RPM Facebook Live: Hearts The organ we love to love.

Brendan and Conor. England, so I'm reliably told by Brendan, are 2-0 up. So these, these two are very, very happy. So, um, lads, what have you been up to? Uh, Brendan, what have you been up to?

Uh, yeah, I've just, uh, yeah, been chilling out, went to the lakes, uh, did a little bit of work up there, conservation work. I love that up there, so it's been really great. Um, Yeah, just, uh, oh, so much on, um, covering for a few other vets just with all the COVID stuff going on and, and that side of things as well. We've had—

does that interfere with your business?

Yeah, well, it just means that I'm sort of dropping back into some more conventional work and operating and, uh, that side of things. Um, but that's, that's great, you know. I think the team is, uh, is really great one to work with, so I sort of enjoy that side of things, dipping back in occasionally and and helping out. And you, Nick, what have you been up to?

Oh mate, I've been up to loads and loads and loads. I've just got Banting's pamphlet on corpulence. Okay, it's a really small book.

I'm glad you said corpulence.

Yeah, I thought it was a coffee.

Written in 1843, guys, and he is going on. The only thing that allowed him to lose weight was going on to a low-carb diet. Okay, so 1843. But I can better that because everybody that I listen to is going on about this guy, Brillat-Savarin. Okay. And he's 1825. He wrote this.

He's still alive.

He also— he's so healthy. He's still going. No, he's not, actually. But everybody talks about him and basically he's saying kill the carbs, get healthy. But he's being a Frenchman, God bless him, and I like the French. He says it in about 300,000 words. So I'm going to be going for that. And really exciting, my friend Gwen Bailey. It's hard doing this in the—

That's a nice cover.

Isn't it lovely? She's just written this book, and I was the consultant for all the nutrition stuff. So she's got a nutrition, and she talks about what would dogs eat naturally, the microbiome, what's really inside your dog's food, what's, you know, how to read brands and things. So a really comprehensive, as well as a lot of stuff on, on behavior and how to do things really, really well. So, um, looks good, looks good, especially in the middle bit that I was helped with. There you go. How about you, Conor? What were you— what have you been up to?

Just working away, you know. I just feel really busy going away, uh, tomorrow for 9 days. So, uh, you know, if anybody has their own business out there, it just— I find it very busy the day before, so I just need everything to go correctly. And so there was just so much things on, and, uh, Yeah, so I feel like I'm just kind of winding down now. I have to pack my case. I'm the last one to pack, and then I'm heading off for a few days. So I'm looking forward to that. But it hasn't been anything remarkable during the week. A few kind of tasty posts. I'm getting back into, um, I'm getting back into making my own food and starting to do short little posts about that. And it's amazing what you can find in the supermarkets when you start applying yourself. You know, I got a beef two-thirds off sides of beef yesterday, so I bought 4 of them and put them in my freezer. And it looks to all extents and purposes like the dog is eating fillet steak. By the time you cut a slice of it And like, you know, I dropped the dog, my friend's looking after the dog for 9 days, and I hand him the lunchbox, 'cause now I made an extra special effort 'cause I wanted him to be impressed. So like, you know, I put some parsley on it and a couple of things dotted around like you see on the TV from the better people. And he was like, "Bloody hell, who's this for? Is this for me or the dog? 'Cause it's a huge steak." And I said, "It does look very good, but that cost me bugger all because, you know." So we put it in the freezer, but he just could not believe it. So he was on the phone straight away to his mum, Conor feeding steak and chicken to his dog. And anyway, I'm very proud of myself because I talked a mean game, but I don't actually do a whole lot of this all the time. I, I can be a bit lazy. I get my pre-made sent to me and I'm happy with that. Anyway, look, um, I'm enjoying getting back into it. But today is— as this thing pops up just before we talk about hearts, and we'll get straight into it, um, as it is a subject close to all our hearts, haha. And we have to thank everybody for patreon.com And everything is going really well there and we really appreciate it. So I hope you guys are enjoying the bits of content we're putting up there. So patreon.com, you'll find us at Raw Pet Medics. And yeah, we'll be talking about what we're going to be doing for the next few shows on Raw Pet Medics. We'll poll you guys. Well guys, let's get straight into hearts because we know we've got an awful lot to get into it. And I suppose, can we start maybe at the start? And is it Brendan starting?

Brendan, you're going to give us some anatomy and physiology.

Yeah, start at the start there, what is the heart?

Yeah, well, I think I promise not to go too heavy into the fineries of what's going on, but I think a lot of people come to us asking for a little bit of a lowdown of my dog's got this, what does that mean? And so I think what we need to do is just to give you an idea. This is one heart, okay, prop from earlier. We're moving things around in the house just to clear them out to storage and stuff so that builders can do their thing. And what do you find just happens to be hanging around? So it was just like on cue. So what we're going to talk about, there's 3 main things that can go wrong with this, okay, for dogs and cats. And I want to just go down. Look, the first one is about this relies— it's a muscle, okay? So muscle first and foremost. So the first thing that we worry about, most people have heard about, is the muscle going wrong. And we talk about dilated cardiomyopathy, where this becomes a flabby, large muscle that's not doing very much other than just, you know, instead of doing a full contraction down, it's just sort of, you know, just doing this, okay, and trying to pump blood around.

And I'm going to talk about DCM shortly. DCM, dilated cardiomyopathy. Dr. Conor's going to give us a broadside on that.

