""More people may know more about dogs than ever before, but it is often a shallow sort of knowledge that is easily exploited by self-styled dog experts for personal gain,""
Whenever you start seeing somewhat obscure or at least not quite mainstream knowledge take flight in infomercials or get celeb endorsement you know there is snake oil selling going on.
Like, Paleo and Keto are good things, they really are, I agree with what their tenants are. Together, it is simply don't eat grains, don't eat refined sugars, don't eat legumes, don't eat shitty oils; eat meat, real vegs, some fruit, use coconut oil and olive oil and lard... but with 30g of carbs a day and a slant towards high fat.
Where it goes wrong? The words Keto and Paleo on the product packaging (beyond the fact that "product packaging" usually means it isn't Paleo to begin with), and merely slapping the words on products skyrockets the price.
The diets themselves aren't snake oil, but the bullshit peddlers showed up to derail Keto and Paleo for their own profit.
Except that there's no proper nutritional evidence that there is any problem at all with eating grains or legumes if you are a normal healthy person. I'm not sure there's any evidence that there's a problem with vegetable oils either. Bullshit is pervasive.
Except you're going about it the wrong way. We've eaten simple unrefined foods for as long as society has existed. For example, what only existed recently has been highly refined seed oils like corn, rapeseed, and canola.
It is up to them to prove that they are safe for human consumption, something that they have been unable to do. However, to continue the example, those types of oils are high in PUFAs (and specifically, high in Omega 6), and this has been linked to basically every modern first world disease, including diabetes and cancer.
The same applies to grains: cereals such as wheat hybridize in ways that are unusual. There is probably a level of certain chemicals (such as, but not limited to, prolamins, agglutinin, and amylase trypsin inhibitors) that are safe for human consumption, but the hybridization of these grasses for modern commercial production have greatly increased the amount of these chemicals in a given food product.
Just like the oils, these hybrids are a recent invention and no science was done before they were pushed into commercial production to prove if they are safe. Unfortunately, more and more scientific papers are coming out that they are not safe and cannot be made safe.
I've taken the logical and scientific choice to stop consuming these foods. During this time, although my caloric intake has not varied enough to explain the results, I lost around 130 pounds in a year: the only change I made was removing foods that are on the list.
Look: Feeding the world on Paleo diet is impossible (right now ... with increased use of insects and sustainable ocean farming not based on rainforest soy that may change).
When one choice is to recommend a diet that will significantly increase green house gas emissions and yet still be totally unavailable to poor people; and another diet which might be marginally worse, then yes the burden of proof should be on the former.
Everyone switching to Paleo diet would be disastrous; and people HAVE attained 100+ years on grain diets, i.e. it is a matter of microoptimization not outright toxicity.
(Also you say "only change you made", but did you really measure calorie intake exactly before the change of diet? A lot of diets lead to weight reduction simply due to people starting to think about what they eat and calculate calories...the act of thinking about what you eat and counting calories itself will reduce calorie intake and increase healthiness of food consumed, leaving most people with no comparison point, hence a lot of hyped diets. Did you try using as much mental energy on a healthy diet containing grains as a comparisonr point? Otherwise you do not even have an anecdote).
We already grow sufficient amounts of common vegetables like carrots, and the members of the cabbage family, and potatoes, and onions, and garlic, and whatever else.
Corn and rice and cereal grains are extremely poor uses of the farm land we have. They are nutrient poor, and the last thing we need to be feeding to poor/starving people is nutrient poor foods.
Most of the reason we have starving people in the world is mismanagement of what we already grow, not that we don't grow enough.
I also don't care what the statistical outliers do. The average American lives far shorter lives than our medical and technological prowess would otherwise indicate.
Sorry, I thought I was reading about the kind of diet where a potato would be the worst thing ever. I.e. avoid carbohydrates. Apologies.
I agree that we grow more than enough food today but we also do not live sustainably, we must reduce resource consumption or hit the wall at some point. At some point there is no more rainforest to burn.
There are way too many things that changed recently to have conclusions on diets. Environment and chemical residues, sedentary lifestyles, lack of exercise, use of drugs (antibiotics and guts flora are now suspected to have interactions) and even more insidious stuff like our social structure changes.
And yet many people still manage to live a pretty long and healthy life nowadays with "regular" diets (ie with cereal, yet home prepared and with the right quantity), but not so much while being morbidly obese, drinking water full of lead or smoking...
I mean I'm not all against special diets, and to each his own, but this focus on diet as some kind of miracle remedy that let us live better without having to put other efforts into it makes no sense to me.
