In this RawPetMedics Tuesday Live episode, hosts Bren and Nick welcome Dr. Conor Brady and guest Matt Muir, an integrative veterinarian and co‑founder of Lyca Pet Food. The conversation begins with personal updates and a brief mention of Dr. Brady’s recent investigation into the "serotonin diet" concept. Matt then shares his background, describing his work in an integrative practice and how whole‑food nutrition has altered disease patterns he observes, noting markedly lower incidences of pancreatitis, diabetes, GDV, obesity, and certain autoimmune conditions in dogs fed whole‑food diets. He explains the founding of Lyca, a direct‑to‑consumer, lightly‑cooked, whole‑food pet food company, and outlines its market positioning in Australia’s saturated pet‑food landscape. Detailed discussion follows on Lyca’s formulation philosophy: low‑glycemic load, single‑protein recipes, high protein, low carbohydrate, grain‑free (with limited quinoa), varied fat levels, 4‑6 % fiber, omega‑6:3 < 3.8:1, and substantial nutrient overages (e.g., 3‑13× DHA/EPA, 3‑7× vitamin D/E, 4× minerals). The panel debates raw versus cooked diets, highlighting energy availability, Maillard reactions, and the practical need for lightly cooked products to gain veterinary acceptance. Matt explains the use of human‑grade chelated minerals and naturally derived vitamins to improve bioavailability, contrasting them with standard oxides/sulfates. He addresses common concerns about iodine (5× AFGO minimum) and vitamin D supplementation, describing clinical judgment, functional testing (CRP, magnesium, vitamin D status), and high‑dose protocols for cancer patients using microalgae‑derived D3/K2. The conversation also touches on microbiome testing, differences observed between dry‑fed and raw‑fed dogs, and the role of functional diagnostics in their practice. The episode closes with a plug for the RawPetMedics Patreon and a teaser for a short “Bit on the Side” segment on biome analysis.
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Yeah, well, we're just waiting for a little bit of a delay to, um, Southern Ireland, uh, at this point in time, uh, so he will be joining us very shortly, um, so we're not gonna say too much about him, um, but, uh, so should we just do a little quick intro, Nick? I think, I think you can come on and the guys have seen the title.
Shall we? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good evening, everybody. Hello. Rachel Mack is first in at 19:02.
Shall we see? Should we just Let's see, let's see whether he's actually got the sound sorted. Yeah, well, hopefully you can hear us.
Sorry about that. Here I am.
Great stuff, great stuff. Jane Durston was second, and the bronze medal goes to Karen Reid. Very good, very good.
Recap of the week, I think. How have you guys been for two weeks? I've missed you. I've been away.
And we didn't—
we turned on last week and we were saying, where's Bren? And we didn't know. Did you go somewhere nice, Brad?
I had a, um, Dog Edition live, and then I had some family stuff to sort out for the bank holiday. So I was actually down in London with my two wonderful nieces, having a wonderful time in London. Went to Buckingham Palace, you know, all that, took them around. So they sort of like, um, had a wonderful time. Don't get to see them that often. And yeah, so I was sort of stuck on a train while you guys were having fun.
So, well, we pre-recorded it on the bank holiday, remember, on the Monday. Is that when you were on the train? Okay, I'll tell you what, pre-record is quite good. It's slightly less pressure and it just felt quite easy to do, didn't it? And we were gabbing on for hours.
Yeah, it was nice.
It was nice.
You do miss that. You miss the crack down the side because you get good ideas. Yeah, you can pass them off as your own ideas. And I like that.
Talking of which, I love your post. I love the feedback you got on your post about the serotonin diet.
Oh yeah, that was crazy, didn't it? That's what I've been doing for the whole afternoon. I've been looking into that. Do you know what somebody did? Very kind of them. I post this serotonin diet. I'll post about it soon whenever I get my head together around it. It's the timing of feeding carbohydrates or protein or low protein diets and then some carbohydrates. Bit confusing how much truth there is to it. We're not quite sure, but I just put it out there and I said, hey guys, I can see behaviorists are still very much back in this diet, this very low protein diet. And so I just asked, I said, can you send me some info? I'm stuck. I do this every year, but I never thought to actually say send me your favorite papers or pieces. And so 2 or 3 people sent some great pieces, but one guy had done a huge literature review since 1970 on the whole topic. I think he might be doing his master's on it. And he goes, look, you can, you can make sense of this if you like. And he just dumped me in reviews of each little study. And I was like, oh, fabulous. So I've been playing with that all day and trying to get my head around it. But yeah, wasn't it great the way people can kind of chime in and say, well, check out this paper, look what this person said. And it's like, oh, so yeah, lots of hot leads to that. So I'm looking forward to getting to the bottom of it.
