Nick, Brent, and Dr Conor Brady answer listener questions on raw pet nutrition and health. They cover allergen immunotherapy for dogs (30-45% effective), protein rotation in raw diets (rotate 2-5 sources), and why dogs get type 1 diabetes while cats usually develop type 2.
Chapters
And here we are, here we are.
Good evening, good evening. How are you boys? I'm going to bring you in. I think we'll just have to do that.
Good. I'm just like that.
Guys, we're doing a pre-record. This is Wednesday the 19th of June, so if anything momentous happens between the 19th of June and the 26th of June, just to let you know, that's why we're not mentioning it.
Yeah, the lads seemed very calm with that. I mean, that A-bomb went off only 24 hours before.
Guys just switched on and they were just like business as usual.
Professionals.
One, you spoil the magic of television by stating at the very beginning this is a pre-record. Two, that you can't come in with and all hell could break loose next week and the world could end.
Yeah, how much iodine do you need in the case of a nuclear threat? We got iodine tablets.
It's Chernobyl.
Yeah, because of your one in in Wales. Um, what's in the one in Wales? Uh, uh, what's the nuclear power plant closest to us?
Brinkley Point?
Or—
no. Oh my God. Oh, I just had something field.
Oh, Sellafield.
Sellafield.
Yeah, Sellafield.
Something Cumbria. The one in Anglesey is different. That's not Sellafield.
Oh, I don't know. We— well, we, we thought it was Sellafield anyway. The IRA made some threats in the late '80s that they were going to, uh, blow up whatever.
And, uh, before they realized that the flow of the Irish Sea would contaminate all Ireland.
So, so the Irish government sent out iodine tablets, iodide tablets to every house. We still have a pack of them in the house. And so I have to— I'll show you the next RPM.
But surely you take seaweed because it's a lot safer way to take iodine.
Yeah, but if you're in the middle of Ireland, you're going around looking for seaweed, you know, and a bomb just got off. But I just thought how easy it was, how easy it was for the Irish government to send out iodine tablets.
This is our view of life.
It's an FAQ. We'll turn it into an FAQ. What do you do in the case of nuclear explosion? Obviously the '50s taught us you hide under your under your desk.
Yeah, you put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.
Oh yeah, that's a good idea.
Remember that one?
That was one.
Yeah, I remember that one.
That's it.
Do you know Conor's changed into you hide under your desk with your secretary? What's that?
Yeah. Oh, I thought you said nuclear bomb. I thought somebody said a bomb had gone off. Tie all crooked, hair all messed up. Did you know why you have to put on your suit?
Maybe that's what Clinton was trying to achieve. Yes, don't go there.
Don't mention Monica. Somebody said, what was the name of the show that some famous actor, I think Kevin Spacey was doing a bit, and he was, it was some show, one of Shakespeare's famous ones. I don't know which one it is, but it was about, there was an awful lot of adultery in it. And this whole show, whatever show they were talking about, maybe it wasn't Shakespeare, but it was all about adultery. And, uh, and Bill Clinton was in the audience, and it had just happened, the news had just broken, and he had already verified he's coming to the show. And Kevin Spacey was like, oh my God, like, I literally have to go through this whole show saying it's about a man doing the dirt on his missus and getting caught and, and the, and the, all the pain of it and all this sort of stuff to go through the whole show. And he's a part of this, Bill Clinton gonna say he thought he'd leave halfway through. He sat through the whole thing because Clinton loves shows, and then he had to go up and talk to the audience, and they thought, like, he's just been caught red-handed doing this with your pants down, literally. And, uh, and he said, and he said, thanks to this theater company and thanks to these marvelous actors for giving us more than enough to think about. That is a great way of putting it. How classy is that? For giving us more than enough to think about. Um, Anyway, the iodine tablets. Yeah, so I just thought how easy it was for the Irish government to send out iodine tablets when it was some kind of casual threat, but send out vitamin D tablets when there was another type of threat? No, not possible. Absolutely not. So I just thought that sums it up. But anyway, let's not start with the war. We are RPM and we are doing Q&A, which is questions and hopefully some answers tonight. You will find us on patreon.com/rawpetmedics. Price of a cup of tea is most appreciated, even a pint, although pints are going up in price, so Maybe a price of a cup of coffee in Starbucks on Main Street.
That's the same price of a pint these days.
Yeah, probably is actually.
Yeah, make it simple. That's what you should be buying.
Yeah, whatever your drink is, Paul, we'll deeply appreciate it. If you can, great. If you can't, it doesn't matter. We're going to be here anyway. So yes, it's Q&A, guys. Are we ready to tuck in or is there anything?
And we're on podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. You can jump in there. So it's all good. Right. Keep it simple, guys. I've got lots of questions in front of me. Most of them are from Patreon because we love our Patreon people. Thank you, Patreon people. And, um, we're not going to be doing a Patreon today because Bren and I are at the Groundswell, uh, conference. Well, we will be in a week's time, which is super exciting. And we're going to do a show, we're going to maybe interview some people, we're going to try and collect some material, and then we can talk about regen and we can talk about what's, what's happening in that world. That's great.
