This morning, I sat at my kitchen table exhausted from working late last night and waking up at the crack of dawn to get my young men off to school. My workout loomed large. I scheduled a tough one with a spotter, so I knew I’d be pushing myself exceptionally hard. I didn’t look forward to trading in my robe for getting dressed; my cozy bed was just yards away.In that … [Read more…]
Want to win this autographed bat? Enter here! Contest runs through Monday, 2/10. You can tweet about the giveaway once per day to increase your chances! a Rafflecopter giveaway … [Read more…]
Keeping a food journal can make or break your quest to get in the best shape of your life.Does any of this sound familiar?A husband and wife make a pact. They are going to get in shape, and they are going to do it together, as a team. Shoulder to shoulder they stand; they’ve got this.A month down the road, wifey is looking a little fitter, but hubby has noticed his … [Read more…]
Super Bowl Sunday is the day when folks consume the second highest number of calories of the year (after Thanksgiving). Luckily, taking care of yourself during the big game isn’t as hard as it seems, and it doesn’t require that you skip the activities and food that make you smile. With a tiny bit of planning, Monday will be less managing regret and more prideful recollection of … [Read more…]
Taking the first step is the most important thing you can do. For today, I want you to take a step – off the scale. Your scale is like your worst ex. It’s a liar; deceitful, manipulative and behaviorally inconsistent. It’s most dangerous characteristic? It’s intoxicating, luring you in day after day with the promise of better things to come.It’s time for you to end the … [Read more…]
We often encourage you to challenge your assumptions around here. Usually when we do, the topic has slightly deeper energy. Today I’m going to push you to address skeptically the notion that you need chips to enjoy guacamole.
We have conditioned our minds that we can’t truly enjoy certain foods without the accompaniment of others. We can unwind that conditioning with a little practice. The first step is acknowledging the health benefits of the food without its perceived perfect match. Let’s riff on the guac I whipped up yesterday.
I used an avocado, yellow cherry tomatoes, garlic powder, organic hot sauce, a single radish, Himalayan pink salt, some chopped onions and that’s it.
You may recall our post on the nutritional punch of the avocado. From whfoods.com:
The pulp of the avocado is actually much lower in phytonutrients than these other portions of the food. However, while lower in their overall phytonutrient richness, all portions of the pulp are not identical in their phytonutrient concentrations and the areas of the pulp that are closest to the peel are higher in certain phytonutrients than more interior portions of the pulp. For this reason, you don’t want to slice into that outermost, dark green portion of the pulp any more than necessary when you are peeling an avocado. Accordingly, the best method is what the California Avocado Commission has called the “nick and peel” method.
Think those yellow tomatoes don’t match the nutritional density of the red ones? Of course that’s what you’re thinking about. From whfoods.com:
Did you know that tomatoes do not have to be a deep red color to be an outstanding source of lycopene? Lycopene is a carotenoid pigment that has long been associated with the deep red color of many tomatoes. A small preliminary study on healthy men and women has shown that the lycopene from orange- and tangerine-colored tomatoes may actually be better absorbed than the lycopene from red tomatoes.
Fascinating.
This guac had plenty of flavor packed into every bite and needed nothing else. So why do we think we need chips with guac? Even once we begin to question this initial assumption, our thoughts often lead us astray. You can run a quick web search and you’ll find countless replacements for tortilla chips. From crackers to blue corn to matzo, they are all just substituting one lower fat (ughhh) processed product for another and you know how we view those “foods.” From health.harvard.edu:
Don’t be so refined. The bolus of blood sugar that accompanies a meal or snack of highly refined carbohydrates (white bread, white rice, French fries, sugar-laden soda, etc.) increases levels of inflammatory messengers called cytokines.
Your healthy guac loses a lot of benefits when you pair it with the processed crunch. You can scoop it with raw veggies or just skip the intermediate step and dive in with a spork. The latter is more my speed.
More broadly, we can step outside our cultural assumptions and reconsider our food pairings and timings entirely. Why are eggs a breakfast food and why must we always pair them with toast? Our notions of what the first meal of the day have evolved significantly over the past century. From historic gastronomist Sarah Lohman:
America at the turn of the century was just as vast and varied as it is now. Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, from 1906, which I think is a decent judge of what the average, multi-generational, Midwestern or New England American family is eating or aspiring to eat, is showing a meal that includes: fruit; hot cereal like Quaker oats or hominy; a substantial meat like beefsteak, ‘warmed over lamb,’ or broiled halibut; potatoes, toast, or muffins; or, of course, coffee.
