RPM TUESDAY NIGHT LIVE: Pregnancy and Lactation

Pet Medics. Nick's in flight at the moment to somewhere sunny, so he's hopefully going to join us next week and just tell us how glorious it was. Hi, Rachel Mack. I see, I see she's always there.

She's always watching. Yeah, a cup of soup on a cold night.

Oh, and they're all on now. We can see them coming. That's brilliant. So we What's been happening with you this week?

Oh, it's grand. What's been happening? Just feel mad busy at the moment. I just have an awful lot on. Anything in particular? No. If I was to look back over the last 2 days, is anything special happened? No. Couple little interesting bits happening. There's a— I was talking to a lady who knows more about probiotics than anybody I've ever met. She's a skin probiotics expert of the highest order, a professor in it, and I'm trying to help her with her dog. And she goes, yeah, no, listen, I actually know a bit about probiotics. Probiotics, as I'm trying to do a little bit of probiotic bit. And I said, all right, good. Okay, so you did a bit of reading? She goes, oh, I'm actually a lecturer and I'm a professor. And I'm like, oh no, the pressure of what somebody says that to you. But I spent about 2 and a half hours talking to her. It was just so interesting. And she has so much to teach us. But like, you talk to someone, you know, when somebody knows so much about a subject, they're just so humble with it that they just say, oh, I know nothing. You really just know nothing. And it's like, isn't it mad? Like, when you talk to somebody that knows nothing about a subject, they're just adamant that if you take this, this will happen and everything will be great. And she's like, I just don't know, you know, but she was, she was very interested about probiotics. We're using broad spectrum probiotics all the time, so we buy a pack of probiotics and we hope it works for our dog. And she goes like, it's just really moving on very quickly now where each individual subspecies of Lactobacillus does a different thing. One might upregulate something, but another might downregulate it. Which species of Lactobacillus have you got? I'm like, I don't know. And so she goes, it's just like we're down at the level of doing picking off bits of the subspecies of bacteria and doing things with them and live bits of them, dead bits of them phenomenally interesting, switching on and off genes with them. And it's like, oh my God, this is just way beyond where I was even comfortable. I was just nodding politely for an hour and a half. It was so interesting. If she's listening, Cath, that was phenomenally appreciated. What about you, Brent? Anything interesting happen last few days for you?

No, it's been howling a hooly over gale for the last couple of days. I've just been getting stuck into this subject that we've been wanting to do for so long. We get so many questions on this, so it's a bit of a breeder special tonight. But, you know, so many people want to know what's so special that we have to change the diet just before they give birth, and hopefully we're going to address that tonight. We want to say a special thank you to Kelly for an enormous amount of hard work, none of which we're— well, No, some of which we're going to be able to include. So much that was produced that we're going to write up for all of you guys on Patreon. So if you want to, you know, see all of that material, please, you know, do follow Patreon down below. Um, that's patreon.com/rawpetmedics.

Kelly is helping us out behind the scenes, a researcher. And so she had given us a ferocious amount of information this morning, kind of like the way I give my information, which is like, there's loads of stuff. And so, um, it needs to be teased apart, what she found. And actually, what Brian has been talking about, what he's going to be talking about tonight, and the few bits I found need to be collated into a, into a piece. So we will put that together and we'll put it up on, on Patreon. I didn't actually realize there was going to be so much to this. I remember looking at the subject of, uh, pregnant bitches and pups for the book, you know, and, and I'm kind of saying there's so little out there but actually I was looking in the wrong places, as we're going to get to tonight. There is a phenomenal amount of information out there, so get the pens out, breeders, absolutely. Brendon, do you want to start us off with a few thoughts? Where are we on pregnant bitches feeding pregnant bitches?

Yeah, so look, we generally split pregnancy into what we call trimesters. So, you know, just as they do with humans, split the pregnancy into 3 and then consider the various stages at which the pups are going to grow. The middle trimester is actually where you seem to have the most rapid growth and development. So they talk about definitely increasing the amount of calories that you take in on that and the nutrients in that sort of space, if possible. And it sort of helps for those people that have morning sickness and can't really, you know, really struggle through the first trimester, but really getting into that middle trimester and then saying that, yeah, there's still a raised amount now. Get this. So if you look at the average human and their basal metabolic rate, you know, you're going to be looking at, you know, a 50-kilo lady taking on what, nearly 1,300 calories a day for sort of just a standard, you know, amount of exercise. You're adding in around 400 calories, okay, if they're pregnant, okay, in that middle trimester. So not massive. You're not doubling the amount they need, okay, or anything like that. You know, it's not like, you know, suddenly they need 5 times more food or anything like that. You know, it is a reasonable amount, but it's, you know, an amount that we just got to be aware of, bearing in mind the difference between highly active, okay, and barely active can actually be as low as that 400 calories anyway. So people have to realize that, you know, if you're sedentary, you still use quite a number of calories for your normal brain activity and your normal turnover of cells and everything else. We've got to bear that in mind. But certainly there is an increase in energy requirement, and that's carried through with FEDIAF and AFCO and the NRC guidance that was given for these. For those guidances for pets, they tend to have simplified it into the first half of pregnancy and the second half of pregnancy. And for all of you cat lovers out there, cat breeders, you know, this is pretty much the same for cats and dogs. Okay, so we're not going to go into being very specific, although we love to talk about puppies, we love to talk about kittens. You know, I think if we got too specific, it would probably detract from tonight. So you can pretty much read for both species, what we're going to talk about with that. So we look at increasing energy requirement as they go through pregnancy. People ask me all the time, we're going to talk a little bit about mineral requirements, you know, what do we need to do as far as their calcium, you know, do we need to start supplementing them, etc. We're going to touch a little bit on why that shouldn't be necessary if the diet is right. Okay. And so we're going to go through that journey and then we're going to talk a little bit about why, you know, raw is and low levels of carbs and things like that can be much better for your puppy's development and why we need to think about, you know, good fats that are going in and also thinking about contaminants. And you've got some really great research on that as well, haven't you?

