Bob, LOL! Of course, you don't have to post your degrees. Heck, folks can just read about your background in the website on the anthro dept. in which you are studying if they want to know. They can't know with me (or anyone else for whom that info isn't readily available, though) so I posted mine. No secrets. I DO think that you should have supplied the other half of that old joke to people, though -- the "many degrees one". A lot of folks will NOT know it. The second half of the joke is "70! Fahrenheit!". It's like the one "Why are people in the U.S. more educated than those in Europe?" You can guess that the answer is a fahrenheit vs. celisus thing... Anyway, folks might want to know that while Google is always a good way to find who has written what and where it was published (even though it misses some things) Pubmed is a really great place to go to see the abstracts of some of the things mentioned in assorted diet discussions. There actually ARE such diet restriction studies in relation to specific types of malignancies, but I have not run into any those are generalized, and in some of the restriction studies for malignancies it is one nutrient or a set of nutrients which is restricted, depending not only on the type of malignancy (given that "cancers" are actually possibly hundreds of illnesses and they all have their own nuances - but some of this is apparently changing from the current classification based on location of origin to one based on behavior of the illness among a few oncology research circles according to some things I've read) -- anyway -- one or one set of nutrients restricteed depending not only on the type of malignancy but ALSO on the treatment routine used. For instance, vitamin C is actually used by one form of breast tumor and that particular type of breast cancer is shielded from radiation treatments if the person with it has too much vitamin C so that nutrient is now being restricted in that particular and very specific situation. BTW, there really is a lot of work of work out there on caloric restriction and longer lifespans, but the data is limited in certain ways so that it is impossible to know for what species of those untested ones it may not work. It's pretty hard to treat anything as universal: look at how bears can eat tens of thousands of calories of fat alone when it is plentiful for an extended time -- actually striping fish and eating the layer just under the skin while leaving the rest -- (ditto fruit for that alone during some times of year though fruit also will carry along some insects) while almost no other mammals can do that sort of narrow diet safely, how bears can concentrate and recycle urine during hybernation which others don't do, and a number of other variations specific to that grouping. Look at how ferrets have a very different adrenal disorder than most mammals... Just this week I have heard of three people confusing it with Cushings and as a result mistakenly thinking that steroids pose the a specific serious hazard for ferret adrenal glands that they pose for dogs and humans. Species do vary! It's fine to discuss hypotheses but when they are still hypotheses -- in fact, it is good -- but they just need to be treated by everyone as such. Things don't always turn out as expected. There was a strange result of a study following people long term to see who gained the most weight over 12 years which was just in a Tufts publication I get. You'd expect that the folks who fared the best had diets high in veggies and fruits and very low in fat, and that the ones who fared the worst ate a lot of junk food, and on those two groupings you would be right. BUT, it turned out that those who ate a low but not terribly low fat level (example: people who ate skin with their chicken) actually were slightly MORE likely to gain a substantial amount of body fat weight than those who ate a lot of fat in their diets. No one knows why. Was the study flawed? Was the reporting by participants flawed? Was it just a statistical aberration that will go away in further studies? Is it real? If it is real, is the human body geared to be more effective at putting down fat stores with a certain percentage of the diets calories such as are found in the low-normal range for U.S. diet? No one knows. A side note which may interest some: there is some interesting preliminary work which has made some publications (I think at either or both Women and Brigham, or Harvard Med, or both, but may be mis-recalling location) in which there is work being done which rob tumors of nutrients and as they found that the meds also help people lose weight, so those medications are being studied as possible approaches for those who have dangerous levels of fat tissue to lose. WHATEVER: the best advice remains: if an idea seems interesting for ferret health look into it and be SURE to discuss it with the treating vet and the consultants FIRST because what is good for one illness can be accidently fatal for another. GO WITH THE FOLKS WHO STUDIED THE NUANCES -- THE VETS! If it wasn't possible that a number of surprises are out there for all of us (and historically have been out there for all of us many times) there would be no reason to study, little reason to have scientists, etc. We'd just read something and deduce something and it would be so. Sometimes that happens; sometimes it doesn't... It's not easy that everyone should look into things rather than just accepting what is told, but it sure pays off. I like discussing these things, but I sure do worry about the ferrets who can be hurt if folks don't check with their ferret health experts and just run with an idea without knowing the possible drawbacks or remaining questions... I also worry because every time folks confuse hypotheses with known facts someone seems to get hurt and then gets defensive afterward and then posts something about how scientists can't know anything because they are always "changing their minds". [Posted in FML issue 3952]