Nick, what have you been up to? What was your last weekend? Were you out? You were at some camping thing before I went away. And then What have you been doing?
No, you've been working hard last weekend. We were, uh, yeah, nothing, nothing much. I'll tell you what we did do on Sunday. There was, uh, the, the village had the, um, the harvest festival. Oh, and before that they had the harvest lunch. So it's really nice because the whole, whole village, there's only 70 people in the whole village, and, uh all those who can come sit down. Everybody brings a meal and we all sit down together and it's really nice. And it's so English. Yeah, it's just, yeah, lovely in the churchyard. Lovely. And so on Sunday we had a really great time there. And since then I've been cooking because I've been working outside. I've got a gazebo outside and I've even if it's raining, I'll be working outside as long as it's not rain coming in like this. And it's the fresh air when you're outside, it really is fantastic. However, this week I've been melting even outside, so it's quite nice to be in here. I've got a fan on. I hope Pete doesn't kill me.
I think on that note, so firstly, before we go into our star guest this evening, I've just got to remind Conor because he's coming at the last moment, Did he press record? And take the gum out your mouth.
Just remember the gum. Sorry, I am recording. I got myself a little Russian hat for the microphone. It's on the way, but there's nothing on it today. Anyway, these are our things.
Well, yeah, don't worry, we've got an Antipodean friend coming on, so we're going to introduce Matt. So hi, Matt, how you doing?
Matt.
Hey everyone, how you doing?
How are you?
Initially I thought that he was a star performer getting up at 5 AM Australian time to join us. And then Nick reminds me, no, he's working remotely. Where are you, Matt? Come on.
He's in Barcelona.
He's in Barcelona and he still can't work out the time difference.
Exactly. I'm managing to work from remotely to Australia and sorting out those time zones with meetings in the US and Australia, but I can't do the 1-hour time zone thing. It's too complicated.
I can't do it either. I mean, there's a 1-hour time zone, if you can believe it. This is just the first year. Can you believe in '43, this is the first time this has happened to me, that Ireland is at a different— is not on GMT, which is Greenwich Mean Time. We're on BST, which is British Summer Time or something. And there's an hour difference. So I've been missing— just starting this year, everyone's sending me the GMT time to switch on to some group live or Zoom, and I'm constantly an hour late and people going mad. I still can't get it right in my head. So I don't know. So I sympathize greatly with you, Matt.
Yeah, I listened to your podcast about the wrap-up from Barcelona. I was so inspired that I just decided to come and work from here.
There you go. Yeah, that was a good one. That was a parasite.
Amazing. Matt, you must come along if we do Barcelona again, which I think is pretty likely within the next few years. You must come along, my friend.
Finland. What about Finland on the 16th? Matthew, you could come to that. Oh, you're coming?
I'm coming, I'm coming to Dog Risk.
Oh, good, good, that'd be good.
Yeah, I love Dog Risk. I think that they're just the most amazing research group. So yeah, super awesome that that aligns so I could come to that because that's really to me the north star of nutrition.
Yeah, what would we do without those guys? Matt, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself? Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do?
Sure, sure.
So I'm from Australia. I grew up in country New South Wales in Australia. I wanted to be a vet when I was a little kid. So spoiler alert, I am a vet. I am a practicing integrative vet. So I work in Sydney at an integrative practice that's 20 years old called All Natural Vet Care. I'm the clinical director of that practice. And also I've co-founded a pet food company 6 years ago. Called Lyca Pet Food in Australia, so a whole food pet food company. So I split my time generally between being in clinic, in practice, and then doing predominantly product development and all things chief veterinarian at Lyca. And I'm currently working remotely because I had a baby earlier in the year.
Oh, congrats.
Very good.
I presume your partner had a baby earlier in the year. I love the way that the men of the family always say, I had a baby, and it's just I stood there and had my hand squeezed.
Yeah.
And so the whole family are over in Barcelona now and settling in. So yeah, the first year is— the first few months are great fun until, until baby starts moving around. It's quite easy and you wonder what all the fuss is about. And then they start trying to stick their fingers in sockets and kill themselves every few seconds. But good, good on you, Matt. Congratulations.
Thanks, guys.
Yeah.
So, so, Matt, tell us about LICAP. I realized you've got a launch soon and there's some things that you can't talk about, but just tell us what you can about Lyca. What was the concept? What do you do? How are things at the moment with Lyca? And why the name? Is that to do with the first dog in space?
