Raw Pet Medics Discuss Fibre - Regularly!

Hello everybody, we are Raw Pet Medics. Good evening. We are here with Dr. Conor Brady, and all the way from a train in Canada is the good Dr. Brendan Clarke. There he is. I don't think he can really hear us, but this is him. Look at that, going through the wilds of Canada. What do you think about that, Conor? You love trains.

I love trains. Obviously everyone wants to be in the wilds of Canada, but I particularly want to go through them on a train. That's how I want to get to my destination. Yeah, I love an old train. But what technology that we can see, Bren, the hearing was hard to hear because the noise of the train. But isn't that amazing that that thing is moving on the ground at that speed and he's able to chime in like that? That is amazing. Can you use your phone yet on a plane? Can you use that? Can you use your normal Android on a plane?

Uh, hang on, I'm just trying to organize my, my earbuds because otherwise Pete's going to give us a really hard time.

Oh, he is. So sorry, I was saying, can you use your phone? Does anybody know if you can use your phone on an airplane yet? Can you take out your Android or your iPhone and use it? Maybe in the posh section of the plane they've got some sort of steel barrier so that plebs can't do it.

Yeah, probably. I think what— because I think they do Bluetooth Bluetooth, Wi-Fi in kind of first class and things on really big jets.

You think they'd give it to the poor as well? I mean, because you hear these terrible stories where people are making phone calls on planes, you know, and always wondered what phones do that, you know? Mine doesn't. Yeah, I often switch it on, try to make a call and try to send emails and stuff. I know I'm not supposed to. I'm always expecting the plane to go, sorry, it was me.

I think you have to pay an awful lot for that kind of service.

But one day, my friend, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe on the next the next junket that we take. Yeah. Have you been good? Good. Very, very, very, very, very, very busy week, you know, the usual. So just, just mobbed and not helped by this topic tonight because what should be a very simple, easy subject, as always, you just scratch underneath the surface and it's like, oh my God. And it isn't, it isn't it so, isn't it? It's just, it's not, what's the word? It's so motivating that when you're in the group and you say something and then like the other two are like, yeah, I'm not sure.

And you're like, what?

I thought that was the case. And furiously, so you have to shift things on that was on today. I had to shift something that was going to take 2 hours because I needed to really prep for, uh, for what should be a simple conversation. But it just goes to show, I think, that like we read about this stuff and talk about this stuff all the time, and yet when you tuck into a few subjects, you realize, you know, uh, there's a lot to learn. So I'm not going to say this is going to be a two-parter, but I've definitely got a lot to learn in this one.

I think you can say that pretty much for any aspect of nutrition, that once you scratch, you think you know what it's about, what is protein, what is fiber, anything, but as soon as you start going below the surface, you see that sometimes there isn't a consensus, there's different people with different opinions, there was an opinion 40 years ago and that's changed now. Isn't that interesting? And I think that is really fascinating, that it's developing as well. It's an ongoing thing.

Yeah, you find that when people are doing PhDs, you can be sitting in a group of 10 or 12 people all studying the same animal, or even the same part of the animal, and suddenly you're studying the ear. Oh, what part of the ear do you study? It's no longer like, I study ears. It's like, which ear? And whose ear? And what part of it? Is it the inner ear? Is it just the cochlea? Is it the anvil? Is it the earlobe? Is it the shape? And all this kind of stuff. And then you come out after years of studying this tiny little bit and go, you know, am I actually useful to anyone after just like studying into a tiny hole? But it is though, like it's exciting to know there's that much to learn about stuff. And that's why people at the top, like, you know, these people that are into probiotics now, and she's all about skin flora and she's a professor in probiotics. I mentioned this last week, I think. And you know, you ask her, I asked her a question on gut probiotics and she goes, oh no, I do skin probiotics. And I'm like, you're a professor of probiotics. And they're like, oh no, no, there'll be somebody else for the guts. That's how, you know, that's how much there is to learn about everything. But anyway, it's exciting. What about you, Nick? Anything?

I love that kind of level of specialization. Well, there's two things that struck me this week. The first is to do with Bluebell. Let me just show you a little picture of Bluebell. She is— so she's there. Can you see that?

I can, yeah, perfectly.

You can see her?

Yeah, lovely.

Let's have a look.

Hang on, ribs.

Just go back to the beginning. So the important thing is, uh, that she's got a bandage on her arm there, on her left elbow, because she opened it up on some, on some barbed wire. Okay, she did that about a week ago. And yeah, yeah, and you know what they're like, whippets. They want— when they cut, sometimes it's very difficult to stitch them. So it was about an inch long. There is a point to this, by the way. Yeah, it's about an inch long, and there was a flap. And so we decided to just bandage it to keep her off it and to allow it to heal by secondary intention. So it comes in from the outside to the inside like this. And so we did that, and for a week it just didn't really do anything. And we started with a bit of Lucilin to keep it clean initially, but then I thought actually were killing any good bacteria in the wound, believe it or not. I was thinking very broadly about this, that maybe good bacteria actually have stimulatory effects on the closing secondary infection in the wound. It would be logical. I don't know whether it does or not, but I think it would. So we stopped using Lucilin after a couple of days when we knew that it was pretty clean. She was licking it a little bit every day, but we were We were bandaging it most each day, and for about a week it didn't really do anything. It was just like open, open, open. It's about an inch square, size of a postage stamp essentially. And then in 24 hours after 7 days, it halved in size and started looking like it was seriously about to heal. And now we're about— so now we're Tuesday, 48 hours on from there, and it's about a quarter of the size. Now, I've been studying wounds in animals for 30 years, and I should know this stuff, but I was just gobsmacked by the fact, like, the lack of reactivity. And then all of a sudden, in 24 hours, it halved inside, and you started to see this granulation, and it looked different. So I just wanted to share that with you.

