The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 298. Dr. Judy Morgan: What Kibble Does to Your Dog's Liver

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Over half the pets in our country are overweight, and Dr. Judy Morgan puts dog cancer incidence at 1.6 out of every two. Our animals are living shorter lives than they did in the 1970s, with better di...agnostics and more treatment options than ever. Dr. Morgan explains what actually changed. CLICK HERE TO BECOME GARY’S VIP!: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Get Dr. Judy Morgan’s books here: https://bit.ly/4ik8TTR Listen to “Naturally Healthy Pets Podcast” on all your favorite platforms! YouTube: https://bit.ly/4wER8lS Spotify: https://bit.ly/46audDZ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/4g9uInH Connect with Dr. Judy Morgan Website: https://bit.ly/4zxPGV6 YouTube: https://bit.ly/4wER8lS Instagram: https://bit.ly/4zsHp4t Facebook: https://bit.ly/4ikn4bu TikTok: https://bit.ly/46h3jKA X: https://bit.ly/4qoQSFT LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3SFX3cl Thank you to our partners A-GAME: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: http://bit.ly/4kek1ij AION: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD AIRES: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/4a3Duze BAJA GOLD: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa BODYHEALTH: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV COLD LIFE: THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp CYMBIOTIKA: “BRECKACYM30” FOR 30% OFF: https://bit.ly/4tjyluP GENETIC METHYLATION TEST (UK ONLY): https://bit.ly/48QJJrk GENETIC TEST (USA ONLY): https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9 GOPUFF: GET YOUR FAVORITE SNACK!: https://bit.ly/4obIFDC H2TABS: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg HEALF: 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S PEPTUAL: “TUH10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4mKxgcn SNOOZE: LET’S GET TO SLEEP!: https://bit.ly/4pt1T6V WHOOP: JOIN & GET 1 FREE MONTH!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RQftU0 Connect with Gary Brecka Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo X: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2 Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps 00:00 Intro of show 04:18 Pet Obesity, Cancer, and Longevity Rates 08:20 Carbs in Kibble and Why Cats Cannot Handle Them 10:06 How Often Dogs and Cats Actually Need Vaccines 17:27 Flea, Tick, and Heartworm Chemicals 29:00 Heartworm Prevention and the Immune System 36:15 Why Judy Feeds Zero Kibble 37:38 AAFCO Minimums and What Pet Food Labels Hide 39:41 Rendering: What Is Actually In Meat Meal 42:53 Mold Toxins and Aflatoxins in Dry Kibble 47:18 Why Kibble Counts as Ultra-Processed Food 56:20 Best Raw and Human Grade Pet Food Brands 1:05:00 Why Indoor Cats Are Stressed 1:13:05 Herbs, CBD, and Flower Essences for Pet Anxiety 1:17:29 Raw, Fresh, and Home-Cooked Pet Food 1:20:23 How to Switch a Cat Off Kibble 1:28:09 Natural Flea, Tick, and Lyme Prevention 1:33:34 What It Means to Be an Ultimate Human Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions. Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation.  Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered promotional in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Over 50% of the pets in this country are overweight or obese. Cats that live inside, over 80% of them are highly stressed. Cancer incidents in dogs is 1.6 out of every tube. We have messed up what we're feeding our animals. Looking at the framing of what has happened to health care in America, I never actually thought about superimposing that to our pets. The veterinary field is highly influenced by Big Pharma and big pet food.
Starting point is 00:00:30 And they make ultra-processed food, and the waste products of all that ultra-processed food go to our pets. And the same way that we started the war on saturated fat and protein in favor of high-glycemic carbohydrates and humans, we probably did the same thing with our animals. That's why food therapy to me is so cool
Starting point is 00:00:46 because we can keep things in balance. Where we get disease is where it gets out of balance. And so the same goes for our pets. If we were to distill this down where we've gone wrong in how we treat our pets, What would it distill down to? Three things that I talk about a lot. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.
Starting point is 00:01:20 I'm your host, human biologist Gary Breka. Today, we're taking everything we talk about on this show, anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and pointing it somewhere you might not expect, your pets. My guest is Dr. Judy Morgan, a veterinarian with over 40 years experience, certified in traditional Chinese medicine, chiropractic care, and food therapy for animals.
Starting point is 00:01:42 And what she's about to tell you is staggering. Over half the pets in this country are overweight or obese. More than 80% of indoor cats are chronically stressed, and dog cancer is now hitting 1.6 out of every two dogs. Our pets are living shorter lives than they did in the 1970s, despite diagnostics and more advanced medicine than ever. Dr. Morgan is going to break down exactly why, the ultra-processed food, the over-vaccination,
Starting point is 00:02:08 the corporate influence, reshaping veterinary care, and what you can actually do about it. So if you have a pet, pay attention. Or if you love someone who does, you need to hear this. Let's get into it. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Brecker, where we go down the road of everything,
Starting point is 00:02:26 anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today's podcast is going to be a twist on all of those things, anti-aging, longevity, and biohacking, because we have an incredibly special guest and incredibly qualified guest talking about all of those things and how they relate to your pet. So I know there's a lot of pet owners out there,
Starting point is 00:02:47 including myself and a lot of my team actually sitting in for this podcast. I got a live studio audience back here because we care so much about our pets and what is astounding to me is the overlap between the chronic disease pandemic that we see going on in America and the chronic disease pandemic
Starting point is 00:03:05 that is quietly going on in our pets. So today's guest is Dr. Judy Morgan. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Morgan. It is so exciting to have you. I'm really happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation. You're welcome. And not only are you a doctor of veterinary medicine,
Starting point is 00:03:20 but you're certified in traditional Chinese medicine for pets, also chiropractic for pets, and also food for pets. So you're super qualified. And what's, you know, really astounding to me was when I was prepping for the podcast, looking at the framing of, you know, what has happened to health care in America. You know, we are the sickest, fattest, most diseased nation, civilized nation in the world, spending $5 trillion a year on health care, type 2 diabetes, morbid obesity, you know, maternal mortality,
Starting point is 00:04:00 infant mortality, chronic disease, multiple chronic disease, disease in a single biome, I never actually thought about superimposing that to our pets. It is so similar. Over 50% of the pets in this country are overweight or obese. Our cats that live inside, over 80% of them are highly stressed. The cancer incidence in dogs is 1.6 out of every two. Wait, 1.6 out of every two? Yes. Wow. And we're literally going backwards in longevity. If we look at our animals in the 1970s, they were living longer. And now we have better diagnostic capabilities, supposedly better treatment capabilities,
Starting point is 00:04:51 except many of those are actually causing a lot of harm. And we're seeing more cancer, more arthritis, more inflammatory bowel disease, more allergies, literally just chronic inflammation in our pets. And we're doing everything wrong. And we need to start making changes. You know, it reminds me of what's going on in our modern healthcare system.
Starting point is 00:05:17 I mean diagnostic CTN-CT scans, MRIs, full-body MRIs. You know, there is, we've made leaps and bounds in diagnostic capabilities. And I would argue that we're probably the best at crisis management, right? Yes. If you have a catastrophic event,
Starting point is 00:05:32 We're extraordinarily good at saving your life. And I would imagine that the veterinary industry is the same. Absolutely. And I have said ever since I started getting more into holistic alternative, complementary, whatever we're going to term it, I have always said, listen, if I get hit by a bus, I'll take some real pain meds and I'll take some real surgery. Of course. Thank you very much. But then healing from all of those injuries and all of those insults to my body, I'm, going back over to the complementary holistic side
Starting point is 00:06:05 because that's where we're going to see long-term healing and that's where we're going to return the body to functioning well. And so alopathic medicine is great for that crisis situation. But when people come to me with their animals when I had my clinics, a lot of them were in crisis. And they had been on long-term medications,
Starting point is 00:06:31 you know, handfuls. And we have to look at that and say, well, that was great when the crisis started. But here we are three years down the line. Things aren't getting any better. And you just keep adding more medications. And we're not getting anywhere. So how do we peel that back and go back to getting the body back in alignment and back into healing?
Starting point is 00:06:53 Yeah, you know, before the podcast I was saying, we could probably strike the word pet off of any of these books and replace kids. or humans, and it would be just as appropriate, right? So what do you attribute this to? If we were to distill this down where we've gone wrong in how we treat our pets, what would it distill down to? What is that thing? So there's three things that I talk about a lot.
Starting point is 00:07:22 Food is the foundation of life. So we have royally messed up what we're feeding our animals. And unfortunately, the veterinary field is highly influenced by big pharma and big pet food. They contribute so much money to the veterinary schools to all of our continuing education. And, you know, as veterinarians, we just buy into it. And that's what we're taught in school. Hey, if the pet has kidney disease, we've got a prescription diet for that. If the pet has heart disease, we have a prescription diet for that.
Starting point is 00:07:58 but it's all highly processed food made with really, really raunchy ingredients. You think McDonald's is bad. Start looking into what's on the label on these ultra-processed pet foods, and it turns your stomach. And if we dive deeper into that, I will, I'm sorry to anybody who's eating when we get into that. Because it's really horrible. So we are feeding them things that are causing inflammation in their body. We feed them inappropriately.
Starting point is 00:08:26 Cats are obligate carnivores. They're little meat-eating dinosaurs. Like, think velociraptors. Like, I'm going for the meat. Mice, rats. Rats, rabbits, birds. But what do we feed them? We feed them dry kibble that is over 50% carbohydrates.
Starting point is 00:08:42 Wow. They have zero requirement for carbohydrates in their diet. They need a little bit of fiber. That's it. So we are feeding them completely wrong. And then we wonder why they're obese, why they have dental disease, why they have urinary tract problems. My daughter and my ex-wife have the fattest cats you've ever seen. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:08:57 And it's because we feed them wrong. So we need to go back to feeding. And dogs are not obligate carnivores, but they do a lot better on a metasaurus diet with a little bit of carbs. So when we look at companies that are doing it right, the carbohydrate content in, which is kind of the vegetable matter content in cat food, it's going to be 2 to 4%. In dog food, it might be 15 to 20%, but that's where it should max out. Instead, when we look at ultra-processed dry kibble, the maximum amount of meat you can put in an extruded product is 30%. Wow. So there's no way the protein content could even exceed 30%. Well, it can because they use peas for protein and they corn protein. And so they're using...
