RPM Friday Night Live: Carbohydrates

See if everybody is— I know there's quite a few of you guys who are going to watch this on catch-up. I know that the pubs are open, you're all looking for— pubs are open, what's going on? Yeah, pubs are open, can you believe it?

Outdoor, outdoor, uh, or indoors? Outdoor drinking, yes, outdoor drinking, it's the best drinking.

Is it going to change on the 21st though? That's the thing. Did you know, Brent, have you heard? Is it going to change or is he going to delay it again?

Well, I had a meal and a drink inside a pub the other day.

So yeah, inside a pub. Oh, that sounds so nice.

It's nice and snuggly, just so warm considering the weather this week has been atrocious.

Yeah, it was brutal. We went away there for a few days actually, and we got lucky. We left on the Sunday and we got 3 days of absolutely banging sunshine, which was very lucky. And then just 1.5 days of just torrential rain. And when you've got kids inside the house, it's like, oh my God, what do we do? Yeah, yeah, a trip to Smith's and, uh, just get whatever you want. Thank you. Quiet for an hour. Yeah, it's great.

But, uh, guys, we went to Salkham. You've ever been to Salkham?

Pictures, go on.

Absolutely beautiful.

We went to Salkham. It's, it's kind of, uh, It's just south of Exeter. If you go straight south from Exeter and it's just—

it looked exotic. The picture you sent was unbelievable.

The light is just beautiful and the beaches are incredible, incredible, incredible. So we were walking, we took the dogs, we didn't take the children.

Oh, nice, nice. Now we're talking.

It was absolutely fantastic. It was really fantastic. I took one day off work and I've been paying for it ever since. I've been running to standstill ever since. But it was so beautiful, and we picked up 3 kilos of mussels on the way home.

And lovely, amazing, very nice.

The best mussels I've ever had in my life. Yes, big, juicy, proper, beautiful, tasty mussels. Couldn't believe it. How about you, Bren? What you been up to?

Oh, I've been traveling over the country, went up to the lakes Um, left my wife in charge of the goats. Scared the bejesus out of her.

Um, well, you just took the dogs?

Yeah, just took— well, just took Artie, actually. Uh, Artie's my little shadow. She comes everywhere with me. So, uh, went up to see a horse up in the lakes and, um, uh, did some woodland work. So just to have the guy around just checking out the, uh, ecology of the woods. You have these people that come around and inspect for you for Natural England.

And you have woods?

Yeah, a bit of woodland. Do some conservation work.

He's a landowner.

Nice.

Yeah, I knew you had a field and a little tractor, but I thought that was just a kind of a thing.

That's local, up in the lakes. Yeah, yeah, we do some work for— yeah, just a bit of wildlife. So yeah, it's really good mixed woodland. It's in really good form at the moment. So nice. We've managed to stay away from the plantation stuff. And yeah, it's really, really good. And then a little trip up to Scotland and then back down. So yeah, it's been a busy week.

Very nice. Got the places really opening up and we're talking about, that's pubs and just taking a trip to Scotland. Isn't it mad how things are opening up now and yeah, we were 6 months ago. Well, let's hope that doesn't go back that way.

Although it's all very strange walking around Edinburgh. Yeah, yeah, you expect it to be really busy and it would be like deserted. Yeah, it's just like, you know, relatively— I mean, yes, there's some people, but it was relatively deserted.

So we went to Edinburgh there, we went to Edinburgh for the Hogmanay one year, and we slept in a Mini Cooper, uh, and it was -6 outside, and it was just— it was so cold that the water froze on the windscreen, so we had to kind of pour essentially beers on the windscreen as we were driving to get us to Hogmanay. And then when we got there, the bloody IRA did a bomb scare was called off. So we just got all these people just furious and then we just sleep in the car. So don't sleep in the car.

And you didn't put your accent out there at all?

No, I put on my best Scottish accent.

My best Scottish accent.

My best English accent.

Hello, my man. I just wanted to mention two posts that I did. Brian, you put me onto that book, Deep Nutrition, which I didn't really get to any bit on my holiday because it's just the sort of books that would be But I loved one of the quotes that she— that I dug out of the book a while ago. And very simple, but it really was— it got me. She said, every bite you take changes your genes a little bit. And I just thought, that's a brilliant line. You know, it's not like— like, yeah, like, you know, look, every bite is influential. That really blew me away for the rise of chronic disease in humans and stuff. And I also finally put up that infographic. Do you remember the infographic I shared in the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society conference a couple of years ago? I put that up there during the week, which was just showing the deaths from various things in dry dog food, and complete raw were still to have a canine death in the studies. And it's kind of, it's just, I very much enjoyed putting that up. So that went good. Oh, that really went around and stirred a bit of poo as well with some groups. So it was very fun.

So before we get into it, We've got some notices. The first thing is for next week, when we did a poll, it went down really, really well. So I think if we can do another poll this week for the next, I don't know, the next 4 days, 4 or 5 days, say. So if anybody has any ideas for what you'd like us to do for next week, please put it down here and then I will make a poll for the team on the Patreon. Everybody who's joined Patreon can then take a vote. Okay, seems like a democratic way of doing it. And then, uh, Conor, you've got a notice about, um, yeah, like we were thinking, uh, are kind enough to offer, uh, a coupon here, a discount.

