Debunking Pet Nutrition Myths: Unveiling the Pet Food Industry's Influence and Exploring the Ketogenic Solution with Daniel Shulof

We’re back from a quick summer break with this chat with science writer, entrepreneur, activist, and pet parent Daniel Schulof. Daniel has made it his mission to expose misinformation about pet nutrition. Listen in as we chat about how Daniel's transition from lawyer to pet parent led him to delve into the world of animal nutrition. We’ll dive deep into the murky waters of commercial pet food and learn how its carbohydrate-heavy composition contributes to pet obesity and illness.

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Dogs, Dogma, and Dog Food
KetoNatural Pet Food

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Dogs make the best companions for humans. This podcast aims to help make humans better companions for their dogs. Welcome to the Baroo Podcast, a modern lifestyle podcast for dogs and their people. I'm your host, charlotte Bain. I've been caring for other people's dogs for more than 15 years and, while I've learned a lot in my career, I definitely don't know at all, so I've collected an ever-evolving roster of amazing dog people and I learn new things from them all the time. Hi you guys. Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of the Baroo Podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:51

In this episode, I chat with science writer, entrepreneur, activist and pet parent, daniel Shuloff. Daniel has made it his mission to expose scientific misinformation as it relates to our pet's nutrition. We chat about how Daniel's transition from lawyer to pet parent led him to delve into the world of pet nutrition and obesity. We dive deep into the murky waters of the carbohydrate-heavy nature of most commercial pet food and its contribution to pet obesity and wellness. So let's jump into the chat. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you, because you are essentially a pet parent who has really taken on big kibble. I guess, for lack of a better term, you found a passion and a calling in really exposing the misinformation that's out there when it comes to nutrition and our pets, especially as a dog podcast, especially our dogs. Even so, much so that you wrote a book in 2016, dogs, dogma and Dog Food.

Speaker 2: 2:08

Yeah, well, it's Dogs, dog Food and Dogma. But Okay, sorry, the right constituent part.

Speaker 1: 2:15

Yeah, which is really a deep dive into exposing some of the information out there and really looking into the science on what our pets should be eating for optimal nutrition and health and taking on the obesity epidemic that is very prevalent, especially in our dogs in this country. So first I'd like to know what made you leave your job as a lawyer to dive into the pet space. What was the inspiration behind?

Speaker 2: 2:41

that when I get asked that question, which I get asked a lot, I guess there are three things I typically point to. So one is, of course I was raised with dogs. My mother bred dogs and so I always had dogs as a kid. But that's different than being an adult, and at the time for me I was a single adult. I was like you said. I was working as a lawyer, living in a big city.

Speaker 2: 3:07

I got this dog it was kind of a lonely existence, I guess you'd say and so I had a very close bond with this dog that I got. He came to occupy a big part of my life and so of course I grew very invested in trying to do good by him, trying to make good decisions for him and give him a good life and all the rest. So that's undeniably. If you take that out of the equation, of course, I would never have gotten into dog food stuff. Second is, over the course of trying to understand how to do that well for him, I became aware in an increasingly significant way of the problem of obesity among pets in the United States, in the Western world, and it kind of motivated me as well because it seemed it was kind of unbelievable to me and it seemed like there was a story there, like basically the facts I always tell folks when I'm trying to distill the gravity of the epidemic, the obesity epidemic. I'm like these are two facts born out in the science. Number one obesity is more common than healthy body composition in dogs in the United States. So like if you pick the next dog you see on the street, you're more likely to find an overweight one, obese one, than one. That is what's thought of as a healthy weight, typically so incredibly common. On the other hand, the second fact that I like to highlight is that obesity isn't just like a little bit bad for dogs and, oh, we should be mindful of trying to keep them lean. It's unquestionably the single condition that has impact on lifespan that you can do the most about as a pet owner and it's like incredibly bad. It's not like a marginal thing, it's like when they've done folks have done these kind of studies where they follow dogs from the time they're born until the time they die. So these long studies where they follow litter as a puppy's all the way around. They look at how long the fat ones live and how long the thin ones live. They look at when they get diseases and basically where it boils down to is being moderately overweight. So like, not colossal.

Speaker 2: 5:13

But like you listen to this and you're like, yeah, I guess my dog could lose a few pounds. Here's the hard. But true, you know, this is the truth is that it's worse for that animal than it is for a human being to be a smoker. From the time they're 18 years old until the time of the day they die. There's worse for a dog than a lifetime of smoking is for a person. And so understanding those two facts and knowing that they coexist like blew my brain and sort of like I just couldn't like. Oh, I love my dog so much and I know that people spend so much money on their dogs, how on earth could this possibly be real? And it was real. And then I started to get into the story and try to understand what that is. And that was the tipping point that pushed me to make that my career, to let me, to you know, write this book and leave my job.

Speaker 1: 5:58

Right. So for people who may not understand why obesity is such a problem for our pets and the impact that it has on their health just to name a few of the ways that obesity can help can impact our pets is just a few extra pounds can impact their joints, can impact their muscles, can impact their organs, their heart, not to mention things like diabetes and all sorts of different issues. So even a little bit of extra weight on our pups is a lot for them to carry around.

