RawSafe Tuesday night live: The Realty of UHPF Labelling

Thanks for giving me that.

Hello everybody, we've just dropped a bombshell on Paul Brady.

Yeah, yeah, that's right, we're going to Canada actually. We'll, we'll send you some photos from that really posh hotel that Bren was at.

Are you actually going to Canada?

No, not at all.

All right, where are you going, Nick? Tell us all.

We are going down to sunny St. Ives, and on Sunday and Monday it's going to be 34 and 35 degrees, and we are camping with children.

Oh man, so we've got a restaurant booked at the weekend. Oh, okay. Yeah, some people have had to cry off. You could join us.

Where are you?

One of Rick Stein's specials. Dog-friendly.

Padstow.

Padstow?

Oh no, I'm not coming all the way up to Padstow from St Ives. It's 4 hours to get there. Anyway, are you well?

Every time someone says St Ives, I remember that Monty Python sketch. St Ives. As he was writing No, was he dying? He could be saying, 'Saint Ives,' you know. Remember? Anyway, they're trying to wrap up. Oh my God, Holy Grail! Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where, um, the man from the Beatles, George Harrison, was funding the whole movie, but they ran out of cash at the end. And so they had this big fight scene, and then the cops just came up and just broke it up. Oh my God, it's so funny. Oh, you've got— you are in for it. Mind you, a guy that doesn't like The Elf, I doubt all your, your taste in movies now. So Well, the Monty Python Holy Grail, oh lad, so good. But yeah, so how are we getting on?

Okay, well, there you go, Nick.

I liked your post there, Nick, where you were talking about Lungworm this week and you were sharing that ultra scary poster that's on the London Underground.

Shall I, shall I show it? Yes. Oh yeah, shall I show it?

Go for it.

Let me see, we'll go to Facebook Live.

And the lady with the slugs crawling up her face.

Yeah.

Yes, that was it. Yeah, she's a minister or a politician. Look how scary that is. Long worm. Yeah, she's a politician of some fashion in England, isn't she?

So Conor, you were saying that those stats are accurate but somewhat misleading. Do you want to tell everyone about that?

A guy on my page there just emailed Alanco, the makers of the lungworm treatment, go figure, and they had 3,000, 2,999, 2,997 cases, 3,000 cases of lungworm. And we thought, wow, and you correctly said, I wonder how many years that was over. So this guy Dan emails the company and they said from 2005 to 2020. And I was thinking, oh, okay, what's that, 30 cases a year, whatever. Now that's a self-reporting 300 cases, that's a self-reporting thing, I get it. It's not— I'm sure there's probably more of that. My point was it's still a tiny amount in a nation of 10 million dogs, and that's the best you can come up with, 300 cases a year? And then Pampered Pooches, so my question to you guys, 14 million, 14 million, 14 since COVID it's gone up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's only 2 years ago it was 10 million. I just checked on Google before I wrote the piece. Wow, what? So my question to you was that there was like say 300 cases a year of lungworm. There's probably more than that. I'm sure if you looked into the data there's more than that. I don't care, whatever it was, 1,000, doesn't matter. But the point is, in these pampered pooches that might get lungworm— I'm not talking about the collies that are chained up in a barn, working collies that some guy doesn't see for 2, 3 days— pampered pooches, is there— how many of those cases would you expect a dog to die? Of a lungworm infection? I can't find hardly any evidence of it online.

I think they can really, yeah, if they get the full-blown lungworm and they start to bleed, I believe it's 45% is the quoted figure, but how many dogs will get to that stage because that's fairly advanced I'd have thought. Yeah, yeah, but that's usually when it's spotted by most people. Is when they start to bleed, and a lot of vets will start to test for it. But yeah, that 2,000— actually, it was misquoted. I think you thought it was 900. It's actually 867 in the papers that are written from 2005 through 2019 or '18. It was one of those. And then it was written up in January this year. But the, you know, 100 cases, who's that? Between friends over 15 years, you know, I'm— oh my God, vanishing swap.

Tell me, just so people Well, what are the symptoms, Brendon? Like, would dogs not be coughing and exploding before they're bleeding out their nose? Is that not like— is there not prelim kind of symptoms for the dog?

So yeah, a low-grade chronic cough is something to be suspicious of many lungworm infections. There's more than one, okay? Chronosoma vulpis is probably more common because it's been around for longer within the fox population of the UK. And dogs, we know what dogs are like, they eat fox muck, you know, they're quite happy to do that. And so I seen quite a few positives for crenosoma. Haven't seen any Angelus strongylus vesorum that are endemic to our region in the north, although the papers quote it as now being widespread across the UK. But I would absolutely back you up, and there's a couple of other people have commented online with actually, if you look at 2,600 dogs or 800 dogs a year, that's a rare disease. Okay, out of 14 million. If you're talking about 2,800+ dogs over from 2005 to 2020, okay, even, you know, just to round the figures up, so 15 years, that's a really rare disease. And actually, even if you just divided it over 10 years, we did a little article on leptospirosis, which was running at about 8 in a million, so that's roughly 210 cases a year. Okay, so you're talking in the same ballpark.

Yeah, it's ridiculous, it's like piano, piano on the head kind of material, like it's just ridiculous.

So you might go, how worrying can it truly be, you know, for, you know, across the whole population?

I would just say, guys, I get quite a lot of people coming to me really, really panicked because they have diagnosed somebody, either the vet or worm count or somebody has diagnosed Craniosoma, which is fox lungworm. And I think it's really important to emphasize that the French lungworm, Angiostrongylus, is potentially nasty and you need to get that fixed fairly pronto. But the fox lungworm is the opposite. It is, it is a self-limiting infection because the worm is so specific to foxes that it can only get halfway through its life cycle within the dog. And So basically it'll just turn into a bit of a tickle in the trachea at the very, very worst and will not give you bleeding or, you know, heart disease or lung disease or anything like that. And you can fix them both with just a course of Panacur. So don't panic about fox lungworm. Do do something about it, but don't panic about it. And if you've got the other one, the nasty one, see your vet pronto.