Great.

It also stretches these valves so the valves don't shut properly and so they don't pump blood around the circulation. Okay, so that's a couple of things about DCM. For cats, okay, because I love— get the right way— cats, okay, it keeps swapping around. For cats, this can in thyroid disease become muscle-bound, so it becomes like a weightlifter's muscle so chunky that the chambers are really small and there's not enough volume of blood that can be pumped around, and it's also going so fast that there's inefficiency there. So that's the first one, is the muscle. The next disease that is actually more common for the majority of dogs is when you've got valve problems. Okay, now these valves can be affected by infection. We talked about this in the dental video if you want to go back and have a little look at that. For example, they can get infected, they become frilly instead of nice and neat closure, and therefore again they can't pump blood forwards. Okay, valves work by snapping shut and then the pressure builds and that shoots the blood forwards.

Okay, and that'll give you a murmur, Brendan, won't it?

Well, we'll come to that because actually murmurs are a really interesting thing, and most people assume it's just just down to the valve leaking, but actually there's another bit to murmurs. So we'll talk about murmurs in a moment when we move on to circulation.

Are the valves the noise that we hear? They're the valves smacking open and closed?

Yeah, well, you're hearing the shock wave go through the fluid as the valve shuts. Okay, that's what the lub dub is. Okay, so it's the shock wave, not the actual— I mean, can you imagine if you could hear the valve?

Boom, boom! That's a big door.

Anyway, so the So yeah, that's, that's where we're dealing with that. So the valves very often for Cavalier King Charles, that's a big one. Yorkshire Terriers. Okay, those are big ones. Chihuahuas, they can have valvular problems where this valve becomes inefficient and it can't pump blood forwards. So they end up filling with effectively a backlog of pressure of blood and that can cause fluid to seep out. Usually in dogs, into the abdomen. They get a big ascitic, so fluid-filled tummy, or they can occasionally get their lungs filling with fluids if it's the other valves on the other side. Okay, so that's the valvular disease. And then the last big one is all about the electrical impulse. Okay, so this is where the electrics of the heart, because this muscle works on nerve input into little nodes that rest on various areas. So there's one on the atria here, There's one here just between the atria and the ventricles. Okay. And a nerve feeds into that. Part of that is the vagus nerve as well to slow it down or speed it up as appropriate. And that fires off electrical activity, closes the upper atria first, and then it fires down to this atrioventricular node that shoots electrical activity down here and it contracts from the bottom. And ejects the blood. Okay, so that can go wrong. So we get arrhythmias where the rhythm of the heart starts to go— you can get tachyarrhythmias, too fast, or bradyarrhythmias. There you go, bradycardia.

I've got a really slow heartbeat. I think I've got a heartbeat of less than 60, of like 58, 59, which is— I always thought that made me sound fit, but I'm not fit anymore. But I do have a slow heart rate. It's called bradycardia.

Brendan, would you just take us through the circulation, how, where, where the blood comes in and then when it goes out, and, and pulmonary circulation as well, because it's really fascinating stuff.

Okay, so there's two sides to the heart. Okay, so we effectively have the first side, so as you come in from the right side, okay, all of the blood comes into the heart, fills the atria, okay, first And that comes in and effectively goes in, fills this chamber. So it goes through from the atria into this chamber, the diastole, that shuts. Okay, and then blood is ejected up through this valve. Okay, round the lungs. So the lungs then oxygenate the blood, and then once the blood is oxygenated, it comes back in and then comes into the left— sorry, got the wrong way around. Yeah, so, and then effectively the bigger muscle chamber fills and ejects it through the aorta, this big red vessel here, and that ejects the blood oxygenated around the body. So that's roughly the circulation. In humans, we worry about lots of other circulation that effectively feeds the heart with blood and oxygenated blood. And if we get the classic heart attack, it's usually because a plaque has filled up in one of these coronary vessels. Okay, and when it creates that plaque that closes it off, that effectively means that it starves the area of the heart muscle of blood. That's extremely painful as it dies with the oxygen lack of. Okay. And then what then happens, the electrical activity fires off and you go into cardiac arrest. So what they do with a stent or a bypass is they actually put on a vessel to bypass that clot, that, that clog in the blood vessel. Okay. And so if you have a quadruple bypass, you've got 4 areas that they need to put onto. Okay, that's brilliant. That's so— that's that. But that very rarely happens in dogs. Okay, in fact, it's so rare, we— it's certainly not on the primary list of things that we would be considering, that a dog has died of a heart attack per se.

Is this because of a lack of this, that they don't get a cholesterol— if the plaques are cholesterol issues? So why don't dogs get cholesterol issues?

Well, actually, you've got to remember cholesterol is a friendly fat, okay? And actually, it's the damage that is happening to the vasculature that is the bigger problem.

Yeah.

So because our dogs don't— I mean, there's loads of cartoons that do, but there's lots of dogs that don't smoke, don't drink heavily, okay, don't do bad things, okay? So the likelihood of them getting damage to these vessels is much, much lower.

Does overweight not do— does obesity not drive massive inflammation in the body? Is that not the leading cause of all that? I thought that's what it was.

Well, it's oxidative damage. So there's other issues around what is causing that damage to the vascular wall. And it certainly is not about just general fats. And it doesn't seem to be— if it was just generally inflammation, I would think there'd be a lot more issues with, you know, cardiac arrests and problems with those plaque building, the vascular plaques. But we don't see it.

