Peeing too often due to an enlarged prostate can be alleviated by losing weight

I am an old man (almost 74). I am pretty fit but like all men I have the desire to pee more often than I used to. It is due to an enlarged prostate which seems to affect almost all men of my age.

I have worked on changing my diet for the past 8 years. Yes, it takes a lot of self-discipline and a long time (for me) to stabilise one's weight when you get old because of a lifetime of eating habits based on a higher metabolic rate. Metabolism slows but many old people eat the same amount as they did when much younger. 

By 'diet' I mean a wholesale change to one's eating habits permanently. This is not a flash in the pan fad diet. And it accompanies a lifestyle change too.

Note: I know that this is not about cats. Well, it is indirectly. If you are ill because you are overweight, you are less effective as a cat caregiver. And if you have to get up all the time at night to have a pee you disturb you cat who is on the bed with you!

There, I have linked the page to cats ✔️👍.

Good BMI to help men pee less. Image: MikeB.

Result: weight gain and for men a pot belly. I don't have a pot belly and I have a good BMI thanks to those 8 years of diet change 😎. That is not intended to be a boast. It is just a fact.

But I still decided to lose some weight and when I did, I found that I have the desire to pee less often. It was almost like going back to my old self. Well, not quite. I believe, now, that it pays to be thin in old age. The benefits are for all to see.

You have to really get rid of the belly fat which is mighty hard because old men are meant to have some belly fat, but it needs to be reduced to the smallest amount possible consistent with not being anorexic!!

Anyway, I looked up the possible link between losing weight and shrinking the prostate and peeing less. 

There is a study on this. Probably many. What better authority than the Prostate Cancer Foundation in New Zealand for some info on this. They say the following: 

"A study published in the Journal of Urology found that overweight men, especially men with a high amount of abdominal fat, have an increased risk of BPH. If you are looking to shrink the prostate, losing weight can help you reduce your prostate size and help relieve annoying and frustrating urinary symptoms."

If you don't believe me, please look it up yourself.

The benefits of losing weight and maintaining a good BMI are legendary. There are so many benefits. But sleeping through the night without the desire to pee is a wonderful thing. And avoiding type 2 diabetes is no mean benefit. And what about high blood pressure. That goes too. Mine is 120 over 70.

Both the last 2 health problems have many ancillary health problems, many severe.

And having a good BMI means you can walk more and because you can walk more you are more likely to lose weight and feel better mentally. It is an upward spiral. The opposite is equally true.

But this is about urinary tract and bowl function. 

I am not saying that losing weight always results in peeing normally for all men. I am just saying there is a link, and it may apply to you.

I recommend trying it. Be prepared for a hard slog of diet change. My diet now is unrecognisable compared to what it was 8 years ago. 

And I stopped drinking alcohol 8 years ago too. Completely stopped. That makes losing weight much easier.

Also, obesity is a risk factor for the development of prostate cancer (odds ratio 1.097–2.47).  The list goes on....

Magic tip: how to stop a persistent tickly cough

This is nothing to do with cats, but I feel that I have to try and get this great tip out there. It really is good, and I don't see anyone mentioning it on the internet. 

It is based on personal first-hand experience, and I feel confident that it will work a lot of the time. Tickly coughs are common after an upper respiratory viral disease: a cold or Covid Omicron for example.

I had a tickly cough for weeks and it was driving me mad. I also felt under the weather with a headache. I don't know if the source of the cough was the same as for the headache, but I think it was. It may have been Covid Omicron which is like a cold.

TCP can cure a persistent tickly cough. Image in the public domain.

I got rid of the cough by gargling with diluted TCP at about 1 part TCP with 3 parts of water, which is a liquid antiseptic based on halogenated phenols.  Make the concentration as strong as you can take, even 1:1 and you might drink a little of it at the end. But only a little bit. If you want to pass on this last bit of advice that's fine.

I gargled three times in the evening and in the morning the cough was 90% gone. It felt like I'd gone to heaven. I did the same thing again yesterday and this morning and the cough has gone.