Vaguely. It is vaguely. Ah, okay. Which today I actually believe is the anniversary of Lyca being sent into space horrendously to her death. So Uh, yeah, so I think rewinding back for me, um, I've been advocating for natural feeding my whole career, um, and I was quite fortunate to grow up in the country, and, um, certainly raw meaty bones was, uh, common in, in my household. And, uh, my dog and all of the dogs of the friends and family around us, uh, didn't really eat, um, veterinary-recommended kibble. And so by the time I got to university and was being taught— taught's a very light term— taught canine nutrition, I was already sort of questioning that. That didn't kind of make sense based on my own observations, that that was the, the best approach. So then getting into practice, I think what really happened for me is I was fortunate enough to work across countries in metropolitan areas, regional areas, and seeing a big spectrum of disease, including a lot of emergency medicine. I worked in big emergency centers in London as well as regional Australia, where I was a junior vet seeing a lot of drama, a lot of emergency medicine. The other thing to point out for me is that when I was at university, I did a year-long field research project in the role of nutrition on the microbiome and particularly the fecal metabolome, which it wasn't really metabolomics back then, but more about what's now termed postbiotics. So, and actually did a lot of production animal medicine, so looking at farm animals. So I was really going into practice with a large animal mindset of, okay, what's happened? Like, something's happened where we're reacting to that. And so the first question you'd ask in large animal medicine is, what have they been eating and what's gone wrong with the nutrition? And that was obviously not what's, what's been commonplace in companion animal medicine to ask like, what's gone wrong? What are they eating? And so when I started doing more companion animal medicine, I sort of took that across. I also took across my farm animal medicine about trying to get upstream with the health and not be reactive and doing herd health consulting and trying to identify future disease risks including and especially subclinical disease, which is what I did my honours dissertation in and what I was planning to do a PhD in. Now, subclinical disease for those at home is really something that's critically important because it's before you see any overt signs of illness. And I think that it's important for everyone to be aware that diseases can be happening under the surface. So when I was continuing to be in practice, I kind of got sick of being called into work and having to deal with high stress situations for diseases that I thought at this stage were very much linked to a problem with the nutrition, including things like pancreatitis, acute hemorrhagic diarrhea syndrome, those kind of disease processes, and not from, and in my opinion, not from the usual nutrients that the conventional practice would say, the conventional community would say cause those problems. So I'm thinking pancreatitis from refined carbohydrates and thinking acute hemorrhagic diarrhea syndrome from having a shot microbiome and dysbiosis, not from eating raw food, for example. So over time, I just kind of merged, sort of moved more towards preventative medicine, away from reactive medicine. And then that led me to 8 years ago, I took on a role and mentorship from Dr. Barbara Fougère, who is an Australian vet who kind of wrote the Western herbal medicine textbook and had founded an integrative practice. I know Nick knows Barbara. And, and so getting into that environment from working in sort of starting more in emergency conventional medicine, conventional medicine, but advocating whole food in both the UK and then in Australia, the UK, and then back to Australia, and then moving more into integrative medicine and pushing further into integrative medicine to be like very upstream and preventative with the medicine. And what that's led me to do over the last, say, let's say 5 years, is be able to reflect back on the population dynamics of the animals that I see, and particularly in integrative practice, you see, I get like both secondary and tertiary referrals. So animals that have been referred to me by a GP or self-referred because they have a chronic disease that's refractory to treatment, it's just not, not getting better, there's frustration or a terminal, terrible prognosis, or tertiary referrals. So I often get referrals from oncologists, for example. A lot of— I do a lot of cancer care. And so what What I found was in our clinic, which both serves as a primary care practice for patients who come for wellness and preventative care and lifelong care and who are like 99.9% on whole food nutrition versus all of these animals that are coming into our clinic for second or third opinions over a few years of doing that, you can actually— it's quite interesting that you see two populations of of disease in that population. And when you start to see thousands of animals a year in a clinic across a couple of practitioners, when you're doing both referral work and preventative work, you start to say, hey, wait a minute, on one side we don't see any cats that block, we haven't diagnosed canine diabetes, haven't referred an animal for pancreatitis in 7 years, haven't referred an animal for acute gastroenteritis for hospitalization, not intensive care. I mean, just for hospitalization, because we don't do that in our practice. All of these diseases, we don't— yeah, so they're the big ones. Those just kind of—
GDVs as well.