Yeah, I found a gem.

And what that can do.

Yeah, that was actually led by Kelly's research. And there was, you know, you have to get a few ideas from when you look at how, what advice mothers, human mothers are given during pregnancy. And the advice isn't to, you know, eat lots of ultra-processed food and crazy, crazy chemically preserved fats and, you know, and chemical napalm to kill your gut flora. That's not the advice. Fresh food, good quality food, good quality fats. Stay away from the crap is the advice. It's quite simple, really. And then you have to pay attention to a couple of little bits and pieces and folding stuff. Okay, those sort of things. That's about the basic advice you're given. And you're given nothing for a baby when you think about it. You come home with a baby and it's like, hopefully on the boob, and that takes care of a lot of it. And then when she comes off, you have no idea. You're just trying to put things into her. And as I keep saying to everybody, Holly's like, whatever. Now I have no idea. She's 4, say. Like when we look back at the end of a week and we go, has she eaten anything green this week? Because she's going through this furious stage of not eating green things. I'm like, eat the green thing. I don't know any of the tricks. So, you know, that's the way we muddle through with our pups. And yet there's some really complicated complications apparently when it comes to feeding actual pups, and I don't really believe they're there. I seem to be getting more laxadaisy as time goes on. The more I look behind the scenes at what is behind the puppy food what are the studies behind a puppy food. To touch upon FEDIAF and AFCO that you mentioned, there is so little knowledge behind those criteria. First of all, a couple of them are based on pigs, iron and another one, so their assumptions based on pigs. Then all the vitamin levels are the same for pups and adults because of course we have the same vitamin requirements, as if. So the knowledge behind these studies and then all the pet foods that are produced on the basis of these ridiculous criteria that they've come with, although they are a guide, they're better than nothing, but the pet food are like like has been studied in 6 or 8 pups for about— what is it? Not even 6 months in adults, it's less than that in pups. I think it's 12 weeks in pups or possibly 16 weeks in pups, and then off you go. That's the first year of his life is sorted. So these pet foods have been trialed. Only some of them were trialed back in the day. They don't do these food trials anymore because their products look similar to the products that were trialed, so they say it's puppy food. So the actual science and evidence behind puppy food today, and I'm talking about ultra-processed, you know, magic complete pet food, is woeful, you know. And to be fair, it's not like, well, dog food companies are testing their puppy formulas that are starting to come out now as well. They're just not tested on dogs. It is a, it's a few tweaks are made where we up the fat count maybe, or you might mulch it a bit more because you think the pups can't handle it at 8 weeks, which most dogs can. A couple of little tweaks like that to make the person think that you've put a huge amount of thought into it. But there isn't a ginormous difference between puppy food and adult food because we don't have the evidence. So that's where we are on the kind of the puppy end of things. Coming back to the mother stuff, Bren, do you have to change anything in the diet for a pregnant bitch? Like, what, where are you on all that side of things? Somebody comes in and they're a breeder and they want to feed raw. Like, are there any kind of, when it comes to groups of foods or anything, do you have to change anything massively? Are you worried about anything there? No.

Well, the thing that I want to establish is have we got a good healthy gut flora? You know me and gut flora, you know, I love microbiome. That's going to be great for the immune system and great for transition. Looking for those pups, our kittens as they come out, because that's what they need to get hold of. And we're going to talk a little bit about caesareans and some things that might need to happen if that goes ahead. And then really just about the food, you know, what is the quality of the food? You know, have they sort of checked that there are certain things in there? So we know that, for instance, folate is great for the neural tube formation and, you know, the multiplication of cells in those growing fetuses. So we want to make sure that they're getting enough of those various organ mixes within their meat and they're not just getting chicken, okay, let alone chicken and bone. You know, if they're just getting those, that is not a sufficient diet for these pregnant bitches. So we want to make sure that they're getting a good, you know, sturdy mix of organs, meats, fats, okay, within that diet to establish that really good flora. We want to make sure that we don't oversupplement in some elements, and we're going to talk about that as well. But I think generally I'm looking for a good, sturdy, rounded meal where they're at, monitoring your pets, your dogs or cats' body condition score coming into that pregnancy, just making sure that they're sustaining a really good body condition score. They don't want to be overly fat. You know, this is really important here. We don't want things that are going to drive obesity. Don't try force feed them so that they become fatter, thinking you're doing them a favor. Because when it comes to actually giving birth, having an overweight, obese animal is just a problem waiting to happen to get those puppies and kittens out of the birth canal. So let's not make them obese, please. Okay, let's keep them to that really good middle of the range body condition score. You know, don't worry about the amount of nutrients that get through to the pups. Nature takes care of that. Okay, they really will, you know, strip out as long as you haven't left the female deficient, then they really will strip out what they need.

