RPM Facebook Live: Liver Problems, YELLO!

As we wait for people to come in here, so tonight's going to be about liver disease, but from the very offset, Bren, if I could just have a very— just 2 minutes to have a very quick chat about a pal of mine who makes these, who's in food production. You know, bearing in mind that most people kind of clue in for the start of the videos, the most is the busiest. I wanted to get this out here. This girl is unbelievable. She's been in the business 5 or 6 years and she's making you know, really high-quality natural treats. The name of the company, I have to plug it, is Ri Raw Natural Pet Treats. So R-I-R-A-W. Ri is the Irish for gold. So Ri Raw Treats, they're in Ireland, okay? Besides that, look, it's unbelievable. You're talking to her and you're kind of asking, what did you do this weekend? You know, it was a scorcher and we're all thinking about, they were down the beach and whatever we were doing. She was in there turning her ovens on Saturday and Sunday and working with massive ovens, getting the meat in so she can take it out 24 hours later so it's ready for Mondays. Orders and whatnot. And she sounded a little bit down. It's like, bloody hell, like, Sarah, how's it going? And, you know, it's just relentlessly hard work. You know, it's so difficult. She's in the game of producing, like, the best quality food, the best quality treats. And I do think that it's very hard if you're not in the game— and the game being food manufacturing, pets or otherwise— if you've never been on that side of things, it's hard to describe to people how hard it is. I was in it for 2 or 3 years. I was trying to make the very best product I could. So your ingredients cost more our Department of Agriculture in Ireland are relentlessly oppressive, in my opinion, very difficult to deal with. Not, not the same as UK Department of Agriculture. I hear good things about them. But aside from that, then you bring this product that's more expensive to the market and you have to convince the market it's worth it. And you're not going to be a marketeer. You might be good at wrapping the product as well as other people, and it's so hard to convince people to spend that extra 30, 40, 50% on what is— it may be ethical, maybe organic, or outdoor-reared, or lightly baked, or slowly produced. If it takes time to dehydrate, it's going to cost you more. And so trying to convince the market, it's so bloody difficult. And at the moment there's a big natural treat market, and I heard a little bit of scandal there 2 or 3 days ago from a major pet food producer in the UK who were trying to hire a pet treat company to make some treats for them. And they're looking at their natural treat range, all very, very British, but, you know, as kind of English as you could hope with the flags and everything and the origin and stuff on it. They couldn't wait to get involved with this company, and a tiny bit of digging revealed you know, the rabbits are being flown in from France, which is, you know, if you knew how those rabbits are being reared. And a lot of this stuff, it just wasn't this ethical, organic, outdoor at all. And I was like, you know, bloody hell, this is not what you kind of say in your packet. Well, they say, well, it's more ethical than the worst ethics out there, and all this sort of nonsense. So when you hear that and then you contrast that to what the likes of Sarah and small tree producers are trying to do— like, Sarah hasn't paid herself a wage in 6 years. Like, people think they're in there and driving around in Porsches. You are breaking your back when you start a business. You invest your money, and if the business doesn't work, you're going down. Because no longer do banks lend to limited companies, they lend to the directors who then put the money in themselves. And so the pressure that these guys are under and the labor they put in, their staff are hardly the highest paid. I just wanted to reiterate, if we could just wrap it up and just say, look guys, you know, we do tend to kind of say we support local and everything's brilliant, we support Irish where we can, you support British where you can, whatever. But like, we need to do that. The small producers deserve a bit of support. And particularly in the treat game, we know how bad food can go with the whole dry food thing, guys. Treats can be just as dodgy, if not a little bit worse. And you know, they can import treats from anywhere. The treats can be sourced from a different country in Europe, but that doesn't mean they made them in Europe. They just got them from a different country outside Europe. Tracking that stuff down is very hard. Please reward your natural treat manufacturers. If you're going to buy treats, Britain, make sure they're made in Britain on British meat, minimum Red Tractor, you know, and quiz them and get to know these small companies. They're going to charge you a bit more, but they're made way better. There's less distance to your doorstep and all the other good things. And if you're in Ireland or Northern Ireland, please support Re-Raw Treats because they're just fantastic and they need— they deserve more from— for what they're doing. That just kind of annoyed me this morning when I was talking to them because I had a lovely weekend, you know, and I didn't want to tell her I was down the beach all day, you know. So because I was in manufacturing, I got out because it's just, it's so unrewarding, it's so difficult to be good.

It's always a challenge. I think, you know, there's so many people that join us this evening and in previous evenings that run their own businesses, have really worked hard. You know, there's so many people out there doing the treats. I could mention a couple, Moo Moo and Bear, who work with, you know, that we've seen at many shows that we attend as a practice. Even somebody we've got, Eve Dewhurst, who's just set up you know, was asking me about treats and how to get into that. And yet often, as the general public will not realize the level of stuff that they need to be looking into, not just the making of the product, but then it's about insurance, it's about making sure that the product's tested, it's about packaging it right, paperwork, paperwork, paperwork, all of those things, the paperwork. Yeah, hats off to any guys out there that are joining us You know, it's great that you're making that effort. And I would just say, yeah, please just support those businesses if you're a purchaser, you know, to save 50 pence just so that you can get something cheaper when you don't know the provenance of it.