Speaker 2: 6:27

Yeah, there may be more things that I'm not even touching on, that you found in your research, but well, look, it's like they're kind of two, that two groups of what are called comorbidities that tend to follow along with obesity. So there's some things that are caused some bad things. You know their comorbidities, bad things that happen when you get fat, and for a long time the scientific community kind of didn't they. We understood that fat people, fat dogs, tend not to live as long, but we kind of didn't understand why. And it was like the types of theories that were out there were basically, like you know, the fat crowds out the other internal organs was like that level of guesswork. Basically, what came to be realized over time is that one of the particularly bad things about fat is that it's like a very metabolically active tissue. It actively secretes hormones and some of those hormones do bad things to your body, do bad things to your dog's body, they're inflammatory and so like if you've got a lot of fat in your body corresponding a lot of these hormones that do bad things and within the body. So some things obesity itself having the fat tissue in the body causes.

Speaker 2: 7:41

And another one is like I think you highlighted a second ago, like joint problems, like arthritis, like carrying all that weight around.

Speaker 2: 7:47

That's a different mechanism, but it's another consequence being heavier puts additional stress on them, the joints, whereas there are other types of comorbidities that tend to run alongside obesity but aren't actually caused by it. They're just caused by the same things that tend to cause obesity, and diabetes, in people particularly, is like. A glaring example of that is like. You know, it's my eyes, the evidence is as rock solid as it could be that carbohydrate is kind of the fundamental cause of fattening, of obesity in animals, and it tends to also produce the metabolic changes that lead to diabetes. And so, like those two things not the fat itself that causes diabetes, it plays a role as well, but it's like these are things that tend to run together. They're both symptoms of the same problem and so, yeah, you're just touching, touching the tip of the iceberg and you talk about the ones that you've highlighted. It's like basically, anything that is prevalent in anything is bad for dogs, it's common these days tends to run alongside obesity.

Speaker 1: 8:47

Okay, so why is there an obesity epidemic? What is contributing to the obesity other than our love? And you know, we feed ourselves, we feed our dogs. Some of us just overfeed our dogs out of love or emotions, just like we do ourselves, etc. What are some of the? What is the main contributing factor? You?

Speaker 2: 9:07

think the so called conventional wisdom, the wisdom that I was, that was told to me when I first was becoming aware of this problem, and that is still sort of what you would call the mainstream perspective on the cause of America's pet obesity epidemic, because it's widely recognized as an epidemic like if you go to any veterinarian in the country and you go, what's the biggest nutritional problem among dogs in the Western world today, they'll say obesity, any single one of them. But there I believe there ought to be disagreement about what the cause of it is. So the conventional wisdom is essentially a very pet owner focused one. It's like we as owners either, like you said, can't. We're too weak willed. Essentially we know it's bad but we can't help ourselves. The dog wants to eat. We give it more than it really ought to eat. It gets fat. It's one Another pet owner focused explanation is kind of a little bit insulting.

Speaker 2: 10:02

It's like too dumb, like we don't appreciate just how bad this problem is. We think it's cute to have a chubby dog, but in reality it's very serious and if only we were better informed we would do something about it. Second one, and then I think the third one that you sometimes hear is kind of like lazy, also sort of insulting, where it's just like well look, we're an increasingly sedentary society. We have increasingly, you know, removed exercise from our lives. That trickles down into how we take care of our pets, and so those three things together produce a nation of obese dogs.

Speaker 2: 10:41

That didn't add up for me when I learned about that. It didn't ring true. I didn't have any reason, any evidence to say, oh, it definitely isn't true. But I like didn't make sense to me. I loved my dog, I'm a very active person, I'm a very involved person and until I read about the significance of obesity, I would never have thought that my own dog was like fatter than the veterinary community said it ought to be. But it was, and I was just like how I'm to? There's no way that, like someone, I have a graduate degree and I have enough money to take care of my dog, how could I have all people as like I was offended by it.

Speaker 1: 11:20

You're healthy, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 11:22

And so, and so I dug into it more and I believe that there there is a big part of the story, if not the prime mover in the story is something that's not being really taught in veterinary school and is not part of what you would call. It's increasingly part of the mainstream discourse, but it's not the conventional wisdom that's being taught veterinary school, which is that there's essentially a little dietary part.

Speaker 1: 11:45

Well, they only have. And what I've been told like one day on nutrition, oh it's quite bad.

Speaker 2: 11:49

Yeah, it's like the the um in my book. I highlight a one particular example. You know I went to every veterinary school in the country. I looked at every curriculum that every veterinary sounds like a bigger job than it is. It's only at time, 26 schools, so it's not that. Oh, really, yeah, yeah, and I didn't know that.