You know, people really, really badly, don't they? They eat a high-carb diet, which in humans is a, a very pro-inflammatory and b, is very pro-obesity disease. So, and yet they don't get heart disease. They must have a quirk. I, I'd heard it was to do with that they, they manufacture their own vitamin C, um, uh, whereas we don't, uh, but I I don't know the detail there. We'd have to look into it, guys.

I remember being bowled over when somebody told me, only reason, the only few years ago did this hit me. They said, well, like a lot of the cholesterol that we hear about, cholesterol's been heavily incriminated and we're learning so much more about it since. But they said a lot of the cholesterol, these plaques that they see in the arteries, and they say, oh, well, you need to eat less cholesterol because cholesterol's in some of the meat that you eat. And therefore, if you've got cholesterol in your body, it's because you've been eating too much cholesterol. Stop eating meat and eat more carbs. And so they started blaming the cholesterol that they saw, just like when we saw fat people getting fat, we said it must be because they're eating fat. And same with pancreatitis, we see fat rising in the blood, we blame fat. Same with the arteries and the plaques and these heart diseases, sort of blaming the cholesterol they were looking at. But it turns out that most of that cholesterol, more than 80, 90% of it is produced by your body. It's like, it's a fire extinguisher. It's trying to help you out. You are chronically inflamed from your lifestyle choices. And so it's spraying this cholesterol everywhere. And yes, over time it will build and it'll probably stop your heart and your blood flow, but you have many, many, a lot of time to fix that. And then we come along and try to scoop that goo out and blame bad goo, but actually it's the bloody environment that it was. Anyway, I found that— I was bowled over when somebody told me that. I was sure it was the food, you know. Yeah, but anyway, it's very interesting.

Just to finish off, there's a couple of questions that have come up, um, uh, when we were we were talking, and from this, there is a pericardial sac, a fibrous sac that covers the heart. Okay, and somebody asked about some of the short-nosed breeds that get a small tumor. Okay, these tumors that form around the heart base, and they can sometimes cause that sac to fill with fluid, as can infections. So we can get pericarditis, and you can get infections in there. And that, if that fills, that effectively squishes the heart because the pressure builds within that fibrous sac that can't stretch, and the pressure builds. So somebody was asking why would that affect the heart for their pet, and it's just basically you're stopping the heart effectively being able to pump and fill with blood. Somebody's asked, doesn't all of the chambers fill with blood at the same time and then come back? You're absolutely right. Look, they're both sides fill at the same time. The atria contract just before the ventricles to pre-fill. So they pre-fill. So these generally are passively filled, the atria, the top bits, and then they squeeze down and fill the ventricles so that there's extra blood to push around the circulation. But you're absolutely right, it's not one side, you know, it's not like a four-chamber thing, that and then that, then this. Than this. Okay, it is a case of atria go down first and then the ventricles close. What was the other question I saw? Somebody was asking about tricuspid valve. That's basically the valves which effectively come out of the heart. So I pointed to one here. Okay, so you've got a bicuspid, okay, and you've got a tricuspid. So the tri is because there's three leaves to this valve. Okay. And the bicuspid is on the other side because you've got two leaves to this valve. And in young dogs, generally there's a genetic fault. Very, very occasionally it will be because they've got an infection that's got into their system. So if they've maybe got an infection from the umbilicus when they were born and that's then allowed bacteria to circulate, you might get infections seeding out onto those valves. But generally, it's either going to be genetic or congenital, i.e., they haven't formed. So this heart has all sorts of bypasses in the uterus because the lungs aren't going to be functioning. So what happens is that there's holes in the heart that effectively bypass the lungs. So as the fetal blood is being pumped around, it's bypassing certain areas of the heart, and you've then also got shunts which go across the major vessels that are the other part of the bypass. So if they don't close properly, that's what we call congenital heart problems, and sometimes they can be corrected by surgery, but it's fairly intricate, and there's only certain places that would do that sort of surgery.

Brilliant. Brendan, you were talking about dilated cardiomyopathy. Now, there's been a big hoo-ha especially in the States about dilated cardiomyopathy. And Conor, you've been looking into that.

What have you found out?

