Dr. Conor Brady, Brendan, and Nick answer questions on raw feeding and pet health. They cover stress-triggered pancreatitis in dogs, the difference between IBS and IBD, cost-saving strategies like bulk organ meats, joint pain treatments including Boswellia and marine lipids, and why grain-free diets don't prevent heart disease.
Chapters
We're back live. I'm praying this is working.
It seems to be working. It feels good. Feels right anyway. Feels good.
I can't see anybody coming up on the thing.
Yeah, that always makes me nervous. That always makes me nervous.
Oh, there we go. No, they're in. There's a slight delay in the brain.
Rachel Mack is usually first. I'm sure she'll be disappointed. She's third tonight.
She came in third there. I was so keen to say hello to everybody that I pressed go and we were in at 7 o'clock instead of 5 past.
Such a relief when they all come in. It's like a warm hug. Guys, do you know what I bought this week? Right, so I'm aware that the conference in Barcelona is coming up and Barcelona is hot and we could be beside a pool. And I don't want to be the fattest nutritionist there. Excuse me, I don't mean to fat shame myself, but I have got a lot of baby, baby— I have a baby gut on me and I don't want to be because another 3 years, I'll leave as well quick. Okay, I'm telling everybody now, that's what I'm thinking about myself and don't care what anybody else thinks about themselves. So I am back in the gym and I'm doing my bits and pieces. And so I wanted to get, you know, a nice little snack is smoked almonds. Okay, so very, very tasty smoked almonds, but the ones you get in the local health shop are actually the synthetic smoky flavor. And I just heard one person saying something a little bit negative about that smoky flavor, and I thought, oh, that's a pity because I love them. And also organic almonds would be nice as well for a change. So I get to Googling and I find this tiny little farm in California with the worst website. I don't want to name them because I don't want to shame them, but it was so bad that I thought, this is the guys I want. And like, I emailed them and the granddaddy emails me back, and it's, it sounds like granddad of the owner and all this. And he's just fussing over me and he goes, look, I'm sorry, sir, the smallest I can send you is 3 pounds of almonds. And I'm thinking, oh my God, 3 pounds of almonds, 1 kilo, what's that, 1.5 kilos? So okay, they send them over. So I just picked them up and they're very tasty. I can't say they're as good as the synthetic ones because the synthetic ones are very addictive. These are olive oil and actually smoked like they were smoked in a fire. They were smoked in a fire with the Hickory. So anyway, I'm eating a furious amount of almonds. I can't say I feel any difference. But after eating a treat of almonds, you don't actually want to eat much after that. Whereas if I was snacking on anything else, you know, at nighttime, I can eat anything at nighttime. I work late into the night. When I come down, I want to eat. So, but almonds switch it off. So I like that about a protein snack. There is something to it. You get the right food into you at the right time and then you don't need to keep on eating. And the question is, do I want— am I hungry enough for a smoked almond? And now I'm looking at them going, no. So it switches off the trick that is like to eat sweets I eat sweets all the time. Well, actually, I'm not hungry enough for an almond. I'm not hungry enough for a sweet. Anyway, day 10 as well.
Do you know the thing about almonds is that on paper, you know, a certain 50 grams or something of almonds, you will get about 160— no, on paper there's 160 calories in a small quantity of almonds, right?
Yeah.
But if you actually eat it and you analyze the energy that you actually liberate, you will only get about 120. Calories from it. Yeah. Because of the amount of energy you use to digest the blooming thing.
Yeah.
Which I think is very interesting. Tim Spector in Spoonfed talks about this, that there is an actual differential. And for the last few decades, we've been thinking that walnuts give us X amount of calories, but actually it's 20% less when you actually examine walnuts. I Guys, I have to share this with you. This is really exciting. There's a little whippet up the road here, one of Bluebell's boyfriends, and he got pancreatitis, right? He's very sexy, he's blue, lovely, called Amos. And he had pancreatitis and we fixed that. He's raw fed and everything else. But what has happened is that the owners have noticed he's had two flares of pancreatitis and they coincide with one single person visiting. This person in the last 6 months has visited twice, and both times after, after the guy has visited, the dog has had a little blip of pancreatitis, you know, bowing and being off a bit of food, a little bit of vomiting and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. How amazing is that? Have you ever heard of that? That, that— so that's a stress. So because the guy likes the other dog in the house but doesn't like Amos, he's not kicking him or doing anything, but it's just, it's just maybe there's a jealousy thing with the other dog, or maybe there's a, oh, you don't like me, I don't like you, some anger issues or something like that. Isn't that fascinating?
I have to tell you, I have to come in with this story, guys. I'm sorry, Brendan, I've just got to come in with this, okay? There was this really famous—
I don't know why I bothered turning up.
Get back to Canada.
