Are your bugs in the mood for food?

Good evening, everybody. Here we are. It looks like it's just Bren and me, but actually Conor is there, but he's having problems with rain and technology.

So he's in Ireland. I mean, come on.

Well, there's, yeah, there's, there's a lot of rain and not much technology, maybe, but he'll probably argue that one. Um, all good. How are you, Bren? What you been up to?

Uh, great. I'm preparing for London Vet Show, so doing some talks with Bella and Duke sponsoring that. Um, down in London, obviously, next week. So that's good to look forward to.

When are you on?

Don't know. Thursday sometime.

Thursday?

Yeah, lunchtime, I think.

Right. So any vets watching, nip along to see Bren. What are you talking about?

I am talking about the reviews of all the papers that are looking at direct comparison of raw versus ultra-processed foods and what papers are out there, what the actual evidence is. In that sphere. So I'm trying to avoid bits where there are papers just about raw and just about ultra-processed. And I'm trying to be fairly balanced in my conversation, which will be always interesting.

Yeah, difficult subject to be balanced about.

I don't think it is. Well, so I had a conversation with one of my delightful nurses today and we were talking about, you know, she's a great nurse and she's got a reputation in the area for being a great nurse and somebody had asked to loan her for a short period of time just because they've just got not enough nurses and we were having a conversation and he said, it's great, but unfortunately I have now fallen into this way that I know, I cannot say anything other than feed raw. And, you know, all of the patients, she's just not sure whether any other practice would ever touch her because she'd just have to say, we've got to feed raw. So yeah, it'll be an interesting one, won't it? You know, how they go with that. So So she was just saying how interesting it is, how they all sort of did their initial, when they joined the practice, you know, oh, well, I'll just cope with that holistic stuff and see what's going on. And then slowly over the years as they've gone through training and then they see the benefits and they see before you know it, they are advocating all of the stuff that they were suspicious of when they joined us.

Wow.

So it's great.

Well done, you.

And so for you, what have you been doing?

Well, it's very busy at work, but Ellie and I nipped down to Butlins at Minehead. I kid you not. And we saw Fatboy Slim at the weekend.

Did you hidey-hi? Did you ho-de-ho? Did you?

No, we didn't do any hidey-hi-ing or ho-de-ho-ing. It was very, very good indeed.

What a guy.

Or a yellow coat or?

No, no, no. Well, it wasn't the full Butlins experience, which I'm sure is fantastic. But we were just there to see the man himself. And he, you know, I know about him, you know, about many of his records and what have you. But he's actually just a really magnanimous guy. And so he did the concert and there was a pool party in the afternoon, the next afternoon, where everybody turned up, jumped in the pool because Butlins, they've got a pool and what have you. And he played tunes for a couple of hours. And then at the end of his set, he actually got in the pool with 300, 400 people and came along and everybody was there. And he walked past me and I've actually shaken the guy's hand. How about that?

I feel amazing. But then I am now thinking to last weekend.

Yeah.

And the weather was absolutely Baltic with rain and everything else. Was this an outdoor pool?

No, it was an indoor pool.

Oh, right.

Okay.

I was just, for a moment there, I was like.

It was an extremely well-heated complex, and the pool was just toasty as well. So it's a slightly bizarre experience being in a pool and hearing, you know, Fatboy Slim. Yeah, very, very strange. And his son was there. Remarkable. This guy, he doesn't look anything like the man himself, but my God, the energy that guy has had. He just, he's just frenetic. He did it. He did a set and the guy just doesn't stop. Moving at all. So very inspiring how magnanimous, because he does not need to get into, put into a pool with all these people. Um, but I think he loves doing it. And, uh, I think he used to go to Butlins when he was younger, which is why he wants to come back to Butlins, just to kind of share the love, you know.

Right.

