How Carbs in Dog Food Impact Weight, Inflammation, and Behavior

Ever wondered why your dog is gaining weight, barking more, or seems constantly low on energy—despite eating a “balanced” diet?
What your dog eats impacts way more than just their weight. This episode dives deep into how hidden carbs in commercial dog food may be driving common issues like inflammation, reactivity, gut health imbalances, and behavior challenges. Whether you're feeding raw, kibble, or anything in between—this conversation will shift how you think about your dog’s nutrition.

You'll Learn

• Discover how excess carbohydrates in popular dog foods may be linked to aggression, anxiety, and chronic weight gain.

• Learn how adjusting your dog’s diet can improve recall, energy levels, and overall behavior.

• Get science-backed insights into raw dog food, supplements, gut health, and why “balanced” might not mean biologically appropriate.

Press play to learn how to optimize your dog’s food for better behavior, energy, and long-term health.

Guest Info: Read Daniel’s book: Dogs, Dog Food, and Dogma

Learn more: https://ketonaturalpetfoods.com

Follow @ketonaturalpetfoods on Instagram

Use code SUDT15 - This affiliate link supports the podcast and helps fund the RV dream

Straight Up Dog Talk Extras:

Get a free copy of Feeding without Fear for mealtime manners

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Email ⁠[e-mail]⁠ to get in touch with Em

This podcast explores real-life dog behavior and training, diving into reactivity, barking, dog anxiety, aggression, picky eating, gut health, and dog food—while unpacking enrichment, mental stimulation, supplements, calming aids, and holistic pet wellness. Whether you’re raising a rescue dog, supporting a senior dog, managing a velcro dog, or just navigating life with a dog who’s asking for more, you’ll find practical tools to build trust, strengthen communication, and create a safe, thriving life together.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Straight Up Dog Talk,the podcast where pet parents,
pet guardians, and pet professionals come together to
dive into real issues in dog parenting.
From controversial training methods to sensitive health
topics, we're getting raw and real about what it means to care
for our canine companions. Join us every Wednesday for
unfiltered conversations, expertinsights, and personal stories

(00:21):
that will make you laugh, cry, and grow as a pet parent.
No topic is off limits and no question goes unanswered.
You won't get one perspective here, you'll get them all
because every dog is different and every human is too.
You can follow along on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook
at straight up dog talk or by visiting
www.straightupdogtalk.com TuneInfrom any of your favorite

(00:43):
podcast platforms. Welcome to straight up dog talk.
I'm em and I'm back again this week with another amazing guest.
This week we have Daniel Shuloffwho is not only an author, but
he is into the whole nutrition of dog world with a brand of
food called Keto Natural Diet. How are you doing today, Daniel?
I'm doing the same as usual, busy and managing it.

(01:06):
Happily enough, Life is all right.
We're recording, as you know, inearly January, so we've got some
New Year's energy, but by the time this goes to air, I think
that'll sound like old news. Maybe not, maybe not.
I feel like that first quarter of the year, everybody's still
kind of pumped up, right? And we're slowly getting into
the spring and summer months. And I feel like that brings a

(01:27):
whole different kind of revival to that energy.
So I think we'll still be pumpedup.
Good. Yeah.
I live in Salt Lake City, UT, and it's certainly a beautiful
time of year here. Wildflowers start coming out and
starts to warm up coming out of the winter.
And so I feel you. I wish it was warming up here in
January. It is cold in Iowa.
Absolutely. Right now it's cold.

(01:48):
My goodness, I always look forward to the spring.
All right, Daniel, we got a lot of ground to cover today.
So where would you like to start?
Would you like to start with thebook?
Would you like to start with thediet?
Would you like to start with thelitigation that's going on here?
Where would you like to start? OK.
I think that the way that if I was listening to this show, some
idiot just appeared on your showand was going to talk to me for

(02:11):
an hour, however long. I think I'd want to sort of take
it somewhat chronologically as somebody who likes to fancy
himself as knowing a thing or two about companion animal
nutrition. I came to this place through a
pretty weird, convoluted path. So if you were to flashback to
2011, I was an attorney. I was still working as an
attorney back then. I went to law school and

(02:33):
practiced law for five years of this big corporate law firm in
the city of Atlanta that was raised with dogs.
My mother would casually breed our dogs, have a litter of
puppies once in a while, and shewas a huge dog lover.
They're always dogs in the household.
But as a young yuppie, basicallyin 2011, I had never had my own.
I got my own in 2011. 2011 was like kind of the when this

(02:56):
transition in my life from lawyer to like dog person
started happening and it happened because of the dog that
I got right. So many people, I'm sure that
are listening to the show. That's the formative experience
for a lot of our motivating experience.
You get this thing, come to lovethis thing so much, grow so
interested in how to be a good owner and how to make good
decisions for him. And the course of doing that

(03:17):
kind of led me to get very interested in the subject of
obesity and dogs and cats. And in essence, I was working an
obscene amount at this dog. He's a Rottweiler, Rottweiler
where he's like big intense dog with protective instincts and a
lot of drive. And he needed daily exercise to

(03:38):
be a plight member of society. And I was a busy dude.
So the intersection of those tworealities was I spent time
trying to understand how to exercise them as efficiently, as
effectively as possible, as dumbas that kind of sounds.
And through doing that, I learned about the extent of the
problem of obesity among dogs and cats in the Western world.
And it fascinated me. It made no sense to me.

(04:01):
So the facts that I always tell folks when I relay this story
that popped for me are #1 being moderately obese.
There's degrees of overweight and obese, but being the kind of
dog that many dog owners wouldn't even recognize as
overweight. The average type of dog that you
see moderately overweight, not like mega obese is worse for

(04:23):
that animal then a lifetime of smoking is for a person on a
percentage basis. That's how much that is expected
to shorten that animals lifespancompared to a leaning.
So a huge deal. I don't have kids.
I certainly didn't have kids in 2011.
My dog was my vehicle for channeling any parental love
that I had. The idea that you would casually
allow your kid to become a smoker for his whole life, that

(04:47):
would be a huge deal. That's generally regarding
society. Isn't that's really bad for you.
Try to stop, even if though it'shard, it's an addictive product.
We know being fat is bad for people.
And so it's like, yeah, OK, thatmakes sense.
There are more overweight or obese dogs in the United States
than what the general veterinarycommunity recognizes as correct
weight or lean dogs. More than 50% of the 70 +

(05:11):
1,000,000 dogs in the United States, overweight or obese.
So you walk down the street, next dog that you see, that
dog's going to be fat. Majority dogs you meet are
lifelong smokers. That's just made no sense,
particularly to me. It's like, well, wait a second.
Keeping yourself from not gaining too much weight.
Becoming fat is hard, but it's hard because we have to exert

(05:32):
willpower. Go out, go exercise, say no to
these tempting foods that big food companies are trying to
shove down our throat. Dog doesn't have to do any of
that. I, as the owner, get to figure
out exactly how much to feed that dog.
What to feed that dog? It's a problem exercise.
You could sort of squint and seelike, oh, maybe this is a
problem of lack of exercise. But The thing is that cats who

(05:54):
are not notoriously easy to direct in a exercise activity
like a dog might be, are just asfat in the United States as dogs
are. So it kind of blew me away.
And you go talk to a veterinarian or you go Plumb the
Internet resources, veterinary professional resources that
exist at that point. And you get folks trying to
explain the 9 obesity epidemic in the United States and you

(06:15):
have them saying the whole partyline is very pet owner focus.
The issues are we have owners that are loving their pets to
death. They're just too weak will to
understand that other dog is begging, but it's bad.
And you got to learn to say no or we're too lazy.
We're if only we were exercisingthem more, there wouldn't be a

(06:36):
problem. Or we're too stupid.
We just have to educate pet owners so they can understand
that being fat, that's actually bad.
And none of that didn't smell right to me.
Those didn't describe me. I got to this place, but reading
a bunch of peer reviewed studiesand trying to follow the
evidence so I could understand how to exercise my dog, that's
what led me to all this stuff. It's not the case that I don't

(06:56):
get that being fat is bad. Not lazy.
I'm a exercise nut. I don't know, but it just didn't
feel like me. And so I went trying to
understand the degree to which there was evidence supporting
those kind of theories, those pet on our focus theories.
And the reality is that the short answer there is they sound
to various degrees, plausible orimplausible, but they're just

