Veterinary nutritionists can be found in universities, teaching veterinary students and treating patients with special dietary needs. We may work in the pet food industry as consultants or by contributing to research, development and education efforts. We also work with veterinarians and their clients, providing answers or input aimed at resolving dietary quandaries.

As a veterinarian with more than 25 years experience and a Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Nutrition (ACVN), I enjoy doing a little of all these.

For example, I may develop a homemade diet for a Labrador with copper liver storage disease, a very particular liver problem. Or Ill check in with one of my consulting clients to see how a picky young German Shepherd with recurring diarrhea is doing with his new diet. A presentation for a large veterinary meeting focusing on diets that can be used to not only treat disease states, but also to perhaps prevent them may be on my to-do list. Conference calls with veterinary students to discuss nutritional biochemistry and how cats differ from humans and dogs also occupy my time.

But my favorite part of the day is reaching out to pet parents through my work with the Companion Animal Nutrition and Wellness Institute (CANWI), a grassroots not-for-profit organization focusing on optimal nutrition and wellness to improve and extend the lives of our furry children and best friends.

At CANWI, we recognize the difficulty people have in accessing companion-animal nutrition information not sponsored by the pet food industry, a multibillion dollar operation instrumental in providing the bulk of consumer information as well as in supporting veterinary nutrition research and education. While we agree that the industrys goals align with the need for safe nutrition, we firmly believe that there is also a need for unbiased information on the subject.

As part of this effort, CANWI raises funds for veterinary education, including forums and programs that educate veterinary technicians, students and the pet-vested community. In fall 2016, CANWI named Danielle Conway, DVM, as its first Veterinary Nutrition Resident; the organization will support her two-year formal training program at the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine. Typically, this sort of advanced training is funded by the pet food industry. As CANWI president Patricia Micka noted when announcing the award, To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a nonprofit is funding a Veterinary Nutrition Residency program. It is our intention to make this an ongoing program and not a one-time event.

Another CANWI mission is to fund scientific research to identify healthy, or what we term optimal or best, nutrition for our companion animals. Every day, we field queries from people interested in feeding their dogs and cats the best possible diet, one that will sustain longer, healthier lives.

While we humans are told to eat plenty of fresh foods, most of our dogs and cats are fed processed commercial foods throughout their lives. What effect does this have do processed foods provide optimal nutrition and support longevity?

Heat processing improves nutrient availability, shelf life and food safety, but it is also known to cause the Maillard reaction, chemical reactions between amino acids in proteins and sugars that give browned food its distinctive and appealing flavor. Similar Maillard reactions occur in body tissues, especially with aging, and form what are termed advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. Diets high in Maillard reaction products (MRPs) have been shown to increase levels of AGEs in the body.

Studies in humans and rodents have revealed that elevated levels of AGEs in tissues are associated with a number of age-related ailments, including diabetes, cataracts, osteoarthritis, atherosclerosis and vascular diseases. The absorption of MRPs from the diet and their accumulation in the bodys AGE pool may be one of the ways foods have an impact on age related diseases in both humans and animals.

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Do Better Canine Diets Support Longer Lives? - The Bark (blog)

While most celebrity or fad diets have not been scientifically proven to be effective, the alkaline diet can still positively impact your body, especially if you have kidney problems, according to a Baylor College of Medicine expert.

The alkaline diet is used to reduce the amount of acid in the body by consuming foods and drinks that are low in acid and high in alkaline, said Sreedhar Mandayam, associate professor in the nephrology section of the Department of Medicine at Baylor. We usually recommend this diet for those who suffer from kidney stones or who have kidney disease.

Mandayam explained that at the cellular level, if your acid level changes or increases too quickly, proteins that are essential for the functioning of the cells may not work properly. Certain proteins impacted can include those that help form receptors and those that are responsible for nerve firing and muscle contracting.

When people have a slow, steady buildup of acid over a long period of time, they tend to lose bone mass, resulting in osteoporosis, and they lose muscle strength and function and their ability to walk and lift things reduces. There also is a significant reduction in cognitive ability.

The body tries very hard to keep your acid levels in a very narrow range. Its when there isnt enough kidney function to make that happen that these problems can occur, Mandayam said.

For those who have had or are at risk for kidney stones, Mandayam said the alkaline diet helps in two ways: 1) It helps make the urine less acidic so there is reduced formation of crystals in the urine of calcium oxalate and 2) it reduces the crystal formation in urine of uric acid.