That should all be ready for you packaged next week as you're watching this.
And Conor, what are you doing next week? You're going to see Tim at the concert on the Monday night. So not so good on the Tuesday. Yeah, there you go.
That's all I actually— The opposite of Groundswell. The opposite of regen. I will be degen.
Degenerative liver.
Go for it, degen.
Go for it. Brilliant.
Okay, so let's, let's go for a few of these. Let's go for a few, uh, questions. Here we go.
Thanks, Karen, for getting these together for us.
Karen, you're an absolute star. The fourth RPMer. Uh, here we go. This one's from Angela J. French, and it's— and she says, I'd love to hear your opinion on specific immunotherapy for allergies in dogs. Brent, do you want to jump into that a little?
Yeah, so we've used those in the past. I mean, God, late '90s, it was a real thing that you, especially for environmentals, because obviously diet you can control, but when it comes to environment, it's really hard unless you're in a Michael Jackson bubble to exclude yourself from everything else that's going on around you. So pollens at certain times of year, moulds that, you know, in the autumn going into winter, house dust mite, you know, through the— especially through the wintertime as we turn our central heating up and start to close the windows, dry clothes on the radiators, all of those things that increase humidity in the house. Those are the key things that we sort of looked at and said, well, we can't stop that exposure, it's always going to happen, therefore are there other ways? And if you ever do an allergy test, and I'm sure there's somebody who's done a video on allergies in dogs amongst us, but when you're doing these allergy tests, there's a couple of options. And many times what we end up with is people getting mistaken with exposure versus true allergy formation. So if you've got IgG, so that's an immunoglobulin which is normally associated with the body fighting viruses, fighting, you know, specific pathogens. That's how the body attacks those and takes them out with certain cells. IgE is the antibody that plugs onto mast cells and releases histamine into the system. So in allergies, in an allergy scenario, so we actually start to look at how, um, the allergy can be converted into a different antibody form. So I have always understood when we give slowly increasing levels of allergen, so these pollens or whatever, you can convert the body from producing excessive amounts of IgE and actually shift it to producing IgG, which is less likely to cause a histamine response. So that's pretty much what those desensitizing vaccines, I was led to believe, um, just going to ask. And so some of those, I feel that Yes, they worked in 30% of cases. They had a risk. So you have a risk of anaphylaxis that if they've got an allergen and you're pumping in that allergen to the allergy, then there's a risk that they'll suddenly swell up and have all of the anaphylactic reactions because of mast cell release of histamine. Or that actually you don't manage to convert those dogs over to producing a less noxious cause of antibody. So, seemed to work in some, didn't seem to work in all. And of course, you then reflect and say, well, actually, when you're looking at producing the antibodies for these— or sorry, the allergens, you're only looking at 30 or 40 allergens. And of course, in those dogs, there's a strong risk that you're missing another set of allergens that aren't being tested for. So it comes back to why I always say, at best they're a guide, at worst they're misleading when you do these allergy tests, purely and simply because you cannot test the millions of allergens that are out there and hope to capture all of them. So how they work may be absolutely true. Do they work in every case? In my experience, no. Could that be because we're missing some of the other allergens that aren't tested for? Yes, quite probably. So great idea. Practically, is it something I use these days?
No, it's not.
Is that a good roundup?
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good roundup. Yeah, the other thing that dermatologists talk about is that you can use them up to about the age of 4 years old, and after that they trail off. 45% is the figure that I've heard, 30, 45, you know, similar. But after 4 years old, there's a pretty sharp decline in the response to these things for some reason. I can't think why, maybe maturation of the immune system, not sure. I will use them if I've got a dog who's really itchy and we get a negative for pollens or indoor allergens. You're absolutely right, Bryn, you can't say that, that you categorically haven't got outdoor or indoor allergens, but it means that you can really focus on the food side of things because you've got to do food sensitivity testing anyway, you know, food trials and what have you. It's just, it's, it's quite a relief if they are absolutely negative. Then we'll say, right, let's really concentrate on the food side of things. The other thing is to, if they're getting itchy during the summer, it's pretty obvious that it's likely to be mainly a pollen thing. If they're getting itchy all year round, but they are still itchy in the winter, it may be that they're indoor allergic in the winter and they're outdoor allergic in the summer, and so you get this, this, this additive effect. The other thing is that the vet may offer you food sensitivity testing. I wouldn't go for that personally because it's not very reliable. If you've had beef for the last week and you take a test, then you may show that there's been some reaction to beef, whereas you don't actually have a sensitivity to beef, for example. So Waste your time. Indoor and outdoor can be a pointer. As Brent says, you wouldn't sell the farm based on those results, but I think it, it, it can be a steer to, to help you as to where you're going. What I do say to people though is that you can get— there's two types of tests. You can do a screen, which is just a positive or a negative, you know, like a pregnancy test. You're either pregnant or you're not. Yeah, blue line or no blue line. That's the one to do first of all. Because if, if, if, if it's a negative on the screen, which is a lot cheaper, then you don't then say, right, which 15 pollens is it not? Okay, so you just do a positive or negative for indoor and outdoor. And if, say, the outdoor becomes positive, is positive, then you say, right, let's broaden that out and see which ones. Oh yeah, there's a, there's a, an oak forest which we always go to in the summer And if that's the only one, it might be that you just avoid the oak forest when they're pollinating, and that might be quite useful, possibly.