I think it's tempting to think that if it's a slogan snail phenomenon, I am tempted to say that dry-fed dogs, protein deficient, starved of protein, will seek out strange bits and pieces. I don't see dogs eating slugs and snails. I'm sure it happens.

You know, there's papers out there now, there's papers out there now, Conor, that even talk about tidy up your dog toys because if a slug or snail crawls across the toy and then your dog goes and licks it, they might pick up Yeah, I couldn't believe what I was reading, you know, anything. So if you leave your dog bowls outside and the slugs and snails go through them, they talk about you must wash them down and sterilize them because there's a risk. There's a risk. We're back to this risk word. Okay. That they could pass larval stages onto your dog from that mucus.

And you're like, possible. It is scientifically possible in the realm of possibility that it might not. It's not happening, but it might. And look, it's just— Jesus, so annoying. I hate talking about these.

But you have to— they have to actually eat— they have to eat slugs and snails in order to get the lungworm.

Oh, okay. It's not like— yeah, it's not just—

and frogs apparently are also another intermediate host because they eat lots of slugs and snails.

Okay, so they have to eat them, but the slime, you know, that's pushing it a little bit.

That's not nice. No, I can't imagine.

It's only because I think in the articles they actually found the larvae, larval stages in the slime of slugs, and therefore they made that sort of jump to say therefore we know where slugs and snails go, and therefore, you know, if there's larval stages, there's a possibility they're going to take them aboard and then they'll get infected. And yeah, anyway, the dog has an immune system that if it's healthy is going to take out those larval stages because it doesn't want things invading its body.

Yes, you have a system set up for that.

And if you're doing fecal egg counts on a regular basis, you'll— and you know, if you're really worried, you can do them every month because it takes at least a month for the worm to get into the dog and then through the bloodstream and into the lungs. Okay, so it's at least a month, so 1 to 3 or 4 months for it to do that. So if you're doing regular worm counts you're going to know exactly what the problem is before you get symptoms. So I think that's a really good reason to do fecal egg counting.

Yeah. And is it the same process, a worm count? Is it not a slightly different process when you're looking for lungworm?

They do something called a Baermann's technique where they effectively soak inside a muslin bag the feces and allow the larvae to come out and float onto the solution, and then they take the larvae out because they're really active. So angiostrongylus are very active. Okay, and wriggle like crazy on the slide if they're done fresh. Gross. And the crenosoma is a little bit more lethargic, as well as there's a little kink in the angiostrongylus tail rather than the crenosoma. So there's ways of differentiating those. Yeah, just forget that, you don't need to know it, but it's really useful.

Have either of you lost a dog to lungworm?

No, not in practice, not for me personally, thankfully. As I say, I'm up in the north, well away from problem. You know, I've often seen people talk about their dogs being positive. I've had people talk to me over the phone, they've rung me like Nick in a bit of a panic saying, you know, their dog's, you know, been diagnosed with this. Remember, there is a blood test and some of those aren't 100%, so there are some false positives in some of those. And also, if somebody is looking at the larval stage, they also need to be fairly skilled to see the notch and the kink that's in that tail and recognise Angelostrongylus versus other lungworms. So Oslarsozlaryi I haven't mentioned yet, but carried by cattle, and so if they eat lots of dung, they may pick up some of those. And then there's the fox one, the Cranisoma, to differentiate between But realistically, there is a lot of people out there that as soon as the dog has a nosebleed, an assumption is made that they are going to have lungworm, and then they treat them with an anti-worm treatment for lungworm, and then they tick it down as that's a positive case and without any controls. So just be careful. Some of those reports on some of the companies that make the product are not looked into any more than a person has dialed into the website and said, I saw a case of lungworm.

I'm struggling to believe they'd be so flippant, Brian. My God. So yeah, no doubt that's the case. Look, guys, patreon.com/rawpetmedics, that's where you'll find us. Appreciate the price of a cup of tea or even a beer here if you'd like. Those sort of monthly donations really, really help us out, and thanks very much to everyone that's donating. It's great if you can afford it. If you can't, no sweat, we'll always be here.

Yeah, I just got some exciting news.

I'm just going to clap, guys, because I forgot to switch my recorder on, so I'm going to get killed by Pete. Sorry, Pete. Sorry, Pete. Sorry.

You're just going to undo my exciting news. So the exciting news is, especially because of how positive last week was about cats, I get to glorify these beasts. And we have got some brilliant guests coming on with great cat knowledge. Julianne, you met last week. If you've not watched the podcast, you should go back and watch it, okay, right now. If you the live. If you have also possibly gone on the RFVS website, we've got a future president of the RFVS also joining us, Amaia Espinola, who's currently working out in Spain, but she does— she's very much a fel vet, so feline vet out there, just concentrates on cats. So she's joining me on the 22nd of of July. We're hoping to do that. Now, I'm officially like Nick down in Cornwall, but I'm going to see if I can get the powers that be to give me some Wi-Fi down there so that we can actually do that podcast, which looks like it's sorted. So it's going to be great. And that will be a great thanks also to another great Raw Feeder, Maudie, who I'm going to call in on and hopefully have a great weekend and also do some podcasting.

Are you going to see Maudie on your way down? Because I'm going to go and see Charlie on our way back on the Friday. Yeah, on Friday I'm going to go and have coffee with him.

I think you go on the way down and we come on the way back. She's trying to keep us apart for something.

Yeah, obviously.

I don't know why. I think she was worried about her wine cellar.

Yes, absolutely. Look guys, we better get to the point here.

