In this podcast episode, host Dr. Conor Brady interviews sled‑dog musher Dr. Mark Roberts, who lives in northern New Hampshire near the Canadian border. They discuss the harsh winter environment, local wildlife (deer, moose, bears, coyotes) and how these affect sled‑dog outings. Roberts describes his large sled‑dog operation, detailing the number of dogs (22 active racers, plus reserves), team structures, training progression from short pulls to multi‑hour, 40‑mile runs, and the roles of lead, swing, and wheel dogs. He contrasts pure Siberian Huskies with Alaskan Huskies, emphasizing breed‑specific traits, coat, and performance. A major focus is the nutrition debate: traditional kibble‑plus‑meat mixes versus high‑fat, low‑carbohydrate or ketogenic diets. Roberts critiques carbohydrate inclusion, cites studies showing marginal performance differences and lower injury rates on low‑carb diets, and shares his own experiments with raw, high‑fat feeding, MCT supplementation, and metabolic adaptation. Historical feeding practices (seal meat, pemmican) are contrasted with modern kibble, and Roberts speculates on why the shift occurred. Health outcomes are explored, including low incidence of pancreatitis in his dogs, rare cancer cases, and joint issues in senior dogs. He mentions breeding practices, keeping males intact to preserve muscle mass, and the challenges of breeding pure Siberian lines. The conversation also touches on driver motivation for mushers, potential crossover diet studies, and upcoming supplement development. The episode ends with listener engagement prompts and Patreon support reminders.
Chapters
Good evening.
Good evening.
Good evening. We're not even going to do a big reveal of our guest because he is obviously in the main screen for those listening on the podcast.
Oh, you want me to do that just so you know?
Leave him up there. Leave him up there. Beautiful. We have the beautiful Dr. Mark Roberts on tonight. Uh, we are Raw Pet Medics, and you'll get us anywhere you listen to your podcast. You'll get us on Facebook and YouTube, and we appreciate all our listeners. And we also appreciate those on patreon.com/rawpetmedics. If you can, the price of a cup of tea really does us great and helps us get on these uber-expensive guests like Dr. Mark Roberts. And so great for people—
you're not paying me anything!
I'm trying to bring our show up a level, but thanks, Robert, you just ruined our 2025 start already. So thanks to everyone on Patreon, we do a little bit, 10 or 15 minutes bit on the side as well, Mark. So when we finish the quarter, quarter to 8, we jump over there for 15 minutes. So guys, anything dramatic or interesting you want to talk about before we get into Mark?
No, I got through the snow and I was moaning about our whole 6 inches and along comes Mark and says, yeah, just what you're moaning about. I mean, -20 or something and 2 foot.
Whereabouts are you, Mark, that it's that cold?
I'm up in northern New Hampshire, so just to give you sort of a bit of a bearing on that, we're about 20 minutes to drive from the Canadian border, and we're about 2 hours from Montreal.
Sounds cold.
Okay.
Yeah. How does one drive their kids to school?
The kids? No, they just, they go down the bottom of the hill and get the school bus and off they go.
Oh, cool. Okay. It's not like a bulldozer plowing its way through 2 meters of snow to the school.
No, to be honest with you, I normally I have to plow the road because we live on a hill. But, um, yeah, I mean, I've got a four-wheel drive truck, so I only do that if I have to.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do kids still toboggan and do stuff that we do over here when we see the snow, like once or twice a decade? Do, do kids still play in the snow over there, or is it just like, what's the point in throwing a snowball or building a snowman? Do people do that when they live in the snow?
Uh, yeah, yeah, they should. I just think they get— they're just going to be a bit tougher when they're out in it all the time. They actually, you know, they like it. Yeah, you know, um, yeah, they don't get I don't know what it's like in, in the UK these days, but they don't really shut the schools for much, you know.
It's—
yeah, it can be really—
they shut the schools at the drop of a hat over here. Yeah, yeah, 2 inches and they'll drop— they'll close the schools.
And I was a kid, so that's what—
come out with a packet of salt, you know, 1 kilo of salt, and you'll do about half a foot of the road.
The gas not working, lads. Cube of salt.
Yeah. Now, when I was a kid and I— when I was a kid and I grew up in Manchester in the UK, Manchester. And, um, we would go and play football and we'd play a team and it would be, you know, back in then you'd get quite a lot of snow. There'd be a couple of feet of snow and you still go out in your shorts and you would rub, you would rub, um, like wintergreen, like a menthol sort of cream on your legs to keep yourself warm. And you'd never miss it, you'd never miss the game. So things have changed.
Nothing worse than standing in the wall for someone taking a free kick there because you'll just break like a twig. I'll use the orange football so you can see. But, uh, so look, where you are, Mark, when the snow comes down, do you— I imagine there's a heap of black-tailed deer. What do you have walking around your back garden? I imagine you have space where you are. You sound like you're out in the sticks.
Yeah, so you get a lot of deer, but I'd say you probably— I mean, when I'm out with the dogs, we typically get deer. We get a lot of deer, but we get a lot of moose, you know. So moose are huge, you know, they're sort of 500-600 pounds, you know. That's the biggest concern I have is in terms of And I, you know, depends on the day, I can, you know, not see any or I can see 3 or 4. You know, the biggest concern you have is them charging you because they're so big.
