RPM Tuesday Night Live: DCM and Raw Safety with NICCI CAMMACK

We are here this evening with the usual suspects, Dr. Brendan Clarke, and we have the wonderful Conor Brady. But the rose among the thorns, we have Dr.— oh, soon-to-be Dr. Nikki Kamek has come to join us. Um, so first of all, guys, I'd just like to say thank you very much to all our Patreon people who are supporting us massively. And just to say, uh, Nikki, welcome! How was your Christmas and New Year period?

Thank you so much for having me again. It was great. How was yours?

Really, really good. Really great. Really great. How about you guys? How were you?

I've switched over here.

Yeah, um, because you're frozen. I don't know why.

I don't know why.

I love that. You've just got Conor's We've got Conor's rants coming. Don't worry about it. But we've just got a wonderful post picture.

Am I frozen or can you see me? Can you see me?

You're frozen, mate.

You're frozen.

Jesus. Why does this happen to me all the time? Honest to God, this is not fair.

The wrong side of the Irish Sea.

This is not fair.

Nikki's coming through perfect. Lovely Nikki.

Yeah, exactly. We've got Nikki all the way from the USA.

Taking all the bandwidth.

Perfect. And what's happening is poor old Conor can't even get across the Irish Sea. I mean, yeah, I can't.

Okay, Conor, you can stop pretending you're frozen now.

Come on, I will be.

Enough's enough.

Give me 2 minutes to switch off the voices and I'll be back in, uh, in 2 seconds. Okay, okay.

Yeah, but your eyes are moving, Nick.

Sorry. While the Irishman's gone, um, tell us Tell us who you are.

No, tell you what, I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell everybody because you're one of my favorite people within the raw food world. And I'm just going to tell them about how I got to know you. Now, guys, Nicki Kamek is remarkable. She came over to the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society conferences, flew all the way over with her lovely husband for what, 3, 4 annual conferences, and I couldn't believe it. People were coming from the Netherlands, and I thought, wow, you're really cool. And then Nikki comes in and goes, hi, I'm from Connecticut. And it's like, oh my God, where's Connecticut? Yeah, yeah, where's that? Is that out— is that near Birmingham, Birmingham, UK?

Um, no, no, it's near Manchester because she's from Cheshire.

It's like, she's from Cheshire. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm from Cheshire, says Nikki. So Nikki is remarkable. She runs North Point Pets, which is, which has got every, every award going. Listen, we were going through a list of her awards and I said, Nikki, stop, just tell us which awards you haven't got because it's going to be a much shorter list. She's got the coolest independent retailer. She's got the best, she's got the, you know, she's got lots and lots of awards. They do a lot of work and they produce really, really amazing food and they educate and they do everything. So there you go, Nikki, that is how I've— my relationship with you to date. And now you're studying, you're doing your PhD with the amazing Joe Barges at the University of Georgia. That's easy to say. The University of Georgia, UGA, in— and you're doing a PhD in metabolomics and nutrition.

Yep, canine nutrition.

And canine nutrition. How about that? I learned that all myself.

Why don't you tell us a bit— tell us a bit about metabolomics? What is that?

Yeah, so metabolomics is under omics. So sure, everybody's heard of genomics, Another popular one is proteomics, study of the genome, the entire genome of different organisms. You know, we've done the human and the dog. C. elegans is another hot one right now. So metabolomics is studying of all the metabolites. So all of the little, essentially, these little compounds. Yeah, compounds. That are present within either A, an entire organism, or B, you could study an organ or a biofluid. So that could be blood or urine, which is actually what I study. And so what we try and do with that is either A, characterize disease. We can try and figure out where things are going haywire from a metabolism standpoint, we can study how food impacts an organism. There's a ton of different things that we can do, and it's a really, really exciting field to be in right now.

So is this, is this the link that you've got, like the human side? Because I know you came from the human side where they're really— so a lot of the functional doctors are really studying into all of the things that you're passing out in your urine now so that they can work out how you're taking those foods, how you're metabolizing them, what could be the inflammatory pathways that you're going through. Is that right?

Yeah, so it's a way that everyone might be familiar with metabolomics is, at least in the US, I'm sure this is true in the UK and throughout Europe as well, we test all newborns for something called inborn errors of metabolism. And those are small genetic defects, or they could be large genetic defects that impede different metabolic processes throughout the body. And some of them can be quite toxic and quite deadly. And that's kind of, kind of was my intro to metabolomics during my master's degree. My master's is in human nutrition, functional nutrition, which is essentially biochemistry. And I became fascinated with what we're able to figure out about the body just through studying urine. And so it kind of brought me down this rabbit hole. And I said, I remember, I think, talking to Conor Brady about it. Do you— do— are we not doing this in dogs? Yeah. And, um, the answer was no. Um, so I had to really search for a program and ended up stumbling upon, uh, this little project. I say it's little, um, because it's quite, quite big. I can't talk too much about it, but, um, this little project, uh, here at UGA. I got really, really lucky, uh, being introduced to, uh, the, the doctors and researchers here, uh, through a a friend, a really good friend of mine. And so the rest is kind of history.

That's cool. I love it. So what sort of diseases? I always think when I think of metabolites, I always think of vets having a look at excess protein in the wee and that kind of stuff. Like what other diseases, like what off the top of your head, what sort of things are on the horizon? Whatever bit we can do now.

So in humans, I again thought this was absolutely fascinating. There are researchers that have identified metabolites that are present in humans, I believe it's 10 years prior to outward symptoms of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. So if we can get a grasp on things like that, it's a game changer.

Whoa, that's nuts. That's insane.

Even in this cup.

And we can tell you if you're going to get some of the predispositions to cancers as well, you know, the genetic predispositions to some cancers. They can tell. So this whole thing about, you know, medical dogs sniffing your urine and working out whether you might have cancer— they're smelling the metabolites. Absolutely. And that's what's so fascinating. I think it's an excellent thing.

In the connection—

we haven't even come on to this.

Yeah, well, in the connection to, uh, proteomics and genomics is metabolites are going to be present or not present if genes are switched on to express or maybe switched off to not express. So it actually is almost like the glue that, if you will, for those other fields. So metabolomics is what we call it, a team sport. There's not— never going to be one, you know, bombshell metabolomics scientist because you see these papers come out and, you know, the people that I am fortunate enough to get to work with, I mean, there's a bunch of them and they're all brilliant, but it's, it's a total team sport. Not any one person can be a master at it.

