RawPetMedics FB Live: Offal

This is Dr. Brendan Clark, Dr. Conor Brady, and me, Dr. Nick Thompson. We're delighted to see you here this evening. Nobody's actually turned up yet.

Rachel, Rachel, she's first across the line.

We were a bit late, so sorry about that, guys. Really, really lovely to see you. And I would say, what have you been doing this week? But I'm not really that interested because the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society has been here. Conor, did you manage to see it?

Guys, I couldn't. I was at the AGM on Friday night, so I attended the lion's share of that, but Saturday was just mobbed with kid-related stuff. I dipped in and out, but I missed virtually everything. I didn't even get Bill and Her Stones. I'm a big fan of his, so I missed it. How'd you get on, guys? Was it good?

It was really—

so well, I was—

I had nothing to do with it.

It was fantastic.

I've organized numerous of them, and my psychology and my heart and my blood pressure still coming back to normal from organizing those things. They're very traumatic to organize.

My best guess.

So I didn't have anything to do with the organizing, so I just sat in my office all day, nice warm office, drank tea and then drank coffee, and then later in the evening drank a little wine and really enjoyed the whole thing. The whole thing. So Brendan, congratulations. You were part of this steering committee on that. So congratulations.

Only a little bit. I mean, there are some great people on the committee that sorted that. I think we've had a bit of input as to what we wanted to gain out of it. I think, ah, just look, some great speakers. As you say, Ian was great. We had Roger Meacock, we had Rebecca Brown.

What did Roger talk about? What was Roger's gist?

So, look, it was really putting the understanding behind why some people just create and they will just draw from nature and try and just emulate or simulate what's happening in that and give a little bit of variety and understand that there's no need to be minuscule in your sort of balancing needs, especially to standards which, let's face it, were based around artificial nutrition. And then we had Charlie Gray and Barbara Royal really talking about their different approaches to formulating. So how they're formulating two different standards to some degree, FEDIAF and AFCO. But actually the whole debate came about and it was really interesting, wasn't it, towards the end, Nick, how actually they really gave the impression that those are not— so for healthy individuals, they would absolutely just allow them to create a diet and go. And only if they were really poorly they used the formulators not to create a diet for them, but to try and determine what they might be deficient in. And at that point, look at finding something arbitrary to supplement that up, not necessarily go through the whole raft and make it a perfect ideal diet. So actually it was brilliant. It was a classic conference that we had of everybody rather than it being, you know, one of those fight fests and everybody throwing cream buns at each other. It was very much everybody ended up agreeing that the best way was to try and emulate nature and, you know, just actually how to tweak diets if you needed to, because somebody's maybe used a substandard diet. And this was something that came up actually, that if you choose the cheapest options, you know, the poorer quality stuff, you're more likely to end up with some issues. But actually, those people that were creating from good quality constituents very rarely needed the tweaking to be done because they just weren't being deficient.

That's interesting.

This is absolutely amazing stuff. I'd love to talk about Ian Billinghurst as well because I'm a fan as well. But before we do that, it'd be lovely to talk to, to describe everybody, to tell everybody about Maudie, who was organizing some things over the time. Would you be able to just put a, put a thing the website up there. So Audie Lambert is a friend of us all. She's been in the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society since the very beginning, the very first conference. She was there helping us all, and she is a nutritionist and a very hands-on and no-nonsense and very diligent raw feeder and nutritionist and will help you with, with feeding. Her website is simplyrawfeeding.co.uk. Simply Raw Feeding and it is down the bottom there. I didn't need my notes. So she's basically great, and she is— if you find you're talking to vets about this stuff a bit daunting, she is very, very undaunting. She's very welcoming, and she's very humble. She's very able, but she's very humble. And so if she sounds like your cup of tea, I would have a chat with her to see whether you're on the same wavelength, because I think she could be very, very useful to you. And I really want to say thank you very much, Maudie, for sponsoring us this evening. We really appreciate that.

And yeah, I remember my first Raw Feeding Veterinary Society conference. I was at 2 live ones before it was taken away from us. And my very first conference I was sitting beside Maudie really, and then, you know, halfway through the night I was just latched on to Maudie. She is the nicest person you could possibly meet, but also lovely with the way she dispenses her information. Like, I highly recommend her as a nutritionist. If anybody is a little bit caught short with needing a few ideas, Maudie is the boss. She's lovely. So Simply Raw Feeding, it's a brilliant website.

Some people love to refer to her as the tripe lady because she really loves tripe.

Queen of tripe.

Tribe indeed. No, lovely.

Absolutely. What about Billions talk, Nick?

I thought, I thought he was really, really eloquent. I think I said sometimes when he writes, I think he is the bee's knees. Okay. I think he is the dogfather. And I really think he's, he's got a lot to say. But I think that the longer he's in the game and the older he gets, the more eloquent. And he, he was just, he sounded like a bit like David Attenborough. Oh yeah, just like eloquent. Yeah, very nice use of language, uh, fluent, uh, fantastic. You know, he was talking about the history of feeding from, you know, from the very earliest times and how it had the dogs came through and latched onto people and, uh, and, and, and then, uh, became more and more dependent on feeding off from our scraps and feces and, and, and piles of food and things like that. I was just very struck and I emailed him as soon as he finished and said, wow, that was just absolutely fabulous and was— I found it very, very inspiring. So it's great that he's there supporting raw food in such a strong way. So if any of you guys haven't seen the Raw Feeding Veterinary— and I'm not just pushing it for the sake of the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society, it really is. You will get something out of every single talk, even if you disagree with the whole formula feeding, the whole formulation feeding. It's worth hearing some clever people talking about why they do it and how they use it when they're really pushed. But then generally speaking, they will not tend to use it. They'll use their common sense and use creation.

