Nick Thompson and Brendan Graham discuss fasting and feeding strategies for dogs with pet shop owner Sarah Pepper. They explain how high-carb kibble causes insulin spikes that drive obesity, while fasting and low-carb diets improve insulin sensitivity. They address morning vomiting in dogs and cover practical transitions to once-a-day feeding.
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Do that.
Good evening, good evening. Hello everyone, everybody. We're going to be talking about fasting. I am still in the beautiful, if windy and stormy, Cornwall, and therefore I'm here with the wonderful Sarah Pepper in Sarah's Pepper Pet Pantry.
A pickled pepper.
Here we are, all the freezers being put to bed for the night to save energy, and we are here. Sarah has very kindly lent me her shop for the evening, and it's great. Um, how are you, Bren?
Yeah, good, good. Um, yeah, I do apologize to everybody who were hoping to see Conor tonight. Um, he's currently cooking somewhere in the South of France. And I don't mean making a meal. I think he's going to be suffering the 30-degree heat with children, young children. So hope he's doing all right. Hopefully he's on the Atlantic coast enjoying a little bit of a breeze.
Hello, Tony.
We had a little video to play. And right now he'll be sort of crossing his fingers and hoping we're not going to play it.
Have you got it? Have you got it?
Do you remember that one?
Which one?
AI is a marvelous thing, you know, where we've superimposed his face on the—
oh yeah, have you got it?
Have you got it on Tragic Mike?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you must.
Oh, I don't know whether it's appropriate. We'll probably get taken off air if we play that sort of thing. Probably.
It might be worth it though.
Meanwhile, Karen Reed's saying play it, play it.
Rach was the first one on, it's official. Fiona came up very, very closely on her tail, and then Barbara and Gemma Lee, Finlayson. So everybody's here piling in, piling in. This is good. Fiona's offering you to pay you, Brendan, if you play. There you go. I can't say—
you can't say how much.
So we're going to be talking about fasting. So I'm not going to bore you with my, my, uh, stories of my tent completely failing and having to go out and buy another tent in order to continue the last week of the holiday. Yep.
Is that because you couldn't create the pressure? Was that the thing? You know, you're supposed to blow that, that tent up? Was that the inflatable?
Oh, if I had my camera, we've got 3, we've got 3 iPhones just here pointing their torches at us to just illuminate us a little bit, but the bright lights behind us, so it's, it's like a Hollywood set here. It's ridiculous. No, it's, it just, you know, they've got the beams like this and the tent goes over the top of the beams. Yeah, one of the middle beams, the tent departed from beam. It just split like a banana from— and just the whole middle of the tent just sank, just inviting rain to come in to form a big reservoir for the rest of the holiday. We'd have been okay, we wouldn't have died of dehydration, but we would have died of hypothermia. But I'm not going to bore you with that. I'm not going to bore you with that. Cornwall is fantastic. And it's— and then the weather, when it's good, it's incredible. And even though we've had some up and down weather, it's possibly been one of the most memorable— in a good way— one of the most memorable holidays we've had. And we've had Sarah, she's a memory maker.
It's a memory maker. That's what the kids love. That's what it's all about.
Making— we're making memories. We're making memories. So Tracy says we should get money back. It's about 4 years old, so I did— I took loads of photos. I didn't want to take photos, I just want to sit and cry, but I took photos in case I could like wag my finger at the manufacturer. But it's not going to happen, it's not going to happen.
Yeah, so are you going to publicly dish them? Come on, tell us the make. No, I'm not going to.
I'll do it. I'm gonna— I'm— it's— life is too short. Anyway, we've got an outwell. Can't they— the The tent we've got now is an Outwell, and it's built like a tank relative to the last one. Yeah, the last one was an absolute revolution to us, and, um, we, uh, we wouldn't, wouldn't go there again. So all good. I haven't looked in the mirror for at least a week, so hence, hence me looking fairly jaunty on, on, on here.
But there you go, you're worrying about that anyway.
