Welcome!
Thank you for visiting my writing portfolio. Here you'll find a few science, health, and medical writing samples. And you'll learn a bit about my story. I hope I can help you with your projects!
-Jill Canada Meyer, Science Writer
About Me
I'm a clear and concise science writer. My background is in journalism, editing, and technical writing. I also have more than ten years of experience as an executive at a successful company in a fast-paced industry. I enjoy writing about science, health, and medicine. And I have a knack for simplifying complex subjects. The challenge brings me a lot of joy.
I'm grateful for the writing opportunities I've had. My news articles and features have been published in U.S. News & World Report, Virginia Tech Research magazine, Hampton Roads Magazine, and other publications. And they've aired on North Carolina Public Radio show's "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition." I've also had the joy of being an editor and working with talented designers.
I've been pretty lucky throughout my lifetime to work with great writers, editors, and teachers. I earned my BA in English from Virginia Tech and my MA in Mass Communication from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I still keep my favorite textbooks and writing guides on my desktop to this day. On Writing Well by William Zinsser is an all time favorite. It reminds me to keep fine-tuning my skills. Recently, I completed an Essential Skills Certificate through the American Medical Writers Association. I'm always on the lookout for new opportunities to further my education.
Jill Canada Meyer, Science Writer
Current Articles
Reflections on
Nature
"DRIVING BY AN OSPREY NURSERY"
By: Jill Canada
November 2024
Written exclusively for www.jillcanada.com
Every Friday during the school year I indulge my child. We go to favorite coffeeshop, we get a hot cocoa and coffee — for my kiddo and me, respectively — and we hot-foot-it across town to school. We call our tradition Cocoa Fridays. It keeps us both sane in our busy world, filled with projects and sports and activities and assessments and everything else. And it gives us a chance to talk through how to navigate the ups and downs of our cram-packed American life.
Make no mistake, Cocoa Fridays is a weekly bribe. My kiddo works hard at school and works hard on homework — always striving. And as a striving mom, extra strong coffee is my weekly bribe to stay perky and be the constant cheerleader.
This fall, Cocoa Fridays holds another unexpected perk on the way to school: we get to drive by an Osprey Nursery.
So far, we've seen maybe six to eight birds in total; maybe two separate families. Their nests are somewhere near the Lesner Bridge, an arched bridge on U.S. Route 60, separating the marsh-lined Lynnhaven River from the beach-lined Chesapeake Bay.
Soaring high above the bridge deck, the mostly young ospreys and their parents are building a tradition of their own: they're scouting fish. Fish make up 99 percent of osprey’s diet, according to the website All About Birds, which is run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.
Seeing the hawk-like birds hunt is truly a sight to behold. Their wing speed is rhythmic. Strong. Their diving skills are expert level — the Olympians of bird-diving — with unmistakable, W-shaped wingspan silhouettes. It’s enough to make us joyously call out “Hello babies!” as we drive over the bridge.
So how can we say that most of these birds are wily kiddos? And that they’re probably learning from their parents? Easy.
Instead of having sleek white heads and muted brown bodies, these little guys’ and gals’ feathers atop their heads look like permanent bedhead; punk hairdos gone awry. The Crossley ID Guide Eastern Birds says juveniles appear “superficially as adults but with pale-fringed upperparts.”
In other words — juveniles have bad hair.
These young birds are a little more awkward than their parents, too. They’re not quite as graceful in the air. Their dives are a little jerky. And they lack authority when they’re perched atop a lamppost on the bridge, trying to mantle — shroud their wings over their freshly caught prey — to look tough against hungry seagulls. But they're working on it.
And all of the hard work is paying off.
Week after week, the juveniles’ dives are turning more fluid; their defenses against opportunistic seabirds and nosey crows, more convincing. They've even stopped sullenly perching on the bridge lights and chirping complaints as their parents glide overhead like pros.
As the sun rays glisten on the deep green waters of the Chesapeake Bay, the young birds are mastering swooping and soaring and drafting in the ever-changing winds, searching for food. And every once in a while, there's even a flash of bright silver in a young one’s beak.