So really, really great guy. Um, we are being followed this evening by Patricia Gonzalez. Uh, I'm not sure where you are, Patricia. Uh, but you're very welcome. Sue Cooper's there, and Tracker. Wonderful to see you, Tracker. They are watching us on YouTube. Please, you can follow us there. Please subscribe and follow and all that stuff. That'd be great. You can also find us on Patreon. Patreon. And we are there. If you just go to Patreon, Patreon, and find Raw Pet Medics and come along, you can follow us. For the cost of a cup of tea every month, you can follow us and you will get a little bit extra because at the end of the Facebook show, we jump onto Patreon, Patreon, and have a, maybe a slightly more relaxed conversation with our guests, with each other. And so you just get a little bit extra for, for us to say, thank you for being there and supporting us. So absolutely wonderful. Really, really good. Looks like Brady may have dropped off the edge of the earth.

Yeah, well, he was trying to toggle off his phone saying that there was a power cut in Ireland. Yeah. I believe it was just in his downstairs. But hey-ho, we will see. It's great to see all of the guys on Facebook that have joined us as well. Thank you, guys. Great to see you, not just on YouTube. Please do pop in the comments where you're watching us from because we've started to see that we're getting people all around the world and it's great to see all of you guys when you join us. The other bits that we've got to talk about is we've talked about hormonal health in the last couple of weeks and there is a great series both by Rita Hogan, if you've not already joined her group, go and see her. She's done a great webinar on supporting hormonal health with herbs. £25, that's about $35. You can get the recording if you want to go watch that. But also there is a free— that's right, free, $0, £0 access available for the community just launched by Dr. Peter DeBias and Karen Becker. So Dr. Karen Becker have joined forces to talk about hormonal health, and you can watch 5 hours of their macerations over hormonal health in dogs free of charge. And that is accessible. I will put a link up, but that's on hormonalhealthfordogs.com. And you can go there right after this show, not right now, come on, pay attention. Okay, right after the show to join their community. And I believe as from tomorrow, they will launch the first of that 5 hours of conversations. So all good. So all free to our communities, guys. Go join them.

Absolutely fantastic. Okay, so tonight we're going to be talking about the gut-brain axis, the microbiome-gut-brain axis. This is, I think it's fairly well-worn territory, But it's so important and it's maybe something that some people haven't come across. And so I think just to go through some of this stuff would be really, really useful because when I was at vet college, it was you had a brain, you had a gut, and the microbiome wasn't really well recognized. We're talking late '80s and '90s. And since that time, the impact of the gut on the brain has been recognized, and the impact of the brain on the gut has been more recognized. And this two-way street, mainly via the vagus in terms of neuronal communication, has been recognized. But there's also endocrine and numerous pathways by which the gut and the brain talk. And it is a two-way street. If your gut is wrong, your brain will be affected. If your brain is adversely affected, for example, with stress, your gut will be affected. And we've recognized this for many, many years. If you're nervous, you get butterflies in your gut. And there are numerous other sayings that I won't go into. But I think the brain affecting gut has been recognized for a long time, but the fact that the gut can feed back into the brain and change the function of the brain is quite a new concept. Mr. Brady, Dr. Brady, no less. You're with us. How are you? He hasn't put his headphones in.

No, he's not put his headphones in.

And he's frozen.

He keeps going in, coming out, going in, coming out. Leave the guy alone. So I think from— it's really interesting you say that. And actually looking at some of the studies that we can see from a convention for psychiatrists back in 1911, I believe it was something like that, of looking at the effect effects of gut flora on mental health, on serious mental health. And seeing how that was being talked about for the 10 years prior, and they actually then wanted to have a convention on it, a whole conference talking about those changes in gut flora and what they meant for mental health. And then all of a sudden, what came along, a few wars, a little bit of antibiotics because of the risk of infection of wounds, and all of a sudden bacteria became bad and we destroyed gut flora and mental health, some would say, at the same time. And all of that talk disappeared for almost 80-plus years before people then started doing the whole thing about forest bathing and getting back in touch with your— improving your microbiome and your mental health and doing other things before truly the reconnection, as you said, about what's going on. And we see the books around what's going on with polyvagal theory and stimulating your vagal nerve and what's going on with the interaction of your gut flora with that to some of the latest stuff in the last couple of years, even affecting seizure activity by giving MCT C8 oil as a prebiotic. So people thought it was because it was ketogenic and it would calm the brain because of how it was produced energy for the brain. But actually, more and more research is showing that it changes how the gut flora produces chemicals which interact with the vagal nerve to calm the brain. So now we see it's almost coming. It's like wearing jeans. It's like just being that fashion that keeps cycling through. And it's like, hopefully it'll just get a shorter and shorter cycle as we go forwards. Rather than it being 100 years, we might be able to get ourselves down to, you know, a 2 or 3 year cycle of it coming back into phase and people talking about it.