They charge your ski? They charge your skidoo or whatever you call it?
Yeah, it depends what I'm out on, a sled or ATV. They have done it to other people. They've never done it to me. You know, the main difficulty you've got if you're taking out, say, 14 dogs, if they just move off onto the side by about 6 or 8 feet, you've got to make sure that the lead dogs go past and don't pull in, because obviously they want to pull in because they're dogs. So you have to make sure you've got really good leading dogs that when you tell them to leave it, they leave it, because if they go in, everyone else goes in, you know.
As in after the moose to start? Yeah. Oh, and you're hanging on the back.
Yeah, I've never had that, but I've got good lead dogs. If I tell them to leave it, they leave it. They look, you know, they want to because you can see them looking. Just tell them leave it and they just keep going.
Yeah.
And can you hunt those moose that walk around the place?
Can you—
what, can you hunt those moose? Is there—
yeah, you can, you can hunt most of them. They have seasons, apparently. I mean, I don't hunt, um, but from my understanding is, is that they, um, it's quite hard. I think it's a lottery, actually, to hunt a moose. There's not many that you can— you know, they don't have a season. You can just have so many you can hunt, and they give out— like I say, it's a lottery to, to be given the right to kill them. But there's not many that you can kill. The deer, the deer are a different thing.
Yeah, yeah.
And then the only other thing I see out on a regular basis, not now because it's winter, but they're in hibernation, is the black bears.
I was just going to ask, what follows the moose? What hunts them?
It'll be, well, it'd be the bears when they're not in hibernation. That's the main predator we have up here. Then second to that, you'd have coyotes.
Oh yeah.
But the bears, the bears, honestly, the bears are the, you know, the moose are far more concerned. The bears don't want anything to do with you. They just see them run off. You know.
Yeah.
Um, the only time I had a concern with the bears once was I saw a baby one that came out and then its mama came after that and I thought it was going to get me. But other than that, you know, yeah, there's no brown-colored bears where you are? No, we don't get grizzlies up here. They're right up in, in northern, um, um, Canada and then up into Alaska.
Okay, so Mark, you just mentioned 14 dogs. We can't leave that without— in, in passing. So tell us about your 14 dogs and tell us, uh, what you do with those 14 dogs, you know, in, in a little detail. And also, what are your plans for this year? Are you going to be racing them? What's, what, what's the plan? And if you can talk to us about how you feed them, that would be really cool.
So at the moment I have, um, 24 dogs, of which, um, there are, uh, 3 that retired, um, and then I've got one that's one's too young. He can only— he's only going to be old enough next season to run. Um, so, so I pick up on 26, so I've got 22 that are running. So I've got 22 dogs that are actually running, 3 that retired, and one's too young. So the 22 that run, I basically have, um, because I can't take— well, I guess I could in theory, but it's a hell of a lot of dogs. Um, I take 2 teams out, which makes it really hard because, you know, it's not too bad earlier on when you're doing a few miles, but when you're doing like 40-mile runs and you're doing it with 2 teams— so initially I start off with running 2 teams separately, and then when I get to about this time now, actually, I just switched to 1 main team of about 14 dogs, maybe 15, I'm kind of not too sure. And then the rest are going to be the reserves. So then I just concentrate on 1 team based on how they've performed. So we start— I kind of do all year round. I officially start the 1st of August, um, But before that, if the weather's cool enough, I'll just take them out for little runs. And then we start off just doing 1-mile runs, and I make them pull and pull and pull against the ATV. And they only go about 3 miles an hour, so I get them just used to really pulling, pulling hard. And then, um, and then as it starts to— as the year gets on, I go from 1 mile to 3 miles to 5 miles to 10 miles. And then I allow them to go from, uh, 3 miles an hour pulling to 5 miles an hour pulling, and then so I get to a point where they're doing 7 or 8 miles consistently, and I give them a bit more gas. So they're still pulling, they're just not pulling like crazy, you know.
How do you dictate how they pull? Is it just the anchor? Is it just you slowing the sled down and making them pull?
Well, it's not. By the time you get to the sled, it's at that point they're doing it, you know, automatically, you know. And some of them just do it anyway because they've done it for a few years, they know. It's just getting back into the groove of that. What you don't want to do is, um, say you don't get onto a sled to the end of the year and you've been on the machine for ages before that, um, especially with Siberian Huskies because they're clever. Like, they'll know if they'll hear you give the juice, like give us some acceleration, they hit the gas, so they'll stop pulling because I know you're there, you know. So, so what you got to do is you've got to get them used to that no matter what happens, if they don't pull, they're not going to go anywhere, you know. And sometimes it's really painful because you're going up a steep hill and they want to slacken off, and you just have to stop and then make them pull. And if they go slack, you stop again and make them pull. And then eventually they get to the point where they just do it all the time. And then when you go into a sled, which is obviously a lot lighter than an ATV, even giving them a bit of juice, they're still pulling more. Then that's, that's the time that you sort of reap the benefits, and they just pull it like a hot knife going through butter, you know.
So these are truly like athletes. And oh yeah, when you're putting them in that, so what, what's your main thing here? Is it all about stamina? And are you going to end up with like Mo Farah's really sleek, thin things that just run and run, or have you got really muscly sprinter sort of get you started dogs? What's the best sort of makeup?