(07:17):
guesses. There's no real science there.
And I just had to understand, wait, what?
What's the real answer here? Over the next four years, I went
from a place of being a lawyer at this big corporate law firm
to being full time working on this book.
I'm going to write something about this because there's got
to be other people that are going through this kind of thing
too. And maybe I can make an ebook

(07:38):
about this and somebody would want to read it.
And then I was like, this is a bigger story than that.
I was traveling a lot. I went to Yellowstone, lived
with the biologist, the Yellowstone Wolf Project and
went to all these dog food factories, went to these
veterinary schools, all that kind of stuff.
And at somewhere along the line it was like this.
I'm going to make this my full time thing and I quit my job as
being a lawyer and I just workedon the book and doing all this

(08:00):
weird research that I had to do.It's a science book.
A lot of it is this study says this, this study says that.
But other parts involve travel. That's what I spent four years
of my life doing and finished itand published it in 2016.
It's called Dogs, Dog Food and Dogma, and it's my attempt to
try to understand how on earth are so many dogs and cats too
fast. And it explains that it comes to

(08:22):
what I think are answers that I feel really strongly about to
this day. And they're not conventional
wisdom. And so they're important things
for, I think, for people to understand.
I think that nutrition for animals, it's just such a hard
topic anyway, right? Because not only did dogs used
to be wild animals that we domesticated, so we don't really

(08:46):
have a full picture of what their diet looked like when they
were out in the wild. We can make guesses, right?
But we'll never know 100% for sure.
And then we have all these free roaming dogs and other countries
that give us a basis of diet that we can also look at.
But then they also come into town and scavenge and get into

(09:06):
dumpsters and things like that too.
So there really is a whole lot of information just in that.
But then we have all of these companies making dog foods.
And when you start looking at the ingredients in the dog food,
there's some consistencies, especially in the bigger brand
foods that are in the box stores.
And then you start getting into the smaller brand.

(09:26):
There's Sundays, there's Zee WeePeaks, there's Ollie, there's
Keto natural pet food, there's awhole range of different ones
and there are some consistenciesand some inconsistencies.
And then freeze dried or dehydrated, which one is better?
And do we want raw or do we wantpre cooked that we stick in our
freezer? All of this back and forth and

(09:46):
it really is very hard to get onGoogle and try to figure this
stuff out. It's not possible get asked this
question a fair amount because my book has kind of two main
theses. There's a scientific thesis,
which is that the real root of the obesity problem is dietary
carbohydrate, that if you took dietary carbohydrate out of the
modern pet food ecosystem, you would solve the obesity problem

(10:07):
overnight. So you can't make a dog obese
without carbide, literally. And then the other is a cultural
kind of thesis. OK, if the science says that,
then why doesn't my vet tell me that?
Why is it that so many people who are supposed to be the ones
that we're relying on for understanding science and
interpreting it for us aren't going to tell me that?
And that is expanded as a big part of the book too.

(10:28):
And the answer there thesis I put forth there is they've
become to A2 significant degree subject to the influence of
companies that make money off ofpropping up the reputation of
the dietary carbon and that sideof the story I tell in my book
and the issue more broadly. They published the book nine
years ago. Almost to this day, a huge chunk
of my work life is spent workingon trying to solve that problem.

(10:52):
And all that stems from industryplays a huge influence in
shaping what the veterinary medical community understands
about key nutritional topics. And it's a huge problem because
some of the information that's in that ecosystem is just wrong.
So when you get to a place whereveterinary professionals defend
it because it's what they've been taught, it takes so much

(11:13):
credibility out of them and it makes folks that are listening
like, can I really trust this person?
They're telling me that because a dog evolved from a wolf at
some point, that that is why we should think it's a healthy
thing to feed it carbohydrate. That's just really, really basic
logic. That's wrong.
And So what it leaves you with is this world where the consumer

(11:33):
does not know who to trust, and they have every right to feel
completely confused and lost in the world of trying to just make
a healthy decision for their dog.
Go on the Internet you are you can't do it without swearing.
Basically it's a total disaster where it's just you're going to
get not just differing information, but straight up

(11:55):
absolute contradiction from two different folks that you should
look to as a source of authorityon these subjects.
If you go to your local pet store, the mom and pop store
that they really care about thissubject been in business 20
years, only carry the good foods.
You're going to get 30 seconds of what makes a dog healthy
nutrition and then you go to your vet and say give me 30

(12:15):
seconds. It's not just going to differ a
little, it's going to be completely opposite. 1 is going
to say everything your vet says is wrong. 1 is going to say
everything does pet food store owners are wrong.
That's a nightmare. That doesn't happen in physics.
You know what I mean? You don't have yes, two major
communities just being like, Nope, they are completely wrong,

(12:35):
but it's a nightmare. Fixing it is the challenge.
I started this whole podcast. I'll tell you the two reasons,
behavior and training. And the second one is nutrition
for my dogs because I have an all white terrier, Chihuahua mix
and allergies, right, because he's a white dog, but he also
has pancreatitis. So we constantly were fighting
this battle of what do I feed him?

(12:57):
What do I feed him, what do I feed him?
And he was on this Hill Science Diet, sensitive Dogs and White
Coat Diet, combination of the two foods.
And it held up for years. But we have since switched
brands of foods because I have done so much research over the
last two years because I got my second dog, Fitz, who was my
behavior challenge, but also a picky eater and he would refuse

(13:21):
to eat Blue Buffalo Science Diet.
All the things that as a vet tech I had been taught were the
top notch thing. But then I started having all of
these conversations around nutrition and I'm learning about
what bioavailability is. I'm learning about how seed oils
are bad for dogs. I'm learning about all the
starch and all the fillers and all of these things and foods
that don't make any sense to me.Trying to figure out, OK, now

(13:43):
where do I go from here? And that's when I run into books
like yours and Canine Coca Mega Effect, which is another one
that I read by Jaron Lucas. He makes Yam wolf and Oh yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so it's another like kind oflike keto all meat based food
for dogs and really learned a lot from him as well.
And it's just kind of have been this constant learning wheel for

(14:06):
me. And the conclusion that I have
come to is that we have specialists in veterinary
medicine for behavior. We have it for ophthalmology,
which is eyes and we have TMJ, there's orthopedics, There are
all kinds of different specialists.
Why don't we have dietary nutritionists for veteran?
I can tell you as well, that's the.

(14:26):
Subject I can tell you all about.
I know I can. I know the history of that and I
can give you the answer because it's in my book and I can
distill. It please do.
Yeah. So right now there are about
100,000 veterinarians in the United States.
Rough. There are fewer than 100 board
certified veterinary nutritionists.
So there is a board certification.

(14:48):
The problem that there's such a small fraction and we're talking
a tiny fraction was one out of 1000 vets have that I went
through the exercise in my book at the time I was working on, I
live where I live now in Salt Lake City, UT and I was like,
I'm going to find the closest board certified veterinary
nutritionist I can and none in my state, none in like 3 or 4
out of the neighboring states. I would have to get on an

(15:08):
airplane to find one of these people.
One out of every thousand, fewerthan 100 total, less than two
per state on an average basis. Moreover, at the time it was
north of 60% of them were full time industry employees.
So not practicing vets, veterinary nutritionists working
for or pills, Purina, etcetera. So 6 out of 10 of those one out

(15:31):
of 1000 are not people that you can go to.
They're not out there marketing.I will help you make good
decisions for your dog. You're talking about a few dozen
people in the United States. Why is that?
The answer is that unlike in humans focused scientific
research and human medical care,the world of dogs and cats,
particularly in the worlds of dogs and cats, nutrition

(15:54):
industry money is the only money.
If you go to vet school because you're like, I love animals and
you get into nutrition because there's I love nutrition.
I want nothing more than to be aprofessor at a university that
does nutritional studies on dogsand cats for my entire career.
And that's what I'm going to do.I'm going to help people
understand that stuff better. I'm going to teach it.
You cannot exist in that profession unless you take

(16:16):
industry money, period, full stop.
We have things like the NationalInstitutes of Health for human
medical science and huge billiondollar budgets, huge foundations
that provide tons of money to ensure that things that are
useful for mankind but not necessarily profitable for any
company or another. We are still going to work on
that scientifically. That does not exist in doggy

(16:39):
Kitty world. It is industry money or you are
going to fail in your career. What does that leave you with?
It leaves you with a few dozen possible sources of advice on
this topic. 90 plus percent of them are in some degree or
another reliant in their career on industry money.
We live in a late enough stage of capitalism in the United
States where industry plays a role in tons of things where in

(17:02):
an ideal society it wouldn't. Politics and science and all
kinds of other things I struggleto come up with and I know I'm
like in the weeds on the doggy Kitty side of it.
There just aren't other domains where industry exerts such a
comprehensive control. If you turn over the leading
veterinary nutrition textbook inthe United States, there is a

(17:23):
Hills logo on the back of. Now, if you were to think about
that for a second, if you were pulmonologist or your
oncologist, if their leading textbook had a Philip Morris
logo on the back of it, we wouldthink of that as a problem.
The nutrition textbook for people had McDonald's logo on
the back of it. That would be a problem.