Cool, cool. That's, that's, uh, I mean, you speak of papers, it is interesting that it's not like you're new to the whole show. You've taken the unusual approach, uh, Nikki, of, uh, coming into your doctorate with a paper behind you. And I suppose, Nick, unless you're going to ask a question there, uh, I'm dying to talk about that paper. Were you going to ask a question there, Nick?

No, I was just going to say that, uh, you've spent, before, even before you did the PhD, you spent a couple of years doing your paper. Please tell us about that paper? What— just give us a— give us an introduction.

Yeah, well, you were actually the one that kind of lit the fire for that paper, if you remember.

Hey, no, tell— yeah, definitely tell us about that.

Tell everyone how I was involved. Let's get it on the—

let's write it down, guys.

You say, why is my name not on the paper?

He's saying, yeah, we need words, young lady.

Um, we were, I believe, in Helsinki It might have been the last time that that conference happened because I think COVID was shortly thereafter. But yeah, it was the Dogress paper had come out on their survey for ROTT. And in talking to Johanna, there were a couple of things that we thought we should do differently. And there were a couple of things that we thought we could do in addition. And so I enlisted the help of my good friend, here in the States, Dr. Ryan Yamka. And we put out this survey and we got a large amount of responses, which was fantastic throughout the world, US, UK. And Dr. Vicki Adams helped us do the stats on it. And it, yeah, it was a large project. COVID definitely drug it on, unfortunately. Put a couple wrenches in there and, you know, stopped some of the data collection a little early, but You know, all in all, um, yeah, I was really, really happy with it.

How many households did you guess, Nikki? How many, uh, what sort of size sample size are we talking about?

Um, we had about 5,600.

Oh yeah.

So for any researcher, um, sample size is huge. You know, a lot of times with these raw-fed studies, you're getting 10, you know, 8, 10 dogs, and you know, you're lucky if you have that. So we had, we had 5,600. So, um, nice sample size.

So what were you looking at?

62 countries, is that right?

62 countries?

Yep.

Wow.

All over the world.

That's really, really great.

All over the world. Yep. All over the world, all different walks of life, which was really awesome to see.

And what were you asking? What questions?

Yeah.

Yeah. So what we wanted to know is what the prevalence was of basically pathogenic infections as related to households that feed raw. And you always hear about these cases and you always hear that it's, it's an issue, but you know, where were they? So we said, all right, let's, let's see what we can do and let's see if we can get some laboratory reports confirming these pathogens. And the fact of the matter is we had zero.

Wow.

A goose egg, which was great to see from our side, but it also, you know, we were secretly kind of hoping for some because if we can identify the cases, and, you know, what those pathogens are, we can then figure out where the breakdown is.

Hang on, let's just back up the truck a second. We had 5,663, was it?

5,611, I think. So 5,611.

5,611 responses and zero confirmed cases of infection. Of raw food to dogs or humans?

So we had some suspected ones, um, okay, which is a whole other rabbit hole. Yeah, because when you have a suspected case, whether it's in human or an animal, um, the immediate— usually the immediate treatment is going to be the introduction of antibiotics. And antibiotics are wonderful, um, you know, they've saved civilization more than once. However, when you overuse them, we have a greater problem. You know, we're worried about the pandemic right now. There's other things that could be way, way worse than that if we continue down this path of overusing antibiotics. And so that was actually a bit that we did discuss in this paper because just throwing out antibiotics, especially in our animals, it can still disrupt the health and immune response of the humans living in the household. With the animal that's taking those antibiotics.

Yeah, okay, so if we were to take those suspected cases and the sort of rate, so if we sort of compare that to the Helsinki paper and we start to look at what, 65 I think were suspected, I know they then split it down and there's far fewer that are actually proved. Are you finding a similar proportion? Are you getting a similar, so a third, let's see, you've done about a third of the cases of them, so you're getting about 20, 25 suspected cases or slightly more? What was your—

um, yeah, so we did, we had it because we had a lesser obviously sample size than, than they did, but we actually put our numbers up against theirs in our paper and we did the graphs out. Vicky did a fantastic job with that. Um, so if you want to go in and take a look at the comparison to the Helsinki paper and ours, um, you're going to see the almost the exact same results.

That's insane. And so when you say, when you say confirmed, for everybody else, like, you know, suspected cases is where people think, look, I suspect it was the dog food, or they had a chat with the vet and the vet said it was the dog food, and now it's in your head, it's the dog food, more like it. So when you say confirmed, what's involved in confirmed, it is actually culturing the infection that the human has as well as the bugs that are in the dog food. And when those two monsters match, then we have a lab confirmed. But that's quite a laborious process. So I suppose what they might say would be that 'Oh well, if we had— if we just had more lab confirmings,' and this kind of nonsense that goes on. But what the paper reeks of straight away is that you just— you found nothing. And it wasn't like you were talking about a set amount of time. This is like, have you ever had an infection from your dog food? So it's not just 5,000 cases, it's 5,000 cases over the length of time that person has been feeding raw, which is years. So it's not like we looked at it for a month. That could be millions of feeds, as the Helsinki paper highlighted. Like you're talking dogs of multiple, or houses with multiple dogs fed multiple meals a day for 7 or 8 years. Yes, and cats. So you're talking millions of meals in a country like that. If most of the responses were American, 1 in 7 Americans get food illnesses, get food infections every year, 1 in 7.

And where are they from?

I'm not sure. This is just in America.

Veggies.

Yeah, yeah. Fruits and veggies. Fruits and veggies, exactly. So it's like, it's crazy that they want, like, you have just proven that the food is so, it seems to be almost as Anna Heimborgmann said, Professor Heimborgmann said, like an oral vaccinating effect. It's like, how is this, how is there this little cases? What an amazing study. Did anybody share this, Nikki? Did you find a great response from the veterinary community? Tell me something.

The veterinary community knew, you know, a couple of veterinarians that I A couple of the veterinarians that I work closely with were great in sharing it. I believe Dr. Becker and Rodney shared it out for us. But aside from that, no, we didn't get a large community response from it. But it is one of the better read papers in the Frontiers journal, which is really exciting. As a first-time publisher, I was excited.

Yeah, what was that figure you gave us earlier? What was the figure?

More than 71% of other papers and frontiers.

Look at that, that is amazing.

Well done, congratulations.

That is just nuts, good on you. So it just shows that lots of people, it's the power of social media because we are a nation of millions. There's millions of people feeding raw dog food, up to 20% of UK, America's coming online, Australia. And so there's a huge amount of people waiting for this information. So it just shows the power of that end of things that when people like Habib and Becker get behind us and that's 5 million people straight away, you know, it does help to get the correct information out there. How was the process for you? Was it, uh, how did you find it? Would you ever do it again? Too quick?