I also used Corsodyl mouthwash after the gargling just to be sure both bacteria and viruses were being killed. Although, phenol disinfectant can kill a wide variety of microbes such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

My research indicates that low concentrations of phenol cause bacterial death by deactivation of essential enzyme systems.

Phenols have a broad range of disinfection capabilities. They are effective against bacteria, micro-bacteria and fungi. They are also effective against envelope (easy to cure) viruses such as influenza. Therefore, phenol is more effective against bacteria and on that bases I wonder if a tickly cough is mainly caused by bacteria on the throat.

Phenol-based disinfectants have a high potency in disinfection of hospitals. Phenol derivatives can deactivate viruses such as HIV and other hydrophilic viruses within minutes at a concentration range of 0.5-5%. 

They deactivate pathogens by inducing membrane damage which leads to the leakage of intracellular components and denaturing of proteins! 

That's very technical but I'm just trying to add a little bit of meat to the bone here to try and explain why TCP is effective at reducing or eliminating the tickly cough after an upper respiratory viral infection possibly followed by a secondary bacterial infection and I think it is effective against post a Covid Omicron infection.

Gargling with TCP is unpleasant, but the result is pleasant. Mouth washing with Corsodyl hurts if you do it after you have brushed your teeth so do both the TCP gargle and mouth wash before brushing your teeth.

Give it a try if you have a bad tickly cough that is upsetting you. You might get lucky. If it works for you, please leave a comment. There is no danger and downside to the best of my knowledge. This is an over-the-counter treatment not requiring a prescription which is why I feel that I can talk about it here.

Clever non-verbal teenage girl identifies as a cat

NEWS AND COMMENT-MELBOURNE PRIVATE SCHOOL: A year eight student at a Melbourne private school who is described as being 'phenomenally bright' but is non-verbal has decided to identify herself as a cat. There's been a trend of adopting a furry animal identity and there is a kind of a culture among some kids in some schools to do this. People take a different attitude towards it.

School kids. Pic: Getty Images.

Those who support the woke movement are very sensitive towards it and the school is providing support staff to deal with a range of psychological issues. The school said that some students were presenting with a range of issues including mental health, anxiety and identity issues. These sorts of issues are present in a sizeable percentage UK school kids according to reports. Self-harming comes to mind as well as a manifestation of these pressures.

The school in question is tackling the issue gently and their approach is to always take matters on a student-by-student basis and seek professional advice.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the right-wing types such as Sen Ralph Babet who has criticised the Melbourne schoolgirl in a tweet (see above). He said that the girl identifying as a cat is:

"...a symptom of allowing the woke radical left in society to run rampant, unchecked. Can we just put a stop to this garbage right now. You go to school to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. You are not a cat. You are a little girl. The end".

That, it seems, would reflect a lot of people's views who don't believe in the woke movement.

I do not think that it is appropriate to talk to a girl who identifies as a furry like that. I don't think people should either encourage them to be furries or criticise them. You have to address the underlying cause of it sensitively. That is the only way forward in my view. From the child's perspective it is very real. You can't just shout at them and criticise them.

There was a recent story, in January, when a group of students at a Michigan, USA school identified as furries and the news went viral because there was a report that the school was providing litter trays for those kids who identified as cats. This was denied by the school.

RELATED: School accused of installing cat litter trays for students who identify as ‘furries’.

Psychologists, Judith Locke, living in Brisbane, Australia, said that she wasn't surprised at this trend of young girls and boys identifying as animals because they romanticise them in their lives and through television and film. And a lot of kids have difficulties in accepting themselves. Comment: Facebook does not help with influencers presenting perfect bodies thanks to photo-editing. Kids are going to hate their bodies.

Another Australian psychologist, Michael Carr-Greg, said that he had a patient, a boy, who identified as a dog but once stressors in his life were removed, he resorted to identifying as a human being. He has only dealt with one patient with this sort of psychological problem.

Furries tend to be teenagers and young adults although there are some in their late 20s and 30s. You even find some 70 and 80-year-old furries.

Comment: I feel I've got to make a comment about this. I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist. But if a child, a 13 or 14-year-old in a school in Brisbane, Australia, commits to identifying as a cat and behaves as a cat as best they can by, for example, being non-verbal, this has to be a mental health issue and they clearly don't want to be themselves. They want to be something or somebody else.

