and it’s not definitely proven) then as parasite loads drop allergies should rise. Drop them entirely and you might have a certainly consistent percentage of the population displaying allergies.
This may not be an entirely bad thing even today - there is some evidence (though not definitive proof) that people with allergies are slightly less prone to cancer than those without them, a possible mechanism being that their hypersensitive immune systems might be better able to recognize, seek out, and kill cancer cells.
I dunno, is lack of parasites and the ills they cause along with slightly fewer cancer cases worth having 20% or so of the population suffering from allergies or not? Seems there are some tradeoffs here. Most allergies are not, in fact, life-threatening, just misery-inducing. Cancer, on the other hand, is much more likely to kill you when it happens.
I encourage dissent, if it can back itself up with facts. Yelling about germs in raw milk, an issue on which I’m well-versed, isn’t especially interesting, although feel free to continue, if it comforts you.
What I usually find with heavy dissenters on my board is that they usually are pretty new to dietary research, and are holding on FOR DEAR LIFE to a specific nutritional guru’s teachings. These people bore me, and I usually heavily moderate or ban them. They get shrill, and often disrespectful, when you question their guru’s teachings. It gets disruptive and unproductive.
Occasionally we get someone who still thinks the processed Western diet is healthy, but that’s very rare. Such people have much the same attitude about their diet that the previous guru-followers do, and usually trash-talk or fear-monger their way into a quick ban. You sound a a fair amount like them, based on your posts in this thread.
I will admit that I ban vegans pretty fast. We’ve had serious problems with raw vegan trolls, the same individuals over and over, who just don’t know when to give in and let us discuss eating our raw meat in peace.
Well, I hardly expected you to believe me about the degree. Fortunately for me, what you do or don’t believe has absolutely no bearing on the truth.
If you actually want me to spell out your mistakes, take it to the other thread, since it’s actually designed for pointing out your failings. I told you I’m done with this hijack. If you want to take it over there, I swear I won’t be a random asshole, I’ll be a very specific asshole, just for you. Isn’t that special?
Yelling? Excuse me, since when is quoting the CDC “yelling” about anything? Seems to me you’re the one getting defensive here.
Ah, so you do eliminate the competition. I see.
Ah, more pruning of the opposition.
And again with the elimination of dissent…
You know, if everyone outside your protected domain you find opposition perhaps you should re-evaluate your position? Granted not ALL of your critcis will be right, but a shitload of people keep telling you you’re wrong maybe you should at least consider the possibility you are in error.
That’s how I feel about homeopathic remedies too: if they didn’t work there wouldn’t be a market for them :rolleyes:
Or vets could just be better at diagnosing them…
Well, yes there is a market, but it isn’t because there has been a steep rise in allergies in dogs. Testing for allergies is expensive, so when a dog presents with what looks like an allergy, the vet will usually tell the owner to switch to such and such food and see if it works. Many times, if not most or all, the new food is merely providing better nutrition than Ol Roy or whatever the owner is buying at the grocery store. Many kibbles aren’t really all that digestible and/or don’t have all the nutrients needed for the pet to stay healthy. For example, so many kibbles are grain based, which is essentially nutritionally useless to dogs, and especially cats.
Also, I said well-bred dogs, the ones whose existence was carefully planned and are much less likely to have genetic health issues than a puppy mill dog or some random mutt. They are also usually better fed and cared for, so they aren’t going to have anything that looks like an allergy due to poor nutrition, or carrying a parasite load. Despite being involved in dog sports up to my eyebrows, I know exactly one dog with what appears to be honest to god allergies but even she hasn’t been tested so her owner is just guessing. She keeps trying different things that seem to work, then the dog will break out in bumps again.
And yet, I don’t worm my dogs at all, because I don’t need to. This is why I find fascinating the idea of humans with parasite loads possibly being healthier because a healthy adult dog won’t pick up worms.
I’ve heard that there is a chance that people with allergies might be less prone to cancer so I hope there is an upside to having to put up with the treatment to keep allergies at bay.
Chicken. There is no reason for you to insist that you must continue a discussion from here someplace else. The only hijack here is you being an asshole.