Um, yeah, I would do it again. I mean, I didn't honestly, I didn't have a hard time. I am kind of geeky. I love to write. So, um, I didn't have a problem with it. I think many of, or at least Nick and Conor read, you know, several versions of the draft and had given feedback. And I think you both know there's a couple other papers that are potentially can get published from that. Um, just from, from a lot of the background and industry research that was done and the expertise of a couple of the other authors as well. But no, I didn't think it was bad. I would— I will be doing it again because there's a lot of papers that have to get published with my doctorate studies. But yeah, you'll be seeing more.

That sounds so cool.

Let's go to the reference. You've put that paper, you've put that reference on there.

I put the paper up on Patreon. Also, there's another one by And to Ranimi et al. And that was, uh, the references are in my paper too. So they're in your paper. Okay.

So yeah, so what's really interesting, and this is just like a little tidbit, I guess, from, for me, um, to everyone, when you want to dig into, to something in a paper, um, look at the references. Um, I think Johanna's paper, um, and mine, we've got a really robust set of references, um, you know, in our— at the end of our paper that gives you all the information you need to be able to go back and find, um, more information.

Yeah.

The other thing, I'm just seeing some of the comments and I want to address, um, because everyone talks about pathogens in raw food and then dry food and everything else. And in the US, and I'm sure the same is in, in many countries throughout Europe, but in the US it doesn't matter what the format is of pet food, right? It could be fresh food cooked, it could be frozen raw, it could be kibble, canned, freeze-dried, air-dried, I don't care what it is. It has a zero tolerance policy. And I discuss this a lot in the paper. It has a zero tolerance policy per the FDA for pathogen inclusion. So what that means is regardless of pet food format, any pathogen that is found in that pet food, it is considered to be adulterated. So that notion that raw food— commercial anyway, commercial raw food— is contaminated with pathogens is incorrect. The major difference, and we talk about this too, is homemade pet food in the United States could potentially be a problem because human food, the food that we go to the grocery store and purchase for ourselves, is allowed to be contaminated with various pathogens. Because it's sold with the intent of being cooked. So there's a kill step that you're introducing at that point, whereas raw pet food, you're not supposed to cook that. So that has to have that zero tolerance policy. So what we talk about is the changing of verbiage from raw pet food or raw meat-based diets to minimally processed diets. So that's a really, really important step for us as a raw community to take because because minimally processed diets encompass two things. They encompass your raw, right, and that could be your commercial raw or your homemade raw, and then it also includes fresh food. So that's, in that being, I mean by that is cooked. So your cooked diets, and that becomes really important for us as research scientists and as a veterinary community because we're now able to start categorizing pet food the same way that we categorize human food. So processing steps— so ultra-processed, minimally processed, moderately processed, and then raw. Um, so all of those things for us as a raw community are really, really important to, to start adapting in terms of herbage.

Would that not bring you under the remit of the USDA as opposed to the FDA?

Um, well, that isn't so— I mean, yes, it is a concern, um, but what we're more talking about is the NOVA classification of food. So we're starting to look at pet foods in the same way that we're looking at human foods and their relationship to disease. So if you all could help us in changing that, that would be really, really helpful for everybody, and it's going to be helpful for the veterinary community to then also understand what these different types of diets are.

Oh, that's good. I like that. How do you go about changing this? How do you— how does this go? How does this come about?

Yeah, so Dr. Donna Radetic from CANWE, um, which is an awesome, awesome, awesome organization, by the way. Um, Dr. Donna Radetic and Dr. Karen Becker founded CANWE, which is the Companion Animal Nutrition Wellness Institute. Um, and Dr. Donna Radetic published a paper, and that's also listed in mine. It's called Insights into Commercial Pet Foods, and that's in the Veterinary Clinician North American Small Animal Journal. And she discussed that just changing the, the verbiage for different types of pet food. So we mentioned that in our paper as well, and you're, you're gonna see other papers that are in the process of getting published right now talking about that. So we're changing it from a, from a literature perspective. And so we're hoping to see that kind of crossover into practice as well as into just household.

That's amazing. And before we came on air, you were saying that actually your— that the paper with Salmonella, E. coli, that actually dovetails into the DCM work that you've done with Ryan Yamka. Tell us about how those two things link.

Yeah, so, um, when I teach, or when Ryan and I teach on these topics, we usually link them and kind of just try and back up and put this into perspective for everyone. Again, I like to speak from a U.S., um, lens because I am not as familiar with all the different pet food practices in Europe and in the UK. However, I know that a lot of things are similar. So basically what we say is, I don't care again if it's pathogens or if it's DCM, at the end of the day, most pet foods on the market, in the marketplace today, even including ones from some of the best-loved veterinary brands, your, you know, your big brands, are— do not have a formal nutrient analysis, a laboratory nutrient analysis done. They don't have digestibility studies done, and they don't have, um, a proper food safety protocol behind them, or if they do, they're not transparent about it. So essentially what we usually end up, you know, just underscoring is that if companies did have a nutrient analysis for their commercial products and they did have a digestibility study, they would have put to bed the DCM thing before it ever really started because they would have been able to prove that their food had the nutrients not only included within it, but also available, bioavailable, or digestible to the animal. And then also, you know, in terms of raw food as well, showing that, you know, those foods are free of pathogens, neither of these things would have been an issue.

Yeah, that's cool. I think people have been thinking about that this side of the pond as well and trying to bring in a bit more. Like, people aren't aware that this is actually telling one of the comments here, but People aren't aware that there is very— when they say pet food is regulated, they really don't understand what that means. You know, I've made it for a couple of years, and Ireland is extremely stringent with this sort of stuff because it's jobs for the boys over here. So we like lots of civil servants doing the same job. So I'd have the same couple of vets coming into me, middle-aged vets, every 3 weeks, and they'd go through the premises with their clipboards and find things wrong, because if they don't find things wrong, they can't come back in 3 weeks. For 3 years, every 3 weeks, relentless stress. And all they ever cared about was pathogens. They'd look under your machines and they'd get the white gloves out and you're step forward, step back, traceability. But at no point has anybody ever considered the nutritional value of my food. They never cared where my ingredients, what the end process was for the dog. All they saw was risk and danger and I'm a madman. And still today, all they care about, even with dry food companies, and we saw this with the Hill's recall, 22 million cans of dog food left the world's greatest pet food company apparently, uh, without a single one being checked for vitamin D, uh, excess. And they had to— 22 million.