Yeah, let's get cracking.

We're supposed to be talking about pet food labels and we're 15 minutes in. So who wants to, who wants to start? Where are we starting?

I'd like to start about what, what, what's not on the label. And I'll tell you what's not on the label: the food miles. They say that in, in, in the States, processed food has usually got about 1,500 food miles on it because of all the various ingredients traveling. So that's one thing that will never be on the label. Uh, the other thing is that even if they say that it's grass-fed. There's actually— I have been reliably informed that there's actually a difference between grass-fed and pasture-fed, because grass-fed could just be one or two species in the field, whereas pasture-fed, you know, the average pasture is going to have 27 species of grasses and plants and herbs and what have you. So pasture-fed Guys, is the, is the future. Um, so that's, that's it. The other thing that I was wanting to say was that, uh, if a processor uses an ingredient that has been processed before it got to them for making up into the kibble— meat and, or bone, or meat and bone meal, for example— they don't have to put the ingredients of whatever that the manufacturers put into those, those bone meals. Okay, so there could be, there could be all sorts, you know. So, uh, the other thing is that they've, they've done studies in the States and they found that dogs taking, uh, kibble food can be up to 32 times more glyphosate in their blood than in raw-fed dogs. And that's mainly because of the glyphosate in the grains, and that won't be on the label. And also we might want to talk— I'm happy to have a little chat about all these things, but I'm sure you've got amazing things to bring to bear— is the packaging will bleed nasties into the kibble because the kibble tends to be quite greasy. And so there will be a certain amount of bleed. And obviously the older it is and the warmer the environment that it's been in, you're going to get a bleeding of phthalates and BPAs and what have you. So this is a reason to be careful about finding BPA-free plastic.

Yeah, that's noted in a cat study on hypothyroidism that we talked about last year when we talked about feline hypothyroidism, which we'll touch again on. But yeah, because you remember a lot of the canned foods, they're cooked in the can. So not only did they then go, we're not, you know, rather than contaminating it with the metals, we're going to keep it fresher by lining the can with a plastic And then they stick the food in and then they cook the food in that can heated up with all of those plastics. What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah.

And so yeah, absolutely, those are the sort of things that are never mentioned. Similarly, my issue with some of the drugs, they give a 28-day withdrawal. So for animals that are treated, you're absolutely thinking great, but actually they look at the general concentrations and accept that below a certain parts per million is acceptable for those drugs to come through into the system. Actually, we know that some of those drugs can be active, and Conor, you talked about this just before the weekend, about chemicals that can be active at parts per billion. He's wondering where I'm going to go with this, but, you know, from a point of view of how those can affect the wildlife in our environment and then how they could actually affect our pets if they— those drugs are in there. And so one of those drugs that I always worry about is the delousing treatment of salmon, which is usually an organophosphate, okay, that they use.

Really?

Still?

You know, and that's the most effective way of delousing salmon. And where does that love to sit? It loves to sit in that fat of the salmon.

It does.

Yeah.

What do we then use that fat for? Our lovely salmon oil, which is one of the reasons I never want to use farmed salmon oil.

So you're saying they're using OPs in salmon even to this day, even though they banned them 25 years ago in general veterinary use?

They banned them for dipping sheep.

Yeah, but also applications, new down top and things like that.

They didn't ban them from all treatments.

Wow, well, they should do. Yeah, it's quite ridiculous, isn't it?

You know, in a note there to what Nick said, this is from a fabulous book called Feeding Dogs. Scientists have discovered chemicals in commercially available pet foods, kibble, that have detrimental effect on sperm quality in dogs and also negatively affect male-female ratios and litter size over the last 30 years. They also found increased incidence of cryptorchidism in male offspring. What's that, guys? You can tell me in a second.

Testicle inadaptation.

I'll actually tell you.

A condition in which the testicles fail to correctly descend into the scrotum.

The environmental contaminants that are responsible for these effects, most notably DEHP and polychlorinated biphenyl, PCB, were found in dry pet food and the dog's testes, quote, at concentrations reported to perturb reproductive function in the species. Can you believe that? And that's all coming off the packets and lining of the cans that's going into the food. So Nick, you're spot on. And they've— the studies to show that's the case, and that fertility is decreasing in males as a result, and in humans because—

human males as well.

Yeah, it's actually— do you know our bum is getting closer to our scrotum? Your taint is getting shorter and shorter, honestly.

You need to stop wearing those tight pants.

Oh yeah, well, I'm telling you, it's one of the ways you tell the difference between a male and female rat or something.

They used to bind the young children's feet in the Far East to make their feet really small. He just wears budgie smugglers, that's all it is.

But it's not good news for the species when that sort of stuff is happening, and just in like 1 or 2 parts per billion changes the sex of little animals living in the sea and stuff. Like, this stuff is in the food chain, it's in our sea, it's in our seafood, it's in our meat, it's in anything with plastic packets. Now we've got boil-in-the-bag rice in a plastic packet. Like, anyway, talk about stuff that's not impacted.

Okay, we're getting close again. If we're not good, we're going to get taken off air because Conor's going to start talking sex and we can't do that again. Again, be really careful.

It's just like, honestly, I don't understand. We are the only species that are embarrassed about our own bums, you know what I mean? It's like ridiculous that we just like—

I'm not embarrassed about it. I'm just saying there's a, there's a section of the There's a line that we can't talk, we can't talk about willys.

I just don't get it. It's just a normal thing.

We could talk about willys. I was just— there was something else that we're not going to touch on.

Well, you let me know where the line is. We'll have to do a little graph where I know what I can and can't touch on.

So we'll have to have a special signal, you know, like—

So Conor, have you got— have you got a— or Bren, have you got that, the pictures of the the ingredients that we can go through.

Oh, I've got it. Okay, here we go. I'm going to share my screen. I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid.