Sure have. Like, you know, this is detailed, okay? And I don't want to go too detailed on it, but it really epitomizes how dark, how nonsensical the science can be, the stuff that's going on in pet food land. This really summed it all up, and the fact that it goes right to the top, which I found very, very juicy. That even the very top people were happy to get involved with this, that we now know utter nonsense. And so here's a little bit about it, guys. So feel free to butt in if you feel a point coming on. But I'm going to skim through some of these points. Okay, so we talked about it before, guys, when AFCO first came, we slag AFCO off all the time because it's got major, major problems, but it was invented with a good idea. The American Association of Feed Control Officials. This idea, this NRC body that was above them, they came in to say, guys, pet food is on the floor, the quality is terrible. And in the 1970s, thousands of cats a year were dying of what we found that was this new issue called dilated cardiomyopathy. It was eventually found— initially they blamed the pet owners for feeding dog food to cats, but eventually, once enough information had been gathered by the University of California, they they found it was due to low taurine in the pet food. And so pet food companies eventually held their hands up and said, oh, there's a lack of taurine. Well, actually what was happening in pet food at the time was there was less and less meat being used and the quality of pet food was on the floor. So that's why NRC came in and said, we can't have this again because so many pets were killed and we need to have a minimum quality of pet food. So they brought out the AAFCO minimum, well, the NRC at the time guidelines, minimum guidelines, keep saying minimum, And so therefore, as soon as the minimum nutritional guidelines were out there to stop this happening again, all the other pet foods, you weren't getting rewarded for being really good, so they just dropped down to these minimum guidelines and they became the target for everybody. So that was the origin of AAFCO's minimum guidelines, which today are now the optimum guidelines, people believe, but actually— so that was the origin of it. So anyway, the fact was there was very little meat being used in it, and meat contains taurine, and animals such as cats absolutely need to be fed a good bit of taurine. So the pet food companies turned around and said, after millions of euros and all the money we spent on research, we have found that taurine is vital for pet food, so we put it into pet food. No, they don't put meat into pet food, they put taurine from a, from a chemical flask in. So unfortunately, that same luxury wasn't afforded dogs because dogs can make a bit of their own taurine from two other amino acids which are called methionine and cysteine, which we'll come back to later. So dogs can do it, not very well, but they can do a little bit of it. So that's enough of a reason for people to say, well, don't give them any taurine. So same with vitamin C. Healthy dogs can make vitamin C. Well, sick dogs are really bad at it. And who needs vitamin C? Sick dogs. But they don't get it from dry food. It's not included because you don't need it. You can make it when you're healthy. So it's just one of those ingredients that sadly is not offered to dogs. So this is the start of the DCM scandal. It was originally a grain— it was a cereal-based pet food issue. And up until the grain free pet food issue a couple of years ago, it had happened 2 or 3 other times. It happened in the '90s, it happened in the 2000s, that cereal-based pet food caused loads of DCM in dogs. And the reason for that is it's not just from a lack of meat that causes a lack of taurine for the pet. It's not just a lack of meat in dry pet food that causes a lack of taurine. Lots of things can cause a lack of taurine for the poor cat or dog eating this pet food. One of them is that you, okay, you don't use a lot of meat ingredients and so you don't use a lot of taurine. That's fair enough because taurine comes from meat. But also, if you don't put in the precursors, methionine and cysteine, which is very common for dog food, then your dogs will suffer and die because they need methionine to build taurine and a couple of other things. High cooking temperatures can destroy what little taurine is present in pet food. And we know, as Nick explained eloquently the last time, it's cooked up to 5 times at really high temperatures. So yeah, how do you expect taurine to survive these things when we know that kills it? Moreover, cooking degrades protein, okay, Maillard reactions, this sugar bonding to protein and causes this folding and stuff that Nick was explaining that I barely understood. But the point is, when that protein is degraded, it becomes, it forms, it's much more resilient to digestion. It's not the normal thing that your bacteria are waiting to eat, but other bacteria are happy to eat it. And these other bacteria, when they grow, in this, these studies were done in cats, two studies here I'm looking at on the side of the screen as I'm talking to you. This pathogenic bacteria that grow when you shift the biome of the cat, they happen to love eating taurine. So when your cat goes into dysbiosis, gut dysbiosis, these new baddies look around and say, we love taurine, and they'll eat any taurine out of the dry pet food. So this is the fourth reason that cereal-based pet food is constantly suffering taurine issues. But there's another one: excess fiber. We know that kibble companies love putting in excess fiber, so beet pulp, which is the leftovers of the beet processing industry to make sugar. For all their horrible foods. And also, you know, corn gluten pulp and just whole corn and just all this indigestible plant protein they put in. So this stuff is really, really crap for dogs. They can't digest it. It goes into the intestines where it messes with the dog's ability to reabsorb his bile. So the dog's constantly releasing bile into the top part of the intestines, I assume, and, uh, but then they reabsorb it because the body's an artist at reusing its nutrients and you need a lot of taurine to make bile. So that's how they re-harvest their, their taurine. They absorb the bile again, but when the fiber is in there, it totally messes with that digestion. It actually binds the bile salts, it says here, and it renders them indigestible, which means the dog poos them out more likely. So you're going to have more of a taurine deficiency. Think of overweight labs being fed high carbohydrate dry foods and moved from really high fiber food already to 12.5% indigestible fiber, which is massively high because there's only a small amount of indigestible fiber.

These weight loss diets.

Yeah, these weight loss diets. So like, talk about DCM, which has never been a long study issued in these things. I'm only still on the first page here. I'm going to have to—

can I just ask, so there was an element in that that they were talking about, is it because it's not truly— there's no taurine in grain, so it's really about the issue of because they were substituting things like the legumes into this, was that truly down to there was some way of that binding out or interfering with the absorption of taurine? And or was it just that actually a lot of legumes are just as pro-inflammatory and have an inflammatory response and it was nothing to do with taurine?

This is the whole thing about the grain-free.

Yeah, I'm going to get to that.

Raw is grain-free.

Yeah.

And they think, oh, raw must be low in taurine, but it's not. It's massively high in taurine. Yeah, there was a thing that grain-free gives you DCM.