Yeah, I like the variation tip. I love saying this bit, and there's lots of studies in rats and what was the other animal, I can't remember, where when you vary the diet in the in the bitch, the pups come out and will eat a more varied diet. You can actually spray apple in the air of a pregnant rat and the pups will come out fighting over the apple-tainted nipples. So when you want a dog to eat whatever you want later in life, it actually begins with mother. So variation not only helps you balance the vitamin and minerals that come up and down in nature, nothing comes evenly like dry food pretends, you know. So you vary things up to make sure you hit all these and you pick your best quality meats. Now is the best time to put in your organic meats, higher in omega-3, game meats, meats if you can, if she likes it. Now is a good time to separate out your meats a little bit and say, what do you like, buddy? Perhaps you don't want to eat chicken on the bone. My intensively rare chicken on the bone isn't going down too well, perhaps. So isn't that a good time to offer the dog and give a little bit of variation? But I do like the variation idea. I like the pups coming out having been given this varied diet, and then crucially, in the first 8 weeks of life, probably the first 12 weeks of life, you've got to vary the diet a good bit in the pup, and then they they're wired onto that for the rest of their life. They knew this since 1967. Somebody had 100 Chow Chow pups, I've said this before, and they reared, you know, 33% of them as vegetarians, 33% of them as meat eaters, and 33% of them on mixed diet essentially. And the vegetarians grew up as vegetarians and wouldn't eat anything else. The meat eaters grew up as meat eaters, wouldn't eat anything else, and the mixed guys would eat bloody anything. And so this is the problem vegetarians and vegans have, and the people that make vegan and vegetarian-based dry food not mention any companies in particular that are doing a ferocious amount of advertising and gimmickry at the moment. But they say that their pets love this food, and I'd say, well, you know, if you're reared on vegetable matter, you will eat that later in life. There's videos of cats eating broccoli, but that's not normal. Domestic cats do not eat broccoli, but if you give it to them as a kitten, they will trigger as safe and off they go. So it begins in the womb. So varying up the diet, Bren. What about— you mentioned a little bit about supplementation. Back in the day, like, you definitely hear this all the time of, um, of calcium coming up and, and people recommending to be careful of the calcium and this kind of thing. Where are we with bones and calcium, pregnant bitch, watching all those levels? Where are we?

So the, the key thing is knowing that, um, the supplementation with effectively ionic calcium— so these are inorganic sources, uh, maybe calcium carbonate ground up into powders and actually delivered into the can make massive differences. And if you think you're doing them any favors by sprinkling an extra spoonful on their diet as they're coming into the end of their gestational period, you probably are just causing some other issues. And actually, if you then do that and carry that forward into the puppy's food when they wean, again, if you're oversupplementing, that can cause deformities. And it was a massive issue when people changed to this complete ideal in the early '90s, and people continued to supplement in at that point. And I think what we need to understand is actually the body's hormones and how it digests the protein matrix around the calcium and phosphorus salts within bones that are taken in and ingested is such that actually the relative stability of their calcium levels can be maintained beautifully just by making sure they've got ground bone in their food and actually digesting that matrix and actually absorbing the calcium as they need it so that they're keeping their bone reservoirs topped up is more than sufficient for the bitches. The issues that come about is if we start to have other diseases going on and actually things that will almost be deficient in calcium and they've actually leached their bones of adequate levels of calcium, or they have diseases which are affecting, affecting the amounts of vitamin D that are in the system that are balancing those calcium levels out. So actually things like eclampsia that you mentioned earlier, you can, can really be a consequence of other diseases rather than necessarily purely calcium. Calcium. And so yes, of course, have adequate amounts of ground bone into the food. Okay, don't need to go to excess, certainly shouldn't need to be supplementing. If you're really worried because your, um, the bitch or the queen that you're breeding with has had history of issues with other diseases, then absolutely you should be monitoring their calcium levels, you know, and certainly obesity can come into that as well. But as I've said earlier, you don't really want to be breeding with obese animals. It can cause its own problems alongside diabetes, alongside these other vitamin excesses or deficiencies.

