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Cats and dogs detox diet
Read through most of this thread today, lots of good info. As I mentioned in my progress thread I've been trying to improve my cats diet. Today for the first time 2 of them ate some gently cooked grass fed beef for the first time where previous attempts had failed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creme_Puff_(cat)
I wasn't sure whether to post this on the longevity thread (LOL) or here on a cat thread. This cat lived to an age that translates to 168 in people years. And it wasn't the owners only long-lived cat...
This cat reached this level of longevity on a diet that is surprising. I suppose it could be fake news. I've written a few other ideas I have below the long quote. Maybe you all have some ideas.
quote "...her diet consisted of dry cat food and claimed he supplemented it with broccoli, eggs, turkey bacon, coffee with cream, and—every two days—"an eyedropper full of red wine". Perry claimed that this diet was key to her longevity, and that the wine "circulated the arteries".[6][dubious – discuss] Both alcohol and coffee are highly toxic to cats, making this claim dubious.[7][8]
Perry turned his garage into a movie theater that played nature documentaries. He installed steps onto his walls for the cats to climb and built a screened enclosure in his backyard to allow the pets to enjoy the outdoors.[9]". end quote
On another site, I liked what one person wrote in a comment which was something like: "They just decided to stay". I bet those are happy cats right there, and happiness matters.
The cats there had shelter, food, fresh air, sunshine, lots of friends, exercise, entertainment, vet care, an owner who loved them and lived for them (and even shared his diet with them).
Anyways, I always felt like my toxic cats who died of kidney issues needed FIBER, maybe that is what the *broccoli* represents. And I wondered how to deliver it, who knew broccoli was an answer? So, now to explain the rest of the diet.
Turkey bacon LOL. It wasn't around until about 1990, so there's that. My guess: Creme Puff ate also ate real bacon with her eggs and coffee for at least some of her life. (b. 1967 d. 2005). I'm going to go circulate my arteries.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-raise-a-165-year-old-cat
This article has quotes from the vet Jake uses who says the cats are provably, at the very least, 30. (which is nothing to sneeze at).
I thought about this long-lived cat anecdote, over the last few days, trying to figure it out. If there is some truth to the story and there appears there may be some, perhaps it is about this strange thing we have spoken about occasionally on this site:
"Hormesis is a term used by toxicologists to refer to a biphasic dose response to an environmental agent characterized by a low dose stimulation or beneficial effect and a high dose inhibitory or toxic effect."
In layman's terms, sometimes taking something toxic in tiny amounts is more beneficial than avoiding the toxin completely.
The idea is not very popular here, and yet I think it may be how many drugs and herbs and toxic foods get their good reputations.
A small amount of alcohol or coffee might be good for you. Drinking these things all day might be very, very bad.
People say "the poison is in the dose" and that is part of it. Add to that: "the cure is in the dose".
Also, it may be that dry cat food isn't the horrible plague upon the planet that we make it out to be. I'm sure there are bad ones, including the one I was using, even though it was expensive. Maybe this cat lover wasn't buying a bad one. I know a breeder who breeds beautiful and fertile cats over several generations on dry. The farm cat across the street is about 20 and lives on dry. Hmm. Some dry foods are probably a better choice than when I was feeding tons of free-range liver to my cats with the theory that more was more.
Quote from lil chick on September 25, 2024, 6:10 amIf there is some truth to the story and there appears there may be some, perhaps it is about this strange thing we have spoken about here and there on this site:
"Hormesis is a term used by toxicologists to refer to a biphasic dose response to an environmental agent characterized by a low dose stimulation or beneficial effect and a high dose inhibitory or toxic effect."
In layman's terms, sometimes taking something toxic in tiny amounts is more beneficial than avoiding the toxin completely.
The idea is not very popular here, and yet I think it may be how many drugs and herbs and toxic foods get their good reputations.
A small amount of alcohol or coffee might be good for you. Drinking these things all day might be very, very bad.
People say "the poison is in the dose" and that is part of it. Add to that: "the cure is in the dose".