Yeah, the temptation is to use the sheds. They are very handy for leads and cheap stuff, and that's great. But the temptation is to buy your treats when you're in there. But that is nothing like somebody in Somerset taking some grass-fed, you know, English cow and making tendons on that, unless of course if the sheds are kind of sourcing those pieces from there. But I look, anyway, look, I just kind of wanted to push, beat that drum a little bit.

That's his rant for tonight, guys.

Yeah, I won't be ranting about tonight. But anyway, so it's that stinking hot, Brian, isn't it? Bloody hell.

Oh yeah, and I've had to shut the windows and everything because all the neighbors are out enjoying the lovely evening sun. So yeah, I'm now in a stuffy little room with loads of lights Yes, cooking, making us sweat even more. For your enjoyment, guys, just for your enjoyment.

I wore a white shirt tonight because I actually had to do a thing last night for a big group of assistance dogs, and the sweat on me was unbelievable. 2 and a half hours in this little room that I work in. I love the sound in here, and not that I have many options of rooms I can use in fairness, but it happens that this is good.

Anyway, without a screaming child.

Yeah, yeah, talk to you guys. Improved or, um, but yeah, listen, I hope you have a liver-supporting, uh, drink tonight, Bren, because we're going to be talking about livers. First up, guys, thanks to everyone on patreon.com. You can check us out, Raw Pet Medics, on patreon.com. You can support us there if you like what you're going to hear tonight. The price of a cup of coffee a month is all we ask. It really helps us get, uh, do, uh, prepare for what we, we do each week. We love doing it, but it definitely helps, that little bit of help in the background. And but yeah, so we're going to be talking kind of Livers tonight, Bren. I imagine this is going to be a heavily— it's going to be a big veterinary kind of issue. Let's face it, this liver disease isn't going to be something I'm very adept at at all. But if I could start off, Bren, with just kind of talking through why a lot— like, I wanted to start with a story if I could.

Okay, okay.

My first consult that I did was while I was a food manufacturer, maybe 10 years ago, 8 years ago, and a guy rang me. I'm going to say his name, Damien. And Damien had a Westie, and the Westie was in big trouble. It had liver disease, and it was given— it had been given a couple of months. It was said, right, this Westie is going down, what can you do for him? And I was like, I don't know. I was very new at the game, and I kind of said, look, you know, this is what I would do if it was my dog. The dog was on special hepatic liver dry food and special loads of different medicines. I said, like, listen, if he had a couple of months to live, I would be banging them onto fresh food because I believe in it, and this is the diet I'd put them on. And I advised on that diet. And you know, you can decide what you want to do with the meds. It's all you and your vet, you deal with that. I can't talk about that. Anyway, I give him all this advice and I say best of luck. And then maybe 6 months later, I get a phone call from the same guy and this time he's angry. And I think, oh my God, I've harmed a dog. You know, I knew this was going to happen. The more advice you give out, I'm sure, Bren, you do worry about that. That's, you know, you can't always get it right. You know, I can only imagine how hard it is with dogs and cats with no feedback. So anyway, he's angry and And I'm thinking it was me. And he goes, Conor, I'm outside a very big veterinary hospital in Dublin, Ireland. And he's standing there and he went back in with his dog after months, bearing in mind the dog had a couple of months to live. And this is like 5 or 6 months later, went back in with the dog and the dog had made a miraculous recovery. They'd never seen this before. The dog was just this completely different dog inside out, back running around. He had removed most of the meds that the dog was on. I'm going to stay away from all that conversation. And eating fresh food. And one of the things I said was that he needs a little bit of good quality liver in his diet. The dog didn't like the organ parts of the diet. He actually put it in a syringe, ground it up, and he fed the dog like a goose for the first few weeks until he resigned himself. This is a foie gras type Westie dog. So this is the sort of thing you would do because the dog's going to die anyway. It's like, okay, I've got to get— eventually the dog started enjoying the food. So that's what he went to. And then they said, we advise against the course of action you've taken, put them back on the hepatic dry food and the meds we recommended. And he rang me to say like, I am going to the papers about this, this is a— this— why is this the advice I've been given? I said, well, look, you wouldn't be doing me any favors hauling me out into the light over this because it's just such a treacherous kind of place. That was the first kind of example I had of liver disease. And to explain to people why a lot of dogs might get liver disease from ultra-processed dry food, if I could just dash through a few of the things that quite obviously is not so good about dry food. I mean, it's got a high grain content, and so studies show that the dogs on cereal-based dry food have high glyphosate concentrations. That's not good for livers. Poor quality rendered protein can contain sick disease animals in the States and all that kind of stuff. But more to the point, poor quality rendered protein contains MRP, which are going to cause you trouble, rendered fat, and the liver's role in all that. The vitamins and minerals they use is a big one. So we were talking about this already, Ben, as we were preparing for tonight. I just wanted to read this very short paragraph on copper in pet food. I always say it's the ridiculous quality zinc oxide that they use in pet foods that dogs have to eat so much of it, but it's like, it's the same with iron oxide, which is rust, and copper oxide. Listen to this. Commercial sources of copper are either copper oxide or copper sulfate. The latter is synthetically produced by treating either pure copper or more likely copper oxide, as it's cheaper, with warm sulfuric acid to yield a blue salt called copper sulfate. You'll remember from school probably. AAFCO states because of very poor digestibility, copper from oxide sources that are added to the pet food should not be considered in determining the minimum nutrient concentration for support. Okay, in other words, they need to use quite a lot of this to hit your kind of the pet's needs to, you know, if you're only gonna absorb 10% of it, you have to whack a lot into the food. This is copper sulfate. So anyway, here's the bottom line. Authors seeking to understand the higher incidence of liver disease in some breeds conclude, we believe that the amount of copper in many commercial dog foods is excessive and that Labrador Retrievers, particularly because of their popularity as family pets, may be functioning as sentinels for trends in hepatic copper concentrations in the general pet population because Labradors are quite prone to the disease. And then, Bren, you said something about Schnauzers. What was that about?