As you can tell, I've got, just for your, for everybody's delectation, I've got a famous Thompson diagram which I'm going to take you through a bit later on. Marvelous. From my friend Dr. Jason Fung, who I think is a master of explanation. He's done a really great YouTube video, and I've kind of ripped it off. However, I am going to say Jason Fung is the man to read. So all good. So, um, Bren, where are we going to go today? We're going to talk about fasting. Sarah's going to ask— she gets lots of questions about fasting, or my dog can't fast, or my dog is on too high fat, too low fat food, what can I do? So, so I've asked her if she would give us the real input from what she hears in the shop. She's talking to people, sometimes they get 50 people a day. They have a Manic Monday every Monday and they get 50 people through the door, which if you divide it by between 10:30 and 5, that's probably one person every 7 minutes or something. That's a lot of people coming, "Ding, ding, ding," all asking questions. So She's got lots and lots of really wonderful questions from the real people with real dogs. So she's going to be our reality check while you and I get doing a barometer. Yeah, we need one.
Brilliant. And I think there's so many questions. I mean, thanks for all the comments on Facebook for pre this live. We'll be going through some of those. And look, we're here to give you a rounded view, and it's not just about starving your dog. I think there are a lot of people that felt that we were talking about, you know, withholding food for days. We're not going to be talking on that side of things. Look, The Obesity Code by Jason Fung is the book that Nick was talking about. If you want to have a little look into that, obviously a lot of human stuff in there. A lot of the stuff that we're going to put out on our page, you know, which is the research, I know is looking at animal models, and some of those are mice and rats and things like that, and human models. But that's the sort of stuff that we're going on. We're all mammals in that sense for our metabolisms. So we've got to look at how that is affecting our physiology, etc. The— but we will go through these and what we found in practice is practical and also what we see can be beneficial and where we go because I think we've got to talk about hunger pukes in that as well. We've got to talk about, you know, what we mean by intermittent fasting and the benefits that that can bring. So where should we kick off? I think we should kick off with a question that's put out there. And so, Sarah, do you want to just kick off with probably what you would say is the first question that you get about feeding?
Just off the top of your head. About hunger pukes. So in the morning, the dog wakes up, has hunger pukes, or goes out, eats a lot of grass. So that is quite a question that we get probably quite a few times a week. I know with my dog, if he doesn't get fed at a certain time, he will get that, and that's normally past 11 o'clock. But yeah, we had a customer the other day that was feeding her dog at 4 PM in the afternoon and wasn't feeding it until 8, 9 o'clock in the morning the next day, and the dog wasn't coping with that very well. So that's quite a common question. Yeah, great.
Okay, well, I will just pop in there, if you want to look up Sick Like a Dog, it's one of our videos from a couple of years back in the summertime, I think, and we do talk about hunger pukes a little bit in there, but I think we should do a little precis of what that video entails. Nick, you love this one as much as the next man, so go on, I'll let you have a go first.
I do, I don't, so how about if I do morning pukes and you can do hunger pukes, rest of the day pukes, Graham?
Okay.
Just being very democratic and all. Yeah, okay, morning pukes. There is a thing called bilious vomiting syndrome, okay, and we even got taught about it in the '80s, so it's been around for a long time. That's a long time now. And fundamentally, they even then, they recognized that some dogs, if they are fed mid-late afternoon, can't go through the night without having these morning pukes. Now, this is morning pukes, which is morning vomiting, okay? Bilious vomiting syndrome. And you get kind of a frothy, whitey, maybe yellowy vomit. The dog is fundamentally pretty okay. They may want to eat grass in the morning. They've kind of got— it's like an indigestion. It's like a, ooh, I can't cope. And the— as long as the dog is otherwise fundamentally well, the cure for that is just to feed some food, not just a treat, and definitely not a a Bonio or something, but to feed some food last thing at night. So if you go to bed at 11, you feed some food at 11 after they come in from their evening pee and poo or whatever they do in the evening. So, and then that in many cases is curative to those morning pukes. Some dogs, because everybody's different, need a little bit extra, and what they need is a feed first thing in the morning. So you get up at 7 you give them a little feed, a little something, you know, even just a handful, and that will tide them through till breakfast when they come back from their walk. If so, if you feed them at 7, you've got 2 hours till they go out at 9. You then come back at 10 and you can then feed them at 10, and that might just cure that in a trice. So that's BVS, bilious vomiting syndrome, but bilious vomiting syndrome, and that's the morning pukes. And vomiting during the day is similar to that, but I'm going to let Brendan come in with hunger pukes and vomiting during the day.