Come on, he's there for me.

Is he? Oh, okay.

Is he? I thought you were the wrong person. Entire screen, click share.

All right, what we're going to do, guys, is we're going to get up a typical, a typical kibble ingredient list and have a look at that and take you through it.

Okay, Conor, you've got too many shares. Let me—

what about that?

Everyone, there we go.

It's not right, not big enough. Get rid of us.

You can still— right, we're gonna get rid of us. Yeah, we're gonna still be able to speak. You'll hear disembodied voices. Okay, okay, Conor, you're on.

Here you go.

This is your label.

Well, guys, this is a Royal Canin, uh, that's Royal Canin Labrador adult pet food. It's not dissimilar to the, to the puppy pet food, in, in fairness. And this is a good news and bad news story. You know, you can go through these ingredients and slag them off very easily, but there's also some good news, or at least they're feeling the pressure and things are changing in pet food world. Because I never even realized— compare this product to the Labrador product 4 or 5 years ago, the one I used in my actual, in my book. For example, the protein content, check it out down the bottom, that protein content. Can you see my little cursor hovering over the protein? No, probably not. The analytical constituents at the bottom, that protein is 30%. Guys, that is an enviable protein content compared to the usual cereal-based muck that some pet food manufacturers are happy to put out. That would be seen as much, much higher because normally the industry average is 18-20% protein. Most dry pet food companies have been using the minimum amount of protein to get 6-8 dogs through a 6-month test. In a pet food manufacturer's warehouse. So this protein content has jumped up, and if it's not— as it's not like a prescription magic food for an animal that suddenly needs more protein, this is heartening for me that there's more protein in the food. So straight out of the traps, I want to say that's good news. The puppy food is 33%, which is good because when Crogdall looked at these foods about 6 or 8 years ago, the Royal Canin puppy food had 21.7%. protein, which is 0.3% below the legal minimum you can have in a puppy food. So Royal Canin have pulled up their socks here a bit. The question will be, okay, protein is not protein. If I tell you I'm going to give you 30% protein in your dinner and I put a shoe on your plate, you're going to go, oh Jesus, Conor, I was kind of expecting a bit more than that. So what's in this food? First ingredient, maize. That's corn. Okay, what a surprise. That's just, you know, junk filler. Rice, junk filler, high carbohydrate, obesity-inducing pancreatitis-loving. I couldn't support any more of these. These are my opinions, Royal Canin, so this isn't reflective of the actual product itself. But high carbohydrates, it doesn't list the carbohydrate. Nick's talking about things that aren't listed in pet foods. It doesn't tell you the carbohydrate contents. You're not obliged to know it.

Which is pretty sneaky, I think.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, as much sugar.

The main ingredient, and they haven't put the percentage down, you can work it out.

But yeah, here's how you work it out. So you add up all what you have, which is 30 plus 13, 43 plus 7, which is 50. And then you got 4, which is 54. Add in another kind of, you know, 10% for ash, 60. So maybe 40% carbohydrates. That is about 10% carbohydrates less than normal. Normally it's 50 to 60%. This is 40% carbohydrates, ever so slightly better, but still high carbohydrate food for an animal that does not need carbohydrates. So let's get into the more scandalous stuff because this dehydrated beef and pork protein, what do they mean by dehydrated? Well, recently the industry, AFGO, decided that bloody bloggers and the internet was tarnishing meat meal and making it sound bad. You know, bone meal that we spread in the gardens, meat and bone meal to the pet food industry. Now these, they started calling it meat meal, but still we saw through it. We said, lads, meat meal is crap. It's the sludge scraped off the bottom of a renderer's vat. At least if you're a renderers vat in Europe, you've got good quality human-grade meat that went into it. Well, human-grade bone. But in the US, that can be cats and dogs, leftover restaurant food, all sorts of crap, roadkill. So this gray goo is scraped off the bottom, dried, and sent to the pet food companies.

So, including, guys, yeah, Conor, including the plastic ear tags that the cattle will have gone in with. So they're under— and also bags. If somebody rocks up at the rendering yard with 300 chickens in plastic bags, they go into the soup. Okay, just to let you know.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I think it's really important to say that that's, that's the starting point and that happens all over the world. I've had that. So that, so that they look like they're not putting too much maize and not putting too much rice. But when you add that carb together, It's loads.

Yeah, yeah, that's very tricky. Yeah, it's lamby chopping, isn't it?

Can I just also just bring in, so these, just for European labeling, these have to be in order. So the first one on the list is the one of the largest quantity. So as we work down that list, so maize is the largest quantity in that food, rice is the second largest quantity in that food. Just to check with you, Conor, because a lot of labels had meat and animal derivatives, which really got a bad name, similar to the meat and bone meal and that side of things. And I'm guessing this is why they've gone to dehydrated beef and pork protein.