So this is really interesting. I just Just rewind for a second. I am going to talk about Schnauzers because loads of people ask about it. Okay, there's a genetic predisposition to copper toxicity which causes liver disease, so we're going to come back to that. But very briefly, what is the reasoning that they're actually introducing copper sulfate in these foods? What, you know, why are they having to bolster that when we can find copper in our natural products without having to shove this in. So what argument are they using for adding it?

I would say the ingredients they're using don't contain an awful lot of copper. It's not like they're using organs or fresh bones or places where you might find low sinks of copper, natural copper. And they could put in good quality copper, which is chelated copper, copper that's been bound to a protein which the gut membrane says, okay, come on in casually. But they use the cheaper stuff.

So yeah, Look, just for the guys out there listening, you know, this is really interesting, but there are several different ions of— so these are electrically charged metal particles that then attract a salt. Okay. And that's, you know, you have cation and anion. And if what we find in the body is various ways of absorbing those ions into the bloodstream and, you know, things like iron different types of iron, but iron are Fe2+, okay, calcium is Ca2+, zinc is Zn2+, you've got copper Cu2+. So these have actually also an affinity for being absorbed, and you will find that actually they can compete with each other for absorption. And this is really useful when it comes to copper toxicity situations where we're worried about the level of copper. So coming back for a moment, let's talk about copper toxicity and liver disease in Schnauzers. So you can get a genetic test. We've talked about Laboclin before, okay, for MDR1 gene testing. They do do these tests. You just swab the inside of the cheek, send it off, you know, it will tell you whether your dog's predisposed or not. And it can cause a cirrhosis, shriveling up and drying out effectively of the liver, reduces the liver function, the ability for it to work. So you'll get jaundice, you'll get just basically a shriveled liver. So it is really important that you look at if you've got those cases moving away from these commercial foods that add these horrible things in is really good. And I've got several cases that have been given very short periods of time to live that have gone on for years having been put onto a raw diet and people panic about, well, but how do I make even less copper in there? And often we look at chelating, chelated zinc or something like that being added into the diet to compensate or, you know, looking at other meats which are rich in, in those foods and looking at liver, looking at heart, you know, using things like that that have these other minerals in them to outcompete levels of copper. And I think, you know, they can't do without copper. It's just they can't cope with excessive amounts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd imagine. Does it matter that there's like huge amounts of excessive artificial copper, even though that type of copper is harder to absorb? The fact is there's just more of it in the mix.

And so it's fine all the time with minerals, you know, phosphorus was a classic we talked about in the kidney side. Okay. You know, when they add in inorganic phosphates as as, you know, ions and they're not bound, you know, organically to proteins and things like that. Again, it has a totally different influence on circulating amounts and what that does to the rest of the body. So, yeah, absolutely. I think thoroughly believe that, you know, there is nothing like using organ meats which are rich in, you know, certain minerals as a way of delivering those rather than, you know, just saying, do you know what, Yeah, ferrous sulfate is a classic as well. You know, for all of those poor women that were out there, you know, that had their little anemia test prior to giving birth and then they were told by the midwife to take ferrous sulfate as their iron supplementation when they should have been told to drink Guinness. You know, it was— sorry, I had to put that in there. You know, from a point of view, ferrous greens and things like that, which are a more natural way of of picking up some of those, that iron, actually, you know, all it does is it causes you to have rock-hard black stool. It doesn't actually get into your system, you know, and they've slowly learned this over the years.

So, so poorly absorbed.

Yeah. Do look at appropriate organic, and that then means, you know, living things that have are rich in those minerals if you need to supplement.