There’s no mistaking what it is — it’s success.
Ospreys catch fish at least one in every four dives, according to All About Birds. They’re experts at fishing. And they’re considered a conservation success story whose population has rebounded after the banning in 1972 of the pesticide DDT, which had wiped out, for example, 90 percent of nesting birds between Boston and New York, according to All About Birds. This rebound is what conservationists dream of for lots of species.
Now our local brood is learning from their parents the art of how to keep going; how to carry the torch; how to live in modern times. They’re learning how to enjoy very fresh Sashimi.
Driving by the Osprey Nursery makes me realize that my kiddo and I are really no different. Like the ospreys, we're navigating life's ups and downs. We're just enjoying very fresh cocoas and coffees instead.
Timeless Articles
1
Health Brief
"Teens and Vitamin D"
By: Jill Canada
This article was originally published in U.S. News and World Report on June 5, 2006. The text only appears here with permission. What's more, the National Institutes of Health Office of Dietary Supplements now recommends that teens age 14 - 18 consume 600 IU of Vitamin D daily.
Teenagers who skimp on Vitamin D may be at risk of serious lung disease later in life. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health found that teens who consumed one fourth less than the daily recommended dose of 200 IU — found in two cups of fortified milk — could not exhale the same volume of air as those who regularly took in the full amount, even though they didn't notice any shortness of breath. Lung function naturally declines over time, and starting out at a disadvantage may increase vulnerability to diseases like emphysema, says lead researcher Jane Burns, who presented the findings at the American Thoracic Society International Conference last week. Norman Edelman, chief medical officer for the American Lung Association, cautions against automatically adding supplements, however. In the past, beta carotene pills where thought to protect against lung cancer and turned out to do just the opposite, at least in smokers. Vitamin D is produced when skin is exposed to sunlight and is found in fish oil and egg yolks.
2
Medical Brief
"A thumbs-up for gastric bypass surgery"
By: Jill Canada
This article was originally published on www.usnews.com on July 21, 2006. The text only appears here with permission. What's more, the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery now recommends weight loss surgery for patients with a BMI of 35 or more.
Gastric bypass surgery may be the best surgical option for extremely obese patients, according to a recent study by George S. Ferzli and a team of researchers from the State University of New York, Health Science Center of Brooklyn and Lutheran
Medical Center. They found that the popular procedure, which connects an apricot-size portion of the upper stomach to the lower portion of the small intestine, bypassing the upper portion and thus limiting food absorption, is "superior" to adjustable gastric bands. The band procedure is a less popular alternative that places a snug, saline-filled ring around the stomach to limit food intake.
The study reports that super morbidly obese patients — for example, a man who is 5'8" and weights at least 340 pounds, or 225 percent more than he should — who have the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery experience fewer complications, lose more weight, and are more satisfied with results than patients who get the other stomach procedure, even though the bypass operation lasts longer and requires a lengthier hospital stay. Gastric bypass patients are also more likely to note decreases in conditions like diabetes and sleep apnea that often coexist with excess weight.
"The band requires behavior changes on the part of the patient, in terms of what they eat," says Ferzli. "They can really sneak by a lot of liquid high-calorie stuff." With gastric bypass, food and drink are processed quickly and not readily absorbed, which can sometimes lead to malnutrition.
But it may be too soon to make a beeline for the operating table. The study, which was published in the July issue of Archives of Surgery, relied on a small sample of people who were not randomly selected and evaluated them for only a short period after surgery, cautions Philip Schauer, director of bariatric surgery at the Cleveland Clinic and president of the American Society for Bariatric Surgery. He advises patients to discuss all their options with a doctor before selecting treatment.
3
Science Article
“Finding the Right Horsepower: Equine nutrition to promote health and performance”
By: Jill Canada
This article was originally published in Virginia Tech Research magazine’s Winter 2003 edition. The text only appears here with permission. What's more, the Middleburg Agricultural Research and Extension Center continues to study the links between equine health and nutrition, and it now recommends horses' diets to consist mostly of forages (fresh grasses and hay) with feeds or treats given as needed.