Feeding.

So he was so inclusive as well. He was, you know, he didn't want to— he was so magnanimous to those people that were doing these other things, and he could understand where they were coming from. There were some great snippets, weren't they, about the sort of rethinking of how long ago, uh, the wolf-dog split and how actually long ago, because there was a point, I think, where we thought that it was 11,000 to 20,000 years ago that sort of dogs sort of became involved with humans, and I think they've pushed that even further back now to even as far back as 60,000 years, you know, for that. And it's just, yeah, just like—

I've got 40,000 in my book. No, I don't want to hear that.

What, this thing? This pile of out-of-date, you know, that's no longer there.

Anyway, it's out of date, guys. Just toilet paper. It's just, yeah, that's it.

Somebody just asked there, guys, regarding formulation, we might as well just answer this before we move on. Is there a way to check your dog if they need— if they're up and down in their vitamin and mineral levels? I can't find the exact question. Is there a way to check your dog? I think a more apt question will be, do you need to?

Yeah, so that was really interesting because Charlie— I asked Charlie Gray this in the conference— was, well, which bloods does she run? And actually the answer, because he talked about— he referred to bloods within the conference. Yeah. And yet Actually, the answer was, well, actually, there's quite a few things that are inaccurate about, you know, if you, for instance, pull zinc off the shelf, you know, try and test their blood for zinc levels and it can be all over the shop and absolutely inaccurate. And she actually turns around and says very rarely would she rely on those bloods as the underlying— she looks at the symptomatology, she actually looks at the diet and then tries to work out, well, what would be deficient? In those diets. Okay, so, and then when she tweets— yeah, yeah, so rather than blood testing, it's the diet that she looks at.

That's interesting. So maybe in healthy dogs, this is not something that people really— they need to think about it as much as they need to think about it in their kids, in my opinion, as a non-vet. But in an unhealthy animal, this is when these things may be taken into consideration by somebody who would be all over this sort of thing. I think most canine nutritionists, me as a regular canine nutritionist, nothing higher than that, wouldn't— I am totally on the side of, you know, doing our best based on what we know. If I was a zoologist and given this animal and I've never seen it before, I would look at a few different things: the ancestry and the digestive setup of the dog and his historical diet. What did he eat when you let him off the lead in the wild? All that kind of stuff. And I do think that the vitamin mineral stuff is down the way. I actually had a I had a bit of a, maybe she's on here tonight, I doubt it, but I had a bit of a tricky customer on my Facebook page where I put up a post, something to do with gut health, and somebody said, well, you know, if you're going to go through an exclusion diet to find out what's wrong, you need to make sure that each exclusion diet goes through the animal diet formula to make sure it's absolutely perfect. That's just one formula, there's lots of different types. And I was kind of saying, look, the person's in a bit of a hole here and we just need to get the poos sorted out and let's just calmly move through a few meats not complicated too much because you're going to freak this person out. They've been through 2 or 3 vets. They've got, you know, and it's like, could you just stop talking about an Excel spreadsheet for the moment and let's just get this dog settled and healthy and digesting a couple of supplements and happy and move through a few proteins and make a little list, treat the pet, the patient in front of you. And I was chastised quite a lot for saying that was very flippant information. And I thought, oh, I'm not, that's not how you get over a gut sickness initially. Leave that stuff for down the way. If you need it, it's there for you. But initially, I don't really think you need the hand of a veterinary nutritionist to get you over a bit of recurring diarrhea in the dog initially, you know. So anyway, I thought that's where I differed from the whole Excelsbridge.

I did like one point. I mean, well, I like quite a few points in all of their talks. You know, there's some takeaways. I mean, the pansteatitis thing for, you know, looking at pain about inflamed fat across the board, you know, if you've oversupplemented PUFA into the diet and actually not corrected the vitamin E levels, that actually you can start to get that. So sort of thinking about how you can raise vitamin E levels for those patients. There's some great stuff. Guys, if you want to look at these, you can go onto the website. I think it's going to take about 10 days for the actual recordings to come up and you'll be able to purchase those individually to support the RFES. And have a look at those. So there's some great talks there, you know, going to be improved as brand, just in case people are freaking out.

What do you mean? Yeah, give me an example.

So finding in the fish oils, you know, if you've overdone the fish oils but you've not corrected and increased the, the vitamin E that's coming out in that.

Do people need to give vitamin E every time they give fish oil?