(17:44):
We would all recognize that as problematic.
It is the norm in the veterinaryworld and it's a huge problem.
It's a huge pickle. It's not close to being solved.
There are things that I'm tryingto do, and plenty of other
well-intentioned people are trying to do to chip away at it,
but it is a big, well entrenchedproblem that is going to take
time to fix. I completely agree.
All of my research has basicallyled me to that point where I'm

(18:06):
just like, OK, so we stay away from anything that's in a big
box store and we would look at the ingredient labels.
For me, the biggest light bulb moment was when I found out that
all of the labels on dog food, dog treats, dog supplements, all
of these things are not regulated.
They're not FDA checks, they're not FDA approved.

(18:28):
And you can literally have the craziest things, cork shavings,
wood shavings, random fillers inyour dog's food.
And I understand that sometimes people are on a budget.
I understand. And I never want anybody to feel
guilt or shame for not being able to for the best kibble
that's out there because it is inaccessible.

(18:48):
And there are a lot of people who just can't afford more than
whatever it is that they're currently paying for.
And I understand that because I was there before, I was at that
point in my life at one time. And I think that as long as you
can at least pay attention, I need to exercise my dog properly
and I need to be aware if there starts to develop health

(19:08):
problems, then you're doing the best that you can be doing.
But I also think that if we helda higher standard to this part
of the industry and really did our research, it would topple a
lot of companies. Oh, it's essential.
The solitary carbohydrate is as central to the modern pet food
ecosystem as tobacco is to the cigarette industry.

(19:30):
It is the backbone of the industry is selling product with
as much carbohydrate as you can get away with.
It's a very simple economic reality behind that.
So could you explain what a dietary carbohydrate is for the
listeners all? Right.
So there are three different kinds of nutrients that contain
calories. It's protein, fat, and
carbohydrate. Everything else, they're they're

(19:51):
little nutrients that are part of nutritional science.
They're called micronutrients, vitamins and minerals.
But like only three big groups that contain calories.
A lot of nutritional science hasto do with what amount of those
respective nutrients you take in.
Should you take in more of one or less of another?
Should I get more protein in my diet or?

(20:12):
Do all these things impact muscular development, body fat
development, metabolism in the same way, or do they impact the
body in different kinds of ways?And so dietary carbohydrate is
just carbs like this. I would say in a poorly
regulated industry, the one worst regulation is that at
present, as of literally today, I suppose even by the time this

(20:33):
episode goes to air, this will still be true.
You do not have to tell the consumer how much carbohydrate
is in your dog. Your listeners won't be able to
see our video recording of this,but I have my trusty Coke 0
sugar bottle right here. And on the back of it is the
FDA's Nutrition Facts panel, andwe're all pretty familiar with
that at this point. It's been more or less the same

(20:54):
for decades, and it's got the helpful nutritional information
that I use to think about. Is this a good thing for me to
eat or drink or a bad thing, Right.
It's required on all packaged foods.
And of course, big part of it isdevoted to how much carbohydrate
is in there. There's a grams of carbohydrate,
percentage of daily value, totalsubsets.
There are different kinds of carbs, sugar is one of them, but

(21:15):
there are lots of other kinds too.
It's got a disclosure, total of sugar, added sugar, all that
kind of stuff. None of that, under the modern
pet food labeling regulation scheme is required in dog food,
and so you can calculate it on your own.
You better bring a calculator. It's not very straightforward.
Of course carbs are bad. My dog evolved from being a
wolf. They ate 0 carbs.
Of course I'll try to minimize it.

(21:37):
I'll find the product that's gotthe least carb.
Good luck. Good luck with that super poor
regulation. It's important to note, however,
that it is changing. Is that something that you know
about already? No, actually it's not.
I would love to know more though.
I'd be happy to tell you, but ifit's not boring enough for your
listeners to talk talk about nutritional science and dog
food, then surely the regulationof nutritional science and dog

(22:00):
food. I'm not sure anybody will be
awake, but basically here's whatit boils down to.
The organization that sets the rules that matter with regard to
how dog food is labeled in the US.
It's called AFCO, the Association of American Feed
Control Officials. AFCO is a private organization.
It's not a part of any government.
It's just a group of. What they do is every year they
put out new rules and each stateadopts those rules as a matter

(22:22):
of course. There are reasons why, but it's
beyond the scope of this. And so AFCO puts that it's 2020
model rules, the organization that says, yeah, you don't have
to tell people how much carbohydrate is in your.
Just recently, at the end of 2023, AFCO adopted new rules
regarding quantitative nutritional disclosures.
So the the numbers regarding what nutrients are in pet food

(22:43):
products. And thankfully, after decades of
pressure, they're finally going to make meaningful changes.
And so now when you turn over the back of a bag of dog food,
you're going to see the pet nutrition facts panel.
And it's going to look a lot like the FDA's main nutrition
facts panel. It's got carbohydrate
disclosure, protein disclosed ina format that actually make

(23:05):
makes sense, all the stuff that you use to make good decisions
for yourself regarding what you eat.
And the only thing, the only reason that I can say that it's
not the rule today is there's anenforcement discretion period
that's going on now essentially like as one last like FU to
anyone that cares about trying to improve the consumer rights
in this domain that AFCO basically was like, this is the

(23:27):
new rule, but we won't start enforcing it for three to five
years. We're going to give everybody a
chance to change their label, which as somebody who owns a dog
food company, let me tell you, it's not take five years, but
the new rules have been adopted.It's happening, it's just a
question of when. I think we will be the first pet
food company in the country to comply.
We're not there yet, but it is anew rule and it's I think the

(23:47):
vast majority of them will drag their feet as much as possible
because people aren't going to like what they see is the bottom
line. As I'm sure you know, at this
point, the vast majority of kibbles in this country and all
of them that are priced anythingunder 50 bucks for a large bag
are 50% carbohydrate or more. There's more carbs than any
other other kind of nutrient in most pet food.

(24:08):
There's more carbohydrate than anything else.
Add the rest of everything together and it's not as much as
it is corn, wheat, potato, whatever your carbohydrate of
choice is. So it's going to open some
people's eyes. Well, and that's another thing
how when you look at labels, thefirst three things that you
should see on your dog food is meat and organ and then bone.

(24:29):
And if you look at 90% of what'sout there as far as dog food
goes, you're not going to see that.
And the first three ingredients,you're going to see chicken,
maybe some chicken meal and thenit's going to be cheese or
something like that. It's never actually what it's
supposed to be. And when I learned that, that
was another thing that I went, OK, well, this is an issue here.

