Dr. Conor Brady, Dr. Brendan Clarke, and Dr. Nick Thompson examine WSAVA's 2020/2021 position on raw diets for cats and dogs, arguing it's shaped by dry-food industry sponsorship and ignores raw-feeding benefits. They cite studies showing raw diets reduce homocysteine and triglycerides, improve skin health, and shift the microbiome, while noting that 64% of kibble samples tested positive for salmonella.
Chapters
I don't normally curse, guys. If you heard me cursing, it was— I was driven to it. I can't open this document, Brian.
Okay, anyway, don't worry, you've got a little bit of time. There is a little delay on the video, so this is just in case you say something you shouldn't and I have to edit you out.
Brady, if you go on to our WhatsApp group and you press the link there.
Perfect.
Very good. Okay, cool. I'm sorted.
So, gents, how are you? How are you? Uh, we are the Raw Pet Medics, and this is Dr. Brendan Clarke and Dr. Conor Brady and me, Dr. Nick Thompson. Uh, I'm the good-looking one in the middle, not the one in red or the slouch in a blue t-shirt. I am wearing a shirt and collar for you this evening.
Yeah, but if I reverse the camera and you looked at the glorious sunshine across grassy hills with cows laid down as if there's rain coming, but there's not a cloud in the sky, you know, you would understand why we're wearing t-shirts because it's super warm.
The weather, the weather in Ireland is, uh, up and down, but when it's sunny, it's very warm. Mind you, we're talking 18 degrees and people are down the beach, you know, getting burnt.
Stripped his t-shirt off. Yeah, 10 degrees.
It's like I was I text my friends in Australia and it's like, you know, they're in their wintertime, but even then their weather's, you know, belting 26, 28 degrees. They're in jeans and jumpers and they're cold. And like, we're in 18 degrees walking around in flip-flops and t-shirts. And, you know, it's all relative, folks. It's all relative.
Tell me, Nick, is your house still a balmy 13 degrees year round?
No, it's not. It hit 19 degrees actually yesterday or whenever it was really hot. Yeah, we hit 19 degrees. It's probably about 6:17 right now. So yeah, it's all right. It's, it's, it's okay. It's very healthy, gentlemen. Very healthy.
It is very healthy.
Um, so, um, uh, many, many thanks to our Patreon supporters. Thank you very much. If you would like to support us, all you need to do is go to Patreon, follow your nose, look for Raw Pet Medics, and we'd be very grateful for any support there. And if you want to catch us on the podcasts, any podcast medium you care to mention, we are there. And this evening we're going to be talking about the WSABA guidelines. Does anybody know when they actually came out? Yeah, was it 16?
The original ones?
The original ones? 16, 17?
But then they revised them in 2020, which I think is April 2020 is the last one.
Yeah, which is the one that we've got in front of us because there's some references from 2019. The Van Brie was, well, it was '18. Yeah, another one that's '19. Oh yeah, David set out in '19. This is probably the 2020 version. Okay, any stories, thoughts, guys, before we jump into the WRC VA?
I think when people heard us talking about Ossava, I think a lot of minds went to the they hear WSAVA guidelines and they might think, um, like, Afco-Fediaf guidelines, they might think nutritional thing, but actually tonight it's more about, uh, um, raw dog— like, what is WSAVA's positional statement on raw, fresh, on fresh feeding is what we meant for, for tonight. So we're definitely talking about that and, and who WSAVA are. Like, WSAVA are the World Small Animal Veterinary Association, and so they call themselves the World Small Animal Veterinary Association, but they're a US kind of group and, uh, very, very relevant for at least US vets. And so vets around the world look to them for guidance. They don't have to take them. There's no kind of legal structure there, guys, I believe. But I think they kind of put down some ideas and kind of say, this is the way we're going to do things. And then your local veterinary council, the RCVS in the UK and the VCI in Ireland. So they kind of then kind of take lessons from the WSAVA and then decide what they're going to be doing. So it works like that. Works a bit like, you know, The Who making suggestions and statements, and then everybody decides how much they want to follow them and that kind of thing. That's the way we like it. So, uh, yeah, so that's who WSAVA are. And, uh, they make— they have a— I, I kind of like them. If as a non-vet, um, I at least like to see that WSAVA say on vaccinations, they would say, listen guys, this way, way, way, way down their list of advice, way, way, way down, you get to the FAQs, and then way down the FAQs there's a question saying 'What's the story with antibody titer testing?' And they say, you know, in fairness, 'Test, don't treat' isn't the worst advice. And they said, 'We don't recommend vaccinations for viruses. Dogs adequately vaccinated for viruses, we recommend they should be boosted no more than every 3 years.' So that advice isn't always followed by vets, I would charge. But I like to say they talk about titer testing and they say the same for worms. They say there's a problem with anti-helminthic resistance and that there are tests don't treat available, that there's such things as fecal tests, which I love as well. So that's really good advice coming from WASAVA, which I like. And I think sometimes not everybody follows WASAVA as much as we'd like them to. And then they come out on the nutrition side of things and they make some crazy statements. My concluding comment on WASAVA is the same problem these regulators have with regulators all over the world. WASAVA are heavily affiliated to the industry. They are cash sponsors. By, I say cash sponsored by the way guys, they don't come up in a truck honking the horn and doling cash out the back of it, you know, it doesn't work like that. But they are affiliated, these dry food companies, their literature that they send out to vets and clinics around the world have like a Hill's badge in the top corner. So you have to take into consideration that when they are giving you advice on bits and pieces that, you know, it's not a bloody Bell Duke or Paleo Ridge badge in the top corner, do you know what I mean? It's a dry food company. So that's where I think a lot, when I hear them talking about nutrition, I start to think, I'm interested to hear what they have to say. So that's my introduction to what WASABA are as a nonprofit.