Okay, so just do allocate, you know, those pollens are very specific. So you'll have things like hazel in the very early, so late winter, very early spring. You'll have the fruiting trees sort of late spring alongside horse chestnut and oak and things like that. You're then going into the sort of May time is grass pollen through to sort of end of July. You've got then the weeds, all the plantains, and, you know, those sort of things start to really emerge at the end of July through the summer months. And then you're into September is when your leaf molds and your general molds start to come in. So that's a general cycle. As Nick was saying, you can focus a little bit more on what's likely to be causing your dog's itch or your cat's itch depending on that timing. And if that's regular every year, year in, year out, and they are fine through the winter and they have a hotspot a specific time of year— we see this in hay fever sufferers, you know, having an issue— then that's great, you can control that. But I have found so much that actually the more we've worked on supplements and diet and sealing and healing the gut and reducing general inflammation, that trying to target just a specific allergen becomes less of a focus that you have to do, that actually you can achieve so much. And I think, Nick, quite early on you said this, that actually, you know, start to sort the gut out, start to sort out the, the food. And it doesn't matter whether food was part of the allergy or not. If you've sorted the gut from being inflamed, then actually you can quite often overcome the allergies without worrying about what time of year it is and whether you're suppressing it at a certain point, etc. And I think that's a really valued point, and I've found that too. And I go back to that 30%. Look, that's certainly not a paper. That was my personal feeling on efficacy of those vaccines. 45%, I'm sure, is actually where the dermatologists have sat down and done a proper workup of what they feel is accuracy. And the 4-year-old thing, yeah, is another matter.
Yeah, 4 years old. If the dog is over 4 years old, then bear in mind that you're not going to be able to get a hyposensitization vaccination out of it. However, it can be just a pointer. It's just, it's, you know, knowledge is power. And so I think that that's quite useful if you're struggling. This is good.
There was a study there showing that the more inflamed you are coming into summer, the more likely you are to have seasonal allergies. So I do second there what Bren was saying. Like, you know, you get these dogs coming into you with these allergy tests in inverted commas because it's like another true allergy is IgE, as Bren is saying, but there's also different types of sensitivities. And so it's confusing. And then your dog is suddenly reacting to a flea bite and you're saying, hmm, that's pretty prosaic. You know, fleas have been hopping on and off your dog for 10 years and now he's got a problem with a flea bite. So that's not an allergy. You know, you would have had an allergic response most likely before that. And so you're kind of thinking, what is this? And so I often think the same thing. It's like when you start getting really bad sensitivities or you're, uh, and it's coming into summer, like if you've got your really inflamed dogs, so that could be dogs with metabolic disease, diabetes, obesity, and autoimmune disease, dry food is inflammatory. So if you have this really inflamed animal coming into summer, they're more likely to have these environmental allergens. So you see like a positive for dust mites and and a flea bite and whatever, and pollen. They're always on these tests. And yet when we sort out the dog and fix the gut and just decrease inflammation, which to me is like pumping up the force field, and suddenly the body is able to deal with these environmental, it just becomes a normal, like dust mites. You've been living with dust mites all your life. Why are they a problem now? You know, so there's something up. And so when you power the dog back up and, you know, pick all the low-hanging fruit and jack in a few omega-3s, are you feeding crappy treats? Are his teeth clean? All the stuff that can inflame them. Do all that right and suddenly environmental allergens are out the window and you can just handle them with a stinging nettle, green like a garden stinging nettle. It's so effective for seasonal allergies. Great studies for an antihistamine against antihistamines. Stinging nettle is fantastic, very easy to use. You can feed it like spinach. You can just wilt it with some boiling water and it becomes this green plant that you can eat. We all used to make soup out of it and everything. And so that's a great product. So that can handle what remains in your itchy dogs. But yeah, the seasonal allergies thing, I often think that's a real terrain thing. There's something up that although I'm no doubt some people can have issues and stuff, I used to have hay fever but I don't anymore. So how was that analogy? Where did the allergy go? Is an allergy not a genetic hiccup? I mean, how do I not have hay fever anymore? You know, it's strange. So I don't know.
I was going to say maybe you've changed the amount of processed food you eat, but I know.
Oh, you know, I am living relatively healthy now, but I mean, I was I was surely more healthy in my teens, you know, although I was probably desperately unhealthy in my teens, I don't know, but it was worse in my teens. I remember I couldn't play golf, I couldn't do anything, I just, I, it would stop me playing football, you know. So now, never, never happened to me. If I sneeze during the summer, I'd remember 20 years ago or 30 years ago, um, you know, been on the pitch. Yeah, anyway, yeah, it's a tricky one, but low-hanging fruit.