Yeah, look, let's put to one side general vomiting, you know, if there's lots of food coming back, if there's, you know, regurgitation, please look at Sick Like a Dog video, go to there. So what we want to concentrate on is if this is vomiting on an empty stomach. Okay. So literally you're seeing a small bit of bile coming back, usually after a lot of gurgling stuff going on. And, you know, if you've got some inflammatory syndromes and we see this a lot, certainly with kibble-fed animals and, you know, that's where a lot of you guys might be dealing with those as they're transitioning and the owners are worried because they're kibble-fed and they have these syndromes and they're worried about what would be the situation if they're on raw, you may come across that. But remember, if they've got anything— we talked about this a few weeks ago with gastroesophageal reflux disease, you know, where you've got an inflammatory condition of the gut and you're seeing, you know, effectively fluctuations in the amount of borborygmi, the gurgling in the stomach, you know, when they don't have food there, that they may have some degree of inflammation and ulceration going on in the intestine that that brings back bile, refluxes bile into the stomach and they bring that back. I personally would say that if you deal with those dogs, you know, even if you're using bone broths as an interim, that's not truly feeding the dog and it's a way of keeping that level of nausea down without necessarily impacting truly the calorific value and therefore the fast period for your dog. So those are options that you've there. Anything you want to add to that, Nick, from your aspect?
I would say, and it's interesting because we were talking about this earlier with Sarah, because they do a lot of travel, they go around Europe, they are European World—
European medal—
European champions in canicross, these guys. I'm sitting next to royalty here, this is amazing. So, but the dogs aren't here, so the real royalty. So they do a lot of travel, therefore they can't always feed at the same time every day, and there's a lot of people I noticed are saying, I feed my dog at 8 PM. I feed my dog at 5 PM, I feed my dog at 6:35 PM. And I would say that's potentially where you're having problems, in that dogs get a lot of anticipatory anxiety about when they're going to be fed. Somebody even mentioned about the anxiety thing. They used— she used to feed their breakfast, and now she doesn't feed breakfast and she no longer gets feeding cues because the dog has nothing to expect, nothing to anticipate. Sarah, what's your experience with, with feeding at set times or feeding with varying times?
So if I feed my guys at set times, they will expect it. If we're going to a race, they kind of know it's a race situation. So we could be racing 11 o'clock or 2 o'clock, they in the afternoon. We do not feed our dogs before we race, um, so, and then it will depend on what time we race to when we feed them afterwards. So, and then it, that kind of switches the feeding routine. So we then try not to have a routine then for them, and they work better being raced on an empty stomach. But they do get water and the baiting of the water as well, so they will get something before, but obviously not food.
It's really interesting that Sarah mentions that they will race on an empty stomach. Now that's counter, you know, everybody was raised on the idea that you preload with pasta the night before you do a half marathon or a marathon, something like this, okay? But that's slightly old school, and for me, the idea that you can perform at your peak of athleticism on an empty stomach makes complete sense because in the old days, the more hungry you got, the sharper you would become in order to be able to deliver food for the family. Yeah, from a human perspective, but also you'd find it from a wolf or dingo and what have you. The more— the more— the longer you fast, the sharper you're going to be because otherwise humans, dingoes, wolves would have just, you know, become extinct. Okay, so there is an acceleration of brain power, motivation, focus with that fasting element. Okay, we do need to talk about starvation, and we do need to talk about diets where you just reduce calories, and we can talk about basal metabolic rate and what have you. This is Such a fascinating subject. But there we go. Sarah is saying she feeds at variable times because then when she goes away, the dogs are not going, oh, it's 4 o'clock, we're going to be fed, you know. Because what happens is from 1 o'clock, they'll go, it's going to be feeding at 4, and then 2 o'clock, it's nearly there, and then 3 o'clock, we're nearly there, and then if you feed them at 10 past 4, they then go, I was expecting it at 4, you haven't delivered, and so I'm going to puke. So I think there's a lot to be said even from a management point of view. If you're feeding at variable times, it means that you don't need to rush home from the office or from the wherever in order to feed the dog, because you go, okay, I was an hour late at work, I can just feed the dog because we can feed when we like. A lot of people say, well, if my dog is used to feeding at 5, if I feed them at 6, I'm just going to get hunger pukes. Yes, you might do initially, but if you went from 5 PM to 4 PM, dog's going to go, wow, this is great. And if you're 4 PM to 2 PM, dog's going to be thinking, this is really, really great. And then you can go from 2 PM to 3 PM, and then they don't— they no longer, after some time, and maybe 2 weeks, maybe 4 weeks After some time, they are not going to know when they're going to be fed, so they just chill out about the food thing and they just ride this wave of fast either from breakfast or from the day before, as they have been doing for 45 billion— million years. Billion would be pushing it a little bit.