Starting point is 00:09:41 Cheapest ingredients. Cheap ingredients that are not species appropriate. And then we wonder why we have inflammatory bowel disease, which leads to arthritis and allergies and, you know, all these other issues. that we have. So that's number one, food. Number two, over vaccination. Oh, God bless you for saying that. So when I didn't know if we were going to go down the vaccine van ragum, but let's go down there. We, too, too, here we go. Get on that train. So when I was in vet school, the mantra and what everyone was taught is every vaccine for every animal every year. And the way that you get people in your office every year with their pets is to send them a car that says your pet needs shots. and it's one of the biggest disservices we ever did in the animal industry.
Starting point is 00:10:28 Wow. Because now we know that those core vaccines, just temper parvo rabies, one vaccine probably lasts a lifetime. It's not something that needs to be given every year. And we have ways to discern that. If you need to, our biggest problem is in like boarding, grooming daycare. And I was talking to one of the people on your staff who said, I just moved into a new apartment, and they required a rabies vaccine for my indoor cat who never
Starting point is 00:10:54 goes outside. And so she had to go get a vaccine for her cat. Wow. So we get stuck. If you want to take your dog or cat to the groomer, if you want to fly on a plane with them, if you want to live in an apartment complex, you're told you have to do these vaccines. And the powers that be put a timeline on that. It's like, well, you, and it's really interesting because AVMA and.
Starting point is 00:11:19 and AHA, which are kind of our governing bodies, have now put on their websites, well, core vaccines could probably be given every three to five years. Well, there's no science behind that. Nobody, like, did a bunch of testing and said, oh, look, it always lasts three years or it always lasts five years. So a lot of veterinarians have gone to the every three years, but there are still some who say no, every year. Wow.
Starting point is 00:11:40 And we have science that says we don't need it every year. And now, sadly, we have mRNA vaccines. Oh, my gosh. So for rabies for dogs and cats. Probably from the same companies. Merck. So rabies for dogs and cats, influenza for dogs, which I never gave the regular influenza vaccine, so why would we go here?
Starting point is 00:12:03 But boarding, grooming daycare. And then feline leukemia vaccines for cats, which I don't like that one either. So it's really hard for the pet owner because when you go into the veterinarian, there's a lot of clinics now because we now have corporate ownership and that's another whole box to open. But with corporate ownership, a lot of times the line is in order to have your pets seen by our veterinarians, they must be up to date on vaccines. Of course. And so the problem is, so I'm standing here with an animal that's unvaccinated and I say to the veterinarian, why I need to bring him in for an exam, well, he's not up to date on vaccines. Well, they will see him to give him vaccines.
Starting point is 00:12:47 so that then I can come back and they can examine for the problem. Like, how does that make it? Like, you already touched them and did stuff with them without the vaccine. Right. So nonsensical. It's nonsensical, and it comes across to the pet owner as you're just going for my money. Mm-hmm. And the veterinary industry used to be one of the most trusted professions.
Starting point is 00:13:12 It is not anymore. Really? Which is really sad. The suicide rate for veterinarians is the high. highest of any profession. Used to be the dentist. It used to be everybody hated their dentist. Suricid for veterinarians?
Starting point is 00:13:22 Yes. Wow. And a lot of that is driven by corporate greed and private equity because the veterinarians are given this huge carrot on a stick. A lot of veterinarians are coming out of school with $250,000 to $500,000 in school debt. And so when the corporate group say, well, we'll give you a $200,000 bonus to sign on, but you have to stick with us for three years or whatever theirs is. We'll pay you more than everybody else,
Starting point is 00:13:53 and they make it sound great, and then the young veterinarian goes to work there and finds out, oh, no, you don't get 30-minute appointments or 20-minute. Nope, every 10 minutes, you got crank them out, crank them out, because it's all about production. And now they've instituted standard of care, which is, you know, it sounds good. Like, here's the standard of care.
Starting point is 00:14:15 And who's determining these guidelines? Because the same thing happens in Health and Human Services, the FDA, CDC, same types of guardrails exist. Right. And so as a holistic practitioner, let's say I have a client who comes in. Actually, I just saw this. This is a good example. Saw this one online the other day. A veterinarian posted, a client called me 20 minutes before closing. And I mean, as a veterinarian, I, you know, yes, we close at 630, but if we get out of here before nine, that would be awesome. Yeah. My kids grew up in the clinic.
Starting point is 00:14:53 It's just what we did. But now it's like, nope, six o'clock or five o'clock closing time. We only work nine to five Monday through Friday. Forget it. If your pet gets sick on a weekend, you're going to have to go to a corporate... Urgent care. Urgent care. Yeah, awful.
Starting point is 00:15:08 So this veterinarian posted a client called 20 minutes before we were due to close and her cat was blocked. It couldn't urinate. Well, that's life-threatening. Yes. The client was, I don't know, nice enough, dumb enough, honest enough to say, I only have $200. And the veterinarian said, well, they weren't even going to get here. And so she was online looking for somebody to say, it's okay, you did the right thing.
Starting point is 00:15:33 Wasn't me. And she said, I told them I couldn't see the cat and they would have to go to urgent care, knowing that urgent care was going to be $5,000. So these people were literally going to have to walk in and mortgage something, borrow. money, something to get their cat seen. And she said, well, if I kept my staff, then they were going to be on overtime, and I'd be paying them overtime. Now, as an old school veterinarian, I would have been like, come right over, I'll wait, and then I would poll my staff and say, who's going to help?
Starting point is 00:16:03 Right. And anybody who doesn't want to goes home and anybody that wants to, oh, we have a C-section coming in. I know it's after hours. If you need to go home for your kids, go. If you can stay, stay. 90% of the time, everybody would just stay because we cared about it. We cared about the animal.
Starting point is 00:16:17 Yeah. So the veterinarian turned this person away with their cat. I have no idea what ended up having to the cat. But of the 100 replies that she got on social media, probably 95 of the other veterinarian said, you did the right thing. And, you know, you should have just offered them euthanasia. Euthanasia would have been a better answer.
Starting point is 00:16:34 I'm like, really? Yeah, because you can do that for 200 bucks, right? Exactly. Yeah. It's like, take the $200 and kill the cat. And I'm like, what happened to we are the profession of caring for the cats? Yeah. So I don't know.
Starting point is 00:16:48 Our profession has changed a lot. And I think that our suicide rate is high because we have these moral dilemmas in our head. I would agree. And I agree. Just because we count off euthanasia doesn't always mean that we should. And, you know, as a holistic veterinarian, when people come to me with their, I've already been to seven other vets and they've told me there's, I've been to the university. They've told me there's nothing else they can do. And I'm like, well, I got 27 more things in my toolbox.
Starting point is 00:17:15 so let's give it a go. Yeah. And so we just are always looking for other things. So let's see, that was the food answer, the vaccine answer, and then there's the chemicals. Mm. We're applying and feeding pesticides to our animals. Same as humans.
Starting point is 00:17:33 How does that make sense? Yeah. How does that make sense? Which is really interesting. So one of the, one of your VIP members sent in a question about Brevecto, Obrevecto is one of the flea and tick pesticides that we feed to our animals. They now have a 12-month injectable. Like, you put it in, you can't get it back out, and there's no antidote if they have a problem.
Starting point is 00:17:52 Oh, that'll be fun. Really? Yeah. It's like a pellet? Like a dissolvable? No, no. It's an injectable liquid. Injectable liquid, okay.
Starting point is 00:18:00 But it also comes in a chew, and it also comes in a topical. These are neurotoxins. So I don't know if your pediatrician said, well, we don't want Johnny to ever be bitten by a mosquito. so feed them this pesticide. It'll last for three months. It'll be great. No problems. And then your kid starts having seizures
Starting point is 00:18:18 and they go, oh, it can't be related to the neurotoxin you gave them. Right. Excuse me? Isn't astounding? It is. And then because we have all this inflammatory disease, like meningitis of unknown origin
Starting point is 00:18:31 didn't really exist when I got out of school, but now it's very common. Meningitis in these animals, dogs and cats. Meningitis, my sister's dog. had it. And looking back on it, my, when I was in traditional practice, like five years into practice, my Doberman developed granulominoinus meninjo encephalitis. So basically meningitis. Right. Encephalitis. And when I took him to the neurologist, he went blind overnight. And so I took him to the neurologist and he said, oh, that's probably from his distemper vaccine. Now, that should have been
Starting point is 00:19:07 my first clue. Like, wow. These vaccines might be a problem. But I was still. in the every vaccine for every year, part of my life. And so we're seeing so much more of it now. And it's like, why isn't anybody putting two and two together and saying we need to do something differently? But we end up with so many animals with these chronic inflammatory diseases,
Starting point is 00:19:29 how do we, we can't cure them, so we put them on immune suppressants. Oh, wow. We wrecked their immune systems and then we wonder why the cancer rate is so high. Actually put them on immune suppressants. Oh, so my Doberman, was put on, at that time we had prednisone,
Starting point is 00:19:46 so he was on that, and I think the second drug was, might have been cytoxin. Wow. Not good, but he was on it for a year. He lost all his hair, he just dribbled urine everywhere he went, he lost all his muscle mass, it was horrible. Yeah. And looking back on it, it's like, oh man,
Starting point is 00:20:04 I would have done that a lot differently. Sure. But you don't know until you start looking at it in learning. So we're doing so many things wrong. If you know me, you know I don't recommend anything I haven't personally tested. That's not a marketing line. That's just how I operate. I've been on the road my entire career. Different time zones, brutal schedules, no margin for days off. And so I'm constantly testing what actually works in my own body. NED was something I keep coming back to. It's the molecule
Starting point is 00:20:33 your cells used to produce energy and repair. And it declines faster than most people realize. When I found symbiotica's liposomal NAD, the absorption technology is what got my attention. I tested it. I felt it. And it's been in my bag ever since. I'm always involving what I put in my body. And this one has stayed on the list. I'm genuinely excited for you to experience it.
