Patients often chuckle when I tell them I am a recovering vegetarian. As a child I was pretty squeamish about things like chicken drumsticks, spare ribs and other anatomically identifiable foods. In my teens I decided the only rational way to handle my qualms was to be a vegetarian.
Decades later, and somewhat overweight, I decided to go back to being a picky eater instead of a strict vegetarian. Thus I increased the protein content of my diet and lost fifteen pounds. Reading Barry Sears’ “The Zone” and Atkins helped me understand what had happened to me.
All along I have been nervous of artificial ingredients and unnecessary additives. My wife has the same dietary background as I have, and shares my concerns.
Today, we have a one-year-old German shepherd puppy raised on organic human grade food. He has a coat unlike any other dog of his breed that I have ever seen.
This weekend two things made me think again about food. The first one was a woman who is cooking for her dog and had read a book we also have, called “See Spot Live Longer”, which tells stories and provides facts about how bad commercial dog food is for your dog, both because of the low protein content and because of the inferiority of its ingredients.
The second thing I ran into this weekend was the September 25 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine – yes, I am behind on my reading – with an interesting article entitled “Storm over Statins – The Controversy Surrounding Pharmacologic Treatment of Children”.
This article quotes the American Academy of Pediatrics 2008 recommendation of doing cholesterol testing on two-year-olds and prescribing “statin” drugs like Lipitor to 8-year-olds(!). This makes me think of my puppy: Why don’t we just feed them right in the first place?
A Country Doctor Writes: 
I find the whole idea of providing statins to children absolutely repulsive. The other side of the coin is the poor, uneducated parent who couldn’t tell a healthy diet if it jumped up and bit her!