Show #2700
DIALOGUE edit
Big Kibble: The Hidden Dangers of the Pet Food Industry
with Guest, Shawn Buckley & Dr. Oscar Chavez

Carl Lanore: [00:00:00]
Many of us own pets. Unfortunately, some people are unaware of the damage they're doing to their pets by feeding them the kibble that is often recommended by their veterinarians. There are 470 million dogs worldwide. Most owners love their dogs. In fact, some of them feel that they are an extension of the family. What if they knew that they were slowly killing their dog and knew what it was that doing it? Would they change?

I did my first show on this topic eight years ago with Peter Rouse when he was living in New Zealand. We've done shows about this periodically, because we want to acknowledge that nutrition is part of the disease process of pets by the humans who develop diseases from their own lack of nutritional education.

I promise you if you really listen today there's not going to be any excuses any longer. You're going to have to do something different. If you love your pet something's got to change.

We have Dr. Oscar Chavez and Shawn Buckley with us today. Welcome to the show.

Carl Lanore: [00:02:39]
I don't think enough people understand why we feed our pets kibble. Let's look into a little history. For decades we fed dogs wet dog food. It was in a can. It was usually some by-product of meat and and fat and stuff like that. What happened to that food? Was that food bad for our dogs? Why did it go away?

Dr. Oscar: [00:03:09]
No, actually some of it was probably better than, than what we have today as kibble. During the start of World War II, dog food and pet food was actually outselling baby food. The industry had already grown to be substantial and used a lot of tin and a lot of aluminum and, canning. Our involvement in world war II started ramping up and there was a shift to do less canning and find other ways to package foods. It was during that shift that things like cereals and dry pet food / kibble was invented as a solution to packaging and it had a long shelf life and they were able to add preservatives and chemicals to make it shelf-stable for even more years.

Carl Lanore: [00:04:20
Now the process to make kibble, by heating the food to such a high degree, removing every bit of moisture?

Dr. Oscar: [00:05:06]
Dry pet food as we call it, contains 10% moisture. So they don't remove all the moisture, but they remove a substantial amount of it.  Subsequently we now also have dehydrated pet food, which is almost completely void of any moisture, but that's, that's a more recent development.

Carl Lanore: [00:05:50]
Not a great solution if you’re a dog. Some nasty things happen from processing the food this way. We know that kidney function is damaged from eating this type of food.

Shawn Buckley: [00:06:20]
When you take out all the moisture, there's another thing that happens that is very beneficial to the very large multinational corporations that make kibble by the metric ton: The cost of freight goes down. That might sound like a minor thing, but in some of the really, inexpensive, really low quality Kibble brands, freight can be as expensive as any other category, like packaging or the actual cost of goods.

Carl Lanore: [00:06:57]
That says something about the quality of the food, when the freight could actually be more than the cost of manufacturing the food

Shawn Buckley: [00:07:10]
Also when you build a kibble factory, you're talking about well in excess of $200 million, because it's really not food processing. It's not like a commissary kitchen, it's a factory. If you closed your eyes and looked around, you would be able to tell what they’re making.  They could be making anything, you don't see any cuts of meat or anything else.

Carl Lanore: [00:07:45]
Yet on commercials you see all those cuts of beef.

Shawn Buckley: [00:07:52]
The rules and regulations around advertising virtually do not exist and/or are not adhered to in the pet food business at all. You'll see grilled chicken breast and there's zero grilled chicken breast in there.

Carl Lanore: [00:08:56]
Things are changing now because people care more about their pets and are really starting to understand the correlation between nutrition and disease in their own lives as well as pets. Are people starting to become more enlightened?

Shawn Buckley: [00:09:25]
Clearly yes, the fastest growing segment within the pet food is our fresh whole food. There are more and more companies doing this because there's more and more demand.

Carl Lanore: [00:09:54]
We have heard a lot about advanced glycation end products in humans because of type two diabetes. We know that people who love to grill their steaks until they're crisp and burnt, are eating these AGS and our bodies are not equipped to get AGS out of the system.

When you put these foods in a kiln and and heat them at temperatures high enough to extract 85% of the moisture, there's an accumulation of AGS, right?

