RPM Tuesday Live: Q&A

Oh, start that. Always in the perfect spot.

There you go. I was just saying to Bren there, guys, that my room that I'm in is really, really small. Like, I don't even have to soundproof it. I don't have to do anything. I think the sound is pretty good, but people think it's like, you know, it's the box room in the house. But I've tried to be in a few different rooms, not that I have many spare rooms in my house, but it never sounds as good as being in here. So I like my little cozy cave, and the kids know not to go in when they're sockers hanging off the door handle. So, uh, yeah, anyway, how you getting on, Brent? All good?

Oh, do you know what? I feel comfort of seeing Rach Mac back at the top. Oh, she does. That's the traps, you know. Yeah, brilliant. Oh, great. You know, uh, I've been buzzing off the back of last week with Karen and Rodney. Uh, thanks to everybody who's watched. Uh, you know, amazing number of views. So many views last week. Oh yeah, so, you know, close to 250,000.

What?

Yeah, I know. So just, I'm reckoning that most of those must be 3-second views and then they saw me and you.

Yeah, don't look into us. I like to say under a quarter of a million, don't look too far. It'll only get worse from there. It's not going to get better from that figure. But that's great. Bloody hell.

So, oh, lots, lots of stuff. But I was so itching as well because I've had some great time at the health optimization thing. So all sorts of stuff looking at peptides and these new peptide biomarkers and things that actually are going to change how we look at medicine and what we're doing to change things, you know, even down to there's an eye peptide that's being used for humans. It's also being made for dogs to actually correct where we've got retinal atrophies going on and actually show some amazing changes to the retinas of, of people, but also of dogs, just by applying eye drops just amazing, you know, this sort of where you've got— I don't know whether you can see these pictures, sort of. So where you start with— so these pale patches being really retinal atrophy and degradation. And then after a few weeks of treating with the peptides, you suddenly just get regression of that, that problem. So some just from that skincare to mental health to longevity, uh, just, uh, just so many things, uh, to go into from there. I showed briefly some of the, um, dried organ stuff, you know, just people were asking about the product. I love the name of the company, which is No BS. Okay, nice. Um, but I'd say that's the only bit of the cow they don't sell. Yeah, that's right. Probably they do. Um, there's all sorts of great things like super healthy coffee I picked up just because they look at all of the mold markers and things like that just to stop that getting into their products. They look at how they roast it, all of the levels of pesticides and things like that that are being used on the coffees. So they filter all of that out just all the way through to Something that we've talked about for ages, and actually one of the questions tonight was about using some of the collagens in their own foods. And I'm just, you know, I've got so many things in my office around me. Um, but looking at hydrolyzed collagens, and somebody was asking, they use it for themselves, can they use it for the dog? And I would say Absolutely. Just as with bone broth, you can sprinkle it into the food, you can put it into the bone broth. Even if you want to fortify that, you can use it as extra fiber. So lots and lots of stuff, some brilliant new products from the mushroom side of things. Classic company called Dirty, so D-I-R-T-E-A. Which do a huge mushroom range for humans, that they can be used for animals too. Just, and the list goes on. So I was really buzzing all the last week. You know, you just got so many things to think about and bring to people. But we've got some brilliant questions for tonight. But before we get into that, and your weekend, have you been, what have you been up to?

Come on. Elaine's been away for 7 days. So yeah. That was hardcore. So she came back on Saturday afternoon, so we went into the airport to meet them and made signs and whatnot. So that was very exciting, but she's back, so that's good. So then I recovered on Sunday and just had a bit of me time. And yeah, that's it. That was my weekend, really all family related, not a whole lot. I'm plowing into two just incredibly, incredibly interesting books. I pushed the last one last week, I think that was The Moth and the Iron Lung, and I talked about on my Facebook page. Check it out.

I want to ask you a little bit tonight, you've got to talk A little bit about that.

There's just so many massive— like, even these following statements, like, we think it's all about to do with the poliovirus, which is a tiny piece of the puzzle. But they'd say, like, you know, of 900 people with poliomyelitis, which is really just a grain of the myelin sheath of injured neurons, it doesn't say why it happened. It's kind of like saying dermatitis. And so poliomyelitis, only a third of them had the poliovirus. So as soon as I hear something like that, I go, well, that's a massive problem. That's— that shouldn't be the case. So the whole definition, you know, when they go through the guys that set up this— if for it to be a disease or caused by this, it can't examples where it's not involved, or, you know, and how the guy teases out the book and lays it out like a detective novel, and then, you know, the timeline of everything, and it's just so incredible. And why it only affects children, you know, and it's just— and why do— why do— why were all animals affected at one time in a year or two? Birds, fish, pigs. The poliovirus doesn't— from the one that infects humans doesn't infect other animals and knock them out. So how come all other animals came down at the same time in the same little villages where it was happening but not in the cities? If it was a gut disease, it'd be prevalent in the cities and not in the suburbs where they don't have, you know, they've got much cleaner water and whatnot. Anyway, he goes through all this, so halfway through you're just itching going, oh my God, what is it? So that book was brilliant. It led me on to the peanut allergy epidemic. That book has loads of stuff about dogs. So I'm walking around for like 2 and a half hours today, and the guy— I just had to have his name here— he won a Nobel Prize in the '20s. I'm going to butcher this now because I'm just it's off the top of my head, Charles Richet and Paul Portier. He was the guy that coined the phrase anaphylaxis. And so I learned about what the word anaphylaxis means. It means the opposite of what they wanted when they did the job. It all came from studies in dogs. They first— yeah, right.