Yeah, it's a good question, that one. I try to go for lean but not exceptionally lean because I still want to keep some muscle on them to reduce the risk of injury. But yeah, you definitely want to be leanish. Otherwise, you know, like you say, like a long-distance runner, you're carrying too much weight, you know, it's going to slow you down. But I want them to have a bit of muscle mass behind And certainly compared to the Alaskan Huskies, these have got more weight to them. They've got bigger, fluffier coats and all the rest of it.
So is that crossing in breeding?
No, no.
Or are these pure?
Yeah, mine have all got pedigree, and that's a rarity. Like racing Siberian Huskies, there's not many. I would say in distance teams in the whole of North America, there's probably only 4 or 5, you know, that do it, that have Siberians. And the rest of them all have Alaskan Huskies, which are just much, much quicker, you know. So we'll do a 200 or 300-mile race and we'll average out at, um, 7 miles an hour. Like, once they get a pace, you just keep going at the same pace.
Um, do you have a subclass so that you're always going to be placed? Because there's no—
no, they don't do that, which is unfortunate, which is unfortunate because, like I say, we'll average out about 7. These dogs, a good team will average out 11.5, 12 miles an hour, you know. Yeah, so I mean, it's a difference. Yeah, I know. But if you think I'm going out for training my dogs for 6, 7 hours you know, they're going out for what, 4 hours? Yeah, yeah. You know, you times that over a whole season, it's a lot of time they're not, you know, they're saving. And then when you do a race, if I'm out for 3 days, they're going to be out for what, 2 and a bit days, you know?
Um, why, what does, what pushes you to keep it so pure?
I just like the breed. I think it's, um, it's a true Arctic breed. Um, whereas Alaskans, what they— because years ago it was all just Siberian Huskies, and then someone got the idea of crossing them with pointers and, you you know, all these other dogs that are fast but they've got thin coats and their pads aren't hardy. So what you ended up with is a really fast dog. Um, the only downside to them is— and it is a big downside— is the pads aren't good. They always have to put booties on the dogs all the time. They have to put jackets on them all the time. I, I, you know, so it's kind of, um, it's a fast— I mean, and they look like they can still live outside in cold temperatures, but they certainly can't handle handle it as well as these guys will lie in the snow and just go to sleep, whereas they need a lot more looking after. But they are, they are much, much faster.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah, I remember when I did the bit that I did up in, uh, at the top of Norway there, the dogs will just curl up in a hole. They'll scratch a hole and they'll throw some hay into it, and the dogs will just sit in there, and the snow will fall on top of these dogs that were hot an hour ago, and the snow doesn't even melt off their coat. That's how well insulated they are. Cold and they just curl up in a little on their lines. I thought they would stop and there'd be gorgeous kennels and stuff. No, these dogs are happy out. Yeah, for the short amount of time we use them. But I was struck by like they didn't look like the huskies I thought I was going to get.
No, they wouldn't. They wouldn't have been. They look— they honestly don't look anything like what you would typically think, you know, a sled dog would look like, you know.
Yeah.
But then once you get to that point where you're doing, you know, sort of 40, 50 miles, then you move on to the next stage, which is you'll do 40, 50 miles and then you'll camp in the forest for a couple of hours. And then do another one after that, you know, because then you want to get them used to running and then resting and going again, you know. So because it is one thing to get out— to get a dog to run for 6, 7, 8, 9 hours non-stop is a, is a big achievement, you know, and it's over serious terrain, you know. Um, like I'll do 40 miles and we'll do like 5,000— over 5,000 feet of climb, you know, over that. Um, but you do a race for that and that's a hard thing to do. But then to ask a dog to rest for 2, 3, 4 hours, go to sleep, and then wake them up in the middle of the night and then say to go and do that again, it's really hard. You know, it's a different dog altogether. It's not even— they've got to have that mentality. And then to rest again and then do that again and then rest again and do that again and the rest and do that again when they are just— they are tired, um, because you can't make them do it. Like if they don't want to go, there's nothing you can do. You can't bribe them, you know, you can't give them a— yeah, you can't give them a smack, that's gonna have the opposite effect, you know. It's a— there's a good saying in sled dog sport which is you can't push a piece of rope. So unless they're going to pull it, there's nothing you can do, you know. So, um, it's, you know, you need— it is a— not all the dogs I've had want to do it. You know, some will get to a certain point where they're just like, I don't want to go out, you know.
And so do you think the driver is like humans that get addicted to the exercise? They get that endorphin release and that feel-good of doing vigorous exercise. Is that— what is the driver? What's the thing that really drives them to do that, have that commitment to the dogs?
Yeah, yeah. I think for the leaders, the main— well, actually, I know for the leaders, their main drive to do it is, well, for them, they all want to go out and run for a few hours. The ones that are really like the ones at the back, they're just meatheads and they just want to go and go. I've got dogs that can do 200-mile race, I mean, in 15 minutes they want to go again, they're barking, you know. Um, so you've got two, two, I reckon two main, well, three different types. The ones at the back, the wheel dogs that pull the most weight, they just want to go, they don't care, they'll run themselves into the depth, to the death. The one is the middle are kind of just— they're in the zone following the ones in front of them. And then the ones at the front, they do it because, yes, they like it, but they want to please you more than anything else, you know. They want to make you happy to pull, you know. So it's more that they're not— they'll do it, but they want to do it because they want to make you happy. This is kind of—
how many lead dogs do you have in that?