Yeah, I'll get to that bit, guys. Okay, okay, that's coming up now. And so, um, this was, uh, there's one other thing that we need to remember, that most of the DCM scandals that have happened in cereal-based pet food, because it is a cereal-based pet food issue historically, and that nobody seems to have mentioned in these studies that came out recently, nonsensical ones, that most of them were actually lamb-based pet foods. Lamb and rice-based dry food caused a huge majority of the issues because lamb is very deficient in taurine. So if you're using lamb meal, which is essentially the bones of a lamb stewed up under high pressure and cooked 5 times, you're getting no taurine from that. So if the manufacturers are relying on the lamb meat in the pet food, there's no taurine going in. But also an interesting study in raw dog food where they compared cats been fed almost a whole rabbit for up to 9 months. Remember that, guys. And they compared it to a complete dry food, and they found that initially the cats were doing brilliant, their poos were better, their fur was turning inside out, and everything was fantastic. But soon the animals started developing DCM. One of the cats dropped with DCM after 9 months, and they said, oh well, look, raw is not complete either. We said, well, no, rabbit is very low in taurine. So raw feeders that go on to their novel protein diets heads up, you can't stay on lamb too long. In like, when I say too long, I mean over 6 months on one, on either lamb or taurine, because it doesn't have enough of the things that certainly cats need to keep going. Look, I just wanted to mention that. And then there's breed dispositions. The point of all that is there is lots of reasons why ultra-processed dry food can be deficient in taurine. Lots and lots of reasons. Okay, in 2018 just when natural pet food went past 50% of the market share in the US. So natural pet food means not cereal-based pet food, and cereal-based pet food is the biggest pet food producers, okay? So they are the biggest guys. They don't have grain-free pet foods really. They're still pushing the rice and corn and wheat nonsense, and the veterinary sector is still pushing those products. But they are seeing a massive decrease in market share. And like a dying bee, these markets don't disappear without a fight. They will keep fighting until the public rebuke is so negative that they don't do it anymore. Like the way bottled milk formula makers would have kept on fighting as they realized, okay, we're losing here, we're going to lose money. So in 2018, what was probably seen as the last hurrah from the cereal-based pet food industry, the FDA, who are the guys that are, you know, supposed to be supervising our drugs and stuff, which is slightly worrying, get involved. And they started investigating the link, inverted commas, between some 600 cases of DCM in pets, and this was not acceptable. There was 600 cases of DCM in pets, and they started investigating, and very quickly they went on to name the companies involved. They were all grain-free pet food companies, and they said these are the companies involved. Now, first, straight out of the traps, this was not afforded us in 2007 in the melamine scandal when tens of thousands of pets were being killed. The FDA knew the companies that had melamine in them, but they couldn't disclose it to the public because it wasn't fair on the company. Here they have 600 suspected cases that they have no evidence of whatsoever, and they name the companies publicly from the FDA website, which is massively damaging to the companies who weren't even given fair chance to say, uh, what happened? I just woke up. So that's the first thing, straight out of the traps, very, very dodgy. But it gets worse. A Facebook group was created, suddenly there's 60,000 members in a matter of minutes, all still for 600 cases. No more cases popping up, just these 600 cases. None popping up in Europe who also eat grain-free pet food, just in the US in these 600 cases. And then there's like studies highlight this guy in Sanderson in 2006, he estimated the normal prevalence of DCM in the overall population of dogs in the US is somewhere between 0.5 and 1%. There's 90 million dogs in the US, so you're talking that there should be somewhere between 500,000 and a million cases of DCM in the US population anyway. Of the canine population. So what are we fussing over 600 cases for? So you're starting to smell a rat now. I realize I've got like 1 or 2 minutes left. To cut a long story short, it's suddenly realized that, and they started pointing the finger at potatoes and pulses, which are peas and lentils and chickpeas. Maybe they're the cause of this 600 cases, forgetting about the fact that cereal-based pet foods historically cause it because of all the reasons that we highlighted. The FDA keeps going on, and prompted by 3 scientists, one called Dr. Lisa Freeman, who we're all very familiar with. If you're not, you will soon. Dr. Josh Stern and Dr. Darcy Aidan. These 3 guys released this piece called Diet-Associated DCM in Dogs: What Do We Know? And crucially, by saying what do we know, it puts it in the realm of a literature review. It's like they're implying that this has been peer-reviewed. If this was not peer-reviewed, it was a commentary piece. And it was rife with issues. I don't have time to go into them, but I'll put them up on Patreon. I'll take this chunk from my book and put up on Patreon to skip this, but the paper was slaughtered, okay? They just said this is an opinion piece, it hasn't been peer-reviewed, because it was. You'd see that two of the papers they refer to make no association to grain-free pet food. Not one thing that they mentioned associated grain-free pet food and ileitis. It was just all, well, we think, and perhaps, which you don't write in scientific papers. It's like you know, there is no trust, it's just data. So to skip all that, that's going on to Patreon. I just wanted to get to the last bit, and the wheels started to come off because Schulhof, who is a lawyer by trade, owns a grain-free pet food company over in the US, wrote Dogs, Dog Food, and Dogmeat. Check out that book. He got really annoyed and he said, right, he got 200 scientists and grain-free pet food manufacturers, got them all on board, and he's taking the FDA, of all people, to court. Which means evidence has to be brought forward. So he's suing the FDA. Can you believe that? The, the, I was going to curse, the guts to do that. And he's, he's suing them because he's saying it's absolutely outrageous, this has done massive damage. And, and he just said, look, it just, there's just no link there whatsoever. But then the, the journal that published their paper initially started having questions. And to cut a long story short, because of all the concerns highlighted by, uh, Shuloff and the band PLOS ONE, which is a massive platform for publishing studies, and they issued— they said there was an issue with these three authors' undeclared competing interests that stood out. Okay, this is in a second effort that they made to repress the industry, and you just have to see the difference. Initially, at the bottom of every study, the authors have to write, is there any competing interest? Like, you know, if I'm going to say, um, I can't think of anything, like if I'm going to say raw dog food is fab and I own a raw dog food company, you have to declare that because it's like 'Okay, I'll taint it a little bit.' If you're going to do a tick study and you're MSD Animal Health, you have to put it at the bottom so you know who's saying that, and you know, these things have to be visible. So the 3 authors that we named above, who also co-wrote a very popular paper incriminating raw, and what, you know, about the good and bad of raw dog food, it was just bad, there was no good at all. Um, but their competing interest piece was initially at the bottom, was initially 4 lines long. And PLOS, who have been— because are aware of this court case, said, guys, we need to see a better competing interest piece than that. And I'm going to put the before and after on Facebook for everybody to see. So the before was about 4 pages long, and the afters, guys, of their actual associations to dry pet food is unbelievable. Like, it's about 20 lines long that they had to admit to just all these ties to the pet food industry, and it just completely destroyed their case. And the very bottom line, just two lines to read out here, the fact is they got the job done. This bullshit that the FDA got involved in, who are supposed to be protecting us, the FDA were happy to get involved. And I'll comment on that in a second. But in 2019, statistics confirmed the grain-free pet food industry's worst fears, and they showed that, um, in an industry that was enjoying year-on-year growth of nearly 10%, in 2019 sales had fallen for the first time by 0.03%. 100%. So they did the job. They stopped the growth of grain-free pet food. It didn't matter if it was over nonsense. But the big question is, why did FDA, a governmental organization, get involved? It's because cereal-based pet food is the garbage line for junk from the food sector. It's the end line for poor quality wheat and corn that they don't even house properly, with covered in aflatoxin and everything, all the beet pulp and corn gluten and crap, but also meat meal. Which is the dregs of the meat industry. Because now if the meat industry can't sell their dregs to pet food companies, now they have to pay to dump it because there's only so much of this crap that the pet food industry can take. So it's so profitable. I worked out maybe about a third of a trillion dollars a year to the US. You can see why governments get involved because like the meat industry is turning around to government going, if you don't slow this down, we're going to have a problem here because we've got a lot of meat waste building up and there's only so much places you can spread credit. And that is what is behind it all. The whole— the government got wholeheartedly into this, and that's how corrupt the whole thing is, lads. It's utter nonsense. No more cases of DCM mentioned since. It's just disappeared, like the APN thing identified by University of Melbourne. No more cases of that, just gone, you know, utter, uh, sham. So that's what it is. I'll put the before and after kind of, um, conflicting interest on Facebook, and I'll put the rest of it on Patreon in a couple of days. Guys. So that's me, bitch. I didn't go too red there.