Speaker 2: 12:09

Yeah, it's not that many and it's like maybe it's increased marginally since then. This is my book was written seven years ago now. The first fact about like what they're taught is insane, which is that, like in a third of the veterinary schools in the country, you're overstated. You don't have to take nutrition. You can graduate and get your degree without taking any nutrition course whatsoever. Interesting If you do have to take it, if it is part of the core curriculum. In almost every case you don't deal with a textbook.

Speaker 2: 12:40

That's not part of what is used in the class. What's used is a little pamphlet that kind of covers. You know my book is like 400 pages long and it's about the one problem of obesity in the one species of dogs. Okay, and I'm a lay person, ostensibly not a veterinarian. The veterinary community is taught about not nutrition with limited applicability or obesity, all nutrition issues anything that food can do to an animal, for all species. Okay, like everything from a snake to an owl to a dog in a pamphlet that's, like you know, 40 pages long and that I mean it's just very glaring. The quality, you know you're talking about two credit courses and so I have two main beefs with like how nutrition is taught in veterinary schools in the modern world, but one of them unquestionably is. This is a subject that is much more impactful than the amount of attention it's getting in the core curricula.

Speaker 1: 13:43

So anyway. So yeah, it's unbelievable. I mean, we're just now making the connection between what we eat and humans and health and what we put into our bodies, right, so it's kind of not just, but we're a little bit late in the game. Yeah, I mean, there's a thing in it. Wow, that's their statement.

Speaker 2: 14:03

And I think that that's the case in the veterinary world too. But the problem and that I believe is the more significant problem actually is not just that veterinarians aren't given enough instruction about nutrition, even though that is an issue and I think most veterinarians that I talk to in my career will say that that was their experience at vet schools. They didn't feel like they were taught enough. The bigger problem for my money is that what information they are taught comes out of industry. That industry, the pet food industry plays too active, too influential a role in shaping what veterinarians are taught, and there's active misinformation, real, definable, evidence-based manipulation of how people are thinking about important topics, where literally what the studies say is misrepresented in the textbook In a way that shapes veterinarians.

Speaker 2: 15:06

It's like if you are a vet that graduates from vet school and goes I don't feel I wasn't taught enough. I feel like I got a lot of information, it was good. You're going to emerge with a very confident understanding, right, you're going to say, unlike many pet owners, I went to school for this, I got a graduate degree, I'm a veterinarian, I learned about nutrition, I know a lot. But if, over the course of that, you're being taught information that someone is deliberately teaching you. That's not accurate. Not only do you not know the truth, you are actively preaching the wrong thing, if that makes sense. You're confident. You have every right to be confident in your own knowledge, and you're persuading people about something that's been misrepresented to you, and so you're passing that through, and it's hugely destructive.

Speaker 1: 15:52

Can you give an example about something that is that veterinarians are being taught? That is misrepresentation of even the science that they're given.

Speaker 2: 16:02

Yes, ma'am. So the most glaring thing for my money. When I started my book I lived in Atlanta. I came of age in Atlanta and I say ma'am sometimes.

Speaker 1: 16:13

I was like. Now I'm at that age where people call me ma'am no, that's what it means.

Speaker 2: 16:18

If you're not from the South that can be the reaction. It's like oh, there's an age with this patient here. For anybody that's listening, I'm a bald. I am not a young man, but it's just not an age-related expression in certain parts of the world. I got it Okay.

Speaker 2: 16:35

The primary thrust of my knowledge about pet food issues ties to obesity, and there's a body of research in the world of veterinary nutrition that is tough to develop in the human nutrition world because of how humans live compared to how dogs live, which are what are called isochloric feeding trials. It's a fancy way of saying the following we're going to take two groups, two groups of people or two groups of dogs and we're going to feed them exactly the same number of calories. So that's isochloric. It's like the same calories. Both groups get exactly the same number of calories, but we're going to feed them calories from different sources. One group is going to get more protein and less carbohydrate. The other group is going to get more carbohydrate and less protein. But because carbohydrate and protein both contain the same amount of metabolizable energy, they end up getting exactly the same number of calories In people. That's hard to do because people want to. They don't want to eat exactly rationed food every day for a long period of time, the interesting things start to happen to the data. Imagine if you were recruited to be in a study where eight weeks you're going to eat exactly the same thing every day, that we're going to monitor your lifestyle. You got to live in what's called a metabolic ward to make sure your activity levels are the same as the comparative groups. It's very hard to do. People don't like to do it. In the doggie and kitty world it's really easy. The dogs and cats are very used to eating the same thing every day. It's not at all difficult to be very careful about feeding them exactly the same thing every day, exactly the same number of calories, and it's not hard.

Speaker 2: 18:19

The most veterinary nutrition research involves lab house animals. It's like they're raised in this kind of environment at baseline. It's really easy to do and so it's been done maybe a half dozen different times, six, seven different times. Scientists have gotten together and said we're going to figure out how different calories impact obesity. We're going to feed these two groups exactly the same number of calories, keep them in exactly the same lifestyle and just change up all kinds of calories to see what happens Every single time that they've done it. Whether it's dogs or cats, the same exact thing happens, even though they're feeding the dogs and cats exactly the same number of calories.