The stuff on calcium supplementation in humans is shockingly bad in pregnant women. Wait till you hear this. In pups, in dogs, we're talking first of all dry food, just to have a quick little jab. I'm going to do this a couple of times. This is the calcium bit on dry food. We're saying at the moment, you'll see a written on the side of a packet, you know, contains no less than 1% calcium. So it doesn't say specifically it contains a certain amount of calcium. Usually it says no less than, and that's because dry food is notoriously high in calcium. When it's tested, it fails miserably for calcium levels. So check this out, Tiksten in 2015, she tested 12 different foods, okay, 12 different samples, and 3 of them were insanely high for calcium. One of them, Nestlé Purina cat food, because I can say because Tiksten did, contained 3.14% crude calcium. That's 3 times their RDA of fake calcium carbonate every day, which is not handled by the body the same way as I'm about to show you. Then 3.17% of Mars dog food, and 7.7% crude calcium in Hill's Prescription Diet for Urinary Tract Health in Dogs. 7 times the RDA of calcium carbonate, which is handled very poorly by kidneys. Mega pressure on the kidneys for a kidney product. So why is that? That's because these products are using bone meal. They call it meat meal. Now they can call it dehydrated meat or dried meat. Actually, it's meat and bone meal, which is actually bone meal because renderers render bone. And so it's quite high in calcium. So they add that in because it's, you know, it's cheaper than adding in actual meat. And so the bone content of these products can be really high, really erratic in dry food. And we know studies show that they are not meeting their minimum requirements. 62% or 64% of UK dry complete pet foods aren't doing it, so you cannot be guaranteed the calcium is right. But the calcium they're using is wrong. The thing is, they're using this calcium carbonate supplement, which is not— I mean, minerals aren't liked at the best of times by the gut membrane. They're not from the land of the living, they're inorganic. and so the body wants them chelated to a carbon, holding the hand of this carbon molecule. And when you start producing a mass, mass-producing it in a conical flask, the likes of calcium carbonate and a few others, it's just not handled the same way. For example, we have here studies in humans, okay? Napoli divided 1,000 women into, 183 women into 3 groups, and what they found was that the diet group which is the food— the group that took in calcium from their diet— ate less calcium per day, yet this group had higher bone density in their spines and hip joints than women in the supplement group. So what they found— and this is repeated many times, I'm about to get to the pregnant people bit now— a meta-analysis by Burszaw and Ferrari— what a name— found an increased hip fracture risk with women that were taking calcium supplements, full stop. So if you're taking calcium supplements, it works out badly for your hip scores. They, a second meta-analysis followed this with 7 cohorts totaling 170,000 women reported that calcium supplementation does not reduce the risk of hip fractures. On the contrary, an increase in risk is possible. And finally, there's an increased concern for cardiovascular disease with using calcium carbonate supplements. So these are huge studies in the last 4 or 5 years, but it gets much worse than this. In pregnant females, a study of pregnancy in women in West Africa. They were on low calcium intakes, notoriously low calcium intakes in these, uh, this population. They started supplementing with calcium and resulted in significantly lower bone mineral content, bone area, and BMD at the hip throughout 12 months of lactation. They also had greater decreases in bone mineral during lactation at the lumbar spine and distal radius. So it's just showing that the supplementation of calcium had the opposite effect on these people.

Yeah, and that's because you skew the body into saying, oh, there's an excess. So you shut all the systems down that allow mobilization, and that's what's wrong.

That's what we're getting to. So here we go. So what happens is when you supplement with calcium carbonate, your body takes it in, but it handles it very, very poorly. So you can spike the blood concentrations of calcium with crappy calcium, but it's just not utilized the same way. So get into the pre-ecantia bit and sewing up just what you said there, Bren, Here's the, here's the rub, okay? So, so we know it's where your body doesn't handle the same way. So what else does excess calcium in the blood do? Well, it tells the parathyroid gland to produce less parathyroid hormone. Less calcium gets absorbed by the bitch. Is this a possible link to eclampsia? So if you've got this excess crappy calcium in the blood that's not doing anything, is this the bit where a bit of Billingshurst mentioned in Give a Dog a Bone in 1993, he said excess calcium, calcium supplementation can turn the parathyroid hormone to sleep, can send it to sleep. I hope I'm totally butchering what Ian Billingshurst said there, so I'm so sorry, I'm probably doing a great disservice. But I remember we all questioned that and said, why does it turn to sleep? Is it because there's excess calcium in the blood, which we know these diets are doing, and the parathyroid sees that and it says, right, I don't need to to release any more PTH and suddenly there's no more calcium being released from— is that a possible link to eclampsia? Have I just hit upon something?

Yeah, so this is all the vitamin D pathway for mobilization and, you know, somebody's put up on the questions and I froze it just there to say, you know, nutritional management says that the mum's body is not metabolically primed to mobilize calcium from her bones Therefore, when the demands for calcium are suddenly and dramatically elevated in the initiation of lactation, she is unable to keep up with the metabolic demands. Do you know what? That's a sick dog because pregnancy is not an illness. Pregnancy is, you know, one of the primary things that we do through life, okay, is to replicate. And can you imagine the evolutionary nightmare if you've created a being that cannot cope with feeding its offspring.

Yeah.

You know, you've just created a species that's going to descend into the depths of not reproducing and becoming extinct. So somebody has seen, well, yeah, if you feed them the wrong stuff, you will switch off their systems and then they're not metabolically primed to actually produce enough calcium when they're lactating. I think what we've got to do here is actually, no, you want the body in balance. You want them to have good working hormonal levels, which are then able to cope with the fact that they're then going to start lactating.

Okay.

So I think they've unfortunately, yeah, you will sell supplements this way, you will sell sickness this way, but let's face it, really, we should be looking at Pregnancy is being within the peak of health, you know, this is one of those prime directives, if you like, of being alive.

Yeah, Fiona Moore has an interesting question and it's stumping me, Fiona, and I will come back to it. The calcium supplementation study showing that does not prove causation, fair enough, I'm going to come back to that, Fiona. For example, women taking calcium supplements may be doing so as they have particular issues. Yeah, these could be studies of women with particular issues, I'll come back to that because I'll I'm totally summarizing huge meta-analysis there. It would take me a lot longer than I spent on that one particular subject today, so I'll bear that in mind, Fiona. And any other interesting points that come up, like the question Bren just dealt with, yeah, put them in the side there, guys, and we will deal with it as time goes on. And so, like, natural calcium, this is like to prove how well— like, if you have, if you have a, a pregnant bitch and she has eaten a meaty bone, do you concern yourself No, she's eating a meaty bone and all is well. Do what you like. They invariably know what they're doing. If you see a pregnant bitch and she's chowing down on a whole heap of calcium supplements, should you be concerned? Yes, you wouldn't. You wouldn't handle that the same way at all. You would be genuinely concerned because those two are not handled the same way by the body. It's the same with all minerals. It's the same with zinc oxide, iron oxide, iodide, because, you know, I put up a post about a product that we have, okay? And it's seaweed-based and you always get the same thing. Is this safe to use this seaweed in pups? You know, and I'd say, isn't it funny that people will question this 1 gram of seaweed? There's a little bit of iodine in there. The confusion comes from the studies of iodide, which absolutely can play havoc with the body. But that is a conical flask, crappy supplement. And studies show the supplement industry suffers woefully from this, particularly minerals. Vitamins, they're much better absorbed. They can mass produce them better. Minerals are crap unless they're chelated or other versions of them. So it's interesting that we kind of know this. Yeah, we know that the natural forms of these minerals, but our information has now been contaminated to the point that we think a little gram of seaweed for the nutritional value that would offer that pup, we question that and go, is that safe? And you go, I'll tell you one thing, the dry pet food he's eating is not safe because we've got studies showing that there's issues with it. We don't have any evidence showing that 1 gram of seaweed ever than a dog. I'm not anything close to it. Iodide, perhaps. But there's Japanese people eating many times their RDA of iodine every day, and they're nothing but healthy islanders living longer.

