Constatine
Member
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2016
- Messages
- 1,781
Wow thanks for sharing. It's amazing just how effective Ray's advice can be.Very much so. Apparently the rest of the pet world doesn't agree.
Practically all pelletized pet food is PUFA-loaded. What's worse, they add antioxidants like BHA and BHT to keep the PUFA's supposedly from oxidizing. Yet these antioxidants aren't safe for human consumption. When is it permissible to feed our pets something that's not safe for us?
Pets get sick as a result. And then they tell us certain dog breeds are prone to such and such disease, genes again. Yet we here know better that it has a lot to do with the quality of food given them.
I recently left a koi hobbyist forum out of frustration. I was questioning the use of koi food pellets that have fish oil, and I passed on some links to Ray Peat's articles. It was hard for the members to accept Ray Peat's ideas. One kept insisting what applies to humans doesn't apply to fish, not willing to consider the possibility that in that the aspect of fat consumption koi and humans may have something in common. One very influential member called Danny Roddy a "groupie" of Ray Peat. The member writes well and does a lot of research, but his fault is to not consider that what he knows so far may not be right, and isn't willing to challenge himself to an opposing viewpoint. We at Ray Peat allowed ourselves to be challenged by a viewpoint that is contrary to the mainstream narrative, and for that we are able to take back our health.
I gave up on that forum. I was trying to share my experience of not feeding fish oils to my koi. Being in the tropics, and consistent with Ray Peat's idea that at warmer temperatures saturated oils are much better than PUFAs because of the risk of oxidation, I stopped feeding commercial pellets (that are PUFA-loaded) and had my own food made for my koi. Coconut meat is one important ingredient. Being new at the hobby, I didn't expect so soon to win major prizes in our yearly local koi shows. Yet I did. Knowing enough of Ray Peat and applying its principles to raising my koi had a major impact. My koi have length (which in human terms is height), have excellent conformation (in human terms a shapely body), and excellent coloration (in human terms, it's the health as expressed in a healthy skin).
It would have been nice to share my ideas with that forum, but instead all I get is grief from members who are "invested" in very expensive koi food pellets. These pellets are fool's gold, and you have to be rich to afford them, or if not you'll become a pauper for spending on them. These hobbyists are no different from most people in making their choices as to what constitutes good food/medicine and bad food/medicine. People have a costly bias towards expensive medicine, devices, and surgeries, with the mistaken idea that quality of outcomes is directly related to the cost involved.
These hobbyists keep finding problems (too small, or too fat or too thin, or poor coloration) with the koi they raise, and end up trading them (if koi don't die first) in with their dealer for new expensive koi to raise (again), blaming the "genes" and their poor luck in getting good "genes" out of koi already selected by Japanese breeders for good future outcomes. They rarely question that genes are only one aspect of the koi's development, and continue on making the same mistakes raising their koi, and never get to win a major prize despite all the time, effort, and money they have spent. Soon these hobbyists, in order to win a major prize, resort to buying "ringers"- koi raised by breeders in Japan to full size, at great cost - and bring them in a few day before the koi show - in order to snag the Grand Champion appellation. And hobbyists seem resigned to the narrative that "only koi raised in Japan can win."
Whether it's our own health or the health of our pets, the same forces of commerialized medical quackery is at work. It truly takes a different inner compass in us to want to veer from the programming in our culture, to embrace something that is coherent and practical, and to shun the safety of relying on experts whose claim to expertise rests on us being ignorant to call them out for being quacks and interlopers.
Thanks for listening to my rant!:)