Yeah, but I think the take-home message is general inflammatory— GIS, general inflammatory syndrome. Do everything you can to reduce inflammation in the gut, in the skin, in, in, you know, all the tissues of the body. And, and you might find that the, the sensitivity just disappears. I will say that itchy dogs can be very tricky.
What a great question to start with.
Um, I thought we were going to do that in about 60 seconds, but That's not usually the case, gentlemen. Yes. Um, okay, here's— now this is an absolute cracker. This is, this is from, uh, uh, one of our followers called Sharon, and I'm going to spell her second name because I don't want to murder it. K-R-A-J-N-C. And I'm assuming that Karen hasn't made a, a, a a typo because she's pretty astute. She's pretty on it with this stuff. K-R-A-J-N-C. How would you say that?
I'm going to say kajink. That just sounds the worst, doesn't it?
Okay, I'm going to go for something like crank. Crank. Brand, where would you go?
No, no, I see I would have made the rookie error as Conor has and tried to pronounce everything. And I'm sure there's something that should be silent.
There you go, Sharon, thank you for your support.
And let's just say Sharon.
Yeah, be interesting to see where that name comes from. I would be guessing perhaps Poland or around there. There's some great names up in that part of the world. Okay, here's the question: how often to rotate proteins... Different sources advocate different advice. Now, once again, that sounds like a really simple question, but I'm sure we can do 15 or 50 minutes from there on.
Go for it, Conor. See you next year.
Yeah, yeah, I'm going. I'm just going to go down and get a glass of water.
There's a lady out there, maybe we should have her on the show or not, I'm not quite sure, but she's big into mono, single protein feeding. She's got a name for her group and people will know, they're shouting it. Oh sure, it's not live. But yeah, so she's very big on single proteins and that's very important for her and her followers. And I'm sure that that's fantastic. I'm not in that camp at all. I think, you know, the only time I would think about single proteins, like actual single protein, I know that's not exactly the question, but it's when dogs are gut sick and I don't really know what's causing it. Do I think this dog has sensitivities? How are you on turkey? How are you on lamb? Tell me you're okay on that. So you make your way through it. That's a different question. You're saying how often do I rotate proteins to—
yeah, protein rotation.
Yeah, I would just— I am wary that Dudley loves chicken and beef, which is great because that's just the easiest thing to feed. It's his favorite thing. You give him a bit of pork and his poo goes black again, a bit of venison, his poo goes a bit dodgy. And so, but I do, I make sure to vary it up a little bit. I stick in some sardines and I stick in a bit of this and the duck neck here and I mix, I do, I do think that way, but I don't overly stress too much about it. I think once there's 2 or 3 meat proteins going in there and a few organs, I think you're doing pretty good. And if it's outdoor-fed meat, I think, you know, I don't stress too much. But there's such a selection now. If you go to, I'm not going to name the companies, but you go to some of those companies in the UK, they've got 12, 15 different animals on there. I couldn't name 5 or 6, you know, and there's goat and camel and everything. So I think it's probably getting a bit mad once you go into bald eagle and all sorts of stuff. It's like, you don't— not sure how much that is needed by the dog, but I think if you're hitting the top 4 or 5, that's really environmentally sound. Yeah, yeah, it's awful. But, uh, so yeah, that's where I am. I don't overthink it, but I do get 4 or 5 meats in there because I'm aware of it. But, uh, yeah, you know, uh, what about you guys?
Okay, so my, my take on this is, is that, uh, what, what I'll say what I say and then I'll say what I do. Okay, they're two different things. Okay, so the way I look at it is that in nature, the dog is going to be presented with single protein over a period. Yeah, in spring it's going to be bunnies. In winter, it's maybe going to be deer because the canine can work better on snow than a ruminant who's whose legs go right the way through. Have you seen the Yellowstone Park? The wolves chasing after the, you know, elk and things like that? Yeah, they've got big fluffy, big pads like this, and so they can skid across the top of the iced snow, whereas the elk and things go up to their elbows in it, and therefore the eating is arguably better in winter for the Stone Park wolves. But what I'm saying is that nature generally will offer a certain range of proteins, and not very many probably, in one season, then she will change it in the next, and she'll change it in the next, and in the winter, you know, you're either going to be fairly starving or there's going to be, you know, A and other. And therefore my thinking was to try and emulate that. Now, I'm not saying feed rabbit for 3 months during the spring and then feed a goat or sheep or lamb during 3 months. That's— I think that's too long, and apart from anything else, dog's going to get bored. But what I'm thinking is to kind of move slightly in that direction would be a week of lamb, a week of chicken, a week of duck, a week of beef, or whatever. I do like single proteins if I can. I'm not religious about it, and I'm not sure there's any good science to say one is better than the other. What I do not like is the Instagram 9 different types of protein. You've got, you've got a duck head, a quail egg, you've got some tripe, you've got some I don't know, a pig's foot all in the same bowl.
