Great Expectations For T'is Winter

Hello!

So we both felt that you guys would probably be a little bit deficient if we didn't at least say hello at 7 PM on a Tuesday night. So here we are.

But Brendan cannot claim that it's 7 PM because, as you see on the side of his head, there is actually a sunny reflection. We're not going to mention hair, or lack of. We're going to do deficiency in obesity over on Patreon. But it's great to be here. Greetings to all our lovely people on Facebook. It's absolutely brilliant. And what we're thinking is we're going to tell you what we've got planned for the winter so that you can get get prepped for that. Lots of good things in store. But before we get into that, Brend, what have you been up to? Anything exciting?

Oh, well, we're getting into the Christmas spirit. There's been a few Christmas dudes. It's been interesting this year. I still see lots of people drinking to excess who are in that middle-aged group. But I think the really young team members are definitely drinking less.

Oh, interesting.

And I actually enjoyed not drinking that much. I never get, you know, I never like to get out of control.

Indeed.

And so it is always interesting to see those people around me that drink to excess. But I would say I was really quite comfortable, you know, just drinking water, just maybe a gin and tonic and not drinking to excess. I know you've been on a big drive to reduce your alcohol Yeah, yeah, well, it's really interesting.

So you've done a study of what, of two? You've done two Christmas dos?

Two Christmas dos.

No, no, I'm validating your data here, my friend. So you've done two Christmas dos, and this year what you're saying is that you have noticed that the older persons are drinking as normal for Christmas, which is a lot, but there is a change in your observation of younger people in that maybe they are not as full throttle with the bottle, as it were.

Indeed.

Okay.

It's an interesting take on it. And not only from last year to this year and actually many years before that, but actually also with both one up in Scotland where I was with a company doing their Christmas stew and the practice down in Leeds. So it's just, you know, it's interesting how times change and, you know, people aren't necessarily that tied to the bottle, as you say.

It's very interesting. If you were a self-publicist, you would call it a two-country study of alcohol consumption, wouldn't you? If you were Ansel Keys, you'd say the two-country study And you would either take a bet for or against the thing based on no evidence whatsoever except a hunch, which is, dear people who are watching this, exactly how the whole bullshitty story of how healthy foods came along. And the myth could— because it is quite, it's absolutely signed, sealed, delivered now that saturated fat, which humans have been eating for 3 million years, dogs have been eating for arguably 45 million years or more, that saturated fat will line your arteries and give you heart disease if you're a human and give you all sorts of other diseases if you are a dog. So yeah, that's interesting. If you're not familiar, guys, with the story of Ancel Keys, A-N-C-E-L-L-K-E-Y-E-S, which is where they get the K-ration. You know, the American GIs, when they came over here, they had their rations were called K-rations. It's because Ansel Keys was tasked with making the rations for the troops, not himself on his kitchen table, I hasten to add, but he basically formulated it. And everybody says, oh, about— I'm going off on one here, but it's just a line of thought. Everybody says, oh, you can only make great discoveries if you're actually qualified in what you do. But this is a fine example. I can't think of many more just off the top of my head, but I'd be interested to see if you can think of any, Bren. So what I'm saying is that Ancel Keys was an epidemiologist, and yet he was making recommendations to the highest powers. I think it was Eisenhower at the time on nutrition, which is why they got him in to do the rations for all the troops, and which is why he then advised— was it Eisenhower who had a stroke or a heart attack maybe? Yeah, well, he was drafted in because he'd started the whisperings about saturated fat, and so he was brought in and he put Eisenhower on a very low saturated fat diet, and That's how it kind of spread, as well as vast amounts of money being given to the American Medical Association in order to promote this message, which was, yeah, saturated fat, which we've been eating forever and ever and ever, was actually bad for you, which is obviously complete rubbish when you look at it in some kind of historical context, when you look at it in some kind of evolutionary context, It's madness. And yet we all bought it hook, line, and sinker, which is why we have semi-skimmed milk and we have low-fat yogurt and all these other things which I would suggest are not good for you. Eat it as how nature intended, which is the message we go for when we're talking about raw food. It's nature intended. Mother Nature intended dogs to eat raw food. We now have the luxury of oven, of cook where and what have you. So there is a small minority who can't go raw, and for those we can lightly cook. However, kibble, the great hideous behemoth that is kibble and retorted cans, should be avoided by all means.