And that desire must be based upon the fact that they don't like what's happening around them, it seems to me. They want to escape the human world and transition into the animal world where perhaps they think that they will be treated better. I sense a desire to escape the human world which places unacceptable pressures upon some teenage students. Arguably adults - the grown-ups - are creating a world that is unacceptable to our kids. And this does not surprise me because it is also unacceptable to the grown-ups too!!

If that is correct then the adults have to do something to improve the lives of teenagers. And I wondered too whether the woke movement encourages teenagers to identify like this. There is a massive discussion about children identifying as the opposite sex and in the UK, there's been a scandal about an NHS clinic (The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust) providing the permanent means for children to transition from male to female and female to male without doing proper research and taking a more holistic approach. 

They took what is called the 'affirmative approach' which means that if the child affirms that they want to be the opposite sex that was enough upon which to provide them with life changing treatments. That clinic is going be sued by about a thousand people because they ruined some lives.

And the argument is that the woke movement encouraged the so-called experts to go down the wrong path and encourage opposite sex identification when the patients were not ready to really know what they wanted and needed. I think this case is a bit similar to that. Teenagers don't really know how to cope with life's pressures. 

The cure it seems to me would be to alleviate those pressures and teach schoolchildren how to cope with the pressures that remain.

How to avoid getting toxoplasmosis from your indoor cat's faeces

I believe that the disease toxoplasmosis is somewhat underrated by many cat caregivers probably because the symptoms in people and cats are often all but invisible. But many are asymptomatically infected. 

The 24-hour window

Toxoplasmosis is one of the most prominent detriments to the overwhelming benefits of living with a domestic cat companion. A lot has been spoken about the danger of getting toxoplasmosis from your cat's faeces. This comes from the fact that domestic cats being the primary vector of the disease shed toxoplasma gondii oocysts in faeces for a short period of time after they been exposed to it.

Toxoplasma gondii oocyst

Although this is a one-off event covering a 2-week period it does happen, which is why domestic cats are heavily criticised by people who dislike cats. But the CDC in America tells us something very important about the shedding of oocysts in cat faeces and it is this. They say that they are only infective (i.e. capable of passing on the disease) after they've been in the environment i.e. outside of the domestic cat for more than one day and between 1-5 days.

Therefore, there is a window between the moment a domestic cat defecates in the cat litter to 24 hours later when their faeces are not infective in terms of the toxoplasma gondii protozoan. That being accepted, if a cat owner cleans out the litter tray every day within 24 hours of it being used by their cat, they will not be exposed to infective toxoplasma oocysts.

This is provided they have been careful in cleaning the litter tray the day before and ensured that no faeces remain. To recap, if a cat caregiver ensures that they thoroughly clean the litter tray daily (on a strict basis) they should pretty well eliminate the possibility of being infected by this zoonotic disease through contact with a cat's faeces. I think that is quite an important statement because it deals effectively with this mode of transmission which has been discussed a lot on the Internet.

No raw treats or unpasteurised milk

And what I said above can be supported by this further information. If you only provide an indoor cat with commercially manufactured cat food there is no possibility that they can ingest the protozoan in food. However, if you feed them raw pork or beef or unpasteurised dairy products which might contain the toxoplasma organism, and they might contract the disease. So, there's two sides to this preventative process. You don't let your cat ingest the protozoan and you prevent them transmitting the protozoan through their faeces as described above. Tackled this way I don't perceive a problem with this disease for a family who looks after a full-time indoor cat.

Clean it every 24 hours for indoor cats to avoid a toxoplasma gondii infection from cat feces. Photo: Warren Photographic.

Children exposed to cats and mental health when adults

Today, I also read about a study which stated that, on my interpretation, children exposed to the family's domestic cat are 8 percent more likely to suffer from some sort of mental health problem when they are an adult compared to those adults who were not exposed to a domestic cat when there are children. 

In round terms, what the study concluded is that due to the possibility of being infected with toxoplasmosis when they are children, they are more likely to have mental health problems because of the presence of this disease in the brain when they are adults. It's a relatively small added risk but it is, at 8%, recognisable.