And there's multiple steps that went wrong, right? So there's— so when you're making— there's no barrier to entry in—

no—

for pet food in the US. So if you want to start a pet food company, um, in the US, you can probably have something mocked up by the end of next week if you started today. Um, You don't have to have any degrees. You don't have to have any certifications or licenses. You can just call up a manufacturer and there are really ultimately a handful at the end of the day here in the US that make all of the foods. They just make them all under different names. You can call them up and you could say, hey, you know, I want to start, you know, raw pet medics food and somebody will do it for you. It might be somebody that's qualified. It might not. There's—

you have like Dr. Conor Brady.

Yeah. These companies will make money.

Possibly very good.

There are computer algorithms essentially that I'll walk you guys through, like how, how pet food is made. So there are computer algorithms of computer programs that we use, and you can type in, um, you know, what you want your ingredients to be, or it can kind of spit out what vitamins and minerals you have to add, or what your premix has— vitamin premix has to look like. And the computer says, all right, make it to this formula. Um, you send it out, it's put through the extruder, and we're talking— we're talking about kibble here— and, um, ends up in a bag. And you don't have to take that final product and send it off to the lab to make sure that what's in it is actually what the computer said is going to be in it. And then what a lot of people also don't understand is that you can have all the best vitamins and minerals in the world in that pet food But unless they're digestible or potentially you can ensure that they're not interacting with one another in a negative way, you don't— that nutrient analysis means nothing until you have what's called a digestibility study. And a lot of companies will tell you if you write to them, and I've written to almost all of them, they don't answer me anymore. But back in the day, I used to write to all of them and I would ask for a digestibility study. And most of them will come back and say, well, it's an animal welfare issue. And I will tell you that a digestibility study is literally just collecting poop. I don't know about anyone else, but I pick up after my dogs after they go to the bathroom, so it's really no different. The difference is that you're sending that poop sample off to the lab to be analyzed, and it's— I'm oversimplifying this, but it's a simple math equation. You know what went in, right? What's coming out, you subtract it, and that's what your digestibility is. Good digestibility should be higher, 80%, ideally 90+ especially if we're looking at raw food. But there are some raw foods that have really poor digestibility because they're not formulated correctly or they're using maybe too much synthetics or maybe too much of one thing over another. So that digestibility analysis is also equally important as the nutrient analysis. Yeah. So when companies say that it's a welfare issue, I disagree because if if that company's not doing that, then ultimately what they're doing is experimenting on your pet.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right? So, and there's ways to get around it. I mean, there certainly are companies that will do, they have colonies of dogs that I promise you live better than most pets today, at least here in the US. So, they'll do digestibility studies. You just have to send them enough food for the 10-day trial and you're off. And if they— if you don't want to do that, what companies can do, and some of them have, um, I believe, um, one of the raw companies over the UK did it. Was it Honey's? Where they collected the poop for 10 days for just people, people's dogs, people's pets, and they did it that way. Um, so there's absolutely ways around it.

That's—

yeah, that's cool. Nobody ever considers that because, like, same with the shelf life studies with dry food, nobody knows if this is made in a land far away and sits in a cargo ship. Yeah. And then it's a hot, sweaty shelf in a pet shop, and then it's sitting open for 2 weeks. Like, nutrients hate that stuff. And so they never have to measure that at all. So it's just, we reckon that's what's in the product. And then you've got clashes of phytates and all this other processing does to the nutrients and all the denaturing that goes on. All that is irrelevant. It's, we put this in, George Jetson. This is how we looked at nutrition in the 1950s, honest to God. And that's when kibble started, and that's that's where they are still because we didn't have a lot of meat around then. So lots of cereal in a kibble form. We suddenly invented extruders. We didn't have a lot of meat around at the time, and suddenly tin was hard to get in the early '50s because of the war. And so kibble was perfect. And since then it hasn't changed at all. I mean, I don't see how it's changed except it's become more scientific on the bag. But what you're saying is pretty dreadful. It's pretty dreadful.

Well, even you're looking at the scientific on the bag. I was just explaining to somebody Yesterday, the day before. So I always love to blow people's minds with, they're worried about protein percentages. Like, oh, don't feed over, I don't know, 27, 28% protein because your dog might, might get aggressive, which is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my whole life because the percentage of protein on that bag or that can or that raw food, whatever it is, um, is essentially meaningless because the percentage of protein doesn't tell you anything about the amount of grams of protein that are in that food. And so canned food, I don't know, say is 6, 7% protein, it's predominantly water. And then you have a dry food that is maybe 28% protein, but it's got no water. Um, that canned food is actually way higher in grams of protein than that dry food is. And most people, and even some veterinarians, will look at me and go, but that's not possible because the dry food says 28%. Um, and it's no, no, no, you have to do a conversion to grams. And, you know, unfortunately, that's the math. I've written about that. There is a blog on that on our North Pointe site if somebody wants to reference that as well.

Fantastic. Nikki, I'm going to, I'm going to jump in here and just say about— bring us back to dilated cardiomyopathy, which is heart disease in dogs. Is it related to grain-free and boutique and exotic foods, but mainly grain-free? Is it? That's the headline question that everybody wants to know.

So we don't have any evidence to suggest there is a link. Is there some association?

Normal language.

Is there some association? Sure. But what I will tell you, and I learn, relearn this lesson every single day, you can make numbers and statistics to say just about anything you want them to. And so what I usually reply to some people when they're very adamant that there is a link, is say, well, I can probably split the data to tell me that dogs who live on second floor of apartment or in an apartment building also are more apt to get DCM as well. Um, at the end of the day, the overall prevalence of DCM in the canine population is estimated to be somewhere between 0.5 and 1.1% of the entire canine population. Population. So for the US, if you want to, I think we're estimated now to have after COVID, like 90, something like 90 million dogs. So I always use 80 million, um, just because I want to err on the side of caution. So if I use 80 million and I take 0.5 to 1.1, to 1.1% of that population, we still end up, I think it's like 0.000005 or something percent. So we're still well below the expected prevalence based on those estimates. A lot of the cases that were reported to the FDA were misdiagnosed. So a lot of heart murmurs were sent in, you know, a lot of congenital defects were sent in. There's just so much unknown and there's so much— so many variables and so much complexity to each of those variables that I think at the end of the day, you're not going to ever see the FDA come out and say that there's a link. It's just way too complicated.

How do you think this rumor got started?