I always remember that vitamins are from the land of the living and minerals are not, and that's why the gut doesn't trust them. So guts don't like minerals because they come from, let's pretend, rocks. So they, they need to be holding the hand of a carbon molecule which the gut membrane trusts, like going to a party with somebody that's been invited. A couple more bits about dry food before we start learning a bit about liver disease. Yeah, and like, don't forget chemicals in dry food. My God, I mean The melamine scandal in 2007 just absolutely decimated livers all over the place, particularly cats. SPB, the second most popular cause of pet food recall, sodium pentobarbital, which is the, the stuff that's used to euthanize pets and horses. But also they have a whole heap of preservatives, additives, emulsifiers in dry food, anti-caking agents, anti-gelling agents, artificial colors, grinding agents, leavening agents, pH controlling agents, stabilizers. None of this needs to make the label. All has to be processed by the— broken apart by the liver. So this is going to lead on to what we're talking about drugs now in a second. And the last thing is mycotoxins, aflatoxins, and a couple of other different types of mycotoxins are known to be highly not only carcinogenic, but they rot the liver. And we have a couple of 3 or 4 studies I mentioned in the book, but in the last incidence in 2006, 100 dogs died with symptoms ranging from enlarged pale yellow livers with or without cirrhosis. So, you know, hepatic lipidosis. So these are all very liver-related diseases from aflatoxin. And then heavy metals— if anybody's reading Susan Tixton's piece there recently, she said like the heavy metals, the amount of heavy metals in pet food are not going down in the last 10 years. It's going up— more uranium, more lead. And it's just like you would never be permitted in human food, leakage off the can and all sorts of things. So there's so many reasons that dry food wouldn't be good, but Before we get into what we might advise, can you just tell us a little bit about liver disease? What is it? How does it work? Tell us a bit about it.

Yeah, absolutely. And before I forget, actually, Bedlington's, you know, I know I talked about Schnauzers, Bedlington's is another big one for copper toxicosis. So if you've got Bedlington out there, get the genetic test.

Where do you get the test from?

Laboclin, okay, we talked about that. If you scroll back to the ones where we talked about MDR1 gene testing and stuff like that.

How do you spell Laboclin?

L-A-B-O-K-L-I-N.

Okay, cool, very good.

There are a couple of other genetic testings within the UK. Look at those, look at the cost, and yeah, and pay for it. It's a direct to them, you don't need to go via your vet. You literally— they send you out a kit, it's an inside the cheek swab, and then you send it off. It's really simple. So let me split this down. The liver is a huge organ. I don't this week have a prop of a big liver. I did consider it The only one I could find was something fresh, and I thought that would be a bit gross on this. So, um, what we need to understand is, um, splitting this down into simplicity of disease. So there is the disease of the liver itself, and I'm going to talk a little bit about blood because loads of people ask about blood levels, and I need to talk about that again, um, like we did with the kidneys. And with— then— and that's the actual function of the liver, how it metabolizes things, creates glycogen, creates, you know, all of these other nutrients and vitamins and controls the release through the body with those. Then we've got the biliary system, which is all about recycling blood cells, about the iron and about absorption of fats from the gut. Okay. And with that, some of the fat-soluble vitamins. And then we have effectively what happens if you bypass the liver with vestigial blood vessels. So the infant— sorry, the fetus within the uterus will actually bypass its own liver. Okay, so the liver remains really, really small and it's not really doing very much in the fetus, and it relies on the placenta doing all of the detox and controlling things from the mum. Okay, the mum's liver is doing all of the work. So there are vessels which bypass the gut, okay, and through the liver and the circulatory system. And so you've got all of this stuff because obviously the fetus is not eating either, so it's bypassing all of those functions. So what happens is congenitally those vessels should close down when the fetus is born to allow perfusion to happen and their livers to kick in and start working and functioning properly. And what can happen is that they remain open and you, you remain with these liver shunts.

No way.

You can get other things which are actually shunts which form artificially within the liver through injury or other inflammatory processes, and they can happen within the liver. And so effectively they're bypassing liver function.

That's not—

and so when we deal with that, that means that if you've got things like protein breakdown, so one of the really important liver functions that we talk about is taking ammonia from where protein is being sliced up and the energy used or whatever, and you've got waste ammonia at the end that binds two ammonias together to create urea, which is then excreted by the kidneys. And urea is a lot less toxic than ammonia.

Yeah.

So what we see in some of these cases, if there's excess ammonia builds up you can get seizures and those sort of staggering gaits and all sorts of problems with poor doers. They don't actually— they're not able to put weight on very easily. So there's lots of things to look at. So those are the shunts that we look at. And a lot of guys will be thinking, you know, being— say you've got, you know, your dog's got liver problems and they've got a shunt, and so surgically you can tie some of them off Other ones where they're inside the liver, it's really hard to tie those off, and that can be, you know, really hard to control.

Can you find— how can you find a shunt inside a liver? How could you possibly—

you look at, uh, so you basically ultrasound scans these days. So you just do Doppler flow, which looks at the blood flow through the liver, and you can find them effectively joining an artery direct to a vein, and it's just bypassing liver.

So you'll notice, you'll say that vein shouldn't be there.

Yeah, so usually the liver's not as big. Okay, so yeah, there's something going wrong. They've got these other symptoms, they may have high ammonia, they've got other symptoms going on, and then you're looking for the external shunt because you're thinking, thank God I can see that and I can tie that off. Or then you go, oh no, that's an internal shunt, that's not going to be so easy. There are stents and things that they can shove inside them to try try and block them if they're just a few, but often there's quite a few together. So anyway, that's shunts, okay? And we're going to put that to bed. Any more information? Look, we could— I could talk for a whole evening on liver here, you know. We're going to have to put this in.

Yeah, okay.