So what was the delay? Why wait 7 days before that starts happening? What's thinking about for 7 days.

That's exactly it, because you'd have thought it would be a linear thing. It would just get a little bit better every day, but it didn't. To my eyes, it didn't. It looked the same, looked the same, looked the same, looked the same, and then all of a sudden— I thought, fascinating, how amazing is that?

I did think it was a linear thing. I did expect to see better and better, drier, scabbier. Yeah, but I haven't seen a big wound. I haven't tracked a big wound on a dog. I've never had that in front of me. Meg had a huge ulcer on her face one time, and I remember Joe Arbon, I said, look, she's got this big wound on her face, kind of just a big wound, and it needed to be fixed up. Whatever way she came out of the vet, it wasn't quite, uh, it wasn't quite doing the job. And she was like, oh, I'll send you up a poultice of various herbal mash, and you just mash it on. And it's like, okay. And she goes, oh, there's lots of different solutions. Goes, check out what I do with Manuka honey. And she had this pity with a huge scar on her leg, like a chunk, like an alligator taking a chunk out of her leg. I can't remember what happened, it looked like a huge dog bite, but it wasn't that. And, uh, she just covered it in Manuka honey, and like within days— she took a picture every single day— and every day the wound was just healing, healing, healing by slathering it in Manuka honey. So I took her poultice, and the dog— what, because the wound wasn't healing because she was very old at this stage, so I thought, okay, she's just not healing as quick as she should, and that's just the way things go. I stuck the poultice on 2 or 3 times because it keeps wanting to fall off. And within a day or two, the thing just started healing over. But I would have thought it healed over quite quickly once the poultice came on. And then I was a total convert to Joe Arbon and natural, natural stuff. Yeah, yeah.

We should have used, we should have used Manuka honey on it. And I feel bad for not actually. But, and somebody was saying, did it start healing after the Lucilin stopped? No, it didn't. We only used Lucilin for about the first 2, 3 days and then stopped because I thought I want some good bugs in there.

Yeah.

And then it still didn't do anything for another 4 days and then— so yeah, okay, the next one, one of them gets— yeah, we'll try some honey and we'll see what kind of a rate we get, what difference we get.

That's really good. Yeah.

The second thing is these 2 dogs, even with her leg bandaged like that, Bluebell and Mouse caught a hare. We went for a walk a few days ago Thursday, in fact. And, um, they managed to catch a hare, okay? He was darting about like this, and they did manage to catch them. They don't often— most of the time they don't. And, and so they, they were, they, they were, you know, 300 yards away, so I couldn't get in, get them to save the hare or anything like that. But they were mithering away with this hare, and I was thinking, oh God, that's—

oh, it's got a squeaker.

Ah, no, he wasn't speaking. I couldn't hear any squeaking. But what happened— this is the amazing thing, and you as the behaviorist, this is why I wanted to share it with you— is that another hare came from the side of the big field directly towards the dogs who were mithering this hare to within about 20 yards until the dogs saw him, distracted them away from the, the, the, the, the hare that was being attacked.

Yeah.

Now, is that altruistic behavior?

Oh man, that's amazing. That is amazing. I can't believe rabbits do that. I'm very— I would have thought they just sit there and look and go, oh, it's a hare, it's a hare. Yeah. Yeah.

So that implies sympathy, empathy, you know, knowing that they could distract the dogs away from the other hare. And apparently I was speaking to one of the local farmers and he said that it's quite well known that when the dogs are chasing a hare, they will tag team with another hare and that— so to give the first one a rest and then they'll tag team with another and they take it in turns like a relay, like an Olympic relay. Wow, that's a recognized thing. It's a thing.

I can't believe that. It is amazing. I would say that the emotions that you attach to it and sympathy and empathy and those sort of words are hotly debated, because that's where they say, oh, that dogs have feelings. Do dogs have feelings? Do they have emotions? Is anybody living with dogs? It's like, these are ridiculous concepts. But in the world of behavior, very, very complicated, because you come in with the whole selfish gene theory, which is like, if that was your you know, you're trying to preserve your, your genes, and it's just like a bird flapping its wing pretending it's got a broken wing. Lots of species do it, and they would say that it's a selfish gene type thing, which really pulls away all the humanity out of animals, which is probably the wrong word to use. So this is the whole ridiculous heated debate. That's the sort of stuff I don't like. I don't like getting into, is this empathy, is this, you know, or is this just survival? Because if I do it for you, you do it for for me.

That's really interesting because in Sapolsky's book called, um, Why Do Zebras Not Get Ulcers? Yeah, so it's all about stress and cortisol and things like that. Wonderful, wonderful book. He describes though, and we're not even into fiber yet, but we will be, guys, we will be. He describes that, uh, if you— if, if, if, if chimpanzees or baboons— now he's a big baboon man— if baboons are in a lab and one of the baboons is taken out and, you know, has to have a blood test or has some procedure, the cortisol in that animal will rise because of the stress. Okay, obviously.

Yeah.

But what they've noticed is that the observers, their blood cortisol will increase as well. Suggesting that they will become stressed at the distress of their buddy, friend, relation.