Even the concept of “breakfast,” as we know it, is primarily a Western affect. Many Asian cultures start their day with very similar foods to what they eat in the evening (fish in the morning kicks ass). In fact, the entire notion of three meals a day isn’t based in science, but merely on a general social convention.
Next time you’re about to sit down to a big bowl of Wheaties because you need a healthy breakfast, remember that you’re primarily consuming decades of concerted advertising efforts. General Mills is whipping you in a mental cage match. Have a pork chop instead and swing back.
[Editor’s note: When Gabe first sent the post about feeding raw to dogs, he didn’t know I fed mine raw. Moreover, the blog post was an example of how authentic this site gets – he wasn’t making an argument so much as walking everyone through his thought process as he explored something new to him. If you’ve read for any length of time, you’ve seen this play out – soap, anyone? He asked for my thoughts, and I sent him this response. We are publishing this as the affirmative case for feeding raw food to dogs (again, unlike the original post, which was an exposition), but be aware, every individual situation is unique, and we all must do our best for our own pets, whatever that may be.]
We start from the basic premise that you use to guide all of your nutrition based decisions – whole, natural foods are better for you and your body than processed foods. Unfortunately, we don’t have the sort of large scale, double blind scientific studies on pet nutrition and health that we do for humans. Quite frankly, there isn’t enough money in it to make it worthwhile for anyone to do them. As suggested on twitter, there is very little in the way of “raw goat stomach” lobbying groups. So, we have to take a step back and do the best we can.
(CAUTION: Science ahead!)
Dogs are descended from wolves. They’re not directly in line with the extant population of gray wolves, but all breeds of dogs can (at least in theory; I don’t suggest sending Fluffy the Chihuahua into the wolf pen at the zoo) interbreed with them. I don’t usually make this argument, because people have confused physiology with behavior and training, but for purposes of nutrition, we start there.
We don’t have absolute evidence on how the wolf was domesticated (current research suggests that the wolf essentially domesticated itself) or when, but the oldest domesticated canines date back about 32,000 years ago. Since then, we’ve produced a lot of changes through selective breeding, but most of the basic physical characteristics of the wolf are intact. In specific, the dentition of dogs is adapted to ripping and tearing flesh, and they lack flattened molars to chew vegetable matter. The jaws of dogs only move up and down, not side to side, because they don’t do a lot of chewing (compare to a cow, who chews cud in a side to side motion for hours). Dogs also lack digestive enzymes in their saliva that humans (and other true omnivores) use to begin breaking down grains and starches. A dog’s stomach is designed to empty quickly; proteins and fats are generally broken down in 3-4 hours. Their digestive tract is significantly shorter than an omnivore because they don’t need to continue to extract nutrients out of plant matter and break down starches.
The dog from 32,000 years ago lived nearly exclusively on a diet of raw meat (horse, musk ox, and reindeer). For tens of thousands of years, dogs subsisted on the scraps from people (organs and offal, meat that humans were unable to eat, etc.) and whatever they could hunt on their own. We don’t start getting into thinking about “dog food” as such until the 18th century. From there right up until about the 1950s (in this country), dogs still ate what the family could spare from their own meals. In the 1950s, roughly coinciding with convenience meals for humans (think TV dinners), you started to see heavily processed grain based extruded kibbles. This process functions very similar to the fast food (Lisa was dead on with the McDonald’s comp). Off cuts, carcasses, 4-D animals, grains, etc. are processed and cooked down at incredibly high heats, stripping out the vast majority of anything remotely resembling nutrition. Additives, dyes, preservatives, and chemicals are added back in to make it “healthy” and palatable. There are some better kibbles out there, ones that come in grain free varieties, but at their heart, they’re all heavily processed, overly supplemented and about as far away from the original form of food as you can possibly get.
Cooking:
Okay, so that’s the basic science. One more thing that comes up a lot is feeding cooked rather than raw. The vast majority of the time, there’s no argument being made that cooking food is better FOR THE DOG than feeding raw; instead, it’s a question of human health. I’ll get to that, but in terms of benefits to the dog, raw is clearly superior. Applying heat, by definition, changes the proteins, amino acids, and fats. Up to 50% of the vitamins and minerals are lost when cooked. For humans, who get plenty of vitamins and minerals from veggies, fruits, and grains, this isn’t a big deal, but it’s distinctly worse for a carnivore. Dogs didn’t eat cooked food for the first 32,940 years of domestication. Additionally, you cannot feed cooked bones to a dog. Cooked bones dehydrate and then can splinter, leading to potential intestinal perforations. This is why you’ve long been told never to let a dog have chicken bones. Raw bones, on the other hand, are incredibly difficult to splinter.