Quail's egg is lightly boiled. Yeah, right, buddy.
So it's, I mean, if that's what you want to do, great. And the book that we did yesterday, where is it? I know it's gone. It's kind of like that. It's if you really want to go to town, it's beautiful. Absolutely go for it. Absolutely go for it. There's nothing really inherently wrong. But if you ask me what the ideal for me, theoretically, it's in blocks. Of single proteins.
Look at that. Oh, yeah, someone said to me afterwards that they're holding up a picture of my book there, Brian Moss, but the pieces are all in squares and there's edges, and somebody said, is that food frozen? Oh yeah, I never would have used it if I had known all the food was frozen. It's taken in Australia. Anyway, thanks.
Okay, so there you go, that's just I could talk to you for an hour on the subject, but in a nutshell, so that's what I advise people to do. Yeah, try and do it in blocks, blocks, blocks, time blocks. Yeah, you know, a block of time. What we actually do, and I don't do most of the feeding, Ellie's downstairs feeding the dogs now, she will just reach in the freezer, pull out the first thing. That's it in reality. And we do use, you know, duck and tripe pep and beef, for example, you know, and I think that's okay. If I had a dog who was not great, I would be, you know, doing food trials, and then, you know, I'd be selecting the proteins and what have you. But, you know, most healthy dogs are pretty Catholic in their choice of foods. Yeah, they can have a bit of this and a bit of that, a bit of whatever. Bren, what do you think?
There's a lot of religious talk came into that. Really?
I just said Catholic, meaning broad broad church, you know, Catholic broad church.
So from a point of Christianity, maybe, but anyway, from a point of view of—
I will look it up.
What I do, if, and as Conor said, if they're gut sick and I'm trying to do something just to settle them and I don't want too much variation, I'll try and choose a light meat. I think it's really interesting. Some of the stuff that's coming in food energetics and, you know, people talking about, I'll do this protein for that long and then I'll change over to this. And actually, as soon as they do that, they're choosing different foods that, you know, some are very heating to the body and some are very cooling to the body. And, you know, depending on what illness they've got, they actually can be profoundly affected by that change, more so than you would otherwise imagine. Um, and I actually do say, yeah, I don't like a lot of foods that start to grab— well, I can only get organs from beef here, and if they hide that in the food, I agree, of course that's a little bit upsetting because actually there's people trying their hardest to avoid certain proteins and then surreptitiously it's put into the food without you really seeing it unless you look at the fine print. And I think that's where you know, working really hard to try and avoid that, you know, for people. Um, does it mean that I would religiously say they need— religion, um, you know, fanatically say that they need to just have one protein in the dish? Can I tell you, I have seen my dog working out on the field eating rats, mice, rabbit, okay? Um, you know, and quite happily choosing between different proteins on the same day and then still having a bit of fresh goat. So I don't think that, you know, it's necessarily that they have to have— I think seasonality is great, you know, especially if you're in touch with the farm and you're getting stuff seasonally, because there will be some variance in the food quality. It doesn't matter that it doesn't have to be lamb, then beef, then duck or anything like that, but seasonally could just be when those animals are culled, there's going to be a slight different nuance in the nutrients within them. So I think of course being seasonal to some degree with the foods, being mindful of what your dog can tolerate and eat and enjoys as well, giving them some choice is really good. Not necessarily every day, but just day to day, just picking up what they prefer.
Watching what he goes for first. You put down 2 or 3 meats and what meat does he go for first every time? It tells you all you need to know. Pork is the last thing Dudley will eat. He'll eat it because he's a pig, but like, he just— he will leave it till last and then choke it down, you know, like he's trying to swallow a marble or something. Um, it's interesting, rabbit is, um, uh, I'm gonna say— I was gonna say deficient in taurine. Rabbit and lamb are the lowest taurine meats that we have, and there is instances of, um, when there's DCM, dilated cardiomyopathy, cases from dry food, it's usually lamb-based dry food because there's not a lot of taurine in it, and so you have to supplement those dry foods more with more taurine.
So now, yeah, you're getting into all sorts of areas of is taurine really an essential amino acid for dogs?
I think we should do a show, boys. I think we should do a whole show on taurine. I think we can justify that.
Yeah, so before we go into that, I think, you know, there are so many other factors within the other things that are added alongside the lamb that then affects, you know, uptake and metabolism.
Lamb wouldn't jump off the page if lamb wasn't one of the issues. Why would, when you're surveying, when these, I'll dig up the few studies that we have, but like when they're surveying these dogs, lamb flavor dry food coming up and rabbit was the other one. So they warned those two meats, like for example, those cats when they want to, the only study they had showing raw dog food was bad. For cats or dogs was when they kept those cats on those rabbits. Now they were skinned and mulched up and that kind of thing, okay, but those cats came down with DCM, and so that's a lack of taurine, and they were eating more than enough meat. So it's not like—
absolutely got no shadow of a doubt they have an issue if there's not enough taurine in the meat.