Yeah, well, Greek, the Greek for anaphylaxis, uh, what does it mean?

Anaphylaxis, it means— yeah, backwards defense. Okay, right. Um, so I'll get whatever came from the book. I can't remember, but he used that word because it was the opposite to what he wanted. When you put in the thing, it's like a side effect of this of the vaccines that were being used at the time, but he wanted to find an antidote for the Portuguese man-of-war sting. So yeah, the headman of Monaco wanted a solution for it because he was a big boatsman, and so they got a few dogs and injected them with some Portuguese man-of-war venom, and they assumed that the second time they gave them a little bit of venom that they would be more immune to it, having built up some sort of protection to venom. Obviously that's not the way it works, but this is us looking backwards. At the time they didn't know and what they found was it made the dogs much, much sicker. And he was so surprised by this that he started doing all sorts of experiments, but the very next one he went to was cooked meat and raw meat. So my tail's just wagging, I just can't wait to get into this, but I just— I'm only after hearing it, but so again, I'm going to butcher it. What he found was, was that he could sensitize the dogs to raw meat depending on how it was delivered to the dog. So for example, no matter how much raw meat he fed to the dogs, which is what his dogs ate at the time, he couldn't make them sensitive to the protein, but if he injected it, he could. And the next time they ate the protein, depending on what was in with the injection as well, the dogs were sensitized to it. And we've pushed this before with the vaccine side effects. We've said, like, you know, if you're going to raise— they used to grow vaccines back in this time, this is the early 1900s, they used to do it on mouse brains. That was the way to— of all things, a mouse brain, why would that be the most useful? But they stopped because it caused the brain disease in humans, and they went to chicken eggs, and then chicken egg allergy goes up, and then they went cottonseed oil when they're doing penicillin jobs. They discovered penicillin in the late 1930s, whatever, early '40s, and they use cottonseed oil as the carrier. And then cottonseed allergy explodes. So it's quite obvious where I'm going with this, but it just— the fact that the studies were done on dogs and he won the Nobel Prize for it, I just thought, wow, there's a piece of history that, that isn't chatted about much. I knew nothing about it. And, you know, it just brought into light a lot— some of the— I just love the darkest history, you know, the way they did they talk about the time and the diseases that were around that were running through, like, terrifying. And even starting with smallpox and then blackpox, and that was way worse than smallpox. It's like, how does it get worse than smallpox? But it was just— oh my God. He said that the boils would be so bad, full of so much pus, that you'd slip off their own bed. I think they said 1 or 2 liters of pus a day. You couldn't get enough fluids, you'd dehydrate and die. And I'm like, oh my God, it is just— anyway, that's been my last 2 days, so I just can't wait to write. So what was that book? That was the—

that one is The Peanut Allergy.

Epidemic and goes into a good bit of biochemistry. So you like that? I skipped it. I'll just assume you'll do it later and tell me what it was. But anyway, though, because when I hear something like that, I just can't wait to talk about it. Guys, we are Raw Pet Medics. We are. And if you like what you're listening to, price of a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, please go to patreon.com/rawpetmedics. We really appreciate anything you can do there, and that really helps us out. And if you can't, not to worry, we're going to be here anyway. We're doing Q&A tonight without Nick. Nick is off gallivanting at some regen festival.

Groundswell.

Yeah, he loves it. So it's just me and Bren. So, and Bren, I have a number of questions. Karen kindly— actually, Karen's mad into the teas you just mentioned there, the mushroom teas. She gets this pack of really fancy teas and she's mad into the gym and she said it's a turbocharge when you drink these things. So I'm going to give them a go. There must be something to it because everyone's talking about it. Did you get the name of a company? So Dirty is the one that— yeah, is that all mushroom-based?

Yeah, yeah, it's very much mushroom-based. They actually have one of the chefs of MasterChef from about 4 or 5 years ago who went through a whole sort of health life crisis thing himself and actually got into biohacking and improving health through nutrition and supplements. On their team of actually producing some of their products. So met up with him, absolutely amazing stuff. So yeah, look into them as a company, say hi, and just sort of like from a point of view of I don't get any commission, there's nothing other than saying, yeah, I know who he is. There'll be nothing back for us guys. But it is something that, yeah, really look into. Tasted a number of theirs at the conference. Brilliant Absolutely.