Or no, no, only if Only if you've got problems. This is the thing. It's like, no, actually you can give those and actually quite often you'll be fine doing what you're doing because if you've got good quality ingredients, there should be enough of some of those vitamins and antioxidants within the foods you're feeding. It's just if your quality isn't quite there, then you might find people over-supplementing one area because they're using supplements instead of just the food. And when they do that, they start to skew the nutrients out. And I think it's something really interesting you say because, you know, the ADF, the Animal Dietary Formulator, is quoted in The Forever Dog and this is a great book and congratulations to the guys. You know, they've been top of the list in the New York Times bestseller list. So well done. But I think they do talk about the ADF in this and their new app has some stuff to do with the animal dietary formulator. And I think it's almost a defensive medicine approach where it's that there's so much fear of if they don't get an absolute formulation, then they might end up getting taken to court over it. And it's just that's not how good nutrition works. You know, I think, Nick, you've made a good point on a few times. In fact, I think you made it at the conference with regards to that you don't have a white coat walking behind you when you're feeding your children, you know, in the supermarket aisles. Why, why have we lost that ability to think a little bit more holistically and varied with our diets for our pets?

Yeah, totally. I think it's because the food corporations have very subtly undermined our confidence in our ability to feed our dogs just as we feed feed our children, which is sensibly using macronutrients, using very good quality ingredients, and just giving variety and letting them sort themselves out. And then if you see something happening, dry skin or squitty poos or something, then you just change things a little bit. We've lost that confidence somehow. We've been disempowered somehow, and we do need to. And that's kind of what part of this is about. It's not that complicated. And just think it's food. It's not rocket science, you know. And if you don't have the confidence to move forward, find somebody like Maudie or one of us or whoever, and they will take you through until you've regained your confidence. And then off you go.

Yeah.

Don't need anybody.

You kind of look at your kids sometimes. I'm looking at my toddler here, 3 and a half, whatever age she is. I don't know, maybe she's 4. She's nearly 4. But I think like you kind of look at her and go, has she eaten anything green this week? Has she?

Will she?

Why won't she eat green things? If she finds anything green, she just throws it. And it's like, it's embarrassing as like a nutritional type person. It's like, eat your vegetables. And so, but you know, they get by, you know, vitamins and minerals and nutrients and anti-inflammatories, antioxidants and all the other things we rarely talk about, which we think they come in supplements. Actually, that's all in your food as well. Like they don't come in an even way in nature. They come in little waves and you get a glut of this and a bit of that, and then you're looking for a bit of this. Why do I want an apple so badly? You know, and that's just the way it comes in nature. And your body stores bits that it needs and things that it absolutely can't live without. It has evolved to produce itself. So you have this body that does not need it every single day. And that is the secret to taking the fear away. It's like the science has been moved to the front of the packet to make you think you can't feed a dog yourself. It's just ridiculous. You know, you've no idea what your child's calcium RDA is. You have no idea where zinc comes from, you have no idea how much they got yesterday, and they're perfectly fine. As if your kids are less important than your pet, you know.

So anyway, look, guys, with all the mucus your kids were spewing out over the last 2 weeks, I think she's probably had her fill of green.