GDVs. I wanted to say GDVs. And the big elephant in the room, pun intended, is obesity. You just don't see obesity. You struggle— you normally in holistic practice with whole food nutrition, you're struggling to either maintain weight, like just tell them, hey, you do need to just bump up the food, just feed them a little bit more, or you're just tweaking body condition optimization, muscle tone, strength conditioning, that sort of thing. Versus the animals that I kind of forget what's happening in general practice, but definitely see the autoimmune disease, like, and I don't see all of the triggered ITPs and immune immediate hemolytic anemias also. So all of that—
what's ITP, Matt?
Like immune-mediated thrombocytopenia, so destruction of platelets.
Okay.
And so, so all of that strengthened my resolve. And when I was in the UK, I was looking at some of the pet foods manufacturers that were coming out back then, or were available, such as like Honey's, Nature's Menu, that sort of thing, and getting quite into that and being obviously aware of, um, Bill Hurst and Lonsdale's work in Australia and Steve Brown's work and Karen Becker. And this is back a few years ago, I think. I don't know how much Rodney was doing back then, but essentially when I got back to Australia, my thoughts were, I'm kind of, uh, I know I can do more by having a pet food company, um, than what I can with respect to outreach to clients. Like, I can only preach to so many people a year as a practitioner. I need to go beyond that. So I went back to Australia and wanted to do that. I knew that the, um, the market was relatively saturated in Australia, but not really for what we were doing. Um, so 6 years ago, I got approached, um, by a, um, a pet lover and, and business person, and she said, hey, I'm interested in you validating some recipes for me. And I said, look, I'm not really— like, I'm interested in that, but I'm not really interested in validating recipes. I'm interested in going big and, and doing this together. If you're interested in co-founding a pet food company, let's do that. So, uh, so in parallel with my clinical work, about 6 years ago, we started, um, with a prototype, and, and we're a direct-to-consumer whole food company. We're lightly cooked, we're complete and balanced above AFGO and FEDIAF minimums. We are— we have 6 recipes, we have supplements, treats, and we, yeah, are only doing direct-to-consumer at the moment. And we've been doing it for 6 years, we've served millions of meals, we do our own manufacturing, we're about to open a world-class manufacturing facility facility in Melbourne, and we've got an amazing team, a lot of people inspired and learning about nutrition to a level that I think is kind of beyond what you'd expect from most veterinarians for sure, and we're really excited to keep growing. So getting great feedback from our reviews.
That's amazing, Matt. Can I just jump in there and say, just give us a smattering of what what, what your recipes, what some of your recipes might be. I don't want the detail, obviously, because then you'd have to kill me. But just a, just a smattering of the recipes. But also, where are you and where is Australia on the raw versus cooked commercial product?
Yeah.
Look at those two things for me. That would be good.
Yeah. So all of our products are low glycemic load. They're all high protein, low carb. They're all grain-free with the exception— and this is where you get controversial— with the exception of some level of quinoa in 2 of our 6 products. We're all single protein with the exception of fish oil, if you count that as a protein. Limited protein then. And we have a beef lamb, turkey, whitefish, chicken, and kangaroo. So we have— all of them are high protein, but then we have a diversity from ultra-low fat through to moderate fat, without— from our kangaroo to lamb. And then we have mixed fiber profiles, 4 to 6% fiber on a dry matter basis. All of our omega-6 to 3 ratios are less than 3.8 to 1. We use fatty acids, vitamin E levels. All of them are enriched with phytonutrients and bioactive ingredients that are put in raw. We cooked between 70 and 90 degrees, lightly cooked. And the reason that we did— so that's the kind of concept of the range. So, great. Yeah, hopefully a lot of things that we're looking for. Big overages, definitely formulate with the input of a team of board-certified veterinary nutritionists and formulators and nutritional PhDs to go well and above AFGO minimums. So depending on which nutrients and safe upper limit concerns, we're usually sitting between 1.3 to 13x more for DHA, EPA, but certainly normally 3x more for the minerals and vitamins that you want higher. I think we're sitting at normally about 7x higher for vitamin E, 3x higher for vitamin D, 4x for vitamin E.
Are you managing to get that in through ingredients, or are you having to bolster some of those recipes in order to achieve that?