But isn't that interesting that a rabbit—
as soon as we talk to dogs, you know, but also that was drained meat.
Drained, exactly.
Yeah, you have taurine in the muscle, so it's like, yeah, exactly.
So if it's drained, if it's minced and then drained and it's soluble and then the water, the liquor's not fed back in.
Yeah, it's not helping, I'm sure, but I still would have thought, bloody hell. So I was quite surprised about that. And lamb was the other one.
Don't get me wrong, there's loads of studies in humans about, you know, for the Native Indians in America that, you know, if they were left on rabbit only you know, through the latter part of winter because that's all they could get hold of, they didn't survive as well. There's a great book that we read probably 2, 3 years ago where we were looking at the various, you know, diets that tribes were being fed, you know, naturally, and how did they do on those various meats. And I think it's interesting to see that, yes, of course, you know, they tend to lose weight a lot more if they're just fed rabbit, but then they're not necessarily eating the skins. The fiber content that they get from that, all the cartilage and everything else, that when they take your rabbit, they're eating the whole thing. They get the gut as well, you know, not just minced up muscle meat that's then drained. So frozen, then defrosted and drained. Yeah, you know, it is— it makes a difference. It massively makes a difference for sure.
Yeah, I was just surprised in relation to the taurine bit because a lot of, a lot of, you know, you find something that works in these sick dogs and then they stay on that one meat. And I'm like, if I hear they've been on lamb for a while, I often— my radar goes up and I go, okay, you know, we need to try something else. You can't stay on one thing too long, you know. Of course.
Well, that then comes back to, look, if you stick with one thing for too long, you're asking for it. Actually, you've not got variety.
Yeah.
You know, one of that food diversity things that we talked about, well, that's actually the best way to compensate and overcome the risk of deficiencies. Frequencies. So absolutely, you know, do I feel it needs to rotate? If you are on just one thing, yes, I would say definitely it should. Is it something that sometimes you have to give them up to 12 weeks on a food if they're gut sick or they've got other disease? Then yes, you may. You know, if you're truly trying to find an allergy, you can go that long and you'll get away with it. but is it ideal? Probably not. And I would just say, yeah, look, would I give multiple proteins? Yes, I do. Okay, am I hung up on that, you know, theory that you have to give single proteins? No, I'm not. I think there are people out there that like to do it and feel that it's giving their dog sort of a clear-out process for their gut flora or whatever, you know, great. Maybe but don't get hung up on it. Yeah, you know, guys, make it simple for yourself. Do not get hung up on stuff.
However, if you've got a squitty or an itchy dog, you do want to go single protein.
What's causing this?
For a while, you don't want to go multiple proteins because if they're simple, you don't know which of the 3 proteins it is.
Yeah, you're in a dark room and lots of people are pointing.
15 minutes, we've got away with 15.
Yeah, right. More importantly, I'm just going to educate you two a little. Catholic means broad or wide-ranging in tastes, interests, or the like, having sympathies with all, broad-minded, liberal.
Oh, look at that.
That's not right. That's not the Catholic that Dr. Conor recognizes.
It's the adjective, not the church.
Oh, okay. There's an adjective. Okay, fair enough.
And I've put, guys, I've put Tory train in for 23rd of July.
Very good.
Just to be efficient.
DCM. Okay, conversation juicy.
Right, do you want another one? Go on, go on. Right, let me just— I'm gonna— right, let me have a look. I'll go to the bottom of the list because we will have worked from the top previously. Um, This is an absolute cracker. How long have we got?
As long as you want.
10 minutes.
10 minutes or so. Okay, we might be able to do this into— right. And I don't— I wouldn't be able to give you an A+ answer for this in an exam, but I'd be able to get— have a stab. So I'd be really interested to hear what you guys say. So this is from Christine K. Larson. Larson with an E. And she says, why is it that dogs mostly develop type 1 diabetes and cats diabetes type 2? And how is it related to carbs and insulin resistance? Okay, so first part of the question, we may not even get on to the second part of the question, but the first part, dogs type 1 mainly, cats type 2 mainly.
Why?
Please start, Ben.
Okay, so I would go down the route of how the— is it insulin resistance building, which is type 2, versus the immune reaction, an attack on the islets of Langerhans, which is effectively destroying the body's ability to produce insulin? So in the latter case, so the type 1, which we see in dogs, we see so much more immune-mediated disease because of what we're feeding, crap environment, what we're— what we've got as far as neutering, um, you know, so many crap environments, the VOCs and everything else that they're in, that actually I believe that the propensity is to type 1. But I would debate, is that the only type of diabetes that we see? Because actually there is a Type 3 diabetes being talked about now, and I think that comes back to, you know, metabolic syndrome. And I do think that we're seeing some critically obese dogs that are falling into those traps, if you like, as far as—
diabetes.