I always love that, that comment about iron sulfate as well. You know, they're worried about women with anemia, pregnancy anemias, and the need to increase their iron intake. And they used to effectively dispense out out iron sulfate tablets as if they were going to suddenly have this miraculous uptake of iron from those. And all they did was turn the feces black and they had no change in their iron levels to any significant degree. And actually, yeah, absolutely. So they then suddenly realized that you needed some organic levels of iron. And what I say to people that say, well, do I need to supplement my dog with iron? Is, you know, and get these weird and wonderful vegetables and stuff. There is nothing richer in iron than the myoglobin in the meat muscle, you know. Yeah, why wouldn't you just think that that's where you're going to get your iron from? Okay, yeah, those— for those pregnant animals. So I think, you know, there's lots of ways that they are going to fulfill these, these natural things. You know, the only things that say if my arty was pregnant, I would say to her, you know, yeah, I might give her extra supplements of omega-3s just into her diet. She gets such a great diet anyway of other fats and other nutrients in that, you know, that's possibly the only thing that I might change.

I have a bit on that, Bren, on omega-3s. So Okay. And the two omega-3s that the dog needs are EPA and DHA. Okay, so they can do a little conversion to get them, get some, a little bit of EPA, but from plant, was it ALA, I think. But anyway, they're extremely poor at it, and cats can't do it at all. But EPA and DHA, they're the real fancy ones, and we call them essential fatty acids in dogs, certainly in cats, essential. They must get them. And where do they come from? Animal fat. Go figure. So these absolutely, I mean, if they weren't bloody immediate, they wouldn't be essential, the omega-3s from animal fat. But listen to this, your brain is about whatever, 17, 20% DHA. Nick loves this bit. Nick was very sorry he wasn't on tonight actually, 'cause he loves talking about DHA. So your brain is a huge amount of this omega-3, 17, 20%, very nutritious thing to feed. Up to 1-year-old lamb brains you can feed. Sardines are a good source of brain, hard enough to get anywhere else. Very good. So brain for brain, you can only imagine. But listen to this, just a quick slagging off dry food. I'm not known to do it. DHA is an essential fatty acid for dogs, meaning it must be consumed. Surprisingly, it comes from meat. As dry food contains so little meat, it needs to be supplemented with DHA for the dog to thrive. Despite this, authors note that 25% of the best-selling complete dry foods in the UK contain zero or practically zero EPA and DHA. A quarter of them. Further, studies show that after just 3 months storage of dry food at ambient conditions, normal, normal temps, you can expect a total loss of EPA, DHA, and total fatty acids of 17, 9, and 11%. So not looking good for dry food so far. But here's the thing, when you listen to dry food, dry pet food manufacturers talking to the BSABA last weekend, you know, they had a slot to talk about the benefits and cons of raw dog food. Who better to ask than somebody that owns a rice-based, cereal-based pet food company. And Arnie comes and there's no evidence at all that there's anything wrong with dry food. The fact is, every time you supplement dry food with any omega-3s, fish oil tablets, my God, there's so many studies. But let's focus on the DHA and the pregnant females. A DHA deficiency in pregnant and lactating bitches affects the brain development of puppies. DHA supplementation of dry-fed dogs support healthy brain function in dogs by improving shape discrimination. Studies show supplementing pups with fish oils rich in DHA following weaning improves their cognitive, memory, psychomotor, immunological, and retinal functions in growing dogs. And there's one on pregnant bitches as there affects the brain, benefits the brain development of puppies as well when you feed it to pregnant bitches. If you are dry feeding your dogs, guys, take Bren's advice and get good quality omega-3s into your dog. And good quality omega-3s will be good quality fish oil at a minimum. And I like the little fish oils like sardine oil, anchovy oil, and Tobias has this cool one, squid oil, because there's loads of squid in the sea and the oil looks very fantastic and it's not very contaminated. So omega-3, EPA, DHA, dry-fed dogs absolutely need if they are bearing pups. I would say that would be a really big thing. So I'm big on the omega-3, but also raw-fed dogs, factory farm meat isn't exactly gloriously stuffed with omega-3. In fact, we have a swing towards omega-6 because they're wheat and corn made, and that is not great. And so while dry foods have a massive problem with their omega-3 to omega-6 ratio because it's virtually plant food and that's where all your omega-6 come from, but raw dog food also is not ideal. You would like to be dosing it with a little bit of omega-3 to reduce that and get that ratio a little bit better, particularly if you're feeding intensively reared meat, which most of us are, let's face it. Now's the time to ramp up to organic and wild and that kind of stuff if you can. If you're not, the omega-3 tip from from brain there is very important, studies are showing.