Speaker 2: 18:57

The animals that are getting fed primarily carbohydrate getting more carbohydrate and less protein get fatter, get considerably fatter. And the dogs that are getting exactly the same number of calories but less carbohydrate, don't get fat. And what those studies kind of collectively show, there's literally never been a single time that scientists have sat down, done that work and gotten any other result. Never once have they sat down and been like, well, we gave them the same number of calories and they wound up the same. It's like it is unquestionably the case that when it comes to how dogs fatten, all calories are not created equal. The very first thing you will read about obesity and about carbohydrate and protein when you go to pick up a veterinary nutrition textbook is all calories are created equal for purposes of fattening. All calories are the same. The amount of calories should be reduced does not speak to carbohydrates uniquely fattening role at all, and that's misinformation.

Speaker 1: 19:58

Right, so you think carbohydrates are. You are saying that carbohydrates are the biggest contributing factor to the obesity epidemic in our pets.

Speaker 2: 20:08

Yes, so yep. Basically, carbohydrate is the backbone of the modern day pet food industry. That kibble products, which constitute something like 90% of the pet food that is fed to dogs in the United States are, have traditionally been made with, primarily like the majority of the product is carbohydrate, and so the vast majority of dogs in the United States eat more carbohydrate than protein and eat more carbohydrate than fat, and the majority of them eat more carbohydrate than protein and fat combined. Okay, you take that reality and combined it with the fact that the science is unequivocal there's no room for doubt about it that carbohydrate is more fattening for these animals than the other nutrients are, and it's not hard to see how you can wind up with the nation of overweight and obese dogs. So, yeah, I very squarely placed the blame for the obesity epidemic on as a nutritional matter on the doorstep of carbohydrate.

Speaker 2: 21:14

Carbohydrate is the fundamental cause of obesity. I say this all the time, and I have yet to hear anybody offer any kind of evidence to the contrary. I don't think that you could make. I don't believe that there's a single case ever that has been observed where a dog doesn't need any carbohydrate and can still develop obesity. I think you literally can't make it happen without that. I'm yet to see it ever happen, and it doesn't happen in other species, really. So, yeah, I think there are cultural factors that are as significant a cause of the obesity epidemic, that have to do with why so many dogs eat carbohydrate. But nutritionally speaking, yes, carbohydrate is the fundamental cause of obesity in dogs.

Speaker 1: 21:58

And there's really I think there's been some science to show that it's just not biologically appropriate for dogs. There's like no, they don't need carbohydrates, right.

Speaker 2: 22:06

Oh no, no, so this is a common, just interesting. So like, yeah, so think about it. You're running a big, big company that sells carbohydrate stuffed products. You've got you're very motivated to try to like basically prop up the reputation of the dietary carbohydrate, and so one of the ways that that is done is by, of course, convincing people that it's perfectly natural for dogs to eat carbohydrate. But when you drill into the regulations, like what you see, the regulatory regime that governs the sale of pet food in the US is like a relatively science based thing. It's like there's a big fat book. That is all the regulations are based on, and it provides a good scientific justification for every kind of rule like how much protein the diet has to contain and what ratio of micronutrients, all that kind of stuff. It's not bad.

Speaker 1: 22:57

Is that AFCO? Is that like the AFCO?

Speaker 2: 23:00

Well, AFCO is the organ that does it, but they look at these two different bodies of research that summarize and kind of every once in a while update the body, like the all of the scientific community knows about nutrition and dogs and cats.

Speaker 2: 23:12

And so, yeah, that's like basically where AFCO gets its rules from. For the most part it's nutritional guidelines, not like all the like what you can and can't say on the label, but like what's got to be in the product comes from science. And so, because the science is so clear, afco doesn't require pet foods to include carbohydrate, because carbohydrate is not in any way an essential part of the diet for dogs and cats, unlike protein. If you take protein out of your dog's diet, it will get sick. It will literally develop like starvation. There are vital things that protein is needed for within the normal functioning body. Take it out dog gets sick. Fat same exact thing. All manner of vitamins and minerals same exact thing. If you take carbohydrate out of the diet, that does not happen. There are plenty of dogs that, to this you know, walk around every day and don't eat any carbohydrate. And perhaps more persuasively, a big part of my not a big part, but a meaningful kind of beginning of the book takes for me when I was writing.

Speaker 2: 24:17

My book takes place against the backdrop of Yellowstone National Park. I went and lived at what's called the Yellowstone Wolf Project, which is this place where really legit wolf biologists study wolves in the wild, and what they will tell you about the relationship between dogs and wolves is that they're as genetically similar as two different species can be. They're basically one. In a lot of ways they're literally one species because they can interbreed. They are dog wolf hybrids in a way that there is no such thing as, like a gorilla, orangutan hybrid. You know what I mean. Like that's how species are off the fence. They're very similar. They follow the same genetic lineage for 99.9% of their evolution. Only in that final tiny bit did dogs evolve the ability to digest carbohydrate at all Like wolves. To this day, wild wolves eat 0.0% digestible carbohydrate. And one of the ways that you can tell you can look at what they eat and you can figure that out.