I'd say you're buzzing at the end. London, London Nootropics, that's the company Karen just said there. London Nootropics do all these, yeah, these crazy coffees. Lion's Mane, Cordyceps, CBD, ticking all the boxes. I want to try these badly. So guys, look, I have a number of questions, Bren, and at least half of them are vet related. Where would we go?

This feels like us blasting back to April when we sort of like went through.

Yeah, yeah, it does.

Flexing my brain ready for this.

Will we start with a Boyle one? How about that?

This is interesting. Go on, let me hide some of these, get us into— stop the distractions. I can hide this as well. We don't need that.

Diana Costa, she's a fan. These questions are off Patreon. We'll try to get to those first because it's only kind of fair. My Frenchie was put on Ursophoque. F-U or S-O-F-A-L-K for elevated liver enzymes. It's like a bile acid type replacement, I assume. Yeah, that's right. While he was on it, I noticed that his GERD-like off and on symptoms completely disappeared. So gastrointestinal reflux disease, that's the reflux which we mentioned before, that they disappeared when he went on to this gastroesophageal reflux disease. Yeah, okay, gastroesophageal. Okay, of course, because it's going up that way.

Yes, it's only because the Americans do it with an E, not an O.

Anyway, ah, interesting. Very good. Uh, that's what put me off. Very good. Yeah, now that, uh, now that he sometimes has the symptoms again, should I supplement them again with ox bile enzymes? And I thought, ox bile, is that where it comes from? Um, does it mean he doesn't produce— does this mean he doesn't produce enough bile if the medicine works? So I got googling ox bile and my God, it's so interesting. It does so many different things. And if you're deficient in it, it's not something you want to be deficient in. So where are we with all this, Brian? If it helps to get rid of the symptoms, does that suggest that's what the issue is?

Can have all sorts of benefits in increasing the absorption of certain nutrients as well. And therefore, if there are inflammatory processes that's going on. So look, the basics of bile. The body produces bile from the liver. It ejects into the small intestine around the same area as the enzymes from the pancreas. And when the fluid from the stomach comes through into the intestine, that's where it mixes with those. Now, it will reduce the acidity of that at that point. Those bile acids, although they're acids, will actually neutralize those the acid from the stomach, allow the enzymes to be more active as far as the pancreas is concerned, but actually then creates these little surroundings which become lipophilic around nutrients, which means that they can be absorbed through the intestinal membrane much more readily. Okay. So it'll have a number of benefits as I've just allocated there. One, you know, how it changes the acidity of the small intestine, how it allows absorption of various nutrients, especially some of the fat-soluble ones.

A, D, E, K, omega-3s.

And that can have in its own right improvements to the health of the small intestine.

Okay.

And reduction in inflammation. So look, if you see something like that that benefits your dog in that way, there are probably some issues with regards to the liver itself and what it's naturally managing to output. And by you subsidizing that with an artificial bile, then, you know, as in a supplement, then that can massively help. Then, then go for it. It's certainly there. But you may want to consider adding other things to further support the liver. Okay, so some of those wonderful things we've talked about— milk thistle, ad nauseam in herbal medicine, but there are similar tinctures that you can use. You can mix with chelidonium and you can mix with taraxacum. That's the dandelion sort of extracts. They can all be really useful alongside Carduus marianus, which is milk thistle.

So what is this cause of this GERD? I mean, when you hear GERD, Brendon, where does your mind go when you hear gastro? Esophageal reflux, where does your mind go to as to like, what do you think is going on?

I immediately start to think of issues with chronic inflammatory gut disease, including leaky gut. Okay. Because of inappropriate foods, often they are carbohydrate rich, and if they're full of lectins, things like that, that can actually increase the leakiness of the gut. Anything that's got if it's highly processed foods, all of those processed agents that are in there, acrylamides, etc., will also add to that load all the way through to if we've been slightly misled into where they've come from, the glyphosate and things like that hidden within the foods because they're not broken down, mycotoxins, so slightly moldy foods, all of those sort of things. I'm thinking about all of that in an inflammatory process. Some people will see rear its head as pancreatitis. Some people will see it rear its head as hepatitis. Some people will see it rear its head as IBD.

IBS.

And IBS. Well, IBS. I always think of IBS as the one that's really influenced by the mental stresses. Okay. And IBD being the physical.

That's the way I think about it.