For those who have chronic kidney disease, he said the alkaline diet is helpful in slowing down the worsening of the disease, especially if the diet is started by stage three. As the ability of the kidneys to work is reduced, the acid that the body produces cannot be eliminated and circulates in the blood, which can cause problems. One way to combat this is to reduce the acid levels in the blood by increasing the alkaline levels in your diet.

However, Mandayam warned that anyone who is thinking about going on this diet should first talk with their doctor.

They should talk to a primary care physician and let them know that they are putting themselves on this diet so that the doctor can monitor to see if there are any adverse consequences, he said. Each one of us is unique and how each one of us reacts to a particular change is fairly different.

He added that besides increasing the amount of alkaline levels in your diet, he strongly recommends drinking lots of fluid.

Try to keep yourself hydrated and dont ignore when you are thirsty. Most people probably need to drink about 32 ounces a day, he said.

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Not just another celebrity diet: benefits of an alkaline diet - Baylor College of Medicine News (press release)

Food Tank has compiled 17 books to educate, inform and inspire us this season. Whether youre looking to dip your toes into the world of modern, sustainable agriculture or searching for a new hobbylike making cheese with no dairythese books about food, agriculture, and sustainability offer something for everyone. Including both seasoned and new authors, writing about health, food, the environment, and the intersection of all three, hopefully you will find inspiration this spring through these 17 reads.

1. Women in Agriculture: Professionalizing Rural Life in North America and Europe, 18801965, edited by Linda M. Ambrose and Joan M. Jensen

Studies of women in rural life, agriculture, and the home are fairly extensive, but the role of women in other agricultural roles has been examined less. This series of essays explores the role of women as agricultural researchers, producers, marketers, educators, and community organizers in North America and Europe and the expertise they have contributed to rural life and modern agriculture.

2. The Presidents Kitchen Cabinet, by Adrian Miller

African-American culinary traditions have significantly influenced American food culture at its roots. In the past few centuries, soul food has pervaded more than the kitchens of American households and restaurants. It has left its mark on one of the most vital kitchens in the countrythe White House. This book compiles the stories of more than 100 black men and women who served and fed our nations presidents.

3. Building the Agricultural City, by Robert Wolf

Wolf offers a plan for the future of rural economies based on the concept of regionalism, in which widespread, isolated communities become large cities, or agricultural cities. He implores rural communities to decentralize the wealth, work cooperatively to rebuild their economies, and move toward a stronger future.

4. Scraps, Wilt & Weeds: Turning Wasted Food into Plenty by Mads Refslund and Tama Matsuoka Wong

With the new cookbook from Noma chef Mads Refslund, otherwise wasted foodssuch as the presumably inedible parts of vegetables or stale and wilted foodstransform into impressive dishes. Overripe fruit becomes sweet glazes for meat dishes. Vegetable leaves and stalks become the savory bases of soups and sauces. Refslunds tips and recipes enforce a new respect for the foods we exploit in our kitchens.

5. Natural Defense: Enlisting Bugs and Germs to Protect Our Food and Health by Emily Monosson

The chemicals we have relied on for more than a century to keep our crops clean and healthy are no longer living up to their job. Diseases are outsmarting our defenses. Fortunately, Monosson offers a positive outlook on the future of plant protection and our subsequent health benefits with innovative scientific advancements that look to germs and bugs to work with nature instead of fighting against it.

6. The Food Lovers Garden: Growing Cooking and Eating Well by Jenni Blackmore

Whether youre working with a small backyard plot or a few pots on your balcony, The Food Lovers Garden will offer what you need to get started growing your own food. This guidebook/cookbook has the essentials for those who have a piqued interest in gardening but are not sure where to start. Blackmore then takes you beyond the growing phase with recipes for cooking, as well as preserving, the fruits (and vegetables) of your labor.

7. The Tropical Oil Crop Revolution by Roz Naylor

This information-packed book provides an outlook for an industry on the cusp of change. The oil crop revolution is gaining momentum and with it, the power to influence the food we eat, feed for our animals, the landscape, biofuels, and the economy. The industrys biggest stakeholders and harshest critics arent the only ones to chime in on its impact. The Tropical Oil Crop Revolution analyzes the major costs versus benefits while exploring the sustainable options that could balance out its future.