There's this really famous forensic anthropologist when we were in college. She was really, really famous, right? And she was the lady that went down to Rwanda when there was terrible genocides and people, you know, blown apart by terrible— and she'd come in and down there, it's like if you can't find any part of the body to bury them, they're in limbo for the rest of their lives. So she was there, just some bus had been blown up and she had to separate out the 50 bodies, and she locked herself in a barn for 2 or 3 weeks. A really famous story back in the day. And she's an absolute hero, total hero, okay. So when she finds his little body bags, separates twins and everything, like just crazy stuff. Anyway, and so, um, this lady tells us her introductory story was about what these special X-rays, they can tell of bones. And she showed us an X-ray of a femur and it looked like there was two fractures in the femur to a non-medical person like myself, two hairline fractures. And she goes, what's that? And we all say, well, it's a femur and it looks like a fracture, hairline fracture. That sounds right. And she goes, it is a femur, but they're not fractures at all. She goes, that's a new type of analysis we can do. And it shows the growth of bone, something like the growth of trees. And in those two times, we can see the growth had stopped. And I can tell you for how long, two weeks. So growth had stopped in this 12-year-old's bone twice in her life at these times. And that is the reason that these bones came to her was because this kid had sadly committed suicide, and the family wanted to know what, what was the reason. And this was one of the first times that this lady was involved, got into it, had a look at the bones, and ended up to cut a very long, very interesting story, uh, very short, was that the uncle was coming over from Texas, and the two times he came over, he was abusing her. And during that time, all her energy was, was, was diverted to keeping her, you know, on the straight and narrow mentally, so all growth stopped. When you're chronically stressed, all growth stops. And I just— and you can see it in bones. So they have this way of scanning bones. So stress, for whatever reason, she goes— and this is obviously the worst possible story you could imagine. She goes, but she goes, anything can do it. She goes, trauma from an incident that you don't get over can stagnate your growth. And bullying can do it and all sorts of stuff. So like, there's all different levels of stress, and you get stressed by something different to me. How interesting is that? And she shows you exactly when it happens. So I don't— it's not the exact same as the story, but I do believe stress can play an awful— can do an awful job on you. I'm surprised it comes out as pancreatitis, though.
And just to draw you back into one of your things, I think, you know, that stress of IBD versus IBS versus—
that was the question. Yes.
A trilogy going into the pancreatitis and actually why pancreatitis. I see in some cases occur in those stress situations, even the CPLI going up. But it's almost a consequence of a reflex of those other inflammatory cases going on. So not just the pancreas, but you'll actually get the small bowel and sometimes even the liver, you know, so that the bile ducts and stuff becoming inflamed as a result of all of that inflammatory process. And so people will quite often see those cases as purely pancreatitis. Because they'll end up with vomiting and diarrhea and abdominal pain particularly, and the preying and all of that side of things. But actually, it's not a primary pancreatitis in all of those cases. I think sometimes it's secondary. And, you know, especially if you've got a stress indicator, what would make more sense than having an IBS-type response which then overflows into having these pancreatitis, cholangiohepatitis cases rather than it just purely being pancreatitis.
Wow, this is like you, you just struck on the first question and we'll come back to them. But the IBS, IBD, a lady got on to me during the week, we're talking about her IBD dog in a bad state and this has been going on and it began in January. This lady is a breeder, raw-fed years and years and years, never touched kibble, and she's like, you know, you couldn't tell her anything about raw feeding. Lovely lady, but we're talking about IBD and how you might fix this terrible gut condition. And she goes, it kicked off in January. He's 14 years old, kicked off in January. And I'm constantly saying, why did it start in January? Why did it start in January? Can you remember? Did you change your supplier? Did something stressful happen? No, no, no. And near the end she said, oh, actually his mum died in January. And the mum was 17 and she died, and he was 14, and they were the only two dogs that slept in the kitchen. They slept in the same bed for 14 years of his life. And I said, well, this, this is what straight away I thought, is this IBD or is this starting off as a stress-like thing? So can somebody tell me straight out of the traps here with the first question, IBS and IBD, what is the difference between those two things?
Do you want a really simple answer? Yeah, yeah. In, in humans, because that's where it's really been, in really been studied, in IBD, irritable bowel disease, there will be actual anatomical change. There will be pathology that you can see, okay? Whereas with IBS, um, which is, um, irritable bowel syndrome, you cannot find any change in the gut, okay? And they think that there's a very strong psychological element to it. So IBD is where you've got inflammation, you've got lymphocyte infiltrating, eosinophils, lots of inflammatory changes. But with IBS, your gut looks as good as everybody else's, but you have symptoms of gut dysfunction. So there's a lot of this going on. Brendan, any other little bits and pieces to add to that?
Yeah, I try to simplify this as my explanation generally is: IBS is psychological, usually in its causation. And if it goes on long enough, you'll then get some pathological change because there's just enough inflammatory change going on. But IBD, I always think as it's an initial disease process and there's— it's less psychological. So you don't tend to see the psychological input into their flare-ups. It tends to be that there is another inflammatory process, possibly down to allergy or sensitivity or, you know, intolerance, something like that that's going on to cause that inflammatory process. And I absolutely agree with Nick about those other initial changes, but I would think that you do see in the later stages some similarities coming through. But I simplify it to people by saying one is generally based about psychological, and that's IBS being the primary cause, and the other is that there's a primary disease process going on that leads to that inflammation.
You can understand the stress bit of it, the IBS bit. I always think S for stress is because if you're walking down the street and somebody jumps out at you, you know, Brady, and you go, Jesus, you hold your stomach, you know, you wish you got into crocodile mode, you know, and you hold your guts because that's cortisol, adrenaline.