We know obviously there is a two-way street in that because mental stress can be aggravated. So there's sort of anxiety following IBD because of that two-way pathway up and down the vagal nerve. You've talked about, you know, before as well. So I think it's worth just remembering that. So that's— so whenever I hear GERD, I always think about that there's a chronic inflammatory disease. People say, oh, it must be at the cardiac sphincter of the stomach because it's all about reflux and coming out. But actually, I think of it as, no, it's inflammation in the upper end of the intestines, and that is causing a lack of the— it's almost like a spasm of the pyloric sphincter, the lower end of the stomach, okay, because of the irritation. And therefore, it's harder to get the stuff to empty from the stomach. And therefore, as the stomach's trying to empty, it's easier to pump accidentally back out through the cardiac sphincter.

Yeah, that's like, that's interesting. Just to recap, like, so the bile salts bit, because I had to do a ferocious little bit of, um, research into it to prepare, but, uh, you said that, uh, so bile salts are involved in fat digestion, that's their kind of, you know, their more famous role, but as you said there, they do nutrient absorption. So it's all the fat-soluble vitamins— A, D, E, K— but also your omega-3s. So that explains why one of the reasons why they drop inflammation. So that could be good for reducing inflammation if this was caused by inflammation. And the other One was just as you said, Bren, was that it maintains pH in the upper intestinal, the whole intestinal tract, so it neutralizes stomach acid as one of its roles. And so it protects against SIBO and dysbiosis. Loads of studies about that. And so SIBO and dysbiosis are highly inflammatory. So if they work against that, if your dog did have this intestine inflammation or leaky gut issue or SIBO, or which is a small intestinal bacterial overgrowth gut flora issue, well, then putting in bile salts may well help that by sorting out the pH and making it less enticing for them to live. So that's really interesting. And the final one there, it supports detox, although this is not related to the GERD, supports detox by binding to waste products. And so you pass them out. Also promotes normal thyroid function, stimulating the conversion of T4, the inactive form of thyroxine, probably to T3. Anyway, there's lots of things.

So that's a really interesting point. So now It supports detox because as the liver produces bile, then that bile can take— so this is one of the ways that the liver excretes toxins. Okay, so, you know, if you can get those— so we often see if you suddenly lose weight yourself or your animal loses weight, they may feel quite, or you may feel quite poorly initially. And that says all of the toxins which are fat soluble, including some of those heavy metals, are recirculated into your bloodstream. You can feel pretty grim for a good 2 weeks after you start to lose weight rapidly and mobilize that fat store. And so the liver can put that stuff into bile. Now, the reason that your feces is the color that it is is because of those bile salts. So you don't reabsorb all of that. However, you've got to be careful if you're eating heavily fatty meals when you're in a detox like that. You're going to recirculate those bile salts with those toxins back into your system. So they will often say, you know, this is why sometimes purgatives are used in those detox scenarios, because you want not to reabsorb those bile salts. You want to actually flush them out of your system.

What's a purgative?

So that's something that forces you to pass usually a more watery stool, okay, and flush everything down the toilet rather than actually it being taken in. So some people will take purgative herbs alongside that liver detox, okay, and that will mean that they will managed to flush all of that bile that's being produced by the liver out through their anus rather than it recirculating.

Interesting. They call that a Herx effect, don't they? Where the release of— you get it from killing off yeast very quickly, and it's all the nasty compounds, all the gliotoxin and crap that bothers you. It releases all at once if you kill it all at once. And it's that effect that makes you— it's the cure is suddenly making you sick.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's Similar, but slightly different in how the Herx effect— I always think of as when you're taking something and maybe food in, and actually the release of that, however it's broken down into the intestine, is actually activating the immune system overly aggressively. And therefore you get that feeling of what should be helping you heal is actually heightening your inflammatory response to the breakdown of some of those horrible products. But yeah, detox, I hate— usually I hate the word detox because I—

So did I until I read the book you told me to read, Toxic.

Right.

And then I was back into detox and I thought, oh, he uses it.

So there's just ways you've got to think about if you're getting rid of some of those toxins Are you getting rid of it through the kidneys and urinating it out? Are you getting it out through the liver? I.e., you're getting the bile to take that out. And there's always downsides to these. You've got to make sure you maintain kidney function or you maintain flow of bile out of the body. And then you've also got your ability to sweat out some of those toxins. We talk about sweating out alcohol. Those sort of things. So those are other ways of getting, you know, hence the wonderful things about saunas and, you know, getting into those to cleanse yourself.

Interesting. The guy in Toxic talks about binders in that case. If you think you're trying to remove toxins, depending on the toxin, like mycotoxins, he says it responds to one type of binder but not another. Bentonite or green clay would be one classic one, but he said spirulina is wonderful for, I think it was mycotoxins. Anyway, he gives you the top 4. And so if this is what— if you lived in a house that had black mold, you ever lived in an old moldy house, those things don't move from your body too quick. If you find yourself ill, chronically ill, he says start taking binders just for a while and see if that improves things. He sees mycotoxin poisoning everywhere. So that's very interesting.