So amazing. This brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. And there's a guy called Ryan Yamka who you'll see on, on YouTube, and he, uh, has gone even deeper than Brady here on, on all that stuff. And if you're interested in this stuff and how corrupt the whole thing is, Ryan Yamka, he's on YouTube, isn't he? He's on YouTube. He's— he, he, he writes for Pet Industry Magazine or some, one of those as well.

He has his own pet food company as well now, doesn't he? Just their interest. But I think he used to work for another big, one of the big four.

Yes, he did as well. He did. Yamka, Y-A-M-K-A, Yamka. He's brilliant, brilliant, very articulate.

Pet Food Industry as well magazine, which is a really top magazine. So like, he is well respected. But yeah, his insight into the stuff is Pretty terrifying. It's, it's, yeah, bring a tear to your eye.

Yeah, he's got— yeah, even more, one or two other, uh, reasons why the DCM and grain-free is nonsense. Okay, so basically you can just throw the whole thing out.

What can you do, Nick? You've got to see if you've got a dodgy— what's, uh, what's the, what's the good news?

Okay, so I'm going to take a little breath. Okay, for you. Yeah. And so I've got some research here in Evernote, and I've just loads and loads and loads of things to say. But first, no, I'm not even going to talk about Evernote because we'll do it another time. So coenzyme Q10— no, I'll tell you what I'm going to start with is the principle of organotherapy. Organotherapy is a really posh way of saying when you've got heart disease, it's a very good idea to feed heart. Now that sounds like it's like something from Shakespeare. Yes, thou shalt have eye of newt and all this kind of thing. But actually it's really, really logical because heart is really full of coenzyme Q10, choline, taurine, and all these things. Yeah, because you're feeding a heart. And so if you're feeding those things, they go into the body of the, the, the animal, the prey animal, then donate all their, their building blocks to the carnivore. And the carnivore goes, thanks very much, I'll use that to help me maintain my heart because I'm a Cavalier and I'm 5 years old and I've got a heart murmur already.

Yeah.

So some support is a really, really good idea. So you can do that with kidney disease, you can do it with liver disease, and you can do it with heart disease, really. So there's a lot to be said for this organotherapy.

