As outlined in this New York Times article, The Fast Diet, by physician Michael Mosley and food/fashion writer Mimi Spencer,  is flying off bookshelves in the UK. It promises to have a similar popularity in the United States, where it has just launched.

When we heard about the Fast Diet, we felt a twinge of recognition. That’s because we’ve interviewed zookeepers and veterinary nutritionists who’ve long recommended a gorge-and-fast approach to feeding the animals in their care, especially large carnivores. In our chapter “Fat Planet,” we describe a study done by Joanne Altman of Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas with scientists from the pet food company, Hill’s. They:

studied five captive African lions at the Topeka Zoo. The cats were switched from daily feedings to just three meals per week. The gorge-and-fast regimen, they found, improved the cats’ digestion and metabolism and decreased the amount they ate. The animals showed fewer restless pacing behaviors.

Whether or not human metabolism works in exactly the same way, it’s the environmental, evolutionary approach to eating that Mosley presents in the The Fast Diet we find most interesting…and promising.

Although we can’t speak to the weight-loss power of this new diet—or to its long term health effects—we do think human nutritionist and the dieters they advise ought to think more like veterinarians. We humans have increasingly outsourced where and what we eat to agribusinesses, supermarkets, and restaurant chains. In doing that, we’ve handed over not just the inconvenience of food gathering and preparation but also the challenge, the puzzle, and even the excitement of eating. Changing our habits and environment can make eating more a process, and perhaps a healthier one at that.

Wolves Image: “The Kill,” by By Patrick Bell (originally posted to Flickr as The Kill) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Alas, fecal therapy is exactly what you’re thinking it is. The patients in question have usually taken a course of antibiotics, which along with killing some “bad” bacteria has also depleted much of the “good” bacteria in their guts. This has left them susceptible to another bacterial infection known as C. difficile, which can prove hard or impossible to treat with standard antibiotics. That’s where the feces come in.

C. difficile bacteria can cause grave intestinal infections

Using a probe, enema, or nose tube, doctors transfer waste material from a healthy donor (usually a spouse or other family member) into the intestines of the sufferer. Within that donor stool are populations of good bacteria. Injected into the afflicted gut, these healthy microbes duke it out with the C. difficile bacteria, and eventually help stabilize—doctors say “cure”—patients’ roiling bowels.

Because it was the first to be done under controlled conditions, the Dutch study positions fecal therapy to become an accepted, routine treatment for these bacterial infections, rather than the freaky last resort alternative that’s been offered on the sly in the offices of gastroenterologists and infectious disease docs over the past few years.

But as exciting as this is for human medicine, it’s also a superb example of how much MDs could be learning from their colleagues on the other side of the species divide. In fact, veterinarians and vet nutritionists have known about fecal therapy for decades (at least).

Zoo vets have told us it’s a routine therapy for many exotic animals in their care, including primates, particularly after a round of antibiotics. They say fecal therapy is especially effective for restoring gut health in mother-infant pairs. On farms there are healthy cows and horses who serve as donor animals for sick herd-mates. Their bug-rich gastric juices are extracted through a special, permanent window (called a fistula) in their sides, and transferred to ailing animals. (See photos)

This steer, and the horse below right, have fistulas–medical windows–surgically implanted in their sides

(Denise Grady referred to this in a sentence in her New York Times piece: “Fecal therapy has often been used to cure gut trouble in cows and horses.”)

In fact, gut microbes are so front-and-center in the thinking of veterinarians that one zoo nutritionist we interviewed said she was trained to “feed the gut bugs first, then the animal.” Clearly this is something that most human doctors are just beginning to appreciate.

While writing Zoobiquity, we constantly searched for the practical applications of the many fascinating connections that exist across species. Fecal therapy is a major “so what” for One Health-style approaches. We hope it opens medical minds to the power of the microbiome, including its role in weight gain and loss. For example, meat farmers have routinely altered animal intestinal microflora to promote weight-gain in pigs, cattle, and poultry. By giving animals antibiotics, they can reliably fatten animals, using less feed. What might that tell us about the effects of antibiotics on human populations?