I'm just starting to read some of the comments. There's loads of comments. Sorry if it's putting you off your tea. I know it's 7 o'clock, but you should have eaten by now anyway because you should be ready for your fast overnight. Anyway, just for the, for the others, um, yeah, look, I'm not talking about, uh, bile changing your blood pH. I'm talking about bile changing the pH of what's coming out of your stomach into your gut, okay, to, to allow enzymes to work at an optimum pH. Yeah, so please don't misunderstand, uh, what we're trying to— you're absolutely right, because of buffering system within our bloodstream and our tissues, it's really hard for your body to work out of a of I think it's between 7.2 and 7.45. Okay. And that's a very narrow range. Outside of that, you actually get either if you go below that 7.2, you get acidosis and a lot of tissue death. Above that, you get alkalosis, a lot of tissue death. It is really unlikely that you're going to sway pH of your body's tissues, your active working tissues out of that range without serious illness. We've talked about that in the past with what can happen with acidosis and alkalosis and your breathing and all sorts of other things.

Yeah, Linda Romano here, that was good, we're 27 minutes in. Okay, let's go. So Linda Romano had a hair and tissue analysis and she detected really high levels of strontium. Okay, so not a mineral that you would talk too much about, but you know, anyway, 1.08, where the level is ideally between 0.0 and 0.36. So 1.08, weight, you're 3 times over what you should be. That's quite high level.

Ever somebody talks about strontium, I always think about the radioactive isotope.

That's what everybody gets straight away. Yeah, I got the radioactive seaweed and I got— oh gosh, especially on Candida. So Brina is raw-fed, okay, no monthly heartworm flea prevention, she's ticking all the boxes. I don't use chemicals on my lawn. She does have idiopathic epilepsy and takes phenobarbital and Keppra, and she's contacted the companies, there's no strontium in those products. But could those products— so Part 1 is for you, Bren, because I've Googled the second answer. Could they prevent her body— could these drugs, epilepsy drugs, prevent her body from eliminating strontium in her diet? Or Part B, is she getting them from her environment somewhere, which I possibly have an answer for? But what about the drugs reducing your ability to eliminate some problem metals?

Before we even go there, many of the hair tests— so I need to know Is this a bioresonance test? Okay, because if this is a bioresonance test, as with homeopathy, as with— I don't even know whether I've got my book to hand, um, but, um, we will often reflect on— see, I always have something so well used— homeopathic materia medica. So basically in here, uh, if I were to look up strontium it will come up with the symptoms of too much strontium. So what your body does with that, so whether we homeopathically prove it or you get a toxicity, etc., that gives a symptom picture. Now, for some people, they're resonant with that symptom picture. They will respond really well to that remedy. Okay, so with that in mind, Bioresonance is effectively reading a sample to see whether your animal is resonant with certain frequencies. This is why sometimes bioresonance things get misread, okay? People will assume that it's to do with a toxicity, an excess, a concentration, an issue with it, but actually it could be they need that as a remedy. And actually, so it may be nothing to do with you need to eliminate it, but you may need one of the strontium remedies for your pet that's had that test, and therefore that is your answer. Now, many of the bioresonance machines can create a remedy from your sample and ask them to stop the blurb, to stop talking about it, okay, as to what their interpretation is, and to actually make a remedy from the sample you've sent to them. Try that first, see where you get. Don't get tied up with, oh, my dog is being toxically attacked by the environment, foods, whatever's gone on. Um, I'd do that first, and then we can start to talk about the complexities of pathways of certain metals, etc., getting into and, um, substances getting into the body through toxicities and how to detox those if necessary, or, or bind them out. So it's then all about chelating minerals that would bind to that and allow you to not absorb it but to pass it out.

Interesting. Okay, that's gone a different way. I just went straight for the obvious, going, okay, I'm going to trust this hair analysis even though I tested that hair analysis out before and I got hair samples from the same dog, from the same part of the dog, and I posted them off and just labeled them as different dogs. And the readings were just completely different for each dog, completely different. It wasn't even like a slight bit of concentration I could forgive. It was unforgivably different. And I've got the image of the, of the two on my site. So I just fell out of love with it completely. I'm sure there's a value to it, and because, you know, people that I trust swear by some of the things that it can do.

But as regards, uh, trust, I unfortunately think Having seen the machines at work and seen the accuracy that they can be at, my feeling is often it's down to human user abuse.

Okay.

And I was going to say error, but I think actually some, to some degree, the human nature is they want to earn their $30. Okay. And in order to do that, they're going to create a narrative that they think you want to hear. Yeah.