Yeah, sounds fantastic. I think meat Doritos at least go in fresh, like by meat byproducts. It's all pieces that, you know, you wouldn't give the mother-in-law. It's all still pieces that's like, my God, you wouldn't want too much of it. But, and actually the thing about meat derivatives and byproducts, when the meat goes in fresh, if it just says chicken or beef, they mean, you know, chicken feet or beef whatever, you know, ears. And but that goes in fresh and the rest of these ingredients are dry. So even if you have a wet meat ingredient at the top, by the time you dehydrate it like the rest of them, it would move way down the list. Another sneaky little ploy they have. Okay, so look, dehydrated beef and pork bone, okay, fantastic. And then dehydrated poultry bone, and then here's a great one, hydrolyzed animal proteins. And I didn't know what hydrolyzed animal proteins were, to be honest with you. I thought it was kind of like the way they make the fancy hypoallergenic magic George Jetson food for dogs with their allergies. But this is kind of an external digestion of meat for some reason. They bathe a whole heap of this meat stuff in hydrochloric acid, which, as Bren correctly pointed out, it's just the same acid in your stomach. And then they balance it with sodium chloride. You know, I'm not liking the sound of it already, but the reason they do that is because hydrolyzed animal protein is considered— it's the precursor to MSG. So that process produces a taste enhancer. Essentially, hydrolyzed animal proteins are used as a taste enhancer. And later, when I work out how not to share my screen, I'll look— there's plenty of reviews saying you don't want too much of this in your diet, there's side effects to this, but it makes the animal want to eat it because it's a taste enhancer. Okay, so hydrolyzed animal proteins makes the dogs eat animal fats. This is an interesting one. They don't tell you what fat, so if they can't tell you chicken fat or beef fat, it means it can't came from a rendering vat that took anything. And if you're in the US, you should run a mile from that because that could mean cat and dog fat. Okay, in 2 out of 5 of the main rendering companies in the US, they're still taking cats and dogs and sell pet food, pet meal, or meat meal to pet food companies. So if they can't tell you the name of the animal, the thing that rendering plant will take in anything. Not so dramatic in Australia, in the UK, in Europe, but, uh, it's much more dangerous in China and Asia that are producing a lot of meat meals and the States. Vegetable fibers, who knows? Beet pulp leftover, mulch from the beet processing industry, the sugar industry, and all this fibrous mess leftover. We need to make money, Evan, we can't just dump it, so we just sell it to the pet food companies or give it away free. Maize gluten, that's just a ridiculous term. That's the outside of the corn kernel that we can't digest and normally poo out. The dog can't digest it either. Why include it? Because it jets up the protein content of the food so they don't have to just rely on meat bone they can just up, they can up it with, you know, beet pulp and maize gluten. It adds protein to the food and blows it. Again, Royal Canin, this is my opinion in case you have a stooge watching, I'm not sure why you use so much beet pulp and maize gluten, but that's up to you.

Wheat, guys, just a thought there, Conor, it's disappointing that they don't take the opportunity to put in vegetables. They just put in vegetable fiber.

Yeah, good point.

Yeah, you know, it's a real But even if they're putting in dried vegetables, that would be better because there's a lot of amazing phytochemicals within vegetables that we don't even know about even now. So that's a real shame. And the beet pulp. Yep, I agree. It's a filler. It's just disposed of by the beet industry and the maize gluten. Maize gluten. Well, they make— they grow so much corn in the States. That they've got to do something with it, you know, and it's all subsidized as well, by the way. And it's all really bad for the soil.

Yeah, monoculture kind of crap. And that's how you grow your animals and your chicken is all corn and then it's wrapped in a corn batter and then you drink a corn fructose drink with it. It's all corn, corn, corn, which is crazy. The vegetable fiber is a good point because there was a product that helped dogs think better and they wrapped it up as magic brain care food and sell it to people at extortionate prices. And the only difference between that and the standard muck book was 1% dried spinach, 1% dried carrot, 1% dried blueberry, 1% dried tomato, because the ingredients in that, from lutein to zeaxanthin and anthocyanins, are known to preserve cognitive ability. And the dogs were better after 2 years locked up— or not locked up, this wasn't fair to say that— but a good quality, good amount of dogs, 40-50 dogs. The dogs that got the slightly supplemented food, as Nick was saying, if they just use this dried, it'll cost them nothing, it's immensely beneficial for them. But instead it's fiber from a vegetable, so it's leftovers as opposed to— they do need a lot of fiber in these products because they have to make this— it's useful for the dog's digestion because this is a high carbohydrate diet, carbohydrates in bone, which would be— that would produce a very, very dry poo. So fiber helps bulk the stool, so it is an important ingredient in that respect. Yeast or parts thereof, I'm sure there's a reason for that, it's probably nutritional in fairness to them. Fish oil, okay, about time, that's good news because this product, as you can you can see down here, has an enviable amount of EPA and DHA. Now that EPA and DHA—

can we blow it up?

8 months ago. Oh yeah, look, there we go. Boom.

Can we blow that up?

Great, thank you.

Yeah, so EPA, DHA, they're your omega-3s, guys. And studies show 25% of complete pet foods sold in Britain don't contain any of these omega-3s. These are the animal-sourced omega-3s from fish oil. So So this is good news. It's also quite a lot. The problem is that you have this bag of food that you open, and as times get harder, we buy bigger bags to save money, and it just sits there oxidizing. And this fat, no matter how well they try to chemically preserve it— and the problem is the chemical preservers they use in this product, I've asked them for comment, they haven't got back to me— likes of BHA, BHT, ethoxyquin. I don't know if they're in this particular product, but that's what keeps fat from oxidizing in dry pet food. So okay, it's great it's in there because it's better. Like studies show when you add the stuff to the pregnant bitches and pups, they do so much better because so much of your brain is DHA. So fish oil, at least it's going in, that's something. I think that's good news because most of the time they didn't do that. Soy oil, God only knows why. What filled— psyllium husk seeds, fructooligosaccharides, that is a low-calorie sugar sweetener. So that again, that's to make the dogs eat it hydrolyzed crustaceans. You won't see any salts written on this label, but they are in there. So there is a serious—

I would also say a lot of fructooligosaccharides are added to foods now just because of this prebiotic, okay, uh, effects. So although the studies are done in non-carnivorous animals, so in omnivores and herbivores, um, fructooligosaccharides are known to enhance certain bacteria. Okay, so the lactobacilli, and therefore they have started to declare those on labels. It's not just because— I mean, because a lot of people would recognize that as a sugar with being a saccharide, but ultimately that name has come on labels since they started to really push prebiotics within foods as much as anything to just try and stabilize the gut flora. From all the disturbance that the feed's causing in the first place.