So I would also like to add to that, you know, look, I've often used WSABI guidelines on vaccination as a great start point because actually they do enroll a number of great immunologists within that discussion, within that paper. And yeah, they advocate, of course, where you've got a practice that will look at, you know, the immunocompetence of your animal rather than blindly vaccinating, it can make sense. And they use some great references and great experts. The difference is chalk and cheese when they're using the references that we're going to go through tonight and they're using a one-pager guidance on raw food feeding that actually is totally inadequate. And I feel not written by experts in raw food feeding.
Oh yeah.
You know, and it probably reflects to some degree in 2021. So this is April 2021. They actually published this on their website that what vets were looking at nutrition really leaving it to companies to make that decision and actually having quite a dogmatic view of what they thought raw food feeding was. And I think it was— it's timely for us to actually help people differentiate when they're looking at these guidances, what might be behind it, look at the references. Maybe it would be a good point for you to go through, Conor, how you review a paper when you're looking at one of these so that people can do that for these references themselves. But this is chalk and cheese. I think this is unfortunately written, as you said, in light of sponsorship and not wanting to upset people and not necessarily even giving people appropriate guidance on this.
It's a biased document, guys. That's the bottom line. It's a biased document written by people who are affiliated with these big food companies, and there was no consultation with anybody that I know within the raw food world. So it is a completely biased thing. Let me— here's a little quiz. The, uh, the WSAVA Annual Report 2023, which I'm sure you've read extensively, you guys, they have got diamond, platinum, gold, silver, and bronze partners. Who do you think the diamond— this is the top, top, top partner— is?
Hills Pet Food, Purina.
Okay, and then the gold partner— who do you think?
Nestlé Purina, just to give them their full name.
Most boycotted food company on the planet. Lovely.
And the gold partner is Hills, and a silver partner is Royal Canin. They probably haven't got their pocket money when they, uh, when they came in for that one. Unlike— yeah, so poor old Mars.
Any drug company? Any Alanco?
Yeah, there are. Platinum is MSD and Zoetis, and Bronze— really scraping the barrel— we've got Virbac and Alanco.
Okay, I love the way you said scraping the barrel, but do you realize how much that sponsorship probably actually cost?
No, I don't think— yeah, I think it's not very much.
I think it's hundreds of, hundreds of hundreds of dollars. It's not hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think it is.
I remember reading a FOIA request to, um, I think it was the Royal Dick— what's the— is it Liverpool University?
That's the Edinburgh Royal Dick Veterinary Studies.
I think it was, I think it was, um, uh, Edinburgh anyway. And for, for Mars to move in in 2003 into the veterinary department, uh, there was all the to and fro was revealed between the guy that was, you know, running the veterinary department and, uh, Mars. And I'm going to butcher it here, but the actual FOIA requests are on UKRMB, UKRawMeatyBones.co.uk. You can check out her website or his website. And, um, but it's like when it came to the figures, it was like, for this €30,000 or £30,000, we want— and I was like, we're going to insert this person who's going to do the teaching, we want access to this, there'll only be our products being sold in your reception. If you want to know who sponsors your veterinary department, just ring them up and ask them what dry food they sell. And so all— and I thought I hadn't— I wasn't told the figure yet. And by the end, I was waiting to hear what this enormous figure was. I just broke it already. £30,000, £50,000. Like, this is chump change to a multi-billion company to own that veterinary department. And every kid that comes out of that comes out parroting, oh, you know, pedigree chum is great food, or whatever, you know. So, um, yeah, small amounts of money can be involved. Um, but I would have thought it was— it'd be much bigger being such a prestigious—
uh, no, you'd have to look at the report, but I glimpsed through it and it was hundreds of dollars, not more than a grand even.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should totally get that for RPM. You can trust us.