So yeah, that makes sense. Pennywood is coming in here. As a cognitive ethologist, I can attest that all mammals experience emotions and many can show altruism. So yeah, I don't think anybody living with any animal could say that dogs— if you're living with parrots, I never lived with birds before, but when I lived with a bird for a year, same thing. To say that you can't see that bird showing you affection and that kind of stuff is ridiculous. But that's a quagmire that I don't visit. Last time I was in there was about 15 years ago, and since then I don't go in. It's that I prefer things I can kind of, I can test and touch and that kind of stuff. I found strength in that one. But look, guys, we are on patreon.com/rawpetmedics, and if you missed the very start, you will have missed me and Nick patting ourselves on the back for the fact that we had to spend a good few hours today trying to sort this out. And I'm not sure if we're clearer or more confused but you're going to definitely hear an introduction to fiber and that kind of thing. But it has taken us a while to get together. So guys, if you can afford the price of a cup of tea or a pint, please go to patreon.com/rawpetmedics and you can donate there. Once a month is all we need, keeps the show on the road. We do appreciate it because like we said, it takes a bit of time to get it together. And even Bren was giving us hours of his time and very complicated studies to sift through. Which was very stressful. I couldn't sleep last night, to be honest with you. So, Nick, would you like to start us off with a brief introduction on fibre? Ease us in there.

Absolutely. But I've got a quiz. I know you're a fan of quizzes, you're a fan of trains, and you're a fan of quizzes. You're a very easy man to entertain, to keep happy. Okay, so here's the quiz. Which of the following I'm just reading, but I've just finished. Davis has written a book called Wheat Belly, Wheat Belly, and I'm absolutely fascinated and blown away by the book. And he talks about wheat in products. So which of the following products do not contain wheat? Okay, take your time, and you can write up in the side. Baking powder, lipstick, hydrolyzed plant protein, ice cream, pharmaceutical tablets, pharmaceutical capsules, imitation bacon, paprika, bought salad dressings, your salad dressing from the supermarket, ground black pepper, chocolate, hair care, human hair care products, and wreath decorations. Yes, Christmas wreath decorations. So which of that list, guys, do you think does not contain wheat? Conor, what do you think? I've read this out to you already, but which of those were you thinking, oh, that can't contain?

I suspect I'm not going to be able to find one too easy off that list, but what I do know of wheat is that gluten is a very sticky substance and it makes up a lot of the glue sector Uh, so gluten and casein from milk, they're the two— that's where your glues come from. And so gluten is Latin for, for glue, isn't it? That's where it's coming from. So I know it's— so I think that's sticky. So when I hear lipstick, I suspect there's gluten in it now that you mention it. Wouldn't have guessed beforehand. Uh, dressings, they need a stickiness added to them. But baking powder, come on. Paprika, there's no— there's no bloody gluten in baking powder or paprika. Why would they put it in there? It's paprika.

It's fantastic, fantastic.

And am I right?

No, you're not, because— but some of our wonderful listeners are correct because they know, they know us by now, and they know that there's always a twist in the tale. And Susie, for example— so no, Sue Alizotti. Sue Alizotti, very, very welcome, and you got it right. Every single one of those products contains wheat. Be scared. Be very— no, be afraid. Be very afraid. So amazing. There you go.

It's a tough time for the celiacs. Bloody hell, a bit of hairspray and next thing you know your head's on fire or whatever happens. Yeah, when you're celiac, I mean, it can be nasty. Can you get it if you're contact? Can you— is any celiacs out there? Can you tell me, can you have a reaction just by touching it or is that gluten allergy? Because celiac isn't quite the allergy response, if anybody can tell me. So that is interesting. So Wheat Belly, what got you into that with fiber? Because you're thinking about the types of fiber that vets use. Sometimes when I hear fiber being recommended and a vet says to use muesli, I always balk at the idea because muesli has a huge amount of wheat or, and/or barley and/or rye. And wheat, barley, and rye are your problems for gluten. So when I hear muesli and, oh, that helps with constipation, it still might help with constipation, but the gluten's not doing your dog any favors, and that would not be the fiber of choice. But let's start at the start, Nick. You know, just tell us just a brief bit about fiber and what are we talking about.

Okay, so fiber, if you think fiber, you think of bran. Remember back in the day, you might maybe made up a muesli or something with this dry, flaky material, okay, that just you can chew forever and it never disappears in your mouth, okay, that's bran. So that's fiber, but there's also a thing called soluble fiber, okay, so we've got— so within fiber we've got soluble and insoluble fiber. Now, uh, Conor, you've got some chia seeds there?

I do have some chia seeds.

Did you manage to find your chia seeds?

I have two different types. Yeah.

So do you want to just give us a little practical experiment?

Yeah, the fiber thing is— could I come in at the intro of that fiber? So like, the trick about fiber is that we humans can enzymatically produce— we can produce enzymes to digest stuff, and we can digest protein and carbs and fat really well. We're really good at them, but we're not good with fiber. And as Nick said, fiber is an umbrella term. Crude fiber on the back of a packet, that's a type of umbrella term because there's different types of fiber, and even in them there's different types of fiber, as Nick was Dr. Conor Brady was explaining to me there this morning. So we have soluble fiber and insoluble fiber, and both of those humans can't digest. But one of them, the soluble fibers, the one that forms the gel, like your chia seeds that I'm gonna show you, and they form that jelly substance, bacteria loves that. Bacteria loves mucilage and pectins and gums. So when you hear guar gum and that kind of stuff, that is bacteria heaven. So bacteria eat that stuff. And so if you eat a lot of soluble fiber, you're going to get bacteria very happily eating and fermenting away. And that's what can give you farts, you know, because that's, that's the end result of your fermentation process. Then there's insoluble fiber, which is the other one that doesn't digest and that doesn't soak up into a gel in water. You put indigestible fiber into a glass of water and it just sits at the bottom. That's all it does. The role for that is that it gets through to the large intestines and it adds bulk to the stool. So it just by sitting there, by the sheer force of osmosis, it pulls in water into the stool and makes for softer stool. So if you don't get enough insoluble fiber, tough crude fiber back in the day we would have called it, if you don't get enough of that in your diet, you're going to be— you're going to have Western diseases like, you know, constipation and hemorrhoids and, and all these other bum things that we get that the societies that eat more fibrous natural diets don't. And the solution to that constipation is putting in some more insoluble of fiber. And then a whole industry pops up with all these isolated fibers and stuff that we're gonna talk about. But just to show you the difference, I went in and bought some very non-organic, just before anybody said they're not organic. I went down to Aldi and I got chia seeds and I got flax seeds. And the difference between these two, while they look kind of similar on the front of the packet, and they do, okay, is that flax seeds contain a lot more crude or indigestible fiber. Okay, they're not going to produce a jelly when you put a teaspoon of that in water. Okay, that's indigestible fiber. So it's great for constipation, keeping things moving. Chia seeds, on the other hand, also have a little bit of crude fiber in there because they've got a little shell and a husk, but they're mainly soluble fiber, and they do produce a gel. Now, I was gonna— in my head today, I think, wouldn't it be great if I just tipped the water on my head? Well, I've got too much expensive equipment around me. Anyway, there's a little bit of water, okay, and I'm gonna put in a big whack of chia seeds into it. I don't have Bren's fancy camera, so Bren, if you're watching this, I know you're laughing at me, but that's because I'm poor, Bren, and I don't have the facilities that you have. So that's the chia seeds in the water. There's a really good health tip that you're supposed to drink a teaspoon of them every night, and then you put the flaxseed in the other one, which isn't gonna create a gel, and you pop that in there.