Bacteria:
Now that those arguments are out of the way, there is the big elephant in the room – bacteria. For me, this is a question of acceptable risk. I believe (as above) that the species appropriate diet for my dog is raw meat and bones. Given this, I am willing to accept a slight increase in risk from food borne pathogens. By inviting an animal into my home, I’ve already brought bacteria into the house. Most household pets carry some strains of salmonella and other bacteria in their digestive systems. A lot of humans do too, along with e. coli and a host of other nasty things, but our immune systems are generally up to the task (and very few people are arguing against having children because of this).
I choose to partake in plenty of behaviours that slightly increase my risk of getting food poisoning or otherwise sick. I prepare my own meat, which means I often have raw poultry in the house. I eat raw, rare and undercooked meats (beef, duck, pork, etc.) and seafoods. I lick the beaters after making baked goods with raw eggs. Feeding raw meat to your dog is really no different. I take proper precautions about handwashing and sanitization in the kitchen and I don’t handle feces without washing my hands. Most food borne pathogens do not survive in dog saliva, skin or fur. There have been literally zero cases of salmonella or other infection attributed to feeding raw.
Notably, salmonella, listeria, and e coli are significant concerns for kibble fed dogs. The FDA has already issued 7 recalls for popular brands of dog and cat food for salmonella and 1 for listeria this year alone. The plaque buildup from eating kibble additionally provides a good host for salmonella growth, and there have been cases of people getting sick from handling contaminated kibble or dog treats.
Benefits: (WARNING: I’m about to mention dog poop several times in this paragraph. Sorry.)
So why do I think it’s worth it? I have fed several dogs on an entirely raw diet. My current dog has not seen a piece of kibble since she was 10 weeks old and we brought her home. She has no waxy buildup in her ears, her teeth have never been brushed or cleaned but have no plaque buildup. Her coat is thick, full, and shiny. She has no doggy breath and next to no doggy smell. Her stools are nearly odorless, well formed, and small (most people suggest their dog’s output is reduced by 50-70%, since they’re using almost everything they eat). In fact, the grass in her bathroom area tends to grow significantly better than elsewhere in the yard; this ought to be the natural state of things instead of worrying about grass burn. I have no problems controlling her weight, even though Corgis tend to be prone to obesity (this is common sense – what happens to people when they eat a high carb, highly processed, overly sugared diet?). She gets mental stimulation from ripping apart her food and has to really use her neck and jaw muscles.
In short, she gets a ton of benefits from eating a species appropriate diet and it makes my life easier to boot.
How:
Here’s what I do. I feed as many different proteins as I can possibly find, as many organs as I can possibly find, and in ways that are as close to the whole animal as I can get. I usually target 2%-3% of her adult weight (she’s just under 30 lbs, so she gets roughly .5-1 lb per day), but I don’t stress about it. I generally feed about 70% muscle meat, 20% bone, and 10% organ meat (organ meat is going to be anything defined as a secreting organ, I shoot for half liver, half other organs), though I certainly don’t worry about those percentages in every meal. So long as over a week or two she’s getting roughly those amounts, she’s good. The general recommendation is actually 80% muscle meat, 10% bone and 10% organ meat, but I find mine does a little better with slightly more bone. It varies from dog to dog.
A large part of her diet comes from whatever we’re having on any given day. If we’re having chicken, she may get a chicken thigh or leg quarter. The bag of organs that comes with a whole chicken usually goes to her. If I’m trimming up some beef, she gets all the stuff I cut off. I also have a local supplier where I purchase bits not usually sold for humans (green tripe, pancreas, brains, necks and frames, etc.) She mostly gets grass fed meats, so I don’t worry much about her omega-3s, but I do feed salmon on a regular basis.
Veggies:
The question of whether to feed fruits and vegetables is a fairly hotly debated topic. I don’t think they’re necessary (again, carnivore), but I do feed them occasionally for variety and treats. If we have apples that are starting to turn, she loves them. I dump the scraps from veggies (no onions!) and fruits into the food processor (dogs can’t break down the cell walls of plants, so you have to puree them for any nutritional value) and mix that with some raw eggs (shells and all) from time to time. She loves when I make miso soup, since she gets the kombu and bonito after I strain my dashi.