I have 4. I have 4 because in case one gets injured, I've got backup ones, you know, or someone gets tired, I can put them back. But I have 2 that are my main ones, and then, you know, 2 that are kind of my backup ones, you know. But, um, but yeah, if you don't have a good pace at the front, and it is quite a lot of dynamics. So the ones that sit behind the, the 2 main ones as well, um, they're, they're called swing dogs, but they, they will put pressure on the ones right at the front to move. So if they're pulling them, they're right at the backside, that will make them move. So there's quite a lot of dynamics in terms of, you know, and I've moved dogs around and had one dog in one position where it's not very good, and then I moved it to another position, it's outstanding, you know. So it's just, it just, you know, it just depends.
Yeah. What's the ratio of males to females? I mean, I'm assuming males are bigger. There's still sexual dimorphism in, in Siberian Huskies? No.
Uh, yeah, there's, there's, the males are definitely bigger, you know. And, and that's the only downside, unfortunately, for being a female, is if you're doing a race that's got a lot of hills, you want the big dogs because, you know, it's the going up big hills pulling weight. So I will try and get— unless a male's just not pulling, or he's not pulling well, you might have a small female that pulls more than the big male. But in general, if everything was equal and they were all pulling, you want more males. So I typically go for, you know, a race where you might have 12 dogs, I'd go for, um, ideally sort of 8 males and about 4 females.
Why do you have the females in there at all, therefore?
Um, yeah, you have to have backups. Um, and sometimes even when you breed them and you're trying to breed them down a certain line, you just get a dog dog that even if it's small, it's just, it's just crazy how it, how it works, you know. And it's, it just, there's no set— I don't, I don't, I'm not, I'm not a massive believer in terms of— I think it helps a bit breeding dogs down lines of where the, you know, the, the parents have come from. But I do believe you can get some dogs that are just like humans, isn't it? You know, you can have some humans that just aren't genetically built for something, but they're just, they just work so hard that they can, they can make up for those shortfalls, right?
Yeah. So what about this, what about this carbohydrate debate? Because because like when I was in with our dogs that we're using, they got a basis of kind of kibble, and on top of that they got a hot meat slush which was frozen. Obviously when we stop and then you have to light the fires and you soften this slush into a stew, and the stew is— I remember that being the food. And anytime this is spoken about on my page, carbohydrates come into it. I know, I know well that most of the, it seems, dog sled teams are feeding carbohydrates with their food, but that's not everybody. What do you feed and what's your opinion on all that?
So you're right, and that's how most people will feed the dogs, is they will feed them in essence a combination of kibble with meat, you know, and it's cooked up into like a slurry and they mix the two. That's the typical approach. Now if you look at the kibbles they feed, most of them will be, um, labeled as being for working dogs, you know. So, um, I mean, I've got one bag down there I've been looking at just for research, and that's got 32%. That's the highest one I've seen on the market— 32%, um, protein and 32% fat. Yeah, and that's the highest I've seen, which obviously means that the carbs are going to be, you know, reasonably high in that as well. Now, the issue I've got is when you're adding meat to it, there's a number of issues. Firstly, what is in that meat? So is it just skeletal muscle, or does it have organ meat, whatever it is, you know? I don't know what's in it. So is it giving any level of nutrients beyond your macros, you know? So you don't know that. And if that's forming up what percentage of the diet, say it's 50% of the diet, is it deficient in, I don't know, zinc or whatever, you know, which for dogs when they're working, you know, the need for adequate nutrition increases beyond one that's not moving much at all. But the second one for me is I'm not sure what that's supposed to achieve because yes, it's giving them energy and yes, it's increasing the palatability of the product, but it's not In terms of energy, if you've got a dog that has, say, I mean, it's not much, you know, 8, 9, 10% carbohydrates that's coming in the diet, you're not going to put that dog into a ketogenic state. You're going to have it— you're not going to have it burning fat naturally. It's going to start using the carbs up first, and when it's used the carbs up, it's then going to switch over to ketosis, to burning fat as a source of energy, or ketones. So I'm not sure what it's actually supposed to achieve. Now, one of the, one of the arguments is that you can, if you give dogs carbs, um, the carbs will stop the breaking down of protein. So protein, basically it can be amino acid pool, it can be skeletal muscle. So one of the, one of the arguments is by giving them carbs will stop that from happening. And actually, I do believe that is true. That is true, but that's a very easy one to counter because all you got to do then is give them more protein in the diet and make sure you've got sufficient fat that's going to be used as a primary energy source, and then you're going to counter that. The other thing to add to that is this is looking at dogs at the extreme end of things, you know, so dogs that are running and running and running for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. So it's not a normal dog, but what I'm saying that even at that even at that level, you don't— I don't believe you necessarily need to have carbohydrates. You know, you can take them out. And yes, if you don't have— if you have an incredibly massively high fat content and a lower protein content, then yes, just for the intensity of exercise, you're going to start biting into some, some, um, amino acids, whether it be dietary or from, uh, so skeletal muscle or from the amino acid pool the animal has. But if you have enough of protein, then you're going to counter that 'cause there will be some wastage, but if I have enough protein, then that won't be the case.