(24:51):
I think the really big one for me was greenies and learning
about how much starch and sugar is in greenies and how it's
actually making it their tartar worse and not actually healthy
in the tartar. As somebody who's a vet tech,
these are what we recommend and these are the brands of food
that we recommend. And then going back and being
like, Oh my God, all those dogs that we did dentals on, we were

(25:15):
part of the problem. Yeah, you've at least had the
realization, and I'm sure plentyof other veterinary
professionals had that realization.
And it's great that you have it.And of course, it makes you feel
a sense of like, what have we done?
Like you said, part of the problem unfortunately that
dental 1 is like not close to the worst one dog needs
cleanings more often. That's good for the veterinarian

(25:37):
and it's not great for the dogs that has to go through this
procedure, but don't shorten itslifespan.
Let me give you 1 prominent example of something that is
arguably worse. I'm sure many of your listeners
know what the disease diabetes, it is very common, unfortunately
problem, a huge problem in people just like it is in dogs
and cats and it's become a huge problem in dogs particularly

(26:01):
pretty recently. Nowadays lots of folks I know
because there are a lot of our customers have dogs with
diabetes. So what is diabetes?
For anyone that doesn't know, it's basically being allergic to
carbohydrate. Your body needs to do specific
things to put away carbohydrate.Carbohydrate goes into your
blood and this all applies for your dog too.
And none of this is controversial, for the record,
this is mainstream. Your vet will tell you this too.

(26:23):
When you eat a carb, it goes into your blood as something
called glucose. All carbs are made of this
molecule called glucose, and it's sugar.
Glucose equals sugar. That's what it is.
Maybe you've heard of like complex carbs or simple carbs.
Complex carbs have a dozens of glucose molecules configured in
some weird way. So they're complex because
there's that weird configurationand when you eat them, they have

(26:45):
to get broken down into those individual molecules of glucose,
which is complex to take them from big complicated thing down
to individual molecules. Simple carbohydrate, much more
straightforward, just one or twoglucose molecules together and
you eat it, that gets digested down to the same constituent
parts and it goes into your blood or goes into your dog's
blood as those constituent parts.

(27:06):
It goes in as glucose, which is why so many people with diabetes
are so conversant with the term glucose and blood glucose.
And they understand that stuff really well because being
diabetic essentially means if your blood glucose gets too
high, it becomes really bad for you because your body has
mechanisms that it uses to bringblood sugar levels back down.

(27:27):
There's a hormone, it's called insulin Bodies, your pancreas
produce it. And when it goes into the blood,
the glucose gets shuttled into other tissues.
It goes into the fat, goes into the muscle and there it's
perfectly stable. But if too much of it is in the
blood, if there was number insulin, that's really bad and
it can kill you, it can put you in a coma and you can die.

(27:47):
People that have diabetes, theirbodies don't make insulin at a
good enough rate. That's what functionally is
happening is they some kind of carbohydrate, glucose goes into
the blood, they don't make enough insulin.
And so the blood sugar, blood glucose levels stay high,
functions exactly the same way in dogs as in people.
If you go to your veterinarian today, they say to you, I'm
sorry your dog is diabetes, that's not a great thing.
It's a bad disease. It's difficult on the owner.

(28:09):
You have to manage it with injections.
Typically you have an animal that's going to be subjected to
restrictions. It's going to probably be linked
with other diseases. There are other things that get
downstream end up being problemsas well.
Not a good diagnosis. Fortunately, nutrition is the
primary way to manage it. And what we're going to do is
we're going to put you on a prescription only formula for

(28:30):
diabetes. That formula, the most popular
diabetes treatment in the UnitedStates, it's called Hills
Metabolic, made by Hills Pet Nutrition.
It's about 40% digestible carbohydrate.
That is like you went into the doctor and you said I have an
allergy to peanuts and they saidgreat, we're going to give you a
prescription only diet of peanuts.
It's literally like that, like diabetes is you cannot process

(28:53):
carbohydrate. OK, here it is a 40%
carbohydrate product. And I use that as an example to
hold up next to the dental one because it's wrong.
Just like the idea that greeniesis actually good for a dog's
teeth is wrong, but it's also a violation of reasonable
expectations that everyone should have of a medical
professional. It's so obviously wrong that the

(29:16):
idea that a vet could recommend that in this day and age should
be malpractice. It's so obvious.
Is anyone outside of a industry where that's completely Co opted
by outside forces of being fed misinformation gets it.
But your vet is going to tell you 40%.
Wow no wonder those insulin doses are so high because they

(29:37):
have so fat with it. When I was a vet tech, a lot of
cats. A lot of.
Cats are diabetic. So many cats are diabetic, and
it's just wild to me to know that now because I didn't know
that the food was so much of a problem.
Like you said, I'm allergic to cinnamon.
That would be like somebody saying, OK, you have to have a
cinnamon roll. Every single special diet your

(29:59):
allergy is going to have only 40% cinnamon.
It's like what, no 0%? Zero.
Another interesting thing about carbs and dogs is that because
dogs evolved the ability to digest carbs really recently,
evolutionarily speaking. Quick detour, talk about
evolution for two seconds and I know we're not trying to do
graduate level discussions aboutscientific topics here, but very

(30:22):
high level dogs evolved from wolves for 99.9% of their
evolutionary heritage over hundreds of millions of
generations. They were the same species.
They followed the same part of the lineage over the past 10,000
years, which is if you think about a clock telling 24 hours
worth of time, you're talking about like the last two minutes
or something like that, or last seconds even.

(30:43):
It's like tiny, tiny fraction ofthe total history of the
species. It broke apart because people
came around and they started doing things that changed some
of them. Generally speaking, scientists
these days, as I'm sure listeners now, genetic science
is like pretty wild these days. They've mapped that stuff pretty
well and they've figured out thetwo things that make dogs and
wolves genetically different. Primarily 2 big things #1 the

(31:06):
brain. Not the same meaningful
differences there. Go take a wolf puppy, bring it
home and treat it like you're brought home a dog puppy and
tell me how that works out for you because it will not work
out. You just have a manageable house
pet. I know that there are dog wolf
hybrids. I know I've had one in my home.
Literally been my dog for a period of time.
It had wildness, it had docileness to some degree too.

(31:29):
But what I'm trying to say is that human interference and
trying to make some of these things docile so that we could
hang out with them and they can do things for us.
Manifest the differences in the brain.
Wolf's got a wild animal brain. Dog is domestic animal.
Second thing though, digesting carbohydrate.
Your body digests carbs using different things.
When you put food in your mouth,it starts digesting it right
away. Other stuff takes place in the

(31:49):
stomach, other stuff in the intestines.
But in the mouth it's there's real stuff going on.
It's why greenies for instance is bad for teeth because it's
getting broken down into individual glucose molecules in
the mouth. If it only got broke down in the
stomach then it wouldn't be an issue.
It passed through. By the time it passes the teeth,
it's not getting digested yet. But your body and a dog's body

(32:09):
makes an enzyme time that's in your spit called amylase.
Amylase is like if you put a piece of bread and hold it in
your mouth for like 30 seconds, it's going to start to taste
sweet. And what's going on there is the
amylase in your saliva is breaking down the complex
carbohydrate that is in the bread.
Bread is complex carbs into individual glucose molecules.

(32:32):
That's sugar. It's becoming sugar and you
taste that as sweet. It plays a big part in how you
digest carbs. The second thing that makes dogs
different from wolves. Wolves don't make much amylase
at all. Dogs evolved the ability to
digest carbs. Wolves on the other hand, I know
this from having lived at the Yellowstone Wolf Project. 0.0%
of their diet comes from carbohydrate.

(32:53):
They can't digest it even if they were to eat some amount of
carbs. You'll hear sometimes people
wrongly say, well, a wolf might eat a elk that has a big chunk
of grass in its stomach. Isn't it eating some carbs to
the extent that that happens andit doesn't really happen, it's
not digesting it at all. They don't pull calories out of
it. They can't break the stuff down.
Dog just evolved the ability to do that like 10,000 years ago,

(33:17):
which is just a few tiny ticks of the clock.
So honestly, I don't know how I got off on that digression about
evolution. Maybe you remember, but it's an
interesting I think, so hopefully listeners got
something out of that. I think that's an important
distinction, right? We need to understand that there
is a difference between humans and animals and how we digest

(33:38):
things and how their bodies are different from ours.
One of the things that I've heard so many conversations
about obesity in dogs and obesity in cats over the the
last couple of years. And for me, what I don't
understand about people who are not on board with understanding
and obesity in animals is the posture of an animal, right?

(34:00):
Their body posture is so much different than ours, right?
So where they carry their weightis different.
But Can you imagine being a ninemonth pregnant woman being
forced to crawl around on your hands and knees all day long?
That's an overweight dog or an overweight cat right there.
You're carrying all that weight in your stomach.