Dr. Oscar: [00:10:33]
Right Carl.  I'm so glad you're covering this. This is a robust area of research in human nutrition and it's emerging as an area of research in pet nutrition. The cool thing is there's more things we can do in the veterinary research world than we can do in the human world, simply because you can control more factors. I think we're going to learn a lot in the next 5 to 10 years about AGS.

We already know that proteins fats and carbohydrates will react under high temperature processing - the longer it's at a high temperature and the more processing, the more AGS.  You can't think of anything more ultra processed than kibble. That's all it is. The ingredients don't come in as grilled chicken breasts, it comes in as chicken powder that goes into a mixing bat that mixes with other powders of lentils and brown rice powder, almost like a batter.

The problem is that pets are eating that kibble every single day as their only sustenance. In the veterinary world we've already measured the amount of AGS in dry food versus a dehydrated food versus canned food versus raw. It's exponentially high in the dry food as you would expect, because again, a function of temperature and time.

Carl Lanore: [00:12:49]
I've been doing this show going on 16 years and we pay attention to the role of nutrition and the ediology of human disease and it's undeniable yet still, few doctors really get any nutritional advice or guidance in medical school.

I have to believe the same is true of veterinarians because we are seeing our pets getting all the same diseases as their humans. Type two diabetes, cancer, kidney failure.

Dr. Oscar: [00:14:05]
Let me start off by saying there are thousands of veterinarians that believe in our concept and we are the number one vet brand with “just food for dogs”, which is a company that Sean and I are associated with.

The majority of mainstream veterinarians are still under the belief that processed kibble and especially the expensive ones, are the healthiest thing that you can give our pets. That's simply not true.

There's already research to show that it is not and there's more in the works. This whole conversation is a trigger for a lot of veterinarians because they want to believe that kibble is healthy. I know that I'm upsetting some of my colleagues out there by even saying this, but the reality is just like it is for us to be healthier with fresh whole foods. The same is for our pets. Why would it be any different? They have a physiology that ages faster.

They have a much faster metabolism. If anything, they need it more than we do. There is no medical reason to believe that they can eat a little brown ball and be fine, whereas we can’t. It's hard to get people to that, to understand that, because we’re up against billions of dollars of advertising and indoctrination the other way.

Shawn Buckley: [00:16:36]
Think about it like this, Carl, there's all these vets getting different training. Pets are experiencing the same disease as humans. We now have oncology, dermatology, internal medicine, toxicology. board certified specialists and specialty areas of medicine for dogs and cats.

Pets are no longer in “the backyard dog house”, they’re on your bed, at your table, and have become an important family member. We have to fix this problem we created.

Shawn Buckley: [00:18:00]
Another thing that's so obvious, but so powerful is that I decide what I'm going to eat and you decide what you're going to eat, but our dogs and cats don't. I can tell you if Marty and Herman my two dogs got to feed me, there'd be no ice cream, no chocolate. It would only be the most healthy food because they love me more than life itself.  That's the position that we're in, in reverse.  We can make them live a longer and happier life simply by feeding them the right way.

The pet food industry is $31 billion for dog and cat food in the United States last year. Dozens of brands are owned by three or four companies:  Colgate, Palmolive, Mars and Nestle. ASCO book lists the official ingredients; things like empty peanut shells and empty almond shells. Now those probably are not going to kill your dog if they ate one, but there's no real, genuine nutritional value in empty peanut shells and empty almond shells.

That ingredient was adopted in the early 1970s by AFCO and it still exists. As a pet food processor, which technically what each of the manufacturers are, they can call that ingredient, vegetable fiber. You don't even know that it's an empty peanut shell. It's called vegetable.

Carl Lanore: [00:20:03]
They're pulverized into a powder right.

Shawn Buckley: [00:20:08]
 Yes, Into a powder and mixed in.

Carl Lanore: [00:21:49]
I am someone who eats what I consider an ancestral diet. I cook most of my food. I eat very few things out of a package. My relationship with food is one that is not typical compared to the average American and when you look at the way people feed their dogs, it's like the way they feed themselves. Their personal relationship with nature. Attrition is emblematic of the foods they're going to buy for their dogs. If a mom was feeding her child a meal every day that it cost 80 cents to make, she would say, Oh my God, what's in that. That's how they feed their dogs and they don't care because chances are, they don't really care about what they're eating either.