Speaker 2: 25:19

But it's also case their physiology can't do it. They don't make a salivary enzyme called amylase. Amylase is an enzyme that is blind and spit and it's like you make it. I make it too and it's like if you put a piece of bread, if you take a piece of bread and hold it in your mouth for a while, it'll start to taste sweet. And what's going on? There is the chains of carbohydrate molecule. The complex carbs in the bread are getting broken down by the amylase into individual molecules of glucose, which is sugar, and starts to taste like sugar. And that's basically the process that has to go on in order for long carbohydrate chains to become things that go into the blood. Wolves don't make the stuff in any meaningful amounts and so they can't digest carbohydrate. So we know that wolves, for the entirety of their genetic heritage, never consumed any carbohydrate. Dogs evolve the ability to digest amylase very recently, so we know they can die.

Speaker 2: 26:13

They can pull nutrition out of carbohydrate. That's not a matter of any kind of consensus. If it was, the backbone of the industry wouldn't be carbohydrate. It's obvious that they can. The problem is that they pulled too much out of it. So anyway, yes, very unnatural by any fair definition of the word for dog to eat carbohydrate. It's very common, but it's unnatural.

Speaker 1: 26:34

Right. So why do you think? Do you think it's just purely like financial for pet food to be put? Let's give some examples of carbohydrates for people who may not know exactly what. What is an example of carbohydrate? Corn wheat. What else?

Speaker 2: 26:52

So the products of modern agriculture tend to be full of what's called starch, which is a kind of carbohydrate molecule that is the common kind that you find in pet food. And so, yeah, corn, rice tubers, meaning potatoes and sweet potatoes, vegetables, to a less significant degree, can contain carbohydrate, meat products very little. So if your dog's diet is composed entirely of meat products, very little, if 0%, carbohydrate. If, on the other hand, the diet that you're feeding your dog leans more heavily into products like corn, rice potatoes, much more carbohydrate goes in. And so, oh, you mentioned this before like the why. Why is that? Why is it the case that carbohydrate is the backbone in the US pet food system? Couple of reasons. Number one is it, for a long time, like what kibble is essentially is like little nubs of, like meaty bread or like meaty pasta. Like you mix all these ingredients together, including starch, including carbohydrate, and you make a dough out of it. You cut the dough into little nuggets, just like you cut pasta noodles into individual noodles, and then you heat it up, dry it out. When you heat it up, all the like constituent parts hold, bind together, so that you have, like if you just tried to dry out your your bread dough before actually baking the bread. If that doesn't work, it just falls apart, it doesn't become an actual loaf of bread. And so then you bake it, you heat it up and that causes the ingredients to all hold together and like kibbles made like essentially exactly the same way, like just like meaty muffins, like meaty pasta or breakfast. They're all made very similarly and for a very long time, just like when you make a loaf of bread. If you don't use flour, that doesn't work. Like if you try to, I challenge you to bake a loaf of bread or a muffin without using flour. The dough just falls apart. When you heat it up it doesn't actually hold together.

Speaker 2: 29:05

And that's sort of like how kibble came to be, is like folks were making bread and then they're like oh, wow, we can put meat into this and dogs will eat it and this works really well. And so it's always been, since the 19th century, a part of the industry. It was like, wow, this works really well, we can make it the same way we make bread. It's pretty shelf stable If we dry it out, really good fit. So like historically it's always been a part of it. It's like kind of been accepted that you have to include it, and so only recently have brands figured out other ways to get it to hold together without using so much starch. So, functionally, it's always been a part of the industry Number one, number two you hit very inexpensive a calorie of meat based protein costs something like 10 times what a calorie of carb of like agriculture based carbohydrate costs.

Speaker 2: 29:54

So if you are a producer, you have a strong motive, financial motivation to use this little meat based protein and as much carbohydrate as you can get away with in there.

Speaker 2: 30:04

And then kind of the last thing is just like all these health ramifications that have come to light over the pet have come up in the been discovered in the past 30, 40 years. For a long time folks have known that the ancestors of domestic dogs never ate carbohydrate. That's not new, but tying the consumption of carbohydrate to disease is new, and so what tends to happen, just like in the history of smoking in the United States, is like industry gets really big and then the scientific community realizes that something industry is doing is bad. It becomes very difficult to turn the ship. They rather than just say, oh, okay, great, we'll just shut our business down, there's instead a big pushback period that takes years and years and years, and that's sort of where the pet food world is right now. It's like science out there. We can look it in the eye and say it's not real, but the folks that rely so heavily on it push or fight in kind of an information war.

Speaker 1: 31:06

Right? Is that why there's, like you know, a lot of companies will come out with there's like a lot of misinformation and marketing?