I'm going to try that. I hope your sphincter's controlled.
Anyway. That's just the shock phase. But like very few people spring ready for this, but it comes, it constricts your— the adrenaline constricts your gut. No time for digestion, Fatty. Time for like, you know, fighting or running away or thinking. So your face flushes as well. And so that's the idea of it. So that's what a shock— and you can understand that bit of it, but chronic stress does the same thing. Small amounts of cortisol and adrenaline squishing the gut, upsetting the digestive process, and the gut flora doesn't like that. So you end up getting this bit of a dysbiosis, growing inflammation in the gut, a pathogenic bacteria shitting all over the environment. And would that— does IBS turn into IBD? Would that not be the way eventually it does such destruction in there that you start getting a wrecked gut? And if they looked at a biopsy, they'd say IBD. And then if you get the IBD diagnosis, maybe perhaps the vet would miss the fact that this dog is chronically stressed about something. And every day he gets his walk, he needs to walk past the Rottweiler behind the gate. Shouldn't have said Rottweiler, whatever dog, you know.
Guys, we've got to remember that if you've got IBS, okay, so this is the psychological version, you are going to have changes in your microbiome which can then lead to pathological changes, physical changes. So I think that that's really valid, Brendan, that if you've got one for long enough.
Yeah, this whole issue around your parasympathetics and sympathetic drive and actually how that polyvagal theory starts to come in about how you can actually develop disease disease just because of your nerve input within your gut process. So it doesn't even need to go down to that level of microbiome, although that will have changes. I think you'll see some physical disease if you chronically change the relative portions of parasympathetic and sympathetic drive within those tissues.
That's interesting.
Couple of things, guys. Paula Blackburn is asking about Bloat. But yeah, I'm going to say to her, we did, we did Bloat when? September time last year?
Yeah.
So Paula, if you, if you have a look, we've done, we've done Bloat, uh, on a previous thing. So crack into that. I would definitely do. Also, just guys, um, we did do a good rant. Um, uh, cockerel. Sorry that there was so much cockerel noise from last week.
A lot of cock.
I thought it was going to be kind of— he's driving me mad. And so What I'm saying is, if anybody wants a cockerel, please get in touch because he's driving me absolutely insane. From 4 in the morning until 8 at night. And watch, they don't touch them. They don't touch them. They run around with the chickens.
Are you serious?
Chicken dinner? Sunday? Apparently. Now, this is the next thing. So we can segue in beautifully here to the cost of chicken. Okay, so somebody asked last time, uh, the, um, uh, how do they cope with feeding so many dogs, um, with the cost of living, with all of these prices go up? And I saw this, brought it to the fore this morning because on the BBC, the good old BBC, there was an article on the cost of chicken rising just because of feed costs, because of, um, the fuel costs to keep them warm, because of how quickly they're growing them, etc. And, you know, everybody's panicking about this at the moment because the cost of food— they were estimating, albeit that it was an organic chicken farm, okay, that the cost of that chicken was going to be as expensive as beef, so organic beef, okay, by the end of the year. And I think that's, you know, that's going to make a huge difference to quite a lot of feed companies for the dog food industry, okay. And we all need to start thinking about how does 'How does this work?' And we've dealt a little bit with this, with understanding that calories in— you've talked about almonds at the beginning. I love to bring things around in a circle. So, you know, about how we can reduce their appetite but actually still satiate them and actually how it's a bit of a falsehood to think that you can feed cheaply because actually what you end up doing is just feeding more and causing more disease issues. So, Nick, what's your go-to when people start asking you about how do I keep the cost of feeding my dog raw down?
This is a great question. I think it's a really, really important question. Can you remember when we did a talk, the three of us, in, in, uh, Bradford? Can you remember that? It's probably the first time we all spoke together. Yeah, there was one, one of the women in the, in the, in the audience, and she said she had got— she was feeding her, I don't quite a big dog, 25-30 kilo dog, and she'd got it down to about 37p a day.
Can you remember that? I remember something like that, actually. Yeah, yeah.
So, but, but that's just, that's just a, just as a, as an also-ran thing. But here would be my thought, um, buy in, get a cheap freezer, buy in bulk, is, would always be a good idea. Get to know your local your local abattoir if at all possible. Or you might be able to get things just, you know, legally but out the back door— pancreas and what have you— and feed more organ meat. Yeah, more spleen, more pancreas, more— goodness knows—
lung.
All these things are still very cheap. And I— that would be— that would be my thought, would be to go more towards the organ side of things because they're still cheap. Also, if you go to, to co-op at any time, you will always find meat in there, um, at the end of their sell-by date. Okay, so you can get meat at some knockdown prices. So, um, your thoughts, Brady? What do you think?