And it's interesting, isn't it, because actually it is almost from that nub or that theory that came up from nowhere in my mind. But that theory that came up as a proposition that actually—

who? Ancel Keys, you mean? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

We ended up with actually the level of processing that we get in foods and all the consequential processing consequences on health. Yeah. Which, you know, just a couple of weeks ago, you know, the human outcome, you know, this paper here.

Let's look at that still. Ultra-processed. So for people listening on podcast, I presume this is going out on podcast. Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes, an umbrella review of epidemiological meta-analyses. Very good.

So that actually came out in 2024, but a couple of weeks ago, you know, the good Dr. Chris van Tuliken.

We like him.

A few others actually raised this research to the fore of the BBC and the Times newspaper. And they've been speaking on this subject of ultra-processed foods, which he's written a book about, Ultra-Processed People.

Brilliant book. If nobody's got it, that's a great book for Christmas, guys. It's by a guy called Chris van Tulleken, T-U-L-L-E-K-E-N, or something similar.

Google will makeup, especially for Nicola Cresswell.

We know Nicola Cresswell. Yeah, she's probably weeping into her—

she's got away from— away from—

weeping into a large mug of tea as we speak. Sorry, Nicola, we love you dearly otherwise.

So, um, you know, they did a review, um, there are similar papers but not as many, um, in the animal world coming up with the similar sort of things, but some great information within that. And we'll review that, I think, in the coming months. But just to say, I think that the majority of the processing agents have been battling to try and emulate the sensation of eating and tasting fats, you know, the slippiness of the food with the, you know, the texture, the taste, the sweetness, the umamis and all of that side of things. And what we've ended up with is all of the artificial additives and creations that they've come quite often from a carb-loaded situation and the effect that's having on our health. And actually it's also then in the '80s seeped into the effects on our pets' health. Because what did they do? They thought, well, if these things work for improving people eating our food, then we could improve pets eating our pet foods by sticking the same processing agents in. So we see a lot of those things in there to try and enhance flavors, make things look nicer, make things smell nicer, make things texturally nicer. So hey presto, guess what? Causes the same sort of disease in your dogs. So tonight we're going to talk about a little bit what we're going to do for the rest of the winter. But when you join us over on Patreon for our true podcast, we'll be talking a little bit about Fat Dog Slim. So a little bit about dogs gaining weight, you know, the goose is getting fat. Well, so this is how we can do it, okay? And this is what we need to do to convert the dogs. But right right now, I think we come back to what we're going to be doing for the rest of the winter. As you can tell, not quite 7 o'clock for us right now. These are not live lives. I will be checking in on your comments. We will be marking your homework.

We will be marking your homework. But you know what? It's really quite nice doing a show in the middle of the afternoon. It's now 18 minutes past 3 in real time, but this is going out probably— it's probably 18-ish minutes past 7 in the evening.

Spoiling the magic of TV and Christmas.

Yeah, sorry. And I'm really sorry, but Father Christmas doesn't exist either. I hope my 11 and 13-year-old children don't watch this. But I'm going off on tangents here like mad. My kids, right, 11 and 13, they're at the stage where they pretty much know that Father Christmas doesn't exist. But they really want him to exist. And so they're in this position of suspended disbelief in that they get a little present. We've got an Advent kind of little house with 24 drawers in it. And so the Christmas fairy puts a little chocky or something It is actually chocolate, all right, I admit, into said drawers every night so that they can open it in the morning. And so they're quite happy to go along.

I've heard you refer to Ellie as a fairy.

Oh, she's a fairy. I was going to say she's a delicate little fairy, but she's not. She's actually, she's a very strong and fairly deadly these days. She's been doing jiu-jitsu. Here's another tangent. She's been doing jiu-jitsu now for about a year and she's going to the British Open. She's a white belt and she's going to the British Open and is going to be competing with other white belts at the British Open, which is like the British Golf Open, except there's no golf balls and clubs. They just wrestle 7 bells out of each other for 3 minutes or whatever.

So where are the— come on, you know what's all the belts and down. So do you know what the— so where's white?

White is at the beginning, right? White is right at the beginning. And then elegantly, black is the first— is the major, major distinction. You can go beyond, you can go down, first down, 12th down, super duper duper duper duper, but it goes I can't remember. I think it goes white and then blue. I can't actually remember. She's actually got her belt, which she wears whenever they have a gi session. A gi is what is the tough kind of judo outfit that they use.

Or a nice clarified butter.