I think there's a lot of politics involved, if you will. I think that there was a lot of irresponsibility involved. You know, it's difficult to come outward and say, you know, the big pet food companies had something to do with it or people were paid off. Is it possible? Sure. Um, but at the end of the day, I think, you know, talking about it as if it's a scandal or trying to create drama, it really does nothing. I think it's important for us as pet owners, because when it's your own pet, it's, it's really hard, right? It becomes very emotional. Um, I think that it's important to just look at what information is out there and what evidence is available. And I think, you know, looking at the small number in comparison to the dog population, I don't think it's something that the average pet owner should be worried about.

Yeah, like to give those figures context again, in a population of 80 million, 1% of 80 million is 800,000. So there could be literally 800,000 of these dogs walking around. Let's take the 0.5%, 400,000 dogs. The FDA gets alerted to 600 cases, which is a blip. I mean, that's not something the FDA with its tiny financial resources for the pet population would react to normally. But maybe in the '70s, after all the dogs and cats started dying at DCM because they stopped putting taurine in pet food, stopped putting meat in pet food completely in the '70s, and cats started falling off around the place, dying by the tens of thousands, the FDA responded well. And that was actually the start of AAFCO and formulating pet food. And they said, well, hang on, there's no taurine in this pet food. That's where cats need taurine. It's like, well, cats need meat, and that's where taurine is, and you've just stopped using meat. So, you know.

And that argument was kind of brought over for The cat DCM issue was caused— this was back in the '80s— was a lack of taurine in the pet food because there was not meat. Taurine comes from meat. It does not come from grains. It does not come from—

That's why it's called taurine in the bowl.

Yeah. —plant-based sources. It comes from meat. It comes from muscle meat. So if you remove the meat from cats' diets, yes, they get taurine deficient dilated cardiomyopathy. The same thing was initially thought to be happening in dogs. They thought that these dogs were taurine deficient, and that was indeed not the case. Um, even some of the golden retrievers, um, a good amount of the sample size of, of these cases is golden retrievers, which are known to have a genetic predisposition to DCM, which skewed the data entirely. Um, but even those dogs did not have largely taurine deficiency. Some of them did, but most of them did not. What we kind of learned from this though is We don't really know how to measure taurine. So there's a lot of different ways to do it. There's whole blood taurine, there's plasma. Um, do you measure it when these dogs are fasting? Do you measure it after they eat? Do you measure it, you know, at night, in the morning, whatever? Um, so that became apparent, which was really interesting. And then, um, another really important thing I want to touch on because I see really dangerous recommendations all the time. You hear vets saying, oh, please, you know, just add— if you want to feed grain-free food or feed raw, that's fine, but make sure you add some pasta or oatmeal or bread, or I've seen a can of corn, um, to the diet. Please don't do that.

Oh yeah, I heard that.

Oh, those are my favorite. So I cannot stress enough to not do that because Taurine actually lives in the bile acids. So in the digestive juices that live in the stomach, same thing goes for people. And so when you're adding extra fiber, especially to a kibble-based diet, if you're adding extra fiber to an already complete and balanced diet and you're— and sometimes I've seen, you know, a fair amount of this being suggested to be added, that fiber is actually going to absorb the bile acids. And so what happens is you end up getting increased excretion of the bile acids in the stool, which translates to a decreased taurine level, and you can actually create the very thing you're trying to avoid by adding extra, adding extra fiber.

Dr. Conor Brady, some of those studies in the past were linking to the reduced-calorie pet foods, which where they jack up the fiber content because God forbid they should lower the carbohydrate content for these poor little bodies. They instead keep the hard carbohydrates where they are because they're important, and keep the protein low, but they jack up the fiber content. And so you get dogs eating huge amounts of indigestible fiber, which, if you're worried about bloat, would, in my opinion, will be very, very risky. But it does, it hampers the ability for the dog to re-digest the bile and then taurine deficiency. Didn't Schulhof— Schulhof was very annoyed about this. Schulhof is a guy that owns a dry pet food company in the US, grain-free pet food company, a lawyer by trade, and not a big fan of the FDA. And so when these cases came along, he highlighted a number of things to me. He was saying like, you know, isn't it crazy we'd the melamine scandal here in 2007 where Asian kind of feeding greens were coming in laced with melamine to jack up artificially the protein content on the side of the pack and it killed thousands and thousands of dogs and the FDA did respond but they were very slow to name the companies involved so despite them knowing for a few months what some of these companies, the names of these companies, it took a senator to get involved saying give us the names of these companies so pets can pet owners can stop buying the pet food products. That's how the FDA responded to the 2007 recall because the biggest companies were involved, hundreds of thousands of kilos of this stuff. I mean, many brands across the top things. But the DCM scandal, 600 suspected cases, the companies found nothing wrong with their products, nothing was recalled, and they named every company that they suspected might be at issue.

And there's lots of lawsuits on, right?

Yeah, because Shuloff got really annoyed about that and he said, well, sure, the piece that really put the cat among the pigeons was by Lisa Freeman. Who I'm no friend of, and she— this is her second piece, and her first piece in 2013 was one of the most read studies on PLOS. I think she issued it about the risks and some benefits of feeding fresh food to pets. So that was the dominating article, and then she comes out against grain-free pet food, which is interesting because grain-free pet food is 50% of the US pet food market at the moment. So it would be seen in my more kind of tinfoil hat approach to things I would say that it is a serious player. It's taking half of the pet food sales, and cereal-based pet food companies might be thinking, hmm, and people might think that sounds ridiculously far-fetched, but I would say the FDA have history of doing funny things in pet food, and I think this is another one of them, in my opinion. Why would they get caught up in this?

You've seen the FDA back off quite a bit in their stance on this. So, I mean, and they've, they've said, you know, they're not gonna come out and speak on it, especially when foods seemingly seem to have no ill effect on the pets eating them, especially for many years. You think, like, people think that grain-free foods are brand new, and they're not. They've really been around for a few decades. They started off as being therapeutic, and they became rampant uh, once the melamine thing hit. But they've been around and they've been in the marketplace for a long time. And the other thing a lot of people, and I would argue veterinarians, don't often realize is a lot of households feed grain-free pet food. Um, and we're talking about kibble here. Um, they're feeding grain-free kibble not because they're worried about the dog, um, having an issue with grains per se, but with the amount of children now with celiac or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, or even becoming more prevalent. And I know this from my human nutrition side. Children are becoming more and more sensitive to the chemicals that are in food, especially here in the US. The grains and such that are going into pet food are not the grains that you and I would be consuming. So they're laced with a lot of agricultural chemicals. And these kids are reacting. So, you know, celiac, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, And then other types of chemical sensitivities. So they're feeding these grain-free foods because of the health of the children or the people living in the household. I know a lot of people that are working in nutrition, celiac and gluten sensitive, and they react to the saliva when they play fetch with their dog or get licked by their pet. So there are other reasons why people decide to feed these foods.