The discussion *started *in the other thread, dumbass. All I did here was correct an error. Over there I called you stupid and annoying. So if you want to discuss why you are stupid and annoying, do it there. I’m out.
I’d just like to point out that “random mutts” are usually pretty healthy and less likely to suffer health problems than purebred dogs. A lot of show champions are a physical mess due to inbreeding and/or breeding for traits that humans like but aren’t necessarily good for the dogs.
Yes, actually a healthy adult dog can pick up worms, although less likely to do so than an ill/feeble/very young/very old dog.
Let me ask - do you feed your dogs relatively sanitary food, or does he/she eat garbage or scavenge his/her food? We’ve eliminated most pathogens from our food chain and from those of our pets, so neither we nor our pets are very likely to pick them up from food.
Adult humans in temperate and tropical zones are less likely to have parasites than those in tropical zones, and nowhere are there more human-adapted parasites than in Africa, where humans have lived longest. If you’re living in, say, California far from humanity’s original home your half a world away from the parasites most adapted to us, the food-chain parasites are largely eliminated, and many of the environmental ones scrubbed by water purification and things like mosquito control measures
So you can’t really compare any first world human’s environment to that our species evolved in. Even in Africa, the affluent can eat parasite free food, drink pure water, and sleep under netting to avoid most parasites even in our ancestral home.
The competition? 90% of the banning I do has been two people, Harley Johnstone and some mentally-ill man in Ireland. Feel free to Google Harley if you want, he goes by the name Durian Rider. If you decide to follow him, after watching his Youtube criticisms of raw meat and sermons about a low-fat fruitarian diet, feel free. I don’t want anything to do with anyone who’s that stupid.
99% of the people I ban are vegan trolls, spreading lies about the dangers of eating meat. If you’re a vegan, spare me your preaching and leave me alone, please. Otherwise, there’s no ‘shitload’ of people telling me I’m wrong. There’s really just Durian Rider, his girlfriend, and that crazy Irish vegan Padraig.
Cooked-food advocates generally avoid my forum, they have no answer for the fact that the Japanese have been eating raw meat and fish for probably thousands of years, and have very good longevity. As soon as you throw that argument at them, they generally disappear.
Man, you would just troll the fuck out of my forum if I sent you there, wouldn’t you?
Ah, so the offer to point out my mistakes on the subject of genetics as it applies to food allergies was a dodge? OK!
That is actually a falsehood pushed by the HSUS and PETA. For one thing, the average mutt isn’t going to get the kind of health care that a purebred will, if for no other reason than people tend to take better care of things that cost them a bunch of money to purchase. Also, there are records on the health issues with purebreds because the people who breed them care enough to check and to breed away from them - there is no national registry for mixes except occasionally by breeders of “designer breeds”. So, you hear more about health issues in purebreds because responsible breeders work towards cutting down or eliminating genetic health issues in their breeds.
And again, I said well bred dogs. The unfortunate fact is that the vast majority of purebred dogs out there come from puppy mills and backyard breeders who just put two dogs of the same breed (or close) together without a plan or any health checks. People like that aren’t really concerned (or even know) if one of their dogs happens to have bad hips, never mind a food or grass allergy. And of course with mutts, one is doing well to even know who the parents were, much less their health history or genetic potential.
And finally, inbreeding itself has nothing to do with health. If one inbreeds on a genetic problem, then the resulting pups will be sickly; if one inbreeds on health, the pups are likely to be healthy. Plus extremely few responsible breeders inbreed to the extent you seem to be thinking of.
Of course they can, but generally only if they were in an area heavily infested.
I feed human grade raw food, so they are eating the same pathogens we are. Except pork - I won’t feed raw pork.
Um, OK, I’m not getting the point here; I think I lost the thread. The theory is that humans way back when carried a intestinal parasite load and so evolved hyperactive immune systems to deal with that, which lead to allergies when we no longer had to worry about parasites, right? Do we even know for a fact that adult humans did carry a heavy parasite load back then?
I assume we’re talking about genetic health, meaning less likely to have blatant inborn defects. Of course if a dog has no health care it’s not going to be as healthy as a dog that does have health care.
