Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Tuesday morning found me at an urgent care center for a dog bite. The PA (physician's assistant) was impressed with the lack of swelling, noting that dog bites almost always get infected.  Two days earlier, I took in a stray dog walking by my house. When I've done this in the past, I've posted pictures of the dog online and heard from the owner within a few hours. Not so with this dog--he must have been dumped.  The next day, he and my dog got into a scrap over a food bowl and when I tried to push him away, he bit me. Have I mentioned the dog is an American bully, weighing about 50 pounds? It broke the skin and made my hand sore--I'm lucky it wasn't worse. Sometimes I have more courage than sense. The PA didn't recommend a rabies shot even though I don't know whether the dog is vaccinated. She did recommend a tetanus shot, since  my last one was just over 10 years ago , and wrote a prescription for Augmentin (an antibiotic). I got the tetanus shot but haven...

Dieticians might recommend plenty of healthy whole grains and low-fat products (maybe even "good fats" from plants if they're progressive), but my dog, Molly, knows better. Like me, she follows a low-carb diet of mostly meat, eggs and fibrous vegetables, along with vitamins. At her vet visit this weekend, she was down three pounds (though still a little chubby) and had clean, healthy teeth. The vet said she sees a lot of slimy teeth--but not on Molly. Molly's wisdom: Vegetables are fine for a snack, but meat and eggs are best for a meal. Food is supposed to be enjoyed! Brush your teeth and avoid sweet and starchy foods. I'm looking at you, paleo bro. Have a weekly treat.  Get some exercise, but don't strain yourself. Get off the treadmill when you're tired of it. Sleep when you're tired. The right vitamins will make you feel good. Ignore yappy little dogs.  Eat real food, mostly animals, but not too much.

Carb Control Works Again Something that just happened makes me wonder how often low carb diets "stop working" for people because they don't realize the extent of their carb creep. The scale and the clothes-o-meter told me last week that I was gaining weight. I had to face the idea that I can't eat peanut M&Ms without gaining. weight. Just by cutting out my few handfuls of M&Ms every day, I'm down four pounds. That doesn't sound like much, but on me, it makes the difference between having a flat belly and having the beginning of a pot belly. What really struck me, though, was how much better I felt. Once again, I can run on six hours' sleep. My head feels clearer and I've started on projects I meant to do months ago. A coworker happened to give up the M&Ms at the same time and noticed how much better she felt, too. As she put it, you know all that sugar has to be bad for you if you feel so much better without it. Who Says Thanksgiving...

We know that foods you can't tolerate can cause inflammation in parts of the body outside the GI tract. But can inflammation in other parts of the body cause inflammation in the GI tract? I'm starting to think it's possible. This morning, I was walking my dog when the cause of my recent TMJ problems and headaches struck me: it was from walking my dog. Molly's so strong that she pulled my mother around in a wheelchair when Mom was in rehab a few years ago. I've tried to get her to walk without pulling, to no avail. When she pulls, I have to pull back and it makes me tense my neck and jaw. Molly has her own treadmill, which I bought when I had this problem before, and henceforth she'll just have to stay on it if she wants to walk. Molly on her treadmill, not the Iditarod. She could have been a contender. What does this have to do with stomach aches? Lately, my stomach has hurt and nothing seems to digest well. I haven't tried any new foods lately; in ...

Dark chocolate and sweet potato fries are taking up too much of my diet--so much that I probably got up to about 70g of carb a day. That's probably too much carb to make ketones and too little glucose to feel energetic. Walk down the middle of the road, Margaret Thatcher said, and you get hit by the traffic from both sides. This might be the reason I've been tired and my stomach is upset so often these days. (Upper GI problems were the original reason I started a low-carb diet.) I overslept by an hour this morning after forgetting to reset my alarm, even after nine hours' sleep and my dog trying to get me up. My dog is going on a stricter diet, too, since she's up to 70 pounds. She eats low-carb home cooking, but needs to eat less of it. Bye-bye, balanced diet. I'm going to use pork rinds and emulsion sauce* instead of sweet potato fries as a vehicle for fat and salt. And no more denial about my chocolate habit. I was good today--I had about 30g of carb--and ...