Wow, there's so many questions come from that long piece there.
Mark, I'm just going to jump in before we get into the other stuff. Just from a historical perspective, if I was a musher for, say, 100, 150 years ago, what would I be feeding my huskies?
Well, I mean, I got into this years ago because my dad used to work with— he used to work for the British Antarctic Survey. And this is how I got into the whole— this is basically years ago, this is how I got into this side of work. And he used to feed— well, they used to feed the dogs down there. They don't have the dogs anymore, they took them off in '94. But they used to feed them seal, seal meat. So they basically just get a seal and chop it up and give them a huge chunk of the seal. And they would give them— they would supplement it with something called, I think it's called Pemmican, which is just like a pre-mixed thing that they'd add to the diet to try and make it complete and balanced. But there was no— from a macronutrient angle, there was, there was no carbohydrates. They were just, um, eating seal meat basically, you know.
Are you saying a seal's not complete and balanced?
Well, I mean, it would have been a lot of blubber, wouldn't it, as well? A lot of, a lot of fat. I'm not sure the protein content you get of that, but they certainly weren't— I, I, I'm gonna bet my life on it, but I'm pretty confident they weren't getting a widespread of sort of organ meats and all the rest of it.
All right, and what made the change therefore? What's— so, uh, so, so back in the day they would feel seal meat or whale meat or whatever, or salmon, or I would imagine that'd be the same.
If you look at like even now, if you were to go— and I don't know, but I highly suspect you went to Greenland or whatever, the Eskimos, they would be feeding that same sort of diet now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's all they've got. They haven't got any kibble, so they can't feed it, you know. Okay, so, so in North America, what made the change? So how did convince these guys who'd been doing it for what, 200, 300, 400 years? How did they— well, not 400 years— how did they convince them to go from something that was ultra traditional to bringing in this funny stuff called kibble? How did that— how did they go about that, do you reckon? You may not know first.
Yeah, I can only give you an impression. I can only give my best guess, and it's probably similar to, you know, someone with a dog on the couch, why they would switch over. Because at some point, yeah, they were obviously feeding meat, and that— and I'm guessing it was probably down to you know, they got news of this new product and it was touted in a way where it was going to improve this and improve that, and they just got on board with it and they've never looked back since, you know. And that's the other argument, is that you'll hear, you'll hear people say, um, well, dogs perform better on a carb diet or a moderate carb diet with fat and protein, i.e., kibble with the meat, um, angle. But I would question that and say, firstly, the studies that have been out, and there have been the studies that have been out, put out there, only really have marginal differences between whatever the composition of the ratio of macronutrients is, and they're not that different. And when they are even a little bit different and they go low carb, the dog seems to perform better. Either better glycogen storage, uh, so they don't have better glycogen, so they have less than ones on a high carb diet, but the glycogen storage doesn't go down as rapidly you know, and they outperform these dogs.
And less injury— there was a big study there of less injury. The less carbs, less injury. And the dogs on no carbs had no injuries in the entire season.
Well, I did, I did a race. I did a race last year, um, I drove 2,500 miles across to Northern Canada. I did a race there, and, um, I was the only one who finished— that was a 10-dog race— I was the only one who finished with 10 dogs. Everyone else had about 5 or 6 that finished.
That is interesting. That is interesting.
Okay, but did you get commended for that, Mark? Did they say— did anybody, you know, I mean, did they all go, oh my God, yeah, we've got, we've got 40-50% depletion rate with our dogs through injury, we're feeding kibble, you're the pure guy, and look at you with 10 dogs still?
Did you—
did they recognize that, or was it like, it was like, yeah, I mean, look, there may be different aspects, you know, I've got a different breed of dog, the then maybe they're more sturdier, maybe the slower pace. But I mean, the slow pace is relative to the size of the dog, I guess. But I, um, you know, I'm just— that, that was a fact, and read into whatever you want from that.
It might have been, it might have been by the time you got there, Mark, the whole race was finished and everyone had gone home, and you just came in. Well, actually, what—
here's what, here's what's interesting is, yes, yes, and I know I mentioned before that Alaskans are much quicker, but I still beat a couple of Alaskan teams then. They were fed racing kibble and all this kind of stuff.
Nice.
You know, so, um, you know, the ones that are really good or even obviously good will, you know, will beat me, but the ones that aren't that good will beat them. So we can still beat some of that breed, we just can't beat the ones that are good.
One of the things that people would highlight would be that the likes of greyhounds, you know, fastest dogs we have, we have, you know, this, this is a, this is a dog that we have engineered carefully to, to be You know, dogs are long-distance running animals. That's what they are. They're hunt and tire and scavenging animals. And they used to be pack hunting, and now they're little scavengers. Very few of them are these bursting speed sighthound lurcher greyhounds. And greyhounds have now switched the type of muscles that they have. So not switched, but, you know, from slow twitch to fast twitch muscles. And the argument is that those run better on glycogen, on carbohydrate diets, but has nobody ever looked at time trials over 100-meter dash, 400-meter dash? How is nobody comparing that with or without carbohydrates with all the chat that's been going on?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I agree, I agree. And that's— and I'm not going to fall back on this, but that's the same argument with sled dogs, is that if you really want to see, test this and see and put it to bed one way or the other, I mean, it's hard because you want to try and get teams that— or you just do a crossover, actually do it that way. Crossover.