Dr. Oscar: [00:23:22]
Correct, and I think it comes down to two things, your relationship with your pets and your relationship to food personally. If those two things come together, then it's a no brainer. Once you learn that processed foods and that kibble is toxic, essentially poison to your dog, you're going to get them off of that.

But there's everyone in between. Some people are essentially poisoning themselves every day with packaged foods, and they don't really care about that so why are they going to care about their pets.

I used to definitely indulge in packaged foods. I weighed 45 to 50 pounds more than I do now. It was this work that we are doing with just food for dogs and big kibble that made me finally just swear off packaged foods. I'm very much like you, I eat cooked whole foods. Since then I've lost 50 pounds, kept it off, stayed active and feel great.

So in my case it was doing it for the dogs first that allowed me to learn to do it for myself. So that's sort of the shift that has to happen. Either you have to already do it for yourself, or at least appreciate doing it for your dogs and then do it for yourself. It all has to come together for it to be a healthy lifestyle in the household.

Shawn Buckley: [00:25:00]
it's all part of an overall process, some of it has to do with how much you care about your pets and if you see them as, as family and as Oscar said, sometimes you will see people that are themselves quite out of shape, but their dogs are actually in pretty good shape.

Carl Lanore: [00:25:49]
The book is called Big Kibble, the hidden dangers of the pet food industry.

I also want to talk about carbohydrates. I just did a show last week where there was a very large population study of over a hundred thousand people. The paper determined that it is low quality, high glycemic index carbohydrates that leads to heart disease and stroke, not fats and not red meat.

If we look at dogs in their native habitat, how much carbohydrates are they really eating?  I want to get into the evolution of dogs in the wild. If we look at dogs in the wild, a Wolf, where is he getting his carbs from? Or is that a bad analogy? You tell me.

Dr. Oscar: [00:30:22]
We can break that question down a little bit, but first of all, I do think that thinking of our dogs in the wild as a Wolf is a bad analogy. For example, I have a golden retriever. His name is Bruce. If I let them go in the forest, he would have his tail between his legs and be shaking, waiting for me to come back for him. He's not going to go join a pack. There's no such thing as a dog in the wild, in the sense that people like to use it for marketing for the ancestral diet.

If you do want to see a domesticated dog in the wild go to a third world country and you would see them roaming the streets and what do they do? They’re living on the trash of what humans throw out and in large part is old produce and carbohydrates and things like that. There is a good article that came out in Nature in 2014 that showed that domesticated dogs have changed their genetics to adapt to a more carbohydrate rich diet. They now match in their genetics more to us than wolves with respect to nutrition.

Dr. Oscar: [00:31:47]
Having said that there are different qualities of carbohydrates. Highly processed, refined carbohydrates are not good for us, and they're not good for them and that's what's in the kibble. That absolutely contributes to metabolic disease.

For example, as dogs get older and especially if they develop. diseases like kidney disease or liver disease, they actually need a modest protein diet because the liver and the kidney process protein, and if they're sick you don't want them to be processing more protein.

In that case you’d want to put them on a modest protein diet and you can't do that unless you have carbohydrates because you have to get your calories from somewhere. Healthy whole food carbohydrates can play a substantial role in providing calories without having to rely on protein and in the more balanced diet.

Carl Lanore: [00:34:13]
So when people start to think about feeding their dogs right now somebody's got a big bag of science diet. They probably paid 40, $50 for it, and they're working their way through it. and we're telling them, you're poisoning your dog. I've been told that when you transition a dog from kibble to whole raw foods, you have to do it slowly, dogs have a microbiome, just like humans.

Can someone safely give this a try. Instead of putting four cups of the kibble in the dish put two cups mix in some ground chop meat and maybe some kale.

Shawn Buckley: [00:35:04]
Carl you're a hundred percent, right. They have to detox. It's a little bit of a detox from the highly processed kibble over to whole food. Another thing I would say is we're not big fans of raw. We believe that it’s best to feed dogs lightly cooked food so that it's easier to digest and any pathogens are also cooked out. The food that we see that in research that really does work the best, what we would call proven healthy, cause it's had enough research behind it to be able to, and peer reviewed and published is lightly cooked as opposed to raw.