"If your dog is fat, you're not getting enough exercise." Baloney! It's just one more piece of cute conventional wisdom that doesn't bear out in real life. My dog gets more exercise than I do, and I'm the thin one. She, if anything, eats the healthier diet: home cooked, all paleo, very low carb, no junk or grains. I control her portions, but Molly's an easy gainer. I don't force her to exercise: after I come home from work and pet her, the first thing she does is jump on the treadmill. Sundays, she bugs me until we go for a walk, a swim, or a trip to the dog park. Trucking along on the treadmill last week. Drying her face on the carpet today after a long walk in Confluence Park and (for the first time) swimming across the South Platte River and back.  A +1 to any reader under age 40 who knows where the phrase "lazy brown dog" comes from. Hint: ask Mom, Grandma or anyone else who didn't grow up with a computer.

I've been on a reading jag about evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth  by Richard Dawkins and Why Evolution is True  by Jerry A. Coyne. I also threw in Dawkins' 1991 Christmas Lectures titled "Growing up in the Universe."   (Link goes to online videos.) A few things worth knowing (among many others): Evolution hasn't made our bodies perfect. The earliest life was bacteria, and all life forms have changed by tiny increments ever since. There was no going back to the drawing board and starting a new, more logical design. For instance, our maxillary sinuses draining at the top is a trait we inherited from ancestors who walked on all fours (their sinuses drain at the front).(1) Both books have an entire chapter on parts that have evolved badly. Good fuel helps a lot, but it won't fix a bad design. Natural selection can occur rapidly. We're all familiar with bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics. But natural (or artificial) selection has been observ...

Molly Goes to the Vet Although my dog Molly has been on the cavity healing diet for awhile, I found out last week she didn't actually have a cavity, just some scratches in her enamel, which the vet said was probably caused by chewing on bones. The vet says she rarely sees true cavities in dogs. Molly had some gingivitis, but no bone loss or infection in her teeth. She now has a layer of dental bonding on the scratched tooth. We'll both continue on the cavity healing diet. Weight Loss This Christmas found me three pounds over my normal weight, and Molly at 64.5 pounds, her weight from three months ago. I know three pounds isn't much, but on my frame, it's enough to make slightly loose jeans tight. It's a step in the wrong direction, and if I kept gaining three pounds a week, I'd weigh 200 pounds by summer. Given how few women in my family weigh less than 200 pounds after age 30, that's a real threat. I knew what the problem was: too damn many dark chocol...

Readers may recall that my dog, Molly, has a cavity that I've been monitoring and trying to heal with a low-carb lacto-paleo diet a la Weston A. Price and Drs. Mellanby. The tooth recently started looking worse, so I took Molly to see a new vet (one closer to home). Dr. Poundstone reminded me of some of the CPAs I work with: pleasant, professional and down-to-earth. She said that she saw very few dogs with true cavities, and most of those were from grainy tooth-cleaning "bones" made in China. The "bones" are so acid that it's like giving your dog a Coke--and the results are the same: cavities. Without an x-ray, she couldn't be sure, but the vet believed that Molly had some flaws in her enamel instead of a cavity. She said that chewing on bones (actual bones, not fake ones) could cause this, making some grooves in the tooth, which is exactly what Molly developed. Dogs' teeth have only 1 millimeter of enamel, compared to 4 millimeters on humans, s...

Would you feed cookies to your dog? What if the cookies were bone-shaped? Absurd? Read the ingredients in a Pedigree Jumbone : Rice Flour, Glycerin, Sugar, Cellulose Powder, Wheat Flour, Propylene Glycol, Sodium Caseinate, Natural Poultry Flavor, Dried Meat By-product, Potassium Sorbate (a Preservative), Vitamins (Choline Chloride, D-calcium Pantothenate, Vitamin A Supplement, Niacin, Riboflavin [Vitamin B2], Pyridoxine Hydrochloride [Vitamin B6], Vitamin D3 Supplement, Vitamin B12 Supplement, Thiamine Mononitrate [Vitamin B1], Folic Acid, Dl-alpha Tocopherol Acetate [source of Vitamin E]), Minerals (Sodium Tripolyphosphate, Salt, Calcium Carbonate, Potassium Chloride, Dicalcium Phosphate, Zinc Oxide, Copper Sulfate). The fact that the treats are mostly flour and sugar is bad enough. But glycerine is an ingredient in soap, cellulose is indigestible by dogs, sodium tripolyphosphate is an ingredient in detergent, and calcium carbonate is an ingredient in cement. But wait--it's...