So you check out their new website, paleoridge.co.uk, and they have a £5 discount code off your order. And use the code RAWPETMEDICS at the checkout. And so £5 off any of your Paleo Ridge orders until the 31st of May. So get on it, guys, free money for you if you're buying Paleo Ridge, it's just got £5 cheaper. So thanks to Paleo Ridge, they've been very good supporters of us for the last 2 months at least. So they've been so good to us. So thanks very much, Paleo Ridge. So RAWPETMEDICS is the code, guys, check it out on paleoridge.co.uk. So yeah, guys, this week we are talking about carbohydrates. I mean, we would need the whole week to be talking about carbohydrates. You know, it is a huge, huge topic. It's so much, so much part of every dog's diet, it seems. So could I start us off and just kind of, I do a little kind of a webinar thing on carbohydrates and I just want to give you the first—

Before you do that, Guys, are you all ready? You've all been clamoring for this. You know what's coming. Conor, lightly touch base.

Yeah, I'm going to be calm this week. I don't want to be known as the ranty guy. Oh, my slides have just disappeared. I'm about to get— Okay.

Okay. Yeah, guys, listen, what we need to do is because we could do at least 10 episodes of carbs, let's keep it really, really simple. We'll just do the simple stuff. So if anybody's offended by that, sorry. But just really, let's keep it simple. And then the next time we can add a little bit more and the next time a bit more, and then we can get really fancy.

So let's keep it simple. Conor, before you go on to all of the study stuff, give the guys out there what you would say carbs are and what really are we talking about as a problem?

What are the problem carbs? Yeah. Well, like, you know, even that's a whole 45 minutes right there, but I think people think about, you know, sugar anyway, they think about sugar as the kind of worst carb, you know, and I think a lot of people don't understand that starch like potatoes, chips, flour, all the stuff that, you know, ultra-processed ingredients that are used in dry pet food, that is as close to sugar as it needs to be. The body so quickly digests that, it just rapidly hits the blood sugar. So you've got this thing called the glycemic index, and they kind of, it tells you what foods have loads of carbohydrates. So things like rice and bread, we don't look at them like sugar, but your body does. That is almost pure sugar to your body. One tiny digestive step, starch is just nothing to the body. So those sort of carbohydrates you should be eating, keeping to the refined carbohydrates that pack a punch, you should be keeping them to a minimum in humans. And you know, that would be, The danger carbs, I think some carbs are okay, a little bit here and there, and I'm sure we'll talk about it again. But, you know, it's the meals and the flours and the wheat and the corn and the stuff that we know we can't be putting too much of into us. What about you guys?

What are your— I think that it's the refined. The more refined it is, the further you get from its natural state, the more dangerous it is. And I don't use that word lightly. I think if you're having refined carbohydrates and sugars over a long period, there are, you know, all the big authors, Tim Noakes and Fung and Gary Taubes and T. Schultz and all the, all the greats, all the contemporary leading-edge nutritionists are saying there is a straight line between those refined carbohydrates in humans and obesity, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, all these things, all the modern ills. So the idea The idea that we turn around and feed our dogs on refined, steam-processed carbohydrates ready, they're half digested by the time they get in the bowl, and how can we expect health from feeding something that with us, we're omnivores, so we're arguably better set to digest these kind of things. We then feed them carbohydrates and wonder why they cause so much disease. That's— there you go, in a nutshell.

Same diseases, in fact, the ones you just mentioned. I mean, obesity in dogs are 10 times more likely to get cancer than humans. 10 times more likely. We've got an obesity epidemic in pets that mirrors what happened in humans, hitting in the red at the same time for the same reasons, and among a number of other issues, all kind of very much carb-related. What about you, Bren? What are your— what's your opening thoughts on carbohydrates?

Yeah, I sort of looked at this whole thing because, you know, the Real Food on Trial sort of like that we talked about earlier in the year. And then you look at some of the studies that they were talking about, those, those illusions of studies that were from the '40s and '50s where they actually had companies. Yeah, they'd look at 21 countries and then they'd streamline it down to the 7 that fit their model. Okay. And then they'd publish on the basis of, well, look, these diets, obviously you can cope with the higher carb in your food, and we can produce that, strangely enough, really cheaply. And all of a sudden they came out with these guidelines that promoted high carbohydrate diets. Guys, look, what's that doing to the human population? Is that working after— what was it, 4 decades, 5 decades? It's still a problem.

That was the food pyramid we grew up with. Now that you say it, it was all carbs on the bottom, bread and potatoes and rice and stuff.

I was like, You know, but it is the refined. We've got to understand that carbohydrates are used by plants for structure. You know, they, you know, they could be considered in there, but it's the starches and the storage roots and things like that that effectively store those energy levels, which are then released. But some of those are also some of the cellulose and things like that are really good for maintaining gut flora in some respects. And actually what people don't understand, and I know you want to talk about this in a moment, but actually it's not just the calories from the actual starches going in. Actually what our gut bacteria do is use that stuff to produce volatile fatty acids, which we use for energy. So actually there's a bit of a double whammy of, you know, you can think that you're being really great and, and, you know, keeping your calories down within your diet by various methods. But actually your bacteria are working really hard to also support you symbiotically. And you knew I was going to talk about microbiome today. Yeah, it was the same. I had to slip it in there. Yeah, I think ultimately there's other stuff that Nick's going to talk about later on. But I would say, you know, if you're going to use any seed of any description, I would say sprouting seed and then ferment it. For me would always be a good option if histamine is not an issue.

Okay, another week, we're definitely talking about fermented veg. We're going to bring that up soon because it's something we've been bouncing around a lot, isn't it? I want to learn.