I think it's more and more, more and more people are talking about this stuff. I mean, when did the first Yakult adverts appear on the telly, for example? You remember Yakult?

Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure.

Does it still exist? I don't know. Yes, it does. It does.

But it's, they got chastised for talking about their health a little bit like the Red Bull with wings. They got told off for saying that it was so beneficial for health. But I think that was— so they're now just very careful about how they term what they say with regard to it. But they've— I remember seeing early stuff in the '90s, but I think they haven't really been launched until the 2000s when they properly started talking about those adverts on telly.

Yeah. But how can you compare Yakult with Red Bull?

Just because they were chastised because Red Bull talks about giving you wings as in it benefits you. Okay. From a mental health point of view. Okay. They were talking about how it gives you energy. And they were chastised because they were overstating a benefit of that drink versus— and that's where I was drawing the line, where Yakult were charged with overstating the health benefits of their product without there being appropriate research. It's a little bit like you could say, well, amphetamines gives you absolutely brilliant concentration for flying a plane on 2 hours sleep in '54, you know, but it's not good in the long term. You know, of course, I'm not trying to say that Red Bull is a really good health drink. I'm just saying that, you know, these companies were getting caught out for overstating, overstating their claims. Yeah. Yeah.

Amazing. Okay. I'm going to bring it all together because there's a fantastic book which we have mentioned on this show before. Uh, called The Psychobiotic Revolution. This Psychobiotic Revolution.

Okay, who's that by?