Yeah, great. There's a few comments out there. Why up to 1-year-old lamb brain? The spongiform encephalopathies are one of the reasons they don't— they shouldn't be producing, certainly within the UK and Europe, brain material that's older than that. And I think that's where they're sort of trying to limit passage of disease onwards. There is a question from Jane with regards to why not real fish?

Yeah, why not? That was— I wish I said real fish. I wish I said that. I'm actually getting at the moment tiny little— so, you know, sardines are the bigger fellas. We are— so for islanders, virtual islanders, like, we, uh, we certainly, like, we know so little about fish. So sardines can be baby herring, all sorts of things apparently, but I just call them all sardines. Little oily fish, fantastic food. Talk about complete nutrition. That is a beast. I wish I said that, Jane. So Jane said that's the best form of omega-3. Studies are showing actually that The omega-3 industry is suffering badly because in the last few years we know that they oxidize very, very quickly. Omega-3s hate being outside the animal fat, and we try to isolate them and do various things. They just hate it. Brown jar in the fridge, all that doesn't seem to be working. You open that cap and then air gets out of— boom. They— the fats hate air, heat, light, but just a little bit gets them going and they don't seem to stop. So yeah, the whole beast would be better. The whole sardine, whole baby sprat. The smaller the fish, the less, uh, the less junk he's gonna have. But sardines will be very clean fish. So yeah, I love a few sardines.

Whitebait even, you know, all of those. Yeah, you know, so yeah, go for that.

Um, so what else have you got, Bren? I have, I have one more thing here, Bren. Could I, could I just talk with this about this, uh, this heavy metal thing that popped up?

Um, yeah, that's really interesting.

