Leaky Gut in Dogs on the Broken Brain Podcast

So I want to take a little bit of a pause in your story and I want to start off on this topic that you've talked about before, which we've never shared, which is the microbiome of pets. And you've talked about how dogs in specifically can have leaky gut in the same way that human beings can have leaky gut. And it's one of the major drivers of chronic illness. I know there's a lot of people that are listening to this podcast that are pet fans.

Yeah.

So let's start off with what dog lovers can understand and what they need to learn about when it comes to their pet's microbiome and leaky gut.

So that's a really important topic. You know, we have, I think it's. 68% of American households have pets. 85 million families in the US have pets, dogs and cats. Right. So they are an integral part of our society, of the web, of our society, of our family structures. I know before I had kids, our dogs were our fur babies. And there was equally important to us as our kids would be. And we are making them sick. Right. We have created diseases in dogs that would not exist in their canine cousins, in wolves. And, you know, the, the wild versions.

Of dogs, they have the same disease that we have.

They have the same. They have diabetes, they have various cancers, they have heart disease, depression.

I saw an action, you know, does your. Is your dog depressed?

Right. Absolutely. Severe anxiety. You know, our dogs are suffering. The most common one is atopic dermatitis, which is a form of an allergy. Right. And we know that asthma and allergies are pandemic among our own kids and ourselves. So we've created the same thing in our dogs. And the big driver of that is dysbiosis is this word that people use to describe a dysfunction in the, in the population of your bacteria. It's dysbiosis within the dog's microbiome and also on the skin and within the gut microbiome specifically. In part, a lot of that is driven by the fact that these are canines and we're feeding them grain based foods all the time. Right. And it's grain based, dried extruded foods that don't really have any of the nutritional components that they would typically eat. They also have a very different microbiome than we do, different types of microbes, less diversity, higher amounts of clostridia, for example, than we would have, which would essentially make us sick. But it's really important to maintain the dog's health. So it was our hypothesis that we know that this leaky gut in humans is a major driver of what we call low grade chronic inflammation. Right. And low grade chronic inflammation is a soup in which the vast majority of our chronic illnesses breed. And we hypothesize, since the dogs suffer from many of the same types of problems that we do, we're likely causing low grade chronic inflammation in the dogs. And the biggest source of this low grade chronic inflammation comes from in the gut itself. So leaking in of toxins from bacteria that reside in your gut into your.

Circulatory system, because they're tight junctions just like ours are developing little holes inside of them. So things that are supposed to stay on the outside are now making their way on the inside.

Making their way on the inside. Yeah. And it's called. The fancy term for that is metabolic endotoxemia. The word endotoxemia means endo, meaning inside. And toxemia is toxins in the blood. And the endo part of it is toxins that are generated within the system itself, so we can't get away from them. Right. These are microbes that live naturally in the gut that produce a toxin called lps. This lipopolysaccharide toxin is produced and released all the time in the digestive tract, but it's supposed to stay in the digestive tract, and you're supposed to poop it out eight to 10 hours later. But if your intestinal lining is leaky, it will leak through and end up in your bloodstream.

A version of almost poisoning yourself.

Absolutely.

Because the barriers.

The barriers aren't functioning.

Aren't functioning. It's similar to, like, you know, you have a castle, it's being protected by a wall. That wall now has holes in it, and invaders can get inside.

Absolutely. And here's the beauty of all of this system, right? So that really important barrier that functions in a form of protection for us, in fact, arguably the most important form of protection in our body, that really thin tenable barrier is controlled in large part by microbes in our body. Like, we have little that we can do to form that barrier, repair the barrier, strengthen the barrier ourselves. We don't necessarily have genes in our system that we can turn on to repair a damaged part of the barrier. We count on certain microbes in our microbiome to turn on those signals for us. So without the appropriate microbes there, the barrier becomes more and more weak over time. And. And you can have a component of it that's dysfunctional in 6 inches of your intestine but you've got 28ft or so of intestine. So over time, the leakiness can spread throughout the entire structure of the intestinal lining. That's the same thing that's occurring in dogs now. Nobody has done a leaky gut study in dogs, and so we had to prove that this even existed. And so we worked with a major veterinary university with a professor there who was really keen on studying this with us because we presented it at a. At a conference where she was there, and we had to develop a model to study it with dogs. One of the ways that we. We can induce this type of endotoxemia in dogs, if their barrier systems are dysfunctional, is by feeding them meals with high amounts of coconut oil in it. You know, so surprisingly, coconut oil is one of the biggest drivers of this kind of endotoxic response in the body.

Yeah. Accidentally eat coconut oil and then have this severe reaction.

Yeah, absolutely.

It happened to my. My sister has dogs.

Yeah.

And there was at one point in time, they were just feeding him, and I probably was feeding him something too. And he's a small dog, so they are less resilient with some of those foods, human foods. Was eating coconut oil and then started having a little bit of blood in his stool that they took him to the vet, and the vet said, you cannot give them these fats, basically messing them up. So what exactly is going on when. And you also mentioned humans, which I'm very interested in.