> When one choice is to recommend a diet that will significantly increase green house gas emissions and yet still be totally unavailable to poor people; and another diet which might be marginally worse, then yes the burden of proof should be on the former.
We have choice Ac with drawbacks Ad and choice Bc with drawbacks Bd. How is it remotely reasonable that the burden of proof is exclusively on Ac/Ad?
> During this time, although my caloric intake has not varied enough to explain the results, I lost around 130 pounds in a year: the only change I made was removing foods that are on the list.
Not necessarily. Physics and biology agree that calories absorbed < calories expended = weight loss, but complicated biological mechanisms are involved in both how many calories are absorbed from food and how many are expended. If the diets in question prevent the body from absorbing a good deal of their calories from food and/or act on the metabolism to increase caloric expenditure, then what he is saying could be true.
I myself have lost about that amount of weight and I didn't do it on a ketogenic or paleo diet. I certainly tried those diets, because a fat guy desperate to lose weight would try just about anything, and they didn't work for me at all.
My personal opinion is that most men who embrace those diets do so because it allows them to eat high-fat "manly" foods like steak and bacon all the time and still virtue-signal that they're being "healthy", something more traditional diets involving a lot of salad don't do. Which isn't to say that those diets lack merit, mind you, I'm not a nutritional scientist.
Which brings up my next point: most people who promote these diets are not nutritional scientists. That's why it is hard to look at them as anything but a fad, and there is so much money to be made in selling people "easy" solutions to weight loss that we really aught to be very weary of anything being hyped.
> s, I lost around 130 pounds in a year: the only change I made was removing foods that are on the list.
That's pretty drastic. Have you been checked for medical causes for the weight loss? When I lost 40 in a year my doctor was alarmed (I was just eating less and walking more ).
>The same applies to grains: cereals such as wheat hybridize in ways that are unusual. There is probably a level of certain chemicals (such as, but not limited to, prolamins, agglutinin, and amylase trypsin inhibitors) that are safe for human consumption, but the hybridization of these grasses for modern commercial production have greatly increased the amount of these chemicals in a given food product.
Is it not possible to buy brown rice thats not polluted with chemicals? I eat brownrice from costco, am I consuming chemicals everyday?
> While most crops don’t readily take up much arsenic from the ground, rice is different because it takes up arsenic from soil and water more readily than other grains.
> Long-term exposure to high levels of arsenic is associated with higher rates of skin, bladder, and lung cancers, as well as heart disease. The FDA is currently examining these and other long-term effects.
> Except you're going about it the wrong way. We've eaten simple unrefined foods for as long as society has existed.
Yes, and the average life expectancy was much much lower.
> I've taken the logical and scientific choice to stop consuming these foods.
There's nothing demonstrably scientific about the choices you;ve made other than a distrust of anything that's been innovated in the last ~8,000 years if you're talking about hexaploid wheat.
I'm a celiac and I legitimately believe a lot more people have problems with food than they realize. I'm guessing most people come across one of these diets and end up feeling better than they ever have. It was the same for my dad with the Atkin's Diet. The idea of cutting out carbs was revolutionary to him (it turned out to just be wheat) and solved a lot of his issues.
You see the same thing with MSG. I get a sinus headache from it. Many people have no issue with it. From this, you see people claiming online that someone having a problem with it is imagining it, or that it's just a rumor.
Doing an elimination diet changed my life. Every single one of my medical issues (daily sinus issues, digestion issues) was caused by things I was eating. I'm now a huge advocate for people experimenting with food and cutting certain things out. If you consistently feel shitty, it might be the best decision you ever make.
But ultimately, dogs and humans are innately different. I don't think diet is a good comparison IMO. Just take a look here, you can see that some human foods can be rather dangerous to dogs (https://www.thegoodypet.com/bad-toxic-foods-for-dogs)
When you actually look at the science, the best advice seems to still be Michael Pollan's mantra: "Eat [real] food. Mostly plants. Not too much. [And get good exercise.]"
The book isn't a book about training dogs. It's more a book about how dogs came to be the way there are. Quoted from the article: "The Domestic Dog" walks readers through the many questions they might have about dogs. What is up with the wacky genetics underpinning some dogs having itty bitty short legs and others immensely long ones? How can a Chihuahua and Great Dane be members of the same species? How (and how much) do genetics contribute to different behavioral traits, and how is this even calculated or assessed? Is there a relationship between early life experiences and later behaviors? What does it mean when a dog barks incessantly or tears up the house in your absence? What is life like for feral or free roaming dogs living on the outskirts of human societies? How do they get food, and what are their relationships like with other dogs? Those questions represent just a tiny fraction of the issues investigated in this 416-page volume.