Just a little bit. When the life on Earth started 3.5 billion years ago.
Exactly, exactly. They're clever, they're amazing, they're not that amazing. So where are you on the variable feeding, Bren? Is there anything to that?
Look, definitely for my dogs and for me, I would say variable feeding has probably been a mainstay, just, you know, and I think it actually suits some people's lifestyles more than others. And I get that, you know, some people have to have structure in their day and that's how they transfer onto their pets, just as some people will be saying we're transferring onto our pets to say that fasting is a good idea. And I would say, look, I see it for my dogs. I've seen hunger pukes, but actually I've looked at that and then gone, is that truly hunger pukes or is that just clearing of a couple of bone fragments that are left after chewing carcass? You know, the following day if they're not fed another breakfast to take the those bone fragments down. Sometimes I see those being regurgitated. That's just a way of them eliminating them. But realistically, my dogs get a very varied feed time and they will go 24 hours without food quite happily. There are some situations where we would not advocate that level of fasting. And some of those are pregnant bitches, bitches that are feeding puppies, puppies themselves. You know, obviously it's not going to necessarily benefit them to have those fast periods at that age, at a very young age, you know. But it has lots of other health benefits that are reported, not just weight control. So let's go through a few of those. Jason Fung's are mainly about the sort of improvement in insulin sensitivity and stuff. Do you want to bring up your little demo?
Okay, so yes, I do. I'd love to. Um, can you—
you want to waste it?
Yeah, quite.
Can you put this up?
I've even done some— some— look, I've even done some diagrams here. This is my artwork. My, my wife will be horrified at my artwork, but I think it tells a story. Okay, so, so, uh, we— let's go like that a wee bit, or do we get a shadow? Here we go. No, there we go. All right, so Brendan and I at college were taught, and they, as they still do— let me find the thing. Right, we were taught calories in— hang on, I need to find my way. I have to do this in mirror. I love that.
Although you say calories, it looks like cakes. That's typical vet writing.
Is it mirrored or is it the right way around?
No, it's the right way around. It just is that your writing for calories looks like cakes to me.
Anyway, okay, and I think they probably still teach in medical school and veterinary school calories in and calories out is the only game in town. Okay, that's assuming that there's— that you've got a reservoir of— oh, this is difficult— a reservoir of calories floating somewhere in your body, you know, a calorie reservoir. I, you know, so, but, but this— and, and if you stop eating, then obviously you're going to lose weight, uh, like that. Okay, you will. Yeah, but what happens if you just reduce the calories in as, as per a low-fat diet? Okay, so classically from 1977, the American Heart Association said, right, fat's bad for you, it'll give you heart disease, therefore you've got to go on low fat. And therefore the, the foods, because you reduce fat, they tend to increase carbs. Okay. So you reduce the calories in, and what happens is your body, because it realizes that gradually, gradually, gradually you're eating less calories over time, it very sensibly, because it's used to going long winters with less food, your body and dogs' bodies will slow down. Which is why when they looked at on in the the Women's Health Initiative study in about 2008. They took about 50,000 women in the States. I think they were nurses or medical women. Women's Health Initiative, by the way. And they said, right, we want you to go on a low-calorie diet, that is to say, low-fat, increased carbs. And with those 50,000 women, that on average they dropped about 400 or 500 calories, and there was no change after 7 years in weight of those, those women. Okay, cakes do eat calories. Cakes, oh yeah, well, that's a good, good point. Okay, and the— this calories in, calories out, um, model is too simplistic. And so, and it's called one compartment, yeah, because you've got this one compartment here which is supposed to be a fridge, by the way, okay? And that is too simplistic. And so Jason Fung rightly says, what about a two-compartment model? And the two-compartment model means, um, that it recognizes that you have short-term storage in your liver as glycogen, okay, which is a bit like having your fridge. Your fridge is in the, is in the kitchen, it's easy to get at, and you can break, you can take things in and take things out. You can, you can, you can burn them when you go for a run, or you can just keep them in the fridge. You can only keep things in the fridge in this model for, you know, 4 or 5 days or so. But if you want to, if you want to store, um, your food, yeah, so your house is like the body, or your dog's body What do you do? You put it in the freezer, but your freezer's in the basement, it's difficult to get at, and it's difficult to get things out because you have to defrost them and what have you. Okay, bear with me with this model. And so you've got to think, right, well, what is it that, that takes stuff from the fridge, short-term storage, to the freezer down in the basement, which is long-term storage? And the answer to that is the captain storage, which is insulin. And so what was happening with these 50,000 nurses and medical persons was that they were having a high-carb diet, aka kibble. Yeah, in the dog world, that would be kibble. And that was maintaining a high insulin. And so even though they were having less calories in, they had an increased increased insulin, and therefore there was a, a, a net push to storage from short-term storage of glycogen, which is kind of a syrupy substance in the liver, to long-term storage, which is fat in here. And if you have a, a diet which is persistently bumping up the insulin, aka a high-carb diet, aka kibble, you've got a net push to long-term storage, which is known as— go on, go on, that's difficult.