Yeah, we do have to enrich with a few to get them to that high. We'd be able to— I mean, this was a big point of contention when discussing with our board of nutritionists team Because of the scale and the batch consistency that the boarded nutritionists want and the optimal nutrition that we're targeting, which has mostly come out of Steve Brown's work, we do enrich a little bit with using human-grade chelates, not oxides or anything, for our minerals and naturally derived D and E. But we just found— and then things like thiamine we do just because we're a 3-month frozen. We serve frozen— or sorry, we send frozen, obviously not serve, not intentionally serve frozen. So yeah, we do, but we would still meet requirements had we not enriched, but we did decide to do some targeted enrichment. And then the other thing to point out is that we are human-grade, and because we're human-grade at scale and limited protein, we do have some issues with certain offal particularly around, like I said, turkey offal, kangaroo offal. So where we can't include things like kangaroo liver because of the Echinococcus risk, like the hydatid worm risk, and other factors leading into either not having enough human-grade supply, we do then have to lean more into other nutrients. But our, our normal approach is looking at our bioactives. So we use like fennel seed, parsley, like a few, Ascophyllum nodosum, microalgae. Like, we normally try and use as much naturally derived as possible and then just top up where we need to, which is certainly a good segue into the controversy between cooked and raw, I think, because it's, I think it's important to talk about, I guess, having a commercial pet food company that is gaining traction in Australia and getting the investment, external investment, to have our own manufacturing facilities and have a team of over 200 people, we have to look at what we can put forward as the most optimal, practical, viable product and need to accept that there's a spectrum of opinion on what should be this and what should be that in this field, and particularly between cooked and raw. So I think controversy-wise in Australia, We're looking at a certain group of raw feeders who would sort of look at lycra and say it's not good because it's not raw, or it's not good because it's got 12% carbohydrates in a recipe, not less than 1% for an ancestral diet, or less than 5%, or you're using like some targeted enrichment with vitamins. Minerals rather, and or both. And it sort of gets to the point where you say, look, what you can do in your kitchen, like we're not biodynamic organic for every ingredient because otherwise no one would buy our food. We're a big company, we need to have a certain level of consistency. It is different to how I do nutritional counseling in clinic, whether it's cooked or raw, for what nutrients I'm sort of okay to be at like 100% of an AFGO minimum for, like say something like phosphorus versus iodine where I want to be 5x or, or zinc where I want to be 3x. So there's, there's a— I think there is controversy there. I think the thing that I'd always point out where someone's saying why cooked, I think the main thing that people need to appreciate with the whole food movement is we really need to get conventional vets behind whole food. And so we saw, we decided to lead with lightly cooked because it just allows us to have a better relationship with veterinarians in Australia.
Yeah, I think just you skipped over something that was quite important. So with the cooked foods, there is raw purists who will say, no, you can't feed any cooked food when actually cooked food releases a bit more energy. Than raw food. So we know that it gives maybe 10% more juice to sled dogs and to snakes and a few other animals they've tested. But there's lots of benefits. Dogs choose cooked meat overall when it's offered to them because of the Maillard reactions that can happen at higher temperatures, which you're not at. But when you're talking about your vitamins and minerals, you said just offhand that you use chelates, which is chelated minerals. You know, that's that just sounds like such a small point for your company, but that is a massive difference between using the bog standard diabolically crap, the zinc oxide, iron oxide, and those very difficult to absorb minerals, and using the chelated minerals that are naturally found in nature. So that's a wonderful step because you know that they— that is the proper way to be put it in. Naturally derived vitamin E as opposed to the just mixed tocopherols and things. So there's a big difference.
It's really important, really important for the guys watching as well. Just go through how and what you're chelating those minerals. What does what does that mean? Because I mean, I know Nick knows, you know, Connor knows, but these guys, you know, they just want to know the difference. What does that do for a mineral uptake compared to all of the oxides and sulfates that they're sticking in standard foods?
Yeah, so in, in plain English terms, it's, it's sort of attaching the, the minerals to a protein so that the body can recognize it and assimilate it, so move it across across the digestive tract and actually uptake it versus using something that's more like rust, iron oxide. Not that we have to use much iron. I think there might be one recipe where we have a tiny little— one of the white meat recipes perhaps to be ultra-conservative. But yes, we're looking at adding the minerals to proteins to facilitate absorption. The other thing that I want to say with vitamins and minerals, I think the argument for synthetic versus naturally derived versus not using them. I think people, if people are going to comment on that, I think they need to think about what the recipe, like whoever's formulating the recipe, what they're designing for, what the nutritional goals are, like the kind of levels of nutrition, and also appreciate that it's on an individual nutrient case-by-case basis. Like I would never green light artificial vitamin E in a formula. That would crazy. But something like tricalcium phosphate— and I would never use other phosphates— but we say something like tricalcium phosphate, someone would say, why would you use a conical flask like lab one versus getting— it's naturally derived from rocks. It's like, well, if you're going to use those, you need to know that there's risk of lead and uranium if you're using naturally derived. And so that's not like— that's not approved as GRAS. So you, you could use naturally derived if you wanted to market that to a pet, like to a pet guardian, but it's actually not in the pet's best interest to do that if you have to do something like that. So I think it's very nuanced. I think that there definitely are people who are using vitamin and mineral premixes out of laziness or out of covering up the quality of the raw ingredients or the quality of or how much processing has occurred or using ingredients that have high imbalance, like a lot of imbalances to the minerals, which will cause other minerals not to digest. I see someone's asking about no natural bone. So with our food, natural bone is problematic in cooked recipes. Bone meal can be problematic. So at the moment, the decision was made that because of concerns with bioavailability, obviously if it was a raw, like, bar food, you could use crushed bone, it's not really appropriate for cooked feeding. So that's a common question that we get asked, but it's, it's just not really appropriate for what we do. And I think the main thing for us is with a team of board-certified nutritionists, myself, like these are risk-benefit discussions that we have at length and sort of come to what the most optimal is.