So while simply thinking about fecal therapy might help us reduce our appetites for a day or two, the veterinary knowledge that underlies it could have a much more lasting impact on human weight management and health.

Image Credits:

C. Difficile: By Content Providers(s): CDC/Dr. Holdeman [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Fistulated Steer: By Federal Government of the United States [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Fistulated Horse: By Todd Huffman (originally posted to Flickr as Fistulation) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Killing and transporting animals and their parts to consumers around the world is a criminal activity worth billions of dollars every year. According to the State Department, only the black markets for weapons and drugs are larger than the illegal wildlife trade. Ivory, they report, fetches nearly $1,000 per pound. At $30,000 per pound, rhinoceros horns are “literally worth their weight in gold.”

On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that the State Department is taking a firm stand on this issue. Wildlife poaching and trafficking is, she said, “stealing from the next generation.” But her plan is not to appeal simply to the noble goals of protecting habitats and conserving species. Instead, as Clinton put it at a meeting of the international Wildlife Trafficking Partnership: “protecting wildlife is…a national security issue, a public health issue, and an economic security issue.”

Of course for conservation groups and endangered animals themselves this was a robust and welcome new focus on a devastating issue. But what really caught our eye was the interdisciplinary and integrated response the State department has come up with – and the term Clinton used to describe it. She called it “holistic.” This is a term you increasingly hear in medicine. Although it can have alternative or New Age-y connotations, a holistic approach is by definition collaborative. It requires looking at relationships across separate parts. It demands conversations, creativity, and in this case a species-spanning approach.

Clinton put it like this: Whether you love animals, see it as a matter of national and global security, believe it will improve public health, or think it will help local and international economies by stamping out corrupt trade, the Wildlife Trafficking partnership has “something for everyone.” She continued:

“Therefore, we need governments, civil society, businesses, scientists, and activists to come together to educate people about the harms of wildlife trafficking. We need law enforcement personnel to prevent poachers from preying on wildlife. We need trade experts to track the movement of goods and help enforce existing trade laws. We need finance experts to study and help undermine the black markets that deal in wildlife. And most importantly, perhaps, we need to reach individuals, to convince them to make the right choices about the goods they purchase.”

I would just add one other group: we need physicians, veterinarians, and ecologists to look after the shared health of people, animals, and habitats at risk from trafficking.

What would a government initiative be without a multi-pronged strategy? The wildlife trafficking partnership has four main parts. It’s worth hearing the speech in Clinton’s voice, which you can do here, but this was the jist:

Prong #1: Diplomacy. Clinton said she will be working with world leaders to get them to agree that wildlife trafficking is a big problem. (Vladimir Putin got a personal shout-out for his leadership in conserving Siberian tigers.) Clinton added that she and President Obama would “personally bring” the message to heads of Asian governments at the East Asia Summit they’re attending together in Phnom Penh next week. She praised the work her department has done with New Zealand on establishing the largest marine protected region in the world: the Ross Sea area. And she named three new science envoys who will work with the State Department by speaking about their fields around the world: “Dr. Bernard Amadei of the University of Colorado, the founder of Engineers Without Borders; Dr. Susan Hockfield, the former president and currently faculty member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and renowned evolutionary biologist Dr. Barbara Schaal of Washington University in St. Louis.”

Prong #2: Public Diplomacy. The State Department and their partners plan to “reach beyond government” to educate and enlist interest around the problem. Their “global outreach” will include Facebook and Twitter campaigns as well as events at embassies around the world on December 4—Wildlife Conservation Day. Clinton said the message will be to “make buying goods, products from trafficked wildlife, endangered species unacceptable, socially unacceptable. We want friends to tell friends they don’t want friends who ingest, display, or otherwise use products that come from endangered species anywhere in the world.”

Prong #3: Crime Fighting and Enforcement. Through programs like the USAID-funded ARREST (Asia’s Regional Response to Endangered Species Trafficking), Clinton said she will beef up ways to go after poachers and the syndicates that deal in wildlife products. (According to their website, ARREST is “a five-year program implemented by FREELAND Foundation…fighting trafficking in illegal wildlife in Asia in three ways: reducing consumer demand; strengthening law enforcement; and strengthening regional cooperation and anti-trafficking networks.”)