No, you're the right way.
Excess equals obesity. And Alex German in 2017 said that something like 74% of dogs in the UK are either overweight or obese. And guess what most of those dogs are eating? And the answer is a high-carb diet.
Diet.
Okay.
Yeah.
So if— but the thing is if you just drop the carbs with a low calorie diet, yeah, a low calorie kibble diet, you still have a major push to insulin, okay, because of the carbs, okay. So you have a major push towards building up fat, and these are the dogs where you say, I feed my fat— my dog hardly any kibble at all, and yet they're still holding loads of weight. And if one goes for a, a raw diet— and most raw diets are low in carbs, and they're mainly protein and fat and mince and bits and what have you— then you maintain a low insulin. And essentially insulin is the enemy, and anything you can do with your diet or with your dog's diet to reduce the insulin, which is in response mainly to sugar, a bit protein, and very little fat, which is why you can eat— you know, Atkins came along and said you can eat loads of protein, loads of fat, and yet you still lose weight. It's because you're not stimulating Captain Storage, which is insulin. There you go.
And brilliant. So that's excellent explanation. And I think, you know, There's a couple of questions that have come up from that. Yeah, I think from— I would say you're right. If you restrict calories in, you can actually downregulate your metabolism to literally a third of the calories that you require on a daily basis. And then it becomes really hard because as soon as you up your calorie intake, instead of actually upping your metabolism, there's a lag phase and your body will automatically start storing rather than actually increasing the metabolism again. So just be careful. And symptoms of that are feeling cold. So those people that really feel the cold, okay, often they are running at a much lower metabolic rate. Okay. So that's one of the first things to look at. If you've got somebody who's really struggling with their weight, they've maybe gone on diets and they suddenly become super sensitive to the cold, you know, they're having to wrap up warm, all the rest of it, then it may well be that their metabolism is downregulated and they need something to speed that metabolism back up.
Or they've got low thyroid disease.
Well, that's all about low, low levels of metabolism. So, you know, it's fix, fix that and you can improve their ability. A couple of other things that came in. So diabetics, Yeah, absolutely. Fatty liver is back down to how the body is managing the carbs that are taken on and why the liver is converting those into triglycerides and fats. There is also fatty livers people are worried about cats which are starved for a period of time. But remember, if those cats are kibble-fed, high-starch diets, they are more likely to suffer from that condition than those which are fed real prey versions.
However, starving cats is never a good idea, or fasting cats is never a good idea.
Starving cats is different from fasting cats because we'll talk about intermittent fasting at this point because I think, okay, because you're not— because effectively, if we've got a dawn and dusk feeder Yeah. Okay, then literally there's going to be a period of the day through daylight where they probably will naturally want to sleep in the sunshine, do other activities. They're not necessarily grazing through the day unless there's a dry bowl of food. So I would absolutely say I've got a cat. She is determined to eat specifically when it comes to dusk. And she'll eat at night or at dawn. But she hates, especially in the heat of the day, to be considering eating. It would just sit there, especially with raw food. You're not going to leave that out. She manages perfectly well in those circumstances and actually self-regulates to almost intermittent fasting. And what we mean by intermittent fasting is literally trying to compress the feeding times to within an 8-hour period. Okay, so that leaves effectively 16 hours of the day. So 14 to 16 hours seems to be that golden period that actually will improve some other health benefits. And we can talk about autophagy. So that's, you know, the body going around eating up its own tissues. So usually damaged cells that it needs to recycle into the system. And that has benefits because it will take out horrible things like tumor cells or cells which are damaged, you know, because of oxidation, damaged because of inflammation. And in those circumstances, that can only benefit the animal to remove some of those disease-provoking materials from the system. Let alone some of the toxins that can build, you know, within those. If they are recycled and managed in a more regulated way by the liver, by the kidneys, they can actually then recirculate those and get rid of them from the bloodstream. Whereas actually, if they're stored in cells which are ongoing and damaged because of that toxin, then they can't get rid of it.