Some of the wide variation between dog breeds is made possible because they have 39 chromosomes, rather more than many other species. Thus its somewhat easier for breeders to select for the characteristics they want without getting too many unwanted genes.
I'd say it's not incredibly hard, but it's certainly not intuitive. Training animals (including people) is very much a learned skill.
Our primate brains get frustrated easily when a canine brain doesn't pick up what we think should be instinctual, and we're very bad at applying well-timed primary and secondary reinforcers until we're shown how.
We're also particularly bad at pacing the jumps in difficulty we should be giving when training new behaviors. I see this all the time, whether it be crate training, heelwork, nosework, teaching commands as simple as "sit" or "speak" on vocal command, etc.
I wish more people saw it this way. My family calls me 'the dog whisperer' because I've always had a good touch with dogs. It's nothing special really, just that I treat training like a fun mutual game. It's like a puzzle. You just have to figure out the exact set of incentives and conditions to establish a behavior and then to generalize it. You have to teach yourself how to teach the dog.
And every dog is different, so you have to be good at modeling their mental state and identifying their needs, which is a huge part of what you need to teach yourself. For example, my dog can be insanely annoying because he has tons of energy and begs for play constantly. His old owners couldn't deal with it anymore so I adopted him. A longish 1.5 mile walk every day plus a brief game of fetch and he's totally fine. Plus consistent lack of response to his begging. All it took to solve his behavior problem was understanding his emotions and strategizing to manage them. He was anxious because he had too much energy. Burn off some of that and stop rewarding the bad behavior, then he's fine. It's been three months and he's already a far happier, better behaved dog.
My point being that this problem solving approach requires the owner to want to 'learn' the dog every bit as much as they want the dog to learn behaviors. Otherwise you'll demand the dog behave a certain way and get frustrated when it doesn't. Then you take the frustration out on the dog, or the dog senses it and gets anxious because it can't figure out what it did wrong. This leads to a downward spiral of misbehavior and escalating but ineffective negative reinforcement. Even good trainers get frustrated but loving the mutual problem solving activity in and of itself and loving the dog for its own sake go a long way toward reducing trainer frustration and its impact on the dog.
> "The Koehler Method of Dog Training" is considered the classic.
It may be classic, but like much of the advice mentioned in the article isn't really based on good science.
Negative reinforcement, like the use of a choke collar, can work, but it makes for not only an unhappy dog, but one that is less eager to learn as time goes (hence the old saying , "you can't teach and old dog new tricks").
Current training science centers on positive reinforcement, and it's a method that is not only humane, but that works amazingly well at making a happy, inquisitive dog that loves people and loves to learn from people.
As your book suggestion shows, our shared knowledge is in drastic needs of an update. We definitely need more science based books for sure, and we need that knowledge to get into the mainstream thinking about our relationship with our dogs.
I'd recommend any books written by Patricia McConnell as a step in the direction of understanding dogs in an effort to train them.
Fantastic, I love reading about canine learning. Seeing Patricia McConnell's (of "The Other End of the Leash" fame) adornment of it is a huge reason for me to buy this book. Training my dog with that book (and Don't Shoot the Dog, by Pryor) framing how I interpret what my dog tells me has been hugely beneficial for both my sanity, and I'm sure my dog's as well.
I have a dog and I'm amazed every day how well we can communicate with a different species. My dog doesn't understand my words like we do, but he understands my intentions very well most of the time.
Obviously this only works very well if you have a deep connection to the dog. Doubt you can communicate with a random dog on the same level.
Looking on Amazon, a book, "The Domestic Cat: The Biology of its Behaviour" looks to be it, anyone read both books?
Incidentally, the pricing for the dog book is a bit odd, with the Kindle edition costing about 2% more than the paperback (also sold and supplied by Amazon). Not what I would have expected, given the lower distribution costs.
"Incidentally, the pricing for the dog book is a bit odd, with the Kindle edition costing about 2% more than the paperback (also sold and supplied by Amazon). Not what I would have expected, given the lower distribution costs."
46 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 68.5 ms ] threadWhenever you start seeing somewhat obscure or at least not quite mainstream knowledge take flight in infomercials or get celeb endorsement you know there is snake oil selling going on.
But I'm intrigued. Sounds like a solid book.
Like, Paleo and Keto are good things, they really are, I agree with what their tenants are. Together, it is simply don't eat grains, don't eat refined sugars, don't eat legumes, don't eat shitty oils; eat meat, real vegs, some fruit, use coconut oil and olive oil and lard... but with 30g of carbs a day and a slant towards high fat.