Yeah.
Okay, listen guys, let's get into it, shall we? Okay, so this is the official title is WSAVA Global Nutrition Committee Raw Meat Based Diets for Dogs. For pets.
Okay. And my—
some, some, as we've just alluded to, it's— it says WSAVA Global. So global in my mind means everybody, totally inclusive. And as we've just said, I don't think it is because the raw meat people within the raw meat world, raw food for dogs and cats world, were not consulted at all. So I think it falls on the second word, which is global. Raw meat-based diets for pets. I think they got that right. But I think very little of the rest of it was either factually correct or is free from a slant, a bias.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
So the first line. So what are raw meat-based foods? Raw meat-based foods, foods based on meat loads and awful brackets of organ meat. Thank you, Miss Ava, that have not been cooked. Excellent. Very, very good. So that's accurate. That's the first statement is accurate. Then they say this is where the, the, the sexing up the document comes in, to quote another period in our history. So these diets tend to be higher in fat, lower in carbohydrates, and can be highly digestible, but raw foods, brackets, similar to cooked foods, are not all equal. They may vary in ingredients, energy content, and nutrition profile. Last little bit that I'm just going to say is on that sentence, they didn't mention that they're high in protein because that would be a perceived benefit of raw food. Can you see how subtle these guys are in their messaging, in their crafting of the sentences? They're saying high in fat because fat is perceived to be bad for you. Lowering carbohydrates because carbohydrates are perceived to be, you know, healthy as well, depending on which ill-informed doctor you talk to. And can be digestible similar to cooked foods, but they're not all equal.
Which is fair enough. You know, they're not, they're not all, they're not all equal. Hardly a groundbreaking kind of statement. You know, if you pick up a frozen lasagna and a frozen shepherd's pie, they're not equal either. I mean, yes, everything is different. That's, that's it's just the nature of the beast. Same with dry foods. As much as they are identical, and even when Krogdahl et al. took out their chemistry sets and looked at cheap dry food, medium quality dry food, and expensive dry foods, they found zero difference between all the brands. Even with a chemistry set, they couldn't tell the difference. But even still, those foods are going to be slightly different because one might use a chicken's toenail and the other one might use a cow's toenail, and that would make them different. So yeah, hardly a groundbreaking introduction, but I think it's kind of simple.
They're trying to make it like that they're all not equal, therefore they may be a little bit less trustworthy. They vary in ingredients, energy content, and nutritional profile. Like, that doesn't apply to every single dog food on the planet.
It's just nonsense. It's nonsense. Watery. Yeah, but, and it just starts— you can tell when you're reading these documents, you can tell straight away but from the language where we're going. I mean, if you zoom out on this document, it's a one-pager. It just says risks in the middle, you know, one big word for people that aren't watching. It says one big word, risk. There's no like benefits. It's just risks of fresh food animals. So anyway, Nick, go on, you're reading that out, your lovely dulcet voice. Okay.
Okay. There is no evidence that raw meat-based diets provide health benefits over commercial or balanced homemade cooked diets.
Bullshit.
Brady, go for it. Give us your top 3, the most punchy studies you have.
I have to be careful with my 2020 date because they could say, oh, we didn't know anything before this. And like a number of the most kind of convincing studies—
2021. This is April 2021.
It says 2020 at the bottom of it. See? Okay, yeah, so it's not, it's not like I have my list of studies in front of me, but I know Helsinki University started looking at the difference between dry and raw-fed dogs as early as 2015, and they were some of the first comparative works of dry to raw-fed dogs. You would think that dry food companies would have been producing these studies left, right, and center to show how amazing their products are, but strangely they don't compare their dogs to control animals, which are animals fed normal food. That is never ever done by the industry. Before that, there's been a raft of studies to show that if you add anything to dry dog food, from blueberries to sled dogs to more protein for sled dogs, to bloody fish oil tablets to colorful fruit and veg to dogs with cancer. There was a whole raft of studies showing that if you simply just put in some real food into the bowl, the animals, the dogs benefited greatly. Okay, so there was that, but the actual big studies you want of dry compared to raw-fed dogs, they came out from '22, '23, '24, and I think Bren might have one or two handy there, but I don't actually happen to but I will find them as Ben takes over. But I know by that point, dogs, they had compared 240 German Shepherds. They didn't publish the study, it was a poster in one of the conventions. 240 German Shepherds suffering less chronic hip dysplasia. We had a number of studies showing that dry-fed dogs or raw-fed dogs suffered more dysbiosis. We had a Masters from Leverus which showed that there was possibly less leaky gut in raw-fed dogs. There was a number of small little pieces. Again, the bigger studies that were produced in Nature showing less skin disease, ear disease, and gut disease— 3 separate studies came out in the last 3 years. So you could say they didn't have time to see those ones, but I'm going to check for the references that I have before '21 and pass over the grant.