Penny Wood, who works in in zoos has made an interesting comment. We only fast big cats from the Panthera group, which I presume is lions and tigers and panthers and what have you. Can you just talk about an ideal regime for a cat, Brent, just so that we're not being doggish? Ideal regime for a cat.
So I would still say that for the small cats, you know, look, if they're hunting birds, they're hunting mice, Okay, I still see that they're, they're not hunting down big prey, but they're hunting down prey which are going to be more susceptible to being hunted at dawn and dusk. Okay, and therefore they're more successful with their hunts in those periods. That's how I see it. That's how I've seen, and it seems to fit with when they want to eat. So they become more active then. You know, the number of people that complain about their cat suddenly becoming more active at night, running all over the bed, you know, wanting attention whilst they're asleep. There's some great Simon's Cat little animations showing what they get up to whilst you're trying to sleep. And I think, you know, it just reiterates that's the sort of behavior we see in our pet cat. So I think, yeah, I totally get the big cats when they're hunting huge wildebeest and things like that, and they're gorging, and then they're sitting and slowly digesting all of that food over a period of time. They've sort of set up their metabolism. But I'm not talking about that when I'm talking about pets here. We're talking about, you know, the, um, the cats which are going to effectively be taking out birds, mice, you know, those sort of rabbits, small prey that are going to be out and about for them to hunt. And if we mimic that with a raw food, if we're feeding at those times, I find that some people will come in saying, my cat's really fussy, they won't eat, and they're trying to feed them in the middle of the day in the heat. And as soon as we move their feeding times to somewhere that's raised somewhere that's not on the kitchen floor, that's somewhere that's a nice shelf that's hidden away that they can just approach come evening time or come to sort of early morning, they're perfectly happy with that and they suddenly go back into a normal eating pattern.
Okay, very cool. So an ideal— for me, an ideal feeding pattern for dogs, however, is I will always try and push people to go for once a day feeding if at all possible. The exceptions to that will be small dogs who, whatever you try, will get hunger pukes. Okay, fair enough. Once a day is ideal, but twice a day is not the end of the world. But, and, and how do you do that? How do you go from twice a day to once a day feeding? Answer is you dissolve gradually breakfast feeding, and you add anything you take off breakfast and you add it to, to dinner so they have a bigger meal in the evening. And if you can do that at a variable time so much the better. And it's really as simple as that. Somebody mentioned earlier about doing it gradually. Do all these things really, really gradually. Yeah, imagine if you went from 3 meals a day to 1 meal a day, you'd be pretty unhappy. But if your human owner gradually dissolved breakfast imperceptibly and dissolved lunch imperceptibly and fed you more in the evening you just— you would gradually move towards that. Yeah, you absolutely would. A lot of people say to me, I can't possibly do that because my dog's been fed twice a day forever. If you do it slowly enough, you probably can. The exceptions are the small dogs who get the hunger pukes and the deep-chested dogs like, um, Red Setters. If there's even the smallest risk of having, uh, torsion dilation and torsion, then you don't want to do that. Yeah, any bloat issues, things like that, then maybe you want to stick to twice a day. Okay, that may be a microbiome issue, which you can look at with your raw feeding vet. It may be, you know, some kind of enzyme issue, whatever it might be. But if there's a risk of bloat, don't go there.
And I would say though, with that thing, feeding twice a day, you can still fit into an 8-hour window. You can still give them those 2 meals, even 3 meals if you want to spread it out, but just keep it to that 8-hour window, and you are still then actually encompassing some of the health benefits seen in intermittent fasting.