Where it goes wrong? The words Keto and Paleo on the product packaging (beyond the fact that "product packaging" usually means it isn't Paleo to begin with), and merely slapping the words on products skyrockets the price.
The diets themselves aren't snake oil, but the bullshit peddlers showed up to derail Keto and Paleo for their own profit.
Except that there's no proper nutritional evidence that there is any problem at all with eating grains or legumes if you are a normal healthy person. I'm not sure there's any evidence that there's a problem with vegetable oils either. Bullshit is pervasive.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pufa+cancer&t=h_&ia=web
It is up to them to prove that they are safe for human consumption, something that they have been unable to do. However, to continue the example, those types of oils are high in PUFAs (and specifically, high in Omega 6), and this has been linked to basically every modern first world disease, including diabetes and cancer.
The same applies to grains: cereals such as wheat hybridize in ways that are unusual. There is probably a level of certain chemicals (such as, but not limited to, prolamins, agglutinin, and amylase trypsin inhibitors) that are safe for human consumption, but the hybridization of these grasses for modern commercial production have greatly increased the amount of these chemicals in a given food product.
Just like the oils, these hybrids are a recent invention and no science was done before they were pushed into commercial production to prove if they are safe. Unfortunately, more and more scientific papers are coming out that they are not safe and cannot be made safe.
I've taken the logical and scientific choice to stop consuming these foods. During this time, although my caloric intake has not varied enough to explain the results, I lost around 130 pounds in a year: the only change I made was removing foods that are on the list.
When one choice is to recommend a diet that will significantly increase green house gas emissions and yet still be totally unavailable to poor people; and another diet which might be marginally worse, then yes the burden of proof should be on the former.
Everyone switching to Paleo diet would be disastrous; and people HAVE attained 100+ years on grain diets, i.e. it is a matter of microoptimization not outright toxicity.
(Also you say "only change you made", but did you really measure calorie intake exactly before the change of diet? A lot of diets lead to weight reduction simply due to people starting to think about what they eat and calculate calories...the act of thinking about what you eat and counting calories itself will reduce calorie intake and increase healthiness of food consumed, leaving most people with no comparison point, hence a lot of hyped diets. Did you try using as much mental energy on a healthy diet containing grains as a comparisonr point? Otherwise you do not even have an anecdote).
We already grow sufficient amounts of common vegetables like carrots, and the members of the cabbage family, and potatoes, and onions, and garlic, and whatever else.
Corn and rice and cereal grains are extremely poor uses of the farm land we have. They are nutrient poor, and the last thing we need to be feeding to poor/starving people is nutrient poor foods.
Most of the reason we have starving people in the world is mismanagement of what we already grow, not that we don't grow enough.
I also don't care what the statistical outliers do. The average American lives far shorter lives than our medical and technological prowess would otherwise indicate.
I agree that we grow more than enough food today but we also do not live sustainably, we must reduce resource consumption or hit the wall at some point. At some point there is no more rainforest to burn.
And yet many people still manage to live a pretty long and healthy life nowadays with "regular" diets (ie with cereal, yet home prepared and with the right quantity), but not so much while being morbidly obese, drinking water full of lead or smoking...
I mean I'm not all against special diets, and to each his own, but this focus on diet as some kind of miracle remedy that let us live better without having to put other efforts into it makes no sense to me.
We have choice Ac with drawbacks Ad and choice Bc with drawbacks Bd. How is it remotely reasonable that the burden of proof is exclusively on Ac/Ad?
Or does the additional 15% to 20% of PUFAs in Canola just cross some tragic threshold?
That is impossible. You're deluding yourself.
I myself have lost about that amount of weight and I didn't do it on a ketogenic or paleo diet. I certainly tried those diets, because a fat guy desperate to lose weight would try just about anything, and they didn't work for me at all.
My personal opinion is that most men who embrace those diets do so because it allows them to eat high-fat "manly" foods like steak and bacon all the time and still virtue-signal that they're being "healthy", something more traditional diets involving a lot of salad don't do. Which isn't to say that those diets lack merit, mind you, I'm not a nutritional scientist.
Which brings up my next point: most people who promote these diets are not nutritional scientists. That's why it is hard to look at them as anything but a fad, and there is so much money to be made in selling people "easy" solutions to weight loss that we really aught to be very weary of anything being hyped.
That's pretty drastic. Have you been checked for medical causes for the weight loss? When I lost 40 in a year my doctor was alarmed (I was just eating less and walking more ).
Is it not possible to buy brown rice thats not polluted with chemicals? I eat brownrice from costco, am I consuming chemicals everyday?
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-muc...