Explain that, Mark, what that looks like.
Well, you just might have two teams of dogs that are fed, for argument's sake, a high carb, or even have three, three teams. You could do it this way, you have one that's fed a high carb, one an average carb, one a low carb, and then, you know, play around with your fat and protein as well, and then train them and then see how they, you know, perform over a certain distance, and then switch the diets around and give them some level of adaptation onto whatever the diet is over a certain period and see how see if they're quicker or slower. You know, it's—
I mean, that's interesting because before we came on, we were talking about can you train your metabolism to cope with different foods? So surely you'd need to therefore in that crossover give those dogs time to adapt to the renewed diet, the different diet that you're proposing.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think in terms of dogs, it doesn't really take— you can have a dog on a high-carb diet, and if I was to give it a zero-carb, high-fat diet, within a week or so, that dog, if you were to measure its ketones and you were, you know, the ketone levels would be higher. And that's the other one I've heard of quite a lot is that you can't put a dog into ketosis. Well, you absolutely can. It is harder. It is harder than it is with humans just because they have a better level of peripheral utilization. They can use them better than we can. But you can definitely do it. I've measured mine and found them in ketosis, you know, and Even things like blood glucose, I've measured mine before they've been fed and then after they've been fed, and then I found basically no difference. The blood glucose stays the same postprandially. Even if I go like an hour or two, 3 hours after, the glucose, the blood glucose stays the same. It never changes before and after they've had a meal.
So do you, you know, going back to a health reason here. So there's, you know, we've got two different ways of metabolizing and certainly, you know, AMPK versus mTOR and, you know, one's for effectively performance, the other one's for effectively repair. How do you ensure for your dogs, do you give them some degree of changeover in their metabolism to keep them healthy, or is it really just feed for performance and, you know, you blast and that's all you do?
Yeah, I feed them, I feed them basically the same diet all year round. The main thing I do is I probably reduce the protein a little bit and add a bit more fat in the off-season. But they don't, honestly, I pretty much just keep them on it by that one change in macronutrient ratio all year round.
So this is a bit of a sad question, but I'm therefore interested in towards the end of life and, you know, when they've got through their racing career and, you know, how they effectively age. Do you get a lot of cancer cases in your dogs? Do you get fewer levels? Have you got senior dogs that just hanging around, or do they go out for adoption? What's the, what's the situation?
Well, I'm trying to think of all the ones that I've got. One, I've got one in the other room now. It was, uh, no, he's outside now in the snow, and he's, he must be 16. I can see him now, he's about 16 outside now. Yeah, and he's the one that's, that's got him now. Isn't, isn't cancer as far as I can see. This is, and that's typical. I find with my guys, it's the joints that start to go eventually. You know. Um, but I know in the past I've had one dog, um, and I never bred it, it was a rehome, but he got, um, pancreatic cancer. So he was, you know, he was dead real quick. Um, um, yeah, and I think that's about it. I can't remember, you know, you know, there's obviously the various ways they die, but I can't— in terms of what I can conclusively say I think that was the only one that was cancer, but I might be wrong. Mostly the joints.
I shared from my Facebook page there about 2 or 3, 2 years ago, of a breeder. I think she was breeding standard poodles, but she was a detailed data collector and she recorded everything about these dogs. Well, she produced a beautiful graph of how long the dogs live for pre and post dry food. So the dogs are fed dry food and what they died of. So cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer in the '70s and '80s, you know, short lifespans, cancer, cancer. And then there was a dotted line of when she jumped to raw and the longevity increases. And then there's like one cancer and then zero cancer. And once the dogs had died off that had started their life on dry food, very few of the dogs were dying of cancer on this raw dog food diet. It's just anecdotal. And as they say, you can't be paying attention to that. So I guess you bloody can. This was about maybe 30, 40 dogs. Spread over maybe 3 decades. It was really, really interesting and it was a real clear kind of line where it's like, of course that's the case. We know this, that this from humans. What about this idea of if your dog is burning off the carbohydrates he's been fed, do dogs hit the wall? Which for people listening, if they're not quite clear, it's your body shunting from burning this carbohydrates, which it loves to burn, and having to for moving over to burning fat. And this is hitting the wall and you see it, it can buckle the marathon runner and it can be a process for people. Do dogs go through that process? Do you ever see something like that?
Yeah, it does happen. And again, that's why I don't really understand this concept of feeding kibble, you know, in combination with meat. You know, I'm not sure, because you are, by giving them a certain amount of carbohydrate, you are going to run the risk of that issue occurring, you know. So I don't understand why you would do that. But surely it'd make more sense Well, if you are going to do that, then adopt the approach of humans, just keeping them carbs all the time, you know, so that doesn't happen. Or take the carbs out altogether and have them just utilizing fat, in which case that's not going to be the issue.
Yeah, you run ultra marathons. How long is that and what energy do you run on?