Uh, yeah, two, two things. I think you're right about that. I think sticking to the spurious bits, um, I, I don't mind a bit of best before, not bad after meat. I think that any meat that goes in the bin is a sin, and it goes yellow label after 2 days, and it's off the shelf in 4. So like, if you can get it, it's only 2 days old. I mean, come on, that's pretty fresh meat. It's good enough. If I had, you know, 4 Labradors and I'm thinking, oh my God, what am I going to do? So, and the bigger, the bigger the problem, the more I would gravitate towards, you know, cheaper meat. Look, you know, I think a couple of raw producers, and I know this for a fact, are selling very cheap beef, and it's like a pound a kilo. And people say, wow, look at this beef, isn't it amazing, it's a pound a kilo. Now, it is ground up lung and trachea, and that is one type of beef. It's from a beef, from a cow even. But, you know, lung and trachea can be part of the diet, and you might up it a bit in times of crisis, like, why not? Okay, so, you know, you might go from whatever— I'm throwing in figures here— 5 to 10 to 15%. Okay, you might but to suggest that beef would be the lung and trachea to be the large portion, as some companies are pretending this is beef, it's not. It's just they're allowed to say beef. They're allowed to call chicken combs chicken and sell it to you as chicken and put it in dry food and call it chicken. And raw dog food is chicken as long as it came from that animal. So as you stray into those bits, I think you might, you start losing the muscle meat bit of it. And muscle meat's expensive, it's sold to humans, and we buy all the rest. And so I wonder about the evolutionary need for muscle meat and how much muscle meat they need, but I bet you they can get away with less than— our dogs are eating a luxurious diet at the moment, there's no doubt, and this crisis is highlighting how ridiculously cheap our meat chain is because we've been growing chickens on corn and cattle now on wheat and corn, stall-fed in horrific circumstances, and now it's coming to light that that is actually not the safest way. In Ireland and Britain, we've got less of an issue because we've got grass-fed cows and most of their feeding is done on that. I don't know how much, if they're finished on grain. But so anyway, to Brian's point, yes, the prices are going to go up. I think you'll still be able to get okay price meat. I think fish will still be okay, hopefully venison. We've got so much deer walking around Ireland and Britain, and you just— besides the Scots, there's nobody really making a business out of it. And then the other thing was that— and this is a bit of a, um, this is going to be a hairy one— but, uh, if I had 2 or 3 German Shepherds and I was being forced to jump to dry food, before I make that leap, I would say, well, if before I feed 50-60% rapidly digested terrible carbohydrates in the form of wheat and corn, why wouldn't you add in a bit of porridge, 10-20% of the diet? Now, do dogs need carbohydrates? Ben, I know, Ben, I'm going to get the fiercest resistance from you. If you have tried all the avenues and you've got your freezer and you're buying 10 kg of chicken gizzards and you're buying as many hearts as you can and the cheaper— all that meat is going to go up because everyone's doing the same thing you are. If you had to put in 10 or 20% carbs, I would say look, from an evolutionary standpoint, we know dogs have taken tiny steps towards carbohydrates, just tiny, tiny steps, but they have taken them nonetheless and they have been on the menu to some part. And if they're on the menu a little bit for your dog, it is not the end of the world. But as Bren said, as you move towards that end of the ladder, are you actually saving money but feeding disease? And that is the way up because I don't believe there's any problem with 10% carbs. But then when you start thinking 10% carbs, okay, it might be 20%, 30% carbs, which is actually a hell of a lot of carbs. But if you're getting 60%—
Yeah, Conor, what about just using green veg that you can grow in your allotment? You can, you can buy cheaply when it's you know, out of date in the supermarket.
Oh, I can feel a whole fiber thing coming on. I've been listening to you guys. I know what you're going to say.
Yeah, because I'm freaked out a bit. I'm freaked out about too much fiber. I think too much fiber, even if you break it down as much as you can by cooking it, imagine putting in the food processor is not enough. You've still got a quadrillion cells of, you know, completely intact there. But if you cook it and break down that fiber, even if you do that, you are adding a lot of fiber into the intestines. It will throw out the good flora, I believe. It'll change the passage of digester, I think it'll affect digestion, and I think I would— I personally would rather go an extra 10. Okay, I'm going to up my veg, I mean, I bloody will, of course I will, but I'll also be upping my carbs as well if I'm smashed broke. Before, I would do anything before I feed dry food, guys. This is— these are like the very last step before I fall off the cliff, you know.
Yeah, so I mean, my personal feeling is, I mean, I say to people, if they're going to eat well and they want to eat Chicken, buy an entire organic chicken, take the breast off and the legs. That usually will cost you the same amount as the whole chicken, and yet you've got the wings and all of the rest of the body left for the dog as an organic chicken without even looking at the yellow label. Really interesting point that you raised about undercooked pork last week, Conor, and you were talking about various bacterial diseases and concerns with those. But actually we're in the same realms with what you're doing when you're buying those yellow label stuff. And actually, when we look at how dogs deal with some of those bacteria differently to ourselves, okay, then they should be able to cope with certain bacteria. And I would accept that they will go there. I would not want to be feeding a lot of green stuff to my dogs, and I'm talking about green meat here, okay, rather than eating out of the veg. But I certainly will accept that my dogs will cope with them. I love the way that the New Zealanders do this. They deal with it by feeding a lot more things like possum and the sort of the rabbit population that they need to keep under control. So they will actually send out people hunting, you know, legitimately trying to deplete the population of pests that are out there depleting crops, etc. And actually using those as appropriate dog food. And I think if we can start to look at that, you know, the gray squirrel population, which, you know, causes massive damage to woodland and forestry, um, you know, starts to encroach onto the red squirrel population, which is being massively got at by, uh, the gray squirrel population. Just things like that. I mean, Cor, these little ground squirrels, which I thought were brilliant. So did you know one really useful fact, and I've got to slip this in here, yeah, one of biggest causes of hospitalization in Canada out of all of the wildlife, what do you think it is?