Well, it came out in 2017. It kind of summarizes all the research over the previous 20 years or so. It's by a guy called Scott Anderson, whose name I never remember, but John Kryan is one of the main authors, and he is a researcher at Trinity college in Dublin, and he's done some really nice YouTube videos. So if you don't know him, he's called John Cryan, C-R-Y-A-N. Lovely guy, lovely, uh, lilting Irish accent. And the final author is called Ted Dinan, D-I-N-A-N. So that's Anderson, Cryan, and Dinan. It's 2017, so it's quite an old book. However, A lot of the ideas that they discuss in this book, Bren, are still current. So it looks like they did their research very, very well because these things are enduring in a very rapidly changing landscape. So basically, I'm just going to give you a summary of this because it brings, it brings together, you know, everything that's happened since 1911 that you were just discussing. Up to 2017. And what they, what they talk about is they explore the gut-brain axis, the trillions of gut microbes that act as a second brain. This is where they are. I'm not sure whether they coined the phrase, but your brain as a second brain. People are now thinking of the gut microbiome as another organ. Yeah, you've got a heart, you've got lungs, you've got liver. But the gut microbiome is an entity of itself. And if it's injured or damaged through probiotics or stress or these kind of things, you have an organ that is injured. And this is what they are looking at. They discuss that it influences mood, behavior, and mental health. And it does that through the vagus nerve. Through the immune system, primarily cytokines, and the endocrine pathways. These are the hormonal pathways. And they even then, back in 2017, recognized that dysbiosis is linked. Dysbiosis is a posh way of saying the balance of bugs within your gut is linked to, in humans, is linked to depression, anxiety, IBS, obesity, Parkinson's, autism, and many other conditions. And that they're talking about prebiotics and probiotics could, you know, if they are targeted, they could actually contribute to psychiatry and psychiatric interventions in the future, which I think is— and this is where much of the research is going. What they— when they're discussing the key ideas in the book that they discuss is that they say that the bacteria commandeer cravings and moods. So, you know, you wake up and you're absolutely desperate for carbs and sugar. That may not be your blood or your blood sugar. It may be the bacteria in your gut especially the bad bacteria who are saying, oh, that's too much fat and there's too much protein and too much fiber. Just give us some junk because we are starving because you're not giving us enough junk food, which is really interesting. And so these, in that way, they can influence the cravings and moods. And they state that colonization of the gut when you're very, very young will actually influence the how your brain develops, especially the amygdala. Yeah, it's a tiny little part of the brain right in the middle. And so, and is correlated with anxiety. They're talking about modern disruptors. And this is really interesting. They talk about processed foods, which in the veterinary world would, of course, be ultra-processed kibble and canned food, which, you know, 80% of people feed their animals, their cats and their dogs. So even back in 2017, they are making a direct link between processed foods and mood disruption. Maybe this is why we're seeing so many anxious and reactive dogs. They're talking about antibiotics, obviously, and they also mention stress. As being, as fueling chronic diseases. Some of the mechanisms they talk about is that the short-chain fatty acids from fiber in the human diet can reduce inflammation, and this can influence the Bifidobacterium and the Lactobacillus, especially Lactobacillus rhamnosus, which can show by increasing those short-chain fatty acids can benefit in reducing the feelings of stress, which is really interesting. So good diet in the front door can influence stress and reactivity, which I think plays into the veterinary, the, you know, the canine side of things. In humans, they again mention in the book, it's linked with depression and IBD and and how important manipulating the gut microbiome is. And so back in 2017, this— they were saying that in the future we may be able to engineer microbes to change the gut microbiome. We may be able to use bacteriophages. These are tiny little viruses which are specifically attacking certain bacteria. So you can knock out some of the bad bacteria to allow the good bacteria to proliferate. And of course, there is the FMT, using FMT to treat psychological disorders, which I think is fascinating. So I think back in 2017, they were right on the money and were predictive in many ways as to how things are going to move forward. They certainly were saying this is a really, really big subject, and I think were exactly right there. Did you read it at some point, Bren?

I have read that alongside a number of others. I was just looking to see if I had a hard copy on the shelf. And I can't see it for some reason, but I have moved house since then. And that's why. But I did grab, you know, there's similar discussions. There's a Russian. I think she's Russian. I'm pretty sure she's Russian.

Natasha Campbell-McBride. She certainly sounds Russian.

Yeah. I mean, the Campbell-McBride thing doesn't belie the Russian thing, but I think that's through marriage. But she does talk about, she's got a whole series of books on those. With regards to things like the gut and psychology syndromes and, you know, talking everything from autoimmune and allergies and those side of things, physical problems all the way through to neurological disease and actually autism, you know, ADHD and all of those side of things. So it's a consideration, certainly when we talk about what's going on with the gut I'm always overwhelmed with the talking about tweaks to individual bacterial groups for specific results, knowing how a lot of the papers that are coming out show that if you don't manage the terrain, and sometimes that is a terrain established in an individual within the first 6 months of their life, that actually there is a propensity for them, unless you do something fairly dramatic to their terrain, to always draw back to that formation of that first 6 months of their life, which says to me that if you're not careful, you will be continually trying to plug away and give something to change that microbiome. And as soon as you stop, it will fall back to a more diseased environment, which concerns me. There are— I have seen it change and I have— I do think that part of that terrain, of course, we talk about raw food all the time. If you guys are just joining us tonight and you've never heard of us before, we are Raw Pet Medics because we talk about raw food feeding. And if that turns you off, this is not the community for you. But from a point of view of You know, is that part of the terrain? If we change the diet significantly, are we managing that terrain? And as long as we keep on feeding raw, that terrain and that prebiotics, the making the foods for those appropriate bacteria, is right. But I have seen some dogs which are raw fed still get poorly, still have issues, still have mental health issues. And then that's where the Forever Dog Life book sort of comes in, where it talks about a whole wealth of impacts from forever chemicals to hormonal health, to looking at what you're feeding your dog, you know, with how you're, what you're giving them to drink, what chemicals are coming through in that, you know, all of that influence. And you can then just sit there and go, Wow. And we're talking about changing one bacterial group to get this profound change in mental health. How can we truly get that to hold? Okay. What's your thoughts? How do you think that process could be managed?