(34:21):
You're stressing your back, you're stressing your spine,
your pelvis. I don't think that people think
enough about that. And I think that that kind of
comes into play when we look at our pets and we give them things
we shouldn't. I give my dogs things that I
shouldn't give them. I know that I do it.
I will flat out tell you when I make Mac and cheese, there's
extra Mac and cheese. I can't eat all of the Mac and
cheese, so I give it to my dogs.They get a little bit of it.

(34:44):
Do I know that's bad? Yes, I know that that's bad.
Does it happen every single day?Oh, does it happen every single
week? No, it probably happens like
once a month. And I've made my concessions
with that. But also, neither of my dogs are
overweight. They're very fit.
They get in their activities, they get in their enrichment,
and they are not overweight. And I'm very careful about what

(35:06):
they get. As far as they don't get
greenies, obviously they're bullying sticks and they're
natural chews and things like that.
So I think that it's really important that people understand
that the chemicals in a dog mouth are going to be different
than they are in a human's mouth, and we're going to digest
things and process things different because we're
different species. Yeah.

(35:27):
How can we make a food for a different species when clearly,
back when all of this started, don't fully understand the other
species and we're just trying tomake sure that they're full?
Yeah. All right.
Look, we know that species tend to evolve into place where
they're natural diet, Whatever diet they're eating on a regular

(35:47):
basis, day after today, is doinggood things for them.
It's keeping them alive long enough to be successful
evolutionarily, right? For 99.99% of a dog's genetic
evolution, it ate one thing and one thing only, and that is raw
animal meat. That's it.
For a period of time there was asub sector of the human

(36:07):
nutrition community that was very interested in what's called
the Paleo diet. And the idea there was smart
thing to do is to eat like your ancestors ate.
And the reason that they think it's a smart thing is we're just
what I was just saying a minute ago.
You had hundreds of millions of years eating this way.
Evolution optimizes your diet. The only way you can have
chronic disease problems is whenyour environment don't match up

(36:30):
with the genes. But the thing with Paleo diet
and people is that there aren't too many people around these
days living like Cavemen. And a lot of the debate over the
validity of that was this tribe that still exists in this tiny
location in the Amazon lives this way.
And some other specialists wouldsay, well, yeah, but this these
guys on this island in the Pacific do it this way.
Well, with dogs, you don't have to try to recreate the past or

(36:53):
find some tiny pocket. We know from genetics that them
and wolves were the same for 99.9% and wolves are still
around. They're out there today.
And so I can go to the Yellowstone Wolf Project and ask
them what do they eat today? They eat today the same thing
they've always eaten. 0 carbs, All meat, fat, protein, meat.
Things don't have carbs in them.Carbs come from plants.

(37:15):
That's a hard and fast rule. So one good way to think about
even if you know nothing about nutrition and you don't even
Google what's nutritious for my dog, if you just go, I'm just
going to assume Mother Nature ispretty good at this stuff and
I'm just going to give it what it did for the vast majority of
its development. You're going to end up making a
pretty good decision, But that'sa good rule to follow.

(37:38):
If you can reliably say that fora huge chunk of your evolution,
things were one way, that's a good indication that that way is
good for you. That's a that's a good sign.
That has always struck me as an important reason why you should
be skeptical of the idea that a diet composed of 40 to 50 to 60%
carbohydrate, which is the norm in the pet food world these

(37:59):
days, is a healthy thing that should immediately strike
anyone. Even if you have just like a
one-on-one level understanding of evolution and biology, that's
got to stick out for you as like, wait, that that can't be
right. And it's impossibly sad that
vets to our professional, we understand science.
People can look at that reality and go now, it's still the right

(38:19):
answer, it's still right. It's just shocking.
It's just mind blowing. Do you feel like there is a
shift in at least some of the veterinary community?
I know my veterinarian is reallyexcellent about having these
conversations with me. One of the brands of foods that
we regularly feed is Sundays, and that was created by a
veterinarian. And it's really important to see

(38:41):
that there is change happening clearly, like you're doing it
right, you're putting in this research and you're making
change and trying to help our dogs have better lives.
I think that the thing that I think about the most is if we
could change dogs diets, what would that do to the longevity
of their life? Would it change how long they
live? Would it just.

(39:02):
Yeah, exactly right. I think about this all the time.
Is ironclad confidence my hand before God that if you took
carbohydrate out of the modern pet food ecosystem you would
improve lifespan? Here's the reality.
You said before, sometimes you give your dogs Mac and cheese.
I give my dogs things that are not great for them if they were
extended more broadly. My dogs are very lean.

(39:23):
I have a Saint Bernard and he isa Terminator.
He is a ripped St. Bernard.
It's crazy. It says, hear that all his ribs,
all his muscular death definition like like a fit
Pitbull is what his body looks like.
The reality though, is you can make a dog lean a lot of
different ways. You can exercise the hell out of
it. You can restrict the amount of

(39:44):
food altogether that it's eating.
You can do any combination of things.
If you want to make a dog lean. You can only make a dog fat in
the 1st place if you feed it carbohydrate.
That is a ironclad rule. If you take carbohydrate out of
the pet food ecosystem, you don't have any more obese dogs.
And obesity is worse than for dogs than smoking.

(40:06):
If you took smoking out of a population of people, you are
going to improve their life. There's no room for debate
around that one. It's clearly broken, but it is.
It's still the norm. I think that if more people knew
that the modern day pet parent, everybody who's listening,
everybody who could potentially be listening years from now.
I think if more people knew thatthere was this issue with

(40:29):
carbohydrates and dog food, thata lot more people who are so
active about doing the best for their pet and they would people
would rally and there would be more significant change.
But the education piece is just not there, which is why this
podcast exists because I'm trying to help make those
connections. If we want to make effective

(40:50):
change, we do have to work together as a community and we
do have to really put that education piece out there that I
think I think a lot of people are missing.
And it's, it's just so unfortunate that it feels shady.
This is something that we've been sweeping under the rug
because it's more convenient to sweep under the rug than it is
to actually deal with it head onand try to help our dogs live

(41:12):
better, longer, healthier lives.And that is something that is so
important to me. I know it's something that is so
important to the listeners, which is a great segue into
talking about your food and why you created it and how how it is
effective change for dog. You sent us a bag of your food
and my dog use open farms and Sundays 1 is on one and one is

(41:34):
on the other. Okay, and you sent your bag of
food over and instead of messingup everybody's diet, we just
kind of sprinkle it in. But we also because love the
size of it. I love the size of it.
It is amazing for training treats for going on walks, our
training session or when we're doing scatter feeds and we
sprinkle the food on the floor and let them find it, sniff it

(41:57):
out and get that mental enrichment going on.
Your food is the perfect size for it.
And my picky eater, as soon as that bag opens, he's right
there. She's bringing out the good
stuff. Returning to where we were an
hour ago when I was trying to tell people about how I got to
be in this chair today after I rose books really proud of it
felt as I feel today that I was absolutely right about the two

(42:19):
main points. One of the points is
carbohydrate is the devil. Basically, that you can't make a
dog fat without carbohydrate, change your dog's metabolism in
crazy ways, and that it ought tobe the number one issue for a
conscientious pet owner trying to decide what's healthy for
your pet. It ought to be, is it toxic?
Will my dog eat it? Then protein to carbohydrate

(42:40):
ratio. There's just nothing else that
moves the needle as much. And I'm not going to try to
persuade you about that today because I'm sure you and your
listeners all come to it from different places, but that
that's my money, my hand before God.
That's the one thing you should be optimizing for Most protein,
least carbohydrate is toss Raw diets because they need to be
kept from spoiling, need to either be frozen, refrigerated,

(43:02):
created, dried out, subject to some sort of process that keeps
spoilation. That tends to make them quite
priced. Generally speaking, a calorie of
a premium bought over the counter raw diet is going to be
5 times the calorie of a kibble.So if you have small dogs, might
not be a big an issue for your budget.
Even if you don't have it, a bigbudget kibble, one of the
reasons it became the backbone of the industry, is like it's

(43:24):
incredibly inexpensive and it does keep the dog alive.
Dog pulls enough nutrition out of it to get through its day.
Great. If you have a small dog, it
might be the difference. Switching it to raw, it might be
the difference between $0.25 a day and $1.25 a day.
And that's nothing for people. That's a doll, but I have a
Saint Bernard. My Saint Bernard eats an obscene
amount of food. What is your Chihuahua mix

(43:44):
weigh? Toby weighs between 9 and 10
lbs. Usually he gets 1/4 of a cup of
food. Wayne weighs 170 lbs ripping wet
a piece of rock. So that's 17 ish of your dog.
Just him and we got three dogs. I'm not a huge outlier.
There are plenty of people that have these big dogs, large
packs, and for them a five timesas much difference.