Anyway, baby particularly, baby was so sick. Bloody hell, the toddler got through it, but she had 14 days with that very nasty cough. I was told after 3 or 4 days give her these antibiotics, but we rolled through it. Just coughed at nighttime, not during the day, just no sleep with them. Anyway, very— it's going around. Forgot to say, guys, we're on patreon.com/rawpetmedics. If you can, guys, please take a trip over, price of a cup of coffee or a pint. We greatly appreciate it for the show we put on once a week. It helps us prepare and spend a bit of time on it, takes the pressure off. If you can afford it, we really appreciate it. patreon.com/rawpetmedics. But tonight, guys, it's 20 past 7, it's supposed to be about awful. So that's all the organ meats. Who wants to start off? Can I actually— can I just— can I just jump in here and start off? Because it happened to come up in a book I'm listening to at the moment called Why Don't Zebras Get Ulcers, which I highly recommend for anybody interested in the nerd side of stress, how it works and how it physically affects you. It's— oh, it was so interesting. So I've got it on audiobook at the moment. But, um, he started— he said that the term organotherapy, which people might be familiar with, which is like We're gonna talk about organs tonight and the nutrition of them, but also the feeding of organs for certain conditions. So if your dog has a sick liver, you might give a bit of liver to the dog, you know, eyes for eyes, brain for brain, which we'll talk about. But the term first came up in the 1900s. And interestingly, it all started off with testicles. So in the early 1900s, men were attributing the decrease in testosterone, they just found testosterone and they realized that as you got older, less testosterone was present. And they blamed the fact that you know, the testicles needed a bit of a, a bit of an oomph and they didn't realize there was a whole cascade to make them produce. So anyway, they went looking for testosterone. So this started a whole business of people going to Switzerland to some uber healthy clinic. Even the Pope got it done where they actually got— what do they call it? They called it male factor because you can't say sperm in the 1900s and they're called glands, not testicles back then. So they got, first of all, they used to get juices from any animal, fighting cocks, pigs, goats. You used to be able to walk out and pick your favorite goat to get his bits and pieces injected into your bum in the hope that it would bring back some vitality and decrease aging. Nobody thought about the fact that there's females on the planet as well, and they age and all that kind of stuff. But he kind of got into it and he said, look, testosterone doesn't fall in all males and that kind of stuff. But then they started doing transplants of— take a little bit of testicle matter from another animal and put it into the male. And that was the first time they used the word organotherapy. And after World War I, when young lads were just decimated across the continent, this became a really cool thing for older men who were marrying younger women, and bloody hell, they needed some organotherapy. So what he said was, was that the surge in positive reports— they said, oh my God, it makes me feel amazing. It was utter nonsense. Nobody got any benefit from it. Any bit of testicle matter put near your testicles was just, you know, devoured by your body straight away. So they eventually found out that the pituitary was running things, and then they thought it was the pituitary that was the whole brain set of the whole body. But then they found out that it was actually a tiny part of the brain where these tiny little blood vessels link into pituitary. They said it's about the size of an area of a full stop. Okay, that's how big this area is of the brain that feeds the hormones to the pituitary to tell it what to do. So after they realized it wasn't the pituitary because they could take it out of animals and different things happened, they knew it was this tiny area. And two scientists went after trying to find out what those chemicals were coming from the brain by studying this tiny area the size of a full stop in the 1940s. And the two of them hated each other so much that they spent 13 years each with a massive team of scientists, and they had to produce tons and tons and tons of pig brains and they would make a slurry of pig brain from this tiny little area of the brain and collect lots of it and squish it out and distill it in the 1940s. And it took them 13 years to isolate the first hormone from the brain. And this was the start of people starting to understand the difference between, like, you know, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and all these other things that might affect the body. But it started with these two nutcase scientists, and eventually they both won the Nobel Prize in 1953. For the discovery of the role of the hypothalamus in the maturity and all that kind of stuff. But that was the start of organotherapy. It was men looking for a bit more oomph, a bit more lead in their pencil. But in the 1920s, just, just I think my most favorite study on organotherapy was in dogs where they started discovering insulin. Diabetes started hitting the nation the first time they'd ever seen it. They wanted to know what it was about. So they knew insulin came out of the pancreas, but they weren't quite sure what it did. So they got two groups of dogs and they depancreatized the dogs, so they locked off their pancreatic function, and they fed them sugar and meat, both these dogs. So one dog had no pancreas and the other dogs had pancreas but were given— the dogs with no pancreas were given insulin. Anyway, what they found was at the end of messing around with all these diets, they found that if the dog ate pancreas, they lived much, much longer than dogs that were just injected with insulin alone. So when they were put in these sugar diets, it was better for the dog that he ate the whole organ, insulin and all, because all the other things like glucagon and amylin and all this other cool stuff that comes out of a pancreas, digestive enzymes, and it's better the dog ate that in the raw form. They live much, much longer than dogs that were just injected with insulin. Now it was probably being injected with pork insulin, and God knows if that's useful at all to them, but they threw away that learning process of actually the whole organ's really, really beneficial because insulin, well, shit, we can sell this. And so they were looking for a thing that they could sell, and they did find insulin. And now controlling insulin, as opposed to avoiding diabetes, which is obviously what, you know, you should be doing, but that doesn't make any money. So what we do is we get the amazing drugs and treatments for when you get diabetes, and if, you know, one in two Americans is it nearly. And it's like, when you get these metabolic diseases, we can use insulin to control it. But actually ingesting the whole organ, uh, true organotherapy, was really helpful for these pancreatic dogs. So I thought that was really interesting. The early 1900s is where it all started off. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah. And there's so many books that we've been talking about over the last 6 months or so that have referred through to things like the use of, in humans, the eating of whole organs to reduce some of the insulin resistance as well as spiking insulin. These things that you were talking there, because actually a big problem with diabetes actually is the insulin resistance that builds up, not just the need for insulin. Of the high sugary diets. So lots of stuff there. Yeah, so absolutely brilliant. That was a quick picture of the book that Conor was talking about. We'll put a link up later on so that you can listen along. I know there's quite a lot of you bookworms out there that love to follow what we're reading. So there's a couple of books that just come to mind.

One is Shanahan, Deep Nutrition, who you introduced us to. So that was kind of That's a life changer, really. And there's another one that I've just read, which is just here.

Yeah.

Yeah. I thought they were going to post that. Yeah. Great.

Sally Fallon Morell, who's basically gone and done some really academic studies of diets of, of American Indians, of the Inuit, of the Aborigines in Australia. The, some of the tribes in Papua New Guinea, some of the African tribes. She's really, really, really gone to town and looked at their old ways of feeding and how they, how they eat now. And they all ubiquitously have organ meat as a key part of their diet, as that ancient, ancient part of things. And with bones, because people don't, don't tend to eat bones. Yeah, they do a bit. You know, you can crunch up small bones, and if they're in fish, you can have bones and what have you. But what a lot— many of these tribes, because they're starving half the time, you know, until, you know, roads came along, you couldn't get food all the time or storage facilities. And what they do with bones is they crush them up and mix them in with their stew, just make the stew go a little bit further. But little did they know, they were actually giving themselves the, the calcium and the minerals that come from the plants that those herbivores eat. So it's brilliant stuff.

So not just that, but the protein, because we all know that bones are not just a mineral stick. They are literally a matrix of protein with minerals deposited into it. So, you know, actually inadvertently they're giving themselves you know, the protein that they needed.

Yeah, that's why we put it on the plants, isn't it? They're so full of vitamins and minerals and that kind of stuff. Bone meal is a brilliant addition. Bone meal is the same stuff that they put in pet food, actually. They call it meat meal. Well, dried meat, they're allowed to call it now, but it's actually bone meal. So let's go, let's go organ by organ, like, you know, okay, like, let's start with the most common one, liver. And there's a lot of, like, people think that, you know, well, you know, what do you think about liver? How much and what's in it and why is it so cool?