Starting point is 00:20:53 This is the standard we hold every product to before it even reaches you. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. Well, you know, I think about, I grew up on a farm. We had a 300-acre tobacco farm. Nice. And so our dogs were outside a lot. They were, and they were well cared for. But when I think back about what we fed them at that time,
Starting point is 00:21:15 and we had hunting dogs. My parents actually rescued Old English Mastiff, which are massive, massive dogs or sweethearts, but they are huge animals. Some of the males would get well over 200 pounds. And, but we had these 30-gallon aluminum pins in the basement. with a little lid. It didn't really seal.
Starting point is 00:21:39 It just went on the top so spiders wouldn't get in there. And then I had a big scoop and a huge bowl. And twice a day I would go out and I would scoop this up and dump it in the bowl. And, you know, thinking back, like, how many weeks it probably took me to get to the bottom of that bin. And, you know, I can still remember as a kid getting to the bottom of that bin and seeing like a little bit of fuzz down there at the bottom. Yeah, we've got mold. We've got maggots. We've got storage mites.
Starting point is 00:22:06 We've got rancid fats. So guilty right now. But then I was going upstairs and eating Lucky Charms. So that's on mom. Listen, I was eating milk bones. But, you know, it is, the parallels are shocking, you know, because I was in the processed food mill. And our dogs were in the processed food mill. And, you know, now that I think back, most of our dogs live nine to 10 years, maybe 11 years.
Starting point is 00:22:33 My son and his fiance have two labs. One of them is about to be 18 years old. Which is amazing. Jack, shout out to Jack. And Jack is the happiest. Now, he's old, and you can tell he's an elderly dog, but he still gets around, and they are so militant with his food. I mean, he eats.
Starting point is 00:22:55 I kid you not, true story. I worked out with my son one morning. We went upstairs into the kitchen. He starts making something next to me, and he walks away from the bowl. I slid it over because I thought it was for me. Because it had rice, had peas, had chicken. And I was like, thank you, man, I'm starving.
Starting point is 00:23:10 He's like, that's for the dog. And, you know, so they have literally kept this dog alive with food. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm also happy to hear about where you fall on vaccines. I mean, they're getting married in September this year in, like, Como, and we're taking the dog. And they've got to get all these vaccines. and what they have a very progressive veterinarian
Starting point is 00:23:36 who's going to help them with that. And, you know, I think about the same thing in children and the data coming out now on vaccination, especially group vaccinations. Oh, yeah. And we do the same thing in animals, right? We group these vaccines. And so that's one of the things that I talk about a lot.
Starting point is 00:23:53 If you are stuck and to go to boarding, grooming, daycare, travel, whatever it is that you need to do, and you're given this list of vaccines. that you need to get. And interestingly, this is actually being published in the veterinary journals now. And I'm like, what took you so long, except that it's still ignored? They have great studies that show the more vaccines you give it one time, the more reactions you have, the more chance of anaphylaxis you have, the more chance of autoimmune disease secondary to it that you have, particularly with small breeds. So the smaller the dog, the more likely they are to react. There are some
Starting point is 00:24:31 vaccines that they're now saying, these are core vaccines. I'm like, I never gave these to a dog under 10 pounds, and I never would. I've never given some of these vaccines to my own animals and never would. Rabies is really the only one that is pretty much mandated. Like if you have a dog that you need to take anywhere and you need to license them or, you know, somebody finds out you have a dog in your house. In New Jersey, they knock on doors. They hire higher college kids in the summer and they knock on doors. And of course, your dog barks at the door and they're like, oh, let me see the license for your dog. You don't have a license? Okay. And then you get 10 days to get your rabies vaccine in your license. Wow. Yeah. So. And is there some big pandemic
Starting point is 00:25:17 of rabies or or is this like the scare tactic that's brought up? It's a scare tactic. And part of it is, and I get it, because in countries where we have a lot of stray dogs, There are countries where thousands of people die of rabies every year. This country isn't one of them. Right. Part of that is probably because of how we handle our animals. We get a certain number of cases of dogs and cats with rabies every year. It's small.
Starting point is 00:25:46 Usually it's strays. Probably the biggest problem is stray kittens. Like everybody finds a stray kitten and picks it up. They don't notice it's got a wound on it. Is that because they tangled with a raccoon or tangled with a possum or something like that? So in the northeast of this country, it's raccoons. In the southeast, it's foxes. Skunks are kind of in the middle and out west it's bats.
Starting point is 00:26:08 Wow. So we know what strain of rabies and what's going to be our, you know, sentinel animal that we need to be watching. So back in 1989, 1990 in New Jersey, we hadn't had rabies cases in years. and all of a sudden there was a huge rabies outbreak in northeast Pennsylvania, and the raccoons walked across the bridges across the Delaware River and brought it to New Jersey. Damn, raccoons.
Starting point is 00:26:38 And so I ended up spending about two years decapitating a lot of raccoons to check for rabies because that's how they were. And my husband at the time actually was head of the State Department of Health as a veterinarian, but he was in charge of the rabies thing. So when they would trap these, you would test them. It would, right. And so I actually had a client. It was an old farmer, and he had this little tiny, fluffy dog that was ancient.
Starting point is 00:27:05 And he let the little dog out to go potty last thing at night and heard this commotion, opens the door, and this little dog comes in with a raccoon attached to it. Oh, wow. Racing through his kitchen, and he couldn't get the raccoon off. So he grabbed a kitchen knife, yay farmers, grabbed a kitchen knife and slash the raccoon to kill the raccoon so that it, finally dropped the dog. Yes, it was a rabid raccoon because that's the kind of stupid things. Like, we saw them attacking telephone poles, attacking people's doors, attacking tires on cars. Because their brains, I mean. Their brain scrambled. Right. So it's pretty obvious when you have a rabid raccoon. They're kind of nasty.
Starting point is 00:27:44 So it was a problem. And interestingly, the state of Pennsylvania during all this decided because stray cats, outdoor cats, they're going to be the most vulnerable. barn cats. I have a bunch of barn cats now, so I get it. Um, so they passed a law that said that all cats had to be vaccinated for rabies every single year. Oh my gosh. You know, it's a three-year vaccine minimum, but they just passed this law. Well, the wrong cats were getting vaccinated. If you had an indoor cat that went to the vet, it was going to get vaccinated. Right. If you had a no chance it was coming in contact with a rabid raccoon. Exactly. But all the barn cats and stray cats that are out that, that are coming in contact, nobody's, like if I had to catch up my seven barn cats,
Starting point is 00:28:26 and get them to the vet, it's going to be a big problem because some of them I can't touch. Right. So, you know, it's like, okay, you guys are really sweet and nice, but putting you in a cage is not going to happen. So we were vaccinating the wrong animals.
Starting point is 00:28:39 Right. And a couple of years after that, the University of Pennsylvania and weirdly out at Davis, California, at the vet school's diagnostic labs, they were diagnosing a lot of vaccine-related sarcomas in cats. And they figured out, Oh, all these rabies vaccines are causing cancer in cats.
Starting point is 00:28:58 Wow. You know, and it's sad, too, because I can still remember walking into the veterinarian's office, and there were always these pictures of hearts of dogs, or just shrouded in worms. Yeah, right? I mean, it looked like you put it in a worm back. It used to be everybody had a heart in a jar with worms. Yeah, a heart in a jar with the worms,
Starting point is 00:29:18 or just like the images or the pictures of just worms all over a heart. So, you know, somebody walking into the vet's office with, I don't want that. I don't want their dog. It's like, oh, my God, I don't want Fifi getting that. And so, but not knowing, well, what is the statistical incidents and, you know, the chance of that actually occurring? And where was that picture taken?
Starting point is 00:29:40 And what was that animal's history? Right. Versus what's my animal's history. Exactly. Who's living in my suburban home or in my condo is on a leash and is going out for a walk every day and coming back. and coming back, you know, what is their chance of catching heartworms? Exactly.
Starting point is 00:29:58 And so that's another one of those that the veterinary parasite council, I don't know their exact name. But they basically say that all pets, dogs and cats, should be on heartworm preventative. Oh, yeah. Heartworms is a dog thing. I remember that. But all of them should be on heartworm preventative every month. and all of them should have some sort of parasite prevention every single month. Well, I don't use any of that stuff on my animals.
Starting point is 00:30:32 I'm like, I look at their lifestyle, and the other thing that people kind of forget and that the veterinarians never talk about is a healthy animal won't be parasitized. An unhealthy animal. So if we didn't see that many heartworm cases in New Jersey where my practices were, but every year we'd have a few. And I could guarantee that that dog would have heartworms, round worms, hookworms, whipworms.
Starting point is 00:30:58 Like, it was going to have fleas. It was going to have ticks. It was going to have everything because that's an animal with a weak immune system, not eating good food that can't fight off anything. And so when one jumps on board, they all jump on board. If I had a family that had a dozen cats, they bring a dozen cats in for exams. And if they had fleas in their house, the old skinny kidney failure cat was. is gonna have 3,000 fleas, the young, healthy adult cat,
Starting point is 00:31:28 might have one or two. Parasites parasitize the weak. Mm. So really important that we keep their immune system strong. Keep their immune system strong. And where do you fall on pet foods? Because one of the fascinating things, I wanna get into pet food,
Starting point is 00:31:45 I also wanna talk about how you categorize different animals, wood, fire, metal. Because I find that fascinating too, because my former spouse was an Aravitic practitioner. It's like the oldest form of medicine, mainly based on observation, and they have different body morphic types that they put you into.
Starting point is 00:32:08 And the characteristics, Pita, Vada, Khafa, of the personalities, the diets, the tempers, their attitude, energetic, docile, aggressive, you know, congenial, really fits these descriptions. And you have the same categorization for animals, which I really find fascinating. And I was reading through this and I was like, wow, I was thinking back at the animals that I had.