(44:05):
Like increase your dog food expenditure by 5X, then go from
$0.25 to $1.25. It goes from $15 a day maybe to
$75 a day or more for a lot of people.
So it's a non starter for some people.
That meant that you're going to just feed your dog a lot of
carbs. The lowest carb products you
could find were 30% carbohydrates, something like

(44:26):
that. If we can make something that
was legitimately low in carbohydrate content like a good
raw diet is, but in kibble form,we have something.
There would be people that wouldbe looking for macro nutritional
profile like a raw diet, but I can't afford a raw diet and
that's what we ended up making. Our flagship product line is
called Ketona. It is less than 5% digestible

(44:49):
carbohydrates, just about 50% protein. 90% of the protein
comes from animal sources, comesfrom kinds of things that most
of the protein that wolves eat comes from, not as opposed to
other things. There's some plants that have
some amount of protein in them. They look a little different
nutritionally than meat based proteins.
So it took us about a year to figure out how to do it.

(45:09):
Making kibble without carbohydrate is like trying to
bake bread without flour. One of the two main reasons that
carbohydrate is the backbone of the US pet food industry is 1.
It's incredibly inexpensive. The calorie of carbohydrate is
less than 110th the cost of a calorie of meat based protein.
It's just way way way way cheaper.
You think of silos, silos of theingredients that are used, and

(45:31):
it's not a thing you can do withmeat.
But secondly, it plays a functional role in making
kibble, just like it does in baking baked goods.
If anyone's listening to this, ever try to bake cupcake or a
loaf of bread or whatever without flour?
It doesn't work. The dough falls apart when you
heat up stuff with flour. It all binds together.
And the reason for that is carbohydrate molecules

(45:53):
gelatinize and they hold everything together.
That's what they do. And then you to use dehydration
to take the moisture out of it, and you're left with the crunchy
biscuit, a meaty biscuit basically, but you take the
flour out. It doesn't work well.
Flour, that's carbohydrate. And so you want to make kibble
without that. That's hard.
No one's ever really done that and it took us a year to figure
out how to do it and we did a bunch of things.

(46:14):
But one of the things that you already alluded to is it made
them really small. You need a lot of binding to
hold together a big carbohydratething.
Well, we'll make our small, somefolks in some companies that
will try to tell you big dog, big kibble, small dog, small
kibble. And like, it seems a little
juvenile to me, but I could tellyou, my 170 LB Saint Bernard

(46:34):
eats our kibbles, even they're really small.
If I could make them with 0% carbohydrate, I would.
That is what I believe is optimal.
If you want the gold standard. Money is no object.
Convenience is no object. You shouldn't feed our product.
You should feed a complete and balanced all meat raw diet to
your dog. Full stop.
But if that is a concession, thedifference between the gold

(46:55):
standard and us is much smaller than the difference between the
gold standard and a shitty raw diet.
There are, alas, raw diets out there that are 40% carbohydrate
too. The specter of raw has become so
synonymous with healthy that there there are folks taking
advantage of that as a business practice where they're like, we

(47:18):
make a raw thing too, But the thing that's good about raw
diets historically is more protein, less carbohydrate.
Unscrupulous folks have propped up lots of products that are
raw, but it's 40% carbohydrate. And so the difference between
those who probably way bigger difference between US and raw
started selling it in 2017. We're recording in early 2025.
Now we've got 10s of thousands of customers.

(47:39):
Personally, my order of priorities and what moves the
needle the most nutritionally after is this toxic and is this
going to give my dog a vitamin deficiency?
If it's not complete and balanced, you can reliably say
it's got the right amount of vitamin D, vitamin A, all that
kind of stuff. That's more important than
protein and carbide ratio because you don't want a
deficiency disease. If you got those bases covered,

(48:01):
dog wants to eat it, it's not toxic and it's not going to give
it a vitamin deficiency. Protein to carbohydrate ratio is
the most important. At the risk of being on a
soapbox a little bit here, if you go around your human
nutrition food store, Natural Grocers, Whole Foods, you look
at packaged foods and what kindsof concepts language folks are
using to sell healthier for you foods, you'll find that they

(48:23):
don't look like the ones that have become the touchstones in
the key language and the key concepts in modern pet food.
It's not the case that raw versus not raw is a major
distinction. Human nutrition scientists don't
spend any time working on that as an issue.
There are 10s of thousands of people working on macronutrient
stuff and how they do different things, but not that.
What are the ingredients? Frankly, to some degree.

(48:45):
But so much of modern nutritional human food nutrition
is macros. How many grams of protein is in
this thing? How many grams of sugar is in
this thing? What percentage of it is that?
And that's just not the case in the pet food world.
People know that there are differences in healthy versus
not healthy, but because they'redeprived of the macro
information in meaningful ways by the poor regulation, you end

(49:06):
up having people trying to come up with good proxies for what
they already know. Grain free.
Well, grain free sounds like lowcarb.
It sounds more like what a wolf would eat.
But there are folks, once it becomes a touchstone, people
could take advantage of it. You can make a grain free dog
food with 60% carbohydrate. You can make a raw diet with 60%
carbohydrate. And so these things that are
like good rules of thumb if you don't have the macros end up

(49:29):
being the rules that we're talking about.
And it's they're good. They're good approximations,
They're good estimates. Raw makes tons of sense, grain
free in a vacuum probably somewhat better than the same
ish macros with green. But the reality is that once the
quantitative the actual numbers are on the label like they are
in chips 15 years, this conversation will look really

(49:53):
different. You can take that to the bank.
It's unquestionable in my mind that it's healthier than the
vast majority of kills, particularly for dogs with
certain diseases. Like I told you before, the
prescription only diet for dogs with diabetes. 40% carbohydrate.
Huge chunk of our customer dog has diabetes.
The vet them to feed hills metabolic.
They're on tons of insulin everyday.

(50:13):
I learned about how diabetes works and so I went looking for
a low carb dog food. I found yours.
We switched our dog. If you have a dog with diabetes,
you measure its blood sugar justlike a person you are doing that
measurement. You can see first hand real data
that will show you that our dietkeeps your dog's blood sugar
lower than Hill's Metabolic or for that matter way lower than

(50:36):
other kibbles. So those people tend to be some
of our best customers. It's just such a clear
indication because they're measuring what's going on inside
their dog's body. What about copper storage degree
disease? Dude, that's an interesting one
that frankly, I'm not sure whereI fall on it at this point.
I have some degree of worry thatlike so many issues, it's sort
of something that's getting played up by folks who have a

(50:59):
dollar to make through it. I am very involved in another
issue that's sort of tied to some of the things we talking
about, which is the scandal involving dilated cardiomyopathy
in dogs, heart disease that dogshave gotten forever but became
big national news in 2018 because the FDA said it was

(51:19):
going to start looking at whether grain free dog foods
were given dogs. This this heart disease between
that carbohydrate related stuff,figuring out a quasi nutritional
justification that points to nowjust feed hills now just feed
Royal Canin to your dog. And this sort of smells like
that to me. But I'm not educated enough,
frankly, to to weigh definitively on is this

(51:41):
something that's major concerns that's getting worse in the pet
food ecosystem because somethingabout how we're sourcing
ingredients is screwing up copper levels.
Should Afco's copper maximum come down?
I don't have a good informed opinion on that.
It's clearly a real disease thatsome dogs get, whether it's
meaningfully worse at specific, like what?