I think it's fantastic. It's really high in all the vitamins, all the B vitamins in particular. It's got plenty of copper, and there's a whole argument to be had which we need to go into, guys, with regard to phosphorus and the kidney and phosphorus and the liver, actually, and copper and whether giving it in an organic form is going to challenge the liver because there's a whole big thing that you shouldn't give too much copper to a dog with with liver disease, or is it that if they've got liver storage disease? That's the only time you actually need to be careful with the copper. And also the form of copper. You can't just say, right, dogs need 5 milligrams per kilogram of copper. Like, what sort? Yeah, is it from a natural source where it may be absorbed very well or much more cleverly, or is it from an inorganic source like copper sulfate? Where the body's going to go, oh, if I must, yeah, and we'll chomp down that mineral.

And we've got to remember, you know, there's some other little bits in there. So the bitterness of liver is often accumulated just because of the bile and stuff like that that's in there. You know, are some of those salts going through going to help those dogs that have a deficiency in their liver? There's so many vitamins and, you know, that are within the liver, that if you've got poor liver function, giving them that by giving them the organ to eat is actually supplementing them up those levels. So, yeah, we're going to see this as a recurring theme through when we go through the organs as to why giving the relative organ to the organ that's struggling can actually benefit the animal at the end.

The liver stores bits and pieces. It's a storage organ as well as endocrine, exocrine kind of function. So like it stores vitamins A and D and the copper and all the other stuff. So that's why we can't feed too much liver. We say kind of a maximum in the diet might be 5%. People can and have fed more, but the poo can get a little bit squitty because you're probably not hypervitaminosis, but that could happen if you fed it too much liver. So you take it easy with liver because that's the one of all of them that contains quite a lot of stuff. I've been interested a bit about this guy rang me one time. His dog had liver disease and the university veterinary hospital locally here had the dog, said, look, your dog's got a month. He was on Magic Hepatic dry food and a bevy of pills. And he rang me and he asked, is there anything I could do? And I said, look, you know, this is totally outside my ability here. And he goes, well, what would you do if it was your dog? I said, you know, I would— this is what I would do. So forget the advice about the products he was on, but you can imagine what I said. I don't want to repeat it and then jeopardize my career. But I said, whatever about them, but I would feed the dog high-dose liver. I would give him 10-20% raw liver in his diet because what that liver needs is in raw liver. If his liver is breaking down, he needs a good high whack of this for 2, 3, 4 weeks, and then you're going to decrease it to a normal dose. The dog was dry fed. He went away and he rang me 4 or 5 months ago, and I didn't hear any more until he rang me, and this time he was cross, and I thought, oh God, what's happened here? And he goes, remember my dog with liver disease? And I thought, oh my God, it's dead. And he said, well, I'm outside the university hospital again, and I brought the dog in. By the way, he's back on top form. He's completely himself after a month. The dog is fighting fit and I brought him in. He says, I had taken him off his dry food and his meds, his idea, and followed your advice on the food and the dog is fighting fit. They looked at the dog and they said, what have you done? They said, well, Dr. Conor Brady gave us advice on the nutrition. And they said, that bloody idiot, get him off what you're doing and go back onto dry food and the meds immediately. The dog was healthy, recovering, and he rang me and he says, I'm a journalist for a top Sunday newspaper here, he says, and he goes, I'll happily write this story. About you and my dog, if you like, but it'll be the last time you'll work with the Department of Agriculture here in Ireland because they won't take that lying down. You know, this is a— it's a bit of a— it's a bloody racket. I don't care what they do about that. But, um, so, uh, but that was very interesting. So when he told me that the dog was dry fed, he wouldn't eat liver, so he got this little Zik Westie in a— in a— like a goose and syringed the raw liver into the dog to make him eat this raw diet. And after a couple of weeks, the dog ate. And I was like, oh dear God, I hope— thanks for not writing that bit in. But the dog made a full recovery because just as you said, Bren, if your liver is malfunctioning and not able to store the bits and pieces it needs, it stores them because you need them all the time. It's not by chance, it's because these are the things you can't do without for very long. So by feeding the liver, you're feeding all the bits and pieces that that liver is not producing or storing. So it's just a real cheaty way of doing it. And like you said, it's the same for every organ. But isn't that interesting that that was the first that was a few years ago. I thought, oh my God, oh my God, this is amazing. I didn't know what I was doing. I was just saying, look, that's what I would give a go to. And it worked, you know. So there's something to it.

The one that really turned me on to this idea was feeding heart to cavies. So Cavalier King Charles often, often, often will get a murmur, 6, 7 years old, and they will often develop heart disease as they get older. And in my experience, by feeding them heart, because it's full of choline and taurine and coenzyme Q10, and it's actually very good for the teeth as well, but which could help because of periodontal disease, I guess. But that was what really turned me on. It made me think, well, I feed heart because the heart— the dog's got heart disease. Why wouldn't I? Yeah, because everything in the heart is going to be feeding the heart, and the heart is struggling, so it's going to be churning through more of this stuff.

Yeah.