But I would say, yeah, I'm really anti sort of highly processed stuff that gives sugar punches to us as well as to our dogs. I don't think it's appropriate. There's all sorts of things with insulin resistance, etc. But Conor, you've got some studies here that you want to punch through with.

Yeah, just to keep it like, you know, just to run through 4 or 5 slides here. Like, if we kind of— a lot of the people on here tonight are raw feeding, they kind of accept that, you know, dogs in the wild eat real food ingredients and not, you know, stuff in packets. And if you were to kind of ask 100 nutritionists, they'd all disagree. But, you know, the dog eats a lot of meat muscle and, you know, a bit of excretory organ, bit of bone, and maybe a bit of veg. Although, you know, you could have them split in two there, whether people feed veg or but that's roughly what the dog's diet is. But in short, a lot of meat muscle, a bit of organ meat, bone, and a bit of veg. That is a huge protein diet. Like, dogs in the wild don't go scavenging in wheat and corn fields and that kind of stuff. Carbohydrates just aren't on the, on the menu. And so we have lots of studies of dogs showing that when they're left to their own devices, free of human influence, most importantly, they don't eat carbohydrates at all. They go after their, their protein sources, their meat, anything with a face. And so the thing is, we like, we know while the study showed dog— I'm just reading a couple of slides here— the dog has zero metabolic need for plant carbohydrate, okay? So everybody agrees with that, even AFCO and the NRC and that kind of those sort of groups. And beagle-fed pups on carbohydrate-free diets all exhibited normal blood glucose concentrations, growth rates, and weight gain over years. So they're the sort of studies you want to see, tracking dogs over years on a carbohydrate-free diet. Wouldn't it be interesting to track dogs over years on a high-carbohydrate diet? They're the sort of studies that aren't in these behemoths of books that we have to kind of read. But taste trials by the actual companies themselves reveal that when dogs are offered to feed ad lib, so there's your protein, there's your fat, there's your carbs, sort of. And they eat about 7% carbohydrates. They choose to include about 7% carbohydrates. Those studies were riddled with flaws because the dogs came into it eating cereal-based pet food. So in my opinion, that's setting you up to fudge the results. But, uh, and that study has been repeated since, and now we know that dogs will initially pig out on fat, but over time they increase more protein. That was Mark Roberts' lads, um, and they increased more protein and decreased the fat. Okay, so We know that dogs eat lots of protein when left to their own devices. That's what they do, and the studies show that they don't need carbohydrates. But the fact remains that we had that study a few years ago, 2014, where we found that dogs do have some more copies of the gene AMY2B for producing— for digesting carbohydrates. So dogs historically in the past have been fed and have been consuming carbohydrates. That's a fact. You wouldn't evolve these genes out if they weren't useful to you. You know, you don't do that. The body's smarter than that. Also, the liver of the dog and the dingo produces hepatic glucanase, which cats don't, and dogs are much better at assimilating glucose than cats, okay? So we know there's a couple of little signs in there that dogs have been historically eating a bit of carbohydrates, but as Nick mentioned at the start of the talk, and now I'm just gonna rob your line, Nick, just because they can digest that stuff and because they have like an ability to digest, it doesn't mean that this should suddenly be a furious amount of their diet. It's Doug Newvin said it to Dr. Jean Dodds the best. He said, just because we can digest ethanol and sucrose doesn't mean 50% of my diet should be Roman cookies. It's such an obvious point. It's like, well, no. Anyway, so, you know, insidious kind of people can kind of say, oh, those genes, we knew they could they use it as a reason to include more carbohydrates. So here's a great quote, I just want to read this out from a very good dry pet food producer here. This is from Waltham, very scientific, and they said, when ranked with other major ingredients that supply protein and fat, carbohydrates are generally considered the least important and are often regarded as the filler ingredient. To the contrary, carbohydrates do not provide bulk in the diet, instead they provide an excellent source of metabolizable energy for dogs. That's what the dry food manufacturers are saying, and I don't think anybody disagrees that, you know, chocolate bars and donuts and stuff are an excellent source of energy. It's, are they a useful form of energy?

Healthy?

Yeah, yeah, you know, so it's just this, it's this twisted kind of logic that, you know, oh, it's a great energy. Ironically, when you run dogs in trials, so Cranfield, Hinchcliffe, Loftus, a couple of the big sled teams, They ran dogs on high carbohydrates— these will be sled dogs, guys, sorry— medium carbohydrate diets, and zero carbohydrate diets. Listen to this, I took this from the conclusions. Dogs on zero carbohydrates, sled dogs, these are the hardest working dogs out there, on zero carbohydrate diets maintained higher blood concentrations of albumin, calcium, magnesium, and free fatty acids during the racing season. They also exhibited the greatest increase in red cell blood count, hemoglobin concentration, and packed cell volume. Which is why, you know, the cyclists training at the higher altitudes and stuff, you know, these are good measures of fitness. The authors conclude that a carbohydrate-free diet appeared to confer an advantage for prolonged strenuous running in terms of metabolic responses to training. In other words, if carbohydrates were a good source of energy, don't you think that these sled dogs will be performing better on them? You know, so it's just nonsense. And just to finish, and I feel myself getting worked up here, but like, just to finish like when you go to the Small Animal Clinical Nutrition book, you know, a massive 1,300 pages, thousands and thousands of references, and you go to the bit that teaches you these companies are using 50-60% of the dog's diet as carbohydrates, you think there'd be some really solid science behind that, wouldn't they, if it's not a filler ingredient? And so when you go to the section that's entitled canine carbohydrate requirements, which itself is just an oxymoron because dogs don't have any requirement for them whatsoever. You've got 2 paragraphs, 2 tiny little paragraphs in this massive book, so half their diet is afforded 2 little paragraphs, and in it they quote the ROMSOS study in 1981, which I love talking about. It's just, they compared 2 groups of dogs, one fed a moderate fat diet and the other, they were pregnant bitches, they fed them a hugely fat diet, so lean diet and really fat diet, and what they found was that the dogs on the higher fat diet started and had issues with the pups and stuff, and they concluded that, oh well, the dogs needed some carbohydrates to balance it out. Like, this study was so flawed and the conclusions of it so bloody erroneous. Like, it wasn't that the dog needed carbohydrates, it's because you were feeding a huge amount of fat to the dogs. And for these big books to use that study as— and that along with two other studies, both of pregnant bitches, uh, and that's it. On the back of that, they conclude in this carbohydrate requirements section, overall, a minimum of 23% carbohydrate is recommended in foods for gestating and lactating bitches. No study ever concluded that. Excess starch in the food typically does not cause health problems in dogs. Completely unreferenced. Dry extruded dog foods typically contain 30 to 60% carbohydrates, mostly starch, and cause no adverse effects. No reference. Can you believe A scientific manual would say 30 to 60% carbohydrates, mostly starch, cause no adverse effects in dogs. And that's coming from a book that calls itself the most comprehensive, practical small animal nutrition resource available, certainly the most widely read. So that's the start of the carbohydrate thing. I just wanted to sow— that's the background science behind—