Well, I'm interested. You mentioned the terrain. When I think of terrain, then that makes me think of gut health because the gut is the environment in which the bugs live. But actually the terrain is everything within the gut. And the gut starts here. Arguably, you could say it starts out here somewhere. And there are many ideas to suggest that, you know, every, every few centimeters you get a different microenvironment in your gut. You go from the mouth with saliva to the esophagus to the stomach with the high acidity to the duodenum where you get pancreatic juice. And so you get these microenvironments going all the way down. And when you say terrain, I'm thinking we're talking about the food that's going in. We're talking about the actual physical structure of the gut. We are talking about the, the bugs that are already there. And, and, and there are so many elements that will play into how things influence. Can you change mood with just a single probiotic? Difficult to say. Can you influence mood through changing the gut microbiome? Yes, I think you can. Will that stay if it's just a short-term microbiome intervention? Probably not. It could do depending on the health of your gut and your microbiome. But there is work I have looked at, work which I can't find right now, talking about even the impact of even short courses of antibiotics being linked to anxiety disorder. So I think it's a whole new world. And actually, my take home is there's more that we don't know about this subject than we do know. You know, it's like antibiotics in 1939. We thought something about it.

I sort of agree with you. That's a relief. It's not just me being swamped by the enormousness of, you know, the trillions of different bacteria that are actually in the true gut microbiome.

Yeah.

And the we probably just don't know 99.999999% of truly what's going on in there. I think interesting what you say about terrain because obviously terrain comes from the terroir, the terroir we're talking about wine and you're not just talking about the physical slope that that wine is grown on, you're talking about the weather impact on that growth, you're talking about the nutrient content within the earth. You're talking about the people that populate that vineyard and grow those vines. You know, so I think it's— we probably— it's lost in interpretation, isn't it, in that translation into the English, that what it truly means in the original language of— there's so many factors that are involved in creating that environment that begets those particular bugs.

Yeah, for sure.

I've got something to add here.

Oh my God, he's here. He's woken from the—

I'm wearing a black t-shirt with a black background, so it's like I'm actually haunting this chat.

Floating head.

I don't know if I can wedge this bit in, but I think this is the only time to do it in the chat. But I found out something very interesting recently, and it was that I'm surprised how many adaptations there are in the dog's digestive system that I never heard about that makes them very meat-eatery. I'm going somewhere with this. And their pancreas is 2 or 3 times bigger than ours. Their gallbladder is 3 to 5 times bigger than ours. Their pancreas releases lots of, you know, enzymes for fat and protein digestion. It's for the feast and famine, rapid digestion of heaps of material. It needs a lot of oomph to get going and digest. It's got a rapid system. So, but the point is dogs don't actually rely on bacteria as much as we do to farm the goodies. They don't farm these, they've got a very undeveloped caecum, very little mucus in their intestines and stuff shoots through. They rely on enzymes, acidity, rapid digestion, big pancreas, big gallbladder, a lot of that activity. We rely more on the compounds from bacteria. We're omnivores, we've got slower digestive systems, we have far more biota in our guts, we make a better home for them, better acidity, We have much smaller pancreas and gallbladders. We rely less on our digestion and we, we have become farmers of bacteria. So it turns out that the short-chain fatty acids that we talk about now and again, they come from the digestion of complex carbohydrates and they play a role in health. And we know the short-chain fatty acids are good for the health, you know, of your gut health and all sorts of immunostuff, but mental health as well. They come into it and there's lots of different types. But they are studies of people being fed carbohydrates and carbohydrate fibers, plant fibers, and that's not really the stuff that dogs eat a whole heap of. Dogs produce slightly less short-chain fatty acids when they are on raw food, but they produce far more branched-chain fatty acids, BCFAs. And they are names here which I had to look back up again because I couldn't remember names of them, such as lots more isobutyrate, isovalerate, and 2-methylbutyrate. I haven't a clue, I don't know. But they're BCFAs, they're not SCFAs with short-chain fatty acids, which we always talk about, they're BCFAs. And when you Google any one of those compounds, they play a role in behavior. And I just think we focus so much on what we know when it comes to the biome, which is very, we know so little, it just changes so quickly that I don't even talk about it anymore. And now we just talk about what I don't know. But when you talk about the behavioral compounds that come from bacteria, you know, there could be a whole other level to this that maybe the same doesn't actually apply to what a lot of the information we're getting is from human studies and we're applying to dogs where they farm less of those sorts of bacteria. They use different compounds. So do the compounds that we apply to them and hope they work, cross our fingers. Is it really the same system? Is that really what they'll respond to? So yeah, that's a whole other level, the fatty acid bit, which I'm only just dipping my toes into at the moment.