And while you're doing that, I'm going to say the experiment that I get people to do, because I use psyllium husk a lot, which is— I've got a lot of soluble fiber. Yeah, so it creates, it creates a gel. Is you get some, some psyllium husk that you're going to put in the dog's food, but you put it in your own mouth. It's perfectly safe. And you just let it there, let it go there and mix with saliva. And what you'll find is it turns into wallpaper paste. So see, salivating everywhere. Yeah. So it immediately, within 30 seconds, will swell. And you can feel it as being slippery. And you remember the paste that you used to have at primary school? Yeah, yeah, that stuff that you mix with water.

Wee glue. Yeah.

That's, that's, yeah, that's what it, that's, that's what it's like. That's what tricycles do to you.

And someone said there, Emma Rutherford, uh, she can indeed. She's the UK's first qualified gluten detection canine. What are you guys talking about? This is interesting. There's a dog that can sniff gluten. I mean, of course they can, but that is phenomenal. Steph Roulette, pop up a quick summary of what you're talking about there for the guys that missed that. Yeah, they've trained the dog to sniff gluten. I mean, every celiac should have one of them. Um, how's my experiment coming along? Good. My experiment's coming along good. I used to work as the educational officer in the zoo for a year, and when you do a zoology degree, these are the sort of only jobs you can get. And you want to see some of the classes of kids coming in. These are like 5 or 6-year-olds just cursing at you, hating your experiments, but if it was good, they liked it. Okay, so this is the chia seed. So what happens to water when you put chia seeds into it? Okay, it pours like that. That there's me holding it over the keys of my laptop. Okay, so it's turned into this thick gel that's slowly making its way out. And it's actually very delicious. It makes your milkshakes really thick and it is incredibly good for you and your bacteria love it. So as you can see from this chia seed experiment, when you put in soluble fiber stuff that makes gums and stuff and guar gum and things into your, into your food, it slows down the passage of digester. Okay, so things move slower when you've got soluble fiber in there. It increases digestion because your bacteria have longer to ferment. They've got food to eat, they've got longer to ferment. So increases digestion, it increases nutrition from your meal, 'cause it slows, it gives them more of a chance to hit it. On the other hand, these lads, the insoluble fiber, this is the flaxseed, and I've put a lot in there, as you can see, that just sits there and it hasn't made a gel out of the water at all. That just sits there and is waiting to get to my colon or some other region that Bren would pick me up on, and that makes your poo move. Quicker because when that hits your colon or whatever part of the intestines that it sits there and it starts to absorb water through osmosis because your body says, oh, it's a little bit dry in there, send in the water. And so that makes the constipation much easier and then out it comes. So that's a kind of start for soluble. I think we've done pretty good there as a start, Nick.

I think that's a really good start. And the thing that also that I read somewhere, I can't remember where, that you have to have some insoluble fiber with your soluble fiber because the soluble fiber is a bit like a mesh that holds the insoluble, the soluble, yeah, the gel, because otherwise the gel just run away. The insoluble fibrous fiber That keeps everything where it needs to be. So really, the best supplements to use with these things are the natural— the chia seeds, the psyllium husk, these things— because they have a balance of both. Within psyllium husk, for example, there is, you know, depending on who you read, 70% soluble, but you've got this backbone of insoluble branny material keeping the whole thing together. So natural products here seem to win out. You can get synthetic, you can get synthetic cellulose, yeah, you can get synthetic solubles, but Mother Nature really has got this.