Back in mid-March, my last dentist told me I needed a bunch of fillings. I declined to get them, embarking on a cavity-healing diet instead . Today, I saw a new dentist--the one my best friend saw when she lived here in Colorado. Since he never gave her a filling, I assume he's not a drill-and-fill eager beaver. The 16 x-rays he took (yes, sixteen) didn't show decay on the teeth the last dentist wanted to fill. He also said I had a good jaw and more than enough room for all my wisdom teeth--something he said he rarely sees. As he went about cleaning my teeth as if my mouth were the Sistene Chapel, he remarked that my teeth didn't seem sensitive to cold despite some roots showing. Yes, I've observed that too: my teeth are no longer sensitive to temperature or vinaigrette, as they once were. And my TMJ problems and nighttime tooth grinding unexpectedly disappeared since I started the cavity healing diet. So even though Dr. Michelangelo (not his real name) insisted that...

I'm posting this just because she's cute. Look how crimped her hair has gotten during Denver's monsoon season. The rain (and my renewed energy) have also helped the driveway reclamation area to finally be reclaimed: Another nice thing about a paleo diet for a dog: there's been a lot less to clean up in the yard, and it's a lot less stinky.

To make it easy to stay on track with Molly's diet, I've created a meal planning spreadsheet. I've listed the foods and amounts she commonly eats along with calories, carbs, fat, and protein. I just enter how many servings of various foods I'm thinking about feeding her on a given day, and the total nutrients show up. You can download the spreadsheet here: http://www.slideshare.net/lorimiller/nutrient-counter Of course, you can insert rows for other foods if you want to do a little bit of research on nutrient content (like, Nutritiondata.com or copying data from a food package), copy and paste the formulas from the orange (or gray) part of the spreadsheet, and re-do the Total row if needed. Needless to say, you can use this for your own diet if you wish.

It just goes to show that we all react differently to the same diet. My dog, Molly, and I eat pretty much the same thing: a lacto-paleo, nutrient rich diet that I hope will heal our minor cavities. I've lost one to two pounds, but Molly has gained weight: she's 73 pounds and I had to loosen her collar. Of course, it may be that her owner is simply feeding her too much; even on a low-carb diet, some people and dogs gain weight with too much food. It could also be a thyroid problem, which the vet is checking. Looking around the web, it seems a 60-pound dog (which I'd like Molly to be) should eat around 1100 to 1200 calories per day. Molly may be eating a little more than that, but she probably needs fewer calories on the diet we follow. Another site recommended about 1.25 pounds of meat per day for a 60-pound dog. (The vet recommended diet dog food to get the calories just right. I didn't ask him if he weighed out his own food and counted calories to avoid going over.) In...

Just over a month ago, I (along with my dog) set out on a cavity healing diet : low in carb, grain-free, high in vitamins A and D, and high in calcium and phosphorus. I've made some changes along the way and listed what Molly and I are now eating at the end of this post. Potassium Power The potassium pills seem to have put the pep back in my step. This weekend, I worked both days helping the tax secretary, whipped my house back into shape, and I'm ready to go out and tear up the dance floor tonight. The Dry Skin Epidemic Since starting this diet, after I stopped eating raw eggs (since I seemed to be allergic to them), my skin has looked better than it ever has. My skin improved last year after I started a low-carb, high-fat diet (more resilient, less callousing, and lot less dry), but now I'm cautiously optimistic that my niggling adult acne is completely gone. A diet's effect on skin was brought home to me while I read an article in People magazine (no jokes, please) t...