So we're going to split this out. I think, um, biliary disease, many of you will find this where, yeah, this is a classic where you may see your dog go yellow because there's an obstruction to the outflow. So the bile ducts come out from the liver and join the small intestine, okay, around where the pancreas joins. So we've talked about triaditis in the pancreas video, so any inflammation that blocks that, and then that can cause the body to back up the bile within the liver, and they can get jaundice. They'll go bright—

the yellow is, it's an excess of bile essentially in the blood. Yellow.

Sorry, that's the strapline. Yellow.

Okay, but so this is why you'll see when people got jaundice, their eyes are going yellow and their skin's going yellow. It's because it's a buildup of bile in the blood, and that is the yellow effect you're seeing. It's this stuff. Is it being stashed in the tissues? Is that why your gums are turning, or is it just your blood is just turning yellow?

It just leaks out. So rather than being able to go through a normal cycle and break down— so we've got 3 types of jaundice. We've got prehepatic, which basically is you've got an excess breakdown of red cells which releases too much of these bile pigments. You've got hepatic, where the liver itself is just basically can't function, and I'm going to talk about that next. And then you've got this posthepatic, where the biliary duct gets blocked and you've got a backup of excess pigments.

If the gallbladder produces bile, how can you live without a gallbladder?

No, no, the liver produces bile. Okay, it's stored in the gallbladder. Okay, and then when you eat, especially fatty meals, it basically injects— when the food passes from the stomach, it injects like a little ball of squeezy stuff to exit all of that bile. Okay, and that changes— it reduces acidity, it mixes and absorbs the fats that have been produced in that stomach process, bile salts and all sorts of stuff.

Yeah. And so all those are stored in the gallbladder. It has no actual form of kind of— that's interesting. You know, that's storage. How can you live without that? How can you buy—

basically, you— so if they get cysts or tumors or, you know, other blockages that are causing problems, we may just say, look, the liver can't cope to actually build up enough bile and then eject it on a consistent basis. So actually it's far better for the dog or human to have the gallbladder removed and allow the bile to trickle into the gut constantly.

Whoa.

Okay, so it just doesn't have this system of being able to build up and form stones and things like that, you know, gallstones, which can be extremely painful.

Yeah, so I've heard.

On that side of things, a little clue, guys: if you have a dog who's had no injury whatsoever, no, you know, trips or falls, and they have— they're poor doers and they have back pain just behind the last rib, okay, then that can be referred pain from the liver. So it's always worth just having their liver enzymes checked. And this brings me into a really important bit here about looking at blood samples. Now liver enzymes are very volatile, they will go all over the place depending on when the animal's tested, whether they've eaten or not, so please help your vet standardize so all of the reference ranges are based on a standard of 12 hours fasting and morning sampling. So if you ever suspect that you need to get your dog's blood tested, please think, well, the vet hasn't necessarily told me this, but first and foremost, you should really be looking at a fasted sample, 12 hours, okay, and looking at a morning sample.

So what about the issue that the vet samples are based on cereal-fed dogs?

Yeah, so there are some issues around those, okay, more so with kidney parameters than it seems to be with liver parameters, okay. And the standard liver profile that they will look at, okay, rather than that you have a, um, the whole profile of everything that liver does, they will probably just look at ALP, so alkaline phosphatase amylase, which is very fickle and found in lots of other tissues. So if that's raised, don't just assume they've got liver failure. There could be lots of other things going on, even gut problems. They look at alanine transferase, which is structural, we call that. That's usually bound to membranes of cells within the liver. So if the liver is disrupted, then the alanine transferase can be slightly raised.

They increase.

Okay. And then they will look at the bilirubin usually, so they'll be looking at bile salts or bilirubin circulating. There are then some other functional enzymes that can be looked at, okay, gamma-glutathione that looks in the thiaminase, which is in the liver, and you can effectively test liver function by testing these enzymes feeding the dog and then retesting to look at how well they're producing bile, how well they're releasing things, you know, all of this stuff that's going on. So if any of these raised and you want to find out for this liver itself, would do this liver function test. Okay, so I know I'm skipping through this quite fast. You have the video, you can— these are all saved so you can go back through any of the information. Always, always look at with these samples, there can be slight tweaks. We chop off the bottom 10% and the top 10% of the range to get a standard range. So it's always worth doing some preliminary bloods on a young dog of yours so that you've got a reference point for them in the future if they become poorly.

Would you expect those blood results to be the equivalent of a 2-year-old dog that you got the bloods done and suddenly your 7 or 8-year-old dog has spiking ATS, whatever you mentioned?

They will progress, you know, things will change. And something that's really interesting with your very first story tonight is that, do you know, guys, unlike the liver, the kidneys, the liver is one of the most regenerative organs in the body. So actually, if you can support it through its really sick phase, dying to get better, stop it getting toxic from copper or whatever else is going on, the drugs or the, you know, whatever, then as long as it's not gone totally sclerotic, okay, you will be able to regenerate bits from this.