Starting point is 00:32:34 And I was like, wow, so many of the dogs that I had, now that I think about, they fit these verticals so perfectly. I just never thought of applying it to an animal. On our website, there's a pet personality quiz. So you can download that and basically do, checkboxes and it'll put a link to it in the show us it'll help you you know kind of figure out what makes your animal tick and then we also have the human personality profile so if you want to figure out what makes your spouse tick it can be my husband is the only person I haven't figured
Starting point is 00:33:06 out he's a guy equal checkboxes all the way across I'm like what what are you um but it's it's really kind of fun to do because every element personality is ruled by certain systems so metal is long and large intestine, wood is liver and gallbladder. So Earth is ruled by digestive system. So we look at all these different things. And if you, so I have a fire dog right now. I have four dogs, but one of them is a fire. She's a redhead. Well, redheads are usually fires. Yeah. They're very vocal. So she's the one who stands there and screams at me the whole time I'm making meals. Like you are not moving fast enough. let's get this job. Really? How's at you?
Starting point is 00:33:52 Oh, yeah, she screams at me the entire time. And I feel bad when we have guests come over because we're right next to the guest room making dog food and she's screaming. Yeah. So she fits all those things. Well, the fire personality is ruled by the heart. Guess which dog has mitral valve heart disease?
Starting point is 00:34:10 Oh, that would be that one. But because I know that a fire dog is going to, if something's going to give way, that's what's going to give way. It happens to be a genetic thing for the breed too, but I have spent her whole life supporting her with supplements and food. So when we use food therapy, it's like, how do I support your heart?
Starting point is 00:34:32 My dogs get hearts cut up in their meal every single day. Wow. So it's very cool to know kind of what rules them and where their weaknesses would be. So I'm a wood personality. A wood person, I'm your best friend until you do me wrong. Oh, man.
Starting point is 00:34:51 It's a volcano. It's scorched earth. Yeah, that's my life. So that's a wood personality. But wood is kept in check by metal because the metal axe chops down the tree. So metal is lung and large intestine. Well, my wood personality has been so strong
Starting point is 00:35:10 for so many years that my poor metal axe has been working overtime trying to chop down this crazy tree. and if I'm ever going to get sick, it's going to be respiratory. Really? My weakness is my lungs because my metal element has just been overworked. And so I know that. Well, metal is supported by white foods.
Starting point is 00:35:32 Like, give me more white foods. I will eat more mushrooms. Thank you very much. Color. Right. So I look at those things and say, okay, well, what's going to support my system? What's going to drain my liver? Give me more asparagus and radishes, please.
Starting point is 00:35:46 So that's why food therapy to me is so cool because we can keep things in balance. Sure. And where we get disease is where it gets out of balance. And so the same goes for our pets. So where do you fall down on food? I mean, are you feeding all of your pets raw food, whole foods? Obviously, no kibble.
Starting point is 00:36:08 Tell people how, I mean, the one thing they should take out of their dog or cats bowl tomorrow is what? Kibble. Because it's ultra-processed food. It's sort of like taking your pet to McDonald's and expecting you get good health when that's... And part of the fallacy and myth of the veterinary push for the ultra-processed food, because that's what they all push. So Mars and Purina rule the landscape. They sell about $23 billion worth of pet food a year. The next after that is Hills, which is owned by Colgate Palm Olive, and they're about $6 billion. So it's a huge difference. And so the veterinary industry is greatly influenced by Mars candy company and Nestle Purina candy company. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:36:53 And they make ultra-processed food, and the waste products of all that ultra-processed food go to our pets. Wow. And, you know, they call it upcycling. Sounds good. Sounds really good. And there are some of up-cycled products. Like, hearts. People don't usually eat hearts.
Starting point is 00:37:10 They should. Right. But they usually don't. That's a great up-cycled products. product for my dogs who need it for their heart health, I'm in. Right. So, but they also use the really awful ingredients in that extruded kibble. Like I said, it's very little meat.
Starting point is 00:37:27 It's what's the cheapest ingredients we can put in there and get. So AFCO, which is the association of feed control officials, they set the minimums, some maximums, but mostly minimums. Like, we need minimum this much protein. We need minimum this much fat. If we allow our cats and dogs to choose free choice, they're going to go for about 50% protein and about 45% fat. Wow.
Starting point is 00:37:55 And then the other 5% is that fiber. Just instinctively. Instinctively, if you give them a choice, that's what they're going to go for. The minimum for AFCO is 18% protein for dogs and 22% for cats. Wow. Not even close. Yeah, not even. But, you know, they were like, well, what can they survive on?
Starting point is 00:38:15 Oh, they can survive on 18%. And that's a lot, you can put a bunch of cheap ingredients in there. And it's really interesting. I remember my first few years in practice, we used to say, oh, too much protein is going to wreck their kidneys. You don't want to feed that high protein kibble. Right. Oh, my lord.
Starting point is 00:38:32 So, yeah, we need to change what we're doing. So my animals, sometimes I make my own food, but I'm a little busy and I travel a lot. So I do have a few companies that I really, really like that are doing things the right way. You can download that list on my website as well. What's your website? What's your website? It's naturally healthy pets.com. You can also go to Dr. Judy Morgan.com at the same place.
Starting point is 00:38:56 But there's a great website, Truth About Petfood.com. Susan Thickston lives here in Florida. I might want to have her on. I would love to have her. She has been the consumer advocate for pet food for about 20 years. The battles she has had, it'll blow you away. But she puts out something called The List every year. And she's up to about 40 companies on the list and are the companies that are doing things right.
Starting point is 00:39:23 Okay. In terms of food. In terms of pet food. And they can't buy their way onto that list. They actually have to submit all their receipts for the year for everything that they purchase to go into their food so she can see what's going into the food. Wow. It's a big process for the pet food companies. So for big kibble, ultra-processed food,
Starting point is 00:39:46 the law states that animals who have died otherwise than by slaughter, so like a cow dies out in the field, not allowed to be used. However, all of those animals that die out in the field go to pet food. They get picked up. This is where, sorry if you're eating, stop right now. they take these dead animals that might have laid out in the field for a few days.
Starting point is 00:40:09 They're decomposing and rotting. They put them in these big open trucks and then they take them to the rendering plants. And at the rendering plant, it's all dumped into the parking lot in the sun. Oh my gosh. And they stay there for a few days
Starting point is 00:40:22 and then it all gets bulldozed into a large vat and it's boiled down. And so it's the whole animal. So we're not taking out intestinal contents or hair or we're not getting rid of the ear tags and the chains and it all just goes in there. The whole animal goes in. It gets cooked down into a soup, rendered. And then the fat that's on the top is
Starting point is 00:40:42 tallow fat that goes into a lot of different things, including pet food. And the meat meal is separated from the bone meal and it's dried and ground. So if you see on a label something that's an unnamed meat, that's an unnamed meat. Unnamed meat. So if it says meat and bone meal or animal digest or meat meal. It's unknown meat because it could have been pig, cow, horse, dog. Any scrap. Whatever went into that bat. There was a lawsuit against Rachel Ray dog food in 23 because somebody tested the DNA and there was dog DNA in there. No. Ended up in the rendering bat. Wow. Dog DNA and dog food. Yeah. Makes sense. Wow. The head of the largest The Wendering Association gave the keynote speech at one of the AFCO meetings a few years ago.
Starting point is 00:41:41 And in that, he said it's almost impossible to have a rendered product without euthanasia solution in it. Because, oopsie, that one was euthanized and it accidentally went in the vat. We didn't mean for it to. FDA knows it, and there's been lawsuits about that too. And FDA says, we find it non- actionable. It's not in a large enough quantity to be a problem. Wow. Where do they get these euthanized animals from, from veterinarian clinics?
Starting point is 00:42:05 No, most of the veterinary clinic animals go to cremation. Okay. But there's been zoo animals known to end up in there. A lot of horse meat can end up in there, and we don't normally think about eating horses. But the thing is nobody, it's rare for somebody to test the food and look at the, I mean, it's not cheap. So rare. Let's look at the DNA. Let's look at the mold toxins.
Starting point is 00:42:30 One of the biggest recalls ever was for mold toxins. So where do you think the moldy corn goes? 60% of the grains in this country are moldy. Yeah. That's why they use glyphosate as a desiccant now to dry it out. Right. But it kills the mold, but the molds release mold toxins. So we have aflatoxins, vomit toxin.
Starting point is 00:42:48 All those. Those cause liver failure in animals. And one of the largest recalls ever was for mold toxins in dry kibble. Wow. So you can fumigate it all you want and kill the mold. but nothing kills the mold toxins. Right. So, you know, if I had an animal come in the clinic
Starting point is 00:43:07 and I did lab work and the liver enzymes are high, I'm like, well, which kibble are you feeding? Because you know that's where it's coming from most of the time. So back to my animals. No, they don't eat kibble. Yeah. And that's the one thing that everybody should get out of their pets bowl right now. And partly because for cats, it is so species inappropriate.
Starting point is 00:43:30 Like our dogs can survive on it better. But for cats, we're just, we're asking for urinary problems. It's a dry food that has 6 to 8% moisture. Cats are desert animals. They don't drink very much. And then we wonder why they have crystals and very highly concentrated urine and urinary obstruction like the cat I was talking about. Because they're dehydrated.
Starting point is 00:43:49 They're eating a high carbohydrate diet. They're not meant to eat a high carb diet. And they're obese and they're diabetic. Yep. And the same way that we started the war on saturated fat and protein in favor of high glycine and carbohydrates in humans. Yeah, we probably did the same thing with our animals. Listen, there's what I share on this podcast,
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Starting point is 00:45:26 in veterinary medicine and pet food. And you've touched on that a little bit, but what do you mean by this industrial food complex? Is it, because honestly, you know, I chair a committee for Secretary Kennedy called the Maha Action. And, in fact, we're meeting in Washington right now on peptides.
Starting point is 00:45:44 And my son's dog is on pet tides, which I thought was really cool. And it's helped my, help the dog a lot. He's BPC 157 for his hip dysplasia. You could be noticeable difference in the pain that the dog had walking around now, it's actually pain-free. And like I say, it's going on 17 years or going on 18 years. But the absolute sinister nature and what I call commissive errors.
Starting point is 00:46:13 You know, you have errors of omission. Omission is, hey, we didn't mean to do that. Some e-coli got into the lettuce, but it wasn't intentional. The commissive errors are we know exactly what we're doing. We know exactly what the risks are, but it's profitable. we're going to do it anyway. Right. And the voluminous extent to which this has done in human food production
Starting point is 00:46:35 and the stranglehold that they have had for decades on our regulatory bodies, again, never made the applicable transition to pet food. Right. But you're saying it's the same. So FDA chooses not to enforce that animals dying otherwise by them by slaughter are not allowed in food. But they're going to the rendering plant. We know, it's like that cow died in the field.