Therefore, why don't we feed it? And so ever since then, it's every heart case that I've ever seen has had heart and selenium as well in heart tissue. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think a lot of the guys have been talking about taurine as we've been talking away and having their own conversations. It's great to know they're actually listening to us. And these guys, you know, they're quite right. Look, in raw meat, there's loads of taurine. So taurine per se as one of the essentials within that mix of giving heart for hearts isn't necessarily what we're truly thinking here. But there are so many other antioxidants and minerals within that heart which will be good supports, you know, let alone some of the essential fatty acids and things like that that are going to be in that. So just remembering that it's not just about the amino acids in these cases.

That's the thing, isn't it? So we look at this, the AFCO food profile type, like this is what your food looks like. It's fats and proteins and then it's vitamins and minerals and it's just like— and amino acids. And it's just like, it's just thousands and thousands and thousands of compounds that we don't even know about. We know about a few. It's like Nick was saying, the coenzyme Q10, when your heart is struggling, as if that's an option. So when you get sick from lack of coenzyme Q10 because it's not required in dry food, it's an optional extra to get when you get sick. Well, look, if you don't eat it, you're gonna need it. Like, you know, so a lot of sickness and a lot of nutritional issues in pets is from a lack of that nutrient. And so it's really a study of deficiency. Oh, I need anti-inflammatories. And so why weren't you eating anti-inflammatories all the time? I need some antioxidants because I'm oxidized. It's like, well, eat better fats and eat antioxidants all the time. Why would you wait? Keep the fire extinguisher going in all the time. The heart is an interesting one for people that aren't quite sure about organs and stuff. The organs are kind of casually separated into two groups. We've got organs that are just machines that don't really have a storage function. They don't have a whole lot of hormones being produced. This is the heart and tripe and, well, you know, other parts of the body like tongue and that kind of thing. These are meat, for the want of a better word. They're leaned on heavily by the raw dog food industry as a cheaper form, not tongue, as a cheaper form of meat that we can use as a cheap filler for raw dog food companies. Still excellent food. A heart is like a fillet steak, tough, but a fillet steak. So these are used as much as you like. You can use as much heart and tripe, we'll get to tripe in a minute, but it's the other organs like spleen and kidney in a lesser degree, liver, brain, these things are fed to us.

You say kidney to a lesser degree, let's not forget there's lots of things that, you know, the vitamin D conversion stuff that happens in kidney, the, you know, erythropoietin that's formed in the kidney, which actually boosts your blood cell counts, you know. And so you've got actually quite a lot of hormones.

I meant not feed too much. Sorry, I meant like on the scale of— yeah, well, yeah, it's in the same group as all them. I mean, I would feed a little bit more kidney. I wouldn't be afraid of kidney like I would be liver. Yeah, sorry, that's— but anyway, totally get that, Brent. What about pancreas? Pancreas, somebody mentioned back there. I wonder, do you guys have the answer? Because there is a nutritionist out there that does. I think it's Alison Daniels who said it to me before. And so you give a bit— when dogs have pancreatic issues and their pancreas isn't producing enzymes enough to help them digest the food, you get this— well, the end stage, you get this fatty poo and that kind of stuff. Adding digestive enzymes in on top of the food is a good idea, and using human ones works absolutely fine. But you can actually use dried pancreas, which would be a step above— you can actually use— sorry, I was going to say raw pancreas would be a step above The problem is raw pancreas is very hard to source. It's a sloppy mess of an organ. In the diagram, it's like this long butterfly, but it's just a gloop. And so they don't harvest it. They really only harvest it from pigs and the rest just goes out to the rendering plant. So you can get it. Some suppliers are selling it to you, but I often push people towards dry pancreas. There's a couple of different American companies that do decent freeze-dried pancreas in tubs. Can be quite expensive, but it works and has all the bits and pieces. So pancreas, guys, would you ever use that? And what's the best pancreas? Someone said, why is pork pancreas the best? There is an answer for that, and I can't remember what.

So up north where we are, we eat weird things. And so sweetbreads, okay, which is pancreas. Okay, so we can go to butchers, proper butchers, and what they will do is if you asked a butcher, you can— they will ask for the product from that pig because often what they'll do is they'll go out to the farms, they'll buy the pigs, they'll send it to a slaughterhouse, the slaughterhouse will do their job and then send them all of the bits of the pig that they request. The stuff that they don't want, that they think is relative waste, i.e., the butcher says, you know, please take the lights out, take the, you know, which is the lungs and heart, take the rest of the organs out, just drop them. I'm not going to sell those. Yeah, they might hold liver and things like that, but— and the kidneys, but very relatively little of anything else from a pig then unless they're making sausages. And then they, you know, so they will just get the main part of the carcass. But you go to those butchers and you say, actually, can you ask them to get me pancreas? And I actually had one guy go off to one of these places, came back with 5 kilos of pancreas.

It was a long time.