Yeah, I think you've nailed a point there that had eluded me, and that really helped me yesterday when you said that as we debated hotly these, these points. You, uh, what they do is an industry springs up. I'm sorry if my eyes have strayed off the screen because I'm about to read out a little cool, a few cool studies there of big cats and dogs. But the industry isolates the fiber and says cellulose. Cellulose is the completely indigestible fiber that, you know, is the backbone of every plant on the planet. It's the most— it's when you add up any single unit of protein out there, cellulose makes up the most on the planet. It is incredibly tough, hard to digest. It's the skeleton for trees. Nothing can digest it, even bacteria. So the industry isolates cellulose and sells it to you as a constipation reliever. But as yourself and Bren are saying, it's actually— you need the two of them. You can't just take one on its own because it can actually result in issues. Similarly, they can take the soluble fiber and just take the inulin, which is pure soluble fiber, and say this can help with diarrhea in puppies. And it does. Studies show it does. But that's not a reason for using soluble fiber all the time without brother's indigestible fiber. They work hand in hand. And it's just another nod towards the fact that you can't take these things out of the ingredients and expect them to work on their own. As any herbalist will tell you, it's usually a mix of things that are happening. You can't just take that single compound out like organ meats when they took insulin out of pancreases. We know dogs that ate whole pancreas lived longer than dogs that just got insulin. So there's a whole lot of things going on. But to your point, Nick, you are spot on about the mixture of these fibers. They had a look at 4 big cats. Cheetah, tiger, jaguar, and Siberian tiger. And they fed them raw beef diets, and they also, of different types, but they changed the fiber to give them a small or a large amount of cellulose, which is your indigestible fiber, or a small or a large amount of beet pulp. And beet pulp has more soluble fiber. So that's the slightly more psyllium husk of the two, although still. And what they found was that the cats did better when those two were mixed. And the more that they put in— so the cats did better when the two of them were present in the diet, and what they found was that it increased the speed of transit through the cats. The more fiber you put in there, the quicker the poos went through because more water was being sucked into the stool. So the more insoluble, the more insoluble fibers, the more cellulose. Yeah, well, actually, I was just reading the cellulose bit there. Yeah, so the more cellulose that goes in, it reduces and your digestibility of your food. So more dry matter comes out. So if you can imagine, if you put loads of cellulose into your poo and then the poo shoots out like a train that brenns on, well, then the body has less time to digest the food. So what you find is, as you increase cellulose in the diet, is that digestion is less. It just— it's shooting past and the bacteria are going, I wanted some of that, I wanted some of that, and it's just flying out. And if you can imagine, in a carnivore, which already has a rapid system, no dead ends, smooth intestines, it comes out like a hot snot down a chrome nostril anyway. It doesn't need any help. So when you put in loads of cellulose, you decrease digestion, the, what's it called, dry matter, the increased amount of dry matter that comes out, the amount of organic matter that gets digested plummets, the amount of nutrients that are absorbed plummets, and generally the amount of poo just increases. You're just, so this is what happens when you put in a lot of fiber, indigestible fiber into pet food. So that was the Cheetah study, but they also mentioned that when the two of them are given together, and Nick, to your point, cats did better than when they're all doing on their own. They also— yeah, so, but here's the thing about light dry food. So with what we've learned so far, in particular indigestible fiber, when you look at pet food, it says 2% crude fiber on the back, and crude fiber is purely the indigestible component of it. It's nothing to do with soluble fiber. Soluble fiber is not told you any more than carbohydrates or sugar or salt, because it's in your interest not to know those things. Okay, so they don't tell you soluble fiber, and that's more of just of an oversight because we've just been obsessed with indigestible fiber up until 10, 20 years ago, relatively recently. They don't tell you about soluble fiber. So TDF, total dietary fiber, is what you see on human products. But crude fiber is what we get largely in pet food. So when you see 2% crude fiber, which is an average for dry food, that's actually quite a lot of crude fiber. And they need that because of the food they're feeding to the dog with the chemical preservatives and all the other stuff that might constipate the dog. High carbohydrate diet, Western Arse Disease, as explained. Somebody said, what's Western Arse Disease? I mean constipation and bum troubles. So a high carbohydrate ultra-processed diet, you would expect that to give you bum troubles. So you make sure you get in a lot of crude fiber, 2%. But if you look at the normal diet of a dog, let's say free of their own devices, 5% plant matter, who knows, who cares, you know, just whatever, pick a figure, 5%. And if 10% of that plant matter was fiber, okay, you're talking about 0.5% fiber in their diet, crude fiber in their diet. Now on dry food, they're getting 4 times the amount of crude fiber they normally do. Okay, you can live with that. It helps the disgusting, disgusting high carbohydrate food move through the dog. And it doesn't get any gut issues. But light dry food has 12.5% crude fiber in it, and we haven't even started talking about soluble fiber. So when you look at the ingredients of light dry food, check this out, Nick, for the amount of fiber that's in light dry food. And anybody that read the book would know this already, but I'm going to say it to you again anyway. Where's my light dry food bit gone? Oh, bloody hell, I can't find it. So anyway, the first 5 or 6 ingredients of light dry food are like, you know, corn, indigestible cellulose, beet pulp, pea bran, which is the outside shell of peas that we all know we can't digest, corn gluten meal, all the sinners, all the fibers. So 12.5% crude fiber, actually when you work it out, it's about 25% fiber because there's the same again amount of soluble fiber, give or take. So 25% of light dry food is fiber. And we know from studies that eating light dry food that's bulked up with this indigestible fiber results in nutrient loss in the dogs because they can't get their hands on the nutrients that are shooting through, increases the amount of poos, and it increases malnutrition in the animal. They know this from weight loss studies where they compare them to meat-fed dogs, and the dry-fed dogs were malnutritioned in these studies. Like, we have these studies to say these are terrible foods to feed a carnivore that has fast food. So that's what cellulose does. Avoid light dry foods. But that's why you have quite a high fiber reading. That's not a normal amount of fiber to have in a carnivore's diet, I'd say. Where do you think animals dogs normally get fiber, Nick? What would normal fiber be for a dog?

Well, I think that's a great question. They will get it— well, just to your point there, Conor, I think it's a very good reason, one of dozens of why we shouldn't be feeding our dogs on kibble. Yeah, it is, it's a really obvious reason. Where do dogs normally get fiber? Well, they get it from a couple of places. Unlike modern— I was going to say humans, but actually modern humans, modern humans don't get any fiber from bone. Okay. And bone is a very, very important part of fiber, of stimulating the gut, of bulking out the stool. I think it's probably prebiotic as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I would say prebiotic.