literally sow the seeds.

Yeah, sow the seeds.

Yeah.

So, you know, that's how—

you know what, I really So respectful. They're saying that was the calmest— your holiday must have suited you.

You are—

that was the calmest rant of the year so far. I would say, do you know what, there's, there's so much out there that the nutritionists that you talk about also have this miscomprehension that processed stuff that's cooked to death and, you know, changed beyond belief by processing is exactly the same as anything in its raw form as well. Do you not come across that so often that they, they will just, you know, they, they liken it whenever they do a— you know, somebody asked earlier and they said, what proportions of, you know, protein to fat to carbohydrate should we be putting in as the macronutrients for, for a dog's diet? You know, what is the recommended amount? And, you know, we've got people out there that they don't comprehend the difference between feeding raw and feeding something that's been through various cooking, sometimes triple cooking processes, and think that it should have exactly the same. Now, if you read all of these books that we've been talking about, they all seem to have that similar view. Well, actually, no, it changes it massively. It totally— even the fats You know, if you're giving plant fats, you know what you will do to change those if you superheat them and then, you know, reheat them and produce them and then let them go off in a bag for however long shelf life, you know, 2 years sometimes these dry foods will say they've got on the shelf life, you know how that changes those things. So there are so many changes that we've got to watch out for here. And I would definitely say don't just think well, it's, you know, carbs are bad. It's also the processing that just accentuates that.

So yeah, I think I'm just—

guys, I'm just going to reiterate because I'm just looking at some of the comments. I'm just going to reiterate that vegetables do contain carbohydrates. But when we talk about carbs in this kind of dismissive and despairing sort of way, we're generally talking about refined wheat and corn. Yeah, it's, it's wheat and corn flours that have then been cooked, and I would say up to 6 times. They've been heated and cooled and heated and cooled and heated and cooled in the extrusion process to produce kibble. And that ultra, ultra processing is, is a carbohydrate, but you cannot in a million years put it in the same category as an, as fresh bit of broccoli.

Yeah, yeah, that's true actually.

You know what I'm saying? I think it's really important. Again, let's— I'd like to really define the basics. So what Conor said absolutely rightly is that when dogs left to their own devices choose only a tiny amount of carb and they really go for fat as their main energy source, and protein is secondary to that, and carbs are just the tail end Charlie.

And they're from cereal-fed dogs. They're dogs coming into the trials eating cereal-based pet food, so that's a normal food for them to eat, so they'll eat it. I wonder if you did the trial on real raw-fed dogs, how much of that stuff they'd eat. I think every dog likes a bit of mashed potato, you know.

Yeah.

Didn't you do a study on dogs, village-fed dogs who'd been raised on, I don't know, porridge or bread or something, and they had a slightly different tilt towards eating more carbs than a wild-fed dog?

You can produce a study. There's like diet studies would be, you know, I love them. You can produce a diet study that shows dogs in India are eating 40% plant material, and you can hold it up and say, that's why we use 60% corn in our diet, because these— this study here of village dogs in India, they're eating a lot of plant material. But actually, there's a big difference between studies of village dogs, free-roaming dogs, which are dogs that are let out and roam around the place. The roaming laws are lax, so they feed in dumps during the day and they come back and live with their humans. These are generally poorer regions, and poorer people don't waste any meat protein on their dogs, you know, they get fed the plant remains. So when these poor village dogs are assessed, they, you know, they cull these dogs, we find that they've got more plant material in them, but almost across the board the authors will say when they're out hunting, they're hunting meat, they're eating poo, they're eating all sorts of things to try and top up their failing protein reserves, which is a line that Dr. Detroit uses, who's one of the biggest people in it. But when you look at feral dogs, the feral dog diet is just meat and bone in the poop.

But it's not even meat, is it? It's animals.

Animal protein is probably—

skin and testicles and brain and lungs and— yeah, they eat the whole thing.

They eat the whole rabbit, the whole rat, the whole thing.

Absolutely the whole thing. So when we say meat, it's not really even— we're not really talking about meat.

We're talking about animals. Yeah, yeah, it's true.