Prong #4: Information-Sharing. Clinton said she would be encouraging many different countries to share  information about individual poachers and what she called the global “criminal gangs” that create supply and demand for animal parts. (To this end, Clinton said she’s asked the intelligence community to prepare an assessment of the level of illegal trafficking and penetration of criminal gangs around the world so that the State Department can see “what we’re up against.”)

It may seem a bit sad that protecting animals for their own sakes isn’t enough. But I like Secretary Clinton’s interdisciplinary plan. If the end result is conservation, I agree with her way of getting there: “Let’s put the poachers out of business.”

Rhino image: By Angela Sevin from SF Bay Area, US (Rhino relaxing) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Plano High School Football Team, 1900

It’s a story custom-made to scorch parental nerves: a teenage sex contest at an upscale high school that went on in secret for five years under the unsuspecting noses of the adults. The teens involved called it the “Fantasy Slut League.”

In this post, the Last Word on Nothing‘s Thomas Hayden tells the disturbing story of the adolescents’ competition and provides an intriguing (dare we say “zoobiquitous”?) approach to thinking about it.

The human side of the story took place at Piedmont High School in northern California. Hayden explains:

“In the competition, modeled after fantasy sports leagues, male students apparently “drafted” their female classmates and earned points for “documented engagement in sexual activities” with them, according to a letter sent to parents by the Piedmont High principal.”

An African Elephant

The animal side of the story comes in what Hayden chooses to juxtapose with the Piedmont students’ behavior: Elephants.

He writes,

“Male elephants famously go through periods of heightened aggression and sexual activity called musth. It’s apparently quite the hormone ride – testosterone levels can jump by a factor of 60, and stay that way for weeks or months. Pilanesberg [National Park in South Africa] was plagued in the late 1990s by a gang of young orphaned males, prematurely in musth and handling it poorly — by killing more that 40 white rhinoceroses, for example.

But something dramatic happened when researchers introduced six mature male elephants to the park: the young guns dropped out of musth, stopped terrorizing rhinoceroses, and presumably went back to being the elephant equivalent of nice young men.”

Hayden goes straight for the animal/human overlap. “Evidence,” he writes, “shows that in humans too, the young male impulse to gang up together and commit acts of violence – physical, sexual, emotional – is similarly damped by the presence and engagement of older men.”

While researching Zoobiquity, we also turned up stories of adolescent males behaving aggressively in bachelor groups and becoming calmer when mature males were a regular part of the social group. Sea otters groom, forage, and eat in multi-age groups where levels of aggression are low. Stallions are schooled in proper herd behavior by older males. We wrote about capuchin monkeys in whom the rowdy bachelor-group behavior of not-quite-fully mature males is quelled by older male members of the society.

(Incidentally, it’s not always dominant males who promote law and order. Female vervet monkeys, bonobos, and hyenas all play leading roles in teaching youngsters their roles.)

We also learned that animal “teens” aren’t the only ones affected by dominant, mature males. In some animal groups, the presence of alpha males can cut off lower-ranked males’ chances to breed—even when they’re fully mature adults. This so-called psychological castration has been seen in sheep and goats, deer and elk. It’s not clear to what extent hormones are involved, but what starts as a physical act of aggression—the dominant intimidating lower-ranked males—can progress into the secondary males’ eventually not even trying to approach females at all.

Piedmont school officials are understandably focusing on the girls involved, and addressing how they were affected by the League’s activities. But it would be interesting to look as well at another group that surely experienced the consequences of a secret sex competition at their school: the boys who weren’t a part of it. For every boy pulled toward the Fantasy Slut League, surely there were one (or more) who stood up to it and suffered shunning from the group or condoned it with silence out of fear of standing up to the dominant crowd. Perhaps the presence of mature males leavens hierarchies and protects other vulnerable groups as well.

We think and hope that comparative approaches like Hayden’s will bring human experts and animal experts together to find species-spanning help for teens navigating the sometimes treacherous terrain of emerging sexuality.