Yeah, diabetes indeed. So I think that actually it is probably more thought of But I have actually experienced being able to convert dogs that are diabetic into not requiring the insulin by effectively helping them nutritionally, using remedies, using, you know, exocrine pancreas, you know, orally as well, getting their digestion reducing inflammation, getting their obesity down, and actually that then requirement for insulin changes, which should be a type 2 diabetes. Okay, maybe what I've heard about with this type 3, uh, thing that was mentioned in an article, and I'm not sure they've scientifically classified that, but they were just sort of like going down the route of a conversation that maybe we need to be thinking, um, outside of of just this thought, destroying the islets of Langerhans means that, you know, with autoimmunity means that you've got to replace the insulin and they'll never heal ever. Okay. Versus type 2, that metabolically, if you can convert those cats back to processing the insulin and becoming sensitized to insulin again, that actually that's why they only temporarily need support, you know, and if you get them dietary sorted out and everything else, then they'll resolve. Is that an okay answer?
Yeah, yeah, that's good.
Okay, so my take on that is much more simplistic, but it's the same, but it's just kind of a slice of what Brenda's just shared with us. And it would be that— and obviously got a few questions— but my take is that dogs, because of the environment that we have them on, over-vaccination and overuse of pharmaceuticals and all these things, terrible food and what have you, they, they, they, as Brent says, a greater propensity to autoimmune disease. Okay, so there's the question is why cat? Why, why dogs? Because cats have exactly the same terrible environment in many cases. Okay, so that's just a question. But the story goes that they take out their own pancreas and then the pancreas just stops producing insulin. This is like young persons diabetes used to be type 1 diabetes because it hit you first in life, and type 2 used to be what happened in older life because of obesity, metabolic disease, and what have you. Okay, so dogs do the type 1 where your pancreas just gives up the ghost. Cats do the type 2, which is they're pumping out insulin and the tissues become more and more resistant to that insulin, so they have to pump out even more. And ironically, the treatment is to give them even more more insulin. So if you've got type 1, you give insulin to make up for a deficit. That's pretty logical. Okay, but if you can get that general inflammatory syndrome down, maybe you can allow that pancreas to poke its head above the parapet and go, hello, I think I can do a bit of work now. But with type 2, the more insulin you give, the more insulin you're going to have to give. And Tom Dr. Farrington said to me, I have got no cats in my practice who have got diabetes because all we do is put them on a raw food diet. Yeah, kill the carbohydrates completely. And we get them to lose weight. And they will cure, they all self-cure. Okay, because that resistance, that's, that's, that's how you engender resistance is by having loads of carbs and sugary material going in, loads of insulin, and they the— it's like shouting at a dog. If you shouted at a dog enough, they, they begin to ignore you. Yeah, and your tissues are exactly the same. So there you go. But the question still remains, we treat cats and dogs pretty similarly, and yet dogs will take out their own pancreas and rarely get the type 2, and cats will get the type 2, the kind of the obesity type pancreas diabetes and not take out their own pancreas. And that's still physiologically a bit of a mystery to me.
Yeah, there's a cat specialist out there, Laurie Wise. She's not pro-raw, very qualified vet here with her special interest is diabetes in cats. And the dietary advice that we are giving here, which is, you know, reduce the carbohydrate and the salt. All the studies support that, by the way. There's a number of studies in cats and dogs showing that you drop the carbohydrate. Yeah, it's not rocket science. Higher protein diets maximize metabolic rate, improve satiety, improve lean muscle mass, that kind of stuff in diabetic cats, the better outcomes. And Laurie Wise does a lot of these studies. I've got this quote from this fabulous book, and in 2012 she said in a piece for Veterinary News magazine, and she's the diabetes in cats queen. And she says, we now know that low carbohydrate diets are more advantageous for diabetic cats, and the weight control diets happen to be high in carbohydrates. Okay, fair enough. She was talking about weight control diets. And yet Wise concludes that piece with, the jury is out. I don't think we have strong enough evidence yet to say that all cats need to be on low carbohydrate diets. It's like—
when was that written?
2012.
They'll still be saying the same thing, I bet.
I'd already CC'd a lot of studies before she made that point. I'd already shared the studies in the 2000s to show here's all the studies on higher protein diets in cats and dogs and diabetes and stuff. So I'd already shared that, and then here's her piece in 2012. You're the diabetes cat woman, you know. And how could you possibly justify keeping a cat, an obligate carnivore, on higher carbohydrate when your own specialty is showing that reducing the carbohydrates, they do better from diabetes. Might it be true that they do better from other diseases like cancer and pancreatitis and everything else that's fueled by carbohydrates? You know, it's crazy that, that one. So yeah, I'm surprised actually that diabetes 1 is not, I can't say so easily controlled, is it can be controlled with diet in dogs. Is that the same in humans? Diabetes 2 seems to be the really easy I wouldn't say it's easy.