Yeah, I think dogs will go out hunting in the morning because that's what they do. So for me, it makes a lot of sense to not feed a dog until midday or beyond. And if you start at midday, you still got 8 hours. You can still feed the dog at midday and 4 and 8. Or if you've got a bilious vomiting syndrome dog, you can feed at 2 and 6 and 10. Okay, so I think that, that squeezing the feeding times to a more narrow time so that you have got this fasting, this intermittent fasting, which is basically missing breakfast, it's very, very, very healthy. Giving. Because the pancreas, for example, loves to rest. And if we're feeding 2 or 3 times a day, you're stimulating the pancreas. Even if you're feeding a great raw food diet, there is, there is some demand on the pancreas. And I always say that fasting is to the pancreas what sleeping is to the brain. Now, you— okay, so you wouldn't say, well, sleeping is a waste of time, so I'm going to cut my sleeping down to 2 hours so I'll be really productive. Yeah, you would get away with that for about 1 or 2 weeks, then you suddenly, suddenly go doolally, and so it would be non-productive. So the question is, just like sleep, you do your sleep in a 6, 7, 8 hour period. Why not do your feeding in a 6, 7, 8 hour period so that you can rest? So that the gut can rest for 14, 16, 18 hours. I think there's a lot of sense in that, and the body is, I think, trying to teach us, and it's up to us to, to, to, to listen to that. You know, the Royal Canins, the, the, uh, the, the Hills of this world have been saying, I know you've got to feed twice a day. Why is that, guys? Is there anything to do with the health of your dog, or is it just to do with convenience and increasing the amount of product sold. I think that once-a-day feeding in many, many dogs, not all, is a really beneficial thing to do.
And to, you know, Liv, to reiterate what Nick's just said, you know, I think absolutely, as you mix into this new way of addressing feeding, you know, you find that your dogs stop, their physiology stops expecting food at a set time and actually they can start to adapt to that more variable feeding time and that more compact feeding time. So yeah, you're right. And yeah, I felt it. You know, you stop eating high-carb sweets and foods, you know, every time you go and fill up the car or do anything like that. It's amazing how quickly you can switch your brain off from desiring that next endorphin fix from the sugar rush. Okay, and you know, it's the same if you can do that for those dogs that have been on high-carb diets. If you're transitioning across, then that's going to only benefit them.
Okay, so we find it quite useful when dogs are really fussy and then like kind of going off their food. If you only feed them once a day, they quickly become pretty keen.
I'm so glad you brought that up, Sarah, because actually, you know, the number of people that come in saying their dogs are super fussy, but when we body condition score them, you know, they can be, uh, you know, on the obesity end of the scale. And it's sort of, you know, people have asked on the Facebook page, you know, well, how do I address that? You know, because they're obviously hungry but they're obese, but I must give them food otherwise I'm being cruel. I think there's so much that can be given, that oxytocin release that you can give them, which is as good a replacement for the sugar rush endorphin I've just been fed scenario, is actually attention, is actually grooming, you know, all of those other aspects to care. And I get it takes more time, you know, because it's not just reaching in the cookie jar and giving them something. But actually, I'd absolutely say if your dog is coming to you and you need to do something with them, try, you know, grooming them instead. You try and do something else that's more in line with that.
In the garden, go to the park, play, and you burn a few more calories. Yeah. Exercise isn't— is not a great way to lose, to lose weight. Okay. They always say you can't outrun a bad diet. Okay. So if you're on kibble, yeah, forget it. But if you're on a really great raw food diet and the dog's not losing weight and you're feeding twice a day, 3 times a day, you can exercise that dog fairly strenuously and they probably won't lose that weight. If you start changing the timing, and that's all you need to do, then you can have a profound impact. Somebody was saying that their Labrador needs to lose 5 or 6 kilos, but that their elbows are gone and their hips are gone. And the orthopedic surgeon says they've got to lose it, that would be— I would say you need to work with the timing and not with perhaps the quantity, although you've got to look at the quantity. 2-3% of body weight, you'd be coming down possibly to about 2% of body weight being fed every day.
Yeah, now I'm putting a bit of the science as we go, is coming up on the Facebook feed so you can have a look at those. Even one of the negative sort of reviews of fasting. And, you know, there's a lot of health sort of discussions going on about the benefits of fasting, and it seems to outweigh some of the others. They are actually also— there's a review done down in Sydney, Australia, where they looked at intermittent fasting, and I think it was amongst the medical sort of students that were there. But actually what they realized, it wasn't just about calories going in and calories going out. They sort of looked at it on that basis of they left them on their normal diets and they put one group to doing fasting and one group not, and they saw limited differences. However, what they did say, there was distinct differences dependent upon the type of diet. Those fasters were on. So if, if they were on a great nutritious diet and they incorporated intermittent fasting, they had not just weight loss, which they say hands down, absolutely, they still would do on intermittent fasting across the board, but they also would gain some of the other benefits on health. Whereas if you just have a really useless diet and you intermittently fast, then you are unlikely to gain any of the other health benefits.