Or it can be very healthy, saturated clarified butter. God bless the Indians for inventing that. That's wonderful stuff. Don't start me because otherwise I'll go off on another saturated fat. Yeah. No, don't get me started because there's a lot of lovely things to say about clarified butter, which is called ghee. I think it's spelled differently, but where were we? Oh, yeah. So she's going— so she's, you know, she's training like mad and is is, uh, had— she almost broke a rib about 2-3 weeks ago. Didn't quite— it was actually really pulled, one of her floating ribs. But that's, that's healing up, so she's heading in the right direction. But she's paranoid that she's going to get injured again, so she's taking loads of RRA, Ruta Russa, and Arnica homeopathic. And you'll be pleased to hear, and Julie will be delighted, she's using the near-infrared torch on all the sore bits that she's got to get through. And she thinks that it's it's being very useful in making healing more rapid. Where she has a point injury, she's blasting it, you know, 4 or 5 times a day, and she reckons it's helping a lot.

You'll have to get one of those big dog coat things that you can strap her in and just switch on.

Listen, don't say. She's all up for getting a mask, yeah, because it helps with your bags. And if you've got any pigmentation, You know, older people get pigmentation on, you know, kind of, um, they're not, they're not male, whatever humans get. Melanoma is a cancer, but it's, it's basically just, you get melanosis, old age spots, yeah, which is just pigment, melanin pigment. Apparently they're good for those as well, so There you go. So near-infrared, wonderful. There's so much that we can look at in the future, i.e., we as a race. There's so much research that we can do on near-infrared. And I think it's potentially an absolute goldmine of healing, not because it's some stunning new phenomenon. It's just because we as a society have decided to be indoors all the time. And therefore, we're making ourselves ill because we've got got a deficiency of good light, vitamin L. What did we call it? I think we called it— what do you call it? You did vitamin L. I did. I like vitamins. I like everything.

I loved your vitamin H talk.

Vitamin H, the water talk.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, yeah, if I called it vitamin W, everyone would get it. That was the thought. But yeah, there we go. Listen, let's get back on topic.

I thought we were going to be talking for about 10 minutes. We need to say, look, so guys, All of these little squirrel moments that you hear us going off on tangents right now, I think what we're going to be doing, we're going to be recording a few of those and just releasing them for you guys to just join in on the conversation and see what you think. So we're going to have some shorter recordings just so that you can still peruse across the page. We're going to be bringing out some of our longer form videos. We're going to edit those down a bit so that they're a bit more concise about some of the issues out there, from seizures to dermatitis to gastritis to anything you can think of. All of those, we're going to edit those down and we're going to release those again because in a place where you can actually index them. And we are looking forward to doing that. So there'll be some excerpts of that that will come onto our page as well. So all of these bits that we're going to try and entertain you with or edutain you with through the winter, As well as me and Nick getting together, still talking, chewing the fat, and going through some bits which you'll see over on Patreon. We'll still do some little short videos from that that will come out as well on Facebook. So don't desert us altogether. We're still here for you guys.

And also over the winter, because we're just taking this time just to kind of draw breath after 5 years of pumping out, which has been great actually. I don't, you know, I'm not— I just feel a bit tired maybe, but still very much enthusiastic about the whole thing. What we are going to do over the winter though is we're going to be working on trying to get all our— all the vids, all the 200 or so Raw Pet Medics vids that we've got squirreled away— to use the squirrel thing again, Brendan— um, and we're going to try and get those onto one website so that they are searchable. So if you, you know, you suddenly wake up one day and the dog's got cystitis, you'll say you'll think, what did Brent say a couple of years ago about cystitis? Okay, so at the moment it's virtually impossible to find that recording, but what we're going to do— yeah, thank you Facebook, Mark, really appreciate that. So we're going to just try and make a really simple website because we haven't got time to do anything else, a really simple website but make it somehow it's going to contain all these 200, which is 200 times, whatever, 45 minutes or an hour's worth of recording. So it's going to be, you know, it's going to have enormous capacity, but the most important thing is going to be searchable. So, uh, cystitis, but it'll take you to what, you know, um, those episodes which where we, we've mentioned cystitis. I'm not sure whether it's going to be that clever. We might just go on the title. So I don't know, we haven't got that far yet, but just saying that we're getting some help with that. So thank you to everybody who's helping us with that. We really, really appreciate it. You know who you are. And that is a stunning contribution to raw and sensible holistic medicine going forward, I think. So we are going to be doing that. And whenever I come across snippets of goodness when I'm writing this here book, Bren, I'm going to put it onto Patreon. So because it's always nice if you find something really juicy to share it. Okay, so we're going to be keeping— we're going to keep feeding, uh, the, the Patreon family with, with goodness because it's always nice to know that you're gonna— you can go on to Patreon and, and here and there, you know, weekly hopefully, there's going to be something juicy to chew on.