Speaker 2: 31:14

Oh, yeah, sure, yeah. Yeah, I fully agree with you that, like any industry, the maybe I'm a cynical person, but like to me, like the mega producers are going to push up against what the law allows. And if you make a diet that is heavy in carbohydrate, you're trying to sell it to folks who sort of intuitively even if they don't know the scientific research that I just highlighted kind of intuitively anybody goes well, dog is like wolf, dog has sharp teeth, wolf eats no carbohydrate. Like that's probably not a great look for my dog. Like people understand, like meaty equals, kind of good, like no matter what, if you're a fancy, scientifically literate consumer or if you're like somebody that buys kind of the least expensive brand you can find, just generally everybody's on board with that. So put yourself in like a producer's shoes. That's like okay, we got to sell carbohydrate stuff products, but hide it essentially from people. We got to make them think every way we can get away with that it's as uncarby as possible. That's the world that basically exists right now and unfortunately, the organization that you highlighted earlier in this conversation, afco, who's like the for folks that aren't familiar with that expression, it's the. It's a group that's called the Association of American Feed Control Officials, and it's a private organization. It's not a governmental organization, it's private, and what it does is it publishes the rules that govern how you can label pet food in the US, and the reason that a non-governmental organization is shaping the rules or like the reason that it can shape the rules is basically every year, they publish a revised set of model rules. Afco publishes model rules that they revise every year regarding the sale of pet food, the labeling of pet food, and then they're set up in a way where every individual state legislature, as a matter of course, every year, adopts AFCO's model rules. Food is largely regulated at the state level, and so every year, the legislature I don't know where you're based, but I live in Utah the Utah legislature adopts AFCO's new model rules for 2024, and that governs the sale of pet food every year. However, it's a private organization and industry plays a huge role in shaping substantively what AFCO does, and so you have very industry friendly rules, particularly surrounding the disclosure of carbohydrate content, and it allows for exactly what you're describing.

Speaker 2: 33:54

I can sell a product with a wolf on the bag, an image of a steak, a ear of corn with a red X across it meat, first ingredient, high the expression, high protein and it's 60% carbohydrate. You know what I mean. I guess that's a totally normal outcome in the world of pet food these days and the kind of most glaring specific regulation that knocks people over the head when you hear it for the first time, even though it's like part of you. It's in every kitchen America. If you sell pet food in the United States right now, you don't have to tell the consumer how much carbohydrate is in there. If you look at I don't know if you have any packaged human consumption foods around I usually have a can of Diet Coke that I'm drinking and I'll just like pop it up. I bought from the fast food instead today, so it's not have that on.

Speaker 2: 34:41

The FGAs nutrition facts panel is like the human equivalent to a quantitative nutrition panel that AFCO requires you put on pet food and the human one very reasonably includes, has mandatory information calorie content, protein content, fat content, carbohydrate content and it breaks out even carbohydrate into some some more specifics, particular kinds of carbohydrate. The doggy equivalent that AFCO requires does not require that you have to include protein, you have to include include fat. You do not have to include dietary carbohydrate. In fact at present you cannot. So I run.

Speaker 2: 35:22

Since I published a book that's about why carbohydrate is really bad for dogs, I found that a company that sells low carb dog food, and I will tell you as somebody that runs that kind of company, it is difficult to communicate the value proposition of our products to consumers legally in the modern scheme. Just to say to people our product is 90% less carbohydrate than blue buffalo or whatever. That just putting that, finding ways to get that on the package in a legally allowed way is difficult because I can't include it in the fat nutrition facts panel, what's called the guaranteed analysis panel, like AFCO has. They have just have a bunch of arcane rules that are just absurd about this. You can't. I can't use the expression low carbohydrate. That is an affirmatively barred expression in the world of pet food. If you put low carbohydrate on your bag, afco should come and get you because they just have an outright prohibition on it, and so there's a bunch of rules that are like that that basically just allow you to be super sneaky and so trusting your gut on what the label looks like is a recipe for disaster.

Speaker 2: 36:26

Unfortunately, when you're a pet food, it's a very difficult market to be a consumer in. That's very poorly regulated and yeah, there's just all sorts of folks who feel the exact thing you said, where it's like I had this conversation more times a day than I can tell you. It's just like people go obesity, real problem, I get it, but like I feed the good, I feed a good kind of food, and it's like what does that mean to you? How did you come to that feeling? And inevitably it's the same very reasonable things, like they understand the price point, what the first few ingredients are, where it's made as indicators of quality but they often aren't indicators of nutritional content.

Speaker 2: 37:05

I think that one of the reasons that pet food is relatively prehistoric when it comes to industry, like consumer protection within the industry, is that, like, the constituency that it's protecting is not all that articulate. It's like my dog, unfortunately, is not a particularly good advocate for itself at a legal level. It sort of relies on us to stand in for them and proxies for them. And you can do that, and of course people love their dogs and of course people do this, but it just adds one more chain to the like. It's hard enough to advocate for yourself, it's harder still to advocate for. And yeah, basically, as I see the world consumer unions about pet food consumption would be very valuable.