I think that that plays into the argument of if we've got a carnivore and we're feeding them an omnivore diet called a kibble, which is high in cereal, then that, that is forcing them, forcing a change in the microbiome which cannot be species appropriate. Where do you stand on that one?

Say that again.

So dogs are carnivorous, so they need to eat high fat, high protein, and get fiber from collagens and what have you. If we feed them, we very intelligent humans, feed them an omnivore diet which is high in cereals, grain, maize, oats, these kind of things called kibble, called cans, because our cereals are very cheap, then we are skewing their microbiome towards an omnivorous microbiome which cannot be species appropriate. It.

Yeah, and it probably got a little few benefits from that temporarily. There might be, if you've got some sort of dysbiosis and you pop in some plant fiber like an inulin, or, you know, you can pop in your— use your chicory or your artichoke, you can get— you can rectify, you can jolt them out of this dysbiosis. But long term, would that be suitable? No, because those plant fibers need a large colon, they need dead ends, they need the right acidity. And carnivores don't want lots of soluble fiber going through their guts. It slows the passage of digestive which increases nasty fermentation products, which they don't want. So it's like there's a big lack of taurine from dogs. Their bile is taurine conjugated. Our bile is glycine conjugated. In other words, that salty bile that comes down is great for digesting taurine and fats, but not so good at carbs. Soluble fiber wrecks that process. So it's interesting that I'm actually doing this fiber talk at the moment. So it's a hot topic. Topic, but I'm now starting to question all the little prebiotics that I used to use to grow what bacteria? I really don't know. I really don't know what bacteria.

And I think that's the interesting thing is, however, we do know that there are significant changes within gut flora at points. So I get your point about generating foods, generating nutrients and benefits you know, are different for us, indeed even more different for big fermenters like the ungulates because, you know, they've got whole vats of, you know, postbiotics to choose from. But I still think there is significant growth of flora within dogs' guts, which you can change and get beneficial changes. Within. And, you know, let's face it, an FMT wouldn't be effective against things like skin disease and mental problems and chronic diarrheas if actually virtually none of their digestive process and their health relied on gut flora. So I think gut flora have a very important place within the dog's gut, whether it's truly as a food producer, I don't think that's exactly the case, but I don't think that's the argument we're having here. I think what we're trying to say is, but what is the influence, the important genetic and metabolomic influence that the gut flora is there? And then to Nick's point, absolutely corrupting that away from a true carnivore's gut the stress that that will put upon the whole system and the mental health on the whole system is a really important point that we should be trying to avoid for both cats and dogs.