That's the risk, no doubt. So I went down the route of what is strontium? And I knew strontium. I knew salt is a form of strontium. It's one of the maybe 80 minerals that's there. Where's the image? I just called my wrong screen. And so I went, look, yeah, rock salt, Himalayan pink salt, all those salts can have a somewhat— for a source of strontium. But lots of things contain strontium, and particularly vegetable plant matter, spinach, lettuce, carrots, peas, beans, potatoes, celery, wheat, barley, top of the top 10. And in the meat sector, seafood, because sea is the one where you think it might be circulating. So any sort of seafood going in, and the smaller the plankton feeder, the more likely you are to be higher in strontium. But then a really interesting line from one of the websites, a study here shows that 99% of the strontium in the human body is concentrated in the bones. And I thought, aha, you're a raw feeder, you're feeding 10-20% bone content to your dog, and strontium resides in the bones of them. And I thought, wow, okay. So then I went Googling and I thought, okay, is it that intensively reared meat is higher in strontium because their animals are potentially not treated as well and fed, you know, grains and all sorts of crap and possibly used a few chemicals to keep them going and all sorts of stuff? Because I'm not quite sure where the source of strontium is, but strontium lives in the soil. That's where strontium lives. So actually, grass-fed cattle are a and I imagine grass-fed cattle bones or lamb bones or outdoor-reared meat bones is a very high source of strontium. So there you go, it mightn't be such a negative thing as you were saying. It might just be a fluke, and who knows. But isn't it funny that the very diet you're feeding could be quite a source of strontium? So perhaps you're comparing it to a dog that's, you know, a reading that got from dogs that don't eat meat or bone or veg. That comes down to the whole, what's he comparing it to? What is this normal for a dog? Who says because don't forget what you're feeding today is completely alien to the levels that they have for everything, for everything. We know that, you know, protein levels in the blood. So I thought, yeah, how much strontium is available to me in these dogs that are eating lots of carcass? Because some dogs can eat a lot of carcass. So yeah, that was just my tuppence worth. But very interesting, Ben. Let's move on. Have you got one, Brad, or do you want me to keep going?

No, keep going, keep going. You've got a list.

I think this is a yes or no answer here. Can someone who is taking chemo treatments for cancer a human taking chemo treatments for cancer affect our dogs? In particular, could it make a male dog go sterile? Could it make a human go sterile?

So the human's taking the chemotherapeutic agent and she's worried about her dog's fertility. Fertility.

Wow.

Yeah, we look how you excrete chemotherapeutic agents. Pollutants is obviously something to be aware of. We're acutely aware of all sorts of things coming through in our sewage from people, what they're taking, from even the hormonal, you know, the birth control pill. Yeah, the influence of that on what's coming through in our waterways and how that's affecting wildlife. Just in you know, we're talking super microdoses that you'd be perceiving of that. And actually, there are all sorts of possibilities. We'd need to know more about the specific drugs that you're being given. But we know for breast cancer, they certainly do use certain hormonal drugs, and that would affect if your dog is in close contact with you and you're excreting some of those drugs, not just in your urine, but in your sweat and, you know, that your other influence there, that yes, that could affect a male dog's hormones. Okay, just as me taking a female hormone replacement could do the same. Somebody has asked, actually talking about hormonal influence, about ovarian sparing spays, and if their vet has to do a full spay, i.e., they back out on all of a sudden and decide to give a full spay. Can dogs have HRT? Yes, they can. Yes, it is something that would be classed as experimental because there's not a lot of work being done on that. But there are things like Incurin, which is an oestrogen that can be given in those circumstances. Okay, but that's an aside. So coming back to your question, yes, of course, some of the cytotoxic drugs that you're taking for cancer therapy, again, will be cytotoxic against the multiplying cells. And semen is made, you know, the sperm cells are made from tissues which are multiplying at a massive rate. Okay. And so if you give a cytotoxic drug that will inhibit that multiplication, then of course the fertility of your dog is also going to be affected. And it may be that again, it's super small doses that you don't even recognize would be a problem, but that actually, you know, your doctors are just saying, don't worry, you know, wash it off, it'll go down in the sink, it'll be not a problem. But if your dog is licking your skin surface as you sweat, you know, all of those sort of things, they may be picking up small doses.

Here's a study of 14 people taking— 7 taking—

one second, my headphones to be replaced.

Okay, I'm going to keep on talking anyway while Brian can't hear me. There's a study there of 14 people—

keep talking because I'll come back to you—

and 7 of them were taking antineoplastic drugs. So just the drugs, as I was saying there, 7 of the women were taking antineoplastic drugs and 7 weren't. And they found the perspiration samples from the patients were significantly more mutagenic than perspiration samples from the 7 control persons. So you absolutely do sweat out your chemotherapy drugs. So that is very interesting. In relation to some of the— Philippa there is saying, why would you breed a dog with cancer? The dog doesn't have cancer. I think possibly the client does, and she's taking the chemotherapy drugs, and she's worried that her chemo— as she recovers with the chemotherapy, is she going to affect the dog in the household. So that is really interesting because your dog would be super sensitive and what a concern because I was thinking, ah no, surely not, that's not something you don't need to worry about either. Plenty of things to be worrying about but, you know, that's just very interesting. So it turns out if it is in your sweat, well then, will tiny doses affect an animal? I mean, tiny doses can affect them, I mean, look at homeopathy, it's just a fact. So that's very, very interesting. I bet you there might be more out there on that. Should we try to get 2 more done? Let's see.