Yeah, I didn't, I didn't get to do as much as I wanted on it because I just got to, uh, I just got started like a puppy chasing the crisp packet and after about 3 hours, I was like, have I written anything? I've just been running around chasing pigeons. So there's too much on it, but wait till you hear, there's a good bit of dirt in this. But this atopic dermatitis study, you know, when this unfortunate vet was talking about raw feeding to the BSAVA conference there 10 days ago, and you know, there's no studies for raw dog food. Well, that's just not true. There is absolutely published studies. Take for example this fantastic one in the Frontiers of Science, which doesn't that somehow missed 4 years ago. And actually initially what they found, dog risk, this is Anaheim-Borgman up in Helsinki, they found that at rest dry-fed dogs are 10 times, contain 10 times more of this inflammatory marker homocysteine than raw-fed dogs. And when you raw-fed the dry-fed dogs, the level dropped from 10 times to 2, so it dropped by a level of 5 I think. So they became significantly less inflamed for want of a better word, and when you change raw-fed dogs to dry-fed dogs, they became more inflamed. They didn't know what this was, okay? So the homocysteine thing was what sparked it off. But these guys in 2017 at the 42nd WSAVA Congress, which is the World Small Animal Veterinary Association, top congress in the world, they did, presented a paper, and what they found was that raw-fed dogs had less gene expression cytokine gene expression and receptor expression at the skin level compared to kibble diet. So kibble-fed dogs seem to have more expression of this elevated plasma IgA concentration. So it wasn't— this is another issue. So then we have the Frontiers in Science piece and where the— I think they surveyed— let me just read it out because it'll be easier. This survey, 8,000 dogs, and they found that feeding ultra-processed pet food resulted in significantly higher risk of canine atopic dermatitis, which is where we're going with this. Feeding raw dog food, essentially non-processed raw dog food, essentially during the prenatal and early postnatal periods had a significant negative association with the incidence of canine atopic dermatitis in adult dogs. So the pups born of mothers that were dry-fed were significantly more likely to have canine atopic dermatitis later on. So So those 3, 2 of them, one of them was published in Frontiers of Science and there was a PhD, was the third one, really serious, heavy. The other one was a paper in the OSABACON, was really serious evidence that dermatitis is coming. Okay, what they can't tell you is why. So what is it that makes dry food so inflammatory? Is it that it contains pre-gluten or ultra-processed protein? Ultra-processed protein is like up 5 to 7 times more antigenic than fresh protein. All these terrible fats, chemical preservatives, aflatoxin, which I think is a huge— and mycotoxin, everyone agrees that's a big problem at the moment. On and on and on. We could slag dry food off for ages, and I do enjoy it. But a huge one that came out was thanks to Kelly, who directed me towards this baby milk issue that they found that heavy metals in our food chains are a huge issue. And I was thinking, okay, it can't be that big. And I went down that little rabbit hole and found that there was a big study of baby, baby formula where cadmium— hard to say— cadmium is one of the really heavy metals that you don't want, and it doesn't go away. Typical heavy metals, they don't disappear. So cadmium has a 15-year half-life in your body. So when you start feeding it to a baby, yes, there might be very small tolerable doses, is what they call it. The problem is they bioaccumulate in you and they have a disastrous effect on you. So now this study just very recently has linked increases in asthma and gut issues from— with cadmium. And they're pretty sure— the study's immense. So they said, we've got a big problem. So where does cadmium come from? It's a heavy metal, comes from all sorts of iron processing. It's in your batteries, it's in everything. It's in weird chemicals that we're using in the soil and mines and how we produce a lot of metals, produce cadmium and a whole heap of other things that I'm not— that I'm not I'm not remembering, and it all flows into the sea. So fish is a huge one. Okay, so I start thinking, wow, you know, what are the top sources of cadmium? So when I went to the European, the EU kind of source for this, they said the top sources of cadmium are grain and fish at the moment. And I thought, grain and fish, wow. So how's fish-based dry food doing? And it turns out absolutely terrible. Listen to the stats. This is the very first study that came up. Toxic metal concentrations were analyzed in 100 commercial pet foods. Concentrations above the MTL, maximum tolerable limit, were as follows. For aluminium, 32% of the dog food samples were above the maximum tolerable limit for aluminium, 11% of the cat foods. For mercury, 100% of the dog foods, and for cats, 100% of the cat foods. Can't wait to share the study on Facebook later. For lead, 81% of dog foods were above the maximum tolerable limit for lead, 32% of the cats. For uranium, 96%. So you're starting to get the message, 86% of cat food. And for amnadium, never heard of it, 75%, 29%. So these are the worst of the heavy metals, and dry pet foods are failing absolutely dismally for this. When you look at the different types of pet food, they found that fish meal was the absolute worst. So fish-based dry foods were very significant, had significantly higher arsenic cadmium, and mercury content than poultry or red meat-based pet foods, dry pet foods. Red meat-based dry pet foods such as beef, venison, and bison have higher lead concentrations than poultry and fish-based diets. So you kind of have to pick which heavy metal do I want when you're feeding dry food. It's not like raw food is going to dodge that. If you're using giant fish in raw dog food and we're using heads and we're using farm salmon, you know, you're going to have issues as well. It's not like, in fairness, they're not looking we're looking at raw dog, we're looking at dry, but just while we're pointing fingers about like, why didn't they pick this up when they're making the food? And there's many, many studies, like there was— here's one on nitrates, isn't it? This— a total of 20 local and imported pet food products were screened for heavy metals according to the guidelines of the Association of American Feed Control Officials, the dry food manufacturers that make the rules for the dry food manufacturers. The nitrate and nitrite contents of examined foods— this is 20 foods greatly exceeded the recommended level. So there was just too much nitrate and nitrites in all their imported foods that they happened to test. It's not like they tested every single food on the shelf, thousands of them. They just— like when Tikston randomly samples 12 foods and 3 of them are grossly excessive in calcium, can you imagine what the implications are for the world's pets? Because there's thousands and thousands of products, you know, these are churned out by these companies. Don't forget, when you're talking about vitamin D there, We had in 2010 Buffalo, a massive dry food company, was found to have too much vitamin D, and it was only found because the university went after this tireless campaign to prove dogs were having hypercalcemia or something from it. And so they got onto the FDA and they said, you know, wake up, do something. And then Hill's came along and they put out 22 million cans of dog food excess in vitamin D, caused sepharol, however you pronounce it, and that is going to play havoc with your calcium, you know. So these are mega, mega issues we're having with dry food. I don't need to be talking about dry food, we're all raw feeders here, but you know, these issues we don't have with raw dog food because your supplements, your food is not in supplement form. You're not getting these heavy metals. I can't promise anything about that, but with the likes, worrying about the likes of vitamin levels and minerals, bar the incidents that pregnant women have access to different things, my wife really needed to eat apples with the last kid. Didn't know why. Nothing else really changed in our diet. You try to feed her as best you can, you know, and then we all have great meals and exercise. But like, you know, she just wanted to eat apples. And I do think, okay, we have dog— bitches don't have any free foraging facility at all. So maybe it is a time to experiment with your tasting plates and see what she wants and that kind of stuff. In your— in our own limited way, we can get nice meats on the plate, nice organ meats, different types of bones. So that's kind of cool thing to do. I think that's really the only little adjustment I make. But after that, I'm hoping I'm putting you guys at ease because the alternative of real food is dry pet food, which has mega, mega issues, you know. So hopefully that's kicked in a little bit, you know.

Yeah. And so I'm going to round up, I think, just, you know, for those that are maybe new to it, those that just want to know a little bit more, I just wanted to sort of again reiterate, reassure that actually the general schema for this is that as you go through the trimesters, by all means split it into the two that Fediaf does. You need to increase probably by up to a third. Okay. And you will not be able to do that in one go. You will need to do that in multiple small meals because as the puppies take space within the abdomen, they're not going to want to tolerate big, huge meals. And you need to think about really just how they're going to take that good wholesome foods on. Okay, give that variety, increase the omegas, make sure there's some organ meat access for the vitamin B folates. Okay. And hopefully then we'll have non-obese bitches that are able to regulate their own calcium levels to the degree of producing milk milk, and then once the puppies are born, continue to feed that. I wanted to mention very briefly the importance about microbiome. Passing on the microbiome to these puppies is so important. Now, normally that will happen if they pass out of the normal birth canal. Okay. They will get some of that fecal contamination that will be passed into them with all of the muck and juices that come out in all of that process. However, and also from mom's teats, and that will be passed on. However, if they're delivered by cesarean and moms are given antibiotics, it can have a massive influence on the level of population of good gut flora within the puppies. So please think about good probiotics. Okay, even using some autogenous probiotic material made from mum and then effectively fed back into the pups. Obviously, that's not good if your mum's suffering from some illness of some description, but it is a way of something that they would naturally be doing. And the antibodies produced in mum's milk will be taking care of any aberrant pathogenics that are detected.