But we definitely had, you know, the surveys that were both from DogRisk, you know, with the 16,500 homes, and also the one that was done by Northpointe Pets and Nikki Camack back in, you know, the year later with the 5,500, which corroborated the relative risks, the real risks, not the proposed risks, which are all the papers that they've labeled on this particular document. But actually, they did have access to those figures in the vet record and plus one reporting by the time they're saying here, Bren, they're saying here specifically there's no evidence that raw meat-based diets provide health benefits.
They're not talking about risk there. That sentence was health benefits. We have to prove that real food is better than dry food. They never have to prove dry food is better than raw. No, no, no, no. The onus is on us for some reason to prove their bullshit make-believe product is worse than the real thing.
But I do understand that there were some in that. So if you drill down into those papers, there was the element that there were some health benefits to having raw-fed pets for those owners where they were feeding raw. So there is, within that, delving down— now we're going to talk about risks a bit lower down, as you say, underneath that big banner in the middle, um, but there were within those papers some health benefits to the microbiome and the reduction and the improvement in immunity within the kids and the adults within those homes. So that is one of the sections within that paper.
Okay, so we had—
sorry, you're gonna, uh, give us some more?
Yeah, I'm trying to get to my, um, go for it. Yeah, it's like a document on— I'm actually going back through my book which went through these. We had, uh, there's just so many small studies. Like, listen, we had, um, what date was the homocysteine study, guys? And let me just— because that will get me in the right year.
2016.
It was 2016. Here's a perfect one to start with, okay? Homocysteine. So they got golden retrievers and they had maybe 10 dogs in each group, and they had some dogs on dry food and some dogs on raw food, and they looked at homocysteine, an inflammatory marker, you know, part of the byproduct of metabolism. It's not the end of the world, but the less of it you have in your blood, the better. And what they found was the dry-fed dogs had 10 times the level of homocysteine in their blood at rest than the raw-fed dogs do. So that was interesting. But then cleverly, being a university and understanding about case control in studies, they changed the dry-fed dogs to raw food and the raw-fed dogs to dry food. And what do you think happened? The dogs that went from dry to raw saw a reduction of 5 times of the level of homocysteine in the blood, and the raw-fed dogs that went to dry food saw an increase by the level of 5 times of homocysteine in the blood. And that was, that was the start of them looking into inflammatory markers. And since then, there was a follow-up paper in 2017 where they're looking at the skin gene expression for histamine release in the skin in 2017 that was published in 2018. And they found that dry-fed dogs, they concluded that a meat diet was associated with a decrease in cytokine gene and receptor expression. That's a good thing if you don't want to chew skin. The kibble-fed dogs had increased expression of immune-related elevated plasma IgA concentrations. So that was 2018. We're at the moment, um, and in the same year, um, the Iowa State University is comparing raw-fed dogs and canids in the zoo, uh, and they found all sorts of cool benefits— highly digestible and also negatively impact them, it boosts health markers in the serum chemistry, electrolytes, blood cell counts, all sorts of cool things.
So I mean, and I'll just add, just for extra reference, I think there's a great paper just last year with regards to, look, if you don't want to, if you don't understand what homocysteine does or could be, and well, it's just a marker, well, actually, no, we know that if you don't methylate your homocysteine through to methionine and it's left to circulate, it will increase your blood pressure. It's one of those things that if it's left in the bloodstream, it causes vasoconstriction and actually ups your blood pressure. So we know the health implications of running higher blood pressure. That's just one of the effects of having homocysteine.
Yeah.
So just to give, you know, a bit of reality as to what that does, it's not just a chemical that's floating around doing nothing as a marker. It actually does have biological effects.