Yeah, guys, have you noticed that in the old days there used to be salt? You could, and you'd be able to say, right, anything above salt would be above 1% and anything below there would be below. So, um, have a wee trick— there's no salt declared in that.

Yeah, there's no salt mentioned here. Potassium chloride, sodium chloride— you have to be Inspector Gadget to find out what that is. But if you don't put salt in the pet food, the dog won't eat it. So salt, particularly cuts. So salt is definitely— and there's 2 or 3 different types of salt used. So people are used to asking for sodium chloride, give me the sodium content, but there's 2 or 3 others, potassium chloride and other sneaky ways to get salt. But it's not even mentioned here. On the plus side, they do include some ground-up seashells or crustaceans of some fashion and hydrolyzed cartilage, which is boiled cartilage. Okay, this just shows this glucosamine and chondroitin, this shows that these pet food companies are listening because you would never would have seen these sort of ingredients outside of a magic joint formula they discovered where they fed pet food with added glucosamine and chondroitin and the dogs were ever so slightly less arthritic by the time they're 8. So these are welcomed ingredients for dry-fed dogs. They still don't have any collagen or vitamin C or hyaluronic acid or glucagon-glutamine and all the other stuff that joints are made of because they don't include this. They only produce pulverized bone meal, but it's still better than no glucosamine and chondroitin. So even though it's ultra-processed, I'd like to know how much got through. I Googled marigold extract— 50% is lost to processing, but at least they put something in there, you know. And then you've got all your vitamins and stuff.

I mean, 0.1%. Yeah, yeah, the forage oil is 0.1. The marigold extract is either 0.1 or less. Well, that's not going to do anything. Anything, is it? It looks good on the label, but it's not going to do anything for the dog, especially when you remove 50% of it after from processing.

So that's interesting. Look, all these additives and stuff, we can talk— we talked about others before. I just want to draw some of the fact to iodine here. And iodine is put in as iodide. That's the way it's found in nature. You don't need iodine on its own, it will kill you. But iodide is how it's found in nature. And this does it very interestingly. The reason iodide from a conical flask blows out your thyroid and iodine from seaweed doesn't is because the iodine in seaweed is wrapped up in fiber. It slows the release and slows the digestion of the iodine, so you don't get the punch. So that was a new thing. I always wondered why the food source didn't have the same effect. And it's the same with calcium carbonate and zinc oxide. The conical flask versions of these— iron, they just write iron now instead of saying iron oxide, which is what it is. The copper is probably copper sulfate, manganese oxide, but they don't put in the oxide bit, which is— that's the nitty-gritty. Because there's good quality manganese supplements, chelated manganese, but they don't have to even tell you what sort of manganese they use because we know iron oxide's crap, zinc oxide's crap. We know that's probably what they're using. They just don't write it anymore. You just don't need to know that sort of stuff. So, uh, yeah, that's the good and the bad. It is cheeky. It's just they can change the rules.

And have you looked into— because obviously these E numbers, which is you know, you've started on there, you've got E1 through 5 on that label. Do they qualify the actual E number in the descriptions in the European legislation for whether that's copper sulfate for E4?

I will find out. I will find out, Bram. I'll have the answer next week. Yeah, yeah, almost certainly they do. I mean, there has to be some reference to that. There's— but I mean, I'm a pet food consumer, I don't bloody know manuals in European. You know, of course not. You know, isn't it not fair? So, so unfair. Anyway, look, that's in the puppy food is kind of similar, but there's some pluses, which is your 30% protein. There's EPA/DHA added, which fish oil. They're paying attention to the fact that joints need building blocks, which is, you know, something. But this is worrying, this amount of dried bone matter here would be worrying. And if I was to put money on it, I would love to send it and test it, test it for calcium and see how much bone is in there. So that'd be one thing I'd really like to do and may well do. And the way you do that is you'd order the product from an online supplier and ship it straight to the lab So they can't accuse you of handler bias and sue the pants off you anyway.

And much, much as I hate to be a pooh-pooher of your positives out of the label, but when you talk about 30%, you need to come off your—

right.

So when you talk about your 30% protein, I then have to recall that actually that's a cooked protein, a processed protein. And all of the stories we used to have of high protein foods causing your dogs to go wappy, because actually what it ends up being doing is being no more useful than another energy source because it's so damaged through the processing that that's all the body can use it for. You know, being able to assimilate it in a normal format becomes really hard.

It's not bioavailable. So that's what the Crockdale study was. He was looking at how much of this protein is available to the dog. And so they use the puppy food because it's more dramatic. And they're all at 22% protein, that means 100% of that protein has to be bioavailable to the dog in good nick. And he found 25 to 30% of the protein was absolutely unavailable. It was definitely going to be pooed out. So now your pups are being reared on protein deficient food, and for that you're paying €5, €6 a kilo on it. So now you have to add that 30% figure, and God only knows what are the sneaky ways they get protein in. The last thing I wanted to talk about, and I forgot to mention, it was the fiber bit. When you look at dry pet food, any pet food products, treats or foods, that is a crude fiber figure. So when you see 2.7% fiber, 2.6 grams of fiber per 100 grams on that label, that's a crude fiber. In other words, that's the indigestible fiber. That's the same fiber content as green beans. So your Labrador is eating the same amount of fiber content as green beans every day. So that's a huge amount of fiber every day. Let's hope they would normally have a fibrous diet, even though it would normally be animal fiber, not plant fiber. That's one thing. What they don't talk about is soluble fiber. And that's— so the true way of getting fiber content in human foods is total dietary fiber, TDF. That's your soluble fiber and your indigestible fiber. And why do we care about soluble fiber? Because this is a deep-chested dog, and we don't want a whole heap of soluble fiber and chemical napalm upsetting the gut flora, feeding the wrong gut flora, fermenting in his intestines and possibly creating too much gas if you're thinking about the bloat/GDV situation. So if I had a Labrador, any deep-chested breed, I would say it's most important you don't select ingredients that are based on corn because corn has a very high soluble fiber content. Choose any other, like grain-free pet food will be easier than that. So the soluble fiber thing is interesting, not mentioned on the label either.