We've—

a few people have mentioned it over the last few weeks, so I just thought I'd bring that in. It's dead easy. Basically, you feed the organ if you've got a problem with another organ. So brilliant. Really great. So that was the first thing I was going to say. And then the second thing I was going to say was I always thought coenzyme Q10, it was a, it was a done deal that we— that there is evidence for it. But actually, looking on the National Institute of Integrated Health— I will post this in Patreon— it says coenzyme Q10 has not been shown to be, shown to be of value in treating cancer. It has only a few studies whether CoQ10 might prevent heart disease. There is research on the effects of CoQ10 in heart failure, but it's inconclusive. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And there is evidence that CoQ10 might reduce the risk of some complications of heart surgery. Now, we're not doing a whole lot of heart surgery on dogs, so I think we're— we need to be a little bit careful with that because CoQ10 costs a fortune and So I think we just need to be a little bit careful there. There's another really nice reference here. This is the nutritional benefits of organ meat by a company or an organization called Organuary, which sounds like it's going to be slightly rude, but actually Organuary is—

what are you doing next January?

In January, we eat loads of organ meat and super, super, super healthy. And Shanahan talks about organ meat, and I have quadrupled my intake of kidney and liver and all these good things since reading Shanahan. So with that and heart, I didn't know this. Heart is very rich in CoQ10. I did know that, but it's 10— and CoQ10 is 10 times more potent than vitamin E. As an antioxidant.

Yeah.

Reducing oxidation. So, so I'm kind of contradicting myself in that some of the high-level studies are saying it's maybe not useful, but as an antioxidant, even more antioxidant than—

Do you think this comes down to the studies? Because we've found this in the past where they will profess to have used vitamin C, but they'll have used ascorbic acid.

Yeah.

You know, and actually the absorption and how the body's utilizing it is totally different. So we've got to then drill down even deeper into some of these papers to see, you know, are they using ubiquinol as a source of coenzyme Q10? Are they using HART as a source of—

I bet they're not using HART.

Or are they just using a chemical reformulation?

Yeah. Yeah.

Brilliant.

The same question is coming up on the side here. Sorry to interrupt, Nick, but the same question is coming from the side here, guys. Can this be any heart? Absolutely. For the dog that can eat beef heart, any heart is going to be good for heart, any animal's heart. It's so, you know, you don't need to be too picky. If your dog will eat chicken hearts or turkey hearts or duck hearts, have at them. If he doesn't eat beef, don't worry about that. Beef is just one. There's lots of different types there.

So that's another aspect to coenzyme Q10, talking of that, is actually also the benefits that we see for gum disease and, you know, gingivitis. And that is also a precursor to some of the issues that we get with—

how does Coenzyme Q10 help with that?

So it's the antioxidant— well, it's just one of those things. If there is a study in cats on some of the odontoclastic lesions and how you can reduce the inflammation in the gums using Coenzyme Q10, but Susie McIntyre, I think, did a a study on that as a veterinary dentist, and that's what turned her on to her declaration of interest is now that she has moved on to producing Pet Plus. But yeah, the same, same lady.

Yeah, okay, cool.

Yeah, a few little thoughts, and then I'm just going to give you some round off for the last 2 minutes with some, some herbs, so you will get some, some nice herby bits here. I've got an article here and I'll put it up on Patreon which says that glyphosate, well-known weed killer, Monsanto and all that stuff, can cause cancer, infertility, brain disorders, and heart disease. And it has— it's such a weed killer, but it also has an antibacterial effect. And so it can screw up your microbiome in a really, really big way. I've got loads of other bits and pieces there.

Interesting. And we know that, and we know that pet food is— we know that dry-fed pets are really high in glyphosate. That's really cool.

Yeah.

Yeah. So you've got a tie-up there with heart disease there. Okay, let's have a look.

So whilst you're looking up that, can I quickly just say there's a few comments about grade 4 or 5 heart murmurs and grading of heart murmurs. Just something to reassure people about. There is a very simple way of working out if the heart murmur is really significant for your dogs because people panic as soon as they hear a low-grade, okay, so something that's maybe a grade 1 is just really talking about turbulence of the blood as it transfers through the heart. We talked about shock waves for the lub-dub, the valve noise. Well, actually, if the blood is turbulent, so if it's too thick or too thin then it will create turbulence as it goes through those chambers. And that's what we hear. The whoosh, whoosh noise is literally the turbulence of the blood. Obviously, as that turbulence gets more and more pronounced with greater and greater heart disease, then that can become more of a concern and more audible. And we will talk about that and we'll talk about that on Patreon so that people have got a good understanding of the various grading of heart murmurs. But just to remember that actually the most significant way of telling if it's causing a problem for your dog is to get one of the little apps that measures the respiratory rate for your dog. And if the respiratory rate is above 40, you need to go and see your vet. Okay, and that's at 40 at rest. So when they're— when you're watching the— not the footy— when you're watching the TV, okay, and your dog's at rest beside you, if you can count more than 40 respirations that's breath rates, okay, within a minute, then that's a time to go to your vet.

That's different for toys and giants, is that not different? Huge difference.

No, they said the study shows that the respiratory rate is the most key thing. If it's between 20 and 40, you should be monitoring it closely. If it's less than 20, you really won't be worrying about heart disease.

All right, cool.

If in doubt, get it checked though. Also, sorry, no worries, if you've got a really bad murmur, it doesn't necessarily mean you've got really bad heart disease. There's not a correlation necessarily.

Yeah.