Now what it's about. So what my advice generally is, for 10 kilos, about 50 grams of pancreas, you know, 10 kilos of dog's body weight, 50 grams of pancreas into their food is usually adequate to give them aid with digestion. So for a little Westie, 50 grams added into in the raw, just chopped up. You can blend it, blitz it a little bit. It is quite fatty. You're absolutely right. But the wonderful thing about pancreas is it's there. It's going to help the digestion of that fat that's within it anyway. So, you know, this worry about it's going to start off pancreatitis. Well, if you guys want to know, look back at our pancreatitis video because you'll understand why fats in the food aren't necessarily going to drive the lipids in the blood, which causes the pancreatitis. That's another story. And let's, you know, understand that actually I do find it helps and I do find it helps with the digestion and gives them back their body weight. Again, for those dogs that have maybe ended up with a longer-term exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, an EPI, you know, these additions can be really, really useful.

I wish they were in all raw dog foods. I wish there was a really big spread of organ meats across pre-made raw dog foods. I wish there was always—

rather than just liver.

Yeah, it's always liver, heart, kidney, but really, like, guys, like, you know, there's— you know yourself, a little bit of pancreas is needed and people will struggle to source like, you know, brains and eyes. Where are we going to get that? Like, eyes are a great one because eyes— the two compounds in eyes I love talking about are, aside, they're full of vitamin A. Vitamin A is important for your eyes. So guess what? Your eyes are full of vitamin A. So the Asians start at the head and the eyes are very nutritious to them. But when they're eating the fish, but we just don't eat the heads at all. And shame on us. So we're missing nutrition there. But eyes are great.

All I can think about is the Temple of Doom and the—

Monkey brain next. It's like, no, I can't. But your eyes are full of lutein and zeaxanthin, and lutein only comes to the plant kingdom. You know, nobody's— no animals can synthesize it, and bacteria can't, nothing. Only plants can. Zeaxanthin comes largely from the plant kingdom, but also some little microalgae can produce it. But the point is, these are two very planty compounds. And so if you're a mammal, and particularly a carnivore, where are you going to get them? You don't eat plants. And so you get them from eating the prey. And particularly if your prey is getting to nibbling all these different fine little herbs and plants around the and mushrooms and all the cool stuff that we add in later. They eat the prey, and studies show that carnivores particularly will— every animal does this, even people that eat animals, eat leaves and stuff— they'll eat certain parts depending on the nutritional content of that part. So depending on their nutritional need at the time, they'll choose the eyes first, or they'll go for the pancreas if they need it, or whatever. So caterpillars will eat certain leaves to fill themselves with poisons if there's a wasp on their back. Chimps eat it for parasites. Cows will eat bits of bones and stuff off the ground when they're short on calcium. So we know carnivores eat certain types of prey, but eyes are the only place they're going to get lutein. So if they needed lutein or zeaxanthin, that's probably where they get it. People are thinking, Jesus, where am I going to get eyes to feed my dog? But this is where fish heads come into it. I love, I love an owl fish head. And most of the time when people sell you pre-made raw dog food and it's like £4 or £5 a kilo, guys, it's fish heads. They're not, they're not you know, putting a whole John Dory in a grinder, you know, salmon, that's just economically it doesn't work that way. But they can, fish head on a salmon head, there's huge meat in the cheeks and it's a huge piece of meat. But in there is a brain which you're rarely going to source and eyes which are fantastic. You can feed lambs in Britain, I believe, not in Ireland, you can feed lamb heads up to a year. You can buy with brains, can't you? Up to a year or something, is that the rule?

Yeah, you've got to cut off. But I mean, look, The obvious ones for us is shot game, you know, we've got rabbit, you know, whole rabbit heads, things like that. That's going to have all of that stuff in with the eyes, etc., you know, pheasants, you know, quail, partridge, all of that stuff.

For the people who are a little bit squeamish, I think sprats, dried sprats. You know, you can give, you know, a Westie you could give 5, 5 of those a day, 10 of those a day. That's a lot of good, good going into, into the dog, I think. So yeah, that is the way around it. Nick, I love tripe. I think it's really, really good. One of the interesting things on tripe, because we're just kind of at the end, there's a couple of things I wanted to say. I find that I've got dogs who are beef intolerant who can take beef, who can take take a beef tripe. I've got them lamb intolerant and they can take the lamb tripe.

That's mad.

But isn't, isn't this, although we're talking about the reflection of organs for organs, gut, you know, gut health issues, gut health, you know, that have basically leaky gut problems or anything like that, you know, the vitamin Bs that are often in those green tripes, you know, let alone the friendly bacteria that are going to enhance the good floral balance of the gut and therefore close those leaky guts. You've got all sorts of benefits. And let's, you know, let's put aside that there's probably those sensitivities are based around processed lamb and processed beef to cause those sensitivities. And when you're feeding them raw, as Nick is there, there's often a total difference in how sensitivities work. But I think, you know, guts for gut issues. Absolutely.

Yeah, I like that.

That does have a benefit.

Yeah, gut for gut, heart for heart, liver for liver. You know, again, it's not rocket science, guys. Not too much on the liver and go easy on the kidney. Just, you know, just feel your way forward. I think 5% is a good place to start.

Yeah, I would say, uh, Marty's just going to be so pleased that we, uh, have got tripe.