Yeah. So we should talk about the coconut oil and humans aspect of it as well. But what's going on in the dogs is that coconut oil has a lot of long chain fatty acids. These long chain fatty acids are strong antimicrobials, so they're killing bacteria in the gut as you're digesting it. When you kill these bacteria that contain this lps, this endotoxin, then you're releasing more endotoxin, so there's more of those toxins to actually get absorbed into the system. The other thing is, coconut oil also induces the production of what we call lipid rafts. These are Shiloh microns is a fancy word for it. But these are little carriers that go into the past, the gut lining and pick up dietary fats and bring it into the system. You know, that's your body's response to, oh, fat's coming in the diet. I gotta bring some fat into the system and use it as a nutrient. So the lipid, sorry, the toxin that is being released by these bacteria are actually fatty acids. So they get inevitably brought in by these lipid rafts itself. So there's two parts to it that's a higher amount of LPS being released and then more of it inadvertently being transported into the system as well by our own fatty acid carrier system. So we are increasing the amount of endotoxins that are appearing in the circulatory system. And after a meal that has a fat like a coconut oil, and it's the same thing in dogs.

So let's look at that for, let's jump to humans for a second before we come back to dogs. So is coconut oil bad for us?

Yeah, and that's a really important question because it's a darling of the health food industry. Right. It's in everything. We've now finally come away from this idea that fats are bad, which is a good idea. Right. We've demonized fats for a very long period of time because. But it also doesn't mean that we necessarily need to go to high, high amounts of fat either. And especially coconut oils with European cultures. And it's important to note that your microbiome is the form and function is dependent on your lineage. Right. Where you come from. And so a lot of the people that are European, of European descent, their ancestors never saw a coconut. And so their body doesn't necessarily know how to deal with the types of complex fats that are in coconut oil. And so I would say in significant moderation, because there's some really good published studies that show that of all the oils they tested, even vegetable oils a lot of times, which can be rancid and have a lot of peroxides or bad lipids in it, the coconut oil was the most toxigenic. It increased this endotoxime or leaky gut far more than any of the other oils tested. Now, interestingly, omega 6 oils and omega 3 oils reduced endotoxemia.

So like omega 3 oils and fish oil that people might have, or let's say like an olive oil. Yes, that would be a little bit better for the gut microbiome.

Absolutely. Yeah. So when you're thinking about things from the microbiome perspective and how we can improve that barrier function and reduce that chronic endotoxemia and that chronic low grade inflammation which is really at the root cause of most illnesses, we have to look at omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids as our primary source of good healthy oils. Now, if your microbiome is really healthy, you can handle more of the coconut type oil or the saturated fats and so on. So a lot of that is based on just how healthy and dysfunctional your microbiome is.

What about everybody who's putting MCT oil in their coffee?

Yeah. So that's an interesting thing, and I am very curious to do a study on that. But of all of the components within coconut oil, the least toxic is the MCT component.

Got it.

The medium chain triglycerides. So in coconut itself, in the raw coconut oil, you've got the long chain triglycerides, which are problematic. The medium chain, I would say, is better than the long chain triglycerides.

Wow. So going back to pets.

Yes.

You're blowing our mind over here. Everybody's got to put down their coconut oil. Stop with oil.

Take it easy. Take it easy on it.

It's funny, there's this Instagram meme that I saw floating around. It was like, coconut oil is great. It's good for healthy skin. You know, you could put on your skin, you could do oil pulling with it. Also, like, you know, if you're tired, rub it in your eyes. Like it was a joke.

Right?

They're, like, joking around. Like, we overuse it a little bit.

Yes. Yeah.

Slap it on your dog. Don't slap it on your dog. So going back to pets.

Yeah.

We know now that there's so. So the study that you did, were you able to prove that there is leaky gut that's happening in pets?

Yes. So here's some interesting nuances between pets and humans. We can. If a human has severe leaky gut, we can give them what we call a challenge meal. That's typically a high fat, high caloric meal that will induce more leakiness in the gut. If their gut is dysfunctional and if their barrier is dysfunctional, we typically see the peak levels of toxins in the blood at 5 hours and after the meal. So 5 hours postprandial in pets, it takes up to 12 hours to increase the toxicity level. So there's a difference in mechanism of how the leakiness occurs in the pet. But one thing that is absolutely clear is that they do have the same leakiness. It takes longer for it to occur, and when it does occur, it seems to hang around a little bit longer than in humans as well. So they are experiencing this. This is a big, big driver of chronic inflammation in our pets and likely at the root cause of the inflammatory and other conditions that we've essentially created in these animals.

So based on the learnings and just what you've read, overall, when people are thinking about how to care for their pets, what's important to know when it comes to designing what the right food is for them. And are there any brands or services that you think are a good fit, or should we start feeding our pets probiotics or their probiotics that are made for them? So what are the recommendations based on what you guys have looked at?

Yeah, so we, you know, first we wanted to identify whether leaky gut existed in pets, which we, which we saw. It absolutely does. And it absolutely increases inflammatory markers in a very significant way in pets. So it is a component of disease in pets. Then there's no point looking at that unless you have a potential solution for it. Also, which we looked at certain types of probiotics and to see if that can actually alleviate the leakiness in the pet. And sure enough, we found that in as little as two weeks of applying a spore based probiotic, so we work a lot with these bacillus endospores, applying those spore based probiotics into the pet's diet, we were completely alleviating the leakiness in the gut. And on average it was reducing it by about 75% in just a two week period.

And is that in addition to removing the fats?

We kept that in, we kept the stressor in, we kept the inducer in, and we wanted to see if we can actually make a significant change despite the negative impact in there. Because the idea is that, you know, people may not perfect what they're feeding their dog. People may not put their dog in the absolute best environment, they may not have the best diet. And despite that, can we still improve the outcome?