> While most crops don’t readily take up much arsenic from the ground, rice is different because it takes up arsenic from soil and water more readily than other grains.
> Long-term exposure to high levels of arsenic is associated with higher rates of skin, bladder, and lung cancers, as well as heart disease. The FDA is currently examining these and other long-term effects.
https://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodborneIllnessContaminants/Metals...
Yes, and the average life expectancy was much much lower.
> I've taken the logical and scientific choice to stop consuming these foods.
There's nothing demonstrably scientific about the choices you;ve made other than a distrust of anything that's been innovated in the last ~8,000 years if you're talking about hexaploid wheat.
You see the same thing with MSG. I get a sinus headache from it. Many people have no issue with it. From this, you see people claiming online that someone having a problem with it is imagining it, or that it's just a rumor.
Doing an elimination diet changed my life. Every single one of my medical issues (daily sinus issues, digestion issues) was caused by things I was eating. I'm now a huge advocate for people experimenting with food and cutting certain things out. If you consistently feel shitty, it might be the best decision you ever make.
I eat brownrice with lentils (daal) and chickpeas with yogurt, almost every other day :\.
why are these bad?
When you actually look at the science, the best advice seems to still be Michael Pollan's mantra: "Eat [real] food. Mostly plants. Not too much. [And get good exercise.]"
Training dogs isn't very hard. Most dog problems reflect the owner's problems.
Our primate brains get frustrated easily when a canine brain doesn't pick up what we think should be instinctual, and we're very bad at applying well-timed primary and secondary reinforcers until we're shown how.
We're also particularly bad at pacing the jumps in difficulty we should be giving when training new behaviors. I see this all the time, whether it be crate training, heelwork, nosework, teaching commands as simple as "sit" or "speak" on vocal command, etc.
in my view the "dog training" isn't just dog training, it is also training of the dog parent, i.e. a mutual training.
And every dog is different, so you have to be good at modeling their mental state and identifying their needs, which is a huge part of what you need to teach yourself. For example, my dog can be insanely annoying because he has tons of energy and begs for play constantly. His old owners couldn't deal with it anymore so I adopted him. A longish 1.5 mile walk every day plus a brief game of fetch and he's totally fine. Plus consistent lack of response to his begging. All it took to solve his behavior problem was understanding his emotions and strategizing to manage them. He was anxious because he had too much energy. Burn off some of that and stop rewarding the bad behavior, then he's fine. It's been three months and he's already a far happier, better behaved dog.
My point being that this problem solving approach requires the owner to want to 'learn' the dog every bit as much as they want the dog to learn behaviors. Otherwise you'll demand the dog behave a certain way and get frustrated when it doesn't. Then you take the frustration out on the dog, or the dog senses it and gets anxious because it can't figure out what it did wrong. This leads to a downward spiral of misbehavior and escalating but ineffective negative reinforcement. Even good trainers get frustrated but loving the mutual problem solving activity in and of itself and loving the dog for its own sake go a long way toward reducing trainer frustration and its impact on the dog.
It may be classic, but like much of the advice mentioned in the article isn't really based on good science.
Negative reinforcement, like the use of a choke collar, can work, but it makes for not only an unhappy dog, but one that is less eager to learn as time goes (hence the old saying , "you can't teach and old dog new tricks").
Current training science centers on positive reinforcement, and it's a method that is not only humane, but that works amazingly well at making a happy, inquisitive dog that loves people and loves to learn from people.
As your book suggestion shows, our shared knowledge is in drastic needs of an update. We definitely need more science based books for sure, and we need that knowledge to get into the mainstream thinking about our relationship with our dogs.
I'd recommend any books written by Patricia McConnell as a step in the direction of understanding dogs in an effort to train them.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B002IPZBP4/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=...
And here's a rundown of the history and evolution of dog training methods http://www.naiaonline.org/articles/article/the-evolution-of-...
https://apdt.com/resource-center/recommended-books-dvds-pet-...
Obviously this only works very well if you have a deep connection to the dog. Doubt you can communicate with a random dog on the same level.
Dogs understand voice and intonation.
Looking on Amazon, a book, "The Domestic Cat: The Biology of its Behaviour" looks to be it, anyone read both books?
Incidentally, the pricing for the dog book is a bit odd, with the Kindle edition costing about 2% more than the paperback (also sold and supplied by Amazon). Not what I would have expected, given the lower distribution costs.
[1] "The Best Books for Cat Lovers" [ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/dog-spies/the-best-book... ]
All cats are more or less the same. You can watch some big cat nature documentaries and extrapolate to your domestic cat.
Welcome to the world of modern publishing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_dogs_in_Moscow