I, I want to, I want to say one thing about tripe. Okay, so I'm, I'm not quite as converted as everybody else. I still kind of pull back a bit. People are worried about washed tripe, or bleach tripe is the word that they use in butchers sometimes. Guys, they don't use bleach in human food, okay? When they say bleach, they mean warm water or hydrogen peroxide, or just a way to get the green stain off the food, which a lot of people want to eat it that way first. So it's still perfectly good protein for the dog. People believe that the greenness on the tripe is probably— it probably enhances the nutritional value of the food for the animal and the the chamber— they say the dog, the cow, has 4 stomachs. Well, he's got a, he's got a big chamber where he stores, called the tripe or the rumen, where he stores all the grass. She stores all the grass, or he. And, uh, and that's where she, you know, uh, chews the cud, brings it back up, chews it, sends it back down, back through. And then a couple of little other chambers, then a mini stomach there above the mesum. You don't get those other bits off the cow. You don't often see mesum, abomasum being sold by a producer.

You do hear that hexagonal tripe.

Yeah, hexagonal.

That's not in the rumen. The other parts are actually where a lot of different tripe are. I mean, and don't forget, you know, some of those other areas of the stomach are just like leaves upon leaves, helping to, you know, grow things, you know. So the various different areas have a different texture of tripe.

Yeah, you don't see them though for sale really, but I think the tripe thing really took off in like in the '60s, '70s breeders had these masses of dogs and they'd go to the abattoir and go, give me the cheapest part of the cow you can. And they inevitably got bags of tripe because no other part was going to be given to them for nothing. And they'd go back to their biscuits, which was a term back in the day for non-meat-containing, literally biscuit for dogs, crackers. And this is what dogs were fed. And they would throw the tripe on top and the dogs would bloom because it's meat. And so the dogs are doing great. And I would say, oh, pound for pound, I probably think a chicken leg would be probably more nutritious than a than a pound of tripe. But like, it's great for the dogs, but is it this elixir? I'm now getting closer to believing it is. It is fantastic because I got confused over the probiotics. I'm thinking, this, these, this is life for a plant eater in that chamber, you know, so why would that be useful to my highly acidic meat eater, you know? Now we know that you can feed probiotics of different species that don't actually live in the animal but when they get in there, they do exist long enough to spread a few of their own compounds and have a good effect. So I believe that now. So now actually I'm coming around very slowly. Marty, you'll be delighted to hear, because Marty keeps on beating it down my neck every time we meet about tripe. So she was right and I was wrong, most likely. That's all I can say.

There's been some— Susan Webb was asking, awesome, was going to ask about DCM. You're very— I've got great news, we have got a real authority on DCM, because this whole thing about grain-free diets and dilated cardiomyopathy really hit the States a couple of years ago. And it's been an absolute bunfight, as, as Brendan would say, to say the least. And, and what's happened is that there are many, many, many vets in the States who are saying that, oh, grain-free diets are absolutely terrible. And therefore, and they cause dilated cardiomyopathy. But there's one, uh, one researcher called Ryan Yamka who's been studying this in really, really, really great detail, and he says basically it's just rubbish. They're just trying to create a storm. And Nikki Kamek, who runs North Point Pets, wonderful woman, uh, she's coming to talk to us on the 26th on the 26th of this month. That's not next week, but the week after. And she's also— don't know how this, this woman gets any time to sleep, but she has also done a study, about 5,000-person study, looking at the safety. Yeah, yeah, of raw pet food. Okay, she's actually done— look, talked to 5,000 people. And so she's going to come and talk to us about grain-free, dilated cardiomyopathy, and the safety of raw food, which I think is going to be wonderful.

So we've got it published, didn't she?

It was published about 6 weeks ago. Yeah, brilliant. So what are we going to talk about next week, boys?

Well, we'll have to bring the Q&A forward so that we've got last week.

Okay, so Q&A, we'll do Q&A next week, and then we'll do Nikki Kamek, uh, with— and that's going to be really fascinating. She's been working with Ryan Yamka for the last 2 years, so he's up to his eyes in it as a result of all this stuff. But she knows exactly how he's thinking about this stuff, and she's very articulate and will give us a great rendition of what the state of play with all of that stuff. So I'm gonna say thank you very much to my— to Maudie, who's at simplyrawfeeding.co.uk. Thanks to all of you guys, and thanks to you too, marvelous. And thanks to our Patreon people for giving us a few quid every month. And if many people do that, we can do lots of stuff. Our study on kibble is coming through. We will be there soon. We've got day jobs as well, but it's all happening. It's all happening, guys, and really, really exciting.

And Peter has the first podcast over the line, guys. I got that this morning. So yeah, so we got that. We'll have the podcast going out. That'll be on general consumption, but we'll put the older shows up on Patreon as well. So he's working away on that, and as soon as he has a little collection of them available, we'll, we'll lash them out there. So he's going to condense them down into a nice 30-minute little podcast, Raw Pet Medic Podcast. That would be cool to have one of these whole new, whole new tribe of people that we can expose ourselves to.

Another cracker. Yeah, as somebody said earlier on, they can't believe the things we talk about before the watershed. Unfortunately, with us talking around the world, it's always before the Yeah, that's it.

And it's always after the watershed somewhere, Brian, which is—

which is—

anyway, guys, I have to toddle on here. I have a little one at the door, standing at the door open. I can, I can sense her. So, um, guys, it was a pleasure tonight. I love that. And Q&A. So guys, put up your questions on Facebook, put them through on Patreon, uh, just text Nick. I'll give you his mobile number later. I'll put it up on Facebook and, uh, join our WhatsApp group. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, so thank