So, you know, kind of interesting to hear. It reminds me, you know, when, when we were kids, and I think they still do it, with cereals. You know, when you, you get cornflakes which were— and, uh, what's the word— uh, enhanced with, with niacin and other vitamins.

Yeah.

And they sold that as they were doing you a favor.

Yeah.

Because they're putting these things into these foods. But they— if had they not processed them in the first place, those fully bioavailable food elements would have been there anyway. And so, yeah, I think they're kind of doing the same. They, they stick these kibbles, they kill the kibble, you know, virtually all nutritional, uh, ability of the food is removed by the very process that they put it through. And therefore they go, aren't we good, we're putting all this goodness back in. For the goodness of your dog, you know. Yeah, it's just, it's disingenuous, isn't it? And it's, it's just sneaky, sneaky, horrible, horrible, horrible. I tell you, the book there is Michael Moore, um, uh, Salt Fat Sugar. If you want to be absolutely terrified by what the food industry, the processed food industry, do to make you eat their products Salt, Fat, Sugar, Michael Moore.

Nick, I think you've just terrified everybody by mentioning another book to read. Anyway, that's—

I'm sorry. Oh, listen, I'm holding back here. I'm holding back, I promise.

I am amazed every day, actually, where people's dogs that come in that are fed kibble are actually managing to survive as well as they are, because that is actually, you know, considering what some of this stuff does to them. I, you know, always take a little bit of a check, and people say how brilliant the quality is and how much better they're doing on this dry food over the other dry food that they were feeding before. And you're thinking, oh, just— I wish that you'd just start to feed raw and just see the difference, because there's some great positives. We've had some recent articles on, you know, that again, a comparison of Raw to Ultra High Processed Foods just in this last week on showing the benefits. Do you remember the reference?

Yeah, I'll share it on the Facebook page now. Frontiers in Science, it came out in, and the name of the study was, oh God, Effects of a Whole Food Diet on Immune Function and Inflammatory Phenotype in Healthy Dogs. So in other words, this is victory number 3. So there's been 3 case-controlled studies of dry v raw-fed dogs. So case-controlled means that they bang the dogs on one food and took a look at their baseline markers for whatever, and then they changed them to the test food, so dry to raw and then back to dry again, or whatever. So that's one way of seeing what's going on. You would think that there's a million of these studies out there because the whole veterinary industry wouldn't have jumped to dry pet food without a whole heap of evidence, would they? And yet they only started producing these studies in 2015, first by Helsinki, and now we've got 3 case-controlled studies, and each one of them a glorious victory for real food. And it's increasing, so it's increasing inflammatory markers in the dog. This is the second one to show that. The first one was the homocysteine study, 10 times more homocysteine. And we don't know if that's because it spikes so much insulin all the time, and insulin's inflammatory, or is it the terrible chemicals, napalm in the gut flora, or just the horrible fats, or lack thereof good fats, and all the other stuff that could— we don't know what it is yet, and then another case control study showing that there's more histamine in the skin layers, and then you had the giant survey that said pups born to dry-fed mothers are more prone to atopy because of course that's linked, you know. So yeah, that was a great victory for science that day. I've got one more odious label, guys, I came across today as I was talking to Ian Billingham today, and we were talking about green-lipped mussel, and I was looking at a label and I was looking at the best-selling one on Amazon, and it said— I was looking at the strengths of the green-lipped mussel, trying to figure out the best way to get the extract because, you know, the danger is you're just buying the squished mussel powder which is the whole point, the whole danger with the green-lipped mussel industry. It's as dodgy as the Manuka honey industry. I'm only getting Manuka honey here. So now they have to tell you how much, how much Manuka honey is in your Manuka honey. So this green-lipped mussel industry is suffering the same issue. So they squish the mussels and you've got green-lipped mussel extract, which is your really good stuff that will help you. And then you've got the squished mussel that they sell up in powder and sell you green-lipped mussel powder and both have the same medicinal effect. So you're trying to see the fat content. Okay, so it needs to be a bit of lipid, green-lipped mussel lipid in there. There. It was the best-selling one on Amazon, is a 1000mg tablet, high-strength green-lipped mussel extract, 1000mg tablets. Do you know how much green-lipped mussel is in that 1000mg tablet? It says on the label 1000mg tablet of green-lipped mussel, and it's the third ingredient. It is 500mg of green-lipped mussel in it. So you think you're buying a strong green-lipped mussel tablet, but actually it's only 500mg. The rest is rice bran and all this sort of filler crap.

Oh, so it's a 1000mg weight tablet—

weight—

with with 500 milligrams of green liposomal in it.

But they don't write that on the label. That is in the— that's on the website. And it's like, Jesus, the first ingredients are carbs because they're packing it up. And now their product looks quite reasonable because the 500 milligram tablets are, you know, so in a price comparison, everyone goes for that and they do see benefits, but they're getting ripped off. And I just thought, Jesus.

And do you know, there was a great WITCH article back in probably the mid-2000s on assessing some really high brands so some high street stores in the UK that do a lot of supplements sometimes sell the second bottle for a penny, you know. And they found anywhere between zero— yes, that's a big fat zero— and 500% of the stated amounts on the supplement's bottle, purely and simply because unless it's pharmaceutically graded there is no control over the supplement industry in the UK and actually in America. It's very similar. There is no demand that you need to test every batch. So actually you can end up buying what— even, even if you found a label that said it was 1,000 milligrams of green-lipped mussel, because there are no controls, unless it says it's pharmaceutically graded and they can guarantee that's what's in it, okay, through that certification, they could still say, well, on average the batches would produce that. It just happened that that batch didn't have the green-lipped mussel in it at the time that it went through the machine.