Speaker 2: 37:53

In the United States, consumer unions have a history of making real regulatory change happen and as far, there's not a meaningful one in the pet food world. I did try to create one and it does still exist, but I'll tell you it's hard. I'm reasonably good at trying to get using digital marketing tools to get people to buy our products. That's what we do, that's how our company works, and I've tried hard to make the same thing work for this nonprofit consumer union that I created called the Pet Food Consumer Rights Council. It's tough getting people to understand why it's a significant problem and why they should put their money behind it. I didn't find that that's a value proposition. I could get too many All my friends signed up, but getting wide acceptance has been very difficult Because it requires conversations like this one where it's like we've been going 40 minutes. It's a hard problem to understand. It doesn't lend itself at this stage to one sentence punchy summary that everybody can get on board with.

Speaker 2: 38:51

So, change takes time, unfortunately.

Speaker 1: 38:55

It's much more complicated than people really love. Yeah, it's like the fact that corporations and whatnot.

Speaker 2: 39:01

So my dogs have a same for Nard and, among other things, he's very jowly and he shakes. I don't know if you could just hear him apologizing for my audio.

Speaker 1: 39:14

Is that what I heard? I did hear that. No, that's fine.

Speaker 2: 39:17

His jowls being literally so loud that they could the fact that I always like to highlight sometimes you think of it as discouraging or not. I don't find it all that discouraging personally, but the Surgeon General's report on the health impacts of smoking on lung cancer came out in the late 1950s. So that was the leading scientific figure in the United States saying smoking causes lung cancer. Smoking rates in the United States did not drop until 30 years after that.

Speaker 2: 39:49

It took for that all to trickle into the public consciousness, into the regulatory system, into the scientific community. New generation of scientists that hadn't been taught information have to come into it. And it's just that stuff just takes time and it's like you're sitting in that kind of window right now in a little bit of a more difficult environment, because it's like the tobacco companies kind of control the medical school in this world. So that's the extra challenge that we've got. But yeah, so you can't stop anybody that's listening after doing good things for the dog. When you think about it on a population level, like a public veterinary health level, that's the nature of the problem we're doing.

Speaker 1: 40:30

So can we talk? What is optimum nutrition for our dogs from what you found in your science?

Speaker 2: 40:37

Yeah, I mean I guess I've got a little bit. Here's how I approach that. There's a couple of different ways. Number one is I think the best thing to tell people is what I personally do, because I'm trying to optimize my own dog's nutrition within my own lifestyle restraints, which I believe is basically what everybody's doing, right.

Speaker 1: 40:56

And that's key.

Speaker 2: 40:57

Because, unfortunately, to some degree, issues of budget and convenience are kind of to be weighed against nutritional optimization.

Speaker 2: 41:09

So for my dogs I own a dog food company Okay, like I founded a dog food company and so I feed them our products. Probably not surprisingly, that's not only a good budget decision for me, but I created the products because I believe that this is kind of the core of what is nutritionally optimal. Essentially, what the nutritional characteristics of our products are are they contain as much protein as we can get in there while the product still holds together, and as little dietary carbohydrate, until that's what makes them unique as compared to the other kinds of kibble products that you will find in the market. Or is there like 50% protein, which is typically thought of as a very high number, even though it's less than most wolves consume. And they're like 5% digestible carbohydrate, which is like 90% less than you know, essentially every brand that you can find. So for me, the way I tell people to think about beyond like this is what I do for my dogs is that, sexually speaking, I say-.

Speaker 1: 42:13

Wait, can you just we can say the name of your pet food company, keto Naturals, correct? Yes, we don't have to sidestep around it. You have a. You worked hard.

Speaker 2: 42:21

Keto Naturals pet foods. Yeah, keto Naturals, which is a reference to the ketogenic diet, which is like a kind of way of saying a low carb diet, right. And it has to go in the weeds a bit to understand, like what that means, more like technically, what keto diet means. But it's like your body produces a certain kind of metabolic substrate when you take carbs out. It makes these things called ketone bodies. So they you call it a diet that's very low in carbohydrate content, a ketogenic diet. That's sort of where the expression comes from. Now, the reason we use it in our, we call our company Keto Natural, we call our product ketona, is for the reason I mentioned before.

Speaker 2: 43:03

Like I was, I sat out there to make a very low carb pep food product and then I was bringing it to market and I was like wait, I can't call it low carb dog food, like no, that's illegal. Okay, so what do I do? Well, they left like keto diet became part of like the lexicon kind of, and they just basically sort of left the loophole and so I just like jumped all over it, because keto, to people that understand what that expression means, it's to anybody, means anything to. It means low carb too right, essentially. So that's. That's sort of why we call the brain.

Speaker 1: 43:32

I know there are many humans on a ketogenic diet. Now, right it's very popular.

Speaker 2: 43:37

Yeah it were. I mean, look it's like it's not. I myself believe in the efficacy of restricting carbohydrate intake in terms of like optimizing your own nutrition for a lot of different types of people. I myself eat a lot of carbohydrate because I'm like a very my hobby is these like long distance running type things.