Yeah. I don't doubt it. It seems to be though, in 2018 there was an industry report and I didn't write down the link, but I'll put it up later. Schulhof was saying the danger is that this is going to very negatively affect my business as a grain-free pet food producer who was totally innocent in this. He tested the pet foods that Freeman identified as possible issues in this study of hers, which wasn't a study, it was a non-peer-reviewed opinion piece that she wrote, but phrased very much like it was a peer-reviewed study. She wrote it like a literature review.

It was the first commentary piece that the Journal of American Veterinary Medicine published.

There you go. That's just astounding to me. They also— they were the same journal that published the 2013 piece on the pure risks involved with raw feeding, no benefits. But in 2018, raw, for the first time in about 10 years, grain-free pet food sales dipped by 0.5%. They were on an upward trajectory of like 3 or 4% a year, which is huge increases year on year. And they dipped by 0.5%. And he said, there you go, that's exactly what they're trying to do. They're just trying to slow the growth. And so it's, it's muddy in the waters. Merchants of Doubt, as Nick was talking about the last time we were on, it's a class, uh, it's on YouTube, you can watch it, it's a great book. But in my opinion, this is very much just so muddy in the waters a little bit to say there might be some problems with grain-free, so don't back away from cereal-based pet food yet. Same with the raw, same with the hysteria about the safety of raw. You have just proven, Nikki, the other side of your life. I mean, the two biggest things you could have done for us, you have eliminated this DCM nonsense. And then you've got this raw food study that says it's incredibly safe. And yet where are we? Does it actually change anything? You know what I mean? How it actually gets me a little bit annoyed when I think about this amazing stuff that you are putting down and it's quite obviously true. And but the damage is done. They sow those seeds and they don't care after 2 or 3 years. Vets remember it. Grain-free causes DCM. Like when Eukanuba says our foods help you live 30% longer. That was a complete lie. They were taken to trial.

They got sued for that.

Yeah, by the FTC. And they said you can't say that. But it was on veterinary walls. It doesn't matter. They don't give a damn. How much is it? Half a million? Take it away, lads. So I wonder, you know, Do you get despondent a little bit about— I mean, maybe you're encouraged about the fact your raw study has done so much good and it has been so well read. That's a really positive thing, I suppose. Do you think we need more of that to kind of change it quicker?

Yeah, I think what— again, I think one of the big things that we can all do as a community is change the verbiage, right? So change it from minimally processed, or change it from raw to minimally processed. Um, I think that's going to do us a world of good It's going to start— well, what is that? And it opens up the conversation. And I think more people need to share it. I think, you know, and I certainly owe everyone this. I need a plain language summary of this paper because it is— it's a long piece. It's one of the longest ones I think I've ever written. So I— yeah, we need just more people sharing, more people talking about it. And don't be afraid to open up the conversation. It doesn't have to be confrontational. I mean, there's plenty of people that I love and respect very, very much that don't agree with raw. But they're brilliant, brilliant people, or they're brilliant veterinarians. Just because somebody doesn't subscribe to that way of feeding doesn't mean that, you know, you need to be confrontational. It, you know, it's a conversation, and, you know, just opening it up to that, it can do a world of good for everybody. Yeah, totally.

I like that. That's spot on.

You know, so we're coming towards the end and I'd love to ask a sort of look into the future of things that you maybe bring. You know, we were talking before the show about, you know, where you came from and the things that you do. And right at the beginning of the show, for those who joined us a little bit later, go back and watch the beginning about the metabolomics Lominix? Metabolomics. Say it that way, say it the American way, it's far better. Omics. Where would you go with— let's, you know, park the DCM, the grain-free, this sort of current safety stuff.

Those are just side projects.

Yeah, just, you know, put them off to one side. You know, what's the thing that excites you that you can bring from where we're going with the sort of pro-inflammatory, the longevity stuff. Let's, let's look at that because that's a big thing in Forever Dog. And, you know, lots of texts that we're looking at at the moment. Where would you start to look into longevity for people's pets out there?

Yeah. So there are two incredibly brilliant other researchers, doctors, females that I'm working with that are absolute powerhouses here. I hope that everybody gets to be introduced to them very soon because we've got a lot of really cool stuff coming down the pike. But what we're trying to do, because it's not me, I, I really stress that this is such a team sport, but what we're trying to do is bring nutrition more to the forefront of medicine, both for humans and for pets. I think for such a long time, and still it's very much laughed at, or thought, you know, or said that it doesn't matter. And it does. And we have more and more mounting evidence to show that it does matter. And it matters quite significantly because it can influence genetics. It can influence everything within the body, as well as her body's response to outward signs of stress. So, you know, toxic things in the environment and things like that. So what we're trying to do is, is bring nutrition to be more forefront, and we're taking it a step further because, you know, we're not just studying nutrition, we're studying pathology and biochemistry and things like that. So if we can do a good job with that, we can potentially change the way that we practice medicine, both for humans and for pets. And if I can see that dial move a little bit before my time on this earth is done, I think I'll have done a good job.

Yeah, that's cool. Amazing. Yeah, really, really good. What's exciting about those metabolites, and when you're trying to get a raw dog food study off the ground, it's very difficult to study dogs. You have to get, particularly in the UK, and I'm not really sure in Ireland because I haven't even looked into Ireland, but in the UK, if you're trying to get it off the ground, you have to apply for licenses and all to do with animal welfare. And it's like, look, we're not in the you know, let's say I wanted Nick to say, Nick, let's send 50 dogs to Nick, and Nick takes a blood test and we just check the calcium levels in dry versus raw-fed dogs. Very simple but quite telling. So let's have a look under the hood. Nick's not allowed to do that if it's part of an experiment so easily. And actually, getting the study off the ground is so difficult because anything invasive is not allowed. But metabolites are great because you can send— Nick can collect 50 wee samples, anything that comes. That's all we need. Yeah, so you just follow them around, little tray captures wee, poo, hair. So anything that comes out of the dog, you're allowed— that just falls off naturally or falls out naturally— you're allowed to study. So metabolites really opens it up because at the moment we're looking at digestibility of various things and it's not that exciting. You really want to get at the bloods of the animal before and after, but that is mega expensive. So people are wondering why these raw dog food studies aren't being done. It's because The companies that are producing the studies at the moment have skin in the game. Big Pharma produced the studies for the drugs.