Please click on this link when you have finished reading this page for a cross-post on this topic.

We don't need to believe in the study but we should at least take note of it. Clearly, the tip about the cat litter that I mention above is significant in eliminating this added risk. Particularly as it is probably not unlikely that children will be assisting the household by cleaning out the cat litter tray. 

If they follow the method that I have mentioned it should all but eliminate the risk and place children with cats on a par with other children who don't come into contact with a cat in terms of mental health when they are adults.

Domestic cats get cancer less often than humans?

Wes Warren is part of a team of three with William Murphy and Lesley Lyons who mapped the genome of cats. Warren works at the University of Missouri and Murphy works at Texas A&M University. Lyons is a veterinarian and a specialist in cat genetic. They are very skilled scientists and Wes Warren said that cats don't get cancer very often. I thought I would briefly follow that up because Lesley Lyons suggests that cats should be used more in animal research which I strongly disagree with. 

He actually said this:

'We know that dogs get cancer more frequently, similar to ourselves. Cats don’t get cancer very often. And that’s a fascinating story of evolution.'

He is staying that cats get cancer less often than dogs and dogs and humans get it at similar rates.

Cat, dog and human. Photo: Pixabay.

The reason given is that they have better genes than humans (this is probably a massive oversimplification) and therefore we should study them to see whether we can improve human resistance to cancer and other diseases.

My brief research indicates that in the UK 0.54-0.59% of the human population will get cancer whereas in general I'm told that one in five or 20% of cats get cancer in their lifetimes. That positively does not square up with what Wes Warren stated.

It probably doesn't square up because when you try and research the prevalence of cancer in cats just don't get a clear answer except the one that I provided which comes from the Colorado State University. One thing is for sure and that is cats get cancer less often than dogs.

Certainly, dogs are taken to a veterinarian more often cats. That may point to the possibility that dogs are sick more often than cats (or owners are more concerned about dog health?). Overall, cats have better genetic diversity than dogs because a far higher percentage of dogs are purebred and therefore inbred due to selective breeding than cats. Purebred cats are relatively rare compared to random bred cats. Therefore, perhaps it is fair to say that cats have better genes in terms of longevity than dogs and perhaps humans.

I think this team of geneticists say that cats have better DNA 'dark matter' as they call it. The DNA dark matter needs to be studied as it is more important than believed.

Conclusion: I can't find direct statistical comparison between cats and humans on prevalence of cancer. But Wes Warren should know. Cats get cancer less often than people and dogs is the conclusion.

The equivalent of 120 million plastic water bottles fell onto the USA over 14 months

The title sounds ridiculous but the science is undeniable. A new study in the journal Science discovered that over a 14 month period more than 1000 metric tons of micro-plastic particles fell onto 11 protected areas in the Western US each year. 

Microplastics. Photo: Pixabay.

This is the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. To put it another way: it's raining plastic. Micro-plastics come from the sea where they are taken up into the atmosphere and ultimately dumped over land. The world is not taking plastic seriously enough but if we don't deal with the problem there will be serious implications for human health. We have to include animal health and domestic animal health in particular.

Fairly soon it is hoped that people will start taking plastic rain seriously in the same way that they took acid rain and fossil fuels seriously. Over the next 10 years we are going to be talking more about the impact of plastics, particularly micro-plastics and their impact on human health.

Concerned people will have seen marine wildlife killed by ingesting plastic bags or seagulls eating bits of plastic believing that they are foods. They even feed plastic particles to their offspring. Whales have been killed by hundreds of pounds of plastic bags in their bellies. But not enough discussion has taken place about plastic rain.

Today's problem is the result of a carelessness with respect to the disposal of plastic in the environment over a period of about 70 years. And over the past 10 years there has been an explosion of single-use plastic. Some of these plastics have not worked through the system yet. This points to a huge problem in the future.

At present we don't have a way of filtering micro-plastics from the soil. Every human organ studied by scientists contain micro-plastics. Scientists have found micro-plastics in the most remote places in the oceans. It seems that every square metre of every ocean contains hundreds of thousands of micro-plastic particles.