(52:04):
Like I said, where the rubber hits the road is LED Afco's
maximums for copper come down because the idea of being too
many dogs are winding up with too much copper in them.
And so I don't have a good. I'm not sure the dust has
settled on that one yet. What about you?
So I have a couple of friends who have dogs that have copper
storage disease and they have had a really hard time finding

(52:26):
foods that have a lower percentage of copper in them or
little to no copper in them. So I think it's probably just
another industry thing that probably should be regulated.
I mean, I think dog food in general should be regulated.
But the reason that I asked is because I wanted to know what
your percentage of copper in your food is so that if needed I

(52:47):
can say maybe you should try outthe the keto because it might
help you. It's not after has rules that
are like you can't put this muchmore copper in your dog food
because there's science that says that's bad.
They're going to get someone oneof these diseases or another.
And I know we comply with those because I look at the
nutritional profile of every dogfood batch that we produce.

(53:08):
But as does it qualify as a low copper food?
That's what those people are looking for is something that's
very low in copper content because it's an essential
nutrient for dogs too. AFCO is a minimum for copper as
well. So if you got to have some of it
in there, whether ours would be a perfect fit for the person
that's trying to minimize their dog's intake of copper, I don't
think so, but I'm not 100% on it.

(53:29):
OK. Well, it's definitely something
worth looking at. I think that anybody who's
looking for options should know that there are lots of options
out there. And as long as I can say safely
that you have a brand of food that is not above the amount.
You can definitely say that. It then it's definitely
something that I should let people look at.
Your dog is not going to get some kind of copper problem

(53:52):
because it eats our food. If that's part of the logic, you
don't have to worry about this is something that people are
worrying about, that kind of thing.
If your dog has diabetes and you're currently feeding Hills
Metabolic, you need to switch basically is the bottom on an
all meat diet that you make yourself.
And before we got on the phone, you're telling me about some of
the social media stories you're putting together recently where
you're going to a butcher and chopping up.

(54:14):
Yeah, cow organs and dehydratingthem.
Go do that or choose our product.
If you don't want to do that, buy a raw diet that's all meat,
not one that's 40% carbs. Just switch.
You have to. It will save you so much money
on insulin and it's so much better for your dog.
Let's talk about the grain thingfor a second.
I would like to go a little bit more into that because this is a
conversation that somehow I keepcoming back to, like you said,

(54:37):
going back to nature, going backto the natural world.
Dogs are not out there just digging around for rice, right?
You can't. It's like, here's the thing
about want to know something about grains?
Whether you're a dog or a person, you can't digest them
until they're cooked. OK?
Full stop. A dog is not taking stock a week
to cook it. Think about what that means in
evolutionary term. Cooking food is not something

(54:59):
that has been around for a long time.
It's like the idea that anyone that understands anything about
science, let alone the people you're supposed to be trusting,
couldn't go your dog needs to eat grains or its heart doesn't
develop correctly is just being a moron.
That is so obviously wrong but it's still a thing.

(55:20):
You will find people saying straight face.
That's crazy. It's wild to me just how much
people don't think about the common sense things like that,
especially in regards to dog food and how simple it could be.
So if you could tell somebody this is the most obvious raw
diet that you could give your dog, it doesn't matter how much

(55:40):
it costs. If you were going to do it
yourself, if you were going to go to the butcher and you were
going to buy the meat and the bone and the organ and the
sardines, do you know what you would feed if you were going to
feed an all? Around, well, I'll tell you the
things I know are micronutrient deficiency are real, that that
is an issue that you can't just sweep under the rug and be like,
Nah, I'm not going to worry about that.

(56:02):
I'm going to give them a lot of protein, some fat, and the rest
is fine. That's not a sufficient
approach. I know also that organs, the
secondary organs, skeletal muscle, tend to be the places
packed with those kinds of micronutrients.
I would not feel confident enough going into the butcher
and being like, give me this oneand this one because I feel good

(56:25):
about that's going to do micronutrient.
I'm not saying by any stretch that I'm well reasoned in that
approach, but I presently I would have to do homework.
What I learned about liver is that you have to be careful how
much liver you feed because you can actually give your dog
toxicity levels of vitamin A if you give them too much liver.

(56:47):
So it's things like that. And again, all of this
information is just all over theplace on the Internet.
So it's so hard to decide. Should we feed bra?
Should we supplement it with some sort of kibble?
And this again where gall of theconfusion comes in and why I
keep bringing in people to talk about dog food because it is so
hard to figure it out. I don't feed my dogs raw because

(57:09):
I have a dog that has pancreatitis.
And I don't think it's fair to give one dog a raw diet and the
other diet, not raw diet. In my head, that's not fair.
Would they know the difference? Probably because you can smell
the difference, right? They know the difference.
That's those natural instincts start kicking in there.
So I have decided to accommodateby dehydrating tracheas, livers,

(57:30):
kidneys, heart, things like thatsupplement in and make it safer
for the dog that does have pancreatitis but benefit from
those nutrients and then balanceit out with our other diets,
which your food has become part of our diet because we use it as
our training. That is a good motivator.
You need a high value treat that's healthy for your dog.

(57:51):
And This is why the whole process of dehydrating start is
because I started looking at theingredients in my training treat
and I'm spending $20.00 for a bag of training treats that's
full of carbohydrate and wheat and flour and all of this stuff
that's not good for your dog. And I'm spending $20 every time
I buy a bag of it. And instead I go to the butcher

(58:11):
and I spend $20 and I get 20 lbsof organ meat that's probably
going to last me six 7-8 months if I cut it all up into tiny
little pieces after I dehydrate.It remember, this is something I
know you've thought about this, but one thing that makes raw,
not raw dehydrated, but raw different from kibble or
dehydrated products is the moisture content.

(58:33):
Meat has 70 plus percent moisture typically.
So your garden variety raw diet is going to be something like
that 70 plus percent moisture, whereas kibble and other things
that have been dehydrated in some kind of capacity or less
than 10% moisture. So that difference in weight,
you'll see. I clearly got a good deal
regardless, But don't forget that 70% of that 20 lbs is water

(58:56):
and it's going to come out. So you're going to be left with
3 lbs. Three pounds is still a shit
load of meat to feed your dog. Right now it's 5 gallon bags
full of frozen parts in my freezer.
Here's what I think in terms of what to figure out how to feed
your dog. First of all, recognize the
nutrition is not the only issue.We talked about some that are

(59:16):
really important for people budget real deal.
However, don't forget that the junkiest human food you can
possibly come up with is four orfive times as much on a per
calorie basis as dog food. One of the reasons it became
such an industry standard is you'll keep your dog alive,
it'll satisfy short term nutritional needs if it's

(59:36):
formulated correctly, it's shelfstable, and it's absurdly
inexpensive. So people's sense of cheap
versus expensive is informed by that being the norm.
If you switch your dog from the healthiest kibble, my kibble, to
McDonald's chicken Nuggets, yourdog food budget goes through the
roof. Also, why are people comfortable
spending $18 at McDonald's on themselves but not comfortable

(59:59):
spending $18.00 on their dog to feed them something that's
healthy and sustainable? Yeah, sure, my emotional
motivation. I love my dogs and I like dogs
generally. I like meeting new dogs.
Some are cuter than others to me.
I like them all. They're interesting to me, But
the reality of my professional life is mostly informed by the

(01:00:20):
feel good factor of helping people.
Because I know people really do love their dog and so I'm really
a you do you. It's your dog.
I know you take your responsibilities towards that
animal more seriously than I do.As long as you're making the
best decision you can, that's what I strive for.
I have plenty of places in my life where I feel like what the
heck is wrong with people, but it tends not to be that people

(01:00:42):
could just do this better for their dogs.
I sympathize, but it is what it is.
Multiple issues. Economics is one of them.
Sustainability is one of them. Sustainability is obviously an
important thing. How to make that work with
hundreds of millions of pets around is a challenge.
And then manufacturing process. You want to feed it as close to

(01:01:02):
its natural environment as possible.
If you give me exact same macrosraw and kibble, I'll choose the
raw. If you give a dog the exact same
protein, carbohydrate, fat content, kibble raw, and you
measure its blood sugar, your insulin levels, they're going to
be identical. Virtually identical, if not
identical. Whereas if you take a dog from a
40% carbohydrate raw diet to my kibble, his blood sugar looks

(01:01:25):
completely different. Macros really move the needle.
There's a reason why the vast majority of the thousands of
human nutritional scientists in the world focus on that.
Of course dogs and people shouldn't eat the same foods.
Of course not, but we can agree on the constituent building
blocks, the concepts that we're playing with.
It's weird that so much on the doggy side is about stuff that