Getting Started:
If you’re transitioning from kibble to raw, I wouldn’t mix them. Normally, even if you feed contaminated meat, it’s in and out of the dog in 3-4 hours; bacteria don’t have time to multiply and take hold. Grains, however, are not well digested and sit in the gut for a long time. Any bacteria introduced into the system then have time to take hold, so you can create a situation where they can actually get sick from a pathogen they otherwise would not have been susceptible to.
Instead, I would transition as follows. For the first two weeks, pick one protein (something easily digestible, like chicken) and feed nothing but chicken for 1-2 weeks. When they’re doing well (check the stools, they should be firm), add in a second protein (turkey, rabbit, beef, pork, whatever) and watch for another week. Then add in an organ meat (usually liver). Be careful, liver is rich, and if you add in too much at once, you will get diarrhea! Don’t try to feed 2 lbs of liver, instead, add an ounce with their current meal once or twice a week. Continue on introducing new proteins and food sources and giving them time to adjust (although after a couple of months, there probably doesn’t need to be any adjustment period).
Make sure to feed parts that are sized appropriately. You want your dog to need to chew; if they can swallow the food in one gulp, you’re not doing it right. A small dog may do fine on a chicken neck, but your large one may need a quarter or half chicken at once. Feel free to feed whole animals if you can get them. Organs, heads, feathers, fur, scales – all of it can be eaten. Don’t feed the weight bearing bones of large herbivores (so no cow femur, for instance). Those bones are too big and hard.
I use two things to keep an eye on how my dog is doing. The first is the weight check – I feel her lower ribs. If I can feel them without too much pressure, she’s right on target. If I can’t feel them (or can’t without really pushing down), I decrease the food and up the exercise. If I can feel them without any pressure at all, I give her a bit more food. The second is the stool check. If her stools are loose, I know I need to add in some more bone and back off on the organ meat for a bit. If they’re coming out crumbly and white, she’s had too much bone. (Note, however, that they will turn white within a day or so, then disintegrate into a powder. This is normal.)
A side note for cats – cats have much more stringent nutrient requirements (if they don’t get enough taurine, they will die). Feeding them raw can be done, and I do advocate taking a close look at what you’re feeding a cat, since they’re obligate carnivores, but it requires more research and preparation.
Final Notes:
The nice thing about dogs, and part of what made them part of human society, is that they are very adaptable. Your average dog will be okay on any diet you choose to feed. Is it optimal? I’d say no, but we’ve all seen the anecdotes of the guy who lived to 100 on nothing but fast food and cigarettes. Everyone has to choose for themselves what they feed to their pets.
However, we’re all on Kaplifestyle because we feel like optimal nutrition leads to improved health and well-being. We skip the drive-thrus, but also skip the protein shakes, since something being marketed as healthy doesn’t make it so. Instead, we choose whole, real foods in as close to their natural form as we can. There isn’t any reason our choices for our animals should be any different.
Prioritizing effectively is a skill like any other and therefore requires deliberate practice.
When we engage in weight training, we deliberately overload our muscles and ask them handle progressively heavier loads. We instantly comprehend that if we were to only train one body part while ignoring the rest, only the area we trained is going to get bigger and stronger.
Our brains are much the same way. It is not some magical entity; it’s a physical part of our bodies. Like every other physical part of our bodies, it changes and develops based on what we ask it to do. When we engage in tasks that are neurologically challenging, our brain affirmatively begins to rewire itself. New connections are formed, old ones are cleaned up and discarded. Yet we all pine for the ability to identify our day’s, week’s, month’s most critical tasks and ensure that they get tackled. Like children, shiny things catch our eyes and drag us down rabbit holes. We are training ourselves to be unable to focus and dole out attention appropriately. From qz.com:
Our ever-present phones allow us to fill all our time productively, to communicate in real-time, and to juggle multiple tasks, swatting away incoming demands like some super-charged task-ninja, potent and efficient. As we seek to maximize our time, we slice and dice it into ever-smaller increments. This leads to what Brigid Schulte calls time-confetti; however, the real impact isn’t on our time, but on our attention. When we scatter our attention across a thousand micro-activities, we prevent ourselves from engaging deeply or thinking properly.
In essence, we are worse at our most attention worthy activities as a result.
Imagine you’re a baseball player. You’ve set your sights on a video session in which you’re prepared to break down your delivery or your swing. You grab a cup of coffee and your iPad and settle in to watch your last outing or at-bat, yellow legal pad in hand (you’re all grown up). After the first few pitches, your phone buzzes. It’s your girlfriend, and she’s texting to talk about where she’ll meet you postgame. You go back and forth for fifteen minutes, she tells you about the fight she had with her mom. You look at the time. It’s 4:15. Stretch is at 4:25.