Okay, and then 2018— sorry, Nikhil, let's get on to the point of this document. Okay, 2018, 4 types of pet food diets were analyzed by Aldea, and they found that raw diets were highly palatable and highly digestible, which was admitted, but they also left out— crude protein was better digested when presented raw than dry, no surprises. Raw-fed dogs exhibited reduced blood triglycerides, which is your fat in the blood, heads-up pancreatitis healthiest dogs, as we keep on saying. They maintained fecal quality, fecal scores are better than the raw-fed dogs. Wasava didn't mention that. Better serum chemistry and adapted their fecal microbial community to their new diet. And then we had 2 studies showing more GABA and more butyrate in raw-fed dogs compared to dry-fed dogs, which is a good thing if you're looking for good behavior. And then what gets us up to 2020, what else? As I said, most of the studies started coming out in 2021. So that got— there was 3 or 4 studies there, the published literature. There was also a whole other things that could be talking about. And like we said, lots of surveys of populations showing healthier dogs, which is what University of Helsinki do. You put out these exploratory things to see where are the leads. And so you do a survey and you produce a poster on that somewhere and you put a master's student on it. But that's before you commit to spending 50 grand on a study. You don't just do a study and not have an idea that there might be something here to look at. And so they have a whole raft of them, go to dog risk in Helsinki University and type in research and you'll see before 2020 there's a whole heap of different projects showing really interesting results but as they weren't peer-reviewed and published I didn't mention them in this bit here. So that was totally untrue what Sava said and they bloody know that, their job is to have a quick look and see what research is out there and they chose to ignore it all because it doesn't support their point. That's it, it's not good.
It's not science, guys, is it?
Should we go to the next line down?
We're on the fourth sentence of this 20-sentence—
and we're 25 minutes in.
And we're 25 minutes in. Yeah, and the rest. So they say the next— so the next one is high-fat, low-fiber diets, brackets, raw but also cooked, close brackets, may be well tolerated by many pets. But others will show gastrointestinal problems such as diarrhea or even pancreatitis. And I'm going to just say, very simply speaking, does that mean that if you're on a raw or cooked diet, you can get horrendous things like gastrointestinal problems, diarrhea, and pancreatitis? Is the implication there that if you're on a kibble, you are off to the races and you will never, get gastrointestinal problems, diarrhea, and pancreatitis, which is absolutely not the case.
Studies show.
Do you think so? I think that's just again, they're trying to bias things. Okay. So that's not very scientific. And that was written by an ad person. I would suggest not a scientist at all. Okay. Next one. There is growing evidence that feeding raw meat can be a health risk both for the pet and for the owner. Who wants to have a go at that?
Let me have it. I mean, if you want to, I'm more than happy to jump in, but I will wind up— look, did you know what's important here? I'm sharing my screen, Ben. Can they see the screen?
They can now if I do that. If you zoom in a bit.
Oh nice. Yeah, there you go. So look, listen, it's a one-page document, as you can see. There it is. And what's crucial, you know, when you're used to looking at studies and well-referenced stuff from people that have nothing to hide and hopefully, you know, something interesting to say is that when they say something like high-fat, low-carb diets and, you know, that there'd be little numbers after this, as you see in studies, and the little number tells you when you go down to the bottom in the references, which reference said that, you know, who said that and when and how many times and do people disagree with that point. And so off you go and you could be gone for a week trying to find the answer to it. But what, what people do when they want to avoid that sort of debate is they make these vacuous comments, okay? And then they put this blurb at the bottom for you to wade through to see if there's any merit to their point at all. And so it looks like a scientific document, but to anybody that wants decent quality science, you're looking at it going, well, this is useless. You're leaving all the research to me. That doesn't, doesn't encourage you. It doesn't suggest much confidence. But this bit here, there's growing, growing evidence that feeding raw meat can be a health risk to both for the pet and the owner. Well, that's great. We're talking about pets. At last. Let's start with the pet bit. Is Wasawa saying that raw dog food is a hazard to pets? Okay, and that'd be great. Let's see the bodies. Show us the data. Show us the data all these pets are getting harmed because all we have is less than 10 cats and dogs. We had the TB issue with the venison there a few years ago. We had a single dog killed by some imported hare meat from Argentina with Priscilla, and we had 2 or 3 other instances. You know, those were 6 cats, not dogs. You're talking less than 10 fingers here that I can find in the literature of pets being harmed. Can you compare that to dry dog food? I can show you single studies of 125 dogs killed by aflatoxin there, a few thousand killed by hypervitaminosis there. Let's not talk about the melamine scandal— tens of thousands of cats and dogs killed that time, still going on. The bloody whole point of AFTCO was invented in the 1970s because of DCM, dilated cardiomyopathy. They dropped the taurine content to zero. Tens of thousands of cats and dogs started going blind and dying and all sorts of things. I mean, the death toll from feeding dry pet food is enormous. Just type it into the recalls into the FDA and you'll see. And, you know, it's great that they mentioned pet there because honestly, the figure is 1 to 100,000. That's honestly the comparison. I cannot believe that they'd put that statement in there. And of course they don't back it up with any sort of studies. And crucially, this little single page, you won't find one on dry food from Wasaba. You'll never see a dry— this balanced up with saying, hmm, here's some issues with dry dog food. And then we talk about the issue with the owner. In 2020, guys, great, we're talking about issues to humans as well. At last, let's talk about issues to humans. Actual figures of people harmed. This is an American organization. Let's just deal with America. From 2006 to 2016, 132 people got salmonella from pet food, every single one of them from dry dog food. 3 studies show that. And worst of those 132 people, in 3 different instances, 3 different outbreaks, half of them were toddlers under 2 years of age. Nobody talks about that. This last year, the CDC, big alert, 7 states, 7 people all poisoned by dry dog food, not raw dog food. And in that time it was all kids under 2 years of age because they crawl up the bag and die. So they're talking about potential harms to owners in the future, guys, but not actual harm to humans today. We have enormous safety studies to show that raw feeding seems to be quite healthy, quite a safe thing to do, as Bren just highlighted those two enormous safety studies with very similar results, eerily similar, from Helsinki and New York. And there's no such safety studies of dry dog food. It is pure— the audacity of that statement They use that over and over. Fear, fear, fear keeps you buying. So they keep beating the fear drum because they can't talk about the benefits of the crap that they're promoting.