However, some breeds are, in fact, inherently unhealthy. The modifications of Pugs, for example - the typical eyes and short nose - will always cause vision and breathing problems for the purebreds, it’s inherent to the structural problems caused by the traits humans breed for in Pugs. Some lines of German shepherds are really messed up in the hips, such that there are now two types of such shepherds: working German shepherds, which are healthy enough to perform as police dogs, seeing eye dogs, and other working animals; and show German shepherds which are barely able to walk due to breeding for desirable traits that mess up a dog’s hips.
The more diverse an animal’s parents the less likely they will suffer from a genetic-based illness - thus, mutts are less prone to such things although there are, of course, exceptions among the billions of mutts worldwide.
If you dog has hip dysplasia you’ll notice something is wrong - it really does mess up a dog’s ability to walk and it’s very painful for them.
All of the mutts my family has had we acquired when they were less than 6 months old so in fact you can have an extensive health history of a mutt. One of them was born at the animal shelter so, in fact, there was a health history from birth for that one.
Granted one can’t know a mutt’s pedigree, the mere fact they are mixed means they are not going to manifest the nasty recessive traits that plague puppy mills.
The problem is that genes aren’t bar codes, you can’t read them from the outside. There have been cases not just among dogs but also other domestic animals of finding out 3 or 4 generations down the line that a champion breeder had a bad recessive trait which is now manifesting among his (almost always a sire thanks to the biological fact male mammals can leave more offspring than a female one) descendants, at which point it might be widespread among that animal breed whereas before it was a rare occurrence.
That, and many dog breeders are not as informed as they think they are. Human egos can get in the way of animal health even if the breeder “loves” his critters.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough - most pathogens have already been eliminated from the human food chain. The “human grade raw food” doesn’t have parasites in it thus your dogs won’t acquire parasites from it. These days, even pork is usually safe to eat as trichinosis and other once-common pig parasites have largely been eliminated from North America domestic pigs due to better control over what the pigs are fed, and some people are eating it rare (although not me). Sure, there’s some risk but it’s probably on par with eating sushi. Most of the dozen trichiniosis cases in the US are traceable to eating wild game which, not enjoying either modern medicine or the modern agri-business industry, are still full of parasites.
Well, people living as hunter-gatherers today, in a manner believed to be similar or identical to that of prehistory, tend to have an abundance of parasites. Just about every culture has had some sort of anti-worm/anti-parasite medication (usually mulitple ones) in its collection of medications and treatments. People in rural Third World places also tend to have parasites in abundance. Malaria is a parasite that still kills millions of people every year. We’re finally driving Guinea worms to the brink of extinction but they used to be common in much of Africa and Asia. Hookworm used to be a major cause of anemia in the American south up through the first quarter of the 20th Century. Pinworms are still a common infection even in First World countries. Actually, let’s cut to the chase: here’s a pages listing human parasitic diseases. And here’s a thought: one-third to one-half of the current world population is probably infected with toxoplasmosis, including First World citizens with excellent medical care.
Given that there is ample documentation of human infestation by parasites not just in rural shitholes in primitive places but also people with access to the best medical care, and historical data back to Ancient Egypt that such infestations were a problem people sought treatment for, and people following the most primitive lifestyles invariably have parasites, it is probably reasonable to assume our ancestors all the way back to when we split from the apes probably had plenty of parasites swarming on and in them. Oh, and human mummies - not just in Eqypt but from all over the world - have been found to contain equally mummified parasites on occasion.
So, your question: Do we even know for a fact that adult humans did carry a heavy parasite load back then?
The answer is: Yes, we’re actually pretty damn certain they did. And the kids, too.
Yes, genetic health but not just blatant problems but also relatively minor things like allergies.
When I was talking about health care, I meant that purebreds are more likely to be taken to the vet for diagnosis and care of genetic issues.
Except, they don’t. Pugs that are owned by responsible breeders get their eyes checked and registered with OFA/CERF so they can see fine, as do the thousands of pet dogs out there that go thru life without running into walls. And yes, they do snore and some have issues with heat but the purpose of the breed is to be a lap animal not a police dog. I have seen some Pugs that are really goggle-eyed but those dogs were not well bred and have little to do with the breed standard.
