But what’s filler? If you go read the actual veterinary sites (i.e. Tufts university and others), they point out a couple of things. One, grains aren’t actually bad for dogs- they can indeed digest carbohydrates (it’s one of the things that sets them apart from wolves) and get energy from them, and whole grains provide fiber as well. Two, byproducts typically are the parts that are not wanted by people; i.e. the organs and other stuff that dogs typically go for first in the wild, not skeletal muscles.
I mean, I feed my dog good old Purina Dog Chow in the green bag. Why? Because it’s been around forever, is probably the most researched and well understood dog food out there, and it’s inexpensive. Why in the world would I mess around with anything else? I mean, I guess if he didn’t like it or there was some compelling reason, I might move up on the Purina scale, or maybe over to Iams or Hill’s, but for now, there’s no reason I can see that I would need to spend twice as much for what… have smaller turds?
I’m not arguing – if it works for the dog you have, it works. The only time a dog of mine actually got sick – vomiting, diarrhea sick – was from a premium brand, pretty sure it was Iams. But feeding your dog ground up chicken feathers and seed hulls is not the same as feeding them viscera. Industrial food processing wastes are not the same as offal from butchering.
Dogs generally have little or nothing to do in today’s world. They spend 90% of their time waiting alone in a house or sleeping at night. Part of the appeal of special foods is it makes people feel better about consigning their dog to that life.
This article raises some very good points about controlled trials. It seems to me that there is one evidence-based therapy that IS very Zen influenced, which is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, an intervention developed primarily for people with Borderline Personality Disorder. My mother is BPD so I am very familiar with this population. People with BPD tend to have extreme difficulties with impulsive behavior and emotional regulation. They are prone to suicide attempts, self-harm, emotional outbursts, and in the case of my mother, sudden violent behavior. Dr. Linehan, who created this therapy and eventually came out as having BPD herself, specifically has cited the influence of Zen Buddhism on its development. I can’t overstate how completely unequipped the mental health community was for helping people with BPD until this therapy was developed. It was not only highly stigmatized by mental health professionals, there were no evidence-based interventions. None. There was no known way to get better. It was considered a lifelong, debilitating mental illness.
DBT changed that.
I do not have BPD but I have always had emotional lability and difficulty regulating my own emotions. When I talk about feeling things less intensely as a result of meditation, what I am really saying is that meditation seems to have brought me to a place that is roughly equivalent to the average person, emotion-wise. In some cases maybe a bit more stable than others - I have friends that are weeping frequently over Trump, but they are not mentally healthy. Whereas I am mostly okay. And I am okay despite the catastrophic impact that executive orders are having on my ability to do my job. I have experienced some lost productivity and a few sleepless nights, which is pretty good all things considered.
For people like me, and like my mother, I think it can be a very useful practice, and it seems to me that the research bears that out.
Another aspect of this which hasn’t been discussed is neuroscience. People have been studying the brains of meditators for a while. These studies are often done with people, such as monks, who engage in intense daily practice.
Mindfulness practice enhances attention. The anterior cingulate cortex is the region associated with attention in which changes in activity and/or structure in response to mindfulness meditation are most consistently reported.
Mindfulness practice improves emotion regulation and reduces stress. Fronto-limbic networks involved in these processes show various patterns of engagement by mindfulness meditation.
I don’t know enough about neuroscience to know what the limitations of these studies are. Brains are weird.
This article from the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative goes into greater detail:
Mindfulness meditation has received the most attention in neuroscience research over the past two decades. Behavioral studies suggest that mindfulness mediation provides beneficial effects on a number of cognitive domains, including attention, memory, executive function, and cognitive flexibility. Additionally, these effects have been found in multiple brain regions, including the cerebral cortex, subcortical grey and white matter, brain stem and cerebellum. This finding is unsurprising because mindfulness practices do involve multiple aspects of mental function.
Fox et al. (2014) performed a meta-analysis on 21 neuroimaging studies (with a total of 300 subjects) that examined changes in brain structures related to mindfulness meditation. They found several brain regions that show consistent difference between meditators and non- meditators, including areas key to meta-awareness (prefrontal cortex), exteroceptive and interoceptive body awareness (sensory cortices and insula), memory (hippocampus), and emotional regulation (anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex).
So it seems like meditation does some potentially helpful stuff to your brain.
I can’t report any improvement in my symptoms of ADHD but it is absolutely wild to say this, I think it makes my PTSD markedly better. And I have read that meditation can have a negative effect on people with PTSD. I’m not sure what to make of that.