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Household Items Poison Pets

By On · Add Comment · In chocolate, drugs, household pets, over-the-counter medications, poisons, Ritalin, toxins

Listen up pet lovers: Be super-careful with your drugs, as they top the list of toxins poisoning household pets.  From dropped pills to medication packets lying around, domestic animals can be sickened by ingesting human drugs.  One ASPCA hotline reports that it received approximately 40,000 calls last year for animals poisoned by human medication–that’s in one city alone!  Dang!

Pet owners do not always know what their pets have gotten into–they just see the animals exhibiting symptoms, like lethargy, vomiting, seizures or refusing food.

The top toxins sending pets to veterinary ERs are over-the-counter meds, antidepressants, and…Ritalin!!!  Ha ha ha ha…no kidding.  Guess little Johnny ain’t paying attention the way he’s supposed to on the dope.  Just try watching your dog fer chrissakes.  Here are the top ten poisons taking out household pets:

  1. Human medication
  2. Pesticides
  3. Rodenticides
  4. People food
  5. Veterinary medications
  6. Chocolate
  7. Household toxins (cleaners)
  8. Plants
  9. Herbicides
  10. Outdoor toxins (like antifreeze and fertilizers)

So clean up your garage, put the Easter candy up high, and please…please…keep your kid’s Ritalin off the floor.

Halloween Candy: Eat or Toss, Don’t Save

By On · Add Comment · In candy, chocolate, Halloween, mold, Salmonella, shelf life
Moldy chocolate

Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat!  Just make sure it hasn’t been sitting around for too long.  Some candy has limited shelf life–something for parents to think about before hiding and storing Halloween candy meant to be doled out to the kids later.

According to Karen Blakeslee, an extension associate for food safety at Kansas State University, shelf life can vary anywhere from two weeks to a year, depending on the type of candy, packaging and storage conditions.  Hard candy may last indefinitely, but chocolate can go bad.  Oh boo hoo…I know.  People have suffered from salmonella poisoning from eating spoiled chocolate.

Some signs to look for are extreme stickiness and/or graininess in chocolate.  Sound pretty nasty to me, so I can’t imagine anybody failing to catch that.  Also look out for an unusual flavor, as well as a change in color.  With chocolate candy containing fruits or nuts, be on the look out for mold.

Typically, the softer the candy, the shorter the shelf life.  Storing in a cool, dry and dark place is always best.

Look, why not ration out a week’s worth, and then toss the rest?  That’s the safest and easiest way to approach things.  You might need to check the individual candies, since there’s no way of telling which misers kept their candy from last Halloween to hand out this year.   But saying that, if most people are like me, that candy’s not lasting more than a week no matter what the amount.  Darn Halloween.

Chocolate Gut

By On · Add Comment · In addiction, bacteria, chocolate, food cravings, food sensitivities, good bacteria
Would you feel better about your chocolate addiction if I told you that it might be related to the make up of your gut bacteria? Well this is the word from scientists who have found different bacterial colonies in the digestive systems of people who crave chocolate. And you thought it was a lack of discipline.

Researchers at the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland (yes, the makers of Quick and Crunch) found that the men who ate chocolate regularly and the weirdos who didn’t (no, really, they were labelled “weird” in the study) had different metabolic byproducts show up in their blood and urine, and these were related to the different bacteria in their intestines. We all have a vast array of bacteria in our digestive systems–called “good” bacteria–some necessary for the digestive process itself and some to prevent the overgrowth of opportunistic organisms, like fungi and other “bad” bacteria (see my post on the appendix’s role in all of this).

What scientist conclude from this study is that our particular gut bacterial make up determines our food cravings. I find this study and its conclusions interesting because I am fully convinced that most everyone has foods that they are sensitive to. This is the principle in Ayurveda; and many other healing systems have been studying these links too. I, in fact, have been treated by a fabulous acupuncturist who gave me a decent guide to my particular food sensitivities by evaluating me and categorizing me into a “body type.” I have to say–he was pretty right on.

In any case, I think this is definitely an area worth studying. For the researchers of this recent work, they felt it might be a way to manipulate the digestive system’s bacterial make-up and help reduce obesity by decreasing food cravings. I don’t know about that, but if they can find a connection between bacterial composition and food sensitivities, I think it can help people stay away from those foods that bother them. Who knows, maybe the endemic proportions of heart burn (acid reflux), gas and bloating could be relieved by such information. We’ll see where they take this one.

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