Yeah. What do you see happening with bone when it's cooked? I presume you tried some recipes with some bone in it, really, really finely ground, ground bone and cooked that. Were the analyses different? Were they really skewed? What led to that decision?
Yeah, so in the prototype stage, we were using some bone meals, but the impaction constipation concerns, whether they were genuine versus the vets blaming it on bone meal in the food, because that's the— and I know I think you've talked about that on another podcast where We're looking at sympathetic tone, etc., many factors like water, etc. But the use of bone meal was like, there were concerns about constipation, but there were concerns about fluoride content in bone meal at scale. And Gene Dodds is a big proponent of that concern, depending on which bone you're sourcing. But I mean, we're doing tons of food a week, so you have to be thinking about the scale of of sourcing quality ingredients. The other thing is that the nutritionists, the boarded nutritionists for diets for growing puppies, they have concerns with the consistency from their perspective, which I respect, and about batch-to-batch consistency and difficulty in bioavailability. And whilst I don't fully see eye-to-eye with them on that, based on my experiences with feeding raw meaty bones, we have to come to an agreement about how to move forward.
Yeah, there has to be. Tell me, I'm obviously into seaweed supplements, I love that, and it's such a common question. We don't need to bog down too much here, but the iodine question, I have an article on my website, guys. If you have a question regarding iodine, I've written an extensive piece. But I'm interested in that you 5x, you 5 times the iodine content, and I'm really interested because to preempt a tiny bit of your answer, like iodide from a conical flask is a very risky business, whereas natural iodine bound up in fiber and found in food is completely different. Hence the Japanese can eat such many times the RDA and they're among the healthiest people on the planet. So how do you come to the conclusion when all we have are AFGOFELIAP, you know, kind of guidelines that plucked from the air for the most part. How do you know to 5 times the iodine? How did you come to that decision? That will really help me.
It comes down to clinical judgment and not necessarily my clinical judgment, and that's a broader concept for nutrition in general because even the World Small Animal Vet Association, like, there's no one size, there's no actual gold standard diet. There's a lot of opinions about what that is, but ultimately a lot of things come down to more observational science and people can sort of say, oh yeah, that's obviously biased, which it, which it is. However, when you're listening to people like Richard Haddon, Steve Brown, James Prendergast, people that have, that have a rich history in pet formulating and also looking at from a One Health perspective at what the human nutritional medicine textbooks say about things like iodine, to your point, about the Japanese iodine intake, you start to just start thinking about, okay, we know that AFGOs are jumping off. Like, I refer to AFGO a lot because FETIAF isn't as commonly discussed in Australia, even though I pay a lot of attention to FETIAF. So I'm much more used to thinking in terms of FETIAF. But essentially, with AFCO, we know that it's a jumping-off platform. I then start to think about what nutrients would we get if we had regenerative agriculture, if the soils were intact, and what we would have got in nutrition from a prey model feeding from 50 years ago. Not what prey model feeding gives you now, but what would have happened in the past. And but really, when someone who's been in the game for 50 years tells you go 5x higher in iodine, which is still within safe upper limit levels, so not going beyond maximum where there are appropriate maximums, so not going kind of cowboy or rogue in what they're doing, and certainly you can cause concerns with too much iodine, but to your point about fibre, that's not really intact food matrix iodine. When you've got a zone to play in between minimum and maximum, we go to the maximum generally where we know that it's not going to cause issues. Like, I want a good copper to zinc ratio because in clinic I used hair tissue mineral analysis, and I, I'm aware of what the human naturopaths do around nutritional medicine. And so I'm just gathering all of these disparate fragmented sources of information and just using common sense to say, okay, if, if AFCO says there's a minimum to maximum vitamin D from 125 to 750, And I also see a lot of cancer patients in clinic and test their vitamin D. I send it to the States and all of them are low, which sort of corroborates what Dr. Erin Banik, the integrative oncologist, says and what some of the research around Marcel's done. And I know you recently did one on a podcast on vitamin D. Because I know that, then I know that I want to push the boundaries of vitamin D because of what I see in clinic.