(01:01:49):
none of the much more sophisticated human nutritional
community is looking at. That's weird to me.
There's something up with that, and it's the labeling, so that's
my hierarchy within that. Your dog's going to eat it.
It's going to tolerate it. Well.
Not every dog. Some dogs have weird digestion.
They shit weird and it's not theright food for you.
Dog cute after it eats the food.Not the right choice for you,

(01:02:09):
but short that toxic, not toxic.OK, micronutrients are where
they need to be. And then as much protein as
little carbide as possible. I think the carbohydrate
information is really important because I don't think the people
not on the land or realize it's not on the label.
And now that we know we're goingto be seeing this change and
hopefully it's going to change things because there are so many

(01:02:31):
people who look at labels that labels are so important to them,
that once we start seeing these breakdowns, I think that people
are going to wait a second. I am uncomfortable.
You mentioned earlier looking atthe ingredient list and looking
at the first few ingredients andmaking sure that they are
certain things pretty good proxyfor what the macros are going to
be. But the problem is with the

(01:02:51):
imprecise things is they're not bad, but the industry figures
out how to game them. You probably talk to folks about
ingredient splitting, which is this concept in pet food
marketing where the brand knows that the consumer is going to
look at the ingredient list and go, what are the first three
ingredients? So they take instead of just
chicken on the label, they're going to break it out into any
individual part of chicken that they're supplied.

(01:03:13):
They don't have to list the percentage currently.
Don't have to list the percentage exactly.
Those things have been around long enough, and they've been
reasonably good guides for people to make what are truly
healthy decisions. But they've also been around
long enough that the producers can game.
And so they're not perfect. And you're going to, at this day
and age, you're going to fall victim to them.
I put on presentations for our shareholders, investors a lot.

(01:03:33):
I have a slide that I show them the highest protein, lowest
carb, every kind of packaged food under the sun from ice
cream, cereal, protein mix, chips, energy bars, everything.
Water. There's literally a water.
You go to the pet food store, you'll see lots of stuff about
source of ingredients. You'll see lots of stuff about
wholesome, natural, holistic. You'll see people looking at

(01:03:55):
ingredient labels, but you don'tsee this many grams of protein,
this many grams of carbohydrate.And that's weird.
It's weird. It's different than how
nutritional science looks at things.
It's different how consumers behave in nutrition world.
And so it'll change. It makes me hopeful that the
education piece has been going to come in and more people are
going to change and we're going to X out some of the issues that

(01:04:17):
we're currently having. Yeah, but just to make sure I
leave you on a down note in caseyou feel too optimistic.
Dogs, alas, live super short lives.
That's the thing that I always talk about is like rock solid.
Certain about the direction thatall these changes are taking
table that accumulates makes it harder for vets to deny stuff.
The arc of Justice Ben's there'sa quote.

(01:04:38):
Well, it's something like that, but we're moving in the right
direction and I believe that. But unfortunately you're talking
about generational type change for it to be a big deal.
I've alluded to smoking a lot during this talk, right?
And the history of smoking in the United States.
Once Upon a time, everybody's right.
Nobody realizes bad. With their kids in cars.
There were national ad campaignswith a guy in a white lab coat

(01:05:01):
that said more doctors smoke Camels.
That was an ad that was successful enough to be a
national ad campaign for camp. People didn't realize it was bad
and it was a good product in some ways because it made people
addicted to it and they wanted to buy more of it.
In 1959, after a lot of scientific work was conducted,
Surgeon General of the United States, the highest scientific
figure in the country, came out and said cigarettes cause lung

(01:05:23):
cancer. Watch out, people.
You're going to, if you do this thing, you're going to get lung
cancer, huge deadly disease. By that point, the science was
so unequivocal that you had the surgeon general of the United
States saying that rates of smoking in the United States did
not begin to drop until 2 decades have passed.
Now, that's an addictive product.
And so it is the case that there's a lag.

(01:05:44):
But these things take time. If you take carbs out of Nestle
Purina's business model, the company fails.
Period pills, done. It is an existential threat.
Those are companies with more money than all the rest of us
combined. It's not easy to beat them at
that. Something that's an existential
threat. But unfortunately some dogs
won't get lived to see it. But you can make the right
decision for your dog today if you believe.

(01:06:06):
Get scientifically literate, listen to shows like yours, and
you make better decisions. A perfect place to end this is
you can start today. You can make better choices
going for your dog forward from here and ask questions about
nutrition. If you have questions about
nutrition, there are so many people out there that I can give
you connections to, including Daniel here so that you can talk

(01:06:27):
to them about nutrition so that you can understand this whole
topic a little bit better. So, Daniel, what would you like
to leave the list? Oh, I've given this some
thought. OK.
And I give it 3 bullets. OK, Is that OK?
Yeah, OK. I don't want to break your
format. So the first is the primary
nutritional issue to keep in mind is protein to carbohydrate

(01:06:48):
ratio. You want as much protein as low
carbohydrate as possible. If you're buying a dog food over
the counter at a store, a packaged food, you can feel
reasonably confident that the micronutrient stuff is all in
line well enough that you don't have to worry about it.
So the first quality that if you're interested in optimizing
nutrition, most protein, least carbohydrate, that's the first
thing. Second thing, this is going to
strike people as being an exaggeration, hyperbolic.

(01:07:11):
I honestly don't believe that itis remotely so, and carrying out
as we speak a survey designed toprove that point up.
The biggest stuff that matters for your dog, nutrition related
health. Your vet is not going to get it
right. They're going to get it wrong.
So far, we're more than 100 veterinarian and veterinary

(01:07:32):
technician responses deep on this big survey we've been
carried out that has simple factual statements about the
scientific record and has agree or disagree answer
possibilities. So it'll say something like
obesity is more than 50% of the dogs in the country, yes or no,
that type of question. And I will tell you that the
stuff that matters 3/4 are getting wrong.

(01:07:54):
You're getting straight up bad information.
I believe that to be the case. And yeah, it might sound like
conspiracy theory to people, andthat's that's OK.
But feel, at least I need to saythat I feel as a science guy and
as an evidence guy, it's the case.
It's true. And then the third thing I'll
leave people with is the best thing you can do to get better
at making decisions for your dogis to become scientifically

(01:08:17):
literate. Be able to hear a claim from a
guy on a show like yours and go,I'm going to figure out if he's
telling me the truth or not because you have the resources.
If you know the concepts and thetools, they exist.
Now we live in the Internet age.It's incredible.
You can find the scientific record for yourself.
You can look at it, you can analyze.
Not everybody has the skill set to do it.

(01:08:37):
Developing that skill set has a tremendous amount of value for
you and your dog, and your dog unfortunately can't do it on its
own. Even the smartest border collie
in the world will never be able to learn how to analyze the
scientific claims. But you can't.
So learn. Learn how to be scientifically
literate at least somewhat. Don't trust me.
Don't trust your next guest. Definitely don't trust your vet.

(01:08:59):
Figure out how to run the answers down for yourself and
understand that if you are lazy about that process, you're going
to get the wrong answer. Doesn't mean you're just going
to Google it. You have to get the skill set on
your own, otherwise you're not going to make bad decisions
because you're going to be subject to being misled by.
I always tell everybody, do yourresearch, do your research.
That's why we talk to so many different people.

(01:09:20):
That's why we talk about so manydifferent topics.
Well, Danielle, I know that we have many other things to talk
about, so we're going to have toinvite you to come back to the
podcast. I love it and I am so excited to
chat with you today. It was really wonderful having
you here. So thank you so much for being
here today and we will see you guys next week on Straight Up

(01:09:41):
Dog Talk. Straight up Dog Talk was created
by Emily Breslin. It is edited and produced under
the supervision of Straight Up Dog Talk, LLC and Emily Breslin.
If you're enjoying this podcast,follow or subscribe and be sure
you don't miss an episode and leave us a review on your
favorite podcast platform. Looking for more honest and
relatable dog content? Check out our sister show,

(01:10:02):
Unpacked with Jerry Sheriff and Madison Simpson.
Thanks for listening to StraightUp Doc Top.
See you next week.