Starting point is 00:47:03 Why are you not enforcing that? They said, we choose not to enforce it. We don't think it's actionable. Well, it's a law. Yeah. So we just pick and choose which laws we want to follow. And that's so widely known, and that's an inexpensive source.
Starting point is 00:47:18 And so they grind it up and it becomes kibble. What else is in there? Like, what else is, is it ground up, animals, is it ground up vegetables? Is it, I know, seed oils and other highly processed ingredients are in there? So the thing with kibble, it goes through the extrusion process. So think of, you know, cereal, breakfast cereal, that's the extrusion process that the Kellogg's invented. And then, hey, we can make pet food out of that.
Starting point is 00:47:45 And that's why, because it's that process, that's why we have to have this starch to hold everything together. Otherwise, it gunks up the machine. So we start with, hopefully, a meat of some sort, a meat meal. But if you're extruding it, you have to have a starch. So it's going to be corn, peas, legumes, potatoes, something to hold it together. So that's, and they do something called ingredients splitting. So it might be pea protein, pea halls, pee, like they'll have peas in their five ways, corn in their five ways, corn gluten meal, you know, spent corn, whatever.
Starting point is 00:48:31 Like, they'll name it five different ways. So when you add up all the ingredients, it's like, oh, I just fed my cat a lot of corn. And he's a carnivore. So we've got that. And then it goes through multiple high heat processes. And so by the time it gets done, we have killed off a lot of the nutrition. The nature of the proteins. Yeah. And, Now we have AGE's advanced glycation M products, which carcinogenic. Then we put preservatives in it. One of the companies that when Susan Thickston first got into being the pet food consumer advocate, her dog had died of bone cancer and her veterinarian said it's probably from that preservative in the pet food.
Starting point is 00:49:13 Really? Athoxicine. And so she called the pet food company and they said, oh, that stuff shelf stable for 25 years. Great. that's not something I'd really want to brag about. Right. So BHA, B.H.T. Athoxiquin.
Starting point is 00:49:28 And what's really interesting, and a lot of that's been taken out, but a lot of it's still there. So we've got preservatives because they want it to be shelf-stable for minimum two years, but probably longer. Two years.
Starting point is 00:49:40 Yeah. Think about a food product that you could leave out for two years. The expiration date on those bags is generally two. So if you're looking at, you know, if you're going to buy pet food, look at the expiration.
Starting point is 00:49:52 date because it's generally two years. So if it's about to expire, it was made two years ago. Wow. So a lot of our... Great tip. A lot of our fresh and frozen foods, it might be one year, but some of them are still even two years. So that's because they don't have to put the made-on date. They have to put the best buy date. I mean, that kind of goes with human food too. Right. So I would definitely look at that. But then because they have cooked out all the nutrients, they add back in a synthetic vitamin mineral mix. And we know that the body uses synthetic vitamins and minerals very differently from whole food nutrition.
Starting point is 00:50:33 And so one of the things that we have seen so much of is copper toxicity in our pets, again, causing liver problems because the copper is stored in the liver. Yeah. And AFCO has a minimum for copper, but no maximum. So let's say the minimum is seven. Some of these companies are coming in at 80. Wow. And so one of the things that people should ask is I want to see the complete nutritional breakdown on the food
Starting point is 00:51:04 because all they're required to put on the label is protein, fat, moisture. Carbohydrate. No, they don't even put carbs on pet food. No. No. It's like four things. Wow. It's ridiculous.
Starting point is 00:51:17 And they've been working on changing the labeling, oh, for about 10 years. That's the infamous Washington. Kick the can down the road. Oh, and actually, after the huge, there was a big problem that killed tens of thousands of animals in 2007, 2008, where we had melamine, you know, melamine plates, plastic that was being ground up and added. to ingredients from China, and it caused kidney failure. Is this straight plastic? Pretty much, yeah.
Starting point is 00:51:55 What is it? It's made, it's used to make plastic plates, but it artificially elevates protein content. Oh, wow. So they were putting it in ingredients that were used to make pet food with, you know, drag kibble. Actually, it was even in some canned foods,
Starting point is 00:52:10 and a lot of animals died before they figured out what the problem was. I actually was in China stuff, studying acupuncture the next year. And all of the Starbucks and all the coffee shops had no dairy products because melamine was being put in the dairy products. Wow.
Starting point is 00:52:29 So what was happening, I mean, it's so corrupt. It is so crazy. They were diluting down the milk and the dairy products, but adding melamine to bring the protein level back up so nobody would know that it was diluted. And infants were dying of kidney failure, because it was in the milk products that were being fed to infants.
Starting point is 00:52:51 So nobody could get dairy products. So that's how corrupt the food system is. It's like, oh, well, we killed 10,000 dogs, who cares? Oh, wait, we just killed a bunch of kids. Wow. And how did that crossover occur? I mean, how do we cross over into human food so that children got a hold of it?
Starting point is 00:53:08 I was in China and it was happening in China. Wow. And so, you know, the dairy companies were like, well, we'll dilute down the milk. so that, you know, a little bit goes further. Yeah. And, but we have to pass the test of the protein level in it, so they were adding...
Starting point is 00:53:25 It helps. Sorry, officially raised that. Yeah, it's just crazy. So, you know, we get... The vitamin mineral mix is a huge problem. We had another recall in 2018 and 2019, again, tens of thousands of animals died because there was excess vitamin D in the vitamin mineral mix.
Starting point is 00:53:40 That much. Yeah, it was like 100 times what it needed to be. Wow. And again, all these animals are dying of kidney failure, and it takes a bunch of veterinarians to get together and say, you know, I'm seeing a lot more kidney failure than I get. Like, you think there's something going on here? Like, wow, why are there so many young animals with kidney failure?
Starting point is 00:53:59 And then finally somebody said, oh, maybe it's the food. And one of the biggest culprits in that was Hills. But it was across many brands because there's only a couple of these synthetic vitamin mineral mix companies. And they're for China. Feeding the foods, but yeah, of course. They're from China, and so all these companies buy from the same manufacturers. So when you have a problem, you have it across many, many, many companies. So when I'm looking at food, when I read the ingredient label, I want to know how to read
Starting point is 00:54:33 every single one of them and I don't want to see chemicals. I want everything coming from whole foods. And I get pushback from veterinary nutritionists who say those synthetic vitamins are just fine, and it's impossible to balance it without that. I'm like, really? I'm pretty sure we can do it, and I have done it, and we do a lot better that way. Mm-hmm, just in Whole Foods.
Starting point is 00:54:57 Yeah. So what are some of the – you produce your own pet food? I don't. I don't. No, you produce your own pet supplements. Your daughter runs a supplement company. I produce some of my own supplement. Well, I don't produce some, but I formulate some of my own supplements.
Starting point is 00:55:09 I have formulated recipes for pet food companies, and I have a couple that I work closely with, but I don't own a pet food company and I don't want to because I don't want to play with FDA. It's hard enough. So we sell products from probably 75 different small companies. In order for somebody to get their products in our warehouse and on my website, they have to jump through a lot of hoops. Kind of like Susan has her list of pet foods that people have to jump through the hoops. we look at the ingredients very closely
Starting point is 00:55:46 and then we also look at the company very closely. What are their morals and ethics? I love hearing that. And, you know, if they're trying to claw their way to the top by saying bad things about all their competitors, we're not going to work with them. Yeah, we have the same thing in our industry. It's, you know, it's, there's, there's a hundred and sixty million dogs and cats out there.
Starting point is 00:56:11 We don't have to compete. We all need to work together. What are some good brands of either raw or human grade food for pets? So right now, for my own animals, even though I work closely with a couple of companies, I like to rotate brands. Because a lot of times a brand will, not all of them, but a lot of times they'll have like sort of a formula. Like here's my meat source, but then when you get past the meat source, it's like broccoli, carrots. sardines, you know, it's kind of the same formula after that. So let's just say there's a micromanoral deficiency in there.
Starting point is 00:56:49 I don't want to be feeding the same thing all the time. So I rotate and I also rotate proteins for my animals. So in my freezer right now, I probably have all provide Viva Raw, small batch. I might have Evermore, raised right. Some of them are raw foods. Some of them are gently cooked. I'm fine with gently cooked, but these are all companies
Starting point is 00:57:13 that are not using synthetic vitamin mineral mixes and they're not throwing a bunch of starchy carbs in there. These are complete meals, so it makes it, my mom is, my 89 and a half year old mom is in charge of feeding the cats. Good for her. That's going to keep her alive for a long time. Oh, yeah, she runs,
Starting point is 00:57:30 she runs back and forth to the barn multiple times a day. She's really cute. But, you know, she's always, she's really funny, the cats always have two choices. So it might be rabbit and chicken, or it might be turkey and venison.
Starting point is 00:57:45 She always gives them two choices twice a day, but our animals also get raw milk from our cow, the yogurt that we make, they get the eggs from our chickens, we process our own meat chickens. So, you know, it's sort of a combination, but we've kind of gone off the deep end. But still all coming from whole food sources.
Starting point is 00:58:06 One of the things you also talk about is constitutional matching. Yeah. Right. Not all food is meant for the same animal. So cats, not all cats, dogs, not all dogs, just because it's a dog or a cat. Right. So how do you, because I know there's so many people watching this right now that deeply
Starting point is 00:58:25 care for their pets and they're like, I'm already somewhat on this bandwagon and probably if they're watching the ultimate human podcast, they're attentive to this, at least for themselves and their children. And if they have pets, their attention strong to it. So what is constitution? matching for? So I actually have a line of food called constitutions and it's made by all provide, but it basically matches the Chinese elements. So like to these personalities, metal, fire, right. And what's really interesting, like I was talking about with myself, I wouldn't, because I'm a
Starting point is 00:59:00 wood personality, I wouldn't necessarily buy the wood diet to feed me. I might buy the metal diet because my metal needs to be supported. But when I formulated those diets, I tried to make them balance. So, like, the wood diet would actually be helpful because it has things that are going to help drain my liver. So it's going to support it, but it's also going to drain it.