That's, that's, yeah, an absolute— you can't go any further than that, you know. Just that ridiculousness that they've gone down this road of. And some of the quotes from the papers, they were all this growing evidence— was not growing evidence, it was a growing number of opinion pieces that there was a potential risk. Well, I know, Nick, you've come up with a favorite reference to everything in life's a risk, including putting your underpants on in the morning.
Oh yeah, I did a study on what's the ROSPA, the Society for Protection of Accidents in the Home, things like that. And there's 7 people on average every year in the UK are injured from putting their pants on in the morning.
Interesting.
Isn't that brilliant? And they are not suggesting we all go commando. Yeah.
Are they not? Oh damn.
Well, that's similar. That's in one year, that's 7 people injured versus the perhaps 10 cases that you were just talking about there, Conor. So worldwide, this is just ridiculously Yeah, these figures, they are, they are taking a minute theoretical risk and they're saying, wow, look, this is a really, really terrible threat.
Yeah. Without ever comparing it to their own product of choice, which is crucial because they leave that comparison out or even looking at what goes on in humans. Are you saying that fresh food for humans doesn't necessitate some care? 1 in 7 Americans go to hospital each year. 5,000 are killed every year from their food. And I think—
do you know what was a real shame about this is actually they've used so much space on total utter bullshit and they've missed the opportunity to have some good educational stuff about, you know, guys, everything in life's a risk. Let's organize your fridge appropriately. You know, let's put your meat right at the bottom. That you're not getting contamination. Let's think about, you know, what you're doing with your food products. You know, at what point can you keep it till? What's it safe to? How should you store it? What jars should you put your yogurts in? You know, if you want to keep them longer, you know, how to avoid molds and stuff like that growing on your foods. It could have been so many other things that they looked at to how to avoid spoilage of food and food poisoning. and keep people safe, rather than what they've written, you know, in this area, this little risk area that they talk about, which is this whole thing here.
Yeah, let's talk about that now. But, but Brent, just to give a little plug for the Raw Safe, uh, pamphlet that you've done and where people can get hold of that.
Yeah, so if you go to, uh, rawsafe.com and just type in under the— just going to the right bit now— for owner's information, there is a PDF of our DL leaflet. Our fold-out leaflet has about the fridge, how to store it, but everything from when you're receiving your frozen food to how to store it, to then how to defrost it in the fridge, to, you know, making sure that you've cleaned the bowls and those sort of things that we've had a few posts of recently about how bowls can actually continue to contain bacteria. Not just raw-fed bowls, that's kibble-fed bowls, that's water bowls, that's anything. So it just talks about that, talks about who hand wash, hand cleaning. Some people are sick of that because they've done enough of that with COVID but it just gives a little bit about actually, yeah, this is food hygiene. It's a shame that we used to get taught that at school. It's a shame they don't tend to teach that stuff anymore, but it's out there now as a leaflet. It's on the PDF. So if you want to share, if you own a pet shop, you want to print it off, you can do that. It's on the site. You can share the web link, you can share a, you know, a little QR code to get to it. Your choice. It's there. It's free.
That should be the information coming out of vets, you know, and regulators and people like OSAVA. It's like, look, guys, you know, there's risk. It's not— I said—
and thanks, Fiona, who's put it on Facebook.