Ground squirrels.
It is literally because it's illegal to feed in the national parks any wildlife. They just do not want you to do that because elk can be really dangerous at this time of year. They can literally— I mean, these animals, you're stood there and they are you know, 6 feet tall at the shoulder, you know, these big elk. And you can imagine the damage they could— and what they do is they come into the towns, um, just to— as they give birth, because the predators aren't so prevalent in the town. So they come into the towns, graze on people's lawns and stuff to have their young. And what you end up with is, you know, these mums that are trying to keep all of the people away from— yeah, it's just like crazy. Because there's all these tourists taking pictures. So there's big signs saying, stay away from the elk and the moose. But literally, so it's illegal to feed, but people think that these squirrels, which is the one animal that it's not illegal to hunt in the national parks, okay, are so cute and they will lean down and they'll try and feed them. And what do those squirrels do? They don't just come and eat the peanut. They come and chomp on the finger of the people that are trying to feed them. So it's absolutely a no-no. Yeah, the most, most people end up in hospital usually on antibiotics and having a tetanus shot is from ground squirrels.
Oh my God. So you're saying shoot the squirrels.
Shoot the squirrels, feed them to the dog. Okay. Sorry, I've probably upset loads of people out there that just love fluffy creatures.
People are highlighting tripe. Yeah, guys, we have a huge amount of cattle here in Ireland and Britain where we are a cattle nation. And we have huge amounts of tripe, and we still export huge amounts of our tripe, particularly Ireland, to Eastern Europe and Russia. Okay, so that's where most of the Europe— most of the tripe goes from in Ireland. We've got an embargo on green tripe. We don't— we're not— we don't permit it. Oh, that's only permitted in the UK. So yes, something like tripe would be a wonderful source of protein. No, it would totally go there before everything else. Tripe would be great even if it's washed tripe. People call it bleached tripe. Still, no bleach is used in the human food chain, guys. They use warm water sometimes to get rid of the green goo off it, sometimes hydrogen peroxide. But if it's safe for humans to eat, believe me, it's safe for your dog. And that's what I think about yellow packet meat.
In this country, they don't use bleach in this country.
In this country, okay, that's a fair statement.
Yeah, you've got to remember what America does to all of their chickens.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a part of it.
Not all, no, that was too much of a sweeping statement.
Yeah, a lot. Actually, guys, we didn't say at the start, we are on patreon.com/rawpetmedics and Most of the questions, although we have got hardly any of them, are put to us through Patreon. So people are asking on my page there the last few days, where do you ask questions? You ask them on Patreon and we'll get to them there. If they come up in the, in the side here, we keep an eye on them too. But on patreon.com/rawpetmedics, if you have the price of a cup of coffee or a pint, we deeply appreciate it. It does help us to prepare for all the other nights, and we have a cool guest coming up next week actually. Should I announce this guy now and just tell people? We just save it to the end, or We've got this great vet, Mark Roberts, coming up, and he is fantastic. He knows his way around pancreatitis. He was the one that highlighted it to, certainly to me, 4 years ago in a conference. And raw feeding cats at the moment, or one of his papers, and he's also raw feeding his sled dogs. And so this guy knows a lot about sporting dogs. For all the sporty people out there, he will be, he's going to be a source of solid information. So he's next week. But again, this is all possible through patreon.com/RAWPETMEDICS. Nick, did you have a question? You had a question you were dying to get out there at the start.
I do, yeah, thank you. So Karen Reed, she's a great supporter of the Raw Pet Medics, and she has asked the question. She's got an older dog, he's 15 years old, and she is looking at what is our top recommendations for helping with joint pain, but what are the least toxic for liver and kidney function? So how do we support using either least worst drugs or best holistic approaches? You got any thoughts there? I've got a few products just here to flash at you. In fact, why don't I do that now and then it gives you a few minutes to have think. So that one there is Boswellia complex, which I find is really useful. Boswellia is frankincense. It's a natural anti-inflammatory. It's good for IBD disease. But it's very strong on— for arthritis. If I ever go running and I jar my joints, things like that, I will use Boswellia. So it's a great, super safe and really, really good to use. Another one that I use here is called Salagesic, and that sounds like it is a drug, but it's not. It's white willow, so it contains a salicylate. It contains an aspirin, but it doesn't muck up your gut. In fact, it's very good for using with gastric ulceration. You can use it. It's, it's an anti-inflammatory.
You can use it. Finally, are they homeopathic?
No, they're not.
They're herbal.
They're herbs. Yeah. And then the last one that I find— this is, this is antenol. Is that the right way around for you, or—
yeah, yeah, that looks good.
Oh, it is? Okay. Antenol looks the wrong way around to me. Um, so it's called antenol. It is the extract of fish oil, and I will use it even with dogs on fish oil, the tiny little capsules. And it is— when it works, it's miraculous. Nothing is a panacea, but that is— I find that's a game changer in many, in many dogs.
