For the record, since this was recently discussed — I just attended my first “nutrition rounds” at our teaching hospital as part of my rotation through the Internal Medicine service. Our veterinary nutritionist spoke at length about: -how to do a nutritional assessment of your patient -how to calculate the nutritional requirements of your patient -how to create a meal plan -the importance of finding out the animal’s routine diet from the owner.

Quality control of pet food and pet food ingredients -the difference between % dry matter and % total calories -rendering plants and the widely varying quality control at same -certain specific companies known to maintain high quality control via routine testing of their ingredients prior to incorporation of them into the food, routine testing of the final product, and long-term contracts with reputable vendors -other specific companies known to fail to maintain high quality control, who use the “same” ingredients on their labels as the good companies, but who purchase these ingredients from the cheapest source at the time, and do no testing of the ingredients prior to using them, ever. -the potential risks of raw foods given that our meat inspection system in the US sucks and raw meats are generally not considered safe for human consumption.

The fact that over 70% of the home made diet formulations she has been asked to analyze have been deficient in some way -the fact that a properly designed, balanced, cooked, home made diet is a perfectly fine thing to feed, but that it is nearly impossible for the average owner to create without a lot of expensive consultations with a veterinary nutritionist and a testing lab to verify the percentages in the final product -the fact that regardless of the point immediately above, lots of normal, healthy animals will appear to do quite well on “substandard” diets (either home made or commercial) for many years or even in fact for the life of the animal, much as some lucky humans live to be 110 while smoking, drinking, and eating high fat, low fiber, nutrient poor diets all their lives We talked about a bunch of other stuff as well, but those were some of the main points. I thought that those who believed veterinary education to be deficient in nutrition would be interested.

Good nutrition is the basic requirement for people to enjoy health and longevity. No country in the world is free from nutrition problems. All are facing either under-nutrition, over-nutrition or both as problems. More than 50% of deaths among children below five years of age in developing countries are associated with malnutrition. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that iodine deficiency was a public health problem in 118 countries in 1995. Approximately 2.8 million children under five years of age were having signs of clinical vitamin A deficiency in the same year.

About two billion people around the world are suffering iron deficiency and 58% of pregnant women in developing countries are anemic. Over-nutrition and diet-related non-communicable diseases including diabetes mellitus, hypertension and coronary heart diseases are major nutrition problems in developed countries but they do not exempt developing countries either. Objectives of the nutrition activities of the Department of Health are:(1) to reduce/eliminate nutritional deficiencies, to promote dietary habits conducive to good health, and  to prevent over-nutrition and diet-related non-communicable diseases.

In order to achieve these objectives, all appropriate strategies including nutrient supplementation, food fortification and nutrition education have been adopted. Vitamin A supplementation Vitamin A deficiency used to be one of the most common causes of avoidable childhood blindness in developing countries. Very often associated with measles, it caused a large number of children in Asia and Africa to go blind. Besides, a significant proportion of children blinded by vitamin A deficiency died within one or two years. During the last decade, regular supplementation with vitamin A, together with measles vaccination, saved thousands of children from blindness and death. Integrated with polio vaccination on the National Immunization Days, vitamin A supplementation has covered more than 90% of the targeted children in Myanmar.

Vitamin A deficiency is no longer a public health problem in our country. Still, there is ample evidence that vitamin A supplementation to children in communities with marginal intakes of the vitamin can significantly reduce child deaths. For Myanmar children to enjoy all these benefits, the Ministry of Health (MOH) has planned to distribute vitamin A capsules to all children between six months and five years of age during the Nutrition Promotion Week which will take place between 1-9-2003 and 7-9-2003. To ensure regular intake of vitamin A from the diet, children should be exclusively breast-fed for the first six months of life and fed, after six months, vitamin A rich foods including liver, milk, eggs, yellow fruits such as papaya and mango, yellow and red roots and tubers such as carrots and sweet potato, and dark green leafy vegetables such as drumstick leaves.

Recently I got into a debate with a colleague about the competency of MD’s in respect to their knowledge of nutrition and herbal supplements. My associate claims that MD’s receive only the most basic training about nutrition in medical school. He feels that MD’s are ignorant of nutrition as a critical aspect of health, and that this mentality is brought about by indoctrination into a culture that forces them to proscribe only drugs to solve problems.