8. The Art of Plant-Based Cheesemaking by Karen McAthy

Who says a more ethical and healthy diet cant include cheese? Whether youre cutting back on dairy-based products or simply looking to try something new, the world of plant-based cheeses offers the same creamy texture from a new perspective. McAthy, an expert plant-based cheesemaker, shares her experience in unfolding new wonders for dairy-free cheese-lovers.

9. A Conversation about Healthy Eating (forthcoming July 2017) by Nicholas A. Lesica

In A Conversation about Healthy Eating, Lesicas highly scientific approach looks at what hasnt worked in the past and why, and how we can better understand for ourselves the principles behind a healthy diet. So what is the secret, exactly? Lesica finds that its about avoiding processed foods as much as possible, and in the book, he provides lifestyle changes that can help you do just that.

10. Compact Farms by Josh Volk

Amateur farmers and gardeners looking to turn their small farm into a business will find inspiration in the stories of 15 farms profiled in this book. The farms serve as guides for every step involved in building a farm enterpriseon five acres or less.

11. Food Anatomy: The Curious Parts & Pieces of Our Edible World by Julia Rothman

Food and food culture across the globe comes to life in this vividly illustrated book. Julia Rothmans distinctive work makes learning about cheese slicing and challah braiding, among other things, interactive and engaging.

12. Sustainable Diets: How Ecological Nutrition Can Transform Consumption and the Food System (forthcoming March 2017) by Pamela Mason and Tim Lang

This book is a comprehensive look at the sustainable diets, as opposed to the unsustainable diets that currently are heavily impacting the plant. The authors look at both nutrition and public health to understand what a sustainable diet actually entails and how we can shift to these diets in a way that still allows billions of people access to food.

13. The Humane Gardener: Nurturing a Backyard Habitat for Wildlife (forthcoming April 2017) by Nancy Lawson

Lawson wants backyard gardeners to create a symbiotic relationship with the creatures and critters that need the natural habitats to survive. Through her book and an outreach initiative of the same name, she teaches readers how to grow inviting spaces for wildlife to prosper, from the best butterfly bushes and flowers for pollinators to techniques for living in harmony with animals otherwise thought of as pests.

14. The Permaculture Promise by Jono Neiger

Looking for a beginners guide to permaculture? The Permaculture Promise explains the concepts main practices from gardening and housing to transportation, energy, and how we structure our communities. Through 22 profiles of people and communities, Neiger demonstrates the ways that anyone can incorporate permaculture practices in their daily lives in order to contribute to a more sustainable world.

15. Immersion: The Science and Mystery of Freshwater Mussels (forthcoming April 2017) by Abbie Gascho Landis

Step into the secret world of freshwater mussels, an unassuming creature of great value to the worlds waterways. Landis, a veterinarian, takes readers to the riverbeds and streams of the southeastern United States, where her own fascination began, in order to introduce them to a small piece of the delicate ecosystems we rely on.

16. Feast: Recipes and Stories from a Canadian Road Trip by Lindsay Anderson and Dana Vanveller

Ever wonder what defines Canadian food culture? Two friends wanted to find out, so they took off on a road-trip from one edge of the Great White North to the other in pursuit of the curiosities of Canadian gastronomic traditions. Along the way, they tell the stories of the characters they meet from chefs to farmers and First Nation elders. By the end, youll be licking your lips and searching for a ticket north.

17. Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want it Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future by Rob Dunn

The bananas we eat today come from what modern scientists standardized in the 1960s from dozens into one basic banana, generally the same size, shape, and taste. Never Out of Season outlines how streamlining our cropsbreeding the hardiest, best tasting varieties to be seemingly never out of seasonhas left our food supply without diversity and dangerously susceptible to natures pathogens.

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Food Tank's reading list: 17 books to dig into this spring - Fairfaxtimes.com

Testing blood sugar level. Patients are usually diagnosed with type 1 diabetes before the age of 14 and must have daily shots of insulin to control their blood sugar levels. Photograph: Trevor Smith/Alamy

Scientists have raised hope for the prevention of early-onset diabetes in children after a fibre-rich diet was found to protect animals from the disease.

More than 20 million people worldwide are affected by type 1 diabetes, which takes hold when the immune system turns on the body and destroys pancreatic cells that make the hormone insulin.