Nice. I put up a link to the statement we're talking about as well. I said 1 in 7 Americans go to hospital with food poisoning. No, 1 in 7 get food poisoned each year. And a certain percentage of them go to hospital and 5,000 are killed each year. But you don't recommend not to give fresh fruit and vegetables and meat and stuff to humans. Of course you don't, you know. So it's just ridiculous. And when we go into these risks, I haven't even looked at these risks yet, guys. I'm being honest with you, okay? I haven't even looked at the risks. I had a quick look at the studies at the bottom. I've seen them all a million times. But I just wanted to highlight that when they're going to in these risks somewhere along the way talk about pathogens again, pathogens, pathogens, risk and pathogens, that's what those risks are going to be all the way along with no references after it. And the thing is, I was going to be debating one of the main protagonists for the RCVS, Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, a few weeks ago. And he's very, very vocal. He's a very, very angry little man. And he's online, he's spouting this and that about fresh food. And he hates fresh food, absolutely hates fresh food. Backs vegan food for dogs. Oh, backs vegan food for dogs. Good science behind that. But doesn't back the idea that you might feed some meat to a dog. So leave your answers on a postcard for that. Anyway, you get all his references and then you send them references back, but some doozies come up as you're kind of preparing for the talk. And, you know, all the terror that they share, they'll show you a study from the Netherlands where raw dog food analyzed in the Netherlands and the results were bad. I mean, whatever company they use, that company should be bloody shut down. And I don't think anybody is disagreeing with that. I mean, if I see a bad raw dog food company and the food honks and it's got a ripped reputation for bad food. I'm thinking you're ruining it for the rest of us and nobody supports you guys. You're rotten. So nobody likes that. And so I'd say, okay, that's a bad example of a Netherlands study. And they'll say, is this representative of what goes on in the UK? No, no results have ever been found like that in UK raw dog food. It has— they have found issues here and there, but much lower. Sweden, UK, when you test those raw dog food companies, as high as 20% in some products, then down below or down to zero. Did they not mention some of the studies where they got zero? So there's a whole range of issues. But the thing is, That's raw dog food. It can have issues. It's raw meat and it can have issues, okay? But there is ways to prevent against that. But when you look at dry dog food, you should see this study from— I love calling this study out, right? And 24 samples of dry dog food were taken a couple of years ago. And do you know what percentage of them had salmonella? These are 24 different dry dog food products. 64% of them had salmonella. Didn't your vet tell you? I mean, that is— that's incredibly high. That's like kind of the Netherlands study. And so if you're going to hold up some bullshit Netherlands study to me, I'll hold up this study from the Lebanon and say 24 of the dry foods from the Lebanon. Now you might say, oh, that's not fair, that's not UK dry food. But that's what you're doing with Netherlands dry food. You're holding up a product. The Portuguese study and the Netherlands study are held up all the time as raw dog food can be dangerous.
There's a great quote.
There's so many examples of that.
Last year, the Polish study on European dry foods.
Yeah, 35 products.
35 different products and 100% of them had bacterial contamination.
Yeah, 17% had Clostridium perfringens, 38% had E. coli, 90% had Staphylococcus. They also had high degrees of Proteus and Enterococcus, which suggests rotting, a hygienic condition that you want to avoid. That was in 50% of the samples. Like, these studies of dry foods are terrible. And I told you the safety issues with people getting poisoned by this product are way higher than raw dog food. So you can hold up these studies before we get into these risks. You can hold them up, but they won't talk about the fact that whatever 20% of heavy metal contamination, the forever chemicals, they won't talk about that.
They won't even touch that.
Yeah, they won't talk about all these other issues, storage mites and all this crap that dry dog food has. They'll talk about potential, potential— think of the children risks. Okay, let's go into the risks, Nick. Do you want to read a few out there?
Okay, so let's have a look at this. I'm just looking at the time, guys. And so we've got the risks, we've got We've got bacterial contamination. I think we've done that.
Yeah.
If you look at the detail, there's a lot more contamination in kibble where you don't expect it. And most people don't wash their hands after feeding kibble. Naughty, naughty. And many, many raw food in the UK actually have lower levels of Enterobacteriaceae and definitely salmonella and things like that because they know they're going to be fed raw to these dogs. Whereas with when you get meat from Tesco's for the family, they know that that's going to be cooked so they, they can have a higher threshold there. Okay, so I think that's bacterial contamination. So there's 3 more sections there. We've got bones, we've got home prepared and balanced, and then we've got parasites. Shall we do those bones, home prepared imbalance, and parasites? Should we do that over in Patreon?