You know, because when we talk about meat, it's like a joint of beef on a Sunday, whereas for a dog, a rabbit is an entire meal. The eyes and the teeth and the lungs and everything all go in the same way.

Yeah, that's right. In relation to the macronutrient bit, if I could just come back to that. Yeah, I would say that when we look at the diets of dogs and dingoes, we've got our studies on the dingoes, but when we look at their diets, they would have existed, they do exist on very lean animals. There's no fat animals in the wild really, because if you're fat, you're a cheeseburger, you know. So generally, you know, bar the young ones when they're born, your animals are pretty lean, light on their feet. Lizards, birds, frogs, you know, rabbits— you're talking like 6, 7, 8 parts protein to 1 part fat. Their bodies are, when you suck all the moisture out of them and have a look at them, very, very lean animals. So we have to assume that dogs evolved on a lean protein diet to some degree. Farmed meat is a lot fattier and stuff. So if you were to ask me the macronutrient thing, I'd say, well, very quite lean diets would be probably the normal for these long-distance running animals, very lean bodies, long-distance running kind of diet, you know. So in the macronutrient thing, I would have said a lot of protein, a bit of fat, but I use a bit of carbs. Like a cold winter morning, I'm eating a bit of porridge, I put that in and I heat up his meat because I feel bad for him. I just think that he wants to eat it a bit warmer, and I do dump a little bit of carbs on him now and again, now and again, because I know he can handle it. But it's just not something that if I was advising a raw company, you know, I wouldn't be putting in carbs in the recipe because it's not something that the dogs need at all.

Yeah, so that's interesting. You know, I've popped this one up a couple of— well, a few people have asked about, you know, the companies that use sweet potato and they'll use butternut squash and things like that. What's your thoughts on that?

I'm not happy with that, to be honest. I don't think it's just not necessary. I think they put it in because people expect it. I think they put it in because it's cheaper than meat, and I'm not denigrating them, but this is the way that it all works at the moment. But when I'm advising people, I will say, why don't we go for greens? They've got a much greater nutrient density. I will use sweet potato and squash and things like that for constipated dogs, but not in every meal for for years and years. If I had to be on one carb source, it would be greens, leafy green vegetables, the kind of things that children don't want to eat. They're the ones that are good for you.

Yeah.

What do you think?

I think the sweet potato thing, and it comes back to what we started off with at the start, as Brendan was saying, I think we need to remember that carbohydrate to the body, potatoes are potatoes, essentially. So a high carbohydrate diet is nearly irrelevant what form we're talking. If you're going to include sweet potato 50% of a dry food diet, that is still a very high carbohydrate, high sugar diet for a dog. So it nearly doesn't matter what form they put it in. It's great that it's not wheat because wheat's just the devil. Well, you know, I don't see a huge difference between corn and sweet potato. Sweet potato comes with a bit more fiber, probably some more nutrients, not by the time they've smashed it to bits. It's just carbohydrate filler. It took off because we didn't want to see wheat on the labels anymore, so grain-free pet foods evolved.

Grain-free.

Grain-free. So it's the avoidance of grain. It's not because sweet potatoes were the better ingredient. If you wanted a really, you know, you'd make a very high meat diet. Yeah, they need the carbohydrates in kibble to bind us for the extrusion process, so you need a bit of carbohydrate in there. But now the pet foods are getting higher and higher meat protein, lower and lower carbs. But that means more and more ultra-processed cooked meat. Is that a good idea? We don't know.

They don't know.

Just don't know. So it's a tough question.

There's a few things that have popped up there. We've got a little bit about things like you've talked about vegetable matter. You know, somebody asked about the cellulose in cabbage and do we need to cook that? And I would say, well, look, ferment it.

Okay.

That's what sauerkraut is at the end of the day. So those are— it can release, you know, one of Connor's favorite manganese supplements in hair and hooves and things like that actually also is quite high in good fermented cabbage. So just tell them that.

So a light cooking then, guys, you agree with a light— like if you were going to use some of the coarser greens, would you give any of them a light cooking first?

I would shred them and ferment them. What would you do, Nick?

I would stick them in the blender. And I would only cook them before I stick them in the blender if it was an older dog or if that really changed the dog's digestion for the better. What about you, Conor?

I would give my greens a little bit— like, I haven't leapt onto the fermented veg thing, so we are going to go through an episode at some stage where you guys are going to talk about fermented veg and I'm going to try to learn a bit about it. But so I kind of give it a light cooking because I do Ever since, and this is another topic, but it's the exact same topic in fact. Another type of carbohydrate is fiber. Plant fiber is a carbohydrate, as you said at the start, Bren. You have two types of fiber, you have soluble fiber and insoluble fiber, one that dissolves in water, one that doesn't. And now we suspect strongly that it's the soluble fiber that's linked to these high amounts of bloat cases in dogs with deep chests. We know now that it's the gas coming up from the intestines, not air in from the mouth. So it's not the speed of eating or resting after a meal, none of that changes how much attacks of this GDV, this bloat with torsion, you're going to get. So we know it's the gas coming up from the intestines and so fiber is one of the chief suspects in that because dry food is a massive risk factor for this.

So, um, remember for GDV the gas that's coming up isn't just also reflux in, in those bloat situations.

Yeah.