If you owned a Mercedes Benz C-Class, would you put low-grade gas in it and risk damaging your engine? Or would you prefer to protect your investment and use supreme gasoline?
Horse owners are faced with a similar question: “Should I protect my investment and feed my horse a diet that maximizes athletic performance and reduces the risk of disease?”
Comparing an investment in Mercedes Benz to a Thoroughbred is less of a reach than you might think. A Mercedes Benz C-Class ranges from $25,000 to just over $50,000. A Thoroughbred ranges from a couple hundred dollars for a back-yard hack to many millions of dollars for a race-track legacy.
The Thoroughbred’s popularity alone moves owners to safeguard their investment. They are one of the most popular breeds in America, second only to quarter horses and Arabians. Thoroughbreds are used for racing, eventing, dressage, jumping, pleasure riding, and improving other breeds.
To help Thoroughbreds fulfill their vast potential, researchers at Virginia Tech’s Middleburg Agricultural Research and Extension (MARE) Center are studying ways to improve horses’ health. Burt Staniar, a post-doctoral associate in equine nutrition; Carey Williams, Ph.D. candidate in animal and poultry science and a Pratt Fellow; and others in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences are researching how a high-fat and fiber diet may reduce the risk of horses developing diseases.
The mission and main research objective of the MARE Center is to “develop pasture systems that promote the performance of horses and enhance the land,” says David Kronfeld, the Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Agriculture and professor of veterinary medicine at Virginia Tech who oversees research conducted at the center.
The MARE Center is located in Middleburg, Va., a quaint historic town strewn with old southern plantation homes, small vineyards, and many cattle and horse farms. The center itself is a medium sized horse farm with 420 acres of lush turnout for approximately 100 horses. Peacefulness and safety are key factors in maintaining a positive environment, which decreases disease. Good management techniques, such as maintaining a positive environment, are influences the MARE Center researchers would like to maximize.
Just as premium gasoline, frequent washing, protected storage, and maintenance check-ups safeguard a Mercedes from damage and increase its durability, good management techniques, such as proper health and nutrition can protect horses.
Targeting Leg Disease
Diseases can short-change a promising Thoroughbred’s career. Thoroughbreds have a reputation for developing leg diseases, such as defective bone and cartilage formations of the joint’s surface, a condition known as osteochondrosis or OC.
On a Thoroughbred-breeding farm, having 5 percent of horses with OC is tolerable. However, many farms have anywhere from 30 percent of OC cases to an extreme of 70 percent. “If you can get them below 10 percent, that’s about as good as you can do because the remainder are genetic,” Kronfeld says.
One of the ways OC manifests itself is when cartilage cells proliferate at an abnormally fast rate. The cells proliferate too fast because they are “receiving the wrong metabolic messages,” Staniar says. These wrong messages can lead to bone and cartilage not maturing normally, which compromises the structural integrity of a horse's joint and causes a pressure point where breakdown can occur. The breakdown occurs when a lesion forms in the joint, becoming the clinical condition known as osteochondritis dissecans or OCD.
The symptoms of OC are not visible to the naked eye. Only a radiograph can show the damage. “You see what are sometimes called joint mice, because you look at the radiograph and you see little bits (of cartilage) floating around the joint,” Staniar says. Such damage is exactly what the MARE Center researchers are trying to prevent. “We are trying to reduce the risk of OCD, starting from the beginning with abnormal cartilage development because that’s where we think nutrition may have some effect,” Staniar says.
Nutrition is one of the environmental factors that might cause OC. Previous research has documented other factors, such as heredity (17-34 percent), forced exercise, management, obesity, mineral imbalances, and inadequate turn-out time.
Controlling Nutrition
Staniar’s research is looking at proper nutrition as a management technique that could be shared with the horse community and help keep horses safer during their developing years.