Wow. It's kind of like the analytical constituents on pet food. They're assuming that, as Hills happily proved to us in 2016, they sent 22 million cans of this dog food out of the factory and they didn't check the nutrient content of one of them. And after a while, you know, there's excess vitamin D here, guys, highly dangerous for dogs. And they're like, oh yeah, well, the vitamin mineral supplier told us this is what the nutrient content of the powders that we were buying in were. It's like, you never measure the mix before or after. They just do a mathematical equation based on the stuff that comes in, they process the hell out of it, and then, oh, this is what your dog is getting 6 months later when you open the bag and it's sitting in the cupboard for 2 weeks. Oh my God, it's so— that's why when you look at this complete food, the levels are all over the place, just like Bren was saying. There's no regulations, no one checking these things. All they care about is salmonella, and the rest is just— you're on your own.

How does that go again? Where's that voice from?

I shouldn't jest. Food poisoning, it's not funny. When's the last time you had food poisoning, guys?

Right, so we're going to apologize now because somebody's got a slight fever and he's feeling just a little bit peaky, so that's why he's coming up with silly villain voices. Yeah, anyway, because it's hot weather outside.

I'm not surprised, Nick, you've never had food poisoning. I'm not surprised. Bren, have you ever had food poison? Surely you've had food poisoning, Bren. What? No, mate. Oh, I've had it. I had it in Bolivia. It is not funny.

You see, I've never, never had food poisoning. I've had a vomiting bug, but that was caught directly off a relative child that was coming. But I've never had food poisoning where it's been from the food.

Oh yeah, I had that.

Mind you, I always say it's in good stead because, you know, the way we used to cook as students where we used to leave food bubbling away, yeah, certainly, yeah, but a very low heat. For days on end and just dip in for a quick lunch.

I don't think there's any life on pot noodles anyway. I think there's no life in it. It's very hard to get salmonella from an ultra-pulverised food.

But I got it really good. Chilies that used to last for a week, you know, that you just slowly cook away.

Yeah. And day 6, you're kind of closing your eyes going, I hope I'm going to be okay because I'm really hungry.

I've had 2. It moved from beef protein to bacterial protein. It was fine.

Yeah, there was a guy selling burgers in Bolivia, and Bolivia is quite a poor country, you know, in fairness. And we're coming out of a bar and it's like, you know, 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, and there's one guy selling burgers and everyone's walking past and no one's stopping. And I kind of stopped and said, I'll have two of your lovely burgers of whatever meat you happen to, you know, catch that day. And I had two of these burgers. I swear to God, guys, I went home and I just, you know, freezing cold sweat and I'm gonna get sick. And you have like an instant of a second, and I grabbed the bin. This is not a great story to finish on. I grabbed the bin, and the bin had like tiny holes. It was a waste paper bin with holes in it, so I just spewed into this bin. I remember the water going, and it just kept the lumps in there. And then I fell asleep. But oh lads, it was, it was the worst few hours of my life. Anyway, brilliant.

Yeah, right. I think We're looking forward to somehow next week. Well, look, next week we've definitely got cats because we've got cats on Friday. Somehow next week we're going to get a wonderful live to you that will be maybe not so live. We might pre-record something because Connor right now is a bit delirious and he's not sure how he's going to cope if both me and Nick are not accompanying him. So we might do a not so live live from a beach with our dogs running around us just to show you what it's like. Oh, things to watch out at the seaside. We could do heat stroke, we could do going in the sea, you know, what it is, why do they do a Marley and Me where they'll drink seawater and end up squittering everywhere. We can talk through that and explain, you know, all of those things. We could do a beach special.

How do you fancy that?

You want to check your 4G out, Nick, and see?

Yeah, well, I'll check it out and see if it works. Can I do it from a phone? Yeah, can I join Be.Live from a phone?

You can now.

Yeah, I'll show you the—

we can do some on-the-road roadshow.

Yeah, okay, so I could walk down the road to my beach here and pretend I'm on holidays, put my handkerchief on and tie knots. Why do people wear such crap hats? I mean, everyone wore hats back in the day, but they all have these handkerchiefs. Why on the beach with that? Hat. It's weird, isn't it? That was an English thing. You never see that in Ireland. You never saw a tied-up handkerchief hat.

Oh, we're going to enjoy this. We're going to have a bit of an adventure. Pete's going to have an absolute dickie fit nightmare because the sound is going to be all over the place, and I'll have to see if we've got a wind mic somewhere. Yeah, yeah, muffle the wind. Um, but yeah, no, let's have some fun next week and look forward to seeing you guys. Uh, no shorts. We're not having those jokes about shorts and Conor you know, make sure they're clean this week.

Oh God, that was years ago. How are you still being honest?

I can see the comments coming up.

Anyway, they're clean now. Actually, they're in the bin. I had to throw them out there a few months ago. I was distraught. You know when you just love an item of clothes and then you have to get rid of it? It's like, I really didn't want to. And Elaine eventually just did. There was a tear in the crotch about that big and it was blowing up my bum. And she said, get rid of those shorts. And she just ripped them on me and I had to throw them out. Oh my God, I still can't replace them. It's ridiculous. I'm gonna really—

see, when you've got a surgeon in the house, what you do is you just restitch them. It's like—

no, they're too— no, I asked my mum, she says that they're lost. They're gone. Well, it's all flimsy, too much anyway.

So right, stop while you're ahead, mate.

Stop while you're ahead.

Okay guys, catch up with you.

See you all next week one way or another. Brilliant, take care guys.

Thanks for coming, guys. Cheers, bye.