Yeah.

The bugs something to eat. So they'll get that from bone when they're chewing bones. But I think they'll also— historically, they will get vegetable material, mainly green, uh, pre-chewed, pre-enzymatically broken down to a certain extent, um, when they eat the intestine. Now, there's quite a few studies which say dogs don't, or wolves don't, eat the rumen contents. Okay, I can live with that. But what you absolutely guarantee that a hungry pack of wolves is going to eat the entire rumen, which is going to be this deep in, you know, the tripe is going to be that deep in material from the rumen. They're also going to eat the entire intestine, which is going to be containing all this digested green plant material. So I think that one can make a very a good argument for we should feed our dogs a certain amount of green material. If you can have it pre-fermented with bacteria, so much the better. If you can pre-chew it like a sheep or a rabbit, that'd be really, really great as well. Yeah, but in the real world, you put it in a blitz and you add some you add some fermented veggies, some kimchi or some sauerkraut or things like this, and you're just doing your best to try and get it as close as possible. Any thoughts to add to that?

I think that's all, that's exactly where I am. I think with the— we know that dogs, we— nobody can really digest 100% of any meat diet. Even if you give them a chicken breast, you get up to about 90%, 95% with white fish, but that does suggest that there is some amount of meat that you can't digest. In dogs, they're better at digesting meat than humans are, but still they produce waste. They don't get— even if you give them a pure meat diet, they will poo out some. But that's probably more to do with a transit time thing. If they held on to that diet longer, they probably would digest the whole thing because it's just an acid bath. But they only hold on to it for enough to break it down to a certain extent, and then they push it on through. So yeah, I think bones, well, that's something that's going to be hard to digest. There's got to be a heap of fiber in bones. Types of fiber, meat fibers. And then there's going to be, you know, ligaments and really tough things like nails, hide, hair. Hair is a big one at the moment in the raw circles. Everyone's talking about feeding fur and feathers and indigestibles, all made of protein, all enzymatically possible to be digested because we've got the enzymes for it, but it takes a long time. But we don't hold on to those things long, so generally they come out in the poo. So yeah, I think that's carnivore fiber for sure. And when we started talking about carnivore fiber, there's a good study here on 13 captive cheetahs fed whole rabbit or just the meat from the rabbit. And they found that— I couldn't be bothered reading it out, but essentially the animal fiber increased. Let me just bloody read it out then. It is likely that poisons— what is it— the version ratios and the decrease in putrefaction fed whole rabbit. So what they found, the first study was that they found a decrease in putrefaction products and increase in short-chain fatty acids and all the cool things that we're looking for. And in the second study, they fed cheetahs with digestive issues fiber. They had IBS, IBD diagnosis, and they fed them horse meat with the fiber on the outside, the hair and the hide, and the cheetahs recovered their bowel issues compared to the cheetahs that didn't. So yeah, that carnivore fiber is a big thing. We removed from the diet because of a raw producer produced a bloody turkey product and those feathers hanging out. But we would think, oh, what's going on? This is scaldy. But actually when you see a wolf eating, they eat some of that material. And actually, when a wolf poos, there's a plug of kind of fiber and indigested material at his butt, and that comes out first. So the first poo is nearly like a dry, pelty butt plug, and then there's a firm poo, and then there's a softer poo behind it. So that's generally the way a wolf will eat, and I doubt that's the same with dogs. But, um, they get— so I think they get the fiber from the two places. I think they have started to incorporate a tiny bit of plant matter I think they eat animals that have plant matter inside them. They're whole prey eaters. So a little from column A and a little from column B. Hairy ears, little pieces of hide are being sold now. You know, people chew chicken feet with the nails on it. That is a very fibrous piece of meat. So that's all. And a prebiotic and probiotic effect. Even breast milk has a probiotic effect, actually. Breast milk, even.

And horse poo. Rabbit poo and sheep poo. Fantastic, you know, absolutely perfect probiotics, also perfect prebiotics. So don't get excited if the dog eats sheep poo. I would personally encourage it. I think it's a great idea unless the animal has just been— unless they've just been wormed, in which case you don't want your collie having a dose of ivermectin. So that's really, really to to think about. Can I just go do a little bit of biochemistry? Because this is very, very, very interesting. We were talking about starch, we were talking about digestible fiber, soluble fiber that you can, you as a human or a dog, can break down. There are two types of starchy material. One is called amylose and the other one is called Amylopectin. Okay, and this— there is a point to this. Amylose, yeah, O-S-E means it's a sugar like fructose or sucrose. Okay, it's a, it's a, it's a line, a chain of sugar molecules. Okay, and that gets broken down, but there's only two ends. Okay, and enzymes work from the end of a molecule towards the middle like this. Yes. Okay, so therefore this amylose, which is in many fruits and vegetables, is broken down quite slowly, so you get less of a glucose lift and less insulin. Yes, you know where I'm going with this. Whereas amylopectin is a branched structure, yeah, so it looks like a tree. So it means that amylopectin has got lots of places for amylase, the enzyme which breaks down starch, to go at it, which means it's liberating sugars very, very quickly. You're getting hundreds of liberated sugars all at the same time rather than 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2 with a chain. And this is why wheat, which is the mother of of the most diabolical upswing for sugars and gluten and insulin. Yeah, it's the worst. It's like every other food product on steroids. It will bump up wheat. So beware of any product that contains wheat, whether it's got gluten in or not. It's this because wheat is very, very high in amylopectin. Wheat is so, so bad for you.