I assert that MD’s receive a reasonable amount of nutritional training and are very aware of it’s value in treating health issue. Furthermore I’d say that most doctors are acutely aware of the balance between nutrition and drugs, and for the most part, are always further educating themselves on these subjects. My friend also insists that MD’s are taught exactly nothing about herbal supplements. I submit that herbal supplements are drugs that the doctors patients will certainly be exposed too. As such it is almost certain that they are educated about the potentials and issues with the current crop of herbal favorites.

Furthermore I suspect that they stay on top of new developments that arrive simply because it is a factor in their patients health. My associate claims that doctors never proscribe herbal cures, even if they believe them to be better than expensive drugs, because they are brainwashed and bribed by the powerful pharmaceutical industry. I am hard pressed to believe that the majority of human beings who are doctors, would deny their patients the best care possible, to the best of their knowledge. As an example I offered him the scenario; A doctor has a patient that has a medical need. The doctor has a bucket full of samples from a large pharmaceutical company. The doctor is also aware that there is an alternative herbal supplement that he genuinely feels is superior. Will the doctor offer the patient the drug that he feels will better serve the patient, or will he dismiss what he feels is better in favor of handing out the sample from the drug company? My friend insists that the doctor would normally go with the sample since he has been programmed to do so by the medical community and bribed to so by the drug companies. I have serious doubts that people who devote their lives to the healing sciences will offer an inferior cure because they are controlled by the large corporations. My associate also claims that doctors are brainwashed by large pharmaceutical corporations.

He believes that these corporations control the schools and produce the medical journals that educate the doctors. I submit that doctors are exposed to plenty of salesmanship from the corporations. However, I also believe that doctors are taught critical thinking skills. The medical sciences are surely influenced by the money of the corporations, however I feel that medical science is not ‘controlled’ by them. While corporations certainly do studies that attempt to glorify their products, I think that modern medicine is built on science. Impartial studies and peer review are what guides science along. I do not believe that there is some corporate conspiracy that has taken control of the medical community. I believe that most doctors care deeply about the welfare of their patients, and about the advancement of medical sciences. I do not believe they are more interested in supporting drug companies than these more humane goals.

Maybe it’s the New! Lunchables soft batch cookies with the chocolate chips and icing you can spread on them? Just saw those at Randalls the other day! Yum! Is this good nutrition? That even makes brown rice look nutritious to me! Over all, our diet has gotten worse and more removed from a natural one by the day. Especially recently in fact. In the same 30 years since the introduction of the food pyramid, and the call for a low fat, high carbohydrate what has happened to the health of the population of the United States? 60% of adult Americans is obese.

More than half of ALL adults! That’s one dietary experiment has obviously failed by any thinking person’s standards. Actually, this last post you read was more complete than the first one. It comes with more book titles and also links. Can you site studies that show that people in Paleolithic times had RA? If you don’t like a post, you needn’t respond to it. There are others here who find this stuff very interesting and people like you scare people away from posting relevant information that could profoundly help even just one person.

There are other ways than just your way. We are all here to share. They are not extinct. We are descended from them. Do you mean why did they give up hunting and gathering to become farmers? That question no one knows the answer to. Here’s one hypothesis: “The origins of agriculture — a biological perspective and a new hypothesis” in which Greg Wadley & Angus Martin argue that the shift to cultivation and animal domestication was due to the “comfort” derived from the opioid peptides from gluten. But some of your direct ancestors must have stayed out where it’s wild and woolly or you yerself wouldn’t have gotten gluten intolerance passed down to you, right? If they, each and all, had settled for agrarian foodstuffs only.

And some juvenile arthritics gimped well enuff from the mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers to reach the age to reproduce..some had to have. You still ARE a most excellent hunter, Don W. With my loose jointedness, I’m picturing my ancestors swinging thru trees like gibbons. Genetically, we are identical to them. We are them, and they are us. That is the whole point of this discussion. Genetically we have not evolved , we just have remote control now, but genetically there has been found that there are no discernable difference between us an them.