Starting point is 00:59:21 Because we don't want to make an excess of something. So the constitutional medicine goes along with the personalities, but it also goes along with yin and yang. So yong is hot, yin is cold. And you can look at your animal and say, well, is he always laying on the air? I mean, we're in Miami and it's 95 degrees out. So it's hot out. I don't want to feed something that is going to add more heat internally to the body.
Starting point is 00:59:50 Right. So lamb, chicken, venison, goat, very warming proteins. I'd probably save those for the winter down here. Right. But in the summer, we can feed things that are going to be more cooling, duck and rabbit and turkey and pork. So we not only change the diet based on the personality or constitution of the animal, we also change it on the seasonality and the weather. And you may have a dog who, like your 17-year-old dog, a lot of times they're cold. They don't have as much body fat.
Starting point is 01:00:24 So even though it's summer and it's 95 degrees, he still might need a warming diet like venison or chicken because he's an old cold dog. Yeah. But, you know, a lot of the youngsters, they're hot. Oh, yeah. It's so funny because that's the personality of these two dogs. They have a very young lab named Aspen, female, and then they got the crotchety old man. And like Jack loves Aspen but kind of doesn't want anything to do with Aspen.
Starting point is 01:00:52 It's like if you're a little much. You're a little much. And you have like a five-year-old little brother that's just constantly like. And so, I mean, she's always wanting to play and running around him and nipping at them and what have you. but she also has heat seizures. So they have to be really careful because she's jet black. Yep. And she has heat seizures when my son would take her out for runs in the wintertime, fine.
Starting point is 01:01:15 But even just on walks in the summer, she actually will start seizing. We've had dogs that will do that too. So that's where knowing that what the energetics of the food are, you could say, okay, this dog, particularly in the summer, really needs a cooling diet. Love that. And then the older dog really needs a warming diet. And the guidance for this is on your website where they can get these different constitutions.
Starting point is 01:01:40 Yeah, it's on the website. And I didn't bring that book with me, but I have a book that's Yinn and Yang Nutrition for Dogs. And it's 62 recipes. There's the original one, and now there's the 2.0 version. But I would do the 2.0. But the recipes are based on the five elements, but also on the yin and yang,
Starting point is 01:02:02 the heat and the cooling. So if you want to make your own food, okay, here's a complete diet that you can make. And I do recommend rotating. So, like, if your son is making your pet's food, he should be rotating recipes and ingredients, just like we would for ourselves. Right.
Starting point is 01:02:19 You know, I find it interesting that people go to the veterinarian and people are really getting away from asking their veterinarian what they should feed because they know what the answer is going to be. Yeah. But if you go to your veterinarian and they're like, we'll feed this bag of dry, burnt brown balls. Don't add anything to the bowl because you'll unbalance it, which is a fallacy.
Starting point is 01:02:39 They're not balanced anyway. We know that from testing. But, you know, only put this in the bowl and don't add anything to it because you'll mess it up and feed the same thing day in and day out. 24-7 year-round. If they handed you a cereal box for your kids and said everything is in here that your child needs, don't add anything to it, don't change it up. They just get this dry cereal twice a day every day.
Starting point is 01:03:01 You'd look at them like they lost their mind. Right. But we go to our veterinarian and think that is perfectly normal. Right. Wow. You also talk about prevention, not like crisis vet medicine. And obviously crises are going to happen. Oh, yeah. Dogs get in a fight or, you know, they're out, they burn their paws, or they hurt themselves.
Starting point is 01:03:24 But what do you mean by preventative medicine for a dog? Is there, do dogs need routine like humans to exercise, sunlight, community, connection like we do? I mean, dogs have, what, 100 times the oxytocin that humans do? And they form, like, these bonds. Maybe it's not 100 times, but they have a lot more oxytocin than humans do, from what I understand. And so they really form these bonds. And a lot of dogs, I mean, when we grew up, they would get anxiety. They would get separation anxiety.
Starting point is 01:03:52 Oh, anxiety is huge. We have more anxiety in our pets than we ever have. Like I said, over 80% of indoor cats are highly stressed. And I see the difference we have two indoor cats. Is this because the owner's just leaving every day and they're in the... Well, that's part of it. We think that cats are like, you know, solitary, do their own thing. They're really not.
Starting point is 01:04:14 They want interaction. So I look at my outdoor cats. They are all over the place. They're jumping through the air, catching grasshoppers. They're getting birds. They're chasing mice. They play with the mice before they do the mice thing. Yeah, it's sort of cruel.
Starting point is 01:04:31 It is cruel, but you look at it. But it's cats doing cat things. And because they're on a species appropriate diet and they have a lot of exercise, they're in a very safe environment, they're being real cats. They don't have any stress. I actually tested the microbiome.
Starting point is 01:04:48 All my cats eat the same. The indoor and the outdoor cats tested the microbiome on all nine cats. The outdoor cats had perfect microbiomes. Really? The indoor cats had not so great microbiomes. The only difference is to live inside. They don't pounce, they don't hunt, they don't climb, they sit.
Starting point is 01:05:08 And they don't interact much. They don't really like the dogs. But they also don't want to go outside. They could if they wanted. But so there's a huge difference in the environment. In the environment that we see. So it is critically important that our, our pets have human interaction,
Starting point is 01:05:28 and for indoor cats that we allow them to hunt and pounce and climb, cats are really into vertical spaces. That's why you find them on top of your refrigerator. Yeah. Like they need- We had barn cats growing up too, and they were always up on the rafters. We had these tobacco barns. Yes.
Starting point is 01:05:44 And they were always up there on the rafters, and they would go up there and tangle with raccoons at the top of our barn, like 50 feet off the ground. So that's cats doing normal cat things. And so we need to get back. And so, yeah, for those who play laser tag with their cats, which is a great thing for them, because that's hunting and pouncing, make sure they win at the end. Don't just turn your light off and walk away. They're like, where did it go and I didn't win?
Starting point is 01:06:11 They always have to win. So throw a piece of dehydrated meat or a mouse toy. Throw something at the end where you ended up with the laser that the cat gets to win and gets to walk off of this prize. Great tip. Always let them win. for our dogs, they need that mental stimulation. And they are pretty darn social. So my youngest dog, when we got him as a puppy,
Starting point is 01:06:38 he's a special needs kid with hydrocephalus. You told me about this one. He's got everything going wrong. He's a little crazy. But he really bonded with our 10-year-old cavalier. And they were best buddies. The 10-year-old cavalier happened to be in late-stage heart disease and heart failure.
Starting point is 01:06:57 And when he passed away, we had other dogs, but they would not play with the youngster. And so now he didn't have a friend and he didn't have a buddy. And yes, I will play with him. But it was very different for it. And he was a COVID baby,
Starting point is 01:07:13 so he wasn't socialized outside of the house at all. The first time I took him into town, I thought he was going to lose his gourd. It was not good. So, yes, we have co-executive. COVID children. My granddaughter's a COVID baby too. So, you know, a whole different thing. So another English toy spaniel came up online and a friend said, you really need to take this dog. He's been returned like three times. He's two days older than my cavalier. And he was really cute.
Starting point is 01:07:45 And my husband's a big mush. And he said, oh, we need to, we need to adopt Gilly. Okay. So we get Gilly. And I, I still say, they're five years old now. We got them when Gilly was two. And I still say I got my dog a dog. Oh. They are, they're like two brothers in that they are best friends. They do everything together.
Starting point is 01:08:07 They sleep together. They play together. And then they fight like two brothers who want to kill each other. But I need. And then they go right back. And then they go right back. But I needed to get my dog a dog. I'm not recommending that everybody get their dog a dog.
Starting point is 01:08:18 But we saw that social interactive need. And I know everybody hates, not everybody, a lot of people hate dog parks. A lot of people speak very badly of dog parks because a lot of bad things can happen in dog parks. Yeah. I see what dogs that aren't trained well that attack other dogs and things like that. Right. And it's not a dog park problem. It's not a dog problem. It's a people problem. It's people who aren't paying attention to their dogs, people who are bringing the wrong dogs to a dog. Like, I would never take my dogs to a dog park. They're unsocialized. They'd be horrible with other dogs. Right. But they have each other.
Starting point is 01:08:53 So, but dogs really are social creatures and, like, the owner of all provide dog food. Single guy, he has a dog. And he takes his, this dog loves, the dog lived most of its life in the shelter. And he adopted him, and he loves the dog park, and he has friends. And so you get these dogs there.
Starting point is 01:09:13 Like, they look forward to going to the dog park every day and playing with their buddies. Sure. And so that social interaction is really critical. So we need good food. We need good social interaction. We need training. I love, you know, non-abnoxious training.
Starting point is 01:09:33 Yeah. I'm not a dog trainer. If you want to untrain your dog, send it to my house. I'll ruin it. I'm really good at ruining them. But yeah, you know, if we could go back to... In training, just to touch on that for a minute. Is this important in the early stages of the dog, like the younger, the better?
Starting point is 01:09:50 The younger, the better, but Forrest, Forest guns. did not go to training until he was two. Farsh Gump is her dog, by the way. Fars Gump is my little hydrocephalic crazy dog. He didn't go to training until he was two. And I finally took him because our veterinary office that we go to, since I don't have a license now, I have to go to a veterinarian's really fun.
Starting point is 01:10:11 She's great, though. She had one of her technicians was a trainer, and so they were offering puppy classes. And I said, well, he's two. Can he still go to puppy class? She's, sure, bring him on in. And the reason I wanted to go is, he wouldn't walk on a leash.
Starting point is 01:10:24 When I put a leash on, he would just hit the brakes and collapse. Really? I was like, all right, he's scared to death of a leash. I have no idea why. And so we had to go to learn to walk on a leash, and now he's my best walker.
Starting point is 01:10:35 Wow. Of all the dogs we have. And then when we got Gilly at two, I was like, all right, well, he's going to puppy class too. Yeah. And so they went at two. My mother had dogs that she took at five and seven.