Speaker 2: 44:00

And it's just like, it's a different. It depends what your goals are Like if you are a person that has struggled with your weight all your life, or you've struggled with diabetes, particularly if you take carbohydrate out of your diet. All else being equal, you are going to see positive changes, undoubtedly Like some people sugar right.

Speaker 2: 44:21

Yeah, that's basically. It is like no matter any kind of what I said before about amylase changing complex carbs into glucose. Like you can't your blood, you can't absorb Complex carbs. That's not a thing your dog can't. You can't. All carbs that go in either get broken down into glucose, which is sugar, blood glucose, blood sugar same thing. They either get broken down into that form or they don't go in at all. And so every carbohydrate that you eat, every gram of carbohydrate that you take in your dog takes in, is a gram of Sugar going into the blood, and so that's sort of the nature of it and it's like the extent.

Speaker 2: 44:59

Obesity is a bigger problem. Modern-day obesity on a popular again on a population level, bigger problem for dogs these days than diabetes is. Diabetes is not as common and, however, the like Extent of the of the scientific illiteracy that's baked into the veterinary community's understanding of disease is More evident in the world of diabetes than it is in obesity, because diabetes as a condition is Basically when your body, your dog's body, can't process glucose, like basically Healthy body when there's, when sugar levels get too high in the blood, when you eat a carbohydrate rich mule and sugar levels go up, they has a release is a hormone that makes it all go away into other places where it's fine and healthy, like if sugar levels stay too high in the blood. That's what's called a diabetic coma. That's why diabetes problem, because you need to get the glucose out of the blood or it will kill you, kill your dog. You have a very net like there's an ingrained system and make this hormone called insulin. It makes it all go away. Diabetics can't make insulin effectively enough, so when their sugar levels go up they just stay up and it's why diabetics need to take exogenous, like shots of insulin They've introduced. Their body can't make it well enough, so they shoot it in.

Speaker 2: 46:14

The Diabetes is treated in similar ways, and dogs, that is, and people they give that. You have to give your animal shots as well. But the diet, of course, plays a role like think about it, like if all carbs become glucose when they go into the bloodstream. Removing carbs from the diet is a reasonably good thing to do if your body can't manage. Because, right, but most popular prescription only food for dogs with diabetes is 40% digestible carbohydrate. Okay, 40%. Every time an animal eats that diet, its blood is flooded with glucose and it's such a matter of simple common sense. All it takes is the the the smallest thread of critical thinking about it to be like whoa, whoa, whoa. What are we doing? Why are we prescribing this? And it's still the most popular product in veterinary soul veterinarian clinics across America. Yeah, and it's somewhat better than a 50% carbohydrate product, so it qualifies as better for a dog with diabetes and, yeah, it's like that's. That's the and again.

Speaker 1: 47:28

That's because I think that veterinarians are told this give this, give this food to your pets who have, you know, diabetes.

Speaker 2: 47:35

It's a simple solution, yeah yeah, cuz they don't study it.

Speaker 1: 47:39

Yeah, so it circles back to not getting enough.

Speaker 2: 47:43

It's a very, very industry, co-opted profession and it's it's something that can be. It's like you can imagine, it's something in my experience at least. It's like it's very easy to Find people that are resentful of that. That assertion that if you talk, don't go. Or I would encourage you, if you don't want to get into arguments, don't go around telling your local veterinarian friends that they're only being they're taught biased information. They will be resentful. Particularly and it's part of my life, you know is going around and hearing people say you don't know what you're talking about and then engaging long enough that I can Resuade them that that's not the case but that's a barrier in every one of those conversations makes it hard.

Speaker 1: 48:30

This has been.

Speaker 2: 48:31

I could feel like I could just keep talking for a really long time because you're, I'm happy to come back, you bring you back, I'm telling you there's there like it's just a wide-ranging set, but this is why we're a book about it, not because I know so many things to say, but because it's not covered enough. Yeah, it's interesting and there are lots of different coves and angles and components of it. Yeah, and nobody's writing that book for summer. You know they like. A time I put my book. There were hundreds, at least dozens, of keto diet books for people. Right, there's not one in the doggie space, right? What is?

Speaker 1: 49:09

that.

Speaker 2: 49:09

That's weird and so there's a lot of stuff that, unfortunately, you're not gonna get from other people. So, yeah, bring me back. I'll be happy soon.

Speaker 1: 49:16

Thank you.

Speaker 2: 49:17

Thank you, so it's good to talk to you.

Speaker 1: 49:24

Thank you so much for listening to the Peru podcast. As always, I put links in the show notes for some of the things that we chatted about today, and just a reminder that this podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not, nor intended to be, a substitute for professional veterinary care or Personalized canine behavior advice, and it should not be used as so. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to rate the podcast and follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can also follow us on Instagram at Baru podcast and if you have a story of canine companionship that you'd like to share with me, or a question or even a comment, I'd love to hear from you. You can just email me, charlotte, at the barucom. All right, you guys, let's chat soon.