Because the useless diet, the standard American diet, which is also the SAD diet, ironically enough, is pumping insulin. So you have cornflakes and orange juice for breakfast. Okay. Insulin. You then have a sandwich or a burger for lunch. Insulin. And then you have pasta because it's low fat. For dinner and you have an insulin hit, and then you have cookies before, before you go to bed, an insulin hit. And in the old days, insulin was a Sunday best, if that. You know, it was like, it's once in a blue moon hormone. And if we look at it within the body, there are 7 or 8 hormones which will increase blood glucose. Yeah, because that— i.e., we spent a lot of time, and our dogs spent a lot of time, with low blood glucose. So we needed lots of mechanisms to keep up our blood glucose so that we can keep hunting and keep being sociable and do all the stuff. But there's only one, one hormone to reduce it. And so therefore, if we just look at basic physiology, it's saying high blood glucose is a rarity Because Mother Nature only gave us one hormone to bring it down. Fascinating stuff. Really, really amazing.
Now, one last little question I had for you, Nick, before you ask Sarah one, is Jason Fung. Did he, in The Obesity Code, discuss how long it took to reset the insulin sensitivity?
I'm sure he did. I can't remember.
I can't remember. I'm sure it was in there, but I just wondered if you could remember.
I think insulin sensitivity Depends where you start from, I think, in terms of your, your quality of your diet and how much insulin and how long you've had this high blood insulin. And it depends how much adipose fat tissue you're carrying as well. But I think one would be measuring it in months, in weeks at best, to maybe a number of months at worst. But it does happen and it happens in virtually every everybody, every dog. Okay, if you've got low thyroid disease, then that may put a spanner in the works, but it will, it will happen with most dogs.
Also remember the influence of cortisol, which is a stress hormone, upon that, and therefore the impact of improving the sleep quality of your dog. So not just the sleep length, but the sleep quality of your dog. And there are ways to do that. Okay, to improve, to reduce that cortisol level, to improve insulin sensitivity, so that can speed that process up.
So don't let your dogs watch any exciting TV late at night because it will just, it'll give them bad dreams and they won't be able to sleep properly. You heard it here first. And I want to ask Sarah some questions about the kind of questions she gets But we've run out of time, so should we do that on Patreon? Let's jump over to Patreon and we're going to get it from the coalface. We're going to get some questions that, that Sarah commonly, commonly comes across, if that's okay with you.
Yeah, so I will say thank you to all of you guys watching. Um, thank you to the massive response to, um, our date at the beginning of December. Um, you'll be able to come 2nd of December that you'll be able to come and see us live, live. Okay, really looking forward to that. The tickets are going on sale first soon. They're going to be available through probably Eventbrite just to make it easy for processing. So that's all coming. So do have a look out. There'll be a release date coming this week so that you can all be prepared because there's a limited number of tickets. We're going to sort of preempt everybody being able to look out for that, get ready to press buy on the date that we release them. It's going to be like a concert. We're going to have it on 10 o'clock on a Friday morning.
Do you think it's going to be like Glastonbury where they all sell out in about 45 seconds? I don't know. No pressure, guys.
We can hope.
But you never know. I think get in there quick. 2nd of December, it's us live. We're going to do education in the morning. Edutainment in the morning, and then the afternoon we're just going to play loads of games with maybe a foodie slant, and then we're going to have a party.
We've got some Q&A in the afternoon as well. Yeah, we've got a little bit of—
yeah, it's gonna be absolutely great.
Listen to the audience.
I want to say a big thank you to all our Patreon supporters. It's absolutely amazing. They're giving us the price of a cup of tea, cup of coffee every month, and we really appreciate it. We can get Pete to do the the podcasts, okay? And we can get Victoria to do our Instagram. I don't even know what Instagram is, but she's doing our Instagram. They say it's a really great thing to do, and she's doing it for us. And we can allow them to do that by doing that, so that we can get the message out. That's all it's about. So thank you guys for supporting us. It's really, really fantastic. And Sarah is just about to be the star of the show, uh, over on Patreon for 10 minutes.
Brilliant. Okay, see you guys soon. Take care.
We'll see