For the past two and a half weeks, my dog and I have been on a mostly lacto-paleo diet to heal our cavities . It's a high-nutrient, high-fat, low-sugar diet that emulates what my northern European ancestors ate before the advent of farming. We've been eating meat, eggs, non-starchy vegetables (think salad ingredients), fish, olive oil, coconut oil, and a few nuts. That's the paleo part. We've also been eating cheese, sour cream, goat milk, cream and butter (the lacto part). We don't eat any grains or beans. However, I do eat a few chocolate candies a day, low-carb ice cream and a Zevia soda now and then. I also use a little bit of vinegar and xanthan gum, which aren't strictly paleo. I need a vice besides overdue library books. Positive results so far: We enjoy this food-especially Molly. She jumps for joy when I feed her. I'm down a pound and Molly feels a little trimmer on our high-fat, high-nutrient, low-carb diet. Take that, Dr. Oz ! My third-day hair lo...

Note: I'm reposting this with some edits. When I first wrote this article, I was under the impression that my dog had a tiny hole in her tooth that had healed (see photo). What looked like a pinhole may have been some crud on her tooth. I've also made another change in my diet. -Ed. A week ago, I went on a cavity-healing diet and put my dog, Molly, on the same diet a few days later when I noticed she had a cavity in her lower-right canine. As described in the highly researched book Cure Tooth Decay by Ramiel Nagel, the experiments of Weston A. Price showed children's cavities healed when they were fed one highly nutritious meal a day of tomato or orange juice with cod liver oil or high-vitamin butter, meat/bone marrow/vegetable stew, cooked fruit, milk, and rolls made from freshly ground wheat. (Note that this experiment and others like it were done in the 1920s and 1930s when meat and milk were from grass-fed, pasture-raised animals, wheat was very different in its genet...

Molly (left) has a svelte new figure after a month on a low-carb, higher-calorie diet. I radically changed her diet after noticing that the Taste of the Wild kibble she eats is high carb and low fat --and that Molly was putting on weight, constantly begging for food, and spending less time on the treadmill. When Molly started her new diet, I could pinch an inch of fat on her waist and back. Now I can pinch 1/4" on her waist and I can grab fat on her back only when she's lying down or sitting up. Her old diet was two cups a day of Taste of the Wild dog food and a snack such as a carrot. Her new diet is, on a typical day, 1/2 cup of TOTW dog food, 2 tablespoons of rice protein powder , a magnesium tablet, and 2 tablespoons of coconut oil for breakfast and 1/2 cup dog food, a cooked chicken thigh with skin and without the bone, and a carrot for dinner, and a handful of nuts and 2 tablespoons of olive oil for a snack. Macronutrient balance before: carbohydrate: 50% protein: 32% ...

What a wonderful day to live in Denver. The ground might have been covered with snow, but it was sunny and seventy degrees (about 20C) and hundreds of people and dozens of dogs went walking or running in Washington Park (left). My dog, Molly, even played in the snow to cool off. It was warm enough to wear a t-shirt, drive with the windows down and flirt at stoplights. When the sun goes down, another great reason to live in Denver is the swing dance scene, if you're into that. You can lindy hop four nights a week in Denver; more if you're willing to drive to Boulder or Colorado Springs. Of course, it takes energy to enjoy long walks and lindy hopping on a school night. My best suggestions for increasing your energy if it's flagging: stop eating sugar and flour. Start eating a high-fat, adequate protein, high-nutrient diet. Eat when you're hungry, rest when you're tired. If there's still no wind in your sails after two weeks, look into which vitamins and minerals ...

In a few posts, I mentioned that I fed my dog a low-carb diet of Taste of the Wild dog food. A few posts on other blogs about animal chow piqued my interest (see this and this ), and I looked up the dog food on the web. It turns out that despite bison, lamb meal, chicken meal and egg product being the first four ingredients in the High Prairie Canine Formula, the macronutrient blend is 32% protein, 18% fat, and presumably 50% carbohydrate. That's not low-carb by anyone's definition, and I apologize for my error. The food is made of good ingredients as far as animal feed goes (certainly better than the sugar/casein/milk fat/etc. pseudo-food--I mean, "Western diet" that gave some of the lab rodents cancer--see links above). And it has several supplements, although I doubt if the Lactobacillus bacteria remain alive at room temperature. Nevertheless, it's a high-carb, low-fat diet that I've come to believe is suboptimal at best and untenable at worst. (I'm m...