And yet there are currently well over 86,000 GSDs with hips cleared by a panel of vets list on the OFA site. There are also show bred GSDs with advanced agility titles, including at least one agility Ch.
No, this is a common fallacy. Purebred or mixed, a dog is still a dog and there are extremely few genetic issues that affect only one breed. For example, hip dysplasia is found in mixed breeds, as are cataracts, PRA, seizuring, our friend allergies, etc. There is no such thing as hybrid vigor in dogs because you just can’t create a hybrid in a dog x dog breeding. The only thing genetic diversity does is spread recessives thruout a population.
If it has a severe case of it yes, but OFA rates hip dysplasia on three levels so mild cases may not be noticeable until old age, well past a dogs breeding career. That’s why we xray hips before we breed a dog, so we can catch dysplasia before it shows symptoms, if it ever does. Even severe cases may not show from the outside if the dog is kept lean and in condition - I had such a dog who wasn’t lame until he was 12 even tho he had an active show, obedience and field career.
I meant the health history of the parents of the mutt.
Quite true but the more we test and the more we keep track of the pups we produce, the more we learn about any given line. We figure out how this disease or that problem is inherited and breed away from it. The popular breeds like Labs or Goldens have a lot of problems with the influx of dogs bred by those who are only trying to turn a fast buck in a hot market, but breeds that are less popular have much more control over their gene pool and can create lines with a very low incidence of genetic health problems.
Again true but it is far better to work on being informed than to just willy nilly let dogs choose their own mates.
Oh, I know - dogs get their intestinal parasites from the ground and from fleas.
Well, I don’t eat sushi either…shudder. Yeah, pork is much safer these days but it still makes me nervous so the dogs and cat don’t get it raw.
Oh! I hadn’t thought of malaria, I was thinking only of worms.
Thanks - some of that stuff was fascinating and others were gross. I figured that children would carry parasite loads as puppies do, but thought they might grow out of it as healthy dogs do.
Maybe that’s true for valuable show dogs, but I’ve known all too many people who’ve sunk lots of money into buying a purebred then horribly neglected it.
Saying “the purpose is to be a lapdog” does not excuse deliberately breeding an animal that will suffer from obstructed breathing its entire life. The “issues with heat” and the snoring are symptoms of that. Saying the animal is “fine” is like saying you can function alright with just one lung - sure, you can, but it’s not an optimal situation.
It is the RATE at which such things occur in various breeds that I’m talking about. Take any random German shepherd and any random mutt and the odds are higher the shepherd will have hip dysplasia. That doesn’t mean the shepherd will have it, or that the mutt couldn’t, it’s the odds.
You’re assuming all recessives are bad. That’s not true. Many if not most recessive traits are neutral, some even positive. Genetic diversity spreads positive traits as well as negative ones.
I hardly think a situation where you have to x-ray every breeding animal is an ideal one. Clearly, the trait is so widespread among the breed that such a screening program has become cost-effective.
And that is a case where environment interacted with genetics - in an environment that keeps the dog “lean and active” it’s not such a detriment. Put the same dog in a different environment and it could be a much sadder story.
If the mutt’s parents were strays then their health was likely much more impacted by their environment than their heredity.
Parasites take such a multitude of forms - there are also things like scabies, which are tiny insects (mites) that actually burrow/embed themselves in your skin.
The human body will eventually throw off some parasites, but it can take decades in some cases. Most adult animals in the wild contain some level of parasites, and humans living in the “wild” i.e. primitive conditions are no exception.
Wow! You’re a winner.
I can’t take vitamin D. I really can’t eat fatty fish. I flare up.
Where did we find this guy?
Can you get sunshine? That forms vitamin D pretty effectively for most people. If you’re having absorption problems due to Crohn’s this might be your best option for the short term.
Assuming that you can take/absorb a supplement, I take Now brand vitamin D softgels. There are probably other brands that work, but I definitely notice that those reduce my symptoms. I recommend softgels if you’re going to take a supplement, they’re more absorbable than a solid pill.