Yeah. So it's, it's a lot of sugar at once, which spikes insulin. And insulin is a problem because he goes looking for trouble and forcing everything into your, into your hips. That is interesting. So that explains that. Yeah. Because there is actually, if you look at the— oh, sorry, you've got more. Go for it.

No, it's practical biochemistry. And, and do you know, in, in humans, Just talking about wheat as well, just in the last few minutes. Wheat is known in humans to be an appetite stimulant. It produces exorphins. They're like endorphins. You know, when you go to the gym, you get endorphins, you feel high. So wheat can change your behavior or the behavior of your dog. If you're feeding a wheat-based product, i.e., kibble, to your dog, you can actually change behavior because of the endorphins the exorphins. Yeah, these are morphine-like substances that you eat in your mouth. It really massively exaggerates blood glucose, which we've just discussed. It's very, very glycating because it bumps up your blood glucose. Yeah, and the glucose then goes and sticks to proteins all around the place, which is furring up your, your body and aging your body massively. So a great way to age yourself quickly is eat lots and lots of wheat. It's very pro-inflammatory. It activates immune system in really, really bad ways. It affects the gut, the behavior, the joints, the skin, cardiac disease. There are studies to show that schizophrenia is significantly worse when you eat wheat than when you don't eat wheat. And gentlemen, it is associated with erectile dysfunction. So be careful when you, when you tuck into your next McDonald's burger. It's very, very— and that's only just starting. So Davis' Wheat Belly is a book and a half to get your teeth into.

I read Braly and Hogan's book Dangerous Grains, and that was similar kind of ethos. They had a great stat, I'm going to butcher it now, but something after the war when there was a wheat crisis, schizophrenia plummeted, the wheat came back and schizophrenia rocketed again. And they've got a, and the links to that. I think the compound in gluten that causes that is called gliadomorphin because I remember in casein it's called caseinomorphin and that morphine kind of tail tells you all you need to know. So it has behavioral effects and there's a lot of studies in kids with issues, particularly ADHD, but particularly kids with autism. There's been, they are very sensitive to these compounds, gliadomorphin and caseinomorphin. Difference. So it's very interesting. But yeah, and to suggest that dogs are better at wheat than humans, we've been digesting it, trying to digest it for whatever, 6,000, 7,000 years. We've given dogs a crust of it now and again, and then the 1950s decided, you know what, buddy, we think 60% of your diet should be wheat. To suggest that they are better when we know, looking at populations, Europeans, 30% of us have a gluten intolerance, which is we struggle to digest it. 40 to 50% of African Americans, because in the 1600s They went over and took Africans away from a gluten-free continent because it's all millet and sorghum and stuff, brought them over to America, which is a wheat belt, and fed them this. So Black people are more prone to these respiratory issues and stuff that gluten can rely on. And then Africans, about 50%, Aboriginal people, 70%, struggle to digest gluten. And then we introduce them to beer and teach them how to do all the wrong things. And that was That's very bad for the Aboriginal people. I love that. That was all Bradley and Hogan that taught me that. So the upsides of fiber, I just want to run through a couple of positives you can get from eating fiber. You can expect when you eat fiber and even moving away from soluble or insoluble, because it's like just talking about foods with fiber in it for humans. This is, don't forget, because we're talking about meat eaters and me, Nick and Brian are very confused over how much of this applies if you're eating a meat and factoids, you know, protein and factoids. But anyway, this is humans. Normalizes bowel movements. I think we've made that point. Helps maintain bowel health, as I said, Western Arthritis. Lowers cholesterol levels. Okay, I'd struggle to get around that one. Helps control blood sugar levels. Nick just talked about that. Aids in achieving healthy weight because if you eat soluble, a lot of soluble fiber, it slows down the passage of digestion, so you feel, you feel fuller for longer. So that's what fiber does for you. It makes you feel fuller. And indigestible fiber swells us, so it makes your stomach feel fuller. So all good news when eating fiber, helps you live longer. Studies show people, the more fiber you eat, the longer you're going to live. There's a downside of fiber as well. I talked about the low-fat dry food, which is a scourge, especially when studies show higher protein diets do it better, retaining lean muscle mass and whatnot, and decreasing hunger and now nutrient loss. But fiber and the DCM in dogs, remember that, Nick, where dogs on high-fiber diets that it can actually affect your bile reabsorption, and that is how you get your taurine back. So high fiber diets such as 2%, I would say, is already quite a high fiber diet for a dog. But when you start lobbying into going into light dry foods and higher fiber diets like that, you're talking massively disrupting the digestion of the dog, the ability for the dog to reabsorb his taurine, or cat and suddenly you have got a low taurine issue. So when you're fed a food with the lowest amount of protein legally permitted for existing in a cage for 6 months, and then you lob a load of fiber into it because somebody thought that was a good idea, because you wouldn't want to drop the carbohydrates, that'd be madness. So that is a big problem for DCM. If you had a cat, I would definitely not feed those light dry foods. I wouldn't give them to the mother-in-law, but don't give them to cats. The taurine thing is something to be worried about. So there's pros and cons for the of fiber. But we can't— what are we going to say, Nick?

Yeah, I'm just going to say that when we say fiber, what we're not talking— what I'm not talking about is grains. Yeah, wheat, barley. I do use oats here and there if I have to, but I don't very much. When I talk about fiber, I'd be interested what you're meaning here, Conor. When I talk about fiber, I'm talking about vegetables, I'm talking about nuts, I'm talking about seeds. That's where we go with fiber, okay? For me, that's fiber. Whereas we've all been taught you've got to eat your wholemeal bread. If you believe Davis with Wheat Belly, he's saying whole wheat bread is better than highly refined Slimpsy-type bread or, or sun-blessed bread, but it is full of wheat and therefore it is doing you very many bad things. It's promoting insulin, promoting diabetes, promoting obesity, all these things. So the best place to get fiber— nuts, seeds, and lots of vegetables for humans, but also, um, for dogs. Yeah, really important.