Look, it's not easy, and you've got to get them through quite often a ketoacidotic crisis first. So you've got to balance them, you've got to help them with insulin, you know, many cases. And the same with type 2, in very many cases you're having to initially stabilize these animals with the help of insulin. Yeah, but it's just a longer phase. Can you reverse some of that damage? Can you get them over? It's just like, you know, when we're talking about the hypothyroid issues in dogs, you know, can you reduce reduce some of that immune autoimmune reaction. At some points, yes, you give— you need to give them support, but there will be a point that if you can dampen the reaction down enough— and type 3 diabetes very much is, look, when you've got chronic pancreatitis and an inflammatory process going on in the pancreas, you've got the consequences of that being that they can't control their insulin and the inflammation and all of the other stuff that then consequence of that, of high blood pressures and everything else that we'd see in diabetes occurs. So, you know, they're very rarely talked about, but it is a disease that we can see in the—
hypothyroid thing is interesting. I saw two big studies from Iran which found that, uh, really significant, um, uh, findings that, that, uh, humans with hypothyroidism had higher heavy metal contents in their thyroid. Thyroid, and they believe that it's the accumulation of heavy metals in the thyroid that was fueling hypothyroidism in these people. And so to put them on heavy metal binders, and, uh, I'll share the two studies. I thought, oh, do you know what, it wasn't, it wasn't Neil Nathan that said it, it was somebody else, one of these dudes that goes on about toxic and detoxing, had just mentioned it. So I thought, there's no way that's the case. And although I didn't think, I just wanted to find it, quick Google Scholar, last two years, two big studies.
Strange that it's coming out of Iran. And there's probably loads of uranium.
Yes. Yeah.
Never mind heavy metals. You've got radioactive destruction.
This is a, this is a thing. We're back in the UK. There you go.
But the other, the other part to, to that is selenium that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. You know, literally, you know, so many people miss giving the selenium because actually the modification to the immune system you actually can reduce the amount of thyroid hormone replacement and iodine that you need to put in the diets and still get a much better output of thyroid hormone if you can just modulate that autoimmune reaction.
Yeah, I saw— I mentioned nutritional yeast last time because it's, it's the one of the only food sources they, they soak the yeast. It's a Saccharomyces, it's a soil-based probiotic. They soak it in a selenium, shitty selenium solution and then it turns it into great selenium, selenium methionine, which is the one you want. And a couple of people I saw just in a couple of, you know, some of the comments and they're saying, but yeast can fuel allergies in dogs. 200 people said that. And I'm like, but this, first of all, the yeast is killed. So it's like it's a dead food source. And I'm thinking, I'm surprised at that. Yeast doesn't fuel yeast. I don't think it works that way.
It's usually a specific yeast and it's usually Malassezia. Bacteria that they've become sensitized to, right, that they can become allergic to. So, and you've then got the other species within the gut, so sometimes the candidiasis that can fuel leaky gut and therefore further allergy. And I think that so much gets mixed up between sensitivity to and true allergy, you know, going back to the first thing we were talking about. And actually that because of those things getting mixed up and then people assume that one yeast is the same as the other. Well, that's as different as, you know, a lamb is from a calf. You know, they're not going to be in the same scenario. You've got to be quite specific if you've truly got an allergy.
I've never— I have never bumped into— it just hasn't been on my radar that yeast or— because a lot of the pet foods are using different types of nutritional yeast and it's mentioned in things now and again.
You can test for Malassezia Malassezia as an allergen. Yeah, um, within the—
just wasn't on my radar.
You can desensitize them too, um, in some cases, but it is okay. More about controlling the Malassezia excess and the barrier in the skin that's more important.
Yeah, buddy.
Great. Okay, gents, I'm gonna, I'm gonna draw a close there because the day is beautiful out there. I'm in here, I've got a blind is closed and we've got some lamb chops. I'm going to put them on the barbecue and we're going to just watch the sun go down.
Lovely lamb. Wonderful.
Wonderful.
How about that?
Guys, great. What another great Q&A.
That was lovely.
That was really lovely. Look forward to—
Enjoy your groundswell. Are you both staying in the same tent?
No, I'm going to be sitting watching Nick next Tuesday attempt to blow up his tent.
Are you pulling up in some sort of tent on wheels, Brent?
He's got a caravan. Oh no, is it a caravan?
Yeah, I think I'm going to turn up in the caravan.
I just, you know, mix in a tent.
Oh, that's hilarious. Oh, that would be very enjoyable. You could just sit there from your toilet, in your own toilet, in your caravan with the door open just looking out. I'm going to the toilet.
I'll take plenty of photos for you, Conor, so that you can laugh along with us. No, it's going to be great. Charlie's coming. And, uh, Fiona's coming, and, um, lots of, lots of, lots of the gang coming along. So it should be great. Okay guys, I really enjoyed that. We, we, we got through 3 questions in 50 minutes.
We talked about nuclear science and we talked about and Catholicism.
Yeah, tonight two Protestants talk about Catholicism.
Okay, everyone take care, guys.
Thank you very much. All the very best. We'll see you next week.
Bye-bye.
Cheers.
All right, chaps, I will toddle on.
