He would not even look at the mound of material I had brought him, which I had already read, concerning low-carb dieting for diabetes (which I suspected I had)--some of which books and articles were written by other MD's who were much more nutritionally aware. He had obviously not been reading anything much more up-to-date than what he'd gotten in medical school.
When someone with a fancy degree is that stupid, you better believe that I will run away instead of walk.
I'm not claiming that I am smarter than doctors, or even that I know everything--far from it. I'm just not into worshiping doctors as little tin gods. I'm not into blindly following their advice, because I know for sure that they make mistakes too.
And if I were into taking prescription medications, I'd be more inclined to take a pharmacist's word for it, because they have MUCH more chemistry training, and they are much more aware of what will cross-react with what else.
I do medical transcription for a living--and every once in a while I do a report for someone who is taking so many medications (all prescribed by someone with a fancy degree) that they are actually worse off--as in, stuporous, with kidney damage, etc.
It's also my understanding that a lot of veterinarians aren't taught much about animal nutrition, whereas they are taught a lot about surgery and writing prescriptions. Now, sometimes you need surgery and prescriptions... but the animal might not have needed surgery and drugs in the first place had it been fed a better diet.
The prerequisites for veterinary school sometimes, but not always, include ONE course on animal feeds and feeding--maybe two. (I found out because I used to want to be a vet, and I checked out things such as prerequisites and ratios of applicants to seats available in several veterinary schools.) It's not enough, if you ask me.
To name just one problem... renal failure is often a long-term consequence of feeding a cat high-carbohydrate, cheap supermarket crap food. But the last time I took any of my cats to a local vet, the vet tech was telling me to feed them ONLY dry food. Just a little bit of a contradiction there?
If fresh foods for humans are better than canned food and fast food, I would expect (for much the same reasons) that fresh foods, especially fresh raw foods, would be better for cats than dry food that is full of grains, fillers, and possibly even toxic stuff (remember the scandal about the Chinese adding melamine to animal feeds).
Yes, I could probably keep my cats going for a few more years on crappy food... but they'll be spending lots of time in the vet's office because of dehydration brought on by dry foods with high carbohydrates.
My oldest cat, now 12-1/2, probably won't live as long as the other two, because I adopted her at 7-1/2 years of age, and she had been fed only crappy dry food by her previous owner. When I adopted her, she had horrible breath and had to have two teeth pulled, along with cleaning the rest... complications of the crappy diet she'd been fed before I took her in. And yes, at 12-1/2 years, she's older than some cats, but she's not as healthy as she'd have been with a better diet.
Re: Your assertion that 30 was old in medieval times: There have always been people who lived to ripe old ages, even in medieval times. It's not as if they were all dropping like flies as soon as they reached 30. The number "30" may be an average, but it doesn't mean that no one lived a long life.
I'm all in favor of real science--but people with fancy degrees succumb to fads just like anyone else. Also witness how politicized science is nowadays, and how some people have turned into what are charitably termed "grant whores." Also witness how many of 'em voted for the Obummer. Some of them wouldn't know objectivity if it smacked 'em in the face.
So, no, I'm not too stupid to either feed myself or to figure out how to feed an obligate carnivore.