Yeah, it might be, it might be that the FMT is actually rectifying a dysbiosis rather than, you know, and while we apply that to thinking that's all the good microbes that give us all the good stuff, well, actually it could be shifting a heap of Clostridium or C. diff. And it's like, um, it's, it's, and it's, it's once that has gone, then the good guys can come back and, and normal function returns, you know, no more inflammatory bowel, and then everything can start working again. So yeah, but yeah, it's not like they don't have lots of bacteria, they do, but significantly less than us, you know. But, uh, yeah, they definitely do get benefits from them. I'm just wondering which bacteria do which. I'm looking at groups, names of bacterial groups that I've never even heard of in, in the intestines of meat eaters, going, what is that stuff and what does to, you know, how long would that eat?

Yeah, and let's remember, you know, herbivores aren't truly plant consumers to the level that we think. They— herbivores are cropping plants to feed gut flora. Yeah, you know, then it's the gut flora that feeds those herbivores. In the majority of cases, they don't truly get all of their nutrition directly from the plant. I mean, let's face it, plants put so many protections in to try and avoid people, animals getting the benefits directly from the plants because they don't want to be eaten. They want to grow, they want to survive on the savannas and, you know, be as obstructive to being consumed as possible.

Yeah. Here's, here's another little bit. I didn't know this. It's not that the gut flora produce serotonin. Okay. I really did think that was the case. Anybody?

Am I alone thinking that there are some gut flora that will produce serotonin?

So what I'm grabbing from this— this is just a— this is a guy's website here. 90 to 95% of total body serotonin in mammals resides in the gut. Okay, so we agree with that. But it's not that the microbes typically synthesize large quantities of serotonin directly. Rather, they produce metabolites such as the short-chain fatty acids we just spoke about that stimulate EC cells. And it's those guys and enteric neurons, it's in our gut membrane that then produces serotonin. Did you know that?

Okay. I didn't know that.

And that's then the stimulation of the vagus.

I don't know, I'm miles behind because I just found this now.

I always say vagal stimulation, or is that going to be releasing to the bloodstream, which then goes through the blood-brain barrier?

It doesn't go through the blood-brain barrier. I don't believe that. I thought we'd had that discussion before, that actually some of those neurotransmitters like serotonin are very poor to go from the blood indirectly into the brain. And that's why the vagal theory was much more likely that actually stimulation of the vagal nerve is the calming effect on the brain.

I think tryptophan needs to have a relative increase in order to get through the blood-brain barrier. I'm not sure about serotonin. No, couldn't say. Couldn't say.

Interesting. There's a fabulous book here before we— I mean, I've missed this whole show, but there was a brilliant book someone told me to read called Sedated.

Sedated.

Have you heard about it, guys?

No.

By James Davies. And the person that recommended it is as big a reader as you two guys.

I can hear Nicola Cresswell laughing right now because we've suddenly started to up the level of books we're suggesting prior to Christmas. Could you just repeat that title for Nicola's benefit?

The book is called Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis. By James Davies. And it is just chatting about, you know, how we treat mental health today and how we used to treat it and how it's seen as something that we need to control today with medication and get people back to functioning, but not addressing the issue. But it's a real big— it's very popular. It's highly, very well reviewed here. So that's my next audiobook. And it's got some great, great testimonies on it. So So infuriating the right, that's what some of these people are saying. So that's like that. Anyway, that was a good book on the matter. So I'm going to be checking out that on mental health. Did you guys talk about the effect of head meds on dogs and how they work? I've always wanted to know that. I need to ask you if we haven't done it yet. We'll do it over on Patreon.

Yeah, let's do that.

Patreon, Patreon now, shall we?

Yeah, we will indeed. Oh yeah, poor old Nicola shouting in her best Scottish accent.

No, it's been a double murder. That's the only thing I can say.

We love you, Nicola. Thanks for watching.

Yeah, she's gone now. She's fuming.

Absolutely. So if you want to catch us, we're going to continue our conversation over on Raw Pet Medics. So we're going to be on patreon.com/rawpetmedics. You'll be able to join us over there and see the rest of our conversation in about an hour or so. Take care.

Toodle-oo.

See you guys.