You just mentioned, like, even antioxidants, you know, like, people think that it seems a dry, dry world, dry pet food world thinks antioxidants are like these benefits, these things we can add in, like, you know, coenzyme Q10. We'll add it in when he's 8, when he's got some sickness. Like, antioxidants aren't— which vitamin E is one vitamin, like, there's just— but there's so many in nature. There's so many in seaweeds alone you've never even heard of. Just so many antioxidants out there. But they wait till you get sick before we give you antioxidants. No, your body needs a constant supply. It's always in a process of oxidization. It's not a perfect process, this making energy. Mitochondria are shooting off sparks all the time. They're trying to create free radicals all the time. They constantly need antioxidants, which are your body's fire extinguishers, all the time because you are a complicated bit of hardware. It's not something that you wait till you get sick. You're probably getting sick without the antioxidants, and livers need a savage amount of them. So why wouldn't you produce this? And why would you have this in food? It's one of the great benefits of raw. You don't need to think about all these things. They're in the food. You keep varying up your ingredients, particularly little bits of plant ingredients where the really sexy stuff can be found. Like it's such a benefit overall for liver disease. But anyway, sorry, that was—

No, absolutely. These are things that you need to know. And yeah, a lot of our herbal medicine, homeopathic medicine, complementary medicines revolves when we're talking about support for the liver around just trying to keep all of those free radicals down. Okay. I had a really— and talking of free radicals, had a really interesting case presented to me last week where they changed their oil from the same manufacturer. There was a new process that they announced and they got loads of polyphenols in it. And so they were advised to consider moving to that. They moved to that. Their dog's joints went from being 1/10 lame up to 7/10 lame, really, really sore. They couldn't work it out. They thought, well, yeah, I've even improved improved these oils, we took it back to the original fish oil that it was on, took away all of that new process. Dog is resolved just with that, back to 1/10 flame.

That's what—

that's the level of— just think about the oxidative damage that some of these supplements that are not stored correctly can do or produce correctly. So be careful, be mindful about how you're sourcing stuff. And absolutely use those.

I'll come back to a few herbs at the end as well. I've got some good studies of herbs that have been shown to be beneficial.

Yeah, and I'll talk about a few too that we use.

Yeah, like I want to say, like, you know, it's, and it's not just, you know, the lack of antioxidants and stuff, you know, there's a lot of kind of chemicals that we're putting in the brain and like, you know, wormers, you know, toxic, surely to God they've got to be processed out by the liver. I think like, you know, people kind of forget that the liver is involved in when you give drugs, you know, the liver is the primary site for the metabolism and excretion of those drugs, you know. So it's not just worms we're talking about, but in the past, and I'm just reading this off my screen here, another little section, but you know, those heartworm drugs have been involved in a terrible amount of liver disease in dogs. The FDA investigated a couple of different products which had a very strange ending. But they're the drugs that, you know, you may or may not need to be given to your dog. But there's always the time, Bren, I'll get your opinion on this, when your dog is ill and you need to give them meds. There's a staggering stat here that 50% drug-induced liver injury has been reported in almost 50% of drugs in the Physician's Desk Reference. So we know that meds that we need, like, you know, there's just so many different meds you could talk about, like antibiotics, have a prolonged half-life in animals with liver disease, in dogs as well.

In, let's see, metronidazole, you should never drink when you've got metronidazole in your system because it's going to be impaired, you know, remain with the alcohol for a lot longer.

Antifungal treatments such as metronidazole, which is Flagyl, solves that antibiotic very popular.

So that's, you know, antifungals like itraconazoles, yeah, all of the conazoles, the miconazoles, all linked to liver stress.

Analgesics, which are your pain management. Your non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, which are, you know, introduce kind of gastrointestinal bleeding, renal failure, anticonvulsants, chemotherapy. All these drugs have a big kick to the liver because the liver has to break them down and get rid of them.

So this is why some of the new monoclonal antibody treatments are looked to now as a way forward, because they're not broken down by metabolism. The liver detoxing the system. We talked about how it uses normal nutrients and how we use some of those pathways that it has to actually detox the body of some of these drugs. You know, it's possible. Now, paracetamol is a classic. Yeah, we've talked about— I said to somebody that I would mention about cats. Okay. You know, this is a classic where for some dogs paracetamol can be a great pain relief. For cats, it's really, really dangerous. Okay. They just don't have the ability to detox themselves in the same way. The same with some of the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories. You can't assume that just because your dog can take it, that your cat can cope with the same sort of dosage. So there's all sorts of changes there. So have a look at this, you know, when you're considering the drugs that you're giving, especially when they've got many different types of drugs being given for different reasons. But yes, a lot of them will be layering upon layer of needing the liver to detox it. So actually you may need to be dialing back on the dosage so that the body can cope. So yeah, do please think about that. You know, cats are far more sensitive to these toxins, you know, as these desert carnivores, they just really don't seem to be able to cope with a lot of drugs which are plant-derived as well. So yeah, paracetamol for the Americans, that's Tylenol, I think, isn't it?

Is that right?

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. So just so that we're covering people over the other side of the pond. Yeah. Just, you know.