And well, there is one company here in the US and I always butcher their UK name, but one of the companies here in the US that's doing and funding a ton of research is Instinct, formerly known as Nature's Variety. Okay, so I forget—

Nature's Menu over here. Nature's Menu.

Susan Lin in the US. Yeah. So they're doing a fantastic job. They've got a lot of really cool things on the front burners, if you will. So stay tuned for that.

Good. How do we keep in touch with that research, Nikki? I don't—

well, I would watch their website. So they do post some stuff. I think they're waiting to publish. I know that there's some things things that are in queue. I can't speak to anything, but they're, they're doing a great job. And just remind us of their name. Uh, Nature's Variety or Instinct here in the US, and then it's Nature's Menu in the UK.

Okay, Nature's Variety in the States. They're the people to check, I guess.

And your shop is underneath there, Nikki, North Point Pets. Uh, did you— have you already spoken about— because I got cut off for a little while. Have we already— no, I don't think we did. Great your shop is. Tell us about your awards, Nikki.

Your awards. No, no, we've been there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Okay, I see. I did miss it then.

Okay, I think we guys— yeah, have you got, have you got any pressing questions for, uh, Ms. Kamek?

One of them was that came up earlier, Nikki, was, uh, how are, uh, fresh Actually, there was two good questions there. First one is, how are fresh pet food companies, let's say raw dog food companies, keeping their products so clean in a country where they permit salmonella and E. coli on the chicken that they are— on the bits they're getting?

Yeah, so there's a bunch of different ways for companies to do that. There's some companies that don't HPP here in the US. HPP is high pressure processing or high pressure pasteurization. Yeah, they squish it. Um, so, and that, that's probably worth a whole nother, um, podcast, HPP. But, um, the, the ones that don't, um, are super, super careful with their sourcing, or at least they should be. Um, if they are super careful with their sourcing, typically you're going to see it be really expensive. Um, and they're testing, um, at several different critical control points throughout that manufacturing process and before it leaves facility and they've got, um, really good, um, transportation, um, if you will. Then you have the camp that HPPs who, you know, there are some companies that still source the same way, um, as some of the ones that don't. And then there are some that maybe source meat that wouldn't necessarily be something you'd want to eat. Um, you know, it kind of goes all over the place, if you will. Um, I don't believe that HPP is necessarily a bad thing. I think, you know, there are some studies for human food that show if you do it for a very long time at a very high temperature, there can be some denaturation of protein and some nutrient loss. But from what I can see from the data that we have through the good— I would say the good companies here in the States, the HPP— there is no nutrient loss or denaturation of protein, which is a really, really good thing, especially for those of us that want to fight the raw fight and see it here and are maybe potentially worried about pathogens or things of that nature, I think it's still better than going with a more processed or cooked diet.

So, I mean, it does kill all the good bugs though, Nikki, doesn't it? That's the problem.

It doesn't always, because some of those actually not— it doesn't necessarily have to, or they're reinoculating, they're using a good probiotic or prebiotic type of technology, if you will. Yeah. And again, you know, I think the way it was explained to me, um, I think it was Dr. Yamka that did this. So when I was like, but there are only a handful of pathogenic serovars of salmonella— I think there's 2,500 or 2,400 different types of serovars of salmonella, and most of them are not dangerous. Are going to make you sick. And so his response was, well, if there's an environment where even the good salmonella can grow, it means that the bad salmonella can also grow. And so that's where the zero tolerance policy comes in in the US. And it's kind of hard to argue that from a food safety perspective. You know, I am absolutely one that believes that, you know, the, the good bacteria need to be there and to grow and be able to grow and survive. But at the same time, you know, you want to eliminate your, or at least reduce the risk for the harmful ones as much as you can.

Yeah. I mean, there might be a place for those products where they are used as a base and you teach people, look, you know, take your products off the shelf and start feeding as much fresh in on top of that as you can. It'd be a hell of a lot better in my opinion. And I've seen the stuff. We actually were one of the first countries in Europe that had one of those machines. It looks like something from a 1980 Superman movie. It's like a giant swimming pool made of steel and you can see windows and it's full of water. And on each side are these enormous steel rods hanging out the sides of them. And you go in wearing your huge earmuffs and it's really clean. And I was one of the first companies, food companies, to try it. So I tried it with my raw dog food and I thought, oh, I'm onto something here. This is great, extend the shelf life. I mean, that's what every company wants to do because shipping raw is such a pain in the bum. So in the product goes. And he was explaining that. So the water is this size and the rods start to compress and they can squish the water and the water just starts to decrease in size. And it's like, Where's the water going? He goes, it's being compressed. There's loads of space between those molecules. They can put more pressure on my food deeper than the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, more than 7 miles of pressure. And afterwards, when my food came out, fingers crossed, I was hoping it would look the same. It didn't. It looked like it had been cooked. It had certainly— but now he had put a good bit of pressure on it. And so I took a step back and said, well, I can't sell that to the raw fooders. Now that they've had the good stuff, they're going to say, Well, there's now raw here.

So I used to feed up more, uh, like local farm-to-table raw when I was living in Connecticut, and now I'm living in Georgia, um, and raw is not as easy to come across down in the South, at least I'm finding, as it was up north. So I'm feeding instinct, and back when I was feeding instinct, I don't know, 5, 6 years ago, it was all gray and looked like it was cooked through all the way through. Now It's all pink. It's actually beautiful looking, and they're HPPing. So interesting. They took the pressure way, way down. Yeah, yeah. And they're still testing, you know, and it's all their pathogen clearance is phenomenal. And they do the nutrient analysis and the digestibility and all those good things. So yeah, I'm super, super impressed with it.

One question that came— did come up earlier, people wanting to know that whole thing about digestibility and you were saying, oh, I send my poop off to, you know, get it checked. And they're saying, well, where? Where is there— is there a special lab in the States that does that? Yes. So I don't—

this is what's in, this is what's out.

Yeah.

So I don't send my dogs out. But if you're a pet food company, you can contract a laboratory to be able to run, you know, X amount of dogs over X amount of time. Usually it's 7 to 10 days that you want to run that. I'm sure I could, but it's not something I would do on my own.

Yeah, the universal thing that Mrs. Jones would be doing because she just wanted to know the digestibility of the dog food. But actually, you should ring the manufacturer for that, surely. Yeah, she rings the manufacturer, they should have that kind of data. No, they won't.