Totally agree with that. I think it's absolutely, um, disgusting that the breakfast cereal companies such as Well, I better not name them, but one of them was recently in the news because the UK Parliament was saying we need to reduce obesity in kids, so let's target sugary breakfast cereals. And one breakfast food manufacturer, I can say it, Kellogg's, took the UK Parliament to court because they said sugary breakfast cereals make us money. That's not fair. So this was something that you'd see them doing all the time. But other companies make sugary breakfast cereals such as Nestlé, and this, now they add in the front of it now with vitamin D and fiber, 'cause fiber is good for your health. Ignore the fact it's on this high-octane sugary mess of a product, but they put in a bit of fiber 'cause it's good for your dog, your kid's gut. Give me a break. So yeah, I'm with you. I think whole foods for fiber and not going after certain things, I think that's probably a good idea. I don't like, look, I'm not gonna let a fiber conversation go without promoting my own fiber supplement. Because it's totally unique and nobody has it except me. So this is stool, right? Okay, so Nick likes psyllium husk, okay, because psyllium husk contains lots of soluble fiber. So if your dog has an anal gland issue, there's two things going on there in my books. One is your dog has probably got too many soft poos, not a lot of expression of the anal glands. I think there's always a bit of digestive unease going on there, the wrong diet. So that's the first. And the second thing is there's a bit of inflammation going on there. So psyllium husk bulks up a poo. It's more soluble fiber than insoluble fiber, so it does what the chia seeds does, and it makes those softer poos a little bit bigger, a little bit more substance to them. So when they pass over the anal glands at 4 and 8 o'clock, you get a bit more of an expression, which is a good thing if impaction is ahead for you. So you need better expression of the anal glands. As Nick would say, you can only accept 9s out of 10, 9 and 10s out of 10 poos. So on a poo scale of 1 to 10, perfect poos all the time. That's what you want. If you've got soft poos, lads, you're going to get digestive issues like anal glands. But the second reason StoolRite beats everybody else is because it's got, it's got anti-inflammatories in it. So seaweed is a potent anti-inflammatory. Many, many studies to back it up, but it's wonderfully effective. But the point about StoolRite is it's a whole product. It's a certain seaweed that we import that is massively high in insoluble fiber. And so it works absolutely wonderfully. But psyllium husk will do it. So if your dog has anal gland issues, the first thing to do is to sort out the diet and get those poos firm. Adding in fiber is a plaster on gangrene, okay? So it's a stopgap to help you get to the bottom of it. So that's a brilliant pun. But so people want to just live on stool, right? And ignore the fact that their dog has soft poos all the time. I would push the dog through and get them onto a good diet, a well-rounded diet, and try and make those poos firm without products. If you're adding in products to get a perfect poo, like dry food has to do with crude fiber, I think you can do better than that than living on fiber. But if you were to pick one, I would highly recommend Stillife. But I would because I own it. Anyway, there you go.

That's where you get it from.

Yeah, cheers, Karen.

Absolutely amazing. You know what, I've got pages and pages and pages of stuff here. I think we should do fiber again because we haven't really talked about it. When we talk about fiber, we're talking mainly about humans and fiber because we're omnivores, and so we require fiber. But dogs, most of their fiber comes from bones. And so I think there's probably— well, I hope there's some research out there, and we can talk about how does fiber, dog's fiber, i.e., bony material and claws and teeth and what have you, and fur, how does that impact the gut, what effects are there, but also how does that change the microbiome? Because the microbiome of the dog is going to be more specialized, it's going to be less broad than a human. We're omnivores, so we need broad, and with the humans, the broader your spectrum of bugs in your gut, the better it is. But if you're a specialist, you need specialist bugs. So I think there's a lot to go there, and Brendan's watching this and he is chomping at the bit to jump in, so spit flying onto the screen, I'm sure.

Nick, I've got one question for you before we go. I can't believe it's 10 to 5, we weren't going to get 45 minutes out of it. Here's a question, I promised the lady I'd read it out because I'm a bit stumped. Here we go. My senior girl Roxy, approximately 13 years old, was on kibble for 9 years of her life. At one point we thought she had pancreatitis, but after moving her to raw, her lipids improved drastically, as you'd expect because it's carbohydrates. She thrived on raw, but after about 2 years she became very constipated, almost chronically, and she had to suffer through a number of enemas. That's not nice. She is now on vet-prescribed gastrointestinal support food recommended by the vet who is not pro-raw. Okay, she can live with that. I mix about half of it, but she wants to get the dog back on raw. I mix about half of her food with very lightly blanched insert raw dog food brand, and I still need to add a daily laxative as she can't pass stool without it. Even tiny amounts of the ordinary foods except raw veggies, because that's your fiber, disrupts her toilet movements and ends up her being constipated. I would love nothing more to put her back on raw but would need help in seeing how can we help with her bowel movements. Why is raw doing this to my dog? Oh, and she's overweight. The dog, not the writer. Nick, you're frozen. You've got a big goofy laugh on you. Am I alone? Oh my God, I'm here by myself. I'm having a good time. Not. Okay, Nick's gone. Well, that's pretty unfortunate because I don't actually have an answer for that lady's question. She sent that email to me in Dogs First. And said, would I be able to help her dog? And I was thinking, wow, I've never actually heard of a dog that suddenly turned chronically constipated on a diet that's only 50% raw. And so I'm stumped.

What you need to do is to see a nutritionist or a raw feeding vet.

Am I still here? Is there— can everyone hear me, or is it Nick?