Well, I just did that as an experiment for like 2 or 3 years. Yeah, so I, I just wanted to see if I could, um, well, there's two things actually we did. So me and the wife, so first the wife did it because there was some paper that came out, I don't know if you've seen this, from a while ago, and it said that you had to give, um, uh, puppies, or they had to, the mother had to have so many, so much carbs, otherwise the puppies basically would be born unhealthy. So we're both on it, and then it just so happened that she got pregnant and had my my second daughter, and she's okay now. She's 4 or 5, and she had no carbs for like a year or two before she had her, and afterwards. So if humans can have kids and it's okay, no carbs, then I think dogs are probably okay. And the fact that— and the fact that I've had— they've had several litters on dogs that have been fed that, and they all seem pretty healthy. I think that one— I know, that's a small sample, um, but in terms of me with the long-distance running, um I was on like a really high-fat protein diet and I ran several marathons, half marathons. I did a few ultras, one down in Vegas, up in the— whatever it is— Area 51 with the UFO thing on it.
Sounds hot.
You know, it was all through the middle of the night. It started at midnight and went all night when it was quite cool actually up in the mountains there. And I did a few other ones. But yeah, I did well, you know, I've— yeah, in fact, when I did a half marathon once in Reno, Nevada, and I finished, I would have finished something like third or fourth in the 21 to 25-year-old group. And now, you know, and I was training a lot back then. But yeah, that was on a pretty much a zero. I certainly was in a ketogenic state because I was measuring my BHB and glucose on a regular basis.
Yeah, yeah. And as you said before we came on, like, and, you know, uh, if carbohydrates were essential for speed, well, then you wouldn't have a cheetah, would you?
You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's, and that's the thing, isn't it? If you've got an animal like that that's achieving these great speeds, you know, it's clearly working anaerobically, you know. So how is it able to do that in the absence of carbs, you know? So, you know, it's, it's, you know, that, that that one example would at least, or should at least get people questioning the, you know, the reason behind having carbohydrates in a diet of an explosive athlete.
So I've got a couple of things come up. Martina has asked, does Dr. Mark Roberts have a, got a superfood supplement that he feeds his dog? Do you have something, superfood, that you add in to improve their stamina, their ability to heal, all of that side of things. Do you use that just in non-racing situations, or are you not allowed to declare it?
No, actually, it's funny you should mention that. I, um, I got approached by a company that's in, um, Canada, um, and I'm working with them on, on creating that, you know. So, um, and one of the— that's it's not in the market yet, but one of the ingredients I'm trying to get in there, and I looked at the research and I've included a level of inclusion of MCT, was to try and push dogs, you know, even if they're— I looked at the research in terms of how much carbs are being fed to these dogs is basically I was trying to make it so if the dogs were fed a reasonable amount of carbs, because that's your way you can get around it, is put some MCT in there so you can increase the the likelihood of ketone bodies being produced, you know. So I mean, if you look at, say, I know when I was doing my PhD back in Massey, there was a lady there that was trying to do that and she couldn't do it effectively. But you can definitely— that's why you have these neurological diets, the kibble ones, that they will have, you know, they will have a certain amount of MCT. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To help with—
I don't know how effective it is putting them into ketosis, um, but yeah, I mean, I guess some research isn't there now talking about that that's actually enhancing some of the bacteria, yeah, serotonin pathway, and calming the brain through stimulation of the vagal nerve rather than necessarily truly being about ketosis.
But yeah, I know, I know, but, but no, I don't, I don't at the moment, but So when I get this one finished off, we're going to do some trial work on it and see if it helps in any way.
Great, brilliant.
There's a lot of— you've got a lot of fans here. The Facebook page is where it all happens. Unfortunately, the comments don't come up on this platform here for me and you, Mark. You're just seeing YouTube. But on Facebook, there's some interesting questions here. Do you keep your males intact?
Do I keep what?
Do you keep your males entire or do you neuter them?
I keep them entire if I can. Yeah, I try to keep— I try, I try not to get them desexed. I've been keeping them, um, yeah, I've just— for that, I just believe that they, they maintain more muscle mass. They seem to be— I mean, sometimes I, I just have to for whatever reason, um, and I don't— I, I— they still perform well, but they don't seem to hold as much, um, muscle mass as the ones that haven't.
Yeah.
Um, there was another question here on your pancreatitis video. Somebody else said, did you just do a 2-hour thing for French Bulldog Club? Oh no, that was something else. Yeah, yeah, so you did a video on pancreatitis. You were one of the first people to kind of highlight to me that feeding high— this is what your PhD was about— feeding high carbohydrate diets rather paradoxically resulted in blood fat building. It's like the body chooses, oh listen, I'm happy enough to build carbohydrates and then doesn't build fat. What about digestive enzymes in a dog with pancreatitis is what this lady said. So we're pretty clear that, what diet do you recommend for dogs with pancreatitis after all your work, and do you recommend digestive enzymes? Is that necessary for a dog with chronic pancreatitis?