Yeah, at least I think we should rapid-fire the next one.

Yeah, okay.

I get too enthusiastic about them.

This is Rachel Mack, so we have to read out hers. Of course. So Rachel Mack says the raw holistic movement is continuing to grow, which is great. The worrying thing is that a lot of people are cashing in on the movement, which means there are many so-called professionals, inverted commas, with little experience, no qualifications. They're charging for their advice, which could be questionable and at times dangerous. How do you feel we can protect the community Protect the community from people who aren't as qualified as they make it? What regulations do you guys feel are needed? It's a tricky one.

Wow, it is. I mean, look, I do, I absolutely do see people getting, going online, getting themselves a little certificate that they can print off on a wall. Is that one back there behind you?

I just said, yeah, it's the back of a card.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. That's okay, that's okay, Brad. See, I don't have any. That's the point.

I had a— yeah, go on.

It's really important that actually it's not necessarily just about the subject they're studying, and I totally get if you get a diploma about nutrition, you know, it's not just about nutrition. Um, you know, as Rita said, you know, overregulation can impede all of the progress in herbal medicine and homeopathy because it's often led then by pharmaceutical drug companies sort of paying for qualification stuff and then trying to influence regulation and money comes into it. We don't really want that, but I get if you're studying about nutrition and nutrients and looking at FEDIAF as your gold standard and, and AFCO and, and that side of things, it sort of takes away from those people that actually have a true understanding of the whole body system and the physiology and anatomy and, and the medicine side of things. But at the same time, I see just as many, you know, really you know, highly thought of vets lose that holistic view when they get into nutrition. And it's almost like, no, you shall go down the method of what I'm saying. And it's almost like they're losing the sight of the patient and the individual needs and requirements, and they're trying to produce a nutrition that should feed all And the non-vet mightn't be burdened by that approach.

They might be more open because open to other things, say pharmacological background.

Yeah, so I sort of really agree with Rita. Look, there's a route here that we need to try and impress upon people that if you're qualified in one aspect, be really careful that you're not trying to then eulogize about just that one aspect, or indeed suppose that you know everything about everything else. And there is nothing like looking at the history of that person's ability to influence health of the patients underneath their care. So ask for references, and that's references of people that they've treated, other pets that they've treated, you know, as examples of, you know, their advice.

Yeah, I think Katie says of the local raw food nutritionist here— I like that— that everybody recommends Ken's culture qualifications as Conor's courses. Oh, that's a— I shouldn't be talking down my own courses, but I don't have a course on, you know, canine nutrition. You know, like, it's such an enormous subject, nutrition. I mean, you can spend years and years and years and years studying. It's just, you're just touching the sides of it.

And courses is one thing, isn't it? Courses is, you know, learning is what we all do. I love to learn. I believe it or not, I do learn off You know, I think that we all should be learning and doing these courses, but qualification is actually when somebody's coming into that, looking at the end results of the knowledge and testing that against, you know, a format that can then be stamped as a certain level of understanding. And unless you've got, you know, a lot of backing of academic universities or something like that is doing that sort of checking, that quality control of the qualification, then you've got to say, no, I've done a course, but I've actually not had my understanding of knowledge tested.

That is a big problem because I was just going to say, so like, you know, whatever about doing online courses, we all do them. I do them. Everyone's got something to teach and the courses are brilliant. I'm just saying that like, you know, I would not have a course saying you know, it would be impossibly big. You know, look at the book I tried to write, and it's this enormous thing. And even then, you're not learning about canine, you're not learning about, like, you know, the intricacies of nutrition. It's just, it's just, it's— you're touching the sides. But anyway, that was my point about the courses. So I'd obviously totally back courses, but to use just, like, kind of my courses, I just wouldn't have enough. I just— I've got maybe 10, 15, 20 hours of content up there. But, like, um, I think that some of the best canine nutritionists I've met don't have qualifications that you would, you know, that you'd, you know, stick up on the wall. And there are some courses out there that are great that I would have stood over until recently, really. Like, you know, people ask you all the time, what kind of nutrition courses can we do? And there's very little I can recommend. I don't really know any out there that I like, you know, gung-ho, I've read the whole course and I've gone through it and I love it because I just don't go through them myself. So I don't know. But there was one that was, that was being great and the people at the end were being tested and I thought, great, because you've got to be tested. Did you do, you know, correcting your homework, not just ticking the boxes at the end and then do it again because the same questions come up and you can eventually get through. So yeah, being tested at the end of your course is really important. It needs to be a little bit long as well. I mean, it needs to be a bit of an undertaking. So it's like not my 2-hour courses. It needs to be like, you know, half a year, a year, you know, to get your kind of bearings with some of the more kind of, you know, the background is just so important. Anyway, look, that's my two pence worth. I don't think you can control it too easily because because anyone's a nutritionist. It's not a word that's controlled. Your mum's a nutritionist and probably a better nutritionist than most of us, let's face it, because our diet's gone so bad.