So do you have to factor this in, Brent? So like, you know, pain relief and you go, okay, well, this dog's got liver disease, so I'm going to use— I just literally read it off the study there. Tramadol might be a better option. Like, that must be serious pressure on a vet then when you're trying to treat a vet with multiple issues. It's like How are you supposed to understand? Have you got a book that you go through when you look at the meds and you see whether—

No, no, we just know. So that's part of our education. So it's another thing that's crammed into our course about how these things are metabolized, what their half-lives are. And then this is why you will, you know, if somebody's looking at more than one drug being used in your pet at any one time, sometimes two have been tested together. Generally the license will be specific to one drug. And so often your vet will say to you, look, we're using more than one drug here, and, you know, sometimes we're using 3 or 4 if you're looking at the pain management stuff that goes on. Then they have to say to you, look, we are effectively working from first principles of how these drugs work, then how they're metabolized, and we're working on what we've experienced as dosages, but there are— it's too expensive to do these huge studies on every class of a drug.

How many animals?

I'm sorry, guys, you have to accept these are off-label. Yeah, and that's why they'll ask you to sign a form, you know, even for the sedation and general anaesthetic for any operation. Somebody mentioned that we need to say, look, this is effectively off-label in many of these cases because they can't do all the possible drug interactions. Yeah, but yeah, it's really important. You said somebody mentioned, you know, anesthetics are changed when we're going into these. So, you know, look at these other, other factors. You know, if your dog is known to have liver problems, getting that test so that we can prepare for what we might need to do to adjust dosages or help support post the situation is really, really important.

Okay, listen, we've got 5 minutes left, so let's both of us just fly through what some advice on what people would do with liver disease, okay, liver issues. Again, let's just be listening to Brand's advice more than mine, but if I could just dash through a couple of things, you know, whatever about removing the toxic insults, which is your dry food, your chemically preserved pet store treats, parasite control if you don't need it, you know, on and on and on, good quality water. That's a really good idea because all that is a kick to the liver. And then you've got to look at the meds that you're at the vet's arm, but your vet will be considering that. That's not really your job. As regards diet, absolutely no to low protein. Ignore all that nonsense. And it's just—

it's quality protein. Yeah, this is the thing, guys. When, when we process that protein, in my view, you corrupt the structure enough that actually all the body can do is use it as energy. You know, you can chop it up into bits and, you know, convert it into glucose, strangely enough, and use it for energy breakdown, but it can't necessarily assimilate it into its own structure because it's so damaged.

Yeah.

So actually, if you give good raw protein, in my opinion, at least it can assimilate that with the least waste product.

Yeah. Okay. Oh, that's a good tip. Now, the amount— coming back to the ammonia thing that you mentioned, it's interesting that red meat of all meats is the one most likely to produce the most ammonia in the body. It's not a reason to cut out all red meats from a liver disease diet, but it's a reason to look, lean more on your white meats.

Is that study in cooked food or not?

Oh, I don't know. It could be a study from humans, actually. Interesting. I'll look into that and I'll get back to Facebook about that, guys.

Right.

Yeah, interesting. So this, they would have been advising more white meats like, you know, fish, turkey, chicken.

A lot of people do that, but I'm just, I wonder with a lot of those studies, I think they come from cooked protein because so many of the scientists do not measure the difference between cooked and raw.

Cool. Really good. I want to check that out. That's interesting. Organotherapy, don't forget, really good quality liver going in is a good idea. Liver contains vitamin A and D and stuff that you can worry about when you've got your liver is a little bit rocky. But make sure you do keep it going in, but good quality liver, because bad quality liver could be a source of all the crap you're trying to avoid. So good quality organic liver that you can put in there is a good idea. Lean is a good idea. As always, dogs, I believe very much so, I push the whole lean diet. So as always, a nice lean diet of good quality protein. Broth is fantastic because one thing in broth, when you make broth, it produces a very high glycine mix. And glycine is this amino acid that is really, really important to the liver for so many things it's involved in there. I'm reading this off the thing. Helps formation of bile salts and gastric acid. And so all sorts of stuff. And so it's really good for removing toxins as well. Somebody said, what do you do herb-wise? Can you detox the liver? I don't really like the word detox because I'm not quite sure what it means, but the herbs for liver disease, they're the same ones over and over because the studies behind them are brilliant. One of them is ginseng. Studies of humans reveal a reduction in ALT, which you mentioned there, GGT, both markers for liver damage when you feed ginseng. Green tea is the same. Big studies of humans over 90 days, massive reduction in liver damage markers. Licorice, there's a great one. Turmeric was a great one to study in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which I'm not sure if that's relevant to dogs. Another huge study. Garlic was a great one, particularly because it mentioned people that were boozing. So I think there was—

yeah, dandelion is another great one. Yeah, I know that we've had. So milk thistle, we talked about. So that's, um, that has the sammies in it, but it also— so you maybe know it as Carduus marianus, um, for, for those. So we often use these in mother tinctures. Chelidonium, um, we use as well, things that improve the circulation. So even Ceanothus we can use in these cases as well. Berberis and Taraxacum, so that's the dandelion and Yeah, berberis, you'll have heard of, also has berberine in it as the anti-inflammatory.