Yeah, absolutely. What about, what about that line there? Pets on raw food diets can be a risk factor for veterinary patients, other veterinary patients in the clinic, as they may carry and shed pathogenic bacteria. I wonder what they say about cats in that situation with their high degree of prey eating. And so therefore, are they not welcome in vet clinics according to WSHAVA? I mean, where does this end? You know, it's—
well, so we're sort of into that. Um, let's take this away just as we, we finish off on that note. I think when a patient is in a clinic, in the back, being treated for an illness, having tests, being in for surgery, we're taught about barrier between, you know, biosecurity is really important because you do not want to spread disease. Okay, you know, when you've got somebody in a hospital bed, the nurse comes with PPE, so not necessarily for their own protection because they've got a relatively healthy immune system, although it obviously will help their protection, but it means that they can take that off and when they go to the next patient who's immunocompromised because they're poorly, that's why they're in hospital, you're not going to risk contaminating them, okay, with your previous patient. So this is what happens in good veterinary practice, and I'm appalled that people think that they only wear PPE for a raw-fed animal. It's like, that is 101 the wrong information. So charging extra for a raw-fed dog because of the level of PPE, naughty, it's totally inaccurate. And I can honestly say, you know, from a practice that has fed for 30 years, for me working in that practice for the last 25, knowing the level of nurse issues with illness is not a problem because of the patients. We have a disproportionately high number of raw-fed patients.
Yeah.
You know, they're far more likely to get it from the takeaway on a Saturday night than they ever are from any of our patients.
Yeah. Yeah. And like, don't forget that studies show dry-fed dogs are more prone to gut disease and that kind of thing. And with gut disease and dysbiosis comes nastier bacteria. Do you remember that study? We haven't even mentioned this. Talk about the risks from dry-fed dogs. You know, the study of pyrometra, they were trying to find out where the bacteria came from with the pyrometra. And so they just swabbed a random— how many studies, how many dogs was this, just so I don't butcher it? 72 dogs. And they swabbed them and they found a lower growth rate of E. coli in the raw-fed dogs. So they had less E. coli and less strains of E. coli, the raw-fed dogs did. I mean, that's really, really important. If you're talking about danger, danger, danger, let's wrap up in PPE, these dry-fed dogs are walking around like a ticking time bomb. We're all going to die. And an interesting line here from Carol in PetBio, who has looked at more poo samples than anybody else on the planet. Listen to this from Carol. We are receiving some interesting results from fecal samples of dogs fed long-term vegan diets. There was a marked increase in percentages of E. coli, diarrhea, colitis, known to proliferate with an increase in dietary resistant starch. Resistant starch has a generally positive influence on the microbiome, which is why it's there, maybe an initial benefit to some dogs. However, the golden rule to maintain balance and harmony in the microbial community is don't overfeed on one of these nutrients like vegan pet food does. So I just thought, they just ignore the stuff when there's a flag, an interesting flag that goes, dry-fed dogs, more gut disease, more dysbiosis, more E. coli, It's like, well, this is important information for vet clinics to have if you're terrified of hazardous bacteria. Why is it just one side? That's, you know, so anyway, um, we're Patreon. Let's get the last 12 minutes.
So we've, we've got those 3 points. We're going to talk about bones, we're going to talk about home prepared and balanced, and we're going to talk about parasites over on Patreon.
And I'm just going to say a little thing about, uh, one of my, the, the things that I've standing on a, on a platform about for many years is about resistance, bacterial resistance. Okay, so we will do that in Patreon right now.
Little teaser.
Perfect. Great, everyone, sorry for the slightly late start. We will— if you go on to YouTube, you'll see the whole video. You'll miss the first 15 minutes, guys. You've got extra there to watch. But of course, you can join us over on patreon.com/rawpetmedics for the price of a pint. Okay, come join us. Listen to the next section where we'll just finish up this guidance. Maybe we'll need to, by the end of the year, publish our own guidance for people.
Oh, what a great idea.
You know, I think we should have that out there on a nice big shiny website that Conor's promised to—
Can we use curse words?
Cusses, cusses. Maybe by the time we visit America, we'll have that document ready.
Promises, promises. Yeah.
Brilliant. Okay. So wonderful guys. See you soon. Next week we have— Do you know what we're doing next week?
Haven't you got your guest lined up for next week or is that in the following? That's not—
No, sorry.
Yeah, uh, what are we doing next week? I don't know, we'll just look at the list and we'll just—
this is an organized—
you know, do you know who we've got next week?
No, no, that's why I was asking Nick. You're supposed to organize the guests.
I'll tell you what, one day we're gonna be, we're gonna be so efficient that we will actually know what we're doing next week.
One day.
Be very afraid. Yeah, any more confident would be dangerous.
Okay, guys, guys watching, guys listening, thank you very much for all your support. And you two guys, thank you. I quite enjoyed that.
Yeah, brilliant. Take care.
Bye-bye.