(Thanks to Jason Goldman of Scientific American’s blog, The Thoughtful Animal, for pointing us toward Hayden’s post.)

photo credits: Football team: Frances Wells Collection [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; Elephant: Martin Mecnarowski, via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re a sea otter who eats a steady diet of purple sea urchins, your teeth and even your bones may turn lavender, mauve, lilac, amethyst….stained that color by plum-crimson pigments in your preferred food. Veterinarians call it “echinochrome staining.” (This link has very cool pictures of what it looks like on otter teeth and skulls.)

Carotenoids and echinochrome are different bio-pigments, and the staining process works differently, but carotenemia and echinochrome staining are colorful examples of how, whether land mammal or marine mammal, sometimes we are what we eat.

Update, October 10, 2012: More interesting information on biopigments. When tree frogs don’t get enough carotenoids in their diets, their colors can fade, as shown in these dramatic photos from issue 5, 2011 of Zooquaria, the quarterly magazine of European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA). Coloration, for many animals, is a crucial way they defend themselves (through camouflage or by appearing more fearsome). It’s also a key part of reproduction for many animals. Bright colors can signal health and desirability to mates; if they don’t get the proper biopigments, they miss out on mating opportunities.

Photos by Victoria Ogilvy, http://www.eaza.net/activities/Documents/NutritionDocs/ZA_NutritionIssue5.pdf

Sea Otter photo: By Mike Baird from Morro Bay, USA via Wikimedia Commons; Carrot photo: public domain via Wikimedia Commons; Frog photos: Victoria Ogilvy, http://www.eaza.net/activities/Documents/NutritionDocs/ZA_NutritionIssue5.pdf

But this recent post on Echinoblog, written by a Washington, DC-based invertebrate zoologist, says that assumption is about to change. With wonderful pictures and diagrams, it shows how starfish locomotion requires a complex system of secretions and substances that stick and unstick the feet from surfaces.

Besides being really cool, there’s a bioinspired takeaway. The starfish foot-substances are essentially adhesives that work underwater. Underwater adhesives could have many useful applications for human medicine.

Source: Griffibo1 Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons

A Philadelphia veterinarian is helping save the eyes and lives of kittens by partnering with human health care providers from the Labor and Delivery department at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital.

As reported by Ronnie Polaneczky in the Philadelphia Daily News, Dr. Rachael Kreisler, who teaches at University of Pennsylvania Veterinary School, sees many kittens at shelters whose eyes have become infected by viruses. The infections can cause irreparable harm to the cats’ eyes, including clouding and rupture. Sometimes the damage is so severe the whole eye needs to be removed. These eye injuries make the kittens much less likely to be adopted.

Kreisler, an expert on animal shelter medicine, knew that kittens aren’t the only baby animals prone to eye infections. Human babies are too–which is why most hospitals apply a dose of antibiotic ointment to newborns’ eyes shortly after delivery. Kreisler saw opportunity for shelter kittens in those partially-used tubes of ointment discarded by human hospitals. After getting permission from University of Pennsylvania Hospital authorities, Kreisler organized a regular collection of the leftover medicine. Kreisler and her students began treating the kittens with the recycled antibiotics this week. (Be sure to click through the gallery of photos showing them at work.)

(Many thanks to Kimberly Gerson for directing me to Polaneczky’s article)

Source: USDA

Source: By Evan-Amos (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

We admire the resourcefulness, and understand the impact of the drought. But is food–whether you’re a human or non-human animal–really that interchangeable?

And we also share toxins in those environments–toxins like second-hand smoke, pesticides, and the flame retardants on couches and in pajamas.

This piece by Lindsey Konkel in Environmental Health News is a useful roundup of some cases where veterinarians and physicians have worked together to learn about shared environmental concerns. Especially interesting is some research looking at relationships between canine lymphoma and lawn pesticides.

For more on animal sentinels and toxicants, see Peter Rabinowitz and Lisa Conti’s textbook, Animal-Human Medicine. It’s a great resource.

Source: reuters.com