You’ve not given your full attention to either the video or your girlfriend, and both will suffer as a result. Our continual search to ensure constant productivity and multitasking might be making us less effective. From the New York Times:
According to a 2011 study, on a typical day, we take in the equivalent of about 174 newspapers’ worth of information, five times as much as we did in 1986… If you’re feeling overwhelmed, there’s a reason: The processing capacity of the conscious mind is limited…the attentional filter, helps to orient our attention, to tell us what to pay attention to and what we can safely ignore. This undoubtedly evolved to alert us to predators and other dangerous situations. The constant flow of information from Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram, text messages and the like engages that system, and we find ourselves not sustaining attention on any one thing for very long — the curse of the information age.
Moreover, it makes us affirmatively feel worse. The article continues:
If the relationship between the central executive system and the mind-wandering system is like a seesaw, then the insula — the attentional switch — is like an adult holding one side down so that the other stays up in the air. The efficacy of this switch varies from person to person, in some functioning smoothly, in others rather rusty. But switch it does, and if it is called upon to switch too often, we feel tired and a bit dizzy, as though we were seesawing too rapidly.
That conversation with your girl had to take place. But did it have to happen then? The more that we’re able to divide up our day into defined periods, in which we focus our attention on the task in front of us, the stronger we’ll be. If we designate 30 minutes post batting practice to catch up on our personal needs, we’re a better boyfriend – and we’re a better hitter. We give our girlfriend our full attention as well as our video work, and both improve.
We already know the application in athletic competition. Imagine you stroll up to the plate and are locked in. You watch two pitches just off the edge outside come in and are quickly up 2-0. But baseball has a new rule – now you have to put the bat aside, walk down the right field line and sign autographs. It’s about the fans, right? Meanwhile, the pitcher stays focused on the mound, tossing a few warmup pitches to stay loose.
When you step back into the box, it doesn’t matter how much advantage you had in the count – you’re now distracted. You’ve lost the upper hand.
We see this all the time in the NFL. Coaches try to ice the kicker – calling time out right as he approaches to strike the field goal, hoping to distract him and affect his attention. During those timeouts, what if the kicker decided to go catch up on an email, rationalizing it’s a better use of time than standing around doing nothing? We’d see significantly more shanked FGs. Instead, he does everything in his power to stay locked in, focused, ignoring whatever is going on around him.
In athletic competition, we generally refer to this as a period of “flow,” of being “in the zone.” In these moments, time ceases to have meaning; we are completely absorbed in our at bat, our pitching. Everything seems to slow down and our senses seem heightened. These moments come from doling out our attention as though it were a precious resource. This state of flow is backed up by science. From qz.com:
Life-enhancing conversations with loved ones are disemboweled with frequent “productive” glances at the inbox; our ability to think is decimated by the distraction of the ping and the ring. We maintain a state of chaotic mental activity that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls psychic entropy. This is the opposite of the optimal psychological state of flow, where attention is allowed to linger, to sink into an activity without distraction, where we bring our thoughts, actions, and goals into perfect synchronicity for extended periods. Flow doesn’t happen in splinters of time, but in great big lumps of attention.
Limiting distractions requires willpower. Prioritizing effectively is prudent, but the only way to train your brain is by practicing deliberately over the course of time.
her home. She has no waxy buildup in her ears, her teeth have never been brushed or cleaned but have no plaque buildup. Her coat is thick, full, and shiny. She has no doggy breath and next to no doggy smell. Her stools are nearly odorless, well formed, and small (most people suggest their dog’s output is reduced by 50-70%, since they’re using almost everything they eat). In fact, the grass in her bathroom area tends to grow significantly better than elsewhere in the yard; this ought to be the natural state of things instead of worrying about grass burn. I have no problems controlling her weight, even though Corgis tend to be prone to obesity (this is common sense – what happens to people when they eat a high carb, highly processed, overly sugared diet?). She gets mental stimulation from ripping apart her food and has to really use her neck and jaw muscles.
can get. I usually target 2%-3% of her adult weight (she’s just under 30 lbs, so she gets roughly .5-1 lb per day), but I don’t stress about it. I generally feed about 70% muscle meat, 20% bone, and 10% organ meat (organ meat is going to be anything defined as a secreting organ, I shoot for half liver, half other organs), though I certainly don’t worry about those percentages in every meal. So long as over a week or two she’s getting roughly those amounts, she’s good. The general recommendation is actually 80% muscle meat, 10% bone and 10% organ meat, but I find mine does a little better with slightly more bone. It varies from dog to dog.