I think it depends on— I don't— the enzyme one, I never did any work on that, so I couldn't really comment on that if that was required. What I can tell you is that from a from a dietary perspective, that you can, if you feed a dog, I think it depends on how advanced the condition is. I did some work after I finished that piece of research with some Miniature Schnauzers that they were, you know, they were in a really bad state and the owner, just really because the dog had pretty much reached the end, tried a high-fat diet and at that point, and we measured pre and post triglycerides, we measured pancreatic lipase, and basically it didn't, it didn't make any difference. And so dogs at that point in life, so I suspect the difference is going to be before that, you know, so once they've reached that, that point, it's too late. But I think if you were to feed a dog a high-fat, low-carb diet, even in ones that potentially are more predisposed to it, I think it's potential is there that it would reduce the risk of developing the condition, you know. The other point to add is that what I've found as well is that it's not just that the high-fat diet produced lower levels of triglycerides and lower levels of pancreatic lipase. The other thing I found was there was something about, if you basically fed the dogs kibble and then I put them onto again a high-fat meal and I measured how would they tolerate that. And what I found is when I did commercial kibble to a high-fat diet, the levels of triglycerides, for example, then at the end, um, so for 8 weeks one group was fed basically the same high-carb diet, protein and fat, but it was, if you like, a more natural raw, you know, bar the, the corn elements of it, the meat hadn't been processed into the form of kibble, so it hadn't been heat treated or anything. And I found that when I did that, the same, more or less the same ratio as the kibble, and then fed them a high-fat diet, they had less triglycerides in their blood at various time points than at the beginning. So what that suggests is that, um, there's something about kibble, not the macronutrient necessarily, that when you feed it, then feed a dog a high-fat diet, causes higher levels of these lipids than what you see if you feed a more natural diet, even if it's got the same amount of carbs.
And do you actually see that in the field? Because you've got most people feeding kibble and something stew and you feeding just pure raw. What's your incidence of pancreatitis versus the word on the street from all these guys feeding kibble? Is there a—
I don't know. I've never had one dog that's had that in all the years I've had it, you know, from a I don't know how many dogs I've probably had, 45 over the years. I've never had it in any of mine.
Zero pancreatitis, Mark, that's what you're saying? Yeah, if you have a high-fat diet and you've seen no pancreatitis.
No, no, but what I said, what that says to me is there's something about kibble. Now it could be something like, you know, the level of processing, maybe there's some, the type of fat, you know, polyunsaturated fats.
Have you seen the stuff by Catherine Shanahan on dark calories? I know Nick's read this.
Yeah, I haven't read it.
No, I haven't read it yet.
Your mitochondria.
Yeah, also lack of vitamin E is a common deficient vitamin, and that's going to affect your fat metabolism.
Yeah, it could be, it couldn't be something just as simple about there's something in that diet that's delaying or increasing the level of gastric emptying. I don't know what it is. And actually, that's the next, you know, because I'm just in the process now of hopefully getting that paper published, albeit it's been quite a few years. I should have got it done ages ago, but getting that one published and the follow-on— well, not even the follow-on, I'm trying to get it up and running now actually with a colony of dogs over here in the US— is to look at various markers of that and see what it is that maybe is different beyond just macronutrients that's causing this elevation that we see in dogs. And the other thing as well is, you know, if there are some dogs that even if they want a low you know, you put them on a low fat diet, the pancreatitis still continues, you know, the disease still progresses. So it can't just be— there's more to it than just giving low fat diet and it's going to solve it, because even that's not the problem. And why are they developing pancreatitis in the first place? You know, so it's, you know, so I would— like, if you're asking me if I wanted— if I had a dog, and if it was— and this is advice I've always— because people ask me this quite a few times— if you've got a dog and you're concerned it's got, for whatever reasons, you know, it's the breed or genetic, it's got a risk of developing pancreatitis and you're willing to give it a go, then what I would say is just, you know, is go with that and then, you know, measure periodically the levels of, you know, triglycerides and pancreatic lipase, you know, and see how it goes, you know, and if you're not seeing anything, any of an issue, then you know it's working for them.
So fantastic. Somebody asked what, what was the—
hang on, hang on, it's 7:45. So let's hop over to Patreon. If Mark, if you can stick with us for another 10 minutes, we'd be really grateful.
I'm going to be asking Mark some questions on the greatest feats by sporting dogs, and we're going to see how well the three lads do. So I have a few questions lined up.
Before we go over though, I will just say, uh, that's the book. It's Dark Calories by Catherine Shanahan, somebody asked, you want to know about that. There you go.
All about seed oils in a nutshell. Seed oils are bad. So sunflower and canola and all that.
And that's, and that's what I'd like to see is I'd like to see a, that's what I would like to do actually. And I've got notes on it here. It's to create diets where you've got differences in these, you know, and see how they impact the dog in terms of the triglyceride levels, you know, just really, really ramp them up and have them really low and see the difference.
Obviously that's a massive impact within kibble foods because the amount of oils, fats that they're putting into those which are plant origin, and then they go through a processing as well if they've not already been pre-processed. But let's talk about that.
You've got plant fibers, but they showed in a few studies that excess crude plant fiber in studies affects how well your body can reabsorb bile acid. So your body really pops out all the bile acids into the small intestine, and then they, they're bound up by crude plant fiber and pooed out. So you get these fatty stools and it's not reabsorbed, which can affect the fat metabolism in the dog. So I wonder, is there something in there as well? Happens with obese dogs when they're put on these low-fat, in other words, high plant fiber and crap diets, and it can really affect the fat. That might be something there too. There's so many different things it could be, you know, high-risk Why risk it? But okay, let's jump over, guys.
And we're going to be asking lots of questions. Martina, yeah, I'll ask him about beer for you. That's fine. Okay. See you all, guys. Thanks for joining us for another week. Catch us up on any of your audio delights from Audible all the way through to Spotify. We hope you enjoy listening to us while you're walking your dogs. Thank you very much.