Is this like pure EPA/DHA? Is it like a concentration of that?
No, it's, it's a, it's a— are you sure that's not backwards?
No, it's—
I'm sure you guys—
yeah, I can see.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay. All right. Okay. That's, that's what's in it. Okay.
It's no mussel powder.
Basically, it's about as clear as mud. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's the, it's the, it's an extract from fish oil. So it's the— they found a molecule that they seem— that seems to be very influential. And it's not EPA or DHA. It's something else. What's it called? PCSO524. Someone was having a good day when they named that stuff. So it contains this molecule which seems to be very anti-inflammatory, and so it's great. It's not expensive, it's great to use. So that would be my 3. What about you guys? Where would you go?
What's that? PCSO4?
No, it's PCSO-524, a unique patented marine lipid concentrate for the support of the metabolism of joints, blah blah.
I thought somebody had just written, uh, polychondroitin sulfate and just done PC and then sulfate. No, there's a 5-2 in front of that. No, that's fine.
It'll be 52 tablets in the pack. Yeah, it's easy, it's easy naming products. What about you, Ben? Where are you on the product front? Is there— can you talk to us a little bit about the meds that you might be able to use in arthritis if you go past herbal approach?
Least worst pharmaceuticals.
Least worst pharmaceuticals, you'll be the man for that.
Pharmaceuticals, wow, okay, look, there's so many of the the non-steroidal anti-inflammatories have moved now away from all of the bad carprofens and the, which was Zenacarp, and, you know, most people still, some vets are giving that out, but, you know, the phenylbutazones and things like that and aspirins that would cause almost immediate gastric bleeding as soon as they're put in, but they also cause other organ issues. We've sort of moved on to ones which are not metabolized through the kidneys now. So you'll have, rather than preferential, you'll have specifics for the various anti-inflammatories. It's even moved beyond that. And I think, you know, have a conversation with your vet if you are being given conventional treatment, and only very few of you are because I think so many of you are switched on to using supplements and things like that.
First.
But if you are having that conversation, at least with the vet, and say, look, where are we at with what is the prostaglandin specificity for this drug? Are we actually using things which are thromboxane-specific now instead? You know, and they're big long words, but ultimately it gets the vet thinking about, okay, they want something that's not just the standard first line off the shelf and has a risk of side effects. I think there are so many antibody options now for arthritis, which is just about pain relief. There are some caveats to that. I wouldn't say that they are risk-free because some of them will interfere with nerve growth factor influencing and things like that. So you just need to be aware of that for chronic injured cases, but they seem to be very good for pain relief. And certainly because they are a standard protein antibody, they're metabolized in a normal way. They don't go through cell metabolism, so you're not worrying about, you know, the drugs affecting liver and kidneys in anywhere near the same way.
How do they get broken down if they don't bother the liver and kidneys?
So how does your— so your antibodies every day of your life are being produced and recycled. And, you know, you're constant, you know, for you to have an antibody titer against any of your viruses, including COVID, you're going to have— are we going to be struck off now that I said that word?
Not anymore.
Just, but from a point of view, you're going to keep an antibody level going on. That's not just there because that protein spat out and stays in your circulation. Constantly that protein is being recycled and broken down, but it's not an abnormal pathway that's going to require, you know, a toxicity to any particular cell. So you're not needing to, you know, worry about like paracetamol, for instance. We know if you start to give metronidazole at the same time and phenol— sorry, phenobarb for seizures, you know, all broken down through a similar pathway, suddenly build up toxicity in the liver. Okay, you're not going to get that because this is a normal protein recycling pathway.
That's cool.
Very, very interesting. Yeah, you know, if you're in Canada or the States, oh my God, the number of antibody therapies that are sold over the counter to humans. Okay, for the counter injection. Yeah, for all sorts of stuff from IBD to, you know, to skin disease to, you know, chronic arthritis. Yeah, any, any of the autoimmune diseases pretty much will have an antibody therapy now for them, and they're just advertised as a constant stream.
So I heard, I heard Florida were giving free monoclonal antibodies out to, for during COVID To much success because there's good science behind that, particularly in the oldies. Even in late stage, monoclonal was proven very effective. They were giving it out for free until the supply was chopped off. So what if you had to, if you had to, let's say Karen's dog is, you know, Newt's 15 now at this stage, he's doing very well, he's got laryngeal paralysis, so she's going to the vet. Give me 2 drugs that you would put into the dog. Put your hat on something.
Oh, well, I'm, I'm just saying she's given every single supplement you can think of. That's all been done from CBD, everything else. And I've got to resort to two conventional drugs. And I'm just putting that caveat out there because otherwise, yeah, that's putting me on the spot because I would never just give two drugs. And I want everybody to be clear about that. No, and I can't name trade names because that's against Royal College rules. So we're going to have to say I would probably be looking at one of the monoclonal antibodies. Okay. And assessing that. And honestly, I would probably be looking around one of the Coxib, which is one of the specific prostaglandin 2 drugs, which will effectively take out those, but only as and when it absolutely needs it.
Okay.