Okay, so just here, I'm just going to give you a list, guys, so that you can go and do some Googling. Okay, so these are cardiotonic. These are the trophorestorative herbs, which basically these are like the milk— you know, milk thistle's great for the liver. These are kind of the milk thistles for the heart. And the key, the king of all of them is hawthorn. Okay, Crataegus, hawthorn. Okay, then we look at ginkgo, and ginkgo actually works with the heart, but it also works to relax the blood vessels because when your heart goes a bit not so good, your blood vessels tighten up to try and maintain your blood pressure. And these can help to balance out that my blood pressure is going higher and higher and higher. As a dog. Okay, then we've got astragalus, which helps to strengthen but also works because it's a really strong antioxidant, works on the heart as well. Crataegus is a massive antioxidant too. Uh, then we've got motherwort, which is kind of— it's like mothering the heart, and it just kind of calms it down and say, now, now, now, you'll be fine. You know, motherwort, it's really worth looking at. Another really massive one is cactus. Which is Selenicereus. I'll write it on Patreon.

Yeah.

Um, and also don't forget Collinsonia. Collinsonia is another one of these, uh, herbs. And, um, if you want a book— sorry, I'm just overwhelming you with books— that—

it's a beast.

It's a beautiful book. It's really well written. It's really well referenced. And Fenrir Herbal Medicine. I wonder how long it took them to dream up that title, guys.

Yeah, it's a phenomenal book though. It's so interesting. You can skip to something and go, oh, I feel like I'm absolutely nailing it reading this page.

It's great. Loads of background, and also my dog's got this, what can I look at? So it's useful for everyone in every situation.

We did a slight disservice here to Nicky Mack. We were talking about Ryan Yamka all the time, and his partner in crime really is Nikki DeSacrantis, North Point Pets Company over in the US. Nikki's the boss, you should check her out. So somebody started talking about Nikki and she came, so excellent recall Nikki, well done. And now that I see you here, we better start talking. So listen, and so Nikki has done a lot of work and Nikki's got a cool study coming out as well. So yeah, you're going to be hearing more from her for sure. So thanks for joining us Nikki, nice to have you.

Great, she's a She's a powerhouse. Fabulous. Great to see you here.

Something that's quite common, because obviously they'll get a textbook like that, Nick, of herbs and stuff. And somebody's asked here, can you use two herbs together, milk thistle and hawthorn? And so I'll let you answer that one, although I could.

Yeah, yes, you can is the answer, because they're both really safe. But I've been looking at these things for 20 years, so I can just say it off the top of my head. I think that I would read that for interest. And if you find things that really apply and you really want to go for it, I would be talking to a herbal vet. There is a group of herb vets, the British Association of Herbal Vets. Um, I can never remember their name. I've got so many acronyms in my name, in my head. That's one that just does not go in. But you just— if you just Google that, you'll find them. They're a great bunch, and they'll really, really, uh, help you with all of that stuff. Great.

Yeah, Kathy's got one last question there. Kathy's— how much of the daily diet should be heart? Look, a lot of raw dog food companies use the likes of heart and tripe as a cheaper form of meat to bulk their raw dog food mixes. Not much wrong with that. It's a hell of a lot better than using grain and stuff. It's just a muscle, so it's great. Heart is like the fillet steak of the body. I don't understand how we don't eat more of it. A little bit stringy because of the tendons that are at the ligaments that are inside it. Yeah, it's great food. So how much of the diet? Listen, the heart can be a very large part of the diet if you wish it to be. It's great to move your meats around for all the reasons that all different meats contain different things for that reason. But if I had a heart issue dog, I'd be lashing the heart in. I wouldn't be afraid of putting in 20-30% heart, 40% heart if you want, but cycle the hearts around, move the other ingredients around to get your balance right. Nothing wrong with that, guys. You're not going to overdo the heart. You're not going to overheart them. So particularly if it's not an issue.

Also, the great thing about hearts is they're really big tough buggers, and so you can put them out in the garden for the dog to chew on, and you will have a, a, a dental effect. You'll clean— help to clean the teeth. So if you've got a dog who can't chew bones or chews or anything like that, I often say put the heart out. Don't cut it, just put it out, and they will be in heaven.

Chicken heart treats are brilliant as well. You just put them in the oven, cook them low and slow, and they form a perfect size treat. And then if you cook them low and slow long enough to get really hard. And so they're a great treat to be giving out to the dogs. So chicken heart treats are just fantastic. You can get them quite reasonably priced, you know, so it's a good way of making your own high-quality treats. Guys, it's 10 to 8, so we are pushing on. So that's brilliant. I don't even know if we have something lined up for next week, but we should go to Patreon now and hit the poll and see what comes out. Press the magic machine. Yeah, is that good?

Cool. Great.

Okay, fantastic, guys. That's it. We're just going to go now. Thank you very much. Thanks to all the patrons. Thanks to everybody who's joined us. Thanks to Nikki Mack. Um, wonderful.

We will drop everything on patreon.com, guys. So that's where you can go. Uh, the price of a cup of tea is all that's needed, really. Uh, we, we greatly benefit from that, and it really helps to keep us going, and we can spend a bit of time on Fridays sorting this out as we do, and spend longer at our meetings. So this is— it really helps us. So if you can, patreon.com/walpetmedics. And we will— I'll be posting up the info that I just chopped out of the book. I'm just going to be lashing that up on Patreon because it's just too interesting to leave aside. But I am going to put up the conflict of interest on Facebook in about half an hour once I drop my kids' bikes down to my brother. He's going to bring them on holidays. I don't know why I told you that.

Well, listen, it's good because you're having a really busy day, Conor, so thank you very much for giving us—

yeah, it's good. I hate to miss it.

Yeah, bless you. It's fantastic. We'll see you in a week, guys.

Uh, take care.

See ya.

Thank you, thank you.