Your fresh garlic, as always, 50% of participants showed an improvement in the severity of liver fat accumulation. Turmeric, as always, is brilliant. But this is a great one, and licorice— listen to this one because this involves drinking. In a small study, in a small study of only 6 healthy people, in fairness, but a good one, it was peer-reviewed, they took glycyrrhizin, which is the magic stuff. It's a saponin in them compounds. And they took it before drinking vodka every night for 12 days, and 6 people only drank vodka nightly for 12 hours. In the vodka-only group, liver damage markers including ALT, AST, and GGT significantly increased, and in the group taking licorice, these markers did not significantly increase. So taking a bit, eating some licorice allsorts while you go out on the lash is a very good idea.

It's not licorice.

I've just graduated science, so thanks everybody.

Licorice tincture. Not sure that sugary, tarry colored stuff. It's interesting.

They wouldn't call them licorice allsorts if there's no licorice.

Licorice laces too. Yeah, it's like wine.

Trying to get drunk on them as a kid. What are your favorite tips, Brandon? So my dog has liver disease, what are you going to do for him?

Yeah, definitely. There's a couple of herbal tinctures I swear by, and I would definitely be putting Berberis thyraxacum. I would look at with Cardus marianus as a threesome, as a first line, whilst we then look at what insult is going on. That this whole thing about detoxing the liver— you're not detoxing the liver, you're helping the liver become more efficient at its processes. I'll say, so you're protecting it, you're nurturing it, you're nursing it and giving it a great environment to survive in. Okay, you're not detoxing.

You can't add something in to take something out. It's not— there's nothing in there that goes in there and, I've got some uranium, out it comes. You can only help the organ get better.

You can try and chelate things, you know, and outcompete. So, you know, with heavy metals, there's lots of things that you stick stick in to try and effectively let the body release the heavy metal and actually secrete it rather than, you know, holding on to it. It's really hard to do, but that's never— yeah, that's, that's where you outcompete. So you force them to take other stuff and let the body release the stuff. In fact, actually, I'll tell you what, there's, um, this is— so people want to know about books. This is, this is the next Oh yeah, cool, sounds good. Another thing to read.

Mycotoxicity is interesting. That's the, you know, it's the, the nasty kind of molds that are on grains and whatnot and green peanuts and all sorts of things. But, uh, somebody told me that you can get a mycotoxicity test, uh, they're very cheap and they can tell you exactly how rotten you are with mycotoxins because once they get in they don't want to leave and they can make you really sick. It's one of those hidden things that we don't know about I keep saying I'm gonna look, but sometimes I'm just doing the Irish thing of I'm just not gonna look. I just assume everything's fine until the shit hits the fan.

Somebody said, remember guys, don't take the licorice before you've got drunk because you just won't get drunk. You need to take the licorice once you've got drunk before you wake up in the morning.

Right.

Bloody hell.

In tincture form, not licorice allsorts. Somebody said, can we put these horrible things? Yeah, look, we'll put this up on Patreon. I've already got these 5 or 6 herbs written out with some cool studies underneath each one. I'm going to pop that up on Patreon so you can check it out. So that's the herbs I recommend. But, Bren, in short, aside from the tinctures, a really good quality diet, the couple of herbs that we talked about that we'll put up on Patreon, is there anything else that you'd recommend?

Yeah, I think just, you know, if you've got some biliary issues, you may just have to cut back on the fat. So this is the one dietary thing where you may need to cut back on a bit of fat and be a little bit more sensitive be sensitive about, especially if they've had interruptions to the gallbladder, not giving them a burst of fats in a meal. You need to spread it in more. Okay. But other than that, I think actually they should be able to cope with a good fat. So egg yolks is again, you know, as omega-3s sourcing, they should still be able to absorb those and get nutrient value out of that. You need to be giving something you'll need to bolster some of those fat-soluble vitamins, you know. So this is where sometimes you do need to do that extra bit of work, you know, feeding liver for liver. Yeah, we've talked about this organic therapy before. Go through that and really just, you know, there is so much that we need to cover that I've just skimmed over today. And I'm sorry that I've spoken really quickly, but, you know, let's, let's hope that it's given you a taster and we can answer some more specific specific problems in the future.

I saw another one there was CLA, conjugated linoleic acid, which is an omega-6, isn't it, in, in, well, you know, animal fat. So really good quality animal fat is a great source of CLA, and it happens that it's important— it's, it's, it's involved in the role of liver detoxicity. So, you know, all the more reason to have, yes, lean diets, but really good quality fats from the—

that reminded me, have I talked enough about cats?

Yeah, you did say you wanted to be on cats today, but look, we're 50 minutes in, Brian, so we need to wrap it up. So again, we'll put this stuff up on Patreon. Find us at Raw Pet Medics on patreon.com. The price of a cup of coffee each month is all you need, and we can— we dump all our info in there. And you can find us there, you can ask us questions there, we do our best to get back to you. We put up a poll there last week, Brian, with 4 ideas. You've already knocked off one with liver disease. And so we need to ask about the other 3.

I wish you'd done the one on how to keep cool. I'm absolutely sweating.

That was actually an interest. I wanted to hear about that, actually. So we would just, we'll just use the results of that, Brian, over the next couple of weeks, really, because Nick's going to be back next week. Okay.

Yeah.

So we'll announce that then the next couple of days.

That's brilliant.

Cool, guys. Pleasure.

Great to see you all joining us. Thanks for your attention. We'll see you all next week.