And I would say I would try and minimize that amount of drug, okay? Yeah. Wherever possible. And some of these are good for an initial trial so that dogs will say, okay, it's in this amount of pain, you know, this lameness, is it down to pain or is it down to physical issues? And sometimes just giving them a 7-day trial, and if they are 10/10 better, okay, then, you know, okay, whatever we give with complementary medicine needs to attain that level of pain relief to be a satisfactory result for that dog, whether it be acupuncture, whether it be, you know, any other complementary medicine. But at least it knows that, you know, that actually you should be able to unwind the pain enough to get it back to that level. If it makes no effect—
I've got a couple of thoughts here.
And if it makes no effect whatsoever, then I would just say, look, please get it x-rayed, make sure there's no other physical issue going on, make sure the diagnosis is right, that this is just arthritis and it's not got, you know, an infection of the joint or some other issue that's going on with a polyarthritis, no immune-mediated condition, nothing else more dramatic. It may have a small fracture that they've just not being able to see, and it needs those X-rays. Okay, so please, yeah, just think hard. So, Nick, go on, you've got some other thoughts.
Cool. Yeah, I've got a few. I'm not sure, I think these are the generics. Have a chat with your vet about gabapentin, about amantadine, and about pregabalin. Amantadine, gabapentin's used a lot these days, too much. Possibly. Yeah, pregabalin people don't talk about very much, but amantadine is very rarely spoken about, and these can be useful.
Just as a word to the wise, just going on about the gabapentin, if you're using CBD, it should be acting in the same way as gabapentin, and it uses the same pathway for metabolism. So please be really cautious that you're talking to your vet that knows about CBD and gabapentin.
Yeah, interesting.
Good, good, good, good, good, good. Sally, let's have a look. Sally Corticas, please keep the book recommendations for human medicine. They have helped my family with one reversing prediabetes. Boys, we're treating— we are responsible for this. My top recommendation would be Spoon Fed by Tim Spector. Yeah, what would be your top human medicine book be, Brady?
That Deep Nutrition rocked my world, but I think it's hard going if you are, if you're a nerd for this stuff and you're happy to delay your walk by hours. I mean, every 5 seconds you have to stop. This book by Catherine Shanahan, Deep Nutrition, is unreal. It really shook me, and had I read it before I released my book, I would have been very, very concerned. So I think another book, for a slightly more digestible book, I think would be Nick's, another one Nick's, The Omnivore's Dilemma. I think that was just a lovely simple introduction to how absolutely insane the meat, the food chain is, and where we are today. So I thought that was very effective for me, I listened to that. If you're sticking to food and health and that kind of stuff, that's a nice little introduction to it. Like, oh, all is not well in the old food chain. So, um, yeah, if you wanted to go to the health side of things, Deep Nutrition for me, um, got me back eating meat after 10 years. So that's how effective that was.
Amazing.
Yeah.
And, and Brent, very finally, I'm gonna have to run fairly soon, guys.
So just your thoughts, your favorite, uh, read, read, um, oh yeah, yeah, I would probably go along, you know, there's, there's these, The Longevity Paradox, I think, um, sort of follows Jason Fung's stuff as well, uh, a lot. So, you know, I think those would be a couple because I agree entirely with the ones that you've talked about already. So I'm looking at two others that I could maybe just add in to those. There's so many I've got that I would love to go into. I love some of the stuff about microbiome and gut health and leaky gut that's going on as well out there. So yeah, just so much.
Can I make a note? Nikki Mack is here, okay, of DCM fame, and brought us that beautiful survey that got published as well. So Nikki's a legend, and Nikki says, do we need to talk about DCM again? Can you believe that this dilated cardiomyopathy, guys? I'm sorry if you don't know what it is. We don't have time to kind of get into the background of it all, but there was all this nonsense, grain-free causes DCM, pretty much any, you know, any dry kibble could cause it. There was a big recrimination, and the FDA got involved and everything, and it was all A big load of bullshit, to be honest with you. A big hullabaloo over 600 cases. Anyway, do you know that there is now a thing online, because I'm getting the questions and we're seeing it coming out of vets, that you are to add grain now to not only dry pet food but to raw dog food to protect against DCM? Because the vets, because they're so— what you see, grain-free pet foods causes DCM, even though 1% of pets get DCM and most of them are dry fed, which is 900,000 American dogs every year, and these 600 cases. So grain-free pet food causes it, so adding grain must protect against the DCM. So now vets— I've been asked this question, how much grain? I was doing a behavioral talk for Judy Morgan, and one of the questions was, how much grain do I add in to protect against DCM? And it's like, I got so confused. I saw Nikki Cummings in on it, who's the DCM queen, and I said, Nikki, what is this? What is it about? She goes, honestly, they think because of grain-free caused us that adding grain— that's how insane it has gotten.
I thought we dealt with this years ago. You know, grain doesn't have taurine in. Just stop it.
Yeah, it's just, it's so pure nonsense. Look, before you go, Nick, before you go, uh, JC asked us on Patreon, um, the, uh, she goes, um, supplements for kids. Does— we talk about supplements for dogs all the time. Did any of you supplement your kids' diets? Please answer that before you go.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. My kids will eat fish oil capsules. We use the Higher Nature fish oil capsules. They will eat them like sweeties at breakfast. Yeah. And they'll crunch them. Yeah. And we haven't forced them or beaten them to make them do that. Okay. They just, they just love them.