What you're actually getting is fermenting of carbohydrate biscuit material in an enclosed— because what happens is the stomach wraps, okay? And as it wraps around, it seals both ends just like, you know, rolling a plastic bag up, you know, to seal it. Okay. And then what's then happening is you've got that fixed chamber of carbohydrate fermenting in its its own set of stuff. And because of various things that happen in that fermenting process, you know, the acidity isn't as high, you know, with the— you know, there's a lot of acid-base balance stuff to talk about to what happens there, but it just basically the acidity isn't as high. You do end up having, you know, fermenting processes going on, and yes, that gas, as you rightly say, is not from air gulped in. Fermenting stuff, and that there are people out there that still have protested wildly that it's all about gulping air in. But there's so many tests out there that have shown that that's not the case.

They actually release the bloat gas into a device, so when they puncture the dog, they can take the gas out and they can see the gas is high in carbon dioxide. So that's nearly—

remember, that is not going to be the level of, you know, we're not talking about fermented veg going into these dogs in sufficient levels that you're going to cause bloat. In that sense. Okay, so that's the difference that we're talking about there.

That's why I cook the greens though, that's why I'm a little bit wary of like, I don't feed a huge amount of like say cabbage, you know, any of the cruciferous vegetables, broccoli if you want your house to smell, you know, like what people do. I use a bit of broccoli in the dog, Brussels sprouts just don't work out for Dudley. But so I do use the fruit greens, but I am a little bit wary of just too much fiber, you know, I just don't think— I'm a bit wary. That's why I would do a bit of cooking.

Okay, so this brings us to the question, guys, about the big question within raw food is, should you— with a raw food diet, should you feed just a meat-based diet or should you feed meat plus some vegetables? And I remember one of you is, is, is more vegetable orientated than the other. And I can't remember which of you is which. I think it's Brendan is anti too much veg. And Conor, you're into a bit of veg, right? Is that right?

Do you want to just give us where you stand on that?

Shall we feed it just a pure meat diet or shall we feed a meat plus a little bit of green?

Where are you, Brandon?

Conor goes up to— you go up to 30%. So I want to hear you say why you think that's right, because I'm—

yeah, I think I was most of the— like, you know, the conclusion of the book there, I would have been saying 10% veg, you know, 10% veg is a, you know, a little addition. I think there's so many nutrients to be had from vegetables presented in the correct way to dogs that they're just— you can't exclude them from the diet. Yes, if all our dogs were eating wild prey that were foraging on these, you know, fields of clover, yeah, that's a great rabbit. That's not the rabbits you're feeding, guys. Most of your rabbits are coming from France. Check out that industry, poor meat industry. Most of the beef in the US comes from CAFOs, concentrated animal feed operations. These guys are fed wheat and corn, not cereals that those animals should be eating. Nutrient bereft, high salmonella. So it's— when you compare that to organic meat, it's much higher in omega-3s and all sorts of stuff. There is— it's not just wishy-washy stuff that, you know, this organic thing is about. It's about you want your prey animals eating all the herbs and plants and berries because We know that prey animals bioaccumulate bits and pieces all around their bodies. So when your dog eats the whole thing, he's getting lutein from the eyes, zeaxanthin. Where else does the dog get zeaxanthin? He doesn't eat plants. So, you know, this is really important if your dog's eating wild prey. So to come to the vegetable idea, it's like there are so many studies showing the benefits of including some plant material in dogs that I think it would be madness not to include a little handful of blueberries out in the grass In the 30% thing, I now leave the door swinging widely open with veggie inclusions because people then say, I've got 3 German Shepherds, I can't afford to feed the 3 of these like carnivores. As simple as that, I don't have the money to do it. Even though you can make cheap raw diets, you do go down a little bit of a slippery slope of quality, higher fat mixes. I'll sell you beef for a pound a kilo, but it's, you know, it's just beef fat and blood. So that's not great for a dog either. So before you jump back to dry food to save money, I'd say okay, use 20-30% plant filler, but put in the correct plant filler that the dog can get on slightly better with, as opposed to jumping back to kibble, you know. So I'm okay with people using 33%, you know, ground-up veg ingredients that we, you know, whichever ones are cool at the moment, you know, that's okay. It's better than 50-60% corn from kibble, you know.

Let me tell you, my raw food journey 25 years ago when I first started looking, I I thought, okay, let's go with the meat and two veg type scenario. So I was feeding about 40% protein, mince with bone in it, and then loads of carrots and greens and what have you. And the Labrador, Labradors plural, did really well on that. But over the years, I have become more and more and more carnivorous, and I'm now at the 10 to 20% level of greens, mainly greens. I don't like carrots, I don't like roots. Yeah, you know, herbivores— carnivores eat herbivores, herbivores eat leafy greens, you know, primarily. So I think, why do we feed roots? Yeah, so parsnips I don't really use, and carrots I don't really use, and turnips I don't really And they're very, very starchy. So my thought is, and this is an evolution, ask me in 5 years' time and I may be down to 2 greens. I doubt it, but I might be. And so I've evolved to get to the 10 to 20%. And I think the important thing is not to be static in your thoughts, is to talk to people and to do your reading and watch crazy programs on a Friday night. And educate yourself. Look at all the evidence and find a path through that that works, that works for you and your pocket, but also works for the dog. It may be that your dog is a 40% greens dog and that does really, really well. It may be that your dog can tolerate only a very small amount. Yeah, so I think I'm being—

where are you, where are you, Bryan? You're on the lesser carb, lesser plant material Yeah, I generally—

so I love that ideal of a third, a third, a third because it makes it simple for people. Tell us about that. So it's a third of sort of minced meat. So that's usually fat, sinew, stuff that's generally you would think of as just meat sort of. Okay. You then think about a third bone material. So that's usually things like neck or wings or carcass, because there's some meat on that. So, you know, just bone is quite a lot of cartilage. It's quite a lot of sinew. There's quite a lot of other stuff with it. So probably averages out around about 7 to 10% bone, actual bone in those sort of bits. And then you've got a third, which I think is really important part, as you pointed out, Conor, you know, things like the eyes, the things like the organs. The organs are so rich in nutrients. Such a vital— everything from where you can get it, spleen, pancreas, but through to liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, you know, all of those can be really, really useful. Tripe, obviously forgot to say, you know, have really important components. There's a lot in a lot of these nutrition books where they talk about humans actually benefiting from eating these organs and actually where we've gone away from doing that because we're averse, that, you know, we're not necessarily the better for it.