It is unclear what causes the immune system to malfunction, but patients are usually diagnosed with type 1 diabetes before the age of 14 and must have daily shots of insulin to control their blood sugar levels.

Working with Australias national science agency, CSIRO, researchers at Monash University in Melbourne created a diet rich in fibre that is broken down in the lower intestine into molecules known as short-chain fatty acids.

The team, led by immunologist Charles Mackay, believe that short-chain fatty acids called butyrate and acetate dampen down the immune system, and have the potential to treat a range of disorders from asthma to irritable bowel syndrome.

For the latest study, the scientists monitored the health of mice that were bred to develop the rodent equivalent of type 1 diabetes. On a normal diet, more than 70% of the animals had developed the condition after 30 weeks. But another group that received the high fibre diet was nearly entirely protected from the condition.

What we saw was dramatic, Mackay said. When we give the diet to mice that spontaneously develop type 1 diabetes, we could almost completely eliminate their disease.

Mackay said it was too early to know whether such medicinal foods could protect people from type 1 diabetes. There have been frustrations in the past that findings in these animals have not translated particularly well to human patients, but at other times they do, he said. But we think our study establishes the concept that we can stop a disease with natural medicinal food.

The diet is rich in a specific type of fibre that comes from a plant product called high amylose corn starch. The fibre is resistant to digestion in the upper intestine, and instead is fermented into acetate and butyrate by bacteria in the large intestine, or colon.

Tests on the mice found that acetate and butyrate may work in different ways to cool down the immune reaction that destroys pancreatic cells in type 1 diabetes. Acetate appeared to lower the number of immune cells primed to attack the pancreatic cells, while butyrate boosted other cells that dampen the immune reaction. The study is reported in the journal Nature Immunology.

Mackay now hopes to test the diet in humans. If trials show that it can slow or prevent type 1 diabetes, children could potentially have it as a powder on their meals, or dissolved in a drink.

John Cryan, professor of anatomy and neuroscience at University College Cork, said: It really reinforces the importance of diet at shaping physiology and offers potential for tailored dietary-based interventions for diabetes. It highlights how little we know about short-chain fatty acids despite them being the among the most important microbial-mediated dietary breakdown products.

But he said more work was needed on the potential side effects of diets that boost levels of short-chain fatty acids. One recent study found that in the brain, the compounds could affect immune processes that underlie Parkinsons disease. Of course, all diet studies in mice need caution as human diet, the microbiome, and their interactions, are so much more complex, he added.

Emily Burns at Diabetes UK said: We know that our immune system and gut work closely together. Understanding how the gut works in more detail could shed light on how to combat conditions that involve an immune attack, like type 1 diabetes. But theres still a lot we dont know.

The idea that a special medicinal diet could help to regulate the immune system and prevent type 1 diabetes from developing is interesting, but this research is at a very early stage. We wont know how effective this approach could be in people at risk of type 1 diabetes until research moves into human clinical trials.

What we currently know is that type 1 diabetes is not linked to diet or lifestyle and it cant be prevented. Diabetes UK is funding a great deal of research to find ways to stop the immune attack against the pancreas, in order to prevent type 1 diabetes in the future.

This article was amended on 29 March 2017. An earlier version referred to type 1 diabetes as juvenile diabetes.

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High fibre diet 'could prevent type 1 diabetes' - The Guardian

American Airlines Flight 1353, a Boeing 737-800 flying from Dallas-Fort Worth to Albuquerque, was 2 miles from landing when the captain declared an emergency, citing "a medical issue" aboard, according to a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman.

American identified the first officer aboard flight 1353 as William "Mike" Grubbs.

The aircraft landed safely at 3:33 p.m., according to Flightaware, and taxied to the gate, where it was met by paramedics, said Daniel Jiron, spokesman for Albuquerque International Sunport. Two people familiar with the incident said CPR was performed for 35 to 40 minutes before the first officer was pronounced dead.

The airline said in a statement that it "is deeply saddened" by Grubbs' passing. "We are taking care of First Officer Grubbs' family and colleagues, and our thoughts and prayers are with them during this difficult time."

The FAA said it "will follow up with the airline" to learn more about Wednesday's incident.

Many of the tasks during final approach in a Boeing 737 can be handled safely by a single crew member, but it would significantly increase the stress and workload for the captain.

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American Airlines co-pilot dies during landing in New Mexico - CNN