Starting point is 01:10:47 I mean, you can take that, like if you adopt a new dog that's older, you can still take them to school to learn things. You can still, old dogs can learn new tricks. Yeah. And they should.
Starting point is 01:10:57 We have a few dogs in the family that need some. We just want them to be good citizens. Yeah. So they can be good citizens. They're great dogs, but not model citizens. And you know what?
Starting point is 01:11:08 It's really, if you have no rules, it's really confusing for the dog. Like, he's allowed to jump on the bed today, but then you come in later and yell at him for jumping on the bed. Yeah. They just set the rules. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:11:19 Either you're allowed on the furniture or you're not. Right. But just let them not. Right. And they'll get it. And they'll get it. And then, like, Gilly is a food maniac, and he'll steal everybody else's food. He has learned to sit in his corner
Starting point is 01:11:35 while food is being made, and he does and doesn't leave. Like, he just learned that, and it's like, well, this makes life a lot easier that you're not attacking everybody else's food. Right. So I've been working out with my son lately, trying to keep up with him and his high rock's competitive athletes,
Starting point is 01:11:50 and I've been starting to use this perfect amino pre-worked workout. I really like it. It's got BH4. It improves nitric oxide output, but it actually seems to stay after the workout and not crash. There's no stimulants. So no caffeine, no Mao-Wong, nothing that gives you that kind of amped feeling. You just feel like you're maybe better able to move during the workout, like you have better blood flow. So if you're in the market for a pre-workout, check out the perfect amino pre-workout. It's my favorite now. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'd love to that you apply traditional Chinese medicine to dogs. So these are things like herbs, acupuncture. So for the listeners that have probably aging dogs or dogs with
Starting point is 01:12:33 hip dysplasia or dogs that are exhibiting pain or even anxiety, separation anxiety, because sometimes there's not a lot you can do. You got to go to work. And so we're leaving our animals. Then we're coming back home. What are some things that pet owners can do to help manage those scenarios with dogs, especially separation anxiety? Yeah. Well, far. Chris Gump has separation anxiety. When I leave the house, he does lapse. He's nuts. And there's always somebody in my house, so it's kind of funny, but it's not me.
Starting point is 01:13:05 So a lot of it is training, but there are also things that we can use to kind of help with that. I'm a huge fan of CBD for dogs. And they all react differently. Some of them it calms them right down. Others, like when our cleaning lady comes every Tuesday, Gilly and Forest. lose their minds. So they get an herbal tincture called tranquil times and CBD
Starting point is 01:13:30 the night before and the morning of makes life a lot better. Is that something that would help them travel too? Yes. So what's really interesting we also use flower essences and a lot of people have heard of rescue remedy and they tend to want to use rescue remedy
Starting point is 01:13:45 for everything, but it's actually pretty specific. But there are other flower essences that you can use for specific situation. So we have one called safe journey. Well, well, that's pretty easy. We're going on a journey. I need to be safe. Right. Is that like an immune booster? No, their flower essences. They call it emotional training in a bottle. But it's basically the energetics of the vibration. So they don't get so agitated or, you know, new environment, new surroundings. They're not freaking out. So we have flower essences. We have homeopathics. There's one called travel anxiety. Pretty easy to
Starting point is 01:14:22 know what that one's for. Yeah. We use melatonin. We use CBD. We have herbal tinctures. So, and it depends on the animal. Sometimes you have to layer on a lot of different things. We saw this in, when I was in the horse training world, we use flour essences a lot.
Starting point is 01:14:40 Really? In the horse training world. Wow. Because when you're showing, you're not allowed to use any chemicals that would show up on a drug test. Sure. But flower essences are fine. You can use something like that.
Starting point is 01:14:52 homeopathic remedies. Wow, it's great. So, you know, it's just kind of knowing what is accepted. Like, CBD is not accepted in all circles. Oh. Is that something they can test for? I don't know if they're testing for it or not. It's really interesting.
Starting point is 01:15:07 I'm traveling around the world speaking this year, and in some countries, CBD is not allowed. So that makes it really interesting because you're like, well, this would be exactly what you know. Oh, you can't do that. That's all against regular story of my. But here in the U.S. Just kidding.
Starting point is 01:15:22 They're good. And so you have these different tinctures, essentially do what the tincture says it does. Makes it very simple. Because I know a lot of people travel with their pets, but maybe it's two or three times a year. Maybe it's only once or twice a year. And so dog has barely been out of the house
Starting point is 01:15:38 or maybe socialized in the neighborhood. And then all of a sudden you're taking on this commercial flight. Hundreds of people. And that can, especially for our short-faced breeds, that travel can be really a nightmare. And so one of the things, like if you go to your traditional veterinarian, they're going to say, oh, here's tranquilizers, here's trazidone. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 01:15:59 They're going to give you something. We used to use ACE Promazine before we had other drugs. But we can end up suppressing respiratory function in some of these animals who are kind of on the edge with that anyway. Right. So you have to know your dog. And again, if you need to travel with them, it's kind of like taking cats to the vet
Starting point is 01:16:20 or traveling with your, get them used to whatever they're traveling in that carrying cage. So my cats, at least my indoor cats and my outdoor cats that are really friendly with me, they were all strays that came, so not as easy. But I leave a carrier out and leave treats and food. And so like my dogs will run right in a crate and just hang out. Right. Because that's just, it's great. Instead of the first time it comes out of the closet, you're stopping.
Starting point is 01:16:50 offer them in there and then they feel like they're in prison. Yeah, and that's why so many people have a problem getting their cats or their small dogs to the veterinarian. It's like, you know, he's hiding under the bed. I couldn't get him out. First of all, they know. Right. They know that you're getting ready to go. And if they see the carrier come out,
Starting point is 01:17:03 there's no way you're getting them. So make the carrier a place that they like. Right. And so it's all about planning ahead. I understand things happen at the last minute sometimes, but the more you can do to plan ahead and make it seem like normal, everyday stuff, the better. So I want to go to like the raw, fresh, homemade conversation, because there's a lot of
Starting point is 01:17:27 online manufacturers of pet food now that seem to be doing really the right thing. I don't profess to know these brands because I don't have animals in the house. I know that can my son and my daughter-in-law do. Actually, we just started having an animal in the house. I forgot. I got I got hoodwinked by my youngest daughter. We were supposed to be fostering a dog. And she was like, oh, no, it's going to be here for like week, two weeks. We're just going to nurse her back to health. And then we're going to foster it home.
Starting point is 01:18:01 And it's a whole racket for like kids and parents. And apparently it's a thing because now I've talked to other parents that have been hoodwinked by the same situation. So this dog comes in. His name's Tori. It's great. He's a staff charred. and he's an amazing dog.
Starting point is 01:18:18 But he came in very emaciated and, you know, came from the shelter and now he's put on weight. And I don't know that we've done a social media post or ever actually talked to somebody about adopting the dog. So that's how I know that I got stamped. That dog's staying.
Starting point is 01:18:33 But now we're going on like four months and now my wife and I are getting attached to the dog. And so actually I think I do have a dog in the house. You have a dog. Not you mentioned it. But the, you know, I spend the label around on this, and it is organ meats and organ blends, ground beef, rice, chicken, whole lamb, peas, you know, a whole food, like, probably something that I would actually eat.
Starting point is 01:19:01 Do you find that brands that are doing that are, there are some really good, trustworthy farm-to-table brands, or are you backed that we should be making our pets food? No, there are some really good brands out there. Unfortunately, some of the biggest. ones that spend money on advertising and are the, you know, ship direct to home are still too high in carbs. So I don't want to see grains. I don't want to see peas. I don't want to see, I don't want grains. I don't want agumes. I don't want white potatoes. Okay. Great. And so some of these brands are making huge strides within the veterinary industry and influence. And I'm so
Starting point is 01:19:43 thankful because it is so much better than ultra-processed kibble, but they still have a price point that they need to make. So there's way too many carbs, and a lot of them are still using synthetic vitamin mineral mixes added into there. So I do want to see all whole foods in there, but I don't feed any, like when you look at my recipes in the Yun and Yang nutrition book, they're formulated without any grains. And then at the bottom, it'll say, if you want to add grains, this is the grain that would be appropriate based on the Constitution or whatever it is
Starting point is 01:20:21 that we're working on. But for me personally, no grains. Yeah. So, I mean, and cat owners, like, listen up. I have so many cat owners in my life. No grants. And all the cats are fat, and I've really even thought about the carbohydrate,
Starting point is 01:20:35 the high-lycemic diet. Yeah. Breaks down to sugar. Yeah. I didn't realize they're carnivores. Yeah. And we see so many of them that end up being obese and then becoming diabetic. Yeah. Because so the thing is, the ultra-processed food has palatants added to it, which is basically the umami to make it taste good. And these companies spend a lot of time and money on what is going to make this cat be addicted to this kibble.
Starting point is 01:21:09 And they truly are addicted. And the problem with cats is you can. not starve them into feeding them the correct thing. Ah. Because cats will go and deliver failure in about three days if they don't eat. Really? So you can't say, I'm going to hold out, he'll eat when he's hungry. No, he'll just die. Wow.
Starting point is 01:21:27 Cats are a big problem. It took me. So what do you do, transition slowly? Very slowly. And so for anybody who has a cat that is kibble addicted, you can try offering them canned food. Sometimes they'll lick the juice and then walk away. for when I first did all this transition 25 years ago with my cats that were kibble addicted
Starting point is 01:21:47 because I didn't know any better. I started with freeze-dried raw food because it is dry texture, more similar to a kibble. It's still a complete diet, and so I would put their kibble in their bowl and then sprinkle some of the freeze-dried over it. And kind of not, and don't put a ton in,
Starting point is 01:22:07 like at the very beginning, like crumble a piece, and then, you know, a couple days later, it's a couple pieces. It took me six months to get the original cats to change over. Transition, yeah. But in our house, kibble for cats is kitty crack. And I guarantee you if I went and bought some kitty crack and put it in my barn for my cats that have only ever eaten raw food,
Starting point is 01:22:31 they would dive in head first because it's made so addictive. And, you know, interestingly, we saw that the, administration recently opened the door to psychedelics for human beings. And a lot of this is microdosing with mushrooms. And where do you fall? I mean, because traditional Chinese medicine uses a lot of mushrooms, raci, cortisps. I haven't played with that at all. There is a veterinarian, Dr. Rob Silver in Colorado, who has written books on on cannabis for pets and for the psychedelics. He's been doing a lot of the research into that.
