Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 135 Editor's Choice: 12
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The "fluke" is not a fluke!
[Read the article: The truth about cat and dog food]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As for the comment about how the melamine "contamination" was a "fluke". It was not. I can't believe this point hasn't gotten much press, but it has been included in the middle of some articles (Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, to name two), that this was not merely contamination, and it wasn't just "spiking" wheat gluten with melamine to boost the perceived protein content to make their wheat gluten look better than other companies' wheat gluten.
This was wheat FLOUR, which is mostly carbohydrates, not protein, mixed with melamine to make its testable protein content look "right" - as if the end product actually was wheat gluten.
That's not contamination - that's fraud. I won't actually claim malicious poisoning, because apparently no one realized that melamine was so poisonous, more so to cats than dogs (15 of the 16 "confirmed" pet deaths were cats). But it's still a deliberate act, and not some "fluke" of contamination.
So, even if it had turned out that melamine was not actually poisonous to cats and dogs, pets being fed this food would probably eventually start developing protein-deficiency diseases. And that in itself would probably be prosecutable if it occurred strictly within this country.
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Pigs and dogs and cats, oh my
[Read the article: The truth about cat and dog food]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]hillboy127, you asked whether it had been determined whether melamine was actually the ingredient that killed these pets, since apparently pigs have been fed melamine for quite some time with no ill effects.
Pigs are not cats, or dogs. Melamine has generally not been known to be poisonous, but that is because it was never really studied in cats. It might be non-poisonous to pigs, mildly poisonous in dogs, and much more poisonous in cats. 15 of the 16 "confirmed" pet deaths were cats. It may also be that some breeds of dogs are affected more than others. If any studies of the effect in dogs used a limited number of breeds of dogs, the results might not hold true for ALL dogs.
Onions are poisonous to cats.
Chocolate is poisonous to dogs.
Why should the effects (or non-effects) of melamine in pigs mean that it didn't poison those 15 cats and 1 dog?
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PubMed for quackery
[Read the article: Scum-sucking epicure]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]lilianejane's abstract is also available at pubmed.gov (which is "A service of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health"). I use this free resource often to see what medical research really says about something. Search it for "spirulina glycemia" and you'll hit exactly on the article. These two organizations obviously consider the Journal of Medicinal Food to be a reputable source of research.
Yes, 25 people is a small number to base any conclusion on. Especially when the 25 also includes the control group (as the abstract makes clear). However, this seems to be a pretty representative number for an initial trial. No one starts off with thousands of people! First, they need to believe (and convince someone else with grant money to hand out) that there will be an effect. And the way they do that is with a study of a couple of dozen people. If there's a significant difference, THEN you sign up your thousand plus (and hope for a STATISTICALLY significant difference).
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How is sensory deprivation different from waterboarding?
[Read the article: The CIA's favorite form of torture]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't understand how sensory deprivation is different from waterboarding. Does waterboarding leave any physical marks? I mean, it makes you FEEL like you're drowning, but you're not ACTUALLY drowning, right?
Of course I probably shouldn't be saying this. MY point is that if waterboarding shouldn't be allowed, then neither should sensory deprivation. But this ADMINISTRATION will probably hear it as - hey, yeah, waterboarding doesn't leave any physical marks! It's still allowed!
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Don't worry - It's only the first month.
[Read the article: Lose weight! Feel great! Well, maybe not]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wait three months and then see if this stuff is still flying off the shelf. If it is, I bet it will be flying at a much slower rate, and in 6 months, it'll just be a trickle - the people that still haven't heard from their friends and family about the amusing side effects. The only reason it IS flying off the shelves right now is because they're not using the phrase "anal leakage" like Olestra did!
One note about the low fat diet, though. The article mentioned limiting each meal to 15 grams of fat, and said that would only save 36 calories per meal. But, that would be 108 calories per day. At that rate you would lose an extra 10 pounds in a year - beyond what you're already losing by switching to a lower-fat diet. And/or, it helps you get to your goal weight that much quicker. So, compared with the 50 pounds per year saved by cutting out 55 grams of fat per day, plus the extra 10 pounds from the pill, that's an additional 20% of pounds lost. For only a minor risk of anal leakage.
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108 calories - response
[Read the article: Lose weight! Feel great! Well, maybe not]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]melthough, you're right. But you must know how hard it is to get those folks to walk for a whole hour, every day - even at a snail's pace. My point was that even that small number of calories, every day, add up. Remember that the flip side of that is, eating ONLY 100 extra calories every day, you'll put on 10 pounds in a year. All the more reason to eat sensibly, every day. Or even better than sensibly, to make up for the occasional fling.