Yeah, they should, but most of them won't tell you. There are some companies that will. We did a presentation last year. I surveyed— I had to do it under a fake name, but I surveyed the top 10 independent, like, small brands in the US for kibble, for canned, and for raw. And I found that I think like 1 or 2 out of the raw and the kibble did a digestibility. You won't often see it for canned, to be honest, at least in the States, because most canned food does not meet the nutritional caloric requirements. You have to feed so much of it, so that actually you won't often see AAFCO statements on canned food for that reason. But kibble and raw, only a couple companies have done and will give you that information.

That's amazing. Yeah, guys, let's leave this poor woman to her afternoon. Nikki, you have been absolutely fantastic. Yeah, everybody's saying how much— a lot of people saying it's the best they've ever had, which us three are really a little bit sad about. You're amazing. So thank you very, very much.

We can't have you back. We can't have you back. It's making us look bad. So no more Nikki.

I want to drink with Brendan next time. Yeah, there you go. I missed the wine one.

Oh yeah, we'll get you back the next time. Next time we're on the piss, Nikki, we're gonna, uh, invite you in. Definitely. We have to minimize how many times we do because— be afraid, be very afraid. Talking as clearly. Um, yeah, fair play, Nikki. That was so interesting, guys. Um, thanks to everybody over Christmas because our Christmas party one has been watched a lot of times and that really helped with our Patreon. Uh, all over Christmas you could see people were donating to— on Patreon. We really appreciate it. It helps us get superstars in like Nikki. She doesn't come cheap, guys. Uh, and so, uh, you'll find us on Raw Pep Wolvetet Medics, uh, Patreon on, uh, forward slash Wolvetet Medics. And like, the price of a cup of tea, uh, a month is all we ask for. If you can afford it, great. If you can't, no sweat, we're going to be here for free anyway because this stuff is just great. We get to meet legends like Nikki and look what these people are doing. It's just unbelievable. It's so interesting and you don't hear about this stuff enough. And like, this is the good side of science that we need, uh, we need to talk more about, you know.

I gotta say, I want to thank you guys because as Nick said in the beginning, I mean, I came over, I met you guys, what, 5, 6 years ago? Yeah. And, you know, you were like legends in my eyes. And without you guys, I wouldn't be sitting here. So thank you. That's mad.

Thank you very much. That's all. Thanks. Now I'm gonna have to thank Nick because it was the same with me. Like, what, what you just said there was what I thought about Nick because Nick was doing all this talking online and now nobody was listening to him at the time. I felt a bit sorry, but I have to be honest with you. But I just, I just thought, bloody hell, here's like a top vet in the UK and he's talking this stuff. I'm like, as others contacted me, Nick just got back to me straight away and he's just chatting to me. And so few people would do that, but only people that are genuinely interested in the subject. As soon as you sit down and talk to Bren or Nick and Nikki, the same thing, as soon as I met you, it's people that are just bubbling. They just want to talk about this. They want to hear, they, they want to discuss it. True scientists that are just— you don't need to have credentials, you don't need to be in the same field. It just has to be people. All these people in these comment sections are scientists because they thought, do you know what, my dog's itchy, or he's got recurring issues. I'm just going to try this fresh food thing and give it a go and see if it's true. Like, that's a proper scientist. Have a look, make a decision, uh, test it, and have a look at the results. You know, that's just— that's pure science. So I love, uh, this. It's so good. In my— with me, it started with Nick, and Nick was what put me on the road. But I remember meeting you 5 or 6 years ago, Nikki, and I thought straight away, oh my God, you're— you're intimidatingly switched on to raw. And then within 2 or 3 years, you're coming up with the goods, and we're all reading you. You know, it's It's fantastic, it's so good. So good on all of us. Yeah, thanks.

Hats on the back for us all. We're good. It's enthusiasm. It's— and how can you not be enthusiastic about raw food? I mean, it's just healthy dogs. That's the bottom line, isn't it? Yeah, you have healthy dogs, they go out and run and do crazy things and run away and all that stuff, and it's fantastic. Great. Okay, wonderful. Nikki, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you. Absolutely amazing. You've overshadowed us all immensely, for which we're very grateful.

We're not sure what we're going to do next week. We still— yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's the correct place. Uh, we have to meet up, guys, and yeah, they're underneath, so to speak. Um, so, um, we have to have a chat, uh, lads, and plan out our next 8 weeks. So, uh, we don't know what we're doing next week, but we will decide in due course, maybe We will pop up, guys.

We don't know what we're doing in, in, in one week, but in two weeks we've got the amazing Patrick Halford from the Sustainability Food Trust who's going to be talking about, uh, um, uh, sustainable and regenerative agriculture in the UK and around the world so that we can create soil so that our future generations can have actually something to work with so that we can create great food for the world. Yeah. For generations ahead. So little do people—

I think raw feeders are only now starting to cotton on. It's how I wrapped up my book. It was like, I'm worried that, you know, meat is produced so unsustainably, the carbon impact of it is so bad. It was one of the main things keeping me vegetarian. I was looking at my cocker spaniel eating 400 grams of raw and the effect that was having on the planet. So raw feeders at the moment, the fear is microbiology because it's so terrifying, because they can't talk about nutrition of products in comparison. So it's fear to keep you on dry food. So the fear at the moment is hazardous microbiology. But very soon, as the climate kind of change conversation starts to ramp up, once we get rid of this COVID nonsense, it's going to be a carbon thing and raw dog food is going to come in for a right good smack on the bum because it's all about carbon. And suddenly raw feeding becomes a high carbon thing And Patrick Halford is the type of person we need to get on side and start giving some airtime to, because it turns out that it's the unsustainable way we're producing meat which is the problem. We've already done a show on it, but Patrick Halford is the man in this field, so I'm so excited about that. That's gonna be so cool. That's in 2 weeks. Yeah, yeah, cool.

2 weeks, Patrick Halford, sustainability. Wonderful.

So, uh, cool. That was such a good show. Thanks so much again, Nikki. And, uh, guys, thanks everyone for being here, and we will we'll talk to you all very, very soon.

Thanks, guys. Bye-bye. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Oh, we're still live. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to talk about the fact I had to drink a gluten-free beer just before I look at that. So knock us off whenever you want. I'm just kidding. I had to drink gluten-free beer. That's how much Christmas has done damage to me. It's like, oh, it's 4 or 5 days clean I am now, and I'm still feeling the effects of a very, very brutal Christmas on my old body. I don't know if everybody else is thinking the same thing. This is a very anti-nutrition— Are we still live?

Yeah, we are. Yeah, we are.

Yeah, can I just— Yeah, there, Ben just left.