“We’re looking at nutrition and how that is affecting a horse’s development. We are growing foals that have potential to be athletes, whether that be three-day eventing or racing,” says Staniar.
He and his colleagues at the MARE Center hypothesize that a diet high in soluble carbohydrates may increase the environmental risk of a horse developing OC. Soluble carbohydrates are fast sources of energy, like sweetened feed and grain (think candy bars or ice cream). To test this hypothesis, researchers used two study groups: horses fed a diet high in sugar and starch, and another fed a diet high in fat and fiber.
The groups consisted of two sets of 12 mares and foals. Each group grazed on high-fiber pasture, rich in clover and bluegrass, for roughly 18 hours a day. Then two different feeds were given as supplements.
The horses supplemented with high sugar and starch or a high soluble carbohydrate diet, were fed a mixture that included oats, corn, grain, and molasses – similar to popular sweet feeds on the market. “These diets rich in starch and sugar are unnatural for horse’s digestive tract,” Knronfeld says.
“Grain feeding became widely used during the agricultural development of the 17th and 18th centuries when horses had to work much harder in the fields, draft-work, and in sport,” Kronfeld says. To compensate for the increasingly demanding work, horses were fed two sugar and starch meals per day. Now those meals are known to cause colic, founder, and laminitis. (See the 2000 issue of Virginia Tech Research magazine, www.research.vt.edu/resmag/2000resmag/horseulcers.html.)
Many leading high carbohydrate feed manufacturers are developing alternative fat feeds, but the top-selling feeds on the market, which the majority of Thoroughbred athletes are eating, are high in sugar and starch.
Feeding Fiber
The alternative feed given at the MARE Center differs from the high fat diets on the market because it has a high fiber content as well. The feed consists of finely chopped alfalfa hay, timothy hay, and beet pulp, mixed with 10 percent corn oil as a fat ingredient. “We have a wide range of various fibers, ranging from slowly fermentable to rapidly fermentable, which allows horses to adjust to pasture changes,” Williams says.
The nutritional content of pastures changes with the seasons, with soluble hydrolysable carbohydrates – or environmental sources of sugars and starches – being minimal in the winter and high in the spring. The multifiber diets facilitates a diverse array of microbes in the horse’s gut to process feed, allows the horse to readily adapt to pasture changes, and keeps their insulin levels at a more constant level than high sugar and starch feed.
Williams began studying high-soluble carbohydrate diets and the effects on brood mares in her master’s degree research, conducted in 2000. She tested the mares from early gestation all the way through late lactation, and discovered a correlation between high carbohydrate diets and insulin spikes in horses’ bloodstreams 1.5 to 2 hours after gestation.
“We were studying the cereal byproduct in the feed, and I was looking at the glucose tolerance, specifically glycemic response (the rise or fall of blood sugar) to the feeds. My results showed that there were higher insulin and glucose spikes with the sugar and starch feeds as compared with the fat and fiber feeds. So we started wondering: What does this mean? Why is this bad?”
Facing A Catch-22
Her results led to the questions now being studied at the MARE Center. Are high carbohydrate feeds negatively affecting horses’ leg development?
Foals experience a natural growth spurt in the spring, but no one is entirely sure how their bodies decide that it is time to grow. Staniar and others are conducting research to see if a high soluble hydrolyzable carbohydrate feed is increasing the magnitude of growth signals in foals and may be causing problems in leg development. “If you’re going to add that sugary starch feed that is also high in hydrolyzable carbohydrates to a pasture high in hydrolyzable carbohydrates, it is going to make this (growth spurt) worse. The grow spurt is going to be large,” Williams says.
It's a catch-22 for the Thoroughbred industry: on one hand, sugar and starch feeds causes yearlings to be larger and more profitable at yearly auctions; on the other hand, it may also cause the onset of OC and dramatically reduce yearlings’ profitability if OC occurs. “In the breeding farms with growing stocks, OC is regarded as a big economic problem,” Kronfeld says. “If a horse has OC, their price greatly diminishes – by tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars.”
