If you enjoy food and health fads, here's something silly...and (LOL) maybe even hopeful: it says here that broccoli contains some near-magical elixir of an ingredient that keeps mice acting young. Slipped to the rodents in their drinking water, the plant's key enzyme, nicotinamide mononucleotide, had wondrous results: "metabolism was boosted, age-associated weight gain lowered, eyesight improved and blood sugar levels improved. In short, Mickey, Algernon and company acted younger than their age."

In their water, eh? Now if we could just put a few drops of it in a bourbon & water...

Here's the weird corgi-related element of this: I've been making my dogs' food in the kitchen for years, ever since the Great Melamine Flap. One of the several ingredients is a serving of the frozen mixed vegetables from Costco called "Tuscan style": cauliflower, carrots, and broccoli -- NO onion, NO garlic, NO added salt, NO other extraneous ingredients. By far this product's main ingredient is broccoli. Slightly cooked in the microwave and finely chopped in the food processor, these veggies are added to a hefty dose of meat plus one or more of various starches (e.g., sweet potato, rice, oatmeal, quinoa).

Just the other day, I was thinking...you would never know Cassie is pushing 11 years old. Her health is amazing: she can walk over a mile at speed (probably could go longer than that, but a one-mile circuit is my morning routine, sometimes repeated in the evening), she tears around the backyard with Ruby the Corgi Pup like the two of them were blasted out of a cannon. Ruby cannot outrun her. She's never gotten overweight, nor does she appear to be underweight.

When the melamine thing arose, I had a German shepherd and a greyhound. As more and more dog foods were implicated -- even well respected premium brands (turns out most are made in China, in the same factories as Ol' Roy's ilk) -- I decided to take the two dogs off commercial dog food altogether, at least until the crisis resolved. After many hours of research, I came up with The Recipe, to which I would add a daily canine vitamin pill purchased at the vet's.

VERY quickly after switching the two dogs off kibble and onto real food, the decrepit German shepherd, who by then was 10 years old and in pretty bad shape (she lived to the age of 12), suddenly seemed to feel A LOT better than she had been. This was a dog that was obsessive about chasing her beloved Ball, but she hadn't been able to go after it for many months. She was essentially crippled with arthritis and hip dysplasia -- she could barely drag herself to her feet, much less run around the yard after Ball.

But now, here she was: on her feet and hobbling across the yard to fetch that Ball. She hadn't shown any interest in doing that in a very long time.  She clearly felt a lot better, even though she wasn't anything like 100%. It was as though a year or so had been rolled back.

Cranking out enough real food to feed two 80-pound dogs was more than my budget or my time could bear, and so after the melamine thing subsided, the dogs went back to premium kibble. Nothing much seemed to happen with the greyhound, but within a few days or weeks, the GerShep was as decrepit as ever.

Feeding a corgi is a lot easier and a lot cheaper than feeding a dog the size of a teenaged human. Each dog eats only about a half-pound a day, plus a scant 1/4 cup/day of kibble tossed in as a substitute for the pricey vitamins. So as soon as I got Cassie (she was about two years old at the time), i started feeding her real food. And now, as she enters old age, she appears to be in perfect health. She is SO much more lively, happy, and vigorous than the GerShep was at this age, it's hard to believe the food isn't doing something good for her -- especially given the change in the shepherd during the brief period that she got the stuff.

LOL! I'm no fan of fad diets and gulping silly pills. But one does wonder: a diet of meat, starches, and vegetables is real food, to which dried factory-made stuff bears little resemblance. Is it possible that dogs, like humans, may do better on unprocessed, whole foods?