Interesting. Can I ask one more question, guys? I'm sorry. I'm— with the vitamin D, can I ask you, is that more in your dry-fed dog clinic or raw-fed dog clinic? Is it that natural vitamin D is a different animal to the more synthetic version like vitamin E? Is that the case?
As in animals coming to our clinic that are on— yes and no. I mean, the thing with vitamin D is it's a a biomarker for what else is happening in the body. So it's a biomarker for inflammation. So I actually look at it, and also I find that it's linked to what's happening with the magnesium status as well. So not necessarily a dog that's on a whole food, raw, biodynamic, organic diet, like the whole nine yards, that dog, it could still have low vitamin D, and not necessarily because it's not got enough vitamin D in the diet. It could be what else is happening in the body. So for example, even though it doesn't really happen on whole food, if you have an obese dog, their vitamin D requirement is higher. So you'd have to supplement them for an extra month and test them. But there's studies that find that if you simply supplement with 5x more vitamin D for an animal that's suboptimal in their vitamin D serum status, it may not move the dial at all. So then what you have to do is look at the CRP, look at the CRP to albumin ratio, look at the magnesium, look at what else is happening, and reduce, reduce the inflammation in the body, which could be through a lot of things going on regardless of what they're eating. Obviously, if they're on a high pro-inflammatory metabolic inflammation, like diet-driven inflammation, kibble diet, and synthetic vitamin D, or D2 or something, that would increase my suspicion that it's going to be a low vitamin D when I order that test back.
Yeah, cool.
How do you supplement them with vitamin D? What vitamin D do you supplement with?
If they have cancer, I don't waste my time with cod liver oil. I go high, hard, fast. Don't do this at home, do it under the supervision of your vet, but I go into the 5, like, depending on the size of the dog, I might be doing like 50,000 units a day for a few days, and then per week. And I warn them that the oncologists are going to freak out. And we can normally— and then I would pull back and potentially do some PTH calcium monitoring. But I'd probably be looking at using D2— sorry, D3, K2, now to, to minimize that concern.
And that's, that's a synthetic D3K2?
No, uh, no, a lot of them are lanolin. You can get them from lanolin, um, but, uh, no, I use a human, um, naturally derived, um, microalgae.
Cool, cool.
Sorry, like, okay, uh, not necessarily liposomal.
Have you got a brand just so that we can just have a look at that?
Yeah, I would use Biocyticals Forte would be one of the brands that I use, but then we also sometimes use the avian injection Adeq formula. I don't know if you have that, but we use the avian injection orally in our clinic sometimes depending on what else needs to happen. But yeah, that's a kind of interesting one where You just have to focus on optimising it, and certainly in our clinic, we try and go upstream and do things like best light— what I describe as the best light blood test. So looking at, is the vitamin D optimal when they're 2 years old? Is the CRP less than 2 when they're 2 years old? Which is very functional testing, so that you're not in a position where you're trying to rescue their vitamin D status after the fact. After some diagnosis happens.
Matt, I'll tell you what you need to get hold of if you are going to those crazy levels. You need to get hold of some polar bear liver.
Yeah, again, this—
and get that into the diet because it's ridiculous. I'm joking, but we talked about it when we talked about vitamin D. Polar bear liver is just, just absolutely stuffed with vitamin D. So just a little Interesting.
Yeah, little thing.
You won't get—
I mean, that's, is that, that's because they're eating like blubber, which has fat soluble. Yeah, yeah, it's a fat soluble vitamin.
Yeah, it's where you get hypervitaminosis D. Yeah, yeah, interesting.
I did some nutritional counseling for some polar bears with some dermatosis recently. I do a bit of zoo medicine, uh, kind of I work between the nutritionists and the zoo vets because I volunteered in a zoo in Australia in the wildlife hospital for a few years and started sort of trying to get more integrative medicine into certain zoos in Australia, which is really exciting.
I would say that was a shock to the system for the polar bears living in Australia. It's like, whoa, it's hot. It's really, really hot. Does it ever snow?
They live in cool rooms in Australia.
Yeah, giant freezers. Lovely.