And so because they managed to rear us.

Yeah, exactly. So I don't know, it's going to be— it's very hard to control. I think very soon there will be really high quality nutritional courses coming out. There will be masters at some stage coming out from a college that will be, you know, talking about real food as opposed to coming out talking about kibble. So there will be a master's in nutrition, there'll be a master's in natural health. These things will come out. And they'll probably require some sort of 3-year or 4-year degree in science to do it first, or something of the equivalent. But a basic canine nutrition course, it's very hard to stand over it, but I haven't looked into them myself, so I can't say.

So, Conor, you know, we were about to say we were going to rapid-fire through the next few.

Okay, let's do, let's do 2 more questions. I'll try doing 10 seconds on each one. Okay, so this is a really interesting one because I've already looked into the answer and Bren won't know, hopefully. 'Hey guys, we've got a lot of cherry trees where we live. The birds and squirrels are constantly dropping seeds in our garden, and my dog will have one or two here and there. It's never a lot, but would you be worried about him consuming too much cyanide? Could this be a form of self-medication?' Which I thought was very interesting. 'He otherwise has little to no interest in eating the actual fruit.' So my advice is really unlikely.

So cherry stones, so small, they're likely to go through without any problem at all. Only if they're crunching the stone and releasing— so the cyanide lines the seed which is within the stone, and therefore unless they actually crack into that— and this is the same with a lot of the stone fruits that are out there, including apricots and peaches and things like that— so unless they actually get inside that stone, the cyanide has some great antibacterial properties and stuff like that, but they have to open that up and be able to ingest quite a bit in order to actually get toxic from it. Okay, so my, uh, so if they were grinding them up, bigger issue. As they are, especially for— now this is not for the bigger stone fruits, but for cherry stones. God, I remember as a child eating them whole. I never used to spit the pips out.

What?

And people used to say, oh my God, you'll get appendicitis. Oh, because, you know, why bother? Why do I have all the mess?

I like spitting the fruit and then you just swallow the whole thing. I like aiming for things. I won't hit it.

I'm still alive.

Yeah, no teeth, mind you. They're all wooden. So here's some of the stats on the amygdalin. Amygdalin is the kind of the stuff you're worried about here. Leads to formation of hydrogen cyanide inside the body. So the red cherries has 4 milligrams of amygdalin per seed. So that's the red cherries you're talking about. The ones that you're really worried about in cherry pit world is Morello cherries, and they have 65 milligrams. So 4 versus 65 milligrams of this amygdalin. So Morello cherries are the worrying one. And studies show you need to eat about 7 to 9 of the pits of a Morello cherry tree, which is probably not the ones you're talking about, to lay you out. So there's lots of studies—

ground up.

Ground up. Exactly. So you're talking about having been— unfortunately, if you, if you said it was a Morello cherry tree, you're go, oh, that's quite like, you don't need a whole lot of those pits ground up to lay you out. But the normal red cherry pit has 13, 14 times less, which means 14 by 7, which is like, you know, okay, 100 cherry pits to lay out a human. So now your dog's not going to go through 100 cherry pits in it. That's a human, okay, do you know what I mean? So I think average red cherry trees, probably not that scary, particularly if they're not grinding them. Probably medicinal personal, but if it's a Morello cherry pit and he's eating lots of ants, I would be afraid. So that would be my—

very afraid.

Should we just boot over to Patreon and do 2 over there? We're going to— the 2 we're going to be doing is Helen Zen. She's got a heart— with a heart block, grade 2. What's a heart block? I don't know. I want to learn about that.

I'll tell you about heart block.

I can do that. Don't worry. And the next one is I know nothing about this. Do different blood groups have a propensity for different diseases? Oh, that's a gem. Do you know anything about that, Bren? I will just ask you something else. You can tell me when we go over. Yeah, I've got 20 seconds.

Yeah, because we know about sickle cell anemia and that certain blood groups are more predisposed to sickle cell anemia.

Oh, that'll do. That's an edge. Lovely, guys. Thanks very much. Patreon.com/WildPetMedics. We really appreciate your help there if you can. Great. And if not, we will be back next week. I assume it's a guest. Is it, uh, do we have Matthew Moore on next week? Is that next week?

Uh, no, it's Vitamin E next week. Um, that'll be, uh, delayed slightly. So Vitamin E. Cool. Yes, we're gonna try and get through that. So, uh, yeah, it might be a pre-record. We'll have to see.

Okay, cool. All right, thanks very much, guys. See you over on Patreon.

Cheers, take care.