Deep nutrition, actually, we were speaking about that, wasn't she, Catherine?

Absolutely. But there's other bits about actually pasture-fed animals. So, you know, I do like the idea of wild-caught rabbit, things like that. They've had a good life, you know, they're then, you know, great nutrition and yeah, full of you know, vitamin D, full of vitamin C, you know, the great source of all of these things for our pets. It's, as you say, if it's lot-fed, if it's cage-fed inside a barn somewhere, it's not going to have the same constituent. So what I tend to say is in that last third, which I talk about organs, yeah, gut contents for me. Now this is, you know, Nick's fermented herbs nuts and seeds sort of thing that sometimes talks about and evolves through. But I would say that for me is literally mimicking the gut content that they would otherwise get. Now, my dogs, if we get a wild rabbit, they get the whole rabbit. They will eat the whole rabbit, you know, everything in it, including the fermented gut contents that they've had.

Yes.

And I'm sure the guys out there watching will know that the typical— yeah, they come across you know, some roaming feral horse on the moors, and they'll find the feces and decide to eat— not, they're not going to demolish the horse, don't worry, Nick. They're just going to take the feces and, you know, they'll chow down on that. And, you know, there's little bits that they'll pick up, you know, along that site. They'll sometimes take out the goat feces and stuff like that. And that's—

on the gut contents thing, actually, though, just to clarify, animals bigger than rabbits, you are very unlikely to see a dog tucking into the contents of cow or sheep belly. So you'll see them picking off the fat from the outside, but I've got videos of dogs eating sheep and they don't touch the belly. It's just a belly left on the ground. They pull it out and they leave it there.

But they will go for the intestine, which will be full of plant material.

They will eat the intestines and they'll leave out the stomach.

The rumen, you're talking about the rumen. Yeah, that's the big fermenting chamber in a lot of these big herbivores. And we've got to realize, you know, herbivores are designed— yeah, we think, oh, they're going to be eating all of this carbohydrate material. No, what they're doing is they shove in loads of carbohydrate material, usually in grasses and things like that, which actually they feed to big vats of bacteria that are actually producing fats to sustain them. That's what people need to understand out there. You know, these animals actually survive on the volatile fatty acids that are built up those bacteria.

Fascinating, isn't it? It's like, bloody hell, we are complete machines. Actually, I wanted to mention something. You touched on the biome thing. When people talk about having a sweet tooth, this was just kind of illuminated to me a while ago. It just makes perfect sense. But you have a craving for sugar, okay? And when you've got a craving, like some people say, I have a terrible sweet tooth, you know, you nearly punch a child in the face to take the bar away. So, you know, a really bad— A proper, a proper sweet tooth that people think that, oh, I was born with this, is it? That's not— that is a calling from inside your gut. That is your gut flora saying, give me sugar, give me sugar, give me sugar, give me sugar. It's not a healthy gut flora. That's a gut flora screaming for sugar. And what do you do? You eventually cave in because those chemical signals, they can actually induce dysphoria in you until you give them what they want. It's like being addicted to cigarettes and booze and everything else. It's the same addiction inside of you that you can't say no. So you eat the bit of sugar and what do you do? You feed what is a dysbiotic gut. And then those— not baddies, but this bacterial group— get louder. So the next time they're calling for, it's like, get sugar, get sugar, get sugar. And next thing you know, you're chasing children around the street.

Not only that, you've also got hormones. Yes, the hormones that they release do that to you, but they mimic all of the things like the grelins, which are about your desire for more food, how hungry you are, all through to the the leptins and the how you're satiated all the way through to the, you know, the insulin itself and the release that that causes and insulin resistance that you can develop. You know, all of those are really important hormones that will drive you to effectively— this is why we called it a human addiction. And what we've done is actually in the process of following these— 1977, I think, was when the American came out from America about human diets. We actually allow the pet food industry to follow that pattern and actually allow our pets to fall into exactly the same trap that we have fallen into.