Starting point is 01:23:18 And I think there's a place for it. These are conditions specific though. It's not like blanket across all dogs, but ones that have severe separation anxiety or severe behavioral issues or what have you. I think that there's a lot of substances in nature that we haven't looked at. nearly enough.
Starting point is 01:23:42 We just need somebody to do the research, and the pharmaceutical companies are not going to do that research. No, no, no, you can't patent it. I get that. Yeah, and if you can't patent it, there's no money in it. So tell me about the books that are on the table right here. Keeping your pets naturally healthy, raising naturally healthy pets. So I wrote my first book, which is Needles to Natural back in 2014.
Starting point is 01:24:06 And that one's sort of autobiographical, like how I went from being traditional to what I ended up doing in my career. But it also has a lot of chapters on seizures, diabetes, you know, pick a disease, and how I was treating them in my clinic. That was different from what everybody else was doing. And I actually wrote that first book on a dare. It was a Facebook group that said,
Starting point is 01:24:31 you know, you answer the questions different from everybody else. It was a dog group. You know, you should write all this down somewhere. And I said, okay. So I wrote a book. And then the next book after that was Canine Kitchen Capers, which it was... It's stories that were sent in from people
Starting point is 01:24:49 who started making their own dog food and, like, blowing up their kitchen and, like, all the different things that went wrong. And so it's kind of a fun, funny book, but also has recipes in it. It also has recipes for humans, like how to order takeout for dinner because you spent all day cooking for your dog.
Starting point is 01:25:09 Right. So that's kind of a fun book. And then I said, well, I'm going to write a serious book. So I wrote my first Yin and Yang nutrition for dogs based on Chinese medicine food therapy. And then I said, you know, I need to write something that is more for somebody just entering the holistic space and not necessarily into Chinese medicine. So that's when raising naturally healthy pets came out. And so it has things in there like how to find a holistic veterinarian. how to talk to your traditional veterinarian
Starting point is 01:25:41 if you can't find a holistic veterinarian and not get kicked out of the office. There's a big chapter in there on vaccines because for me, education is power. And so as the pet parent, if you can walk in and say, well, I know how distemper is transmitted from one dog to another and I really don't think that my dog has a risk for that.
Starting point is 01:26:03 So this is why I'm saying no to the vaccine. or my dog had that two years ago and I know that vaccine lasts five to seven years or more so you know if you go in with that kind of knowledge versus just no you're gonna get a lot further
Starting point is 01:26:18 you don't want to have an argument with them you don't want them to feel backed into a corner so that's and that is cats I love that cats and dogs there's a chapter in there about making your cats not so crazy like you know climbing and all that stuff talk about cat litter The cat litter industry is multi, multi-millions of, like, crazy amount of money spent on cat litter research.
Starting point is 01:26:45 Yeah, it's nuts. And it is true. They have huge preferences. Cats do. Cats do. For the type of cat litter. Yeah. And don't use anything that's perfumed.
Starting point is 01:26:55 I can't imagine that stuff's very clean either because sometimes, yeah, you come in and it smells like. So the litter that I use is a dried grass. Like potpoury over it. Yeah, yeah. So mine's a dried grass litter. because I have two indoor cats. It tracks a lot, but where I have it, it's not a problem. So talk about, you know, how to choose that.
Starting point is 01:27:14 So then I said, okay, well, for somebody who's already been in the holistic field a little bit with their animals and they want to dive a little deeper, that's where keeping your pets naturally healthy came about. So that one takes a deeper dive in. There's a big chapter in there on allergies because that's such a huge problem. Huge.
Starting point is 01:27:32 Big chapter on inflation. inflammatory bowel disease. Like, you know, this is how they're going to diagnose it. This is what they're going to tell you to use. This is what I would do instead. So lots of tidbits in there for how to treat your animals. Oh, geez, what else? Oh, protecting your pets from parasites.
Starting point is 01:27:49 So this one started out as an e-book, and we said, oh, we need to put it in print as well. And it's actually on Audible and coming out in Spanish very soon. Because fleas sticks and heartworms are something that panic a lot of. Which is huge and it also goes into Lyme disease because that's a big scare tactic as well. So how do we protect them naturally? How do we not use all these chemicals? Do dogs get Lyme? Oh, it's a huge problem. Huge problem. Huge problem. About as big as people. Wow. But they also...
Starting point is 01:28:20 Do they respond to the same type of antivirals and antiparcytics? So we use herbs. We use homeopathics. and what's not told to pet owners is a positive Lyme test doesn't mean your pet has Lyme, it means they have antibodies to Lyme. It's like, oh, he was exposed, maybe he fought it off. It's less than 5% who are bitten by a Lyme positive test or tick will actually develop Lyme disease.
Starting point is 01:28:48 But, you know, everybody gets scared into it. Does the immune system too, yeah. Yeah, everybody gets scared into, oh, you have to vaccinate against Lyme. And I'm like, what about the other dozen tick-borne diseases? Mm-hmm. The big thing is we have to keep them from getting tick bites. Right.
Starting point is 01:29:03 So, check the dog. Approach it from a different direction. Yeah. And like I said, a good immune system, like I have seven outdoor barn cats. Mm-hmm. Go down in the woods all the time. Come, you know, they play with mice and bunnies and all kinds of things.
Starting point is 01:29:18 We have deer in our backfield. Mm-hmm. If I pull off two ticks a year from seven cats, that's a lot. Wow. Like, they just... Don't get them. They don't get them. because they don't taste good.
Starting point is 01:29:31 There's a lot to be said for that. So I'm trying to think if there's any other books. Oh, I have one called Unleashed about dog parks. I have a friend who, John Sarver, who owns gyms for dogs, and he designs dog parks, and he's built about 2000 in the U.S. Really? Wow.
Starting point is 01:29:48 And he's really big into the fact that our dogs are very social and need to socialize, but a good dog park is good and a bad dog park is not good. So he asked me if I would write a book that he could give away to people going to dog parks to kind of say. Yeah, because there's several right around here where I leave. Yeah, and they may be good, they may be bad. A dog park is not a chain link fence in a field. That's what most dog parks are.
Starting point is 01:30:18 Exactly. Yeah. So a good dog park is going to have a clean water source that's not, you know, where they're sharing a bowl. it's going to have pieces of equipment for the dogs to play on and be active with where they can get multiple levels and climb and just like a playground for kids. We need toys for the dogs. You know, we need good ingress and egress
Starting point is 01:30:43 so that we're not losing dogs. And we need to have separate areas for aggressive dogs. We need to separate the small dogs from the big dogs. So dog parks can be very good. So I wrote that book for him. and now I am rewriting my very first book because I go back and read it now 12 years later and there are some things in there that I said that I'm like
Starting point is 01:31:05 I can't believe I'd re-framed that, right? So I'm like, I need to rewrite this one because I really, really want, it's a great book and it's funny, I remember one of my clients, she had a dog with Cushing's disease and she had bought my book or I gave her a copy when it first came out And this was like a year and a half later.
Starting point is 01:31:26 And her dog had Cushing's, and she'd been coming to me, and we've been working on staff and treating everything naturally. And she took a trip. And she decided that she would read my book on the trip. And she's reading out loud to her husband as he's driving. And she got to the chapter on Cushing's disease. And she was like, oh, my gosh, all those questions I've been torturing this poor veterinarian with, they're all in the book.
Starting point is 01:31:49 So, you know, that's the goal is we want to educate people. and that's our social media and our website is just chock full of information. I'll link all that in the show notes. Because we want to empower pet parents. We want you to be able to make good choices and to avoid making toxic choices. Wow. Dr. Moran, this has been amazing. I know this is going to resonate so well with my audience.
Starting point is 01:32:16 And again, the parallels between what we have going on in our food supply and the pet food supply when we have going on in our medical system and the pets medical system, the parallels are just stark and it's astounding. But parent, I mean, pet parents really are empowered to change the entire trajectory of their pets' lives. They are.
Starting point is 01:32:34 And they have the resources. We're seeing that change in the pet food industry. That's good. We're seeing it in the whole food industry. Mars and Purina and Hills have all come out with gently cooked fresh foods. That's what they're calling. After the last 50 years of saying,
Starting point is 01:32:50 that's horrible, that's gonna poison your pets. All of a sudden they now came out with it. Unfortunately, they're using really subpar ingredients and they're charging a lot of money, but they finally got on the bandwagon and said, oh, that little piece of the pet food market is growing rapidly. We better get on board. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:33:10 And so kudos. You're not saying it's all about the money, are you? Oh. How dare you? How dare I. Yeah, private equity buying up veterinary clinics. Yeah. You know, it might be about the money.
Starting point is 01:33:22 We can go down that rabbit hole in the next podcast. Yeah, that's a big. That's a big one. I can see your antenna going up. So Dr. Morgan, I end every one of my podcasts by asking all my guests the same question. And there's no right or wrong answer to this question. But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? Oh, man.
Starting point is 01:33:42 I should say, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate pet? But I feel like that would be the first time I've ever asked that one. I love that answer. and to be an ultimate human for me is to honor my God-given talents and to honor that God charged us with dominion over the animals. Wow.
Starting point is 01:34:03 And for me, my ultimate goal is to care for those animals in a way that honors them and their lives and we don't do any harm. So that's, that's my goal and I've spent a lot of years talking about it and I'm going to continue talking about it because I think we need to make changes. Well, of all of the guests that we have had on our podcasts, we have the most number of VIPs
Starting point is 01:34:33 waiting to ask you questions in our VIP chat. So if you are interested in becoming a VIP, go over to the Ultimate Human.com forward slash VIP where we do private podcasts with our guests and you can ask them questions directly. but I really hope that you enjoy this podcast. I have so many notes and takeaways from this. I hope you do too. We'll link all of the subjects, the books, and the guides that she referred to on the podcast.
Starting point is 01:34:59 We'll link those in the show notes for you. And until next time, that's just science.

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