The notion that small doses of poison are beneficial to someone who doesn't need to ingest poison in the first place is ridiculous.
Generally speaking, hormesis is a homeostatic phenomenon. It represents an adaptive response by the body to an offense, which enables the body to better cope with similar offenses it expects to occur in the near future. Creating resilience to expected offenses is a necessary and desirable response, but that does not make the exposure to offense beneficial.
Building muscle by lifting weights is a classic example. When you lift something that is heavy enough to strain your muscles, you tear muscle fibers. Is tearing muscle fibers desirable? No. Tearing muscle fibers makes you vulnerable and compromises your ability to survive. The body wants to survive, so it rebuilds the damaged muscle and adds additional muscle to insure against future tears. Having that additional muscle is only desirable if you're going to continue to lift heavy things that would otherwise tear a smaller muscle. If you're not going to keep lifting heavy things, then the cost of maintaining and carrying that extra muscle is unnecessary and can actually compromise your overall fitness. Similarly, the body often reconstructs a broken bone to be bigger/stronger than before the break to insure against future breaks, which sounds great, except the additional bone mass is only desirable if you are at risk of breaking that bone again; otherwise, that extra bone mass represents an unnecessary cost.
Why even PhD's like Rhonda Patrick can't understand this simple concept is beyond me, it's a basic application of evolutionary principles. Patrick promotes the consumption of cruciferous vegetables (which contain the toxin sulforaphane) under the misconception that the subsequent rise in glutathione levels, among other detoxification responses by the body, represents a net benefit to the body. Ask yourself this though: if the body was capable of producing glutathione in response to a toxin, then why did it wait until it was exposed to a toxin to produce that glutathione? Because it didn't need that glutathione until it was exposed to a toxin!
As with physically exercising to build muscle, exercising your detoxification system is only useful if you're going to keep exposing yourself to toxins on a regular basis. It's much more efficient to simply avoid toxins and allow your body to reduce its expenditure on defenses to those toxins. I suspect this is one explanation for the negative response people often have to plant products after adopting a plant-free diet for an extended period of time. A plant-free diet leads your body to downregulate its defenses to plant toxins. Subsequent reintroduction of plant toxins catches your body off guard. With continued intake, you would expect the body to once again upregulate its defenses and form a renewed tolerance to plant toxins. You see this when reintroducing significant glucose intake after being on a very low carb diet, where an initial lag in insulin production/circulation results in a prolonged period of elevated blood glucose until the body realizes it needs to regularly crank out insulin to deal with large boluses of carbs.
Hi Tricky Turkey! Have you sat and had a think about why these cats lived longer than other cats?
Quote from lil chick on September 25, 2024, 3:13 pmHi Tricky Turkey! Have you sat and had a think about why these cats lived longer than other cats?
How many individual cats are you talking about? I didn't bother to read the Creme Puff thing, no point in analyzing one questionable anecdote.
I suspect this is basically the same as trying to understand why some humans live so much longer than others...too many factors to say definitively, although it's safe to say that generally avoiding toxins conveys a higher likelihood of long life.
BTW I got a new cat last year. She's been eating grass pretty regularly throughout the summer and has been throwing up and retching all summer. The only non-liquid substance I've ever seen in the vomit is grass. I've never seen grass in her poop though, which suggests she's throwing it all up.
She doesn't go out in the winter and therefore doesn't eat grass in the winter, and she doesn't throw up or retch in the winter. She had no discernable problems during the winter. Her diet has been the same in summer and winter.
Seems like there's no universal conclusion on why cats eat grass, but the best hypothesis in my opinion is that they're trying to clear ingested hair from their digestive tract. They're not getting meaningful nutrition from it, that's for sure. With dogs, eating vegetation may help to clear parasites from the digestive tract. Dogs eat all kinds of disgusting things, including the vomit and feces of other dogs, and are probably regularly exposed to intestinal parasites. Cats less so, although maybe they eat vegetation to clear parasites as well.
It would be interesting to know whether longer-haired cats tended to eat grass more often than shorter-haired cats.