Yeah, and ours is self-inflicted. It's hard when you've got money in your pocket and you can buy any chocolate bar in the shop. It's bloody hard not to. Your dog is just eating the things that we give them, the best give me, give me the advice and I will feed it to my pet. That's the sad thing, you know, it's like we are putting that into, into the dog. He's not choosing that stuff, you know. Can I address a couple of things here? One person, Ashley Good, can you speak— I've heard this before in regards to carbohydrate usage— that a raw diet without carbohydrates is too high in phosphorus, causing stress on the kidneys? You know, there is— it's wrapped up a million ways why they use carbohydrates. One, to drop the phosphorus contents on it is it just doesn't have any scientific kind of grounding. Like, a dog is a meat-eating machine, a protein-eating machine. The only studies we have are phosphorus really harming kidneys so far is dry-fed pets. It's probably phosphates as opposed to natural phosphorus. The body doesn't like minerals too much, okay? It likes vitamins that comes from the land of living. They don't like calcium and phosphorus and stuff. That has to be bound to a carbon, has to be holding carbon's hand to get through the gut membrane. The lads of the gut membrane are saying no, unless you're, you know, with a carbon. So natural phosphorus is probably not an issue. We've got all the studies we need of dogs where they lop off the kidney function of dogs and feed them higher and higher protein diets to see what happens, and the dogs in the higher protein diets do better, except near the end if you're suffering proteinuria or whatever else. So like, the phosphorus thing is odious. That— I don't know where that pops up, but it's repeated all the time. It's total nonsense. And somebody else mentioned back about carbs and cancer. Like, we will have to do part 2 of this, guys, because the other end of this is really talking about, which we haven't mentioned, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and bloat. And it's like we haven't even touched on the fact that, like, you know, tumors—

do a whole day on this.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

Yeah. I would like to address one very much more simple thing. Somebody mentioned about grain-free diets being responsible for dilated cardiomyopathy. Yeah, DCM, dilated cardiomyopathy. Can we just put to bed now, there is no taurine in grains. It was not around the grains being rich in taurine and therefore preventing it. It was all about the fact that there were some modified diets out there that were not supplement— these are processed diets which were not supplementing the diets appropriately because they were, I think, high in legumes. And there was a thing about binding out some of the the taurine uptake, etc. But realistically, in raw diets that we're talking about, the meats are super rich in taurine. You know, that's the whole point. That's where taurine is coming from. So just because your raw diet, your biologically appropriate meat-based diet for dogs, is low in grains does not mean that they're still at risk of heart disease.

Sorry, Nick.

Sorry, for me, the, the guy to talk, uh, to go to YouTube and listen to is Ryan Yamka. He's speaking the most sense I know. I don't know whether you agree, guys, on the whole DCM thing. And he says there's a lot of nonsense spoken and there is not really a strong association between grain-free, general grain-free diets and DCM. It does. And there's a lot of politics and a lot of money behind it.

Even then, yes.

I think like all extruded, dry extruded pet food can cause DCM because there's so many reasons that it can reduce taurine in dogs. So too much fiber is going to reduce the ability to reabsorb taurine. If they don't put in enough methionine and cysteine, the precursors, like on them they use so little meat there's hardly any taurine in there. Taurine is the Latin for bull, isn't it? That's where it comes from. So they're telling you it's coming from meat, but like, you know, there's, there's 5 or 6 different things that can trigger and the dog's not reabsorbing bile and that kind of thing. So you can have a taurine deficiency for a lot of reasons that are pretty unique to dry pet food. So it's not, oh, it's not fair to pick on grain-free. The reason they picked on grain-free is because grain-free is taking over the market.

Yes.

No more wheat and corn, cheapest of the cheap crap. And we've already put all our research and scientists behind this food, so we can't admit that we are complete bullshitters for the last 60 years So we fight it. And unfortunately, if you can believe it, the FDA got involved with this and they put their oar in. And it just shows that when we rely on somebody like the FDA, who is in charge of the FDA, can change with whoever is in charge of the Congress at the time. There is big problems there. And they have now shown their colors. What they did with that DCM thing, they named the companies involved. There was no links at the time. They suspected cases. They never did that for the melamine scandal when thousands of dogs were dying and pets. We weren't even told the products that were all that they knew had too much melamine in them. We weren't told those companies because those companies were the big boys, so they don't mention those names, but they mentioned the grain-free pet food companies. It was an odious repression, it was a witch hunt, it was hideous, hideous.

So Ryan Yamka is your man there, right guys? I'm going to stop you there. And I'm going to say, please, please have a look on Patreon, everybody. If you haven't joined Patreon, please do. It's a fantastic resource. It's very easy to join. Just follow your nose. It should be just down here in 1 second. And we'll do a poll for what we're going to talk about next week. We could do carbs too.

We do carbs too, guys, because so many people have asked for us to do our next course on carbs. I mean, there is a weekend's worth easily.

Let's do carbs part 2. We'll do carbs part 2 next week just to get it done while it's fresh, and we'll address, guys, all the questions you put up here, we'll address them. Any other questions that, if we've started to sow the seeds of anything, ask us on Patreon and we'll bring them up. So we'll do, we'll get to these questions next week, so we'll fly through some of them, and then let's get into the whole kind of carbs and cancer, diabetes, obesity, explain the link of what these high carbohydrate diets are doing to pets.

Cool. I've put references to Gary Taubes' Case Against Sugar and Jason Fung in Patreon so you guys can get into that. Amazing books, really, really, really mind-blowing. And, and we'll put up other references, perhaps that phosphorus reference. Yeah, the organic phosphorus versus the phosphate ones. Phosphates, that's a goodie. So it's all happening there. We're going to see you next week at 7 o'clock on Friday, and it's going to be carbs part deux.

Absolutely. And don't forget your rawpetmedics code at paleoridge.co.uk is going to get you £5 off your Paleo Ridge orders until the 31st of May. So get on it, guys. Rawpetmedics is the code to use, £5 discount at paleoridge.co.uk. And thanks to them again for sponsorship.

Awesome, guys. Thanks for all of your very, very good comments. Thanks to Dr. Nick Thompson, who's that way, and Conor Brady, who's that way. And I'm Dr. Brendan Clarke. I hope you've enjoyed tonight, and we look forward to seeing you next week.

Awesome. So yeah, guys, thank you, thank you, thank you.