Dr. Oscar: [00:36:48]
If you wanted to go to a complete whole food diet, then you need to balance that recipe properly to make sure it contains all the nutrients that dogs need. You wouldn't want to do that by just putting cooked whole foods in a bowl and serving it because that might not provide all the nutrients they need in a day. Over a year or two you might get some severe deficiencies, like how cm phosphorus, brittle bones, etc.  What we recommend is in the book, we have recipes that you can follow and, and they call for a nutrient blend that you can add to it to make sure the diet is balanced for long term feeding.

You can also work with your veterinarian or veterinary nutritionist to develop a recipe that you can balance at home.

Shawn Buckley: [00:39:12]
I like to point out to people that roll their eyes and say, well, I don't even make food for myself, that's the problem but it's an easy problem to fix. Depending on the size of your dog, you can make two weeks or a months worth of food all at once and put it in Ziploc bags and put it the freezer, because that's the best preservative.

Dr. Oscar: [00:44:54]
Enriched white rice, as we know it is actually a pretty good quality carbohydrate. It's an expensive ingredient. If you want to call it that in the pet food industry and most of the pet food industry doesn't use real rice, they use what we call broken rice, which is sort of the leftovers of the by-product of harvesting rice for us.  But rice itself, is actually an excellent pet food ingredient and it just gets a bad rap because most people associate it with broken rice or processed rice which I wouldn't recommend.

Shawn Buckley: [00:45:48]
That exists with chicken and different cuts of meat too.  The things that we call ingredients in pet food are almost always a very distant, broken down bi-product /second cousin.

It's allowed to be beaks and feathers. If you go to a proces house today, and they're processing lamb today, they don't say this many lamb chops are going to go to Kroger and this many lamb chops are going to go to Purina. There are zero lamb chops going to a pet food company. It's all the things that humans don't eat and only the things that humans don't eat. You won't even find beef tongue in pet food because while I personally don't eat it, people eat beef tongue therefore they are way better off selling it through that channel than they are the pet food channel.

Carl Lanore: [00:47:03]
A listener says his boxer died of kidney failure. He was feeding him vet recommended diamond dog food, diamond contains ingredients sourced from China. Melamine was used by China back then at the time. He's asking, do you think there was melamine in the food that damaged his dog's kidneys? Any opinions.

Dr. Oscar: [00:47:32]
First of all, I'm sorry that that happened. There were thousands of dogs that unfortunately died during the 2007 recalls. We talk about it in the book. And we also use it as an example.

There's a whole chapter on the globalization of the supply chain of pet food. What happens is when a few key ingredients in this case, it was wheat gluten, are used by multiple pet food companies and brands and they source it from a few key suppliers in China, when there is a problem, it leads to the biggest recall in American history and consumer goods.

So if it happened around that time then yeah, unfortunately there's a chance that that could have been the issue. It could have been a hundred other chemicals and issues with the kibble. Starting with the fact that it is kibble and high in AGS and we know AGS accumulate in the kidneys, the heart and the liver, and also the blood.

Dr. Oscar: [00:50:39]
A lot of the show dogs and racing dogs will eat what we call 4d meat. 4D meat is dead diseased, decaying and disabled. It's a form of raw food. Commercial raw is not the same as feeding a USDA inspected and approved meat at home. That’s human grade. There's an entire industry in the RA world that relies on getting rejected meats from slaughterhouses that didn't make it into the food chain for whatever reason, maybe that cow was riddled with liver flukes or bovine encephalitis, or whatever.

There is a vast difference between the human grade and the 4d meats, or what's called feed grade. Not only how the cow or the animal came to die but also how it was handled and transported thereafter.

But I have to come back to this question, Dr. Chavez, why are domesticated dogs having to have their anal glands?

Dr. Oscar: [01:01:39. It comes down to obesity. Feeding these processed foods and these highly refined carbohydrates is leading to weight gain. What happens is the anal glands sit right towards the opening of the anus. When a dog goes, it naturally pushes the anal glands and they will express as they fill. What happens when they gain weight is that fat pockets will line those anal glands and essentially as the feces just glides right over it and completely misses it. Then they have to put on a glove, put their finger in there and, and essentially find it and it's tough to find behind fat pockets. Then you have to then express them. That's why they get impacted. I think it’s a nutritional issue based on the fact that they're eating these processed diets.

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