Okay.
So that's number one. Number two, during the winter, we give a bit of a good vitamin D supplement. Supplements because none of us have got enough vitamin D. That's me. What about you? What about you, Brady? You've got young ones.
Nothing. I don't, I don't give any supplements. I think, uh, you know, I, I was getting a bit of echinacea and I certainly was given a bit of vitamin D, uh, at the start. And my plan was to keep going with that, but, uh, you know, uh, I didn't. I'm just haphazard. And so, uh, they got a bit of echinacea during winter here and there, uh, and we had a baby vitamin D which the baby was getting, but she's 1.5 now. But now, as I look at the lack of veg in Holly's diet, you know, she is just, you know, she's 4 years old. She's starting to understand that there's all sorts of food out there and she can, she can be very willful, if you can believe it. My child's willful. So I know I'm not, but I'm going to take whatever you say, guys, and I'm going to, I'm going to learn from the experience. What about you, Brent? Ever supplement the kids back in the day?
So what have I given to my children? Very little other than where I felt I could nutritionally change them. And then they went to nursery and nursery just totally corrupted them.
Yeah.
I was like, oh my God, don't send your kids to nursery. It's the worst place. They learn from every other child. They want the same as every other child. And that's like, you know, oh yeah. They were so good. They used to eat their raw veg. They used to do all of the things and we took them to nursery and Yeah, that just changed everything. And then my youngest went to nursery fairly early on because the eldest was already there. Oh, just, yeah, why, why? But what I would say is something called dimethylglycine as a something for if they got a viral cold, if they got any sort of, you know, you could just see their immune system dip. And, you know, certainly if there's any sort of signs of even bacterial infection, I've just found it really, really useful. Stuff going around school, you know, you just sort of like something to give them to help their immune systems. Much safer than, you know, risking over-supplementation with things like vitamin D or calcium, things like that, which can just totally wreck their limbs. So I hope they all grow up with straight limbs. Conor, that you're—
Yeah, I know, no way. But yes, the fish oil thing, I'm going to take that to heart. One of the fish oils that I really like at the moment is the phytoplankton is now coming online in a big way. And so the vegan veg phytoplankton oil is looking really cool. They've got loads of EPA, which phytoplankton beforehand could not really produce a hell of a lot of. They always had loads of DHA and a tiny bit of EPA. You actually want more of that. Anyway, so this vegan fish oil, which doesn't taste fishy I think I'm going to bring it into the house and I'm going to start forcing it down the kids' necks.
Never force, never force. Say how lovely it is, you eat it, you're dirty.
I've tried all that, Brent. She sees me panicking and the sweat rolling down my face.
There's a really great company, a company called Pet Plus, and they do their associate for pets. They're associated with a company called Juice Plus, and they— that was one thing that I did find my kids voluntarily took as a healthy— and they were gelatinized, so they made them look like fruit jellies, but they had the antioxidants and everything packed into each and every one. Yeah, I did have to— you have to stop them eating too many.
I saw them actually. I saw the jellied antioxidants in the pharmacy and I looked at them with suspicion because they were sitting beside various other candy bars that they were selling there. And I thought, maybe not a bad idea, a nutritional local honey-based kind of jelly. Lucy Killick, is that the vegan oil that we were talking about? Yes, it is. Patricia Gatton put me onto this vegan oil. Norsan also does a great fish oil, but it tastes quite fishy. I've already bought it and it's quite fishy anyway.
So how vegan is krill?
Uh, krill is it?
Is it?
Is it an animal? It's an animal plant. All right, it has chlorophyll. Oh, it's, uh, all right. No, krill doesn't. Krill doesn't. Phytoplankton has chlorophyll, but it's actually an animal, isn't it?
Oh, so you are on phytoplankton?
Is that what you're talking about? Grown in tubes in Portugal. Unbelievable. You should see the videos of these farms, guys. Cyan and green and red and blue all going out through the desert. But now they've isolated two species that produce lots of EPA and they can mix them and now they can produce this veg oil. This one on— it's just a complete— it's amazing.
And out there for everybody, you know, please, if you find that your product is made in Vietnam or China, it's grown in clay pits which have high amounts of arsenic and other things that seem to contaminate those products. So please, if you're getting powdered versions of these and are coming from those particular countries, but certainly from the Far East, double-check. You know, this is your due diligence for your pets and yourselves and your kids, you know, just to make sure what other contaminants may be in the products.
EU-based, it's grown in glass tubes. Outside of that, it's grown in open pits. And the analysis of spirulina, particularly is worrying, very worrying. It's like, I don't really worry too much about heavy metal stuff, but that's a heavy metal issue. So anyway, look guys, Nick, and where this has already gone on, so guys, that was great. Patreon.com/rawpetmedics, and if you can, the price of a cup of tea is fantastic. We really appreciate it each month. If you can, great. If you can't, not to worry, we're going to be here anyway. Next week we are back with Mark Roberts. Trust me guys, you're going to absolutely love this guy. He's a raw food fiend and he is highly learned. Great, great vet. You're gonna love him. So, uh, he's here back same time next week.
That is brilliant.
Fantastic. Fantastic.