And we're also going to be exploring a little bit more of different platforms. So we might get you some better graphics and some better understanding. And maybe we'll try and make it so that Nick doesn't get blitzed out by some internet sensation within those videos.

Yeah. Okay. So yeah, we're going to— so we're using BeLive at the moment and The thing is, I'm not sure if it's the BeeLive and whether— are you looking at Riverside or— Yeah, okay, cool, cool. There's a few to choose from. Yeah, we're not sure. We might change and we get exactly the same hallucinogenic effect on me. And if that's the case, well, then you're just going to have to live with that.

But it may be, of course, the time of day. And so because we're choosing different times of day, that may not happen.

So yeah, true. Starlink may be in a better position Yeah, or maybe just less demand and therefore the signal is not sharing with 300,000 other people who are trying to use— you know the satellites? Here we go, I'm going off on another one. You know the satellites these days? They're about the size of a shoebox.

Yeah, but the ones for Starlink are much bigger than that.

Oh, are they? I don't know the size now.

You can see them with the naked eye. If it was the size of a shoebox, that's the only way you'd see it with the naked eye.

Unless it was No, it's just, well, you never know, it might have, you know, whacking great solar panels on it or something like that, which makes it look big. I don't know. Listen, this is not— if anybody knows the answer to this question, how big Mr. Musk's satellites are on average, the ones he uses for the Starlink network.

Can you remember how many is in the chain? Is it 9?

Is it 9? Okay. I think Uh, we, we've seen them once. You could see just like them lined up over the sky, which was quite eerie. Um, but no, so I have, I have no idea. It would be easily easy to search such things on internet. So there we go. Um, any more thoughts, Bren? I'm writing this book and I'm really, really excited about that, which is why I'm going to be able to douse you with loads of stuff, you Patreoners. Because I'm doing little else these days but writing, reading, and being generally obsessive. But I'm loving it. It's basically, I keep on saying, it's like squeezing a zit. I've had this book-shaped zit within me somewhere, and suddenly I'm squeezing it, and it is so cathartic, putting all this stuff down in one place. So that's me. You got any other plans that you can share this winter, Brendan?

No, I'm just sorting lots of loose ends.

Tying up loose ends, always good, always very good.

I want to do my winter clean out, you know, get all of those loose ends sorted and, you know, be able to sort of start the new year afresh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fresh threads, shall we say.

Yes, indeed. And for 2026, I'm just thinking, I was going to ask you about, have you got any thoughts of what we're going to be doing? There is whisperings of maybe trying to get, do some Groundswell. We'll have to talk to the good Fiona Currie about that because she's an organiser and we are dilly-dalliers and we'll have to see if we can get pointing in the same direction on that. I don't think it'll take much just to put some kind of little proposal together for the good people of Groundswell. So that would be nice. And that's when? That's mid-June, Groundswell?

Yeah.

Yeah. So that would be good. Any other things in the off thing?

Stuff in September.

We've obviously Helsinki in September and then we've got South Africa. A week or so later in September. Um, maybe a bit of Botswana action with, uh, Peter. He was talking about— he was talking about maybe going out to Botswana. I've never been to Botswana, would love to go. Um, maybe later in the year. So lots of interesting stuff, I think. Yeah, great.

Okay, well guys, it's been great that you've joined us, uh, again. Um, Whenever you've caught us through this week, we're just here to say we're still here, still doing some stuff. Please don't forget, if you want to see more, we're going to be available over on patreon.com/rawpetmedics. You can join us there. There's a little bit of paid content. You literally just have to donate what you can a month. So if that's the price of a cup of tea, then so be it. If it's the price of a bottle of champagne, that would be wonderful.

But that's your choice. Price of a Rolls-Royce, very much accepted. Yeah, one-off donations are very much accepted. Basically just means that we can keep, keep the show on the road, guys, and it means that we can, we can push on with this project of making information available permanently, you know, because it's all very, very well us three and— oh, we haven't mentioned Brady We must do that. But it's all very well, you know, just, you know, nattering every week. But that— there is once every now and again, there is— there are some, some pearls of wisdom in there. And if we can nail those down into one place, the Raw Pet Medics website, that would be really good. It would be a resource that people can use, which we absolutely— yeah, yeah, yeah. So there you go. That's our thought. Great.

So good to see you all again. Don't forget, we're still going to be here. Take care.

Yeah, stick with us, guys. See you soon.