Do you mean mum's poo there, Brendon? Do you mean like a— Yeah. Yeah, mom's poo, kind of like, wow, okay.

So you can mash that up, make it in. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, they can take that at this point. There's not a great deal of stomach acid going into the pups, so they'll, they'll take those probiotics. For those that are particularly squeamish about that, they can, you know, get pre-made probiotics. But yeah, mom knows best, you know. There's, there is this level of, she's, her environment is what she's been brought up in, that's, you know, and developed in, you know, passing that on to her pups is actually part of that genetic material pass-on. Okay, and so that's something to be encouraged in many of those situations.

So cool. Somebody said about worming in pups, Ben, what's the story there? What's going on? Why do pups get born with worms? Does that happen?

So Toxocara, okay, particularly for both cats and dogs, are passed across the placenta and also in the first milk. So those larvae actually pass across at that stage and then sequester into the muscles of the pups. Okay, if they don't get produced directly into the gut, they will sit there hibernating, waiting for the pups' immune systems to get stressed, and then they'll come out and they'll pass through the normal pathways to produce. So that can happen years later. So people ask me all the time, well, my my, you know, why has my puppy got these worms? Where have they come from? Most of the time for Toxocara, it's not from scavenging in the park. This is from mum's milk. Okay, these larvae sit hibernating in the muscles of your puppy, okay, for years and years and years until their immune system dips, some other illness takes effect, and then those larvae migrate back through. They pass up through the lungs and coughed up, swallowed, sit into the intestine and grow into adults producing eggs. So I would say test mum, you know, worm egg count mum. If she's negative, okay, and you're doing really well, she's negative, that's great. There is an element of her sequestered larvae that are hibernating are the ones which are actually migrating into the puppy puppies. Okay, they're shifting because her immune system will be lowered during pregnancy, so they start to mobilize and find their way to other areas. That's how they can pass across. So it's not foolproof. So I definitely would then say be testing the puppies when they come out. Fecal egg counts, there's a few online options. There's some vets that do it. You know, worm egg count is just one of many. And get those tests done. And that way you can look at, you know, is that appropriate worming? Some people will use the various herbal wormers, okay? And that's certainly a choice to make, but still be testing. But certainly if you found that your, the mum has been negative for the majority of pregnancy and before, then there's less likely to be a heavy worm burden when it comes to puppies being born.

So a couple of checks on mum, start and end. Send off a couple of worm counts just to put your mind at ease, and that should get you through the first few weeks of puppyhood. And then you can start your natural wormers, which are usually quite simple, like ground-up pumpkin seeds are just fantastic. You grind organic pumpkin seed into flour, EU-sourced pumpkin seeds, not anywhere further than that, are fantastic. Styrian pumpkin seeds don't have the shell on the outside, they're just the seed, they're tasty, and the shell the dog won't be able to handle. So that's my tips, is stevia and pumpkin seeds, or a tiny little bit of garlic when the pup is a little bit older. So that's the— there was one other question there, Bren, damn, I can't remember what it is. Somebody just made a great point there. I just want to come back to her point there. Shani, who's raised a couple of litters there, and she's found that the young dog does not like vegetables and fruit so much, but during pregnancy and lactation, she really wanted them. So I forgot to mention fruits and veg. Yeah, like, this is definitely something I've overlooked. Like, there's going to be easy energy in a little bit of fruit. There's going to be bioactive compounds, antioxidants, all sorts of stuff. So talk about easy energy. If it's just about increasing calorie content and there's a, and there's something juicy that likes a little bit of banana, try those things if your dog wants to take them. She's no dummy, you know. So, and same with the veg as well, you know, you're now and again, you try a little palette of different types of veg. What sort of veg do you want? You know, nobody likes Brussels sprouts, but you're going to try a little bit of kale. No, I don't want that. I'll have the carrot this time. Okay, have the carrot. So good time to get tasting plates going. Lots of people are into them. You'll see pictures online.

So little herb gardens, you know, little sort of boxes of plants for them to munch on, you know, just getting out there. That's also a good thing. They will self-select some herbs, but, you know, they're not really able to open up that vegetable matter and release all of that herbage. So I would definitely say that your mainstay is going to be good you know, meat-based diets for dogs and cats.

Yeah, okay, yeah, definitely. So I think we got through that, Graham, pretty, pretty good.

Time has shot by. Can you imagine that was 50 minutes? We could do a whole day on breeding and food and stuff.

Yeah, yeah, see, I didn't know there was that much in it actually. And actually, this second bit, as we said, Kelly's research there on the human stuff is interesting because there's just so much— this is where the studies are being done and you can betcha that ultra-processed food is having its finger pointed— the fingers point at ultra-processed food and a lot of things in mums. So I'm gonna do a job on that and write it up and I'll put it up on Patreon. For the moment, a couple of studies that people are asking about, the heavy metals things, I'll put that straight up on Facebook so it gets maximum coverage. Don't you worry about that. And so yeah, so we back to— is Nick back next week or how many?

Well, he's gonna see whether he wants to deem to join us from his sunbathed with, um, a hotel room, I think. So we're gonna see, uh, see what he's up to. So yeah, we didn't have you informed, you— we might have him back with his magic carpet.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, so what a lucky man. I would love it now, a holiday now. Um, okay, so listen, we'll decide on what we're doing the next few days, Brent. We see what comes up when we're chatting.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, brilliant.

Take care, guys.