Staniar’s research now focuses on bridging the gap between OC, high hydrolysable carbohydrate pastures and feed, and the growth spurt foals experience in the spring. His research has three stages. The first is an examination of previous research conducted over the past eight years at the MARE Center. The second, on the macro-level, is an examination of growth signals in the horse’s blood-circulatory system. The third, on the molecular level, is an examination of the horses’ cartilage cells.
Staniar is researching the effect of high insulin on growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor one (IFG-1). On a molecular level, growth hormone and IGF-1 at abnormal levels may cause cartilage to proliferate too fast, possibly causing the onset of OC.
Learning From Previous Research
Staniar used Williams’ and other scientists’ research as a launching pad for his study. “There is in vitro research that shows that cartilage cells proliferate in presence of IGF-1,” Staniar says.
Growth hormone, produced in pulses from the anterior pituitary of the horse, is triggered by a number of different factors. “Changes in glucose and insulin may affect the size and frequency of some of those pulses,” Staniar says. “The idea was that differences in the magnitude in glucose and insulin response to the sugar and starch or fat and fiber feeds would result in different patterns of grown hormone secretion.”
Like growth hormone, it is believed that high insulin levels also cause IGF-1 to release. IGF-1 and growth hormone bond to cartilage cells and tell it to proliferate. “IGF-1 and growth hormone bond to a receptor on cartilage cells and initiate signaling cascades that result in cell proliferation and the possible onset of dyschondroplasia, a formative stage of OC,” says Staniar.
Measuring Blood Chemistry
Given this previous research, Staniar and other researchers began to test their theories on the macro-level, the horse's blood-circulatory system.
Staniar found that foals fed a diet high in sugar and starch had higher levels of IGF-1. “We started looking at circulating IGF-1. The interesting piece of information we found is that circulating concentrations of IGF-1 were positively associated with average daily gain, the average weight gain per day,” he says.
After discovering the positive association between the amount of weight a foal was gaining and a high level of IGF-1, Staniar and his colleagues needed to check the circulating growth hormones as well to see if this other factor was affected too. “Our next step was to look at circulating concentrations of other growth signals. We found a possible association of growth hormone secretion with meal feeding following high carbohydrate meals. It appeared that insulin and glucose may be affecting growth hormone,” Staniar says.
After positive findings on the macro-level, it was time for the researchers to delve deeper and look at the molecular level by examining changes in the cartilage cells – stage three.
Tracking Molecules, Genes, and Proteins
In Staniar’s pilot-study, he is taking six cartilage cell samples over a 12-month period from four yearlings. The extractions will not harm the horses in any way. After the study is concluded, the yearlings may be sold at auction with a full disclosure of their medical history.
For his third stage of research, Staniar is working with Ed Smith, associate professor of animal and poultry sciences, and Mike Akers, the Horace E. and Elizabeth F. Alphin Professor of Dairy Science. Staniar is examining the amount of messenger RNA for growth signals within the cartilage cell samples. Smith is helping Staniar determine the link between diet and gene interactions. “Nutritional genomics gives us the opportunity to investigate how diet affects genetic expression of growth signals within cartilage cells,” Staniar says.
And he is working with Akers on proteomics – how gene information is translating into proteins. “This is the final piece in the bridge connecting diet to OC,” Staniar says.
Staniar and other MARE Center researchers have the pieces to the IGF-1, growth hormone, and spring growth-spurt puzzle, but they must continue to pull the molecular findings together for a detailed picture of how equine nutrition can prevent disease.
The goal is feed recommendations that every horse owner can understand an apply, Staniar says.
In the meantime, “If we can get the food industry to add more fat and fiber sources to their feed instead of hydrolyzable carbohydrates, we can minimize OC and promote better performance and a better life for horses,” Williams says.
Ultimately the MARE Center research could yield a high-quality performance feed to maximize Thoroughbred owners’ investment – the best fuel to get their horsepower sold and safely on the track, and pull them out of their catch-22.
It’s an investment opportunity even a C-Class owner could appreciate.