Yeah, I've got one thing before we switch over to Patreon. And, you know, you guys, if you want to join for some extra bits on the side, please, you know, do follow us over on Patreon. It's patreon.com/rawpetmedics. You'll find us there. But I'm just really interested because you've talked about optimizing minerals, you know, getting them up to the maximums. But we always look at that and see a lot of cross-competition for uptake of minerals. Do you find that because you're using chelated minerals that gets you round this, or are you still just saying, well, I've got to go to the top end of minerals because they do compete with each other? What's, what's the situation there?
I think, I think it's a, it's a very individualized response. I think that as a, from a If I'm putting on my commercial pet food company hat versus my individualised clinic hat and thinking why do we make the decisions that we do, firstly I'd say that the use of targeted chelated minerals and other enrichment targeted nutrients is very minimal compared to what we're getting from within the food matrix. Our recipes across all of our recipes have 19 ingredients in them, whole food ingredients, and so across the we have a plethora of plants and meat including a full spectrum, so a lot of diversity in where nutrients come from. But with regards to that, we're seeing that the nutrients, like taking, like using low, we don't have phytic acid containing ingredients, so that gets rid of a lot of that drag or steal of mineral concern, but then because we're trying to optimize the microbiome with the polyphenols and the carotenoids and the fiber profiles we're using, certainly having a better microbiome should— and using in-food matrix minerals, you should be able to allow— the body should be able to work it out. But in saying that, if in clinic, like, I have dogs that are either on— and playing by rules, like I said, the kind of copper to zinc rule and that sort of thing, and watching calcium, magnesium, particularly making sure that there's that we've got more magnesium to like appropriate balance between those, for example. And then certainly not including high heavy metal raw materials that are going to cause a lot of problems and certainly avoiding glyphosate Roundup Ready crops like 100% because that's— they're the big issues in pet food. I think when we get to the point where we're looking at these drags of like steal of those minerals, and going through to my individualized practice, if I'm doing something like a hair tissue mineral analysis, you can't really predict what the microbiome is going to do with the minerals. So there are— and I follow a lot of the— because there's also synergism and antagonism across vitamins and minerals. There's like some great charts by Dr. David Watts who's done a lot of work in this. So you're looking at that across vitamin-mineral antagonism, synergism lines as well. Some great charts. But I think that when you go with the overages that we do, we just don't see subclinical issues. Noting that because we're a subscription model, we hear a lot whenever anything happens. Like if a dog goes— doesn't eat their breakfast, like we would hear about it as a subscription company, which I'm happy about because it's like amazing to have that level of traceability and being able to have that level of communication. But the other, the other thing also is, um, whilst I don't use it for every one of my patients, my commercial food, because a lot of my patients were doing home-prepared, or they're wanting to use, um, like a commercial raw, or we're doing some other fusion or some other targeted strategy like keto for cancer or a whole food renal strategy, something like that, um, but I am monitoring a lot of my patients who are on Lyca in clinic So I can kind of see what's happening there and just not really including the functional tests like hair tissue mineral, dysbiosis index, because I do a lot of microbiome testing and, and do a lot of Gene Dodds testing. Not so much Nutriscan nowadays, but some of the thyroid testing and certainly a lot of in-house— sorry, um, like just standard biochem and CRP monitoring in Australia, as well as the vitamin D, magnesium um, the neoplasia index from VDI in the States. So I've got like— do a lot of functional testing where my clients are engaged with that. Um, so yeah, I just don't really see it. But whenever you do a hair tissue mineral analysis test, like, you're going to find— either for a human or a dog— you are going to find some recommendations that better suit that, that patient. Um, so you can't pick it right every time.
Yeah, cool. Listen, we've got a thing we do which is called Bit on the Side, and it's just about 10 minutes long, Matt. And one of the questions I'm going to ask Matt is when he's doing the biome analysis, does he see much difference between the dry and raw-fed dogs? Because sometimes, you know, the kits kind of say, well, that's not normal for this dog. You say, well, what's normal? You know, so I'm interested to get your opinion on that. So listen, that will be over on Patreon, guys. Thanks for tuning in tonight. Don't forget, we're on podcast wherever you listen to that And if you can send us a rating, it really, really helps to tick that, tick those stars. And thanks, Matt, for coming tonight. I just love that. I could do hours of that. Really learn.
Thanks everyone. Thanks for joining.
And remember the podcast, everybody. Remember the podcast. This has been the Matt Muir Show and we have been bystanders. Amazing. I've never seen these two so quiet. I've never been so quiet as well. Been amazing. You are an absolute star. Thank you so much